She raised her hands. ‘Who knows?’
‘How could they suppress the secret?’ Petrie asked. ‘We all know about it.’
There was a sudden, tense silence.
Petrie said, ‘Let’s not get into fantasy here.’
… your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.
A warning, but of what and from whom?
Shtyrkov tapped the table emphatically. ‘Suppression, pre-emption, whatever. We must beat them to it. Make the announcement sooner, Charlee. Today.’
Gibson said, ‘When I go public with this I want to say the signal has come from Planet X or Star Y. Freya, how goes the identification?’
‘I may or may not have identified the source. It’s weird.’
‘How long will it take you to get one hundred per cent certainty?’
‘Never. But I’m weeding out the implausibles.’
‘With or without identification, this goes into the public domain on Monday.’
‘Today, Charlee. Don’t give them time for mischief.’
‘It’s a balance, Vash. Give Freya a chance to come up with something.’
‘I might — just — be able to decrypt more of the message,’ Petrie said. ‘I’ll work on it today.’
Shtyrkov said, ‘Svetlana, your job is distraction. Spend the day briefing this man from Her Majesty’s Government. Tell him everything. Tell him anything. But keep him out of our hair.’
Svetlana said, ‘Shall I wear fishnet tights?’
16
The Whirlpool Galaxy
‘Tom! Tom! It’s Vashislav.’
The bedside lamp was shining in Petrie’s face. He waved Freya ahead and pulled on clothes, slipping his feet into shoes without tying the laces. He wondered if he was destined ever to sleep again, but the urgency in Freya’s voice said there were other priorities.
Until he saw the Russian, Petrie had always assumed that ‘foaming at the mouth’, as a description of a man gone mad, was populist nonsense. But flecks of white frothy foam were dribbling out of the corners of Shtyrkov’s mouth. He was in the main hall, arms flapping, an idiot grin lighting up his face. He was running from one chandelier to the next, shouting and laughing in Russian, staring up at them in adoration. Svetlana was standing at the foot of the stairs, long yellow nightdress hanging under her red robe and her face screwed up in distress.
The Russian saw Petrie, pointed to the chandeliers and called up in English, ‘Look at the pretty lights!’ His eyes were starting to roll.
‘How long has he been like this?’
Svetlana said, ‘I don’t know. I heard him singing half an hour ago but didn’t think it was anything at first. I’ve been up for ten minutes. I’ve tried to stop him but he just keeps going.’
‘He’ll collapse,’ Freya said. ‘Nobody can keep that up.’
Tears of happiness were welling from Shtyrkov’s eyes; his voice was enraptured but he was gasping for breath. ‘Aren’t they beautiful, Tom and Freya? Are we not in Paradise?’
‘Vash.’ Petrie stepped forward. ‘Come to bed.’ But Shtyrkov giggled and ran off like a naughty child, wheezing and foaming.
‘Where are the light switches?’ Petrie called back to Svetlana.
‘Round here.’ She switched them off.
In the sudden pitch black, Shtyrkov’s footsteps halted, as if he too had been switched off. Petrie moved in the direction of the man’s rasping breath, took him by the arm, and led him back towards the stairs. Shtyrkov was trembling, and whimpering quietly.
‘Temporal lobe damage. It affects perceptions.’
‘Are you sure, Freya?’
‘Not even fifty per cent sure. All I can say is that it fits the profile I got on the internet.’
‘Vashislav ran into the thick of the beam when it was hitting the lake.’
‘Is it reversible, progressive or what?’ It was just after noon but Petrie was at breakfast: a biscuit, which he was dipping into his second coffee. He hadn’t bothered to shave.
‘I don’t know. Some people say Van Gogh had temporal lobe epilepsy, that it maybe even accounts for the intensity of his paintings. Colours are brighter, everything is seen more vividly. And Vashislav seems to love glittering things.’
‘How can a particle beam do that? If it was disrupting cells it would surely have fried his whole brain.’
Freya said, ‘It usually needs a lesion, but there were thin, concentrated pencil beams in the flow. And maybe it’s more subtle than that. A powerful magnetic field applied to the brain can play tricks.’
‘If you say so.’
‘You don’t understand, Tom, you’re a creature of mid-latitude. Your body is synchronised with the rhythms of light. But in polar latitudes we’re more sensitive to the effects of strong geomagnetic disturbances. We don’t understand how, but there’s a clear connection between things like Russian mine accidents and strong magnetic disturbances up top. It’s been established by the polar geophysics people at Murmansk. They do upper atmosphere.’
Petrie said, ‘The particles were surely non-magnetic, otherwise the underwater magnets would have distorted their paths.’
‘Unless they carried so much energy that not even forty thousand gauss could divert them,’ Freya suggested.
‘That’s surely incredible,’ Petrie said.
‘It’s testable, Tom. The ionosphere is charged up. If you fired charged particles through the Earth you’d create a short-circuit between ionosphere and ground. At the very least you’d get disturbances in radio or radar. You might even get weird cloud effects through nucleation around the beam.’
‘What about Charlie and Svetlana?’ Petrie wondered.
‘They were either on the periphery of the particle flow or they missed it altogether. I haven’t seen anything odd about them yet, Tom, have you?’
‘They’re both odd. But what other symptoms might we see? Assuming it’s this temporal lobe thing.’
‘All sorts. Anxiety, visceral symptoms, feelings of fear or anger, destructive or aggressive behaviour, out-of-body experiences, you see tunnels, bright lights and so on. Sometimes you get an overwhelming sensation that there’s someone near you. You might even see a face, and extreme character traits appear. Some people get religious hallucinations.’
‘At least Vash isn’t claiming to be Jesus or something. Will you tell him what you suspect?’
Freya said, ‘Not until after the ET announcement. Let’s not spoil his moment of glory.’
‘We should keep an eye on the other two.’
Shtyrkov was last to appear, mid-afternoon. He showed no obvious after-effects, and made no mention of the trauma he had been through in the early hours. Petrie wondered if the Russian even remembered it. They settled themselves around a table in a bar next to the common room. Gibson stared greedily at a folder of papers Freya was holding.
Hanning said, ‘Dr Popov gave me a very thorough briefing. I must say I’m having difficulty taking it in.’
Gibson ignored him; Freya was the focus of their attention. ‘Friday afternoon, Freya. What have you got for us?’
‘I’ve narrowed the source down to two possibles, depending on whether the particles came down through the lake from above, or up from below. Here’s candidate number one.’ She spread a large image on the table.
There was an assortment of gasps from everyone. Petrie’s mind began to race. Two blue, feathery arms spiralled out of a reddish-white nucleus. The arms were lined with dark lanes. One of them, with little outcrops striking off, extended as a long bridge to a smaller, outlying galaxy. ‘M51, in Canes Venatici, not too many degrees from the north galactic pole. It’s just below the Plough.’