The Hercules Text Read online

  Gambini and two men she did not know sat around a conference table in intense conversation, which her entrance did nothing to hinder. The young woman who’d accompanied her smiled politely and withdrew. Leslie stood just inside the door, trying to make out the direction of things: she caught references to red giants, vectors, radial velocity curves, and sling effects. The youngest of the three was doing most of the talking. He was bearded, blown-dry handsome, energetic. He spoke with the cool confidence of a man who has never known disappointment. At one point, while holding forth on something called Fisher’s Distribution, he took her in at a glance, and dismissed her.

  Leslie bristled, but observed that the young giant had a similar effect on others. Ed Gambini sat with his back toward her, his eyes closed, and his head slightly inclined. But his own hostility was visible: he’d pressed his fingertips together in an unconscious steepling gesture, signaling his awareness of the speaker’s inferior position and, probably, a repressed desire to inflict punishment.

  The man opposite Gambini was lean, with black hair and quick perceptive eyes. He, too, was showing signs of impatience. A visitor’s badge was pinned haphazardly to the pocket of a plaid shirt.

  Gambini had somehow become aware of her presence. He swiveled around, rose, and shook her hand. “Leslie,” he said. “Good to see you, again. Have you had breakfast yet?”

  She nodded. Once, years before, during more enlightened times, she and Gambini had sat on a commission to advise the White House on funding for various science projects. She remembered him from those days as a man with a wide range of interests, unusual in the narrow disciplines of the scientific community. It had made him an ideal choice for the commission.

  What she recalled most vividly, though, was an evening after they’d listened to a presentation for funds to expand the SETI program. It had been a night full of numbers. An astronomer whose name she’d forgotten had delivered an impassioned plea, illustrated with flip charts, slides, and massive collections of statistics purporting to imply the existence of thousands, and possibly millions, of advanced civilizations in this galaxy alone. It was a subject in which Gambini was intensely interested, and yet he’d voted against the proposal. When Leslie had asked why, he’d replied that he could not take mythical projections seriously. “All the numbers are predicated on the terrestrial experience,” he’d complained. “As far as we know, Jehovah assembled us bag and baggage. No, if they’re serious about the money, they’ll have to give us a rational reason why.” And later, while they’d sat in a small restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue, he’d added that, next time, if they asked him, he’d be glad to do the presentation for them.

  “Yes,” she replied. “I’ve eaten.”

  “This is Pete Wheeler,” he said, indicating the man in the plaid shirt. Wheeler stood; she offered her hand. “And Cord Majeski.”

  The bearded young man nodded peripherally.

  “I assume,” Gambini said to her, “you’d like to know what this is about?”

  Julie packed Monday night.

  In the morning, Harry stayed home and ate breakfast with his son. Tommy was pleased to see him, and said so. But the boy, who knew only that he was going to visit his cousin for a while, slid rapidly into the sports section while Julie paced nervously through the house, trying to keep occupied. When it was time to leave for school, she pulled his jacket over his shoulders and handed him his plastic lunch pail.

  “Tommy,” she said, “I’m going to pick you up this afternoon. We’ll be going to Ellen’s for a while. Okay?”

  “How about Daddy?” He looked around at Harry, and Julie paled.

  “He’s going to stay here,” she said uncertainly.

  They’d agreed on this approach last night; but somehow it sounded different now. “Tom,” Harry broke in, determined to get it over, “your mother and I aren’t going to be living together anymore.”

  “Damned fool,” snapped Julie.

  Tommy’s eyes grew very round, and he looked from Harry to his mother. His cheeks reddened. “No!” he said.

  Julie knelt beside him. “It’ll be all right.”

  “No, it won’t. You know it won’t!” Harry felt proud of the boy. He hurled the plastic lunch box across the room. It bounced off the sofa, popped open, and the sandwich and Coke and cake spilled out. “No!” he screamed, tears welling out of his eyes. “Daddy, you wouldn’t leave us!”

  Harry wrapped the child in his arms. “It isn’t exactly my choice, Tom,” he said.

  “Good,” hissed Julie. “Blame it on me.”

  “Who the hell do you want me to blame?” Harry’s voice was thick with rage.

  Julie’s eyes flared. But she looked toward Tommy and simmered quietly. The boy had buried his face in Harry’s shirt and was sobbing uncontrollably. “So much for school,” she said. “I think things would be easier if you went to work.”

  “By all means,” he rasped, “let’s not have any difficulties about this.”

  She tried to disengage Tommy, assuring him that he would still see his father frequently. But the child struggled hysterically to get back to Harry. She looked up at him, pleading silently for him to leave.

  Harry glared at her, said good-bye to his son, an act that provoked a fresh scream, and walked out.

  It was a little after nine-thirty when he arrived in the Hercules conference room and met Leslie Davies. She was slender and efficient in a gray business suit, with a classically chiseled jaw and brooding, distant eyes. “Leslie thinks,” said Gambini after the introductions were complete, “that the aliens operate along logical parameters similar to our own.”

