The Hercules Text Read online

  “What’s the President going to say?” asked Gambini. His mouth was set in an angry line.

  “‘What hath God wrought?’ Same old thing. Even as we speak, I understand he has his people hunting for appropriate biblical remarks.”

  Gambini laced his fingers across his stomach. “It should be an uplifting show. But if it’s all the same to you, Quint, I think I’ll pass on this one. For one thing, I’m not exactly proud of the fact that we kept this quiet, what is it now, two months? Some people out there are going to be very unhappy with us, and I’d just as soon not be too visible.”

  Rosenbloom smothered his first impulse and displayed instead an expression of tolerance. “I understand your feelings, Ed. Nevertheless, it isn’t an invitation we’re free to decline.” He turned to Harry, as though it were settled. “I don’t think they’ll want you to do any more than take a bow. But you’ll have reporters to deal with too, Harry.”

  “I’m an administrator. They won’t expect technical stuff from me.”

  “Newspaper guys can’t read. They’ll know you’re with the Agency, and that’s all they’ll need. Same guidelines as Ed’s, okay? No speculation. By the way, I’d just as soon we not bring up this artificial sun business. Let’s go for lots of talk about the enormous distance between them and us. Maybe you could come up with one of those illustrations where Earth is an orange, and the aliens are over in Europe somewhere. Or on the moon. Okay?”

  “Somebody,” said Harry, “is going to wonder why we waited so long to make this public. What’s our answer?”

  “Tell them the truth. We literally did not believe our instruments. We wanted to be sure before we said anything. Nobody can object to that.”

  “In that case,” said Gambini, “you stand out there.”

  “I intend to.”

  After they’d left the Director’s office, Gambini grumbled loudly about his proposed role in the press conference. “Play it for all it’s worth,” advised Harry. “You’re going to take a lot of heat: you might as well get some benefit out of it. In the meantime, let’s hope nobody discovers some sort of musical star that transmits exponentials.”

  Leslie Davies came in from Philadelphia that afternoon. She seemed more intrigued by events than some of the investigators, and admitted to Harry that she took every excuse she could find to visit the Hercules Project. “Things are going to happen here, Harry,” she told him expectantly. “Ed’s right: if something weren’t on its way, the pulsar would be back to normal.”

  She invited him to dinner, and Harry gratefully accepted. The only other staff members who regularly ate alone were Wheeler and Gambini. But the priest was back at Princeton, and Gambini showed little inclination for company.

  At Harry’s suggestion, they skipped the Red Limit and drove instead to the Coachman in College Park, which offered a more exotic atmosphere. “Leslie,” he said, after they were settled at a table, “I don’t really understand why you’re so interested in all this. I wouldn’t think a psychologist would care much one way or the other.”

  “Why not?” she asked, eyebrows rising.

  “It’s not your field.”

  She smiled: it was a deep-water response, reserved, noncommittal, amused. “Whose field is it?” When Harry didn’t answer, she continued: “I’m not sure that any of these people have the potential for profit I do. For Ed and Pete Wheeler and the rest, the whole project is only of philosophical interest. I shouldn’t have said ‘only,’ I suppose, because I’m as involved philosophically as anyone.

  “But I may be the only person here with a professional stake. Listen, if there are Altheans, they can be of only academic interest to an astronomer or a mathematician. Their specialties have no direct connection to the issue of thinking beings. That’s my province, Harry. If there is a second transmission, if we get anything at all that we can read, I’ll get the first glimpse into a nonhuman psyche. Do you have any idea what that means?”

  “No,” said Harry. “I haven’t a clue.”

  “Maybe more important than learning about Altheans: we might get a handle on qualities that are characteristic of intelligent beings, as opposed to those that are culturally induced. For example, will the Altheans turn out to be a hunting species? Will they have a code of ethics? Will they organize themselves into large political groups?” She tilted her head slightly. “Well, I guess we’ve already answered that one. Without political organization, you wouldn’t get large-scale engineering projects. In the end, we may not learn a lot about the Altheans, but we stand to learn a lot about ourselves.”

