“The woman said Huneker had encoded the message using RSA—that’s a system that employs the prime factors of very large numbers as the decryption key.”
“Were people doing things like that then?”
“Sure. As far back as nineteen seventy-seven, Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman—the three MIT scientists who worked out the technique—encoded a message using the 129-digit product of two primes. They offered a hundred-dollar prize to anyone who could decode it.”
“And did anyone?”
“Years later, yeah. Nineteen ninety-four, I think.”
“What’d it say?”
“ ‘The magic words are squeamish ossifrage.’ ”
“What the devil is ‘ossifrage’?”
“It’s a bird of prey, I think. It took six hundred volunteers using computers worldwide each working on part of the problem over an eight-month period, to crack the code—more than a hundred quadrillion instructions.”
“So why haven’t they done that with Josh’s message?”
“He used 512 digits—and each additional digit is an additional order of magnitude, of course. They’ve been working on it, using conventional means, ever since but haven’t cracked it yet.”
“Oh. But why did this consortium come to you?” She was a hard-T person, too.
“Because they think I’m getting close to a breakthrough in quantum computing. I’m not ready yet—we’ve got only one prototype system, and even if we do get the bugs out of it, it’ll work only with numbers exactly three-hundred digits long. But in a few months, with luck, I will have a system that could decode messages of any length almost instantaneously.”
“Ah.”
“This woman who came to see me, I think she wants to patent whatever technology is gleaned from the message.”
“That’s outrageous,” said Heather. “Even if such a message exists—and I really doubt that—it belongs to everyone.” She paused. “And besides…”
“What?”
“Well,” said Heather, frowning, “if it exists, then Josh did kill himself after he saw what it had to say. Maybe—maybe you don’t want to know what it says.”
“You mean maybe his suicide might actually have been related to the message?”
“Maybe. Like I said, as far as I knew, he wasn’t gay or bi.”
“But what kind of message would lead a man to kill himself, but first hide it from the rest of humanity?” asked Kyle.
Heather was quiet for a moment, then: “‘Heaven exists, it’s absolute paradise, and everyone gets in.’”
“Why keep that a secret?”
“So that the human race would go on. If everyone knew that was true, we’d all commit suicide to get there sooner, and Homo sapiens would become extinct overnight.”
Kyle thought about this. “Then why leave an encrypted version of the message at all? Why not just destroy the message altogether?”
“Maybe it’s like the Pope,” said Heather. Kyle’s face telegraphed his lack of comprehension. “They say there’s a prophecy under lock and key at the Vatican; it’s been there for centuries. Every once in a while, a Pope looks at it—and reacts with horror, locking it up again. At least, that’s the story.”
Kyle frowned. “Well, this consortium wants me to go work for them; they’re offering a lot of money.”
“How much?” asked Heather.
She could see hesitation on his face. Even before he spoke, she knew what he must have been thinking: If we don’t reconcile at some point, is it wise for me to disclose the magnitude of a new source of income? “It, ah, was quite a substantial sum,” said Kyle.
“I see,” said Heather.
“They’ve already got a line on another researcher who also is close to making a breakthrough.” He paused. “Saperstein.”
“You hate that guy.”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t know. Maybe you should do it.”
“Why?”
“Well, suppose Saperstein or someone else does it instead. That doesn’t mean the Huneker message, if it really exists, ever goes public—the government doubtless has a copy of the message, but they’ve kept it under wraps for over twenty years now.”
“Perhaps. But I’m sure the consortium will make me sign an NDA.”
“Ah,” said Heather, imitating her husband. “The coveted NDA.”
He smiled. “An NDA is a nondisclosure agreement. They’d likely make me sign a contract with very stiff penalties, promising not to divulge the message’s content, or even its existence.”
“Hmm. What do you want to do?”
Kyle spread his arms. “There was an old Monty Python skit about a joke so funny you’d literally die laughing if you heard it; it was used as an Allied weapon in World War Two. It had to be translated from English to German by teams, each person translating only one word at a time. One guy accidentally saw two words and ended up in intensive care.” He paused. “I don’t know. If somebody handed you a joke and said it was that funny, wouldn’t you have to look and see for yourself?” He paused. “Even if Huneker did kill himself after he read it, I want to know what the alien message said.”
“It might be indecipherable, you know—just like the Centauri messages. Even if you can figure out the prime factors, it doesn’t mean the message would make sense. I mean, despite what I said a moment ago, I guess it is plausible that Josh killed himself for personal reasons, and the message had nothing to do with it.”
“Perhaps,” said Kyle. “Or perhaps the message made a pictogram that by coincidence meant something only to Huneker.” He jerked a thumb at the Dali painting. “You know, maybe he’d stolen money from his church poor box and the pictogram happened to look like Jesus on the cross, or some such thing. Drove him crazy.”
“In which case you’d be immune, you atheist you.”
Kyle shrugged.
“Maybe you should do it,” said Heather. She lowered her voice. “After all, if Becky…”
Kyle nodded. “If Becky sues me and I lose everything that the world knows I’ve got, it would be nice to have a lucrative source of income.”
Heather was quiet for a moment, then: “I have to get going.”
Kyle stood up. “Thanks for coming by,” he said.
Heather smiled wanly and left.
Kyle returned to his chair and sat thinking. Was there anything—anything at all—that someone could reveal to him that would cause him to kill himself?
No. No, of course not.
Except—
He shuddered.
Yes, there was one thing that someone could reveal that might indeed cause him to take his own life, just as poor Josh Huneker had done all those years ago up in the middle of nowhere.
Proof that it was he, not Becky, who had false memories of what had really happened during her childhood.
16
Heather returned to Paul Komensky’s lab late the next afternoon. The little robot was still chugging along, but it had consumed most of the third and final substrate sheet. “It should be just a few more minutes,” Paul said, coming over to greet her.
Heather thought of something she’d once heard about never trusting engineers’ time estimates. “Okay.”
As if feeling a need to demonstrate that he wasn’t that far off, Paul gestured at two large boxes, which were indeed mostly full of little rectangular pieces of painted substrate.
Heather went over to the boxes and picked up the first two tiles. She snapped them together; they held nicely.
The robot made an electronic chirping sound. Heather turned around. She was blocking its path. She got out of its way, and it rolled over to the second box, dropped in a tile, then made a different series of bleeps and stopped.