Harris said, ‘This Petrie knows where the signal came from. He could talk. Some fool would then fire off a reply.’
Hazel said, ‘We must go for it, Mr President. We’ll never get another opportunity, not just for ourselves, but ultimately for the whole of humanity.’
Harris said, ‘Join the Galactic club, huh? We become immortals, gods on Earth? Producing children in the image of little gods?’ There was a smattering of uneasy laughter around the table. He continued: ‘Who needs Frankenstein? The signallers are doing it all for us. And I’ve seen no more concern here about the moral issues of tampering with life than I suppose Baron Frankenstein did in the book.’
‘If we have the knowledge we can choose whether or not to use it,’ Hazel said. ‘Sort out the ethical issues at leisure.’
Harris shook his head. ‘That’s pretty naive, Ms Baxendale. The knowledge would eventually be misused.’
‘Or used. Even kept in reserve, to rebuild society if we were ever nuked or hit by an asteroid or blanketed with comet dust.’
Harris said, ‘You’re evidently a godless woman, Ms Baxendale, and I don’t expect you to appreciate this point, but the fact is that God made Man in His image. There’s nothing in sacred texts about extraterrestrials. And redemption is at the core of all Christian doctrine. But as I’ve explained to the President, there is nothing in the Bible to say that unearthly creatures have obtained redemption. That being so, they are not God’s creatures. We are. It follows that we must reject whatever message they send, and make no response. We already have a saviour of mankind. All we have to do is listen to His message.’
The President, half-smiling, looked at Hazel expectantly. She controlled her temper and kept her voice even. ‘Mr President, I have no answer to this Antichrist rubbish. If you believe it, there’s nothing I can say.’
The CIA Director said, ‘You know better than to question a man’s religious faith, Hazel.’
‘No, sir, I don’t know better. We have a golden route to the future in our hands, the conquest of disease, unbelievable longevity, great wisdom. It’s in our hands and from where I sit we’re being denied it by one man’s medieval superstition.’
Sullivan opened his mouth angrily.
Bull said, ‘It’s okay, Al, calm down. I’m not looking for Yes men.’
Sullivan strode over to a side table and poured coffees. The flames from the fire were now leaping up the chimney. He came back with a tray and distributed cups. ‘If the disks end up in the wrong hands it would be a catastrophe. It could reduce our nuclear arsenals to the level of pikes and swords. They must either be destroyed or delivered into our hands.’
The President turned to his Science Adviser. ‘Say we had to remove Petrie, Hazel. What’s your view on that?’
Hazel replied tensely, ‘Not my field. I’m just a hack doing my job.’
‘If I thought that, you wouldn’t be here. But I’m never quite sure what’s going on behind those beautiful dark eyes of yours.’
‘I just do my job, sir.’
‘Uhuh. Tell me something. Would you kill a man for your country?’
‘If I had to. Like any soldier.’
‘Say some terrorist in Teheran needed to be stopped before he set out to spray New York with botulinus toxin? Me, I’d knife him in some dark alley and sleep like a baby after it. But you?’
‘Pass me the knife.’
‘But now suppose the man is innocent. That he just happens to know too much.’
‘I’ll pass on that.’
‘See what I mean, Hazel? That’s what I call an ambiguous answer.’ This time the laughter was subdued, and had a nervous edge to it.
Bull finally dipped his nose in the brandy glass, took a deep sniff and swallowed half the liquid. ‘Politicians have this in common with soldiers: they don’t like ambiguities. It makes them nervous. We give a directive, we like to be sure it’ll be obeyed.’ He gave his Science Adviser a quizzical look. ‘Having you around can be, let’s say, uncomfortable.’
He looked across at Sullivan, who was eyeing the President speculatively. ‘We’ve got this mathematician guy in a safe house?’
‘The word “safe” is an exaggeration, sir. We haven’t had much call for safe houses in Central Europe these last ten years.’
‘What are you saying? That the Europeans could find him?’
‘And soon. The Russians have sent in a team of specialists and the border is effectively sealed. They must know that this Petrie and his girlfriend might approach us.’
The President had been about to finish the brandy. He stopped, the glass poised at his lips. ‘Yeah. The girlfriend. What do we know about her?’
‘A young lady by the name of Freya Størmer, part of the team. She’s a Norwegian astronomer, co-opted like Petrie. Our information is that they’ve become close.’
‘And where is this Freya Størmer?’
‘Vanished. But she must be at the end of her tether by now. She can’t stay free without money.’
‘Hell, Al, if they get to her…’
‘Yes, sir. I’ve a team flying out there now. She was last seen in southern Slovakia, a few miles from the Austrian border.’
The President stood up. Light from the room was catching snowflakes just outside the window. Ford had used a snowmobile to get around the site and he wondered idly if he ought to get one in for himself.
He turned back from the window. ‘Who do you have out there, Al?’
‘A man by the name of Joe Callaghan. His file says he’s third-generation Irish. Not what you’d call a high flier, but he has a reputation for reliability.’
‘Christ, Al, we’re talking about the vital interests of America, and an unsafe house, and specialist Russian teams looking for these people and the clock ticking away. And what do you give me? A footsoldier. Some third-rater out in the boondocks waiting for his pension.’
‘As I said, sir, I have a team flying out at this moment.’
‘A team? What sort of team?’
‘Specialists,’ the CIA Director said vaguely.
‘Specialists.’ Bull nodded thoughtfully.
46
Iced Logic
So far as Petrie could remember — or was it a false memory? — it had started at age four. He faintly recalled spending hours making patterns out of Smarties, sometimes constructing little regiments of rows and columns and eating the stragglers. Eating your prime numbers was a good way