  “It never occurred to me,” said Harry, “that there could be any doubt. What other logical parameters are there?”

  “There are other possibilities,” said the psychologist. “Logic will depend heavily on things like the range and quality of perceptions, the initial value system, and so on. But we need to wait a little: we don’t have much yet to speculate with.”

  “Maybe wait a lot,” offered Harry. “Majeski mentioned that the Altheans might be on a time scale different from ours.”

  “I don’t think we need worry about that,” she said. She was a slim, almost diminutive woman. Yet she commanded attention, and Harry eventually decided, since she was not particularly striking, that the attraction must lie in her seawater eyes, which seemed extraordinarily reflective of both mood and color. They were set wide apart and were enhanced to some degree by an expressive mouth and (when she chose to show them) strong white teeth. Her reddish brown hair was cut short, and her manner of speaking was pointed. She was, on the whole, an economical woman who seemed disinclined to waste either movement or words. “Their temporal sense can’t be too much different from ours; I doubt that we’ll have to wait the ten thousand years or so for additional events that some of you were concerned about—”

  “How do we know that?” asked Harry.

  “It’s obvious,” she said. “The signal itself demonstrates a capability to modulate extraordinary amounts of power in fractions of a second. There’s other evidence as well: for example, that they switched off and on in a single morning. No, I think we’re safe in concluding that, if there is to be a text transmission, we’ll have it within a reasonably short time. Incidentally, I’d be willing to bet that the very nature of physical processes would prevent a being with a frame of reference appreciably slower than our own from ever achieving any sort of technological capacity.”

  “Would we be different in any major way,” asked Harry, “if our skies were blank? If we had no stars, I mean. And a badly distorted sun?”

  Her eyes settled on Harry; they were bright and good-humored now, as she warmed to her subject. “This project is going to produce a lot of unanswerable questions, and that’s one of them, in this sense: we’re finely attuned to our environment. Circadian rhythms, menstrual cycles, all sorts of physiological characteristics are tied in to lunar cycles, solar cycles, you name it. Furthermore, the visible tabl
eau in the skies has always affected the way we think about ourselves, although, since everyone sees more or less the same astronomical show, we can’t be sure about the details. We ally ourselves with sun-gods, and think of death as a retreat into the underworld.

  “Look at the difference between Norse and classical mythology. In the Mediterranean, where the sun’s warm and people can go for a dip whenever the mood hits them, the gods were, on the whole, a playful lot, mostly concerned with war-gaming and seductions. But Odin lived in a place like Montana, where a man went to work when it was dark and came home when it was dark. The result: not only a far more conservative pantheon in northern Europe, but one that is ultimately doomed. In the end, they face Ragnarok, the ultimate dissolution. Germany, where the winters are also bleak, had a similar fatalistic system.

  “I’d never thought of it before in quite these terms, but I can’t help wondering whether the Germans would have unleashed the two world wars had they been located along the Mediterranean.”

  Wheeler looked up. “The Arabs,” he said, “live along the Mediterranean. And they’ve certainly shown no reluctance to spill blood.”

  “Their lands are hot, Pete,” she replied. “And I think there’s a special situation in the Middle East, too. Well, no matter. To answer Harry’s question in a word: yes, certainly your aliens would be influenced by their peculiar environment, and I’d be willing to hazard a guess that the influence would not, from our point of view, be in a positive direction. But I don’t think I’d care to go further than that.

  “Incidentally, does anyone care to theorize why they are transmitting in the first place? Whoever sent the signal is a million years dead. Why did they do it? Presumably, it required an engineering feat of considerable magnitude, and there was no chance of a reply, and certainly no assurance of success. One wonders why they’d bother.”

  “Aren’t you assuming the existence of organic life forms?” asked Majeski. “We could be listening to a computer of some sort. Something for which the passage of long gaps of time means nothing.”

  “I don’t deal in computers,” she said, smiling sweetly.

  “Nevertheless,” observed Gambini, “it’s a possibility we’ll have to consider. But let’s get back to the question of motive.”

  “They’re throwing a bottle into the ocean,” said Harry. “The same way we did with the plaques we put on the early Pioneers and Voyagers.”

  “I agree,” said Leslie. “In fact, unless we’re dealing with something that is, in some way, not really subject to time—a computer, a race of immortals, whatever—I can imagine no other motive. They wanted us to know they were there. They would have been a species isolated beyond our imagination, with no hope of intercourse of any kind outside their own world. So they assembled a vast engineering project. And sent us a letter. What activity could be more uniquely human?”

  In the long silence that followed, Pete Wheeler got the coffee pot and refilled the cups. “We don’t have the letter yet,” he said. “Cord, you dated the class G. What sort of result did you get?”

  “I don’t know,” said Majeski. There was a strange expression on his face.

