Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Read online

  Her toes went numb. A blast of wind knocked her down. When she got up, she no longer had the penlight. Didn’t know where it had gone. She’d been carrying it in her right hand, but the hand had no feeling.

  For the first time in her life, she felt real fear.

  This was the darkest place she’d ever seen. There was no glimmer of light anywhere. The edge of the road was no longer visible. The world had vanished, had become a place utterly without borders, without any distinguishing features, other than the snowflakes that continued to rush at her.

  She thought about calling Kwame. But she couldn’t do that. What would he think? Poor woman can’t get from the Jeep to the cabin without getting in trouble.

  It was hard to breathe. Her lungs hurt, and tears froze on her cheeks.

  She pushed her hands into her sweater pockets and started out again. Hell with it. Didn’t need the light anyway.

  Still no sign of anything. Not of a cabin. Not of the marker.

  The terrifying truth was she could walk right past the marker and never see it.

  She was counting her steps now. Roughly thirteen hundred to a kilometer. Right? She’d already come about five hundred. Or maybe one hundred. Somewhere, below her, she heard the sound of a plane.

  She tried to pick up her pace. Keep moving. Keep watching. And think about something else. Think about Daddy’s rising falsetto. If she was lucky the marker and the cabin would be right next to each other. Why, Daddy, they’d be touching!

  After a while, she became convinced she must have missed it. She debated starting back toward the Jeep, and looked helplessly in both directions. Couldn’t have been this far. She’d only passed it about three minutes before she’d stopped and gone into the ditch. She’d been traveling about fifteen, twenty at most. How far was that?

  She couldn’t figure it out. She’d begun to feel as if she’d withdrawn into a cave, was looking out through her eyes from a safe place somewhere back of her nose.

  That was funny, Lang. Laugh.

  Ha.

  Still trudging forward, she flipped open the cell phone. Time to confess. Tell Kwame she was in trouble.

  Off to her left, a soft orange glow appeared in the blowing snow.

  Nothing about this class of brown dwarfs made sense. Their composition was just under fifty percent deuterium. Fifty thousand times what it should be. Crazy enough. The remaining half was mostly hydrogen, the ordinary one-nucleon variety No problem with that, except that it left little room for helium, which, in most of the chimeras, totaled less than one percent. It was their larger than normal size that tightly constrained the helium abundance. Even Tim, the brightest young theorist she knew, had to concede the point. Every other cosmic object is born with the allotment imprinted by the Big Bang: a full twenty-seven percent. So where was the rest of the helium?

  There was no way to hide helium in a still-warm brown dwarf, and all of the chimeras were warm Galactic infants. Kristi’s deuterium reservoirs mocked her, because they simply could not exist.

  The orange glow hung momentarily in the darkness. Then it went off.

  Somewhere, far away, she heard a snarl. Leopards don’t climb this high, do they?

  She started walking toward the spot where she’d seen the light. It came on again. And went off.

  It had to be the cabin.

  She moved closer. Saw the 5000-meter marker to her right. A metal sign, white with black numbers.

  The light blinked on again. More distinct this time. It was a police car beacon. Set on a rooftop.

  Thank God.

  Wooden steps led up onto a porch. She saw three dark windows and a door. There were wicker chairs on the porch, and a table. She climbed the steps, felt the wind cut off as she came into the shelter of the cabin, and tried the doorknob.

  It was locked.

  A number pad was bolted to the frame. The combination. What was the combination?

  Kwame had said, Remember ‘e’. Twenty-seven eighteen.

  The beacon kept flashing. Every few seconds. It reflected off the snow cover, giving her just enough light to work with.

  She got it wrong the first time, and for a heart-stopping moment she feared the lock was frozen. Or she’d been mistaken. But the second try was golden and the door clicked. She pulled it open, kicked the snow out of the way, and half-fell through onto a stone floor.

  The interior was frigid.