  Harry had gotten into the noxious habit of comparing with Julie every woman with whom he came in contact. Although Leslie was not unattractive, she lacked the native sensuality of his wife. It was not, he realized, simply a matter of putting an ordinary human being against Julie’s classic features. There was also the fact that Leslie was more accessible. Friendlier. And, oddly, that, too, counted against her. What sort of comment was that on the perversity of human nature? “Did you know,” he asked, “that the White House is going to make an announcement tomorrow?”

  “Ed told me. I’m going to plant myself in a bar in Arlington and take notes on the customers’ reactions.”

  “Leslie, if they were going to send another signal, why would they wait so long?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe we’re only listening to a computer, and the tape reader’s burned out. I’ll tell you one thing: if we don’t get another signal, you’re going to have a real problem with Ed.” She finished her manhattan. “How about another round of drinks?”

  Harry signaled the waiter.

  “How well do you know Ed?” she asked.

  “I’ve worked with him a long time.”

  “He lives in heart attack country. Doesn’t he do anything other than look through telescopes?”

  Harry shook his head. “I don’t think so. Years ago, when I first met him, he used to go to Canada on hunting trips. But he got bored with them after a while. Actually, it’s pretty hard to imagine him in a bowling alley or on a golf course.”

  “It’s very sad,” she said, her eyes growing distant. “He’s so obsessed with trying to analyze the inner machinery of the cosmos that he never sees a sunrise. Rimford’s not like that. Nor Pete. I wish he’d learn something from them.”

  Neither Harry nor Gambini had previously been to the White House on business. (In fact, Gambini freely admitted that, despite having lived a substantial portion of his adult life in Washington, he’d never before been inside the building.) They entered, as instructed, through a connecting tunnel from the Treasury Department and were escorted to an office, where they found Rosenbloom and a self-important, energetic man whom Harry recognized as Abraham Chilton, the administration’s press officer.

  Chilton had been a highly popular conservative radio and TV commentator before joining the administration. He had a voice like a whip crack and a debater’s skill that served him well in his periodic jousts with the press. He looked pointedly at his watch as Gambini and Harry entered. “I’d appreciate it if you gentlemen could get here on time in the future.”

  “We were told three o’clock,” objected Gambini.

  “The press conference starts at three. We start, or try to, at two.” Rosenbloom looked uncomfortable. “Who’s Gambini?”

  The physicist nodded frostily.

  “The President will ask you to say a few words.” He reached into a briefcase and withdrew a single sheet of paper. “We’d like it to be along these lines. Try to sound spontaneous.” He threw Harry off stride with a sudden laconic grin that suggested no one should take any of this too seriously. But as quickly as Harry defined the sense of the gesture, it was gone.

  “The three of you will be seated in the front row when the President enters. He’ll make a statement. Then he’ll introduce each of you and invite you two to the podium.” He indicated Rosenbloom and Gambini. “Dr. Gambini, you’ll speak and then go back to your seat. After that the President will take
questions. We’ll close it out after thirty minutes. When Ed Young asks his question, that’ll be it. Young is a little guy with blond hair, except that most of it is gone now. He’ll be sitting right behind Dr. Rosenbloom. After the President leaves, you gentlemen will find yourselves subject to a barrage of questions. We’d debated getting you right out of here to save you that, but there’s no point: they’ll catch up with you wherever you go, so we might as well get it over with. Anything unclear so far? Okay. We don’t have much time left. Let’s go over what the reporters are likely to ask.”

