The whole thing seemed ramshackle. In fact, more than anything, it reminded Heather of something that had happened in kindergarten. Her class had gone in 1979 to see the first-ever landing of a Concorde jet at what was then called Toronto International Airport. After they’d returned, a kindly janitor had made a pretend Concorde for the kids to play in from an old garbage can and some green corrugated cardboard. This thing was about as flimsy as that had been.
Paul shook his head in wonder. “What do you suppose it is?”
Heather shrugged. “I haven’t the vaguest idea.”
She looked at her watch, and Paul looked at his.
They walked up to the subway station together. Heather had to go east to Yonge; Paul, who lived in a condo at Harbourfront, needed to go south to Union. He came down to the eastbound platform, just to make sure Heather got safely on a train. St. George station was decorated in pale green tiles, not unlike bigger versions of those they’d assembled that evening. The tunnels were quite straight here; Heather could see her train coming up well in advance of its arrival.
“Thanks, Paul,” she said, smiling warmly. “I really appreciate your help.”
Paul touched her arm lightly; that was all. Heather wondered what she would have done if he’d tried to kiss her.
And then her train rumbled into the station, and she headed back home to her empty house.
Heather had tossed and turned all night, dreaming alternately about the bizarre alien artifact and about Paul.
Most of the subway trip to work was underground, but at two stretches along the Yonge arm the subway waxed oxymoronic and poked out into the light of day. At both points—around Davisville and Rosedale stations—the sunlight seemed painfully bright to Heather’s sleep-deprived eyes.
Mercifully, when she finally arrived at her office, the drapes were still closed. She couldn’t work comfortably with the construct made of eight cubes dominating the room. But she sat quietly in the darkness, sipping a coffee she’d bought on the way in from the Second Cup in the lobby, waiting for her head to stop pounding.
Which, finally, it did. She’d hoped a night’s sleep would have suggested some sort of answer to the puzzle represented by what they had built, but nothing had come to her. And now, looking at the thing, she felt like a fool—what a crazy idea it had been! She was glad that Omar—and just about everyone else—was away on vacation.
Heather took another sip of coffee and decided she was ready to face the day. She got up, went to the window and pulled the faded drapes. Sunlight streamed in.
She sat back down, cradling her head with her hands, and—
What the hell?
The painted-on markings on the substrate panels were sparkling in the sunlight. They were a film of crystals, so perhaps that wasn’t too surprising, but—
— they seemed to dance, to shimmer.
She got up to look at them more closely, stepping across the room, and—
— and she tripped over a pile of paperite printouts she’d left on the floor. She went tumbling forward, crashing into the structure she’d built.
She should have ended up smashing it to bits—not just the big square panels, but also snapping many of the connections between the thousands of tiles.
She should have done that—but she didn’t.
The structure held. In fact, Heather came close to breaking her arm when she smashed into it.
Something was holding the panels together. Up close, she could see that the individual square markings on the tiles were flashing separately, refracting like the surface of soap bubbles.
Yesterday this had been a flimsy construct—jerrybuilt, held together by clamps, propped up by a stack of books.
But today—
She went to the far end of the structure, examining it. Then she gave it a good hard rap with her knuckles. It was solid, but not completely immobile; the unit shifted slightly. Her fall had pressed one face flush against the wall. Heather used her foot to nudge out the stack of books holding up that end; the volumes cascaded to the floor.
But the final cube still stood solid. Instead of collapsing under its own weight, the row of cubes stuck straight out into space.
Maybe the paint acted as a kind of cement after it had time enough to dry? Maybe—
She looked around the room, saw the light streaming through the window, saw her own shadow on the far wall.
Could it be solar powered?
Sunlight. The one energy source any civilization anywhere in the universe might have access to. Not all worlds contained heavy elements, such as uranium, and surely not all had stores of fossil fuels. But every planet in the galaxy had one or more stars around which it circled.
She got up, closed the drapes.
The object stayed rigid. She sighed—of course it wouldn’t be that simple. She sat back down at her desk, thinking.
There was a creaking sound from across the room. As she watched, the construct began to buckle. She leaped to her feet, hurried across the floor and tried to catch the final cube before it fell apart, its two side panels and its bottom and end panels dropping away.
She tried to support the rest of the structure with one hand while frantically rebuilding her book buttress with the other. Once she had the object secured, she hustled back to the window and opened the blinds again.
Obviously, the thing had some trifling power-storage capacity. That only made sense in a solar-powered device; you couldn’t have it failing every time someone cast a shadow over it.
Well, then.
The first order of business was to make sure the construct was permanently powered; in a couple of hours the sun would no longer be coming through that window. She thought about taking it outside, but that would solve the problem only until evening. Clearly, the energy-efficient office fluorescents hadn’t provided enough illumination to power the construct yesterday, but she could get high-output electric lamps from the Theatre Department, or maybe from Botany.
She felt adrenaline surging through her. She had no idea yet of what she’d discovered, but she’d clearly made more progress with the alien messages than anyone else had.
She thought for a second about immediately logging on to the Alien Signal Center homepage and reporting what she’d found. That would be enough to ensure her priority. But it would also mean that in the next few days, hundreds of researchers would replicate what she’d already done—and one of them might take it to the next step, figuring out what the darn thing was for. She had a dozen years of career catching-up to do; discovering the construct’s purpose might be enough to make up for all the lost time…
She went to find some lamps.
And then she got down to work.
17
Kyle entered his lab, the lights coming on automatically as he did so.
“Good morning, Cheetah.”
“ ’Morning, Dr. Graves.”
“Hey, that was good. ‘ ’Morning.’ I like that.”
“I’m trying,” said Cheetah.
“You certainly are.”
“Was that a shot?”
“Moi?” But then Kyle shrugged and smiled. “Actually, yes it was—good job catching it. You’re making progress.”
“I certainly hope so. In fact—how’s this?” Cheetah paused, apparently waiting until he had Kyle’s full attention. “Julius Caesar wasn’t just the great-uncle of Augustus—he was also the son of the Wicked Witch of the West, and like the Wicked Witch, he could be killed by water. Well, given that, Cassius and the rest of the republican conspirators decide that they don’t need to off Big Julie with knives—they can do it far more cleanly with squirt guns. So they lay in wait for him, and when he comes down from the capitol, they open fire. Caesar resists, until he sees his best friend also shooting him, and with that, he utters his final words before falling down dead: ‘H2, Brute?’ ”