  She shut the door and looked around. There were more wicker chairs and another table. A long row of solar batteries powered the beacon. A cot was set against one wall. And a pot-bellied stove stood in the middle of the room. She looked around for a thermostat. Saw nothing.

  Someone had left a box of matches, and a yellowed copy of USA Today.

  Kristi stared at the stove. My kingdom for a few logs. She could go outside and root through the storm. Maybe get lucky. But the furniture was more convenient. She picked up one of the chairs and brought it down hard against the floor.

  It held together.

  She tried again.

  It was remarkably resilient. She stumbled around the cabin, looking for an axe, gave up, and went back to beating the chair. Desperation lent strength and, finally, it came apart. Enough, at least, that she could jam it into the stove.

  Ten minutes later she sat in front of a fire that, if it was not quite blazing, nevertheless served to take the freeze off the room. She called Kwame. “I’m in.”

  “Good,” he said. “I was getting worried. Don’t leave the cabin until the storm stops.”

  “Have no fear. One problem—”

  “Yes?”

  “I left my transportation in a ditch.”

  “You were not hurt, I hope?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Okay. I’ll send a truck down as soon as the road’s clear.”

  “Kwame?”

  “Yes?”

  “Send sandwiches, too.”

  Her toes began to recover some feeling. She found a blanket in a closet. It smelled of cigarettes but she didn’t care. She warmed it on the stove, wrapped herself in it and closed her eyes.

  She was wide awake. She’d have liked to read. But even if the light had been adequate, she’d left her briefcase in the car. In it were copies of Physics Today and People, which she’d brought for the skyride. And a marked-up version of her dissertation. Once at Clarke, there’d be no leisure. She expected to spend six days doing nothing but observing, reducing data, and sleeping.

  The wind shook the cabin. And suddenly her eyes felt heavy Her head drifted back, and the sounds of the fire, the sense of the storm outside, faded.

  She woke a couple of times, and jammed more furniture into the stove. And once, toward the end, she saw gray light in the windows.

  The nuclei were piled high in her office. Thousands of deuterons. In the drawers. On the keyboard. Scattered across her desk. Each deuteron’s green neutron and blue proton were morphing back and forth, into each other, a colorful display of the strong nuclear force in action.

  Get the vacuum cleaner. Where was the vacuum cleaner?

  She was still looking when a hand touched her shoulder. “Hey, Kristi. How you doing?”

  Kwame.

  The fire had gone out but the stove still held some heat. “I’m okay,” she said.

  “Good. The road’s clear. If you’re ready we can head out.”

  Kwame was a middle-aged African, not quite as tall as she. His hair had gone white, and his features suggested he’d known some difficult times. He was wrapped in a heavy parka with the hood down. His dark eyes were shining, and he spoke with a British accent.

  She pulled the blanket more tightly around her while she pushed her feet back into her shoes. “I’m ready,” she said.

  “You don’t want to take a shower first?” He nodded toward the washroom, but kept a straight face.

  A snow plow waited outside. The sun was behind some white clouds. It was relatively warm, and the cabin roof was lined with melting icicles.
r />   She climbed into the passenger’s seat and looked back at the police light. “If it hadn’t been for the blinker,” she said, “I’d never have found the place.”

  He nodded. “That’s why it’s there, Kristi.”

  She thought about suggesting he add an ax to the amenities. And maybe some canned goods. But, on second thought, maybe another time.

  He passed her a jelly donut.

  Kristi had been to the summit of Kilimanjaro four times before, but the sight of the base towers and the nanowire ribbon stretching up to infinity was as exhilarating as ever. “It hasn’t left yet?” she asked him.

  “No. They’ve been waiting for you.”

  It wasn’t critical that she be on site while her data were collected. But Greg had designed MEGASPEC and Kristi had written most of its software to confirm brown dwarf candidates, so a trip to recalibrate the million-object spectrograph was justified. And there would never be a time she’d pass on an opportunity to go up to the station, to see the home world from 36,000 kilometers. There was still a little kid in her somewhere. She’d commented along those lines once to Greg and he said it was true of everyone in the sciences who was worth a damn.