  President John W. Hurley strode smiling through the curtains and took his place behind the lectern that bore his seal. A flip chart was set to his immediate right. He was of less than average height, the shortest President in modern memory, and consequently a running target for “short” jokes. Cartoonists loved to portray him talking things over with Washington, Lincoln, or Wilson. But he responded in good humor, laughed at the jokes himself, and even told a few. His lack of stature, usually a fatal handicap to serious political ambitions, became a symbol of the man in the street. Hurley was the President everyone identified with.

  Approximately two hundred people were packed into the small auditorium. Television dollies rolled up and down the central aisle as the President graciously acknowledged the applause, looked squarely down at Harry in the front row, and smiled. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I know you’ve all seen the numbers on the economy that came out today, and you expect me to do a little crowing this afternoon. Truth is, I don’t intend to mention the subject.” Laughter rippled through the room. The fact was that, while the President’s point of view generally tended to be well to the right of most of the members of the press corps, he was nevertheless popular with them.

  He looked down at his audience with sudden gravity. One of the television cameras edged in. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have an announcement of importance.” He paused and looked directly ahead into the cameras. “On Sunday morning, September seventeenth, shortly before dawn, the United States intercepted a signal of extraterrestrial origin.” Harry, who knew what was coming, of course, was struck by the sudden absolute stillness in the crowded room. “The transmission originated from a small group of stars outside our own galaxy. They are located in the constellation Hercules and are, I am told, extremely far from Earth, far too distant to permit any possibility of a two-way conversation. NASA estimates that the signals started on their way toward us a million and a half years ago.”

  Chairs scraped, but still, except for some startled exclamations, the press corps held its collective breath.

  “There was no message: the transmission was simply a mathematical progression that apparently leaves itself open to no other interpretation.

  “I should take a moment, by the way, to point out that this achievement would not have been possible without SKYNET.

  “We are continuing to monitor the star group, but it has been silent now for several weeks, and we don’t expect to hear any more.” He paused; when he spoke again, his voice was laden with emotion. “We know nothing, really, about those who have announced their presence to us. We cannot hope ever to talk with them. I have been given to understand that their star group is receding from us at a rate of approximately eighty miles per second.

  “It’s unfortunate that these…beings…did not see fit to tell us something about themselves. But they have told us something about the universe in which we live. We now know we are not alone.”

  Still no one moved. One of the TV technicians, riding on the back of a dolly, briefly lost his balance. “Two of the men responsible for the discovery are here,” the President continued. “I’d like them to join me now to help answer any technical questions you may have: Dr. Quinton Rosenbloom, Director of the Space Flight Center at Goddard, and Dr. Ed Gambini, who led the research team.” Someone began to clap, and that broke the spell. The room erupted into thunderous applause. Harry, who’d expected to be recognized with the others, was both relieved and disappointed at being overlooked.

  Rosenbloom tossed back the first page of the flip chart and delivered a quick course in pulsars, using a series of illustrations assembled that afternoon under Harry’s direction. He described the Altheis system, discussed the distances involved, and, somewhat clumsily, compared the incident to ships passing in the night.

  Gambini briefly recounted his reaction on the first evening. He stayed within the parameters set for him by the White House, but he was clearly angered. It had been, he said, a near religious experience: to realize that there was someone out there. “The mind that sent the Hercules transmission,” he said, “recognized that no habitable world could exist within less than a million light-years. And so it needed a transmitter of incredible power. It used a star.”

  When he had finished, they took questions.

  A political columnist for the Washington Post, referring to Beta, asked how an object only a few kilometers in diameter could have such a destructive effect on a star so much larger than the sun. Gambini tried to describe its density, and the President, demonstrating his touch for the picturesque, suggested that the newsmen think of it as an iron sun. “Yes,” observed Gambini appreciatively. “Though iron would never do that thing justice. A matchbox full of the stuff would weigh more than North America.”

  A reporter from the Wall Street Journal: “If the signal took a million and a half years to get here, they must all be dead. Anybody want to comment on that?”

  Rosenbloom gave it as his opinion that the Altheans, by this time, were undoubtedly gone.

