A knock on the door. Svetlana. ‘Join us for lunch?’ She saw the strain on the mathematician’s drawn face and added, ‘Have you found something?’
Petrie shook his head. Suddenly aware that his bladder needed relieving, he waved Svetlana ahead. He followed her along the corridor. She was trailing a whiff of perfume. Or maybe it was shampoo — Petrie wasn’t into the things women sprayed themselves with. She passed behind the curved stairs. Gibson, climbing them with a burger in one hand and a mug in the other, called down. ‘Found anything, Tom?’
‘Give me a chance, I’ve just arrived.’
In the kitchen, Shtyrkov was loading a dumb waiter with half a loaf of bread, butter, jam, biscuits and a plate piled with beetroot and what looked like a squashed octopus. Svetlana rattled a pot on to a big electric hob. ‘I’m making myself some pasta, Tom.’
‘No, thanks. I’ll just get back to it.’ Petrie poured himself a coffee from a bubbling percolator, helped himself to a couple of chocolate biscuits from Shtyrkov’s dumb waiter collection and disappeared back to his baroque study.
This time he ran the animation for six hours. Apart from one visit to the bathroom, and one to the kitchen for water to relieve his parched throat, he never stirred from his chair. Gradually, as the swirling patterns saturated his brain, an unwelcome image kept forcing itself forward. He tried to reject it, concentrate on the patterns, but it kept coming back. It was a memory of Sampson-Kildare, his sixth-form English teacher, a vile old lecher. The man was thrusting his wrinkled, leering face into Petrie’s, and he was croaking: ‘The mirth and fun grew fast and furious,’ while the patterns danced like Tam O’Shanter’s witches, and another image, incredible and malign, slowly crawled out from his unconscious mind.
8
Decode
‘Look at you! You’ve got to eat.’
Petrie stared dully at Freya. It was some seconds before he brought himself back from his world of swirling blizzards. ‘What’s the time?’
She looked at the clock on his terminal. ‘Just after eleven. The others have eaten.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘You are. And Vashislav’s made something for us.’
‘It’s probably squashed octopus.’
‘What?’
‘Never mind. Okay, I’ll be along.’
She took him firmly by the arm. ‘Nice try, but you’re coming now.’
‘You remind me of my mother.’
Shtyrkov had been busy. Freya steered him to the first-floor canteen, if canteen was the word for the chandeliered elegance and gleaming silverware which greeted him. She sat him down at a table set for three, spread with a white tablecloth. He surveyed the bowls with brown bread, olives, gherkins, salad and fruit. A bottle of vodka took pride of place at the centre of the table. Through the windows, a flicker of distant lightning briefly lit up heavy clouds and forested hills.
‘Where are Charlie and Svetlana?’
Freya poured the vodkas. ‘Gone to bed.’ She smiled mischievously. ‘Separate beds, that is. Are you making progress?’
Petrie massaged his forehead. He felt as if his head was splitting in two. ‘Maybe. I don’t know. Where does the food come from?’
‘There’s a big freezer. And Vash tells me fresh food will come with the cleaners in the mornings. They’ll be here for an hour each day. The castle administrator is keeping out of it but Charlie has his home number if we need anything.’
‘An entire castle to ourselves. He carries some clout, does our Russian colleague.’
‘And I can cook,’ Shtyrkov boomed, appearing from a side room with a tray. ‘A talent which I owe to my Great-aunt Lidia. First, we have caviar.’ He set a large bowl of some chilled purée on the table and sat down heavily. ‘Poor man’s caviar, that is. A Georgian spread made of aubergines, tomatoes, garlic, sugar, lemon juice and pepper. Tom, tell us what you have found.’
‘Nothing.’
Shtyrkov smiled sceptically. ‘You are a bad liar. You can hardly keep your eyes open. Something is driving you.’
Damn the man. I’m not ready to talk about it. ‘Maybe something.’
Freya’s eyes widened. ‘Maybe something? What exactly?’
Petrie spread the fake caviar on a hard, flat square of bread. It was his first taste of food since Shtyrkov’s commandeered biscuits and he savoured the sharp, tangy taste. He wiped his mouth and said, ‘Patterns. But no more than gusts of wind in a storm. Who knows what furnace these things came out of? I don’t see evidence of an intelligence lying behind them.’
Shtyrkov seemed unperturbed by Petrie’s negative comment. He smiled slyly and poured vodka to the brims of their vodka glasses. He nodded at Petrie’s T-shirt. ‘You play chess?’
‘Sort of. Come on, Vash, what makes you think there’s something in that particle burst?’
Shtyrkov raised four fat fingers. ‘Yon. Tesera. Chetire. Cuatro. Quattre. Quattro. Vier. Four.’
Petrie looked at the Russian with astonishment. Groupings of four, additions up to four, foursome reels, the bewildering fact had come to Petrie as the merest glimmer after hours of mind-breaking work. He said, casually, ‘Okay. But I can’t make sense of it. Not yet.’
Shtyrkov grinned but said nothing. Freya poured tea.
‘People have always assumed that extraterrestrials, if they exist, would send out radio signals,’ Petrie said. ‘Nobody thought about weird particles.’
Shtyrkov sipped the vodka with satisfaction. ‘Ice cold, as it should be. Extraterrestrials, however, may not feel bound by our limitations.’
‘A Harvard/Princeton team are searching for laser pulses,’ Freya said. ‘They’re using a modest telescope and they could pick up signals out to a hundred light years, maybe a thousand.’
‘And let me tell you why, young Miss Freya, or has Anglo-Saxon angst spread to Norway and you prefer Ms?’
Freya laughed but didn’t rise to Shtyrkov’s provocative bait. The Russian continued, ‘Bandwidth. Red light has a frequency thirty thousand times higher than microwave radio. In the time taken for a radio wave to arrive, thirty thousand light waves do so. Information is transmitted thirty thousand times faster. Equipment is smaller and more mobile: an intelligence could easily fire signals at ten solar systems a second if it was trying to make contact with other life forms. And one other thing. The Galaxy is awash with radio waves, from pulsars, nebulae, even stars. But I very much doubt if, anywhere, Mother Nature fires nanosecond laser pulses. Find one and there can be no confusion with a natural source.’
There was a rumble and lights flickered briefly. Petrie felt the icy vodka burning his lips and then warming his alimentary canal all the way down to the stomach. ‘You mean, why use radio when you have lasers?’
‘Why have cotton when you can have silk? Radio searches happen now because they happened first. They are an accident of history, a hundred-year slice of our technological evolution. Better means to communicate already exist.’
‘If you’re operating on timescales of thousands or millions of years, lasers may have a short shelf life too.’
Shtyrkov nodded. ‘Exactly. To an advanced signaller, they would have the byte rate of smoke signals. You learn fast, young Tom. And because the higher the frequency the more efficient the communication, why stop at electromagnetic radiation at all? Weird particles, as you call them, carrying energy beyond even gamma rays, would be much more effective at transmitting information. A few thousand years down the line and we too will be firing them into space.’