  Kwame apologized that there was no time to shower and change. Have to do it in zero-gee.

  “I’ll try to keep away from the other passengers,” she said.

  “Ah. It is their loss.”

  They pulled up at the front door of the terminal, and she thanked him for maybe the fifth time. Then she was hurrying through the reception area and someone came alongside to help with her bag and briefcase. Moments later she cleared the entry ramp, and hatches shut.

  There were roughly a dozen other passengers. About half of them were tourists, including two kids. They looked curiously at her as the carbon nanowires stiffened and the elevator lifted away from Kilimanjaro. Minutes later she caught sight of Lake Victoria. They rose through the clouds, and the Atlantic came into view. And eventually she was looking down at the entire continent, from the Cape of Good Hope to the Nile delta.

  Two hours out, at an altitude of 8000 kilometers, she got a sandwich and coffee from the convenience counter and settled down at one of the viewport tables to enjoy the ride. Closer to the chimeras, she thought. Well, not really, but the illusion was there as she soared ever higher.

  She wished there were starships. She’d love to have an opportunity to go out and look at one of the things, close up. She knew how it would appear, of course. She had virtual brown dwarfs on call back home. They were Jupiter-sized spheres, red-brown, with mottled clouds floating in the atmosphere. The clouds were iron hydride, and of course the dwarf would be glowing, rather like a coal recently plucked from the fire.

  She visualized it, and somehow she found herself thinking about Kwame’s police lights.

  Someone came over and asked if he could share the table. Of course. He was a young man, and she realized immediately he was on the make.

  “…Going to be pretty well tied up while I’m here,” she was saying.

  He was a technician of some sort. Dull-looking. Thought well of himself. “Of course,” he said. “But all work—”

  She heard him out, and smiled when appropriate. “They pay to send me up here,” she said, as if she were making a major sacrifice. “…Don’t want me sitting around.”

  The police lights. She stared through the young man into the deep night of the 5000-meter elevation, saw the soft orange glow, blinking on and off.

  And suddenly she understood.

  “I don’t buy it, Kristi,” Greg said. She had him on the vid relay, from his office. “There’s got to be a natural mechanism at work. Maybe high pressure chemistry. Maybe magnetic fields. Maybe radiative levitation. Geochemical processes can concentrate minerals by orders of magnitude on Earth, so why not deuterium on the surfaces of brown dwarfs under far more exotic conditions?” He sounded really concerned. It was why she liked him so much. He was worried about what would happen to her career if she tried to go public with her notion. She imagined it was hard for him not to say, You’re skating at the edge of academic disaster. Blow your reputation now and you’ll always be at the fringe.

  “I admit,” he said, “that fifty percent deuterium is far out. But whatever did this could also bury the helium. We just don’t know enough.”

  “I think it’s true,” she said.

  “It could be. Anything’s possible, Kristi. But think about what the professional price will be if you go off half-cocked, and then someone finds the real explanation.” Then, more gently: “I’ll go this far: Get two more pieces of independent evidence. If your idea stands up, Galileo will have to move over.”

  While the Earth dropped away, she worked on her computer. An hour later, still on the elevator, she raised a fist in triumph. The act drew the attention of several of her fellow passengers. She didn’t care. She had a match. In fact, the chimeras, almost the entire sample of two thousand, except two, showed up at the same sites listed in the all-sky X-ray source catalogs as black holes. That gave her a stunning 99.9% correlation. How much proof do you want, Greg?

  For the next five hours she looked fruitlessly for other patterns. She was still engrossed in her analysis, and trying hard to keep her sense of exhilaration under control, as the elevator began its approach to the station.

  An attendant asked her to return to her seat and buckle in. She felt indestructible at the moment, but she happily complied. Galileo was a piker.

  An orange light was blinking on the link-up collar. It reminded her of Kwame’s beacon, and she smiled. A series of thuds reverberated through the hull as the elevator docked and the airlocks mated. Hatches opened and the passengers floated through into the connecting tube. The tourists would be headed for the hotel. The others scattered in different directions.