  Someone wondered whether it was possible that any of the aliens, in the distant past, might have visited Earth?

  “No,” said Gambini, who could not conceal the fact that he found the question entertaining. “I think we can say with confidence that they’ve never been much closer than they are now.”

  “Then there’s no military threat?” That came from the Chicago Tribune’s representative.

  The President laughed and reassured the world.

  “Do we have any idea what they look like?”

  “Do they have a name?”

  “Where are they going now?” That last was from an ABC correspondent, a young black woman with a dazzling smile. “And isn’t Alpha a prime candidate to explode?”

  Gambini was impressed. “They’re headed toward the globular cluster NGC6341, but it won’t be there when they get there.” To answer the second part of the question, he began a discussion of H-R diagrams and stellar evolution which the President broke into, gently, explaining that Gambini might want to go into detail for those who were interested after the general meeting broke up.

  The President took his last question from Ed Young of PBS: “Sir, do you see any effect on international tensions as a result of this incident?”

  Hurley sidestepped adroitly. “Ed,” he observed, “there’s been a notion around for some years now that technological civilizations self-destruct, that we can expect to blow ourselves up at some point in the near future, and that nothing can prevent it. At least we can be reassured that that need not happen. Now that we know it’s possible to survive, maybe we can get serious about finding a way to do it.” He turned, waved at his audience, wished them good-day, shook a few hands, and was gone.

  Harry unlocked the front door, dropped his briefcase on the floor, threw his coat over the back of the sofa, and turned on a lamp. He sank into an upholstered chair and reached for the TV control. The house was filled with noises: an upstairs clock, the refrigerator, the quiet murmur of power in the walls. A plastic paperweight, inscribed “Superman works here,” which Tommy had given him at Christmas, rested atop his desk.

  His impression that Gambini had performed well at the press conference was borne out by the newscasts. The physicist, displaying dedication and competence, was a gray figure, perhaps, beside the President’s colorful showman, but he rose almost to eloquence on several occasions. And anyone who knew the project manager would not have missed
the wistfulness with which he responded to questions about the fifty days of silence.

  Rosenbloom, on the other hand, was at his worst. Harry got the impression that the Director had stage fright. However that might have been, the charm he was normally capable of delivering was utterly missing. He sounded irritated, arrogant, pompous. Which is to say that his more repellent qualities came to the fore and held the day.

  The network reports themselves were restrained, considering the enormity of the story. Holden Bennett, on CBS, began with the simple statement, “We are no longer alone.” Virtually the entire thirty-minute newscast was devoted to the press conference, with an announcement of a one-hour special at nine. There were clips of the Space Center and the Research Projects Laboratory.

  The networks also ran shots of slowed traffic on Greenbelt Road as people who’d heard the news earlier in the day scrambled to get a look at the Space Center. In fact, with the trees bare, the lab itself was visible from the highway.

  Man-in-the-street interviews revealed mixed interest. Some people were excited, but many felt that the country was spending too much money on projects of no conceivable benefit to anybody, at a time when the taxpayers were being asked for record sums. There was no indication that anyone was nervous.

  Reports from Paris, London, Brussels, and other capitals indicated that European reaction was unruffled.

  Tass denounced the United States for withholding the information so long, arguing that the event was of supreme importance to all nations. They wondered what else the American government knew that it was keeping to itself.

  During the cut from Moscow, the phone rang. “Mr. Carmichael?” The Voice was resonant and full and vaguely familiar.

  “Yes.”

  “Eddie Simpson. We’d like to have you on tomorrow’s show…”

  Harry listened politely, then explained that he was far too busy now, thanks anyway. A second invitation came fifteen minutes later, after which the phone rang continually. At about eight-thirty, a TV news team arrived, headed by Addison McCutcheon, an energetic Baltimore anchorman. Harry, too tired to argue about it anymore, refused to let them in, but allowed himself to be interviewed on his front steps.