The young CIA officer was alone, the Gorki-9 telephone traffic being light in the early hours. He had arrived only three weeks ago, full of enthusiasm about his Moscow posting, on the strength of his background in Van Eck monitoring. To his disappointment, he had been assigned to the ‘chatline’, the routine coverage of private calls to and from the dachas, private and government-owned, of the government officials.
Velikhov’s name and address came up quickly on the screen, but there was a few moments’ delay while the recipient’s location was traced through a satellite.
Ninety-nine per cent of it was drivel — gossip between wives, teenagers talking to each other, remote calls to children in distant places. There was an occasional diversion, the Canadian diplomat’s wife in particular: ‘Ruth’s on!’ would bring a gleeful rush to the terminal, as the calls between her and her opera house lover became ever more steamy and inventive.
No name. Some castle in Slovakia.
At this hour. Interesting.
The phonetic translator threw up the words in passable English but the CIA officer’s Russian was better than the machine’s.
He listened with growing perplexity. This wasn’t a conversation between two normal adults, it was between lunatics. He dropped the crossword and pressed the headphones lightly against his ear, frowning.
And then he smiled. Of course — he was on the receiving end of a joke, some ponderous Russian humour. They were saying, ‘Merry Christmas, Amerika, we know you’re listening in.’
But there was no humour in the voices.
His smile gradually faded. If they knew he was listening in, why tell him this through a joke? Why not use this knowledge to transmit misinformation? Why tell a tale that couldn’t be taken seriously, not for a second?
As the crazy exchange continued, it increasingly dawned on the young man that this was no joke and that if these were actors, they were damn good ones.
The call lasted over an hour. At the end of it, the CIA man took off his headphones with a sigh and scratched his head.
I’ve just intercepted this call about aliens.
Aliens?
The callers were serious.
Of course they were. How long have you been with us? Three weeks?
He shook his head. Three weeks in Moscow and either he had the coup of a lifetime, or he was the victim of a humiliating, career-damaging practical joke.
14
Kanchenjunga
‘You people are nuts.’ Little patches of damp have appeared under the armpits of Gibson’s shirt. ‘Am I supposed to go to the British government and tell them that aliens have beamed us a picture of a virus?’
Shtyrkov says, ‘It’s obviously a virus. They like to be icosahedrons.’
Petrie says, ‘We can test it. Your little coloured spheres, Svetlana.’
‘Yes. Each is a cluster of dots, hundreds of them.’
‘These dots should be proteins.’
‘Tom, I wouldn’t recognise a protein if it hit me on the nose.’
‘It’s a string of amino acids.’
‘That’s all right then.’ Svetlana is looking defiant.
‘Right. We need a biochemist.’
Gibson says, ‘No. There’s no time. And we have enough outsiders.’ He attempts a conciliatory smile at Freya and Petrie but it comes out as a leer. ‘Nothing personal.’
‘Svetlana and I will learn biochemistry tonight,’ Shtyrkov says.
Petrie says, ‘Will it take you all night?’
‘Even genius has limits. Tom, you try to decipher fresh bits of the signal.’
‘I’ll try to identify the source,’ Freya says.
‘It’s why you’re out here,’ Gibson reminds her. ‘I’ll get back to the press release.’
Shtyrkov warns Gibson: ‘You and I contact our governments simultaneously, Charlee. No jumping the gun.’
Apart from a scowl, Gibson makes no response.
Petrie says to nobody, ‘This is the biggest thing in history.’
Freya says, ‘I’d kill for a coffee.’
6 p.m. Freya says, ‘We can rule out 47 Ursa Majoris. It’s way outside the error circle.’
A little later, Petrie takes to pacing up and down like a caged lion. There is a clear patch of floor near the centre of the room, and he criss-crosses this at random, looking over at the dancing patterns taunting him on his screen. From time to time he sits on the edge of his chair, still staring at the dots.
At random, he has cut into the signal about a minute down the line. Here the patterns are different. The biology was snowflakes in a blizzard, random swirls, sometimes a handful of dots, sometimes thousands. Random and yet not random. But here, further down the signal, things are in stark contrast. The salami technique, stacking slices of time to create a figure, doesn’t work. Here the patterns are harsh and geometric. There are pentagons and pyramids, abacuses in three dimensions and jagged cliffs in four. And yet sometimes, as he pushes the movie on, the harsh geometry dissolves and the blizzard reappears.
An alien mind, reaching out to me. What are you saying? What are you telling me? What do you mean?
6.50 p.m. After forty minutes of sitting and pacing, Petrie mutters something about the theological library and disappears. He returns without explanation an hour later. The restless pacing resumes.
8.30 p.m. Shtyrkov and Svetlana say that the virus theory is looking good. The little spheres look like proteins made up of amino acids, but they don’t know enough to identify any of them or even to say if they are of a known type.
Close to midnight, they announce that the signal contains the codings for hundreds of viruses, maybe thousands. There is a brief discussion of what could possibly motivate the signallers to beam information of that sort. There are other structures of some molecular complexity, in their thousands, but they can make no sense of them. By this time Petrie, still doing the walk, is starting to mutter.
12.40 a.m. Gibson leaves the room and returns with a tray of mugs and biscuits. Snow is fluttering down, the flakes catching the light as they pass the windows.
Petrie keeps disappearing and reappearing, muttering and sometimes walking up and down with his hands on his head, his face screwed up in concentration. Now and then he scribbles on paper and then, often as not, darts out of the room, sometimes with a groan of despair. Nobody pays him any attention.
2.05 a.m. Freya’s program runs to its conclusion. She tidies up some numbers and consults star charts. The signal has come from one of two small regions of sky, in opposite directions. One of them contains a few ordinary stars. The other is deeply disturbing. She looks around furtively; everyone is busy at terminals, except for Petrie, who is still pacing, lost in his world of patterns. She thinks he looks mad, like Rasputin or somebody. She decides to keep her finding to herself until she has searched the Net for every scrap of information about the candidate sources.
3.15 a.m. Gibson finishes the first draft of his press release with a sigh. He makes a show of walking up and down, holding the paper in front of him, and reading it with every sign of adoration. Petrie seems not to see him but somehow they avoid collision. Gibson puts his hands on Svetlana’s shoulders, looks at her screen, and asks: could the double helix be human? On the face of it the question is mind-bogglingly silly, but after the day’s surprises nothing seems too bizarre. Svetlana says they’ll get on to it.