  Jeff Fields, who ran the observatory programs, was waiting for her. “Jeff,” she said, “I want you to do something for me.”

  “Okay,” he said. “What do you need?”

  “Tomorrow, before we make any observations, I need you to change to the highest resolution grating.”

  Standing at the lectern before her mentors and her peers, Kristi had deftly fielded a dozen questions about her analyses and catalog. The privilege of asking the final question traditionally went to the senior graduate student. Tim. She’d seen him writing while she spoke, scratching out lines, making faces, writing again. When the moment came, he stood. “Sorry, Kristi,” he began. “Nobody here is more anxious for you to be right. But I still don’t get it.” He glanced down at his notes, looked over at Greg, and plunged on. “Your high-res spectra and gravitational redshifts unquestionably prove that every one of your chimeras is eight Jupiter masses, and that each is orbiting something every year or so.” He took a deep breath. “The X-ray source coincidences are a convincing argument that the somethings are black holes. But black holes can’t concentrate deuterium or hide helium. Black holes were all once stars way too luminous to have formed with sub-brown dwarf companions in the first place. And, worst of all, your chimeras are too low in mass to ignite deuterium, yet they radiate like hot brown dwarfs.”

  The others around the table were looking anxiously from Tim to her. A few whispers began. “In theory,” Tim continued, “your chimeras can’t exist, right? But they do. So what’s going on?”

  You know, she thought, he really is good-looking. But not as quick on the draw as I’d thought.

  He started to sit down, but got up again. “Kristi, you must have some idea how to explain these things?”

  She looked over at Greg. He was gazing out the window at the beautiful autumn day. Then his eyes met hers. And he nodded. Do it.

  Her paper had been accepted yesterday by Nature. Letting the cat out of the bag now wouldn’t jeopardize anything. She’d kept everyone, other than Greg, in the dark. Even Tim.

  “We classify anything less than thirteen Jupiter masses as a planet,” she began, “because these objects never develop sufficient interna
l pressure to ignite their deuterium, let alone their hydrogen. Yet we now see objects eight times Jupiter’s mass displaying surface abundances that can only come from deuterium burning. That’s impossible with one thousandth of a percent deuterium. But deuterium ignition works just fine if these objects are born with eight Jupiter masses and fifty percent hydrogen and fifty percent deuterium, and they’re somehow sparked.” She smiled at Tim, who was sitting looking lost.

  “By analogy,” she continued, “a trace of air mixed with gasoline is stable, but a fifty-fifty mixture is highly combustible. A spark would set off a conflagration. Since nature can’t make, or ignite, fifty-fifty deuterium-hydrogen objects, especially near the kind of massive stars that collapse into black holes…” she paused for effect, “…it’s hard to see that the chimeras can be anything other than artificial.”

  The room went dead silent. A gust of wind struck the windows and she thought briefly of Kwame’s cabin. At the doorway, a small group of professors had gathered. She wondered whether Greg had alerted his colleagues.

  History being made today in the Bishop Library.

  Tim looked stunned. “Kristi,” he said, in a voice she did not recognize, “you’re not making this claim seriously?”

  “I am,” she said. A wave of guilt passed through her. Maybe she should have taken him aside. Warned him what was coming. “They’re artificial as in synthetic. As in not made by nature. As in manufactured by Little Green Guys. I would argue they were deliberately placed in orbit around black holes that were born without companions. Some of each chimera’s solar wind now falls toward its black hole. That superheats the wind so it radiates X-rays. Hence the chimeras coincide with catalogued X-ray sources. They used to be invisible. Now you can’t miss them.”

  Guilt, hell. She was Hubble discovering that the universe extended far beyond the Milky Way, Rubin finding the dark matter that surrounds all galaxies. She was on top of the world. “At first I suspected they were an experiment, test objects of some kind. But that would be an experiment hugely wasteful of resources when you could get away with masses a million times smaller.”