  “You don’t know? Was the lithium exhausted?”

  “No, that wasn’t the problem.”

  “I think I can explain,” said Gambini. He opened a Manila envelope that lay on the table in front of him. “A class G star,” he explained to Harry and Leslie, “uses up its supply of lithium as it gets older. So we can get a fairly decent idea of its age by looking at how much lithium remains.” He extracted from the envelope several pages of trace paper with color bars and passed them around to Wheeler. “This is Gamma’s spectrogram. We’ve run it several times, and it keeps coming up the same way.”

  Wheeler must have been surprised by what he saw: he leaned forward, straightened a crease in the sheets, and then spoke in subdued tones. “How long have you known about this?”

  “We got the readouts the first night. Saturday. Sunday morning. Whatever. Then we checked the equipment and ran it again. We’ve relayed the test data to Kitt Peak.” He raised his eyes significantly. “They came up with the same result.”

  “What is it?” asked Leslie.

  “One of the problems we’ve had all along,” said Gambini, “is to find a source for this system. The thing had to coalesce before being expelled from its parent galaxy; Altheis could not have formed by itself, in the void. And here we were, looking at three stars, which appear to have been out there for a longer time than the stars have been burning. So it was very difficult to account for their presence at all.”

  “And now,” said Leslie, “you feel you have a solution?”

  Wheeler was still staring at the spectrogram.

  Gambini nodded. “We have an intriguing possibility.”

  Harry cleared his throat. “Could somebody explain to the rest of us what we’re talking about?”

  “This is an extremely atypical spectrogram for a class G,” said Wheeler. “There are no metallic lines, not even H and K lines. No calcium, no iron, no titanium. No metals of any kind. Gamma appears to be pure helium and hydrogen. Which is why you couldn’t date it, Cord. No lithium.”

  Majeski inclined his head, but said nothing.

  Harry listened to the silence all around him. “I still don’t think I know what it means,” he said.

  Gambini tapped a pen restlessly on the tabletop. “Class G’s are Population I stars. They’re metal-rich. Even Population II stars, which are not, have some metals boiling in the pot somewhere. But this one”—he held up a second set of spectrograms—“has none.”

  Harry noticed that all the color had gone out of Wheeler’s face. “What’s the point?” he asked.

  The priest turned puzzled eyes toward him. “There’s no such thing as a metal-free star,” he said. “Ed, what about Alpha?”

  “Same thing. Somehow, the original spectrogram was made and filed, and apparently no one ever looked at it. We got it out after this turned up. Neither one of those stars seems to have any metal at all.”

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  4

  RIMFORD WAS SCHEDULED to come into National on an afternoon flight.

  Ed Gambini insisted on driving out to pick him up. Harry, who’d briefly met the celebrated cosmologist on several occasions but who’d never really had an opportunity to talk with him, went along. Despite his excitement, Gambini seemed reluctant to discuss the Althean transmission. Harry wondered whether he wasn’t psyching himself to play the hard-nosed skeptic for his incoming guest. They engaged, instead, in some desultory conversation about the weather, their mutual dislike for Quint Rosenbloom, and the probability
of a long season for the Redskins. But on the whole the two men rode south on the parkway locked in their own thoughts.

  Harry was trying to come to grips with the fact that Julie was gone, and beside that hard piece of reality, the eccentric behavior of a trio of stars unimaginably far away seemed of little consequence. But it was a pleasant sort of early autumn afternoon when he could bring himself to look at it and absorb its texture, filled with hordes of kids in their big-shouldered armor on high school fields, and people standing over smoldering piles of leaves, and lovely women in short-sleeved jackets. It was the sort of afternoon to be out with a woman, strolling through tree-lined parks.

  “Tell me about Gamma,” he said. “Is it really possible that someone has altered it?”

  The sun was bright on the surface of the Anacostia. They threaded their way between clean white government buildings, riding with the windows open. For a time, Harry thought Gambini had not heard. The physicist guided the black government car onto the Southeast Expressway. To their right, and ahead, the Capitol dome glittered. “Harry,” he said over the rush of wind, “there’s damned little that’s impossible if you have the technology. I don’t think you can travel faster than light, and I’m damned sure you can’t go backward in time. At least not on the macroscopic level. But a little engineering with a star? Why not?

  “The real question is not whether it can be done, but whether we’re looking at a bona fide example of that kind of engineering. Stars always show metal lines in their spectrograms. Always. Maybe a lot, maybe a little, but a star without metal just doesn’t happen in nature.”

  “As far as you know.”

  “As far as we know. But we know how stars form. This one’s a Population I star, which is to say it’s second generation. All class G’s are. They’re made up of the remnants of Population II stars, which manufactured a lot of iron and other metals. In fact, they manufactured most of the metal in the universe. When they explode, we get the makings of stars like the sun.” He hesitated. “I can’t imagine any natural process that would produce a Population I star without metal lines.”