"At least it's not alien," Chase said, trying to lighten the mood. There had been a rash of UFO sightings over previous months and he'd even heard a few people speak seriously of an "invasion."
"The source is southwest," Hegler said, leaning over the desk and jabbing a stubby finger at the map. "I can't pinpoint it exactly, but I'd say between two and three hundred miles."
"Anything in that area?"
"Yosemite National Park, Death Valley, China Lake Naval Weapons Station, Fort Irwin, Las Vegas. Take your pick."
"So there is a military presence near the source of the signal," Chase said thoughtfully.
"Is. Was. Who knows what's there anymore?"
"And what about Emigrant Junction?" Chase said, studying the map. "Is that an actual location or just a call sign?"
Hegler shrugged again. "If it exists I can't find it."
Chase listened for a moment to the remorseless beeping coming over the speaker. "Does nothing in the message make sense? I thought I heard the word 'island.' Did you get that?"
"Comes up pretty often. That's in plain English, but then it's followed by a string of characters and digits." Hegler glanced at him sideways. "If you think you can crack it you're welcome to try."
"I'll leave it to the experts," Chase said, smiling and shaking his head. "Anyway, I wouldn't want to deprive you and Ron of hours of harmless amusement."
Art Hegler reached out to fine-tune the dial. Chase admired his persistence. It had been sheer accident that the signals were detected at alclass="underline" Ron Maxwell had picked them up on a random sweep several months ago, and ever since he and Hegler had spent countless hours monitoring them and trying to crack the code. Why they went to all this time and trouble wasn't clear--even to them, Chase suspected.
Like most activity in the Tomb it had taken on the form of ritual, a way to get through the day.
They were all, himself included, on a journey with no destination. There was a time bomb ticking away inside every brain. The trick was to ignore it, to swamp it with ceaseless activity so that the ticking faded until it was no more intrusive than the background hum of the filtration plant. Of course one day--one day--the ticking, like the filtration plant, would stop and the bomb would explode. But he didn't want to think about that. Neither did Hegler nor Maxwell nor any of the others, which was why they carried on obsessively with futile tasks.
"Hear that?" Hegler said suddenly.
Chase paid attention, but the Morse sounded the same as before, garbled and indecipherable. "What is it?"
"Answering message. They gave the call sign: Island-whatever-it-is to Emigrant Junction and then the coded message follows."
"Can you locate the island? If we knew who they were talking to--"
Hegler waved his pudgy hand impatiently. "It's a random signal, could be coming from practically anywhere, and we only have one directional fix on it. There's more than one island though," he added, frowning at the console.
"How do you know that?"
"The messages overlap. Emigrant Junction talks to three, four, or more simultaneously. Goes on nonstop without a break. Damn windbags."
Islands in different parts of the world? Was that where people had run to? Or were these military bases reporting to and receiving orders from HQ? It was bloody infuriating not to know what was happening elsewhere. Communication with the outside world had dwindled as everyone withdrew into secrecy and suspicion, as remote and isolated from one another as tribes of headhunters in the depths of the Borneo jungle. The global village was no more. The Tomb itself never transmitted for fear of hostile outsiders locating their position.
Ron Maxwell came in carrying a stack of magnetic tapes. Tall and thin and buzzing with nervous energy, he was Stan to Hegler's Ollie. He wore a brown one-piece coverall with an oxygen counter on the left breast pocket: Below a certain percentage it turned blue, then purple, then black. Some had audio circuits attached that trilled like songbirds.
"When are they due back?" asked Maxwell, dropping the tapes with a clatter onto his half of the console. He peered amiably at Chase through tinted spectacles.
"The deadline is nine o'clock tonight," Chase replied. Maxwell's daughter Fran was with the reconnaissance party that Dan was leading. "I should think they'll be back before then. Art's been telling me about your daily soap opera; pity we can't follow the plot."
"Maybe we can't," Maxwell said, brandishing one of the tape reels, "for the simple reason that it's in another language."
"What?" Chase stiffened. Surely they weren't back to the nonsense about aliens again? And why hadn't Hegler mentioned this? He got the feeling that private lines of research were going on all around him that he knew nothing about.
"Computer-speak." Ron Maxwell flipped the reel and caught it in his bony fingers. "We dusted off the weather-modeling computer--it hasn't been used for three years--and ran some of the tapes. Had to teach it Morse code first, and we're dealing with an unknown program, yet the computer recognized a distant cousin when it heard one. Overjoyed to hear a friendly voice. You could almost see its diodes glowing with pleasure."
"It was able to interpret the tapes?"
"Ah--no," Maxwell admitted, perching himself on the corner of the desk and swinging a lanky leg.
Hegler said tartly, "It didn't tell us anything we didn't already know."
"If it didn't break the code, what did it do?" Chase demanded.
"That's not so," Maxwell objected, carrying on the conversation over Chase's head. "We know--" He broke off, sighed, and spoke instead to Chase. "The messages from Emigrant Junction to the islands appear to be coded binary data: a master computer instructing other computers what to do. The answering messages are the computers feeding data back to the master computer."
"Data about what?"
"We don't know. Highly technical information for sure, but until we understand the program we can't say."
"As I said, we're no nearer interpreting the messages than we were before," Hegler put in, sounding pained and weary. "They could be military, scientific, or a new recipe for hamburger."
"Do you think you'll crack it eventually?"
"Bound to," Maxwell asserted, full of confidence. "All we need is time and that's one thing we've plenty of. Come back in three months and we'll have the answer."
"Might have," Hegler rejoined, twiddling the dial.
Chase stood up and eyed them both keenly. "You do realize this is absolutely vital. You've got to crack that code!"
Hegler looked over his shoulder and Maxwell stopped his leg in midswing.
"Why's that?" Hegler said.
"So we can start up in competition to McDonalds," Chase said.
When he told Ruth about it later, her reaction was, "I don't see the point, Gavin. What are they hoping to prove?"
"They don't want to prove anything. They're investigating a problem, or more accurately a mystery, that's all."
They were sitting in the recreation room that they shared with ten others, Nick Power and his family among them. There was no shortage of living space in the complex--in fact there was too much of it-- though communal sharing of facilities was necessary in order to save energy. There had been a suggestion to depressurize the corridors and stairways, but Chase thought it might be too dangerous. Most of the available energy went toward maintaining a breathable sealed environment; it was their most worrying problem.
"We know things are getting worse," Ruth said drably. "We don't need instruments to tell us that--just step outside."
"You don't think we ought to continue our investigations?"
"What for? To leave as a legacy for those unborn who never will be?" Ruth's complexion had always been fair, but now it was very pale, emphasized by the crooked pink scar on her forehead that intersected with her right eyebrow, giving her a perpetually quizzical expression. The strain of living underground had told on them all. Everyone was pale because the sunlight was too fierce on the unprotected skin; everyone was subdued because of the inevitability of what was to be--had to be. Hence Ruth's skepticism about the work that still went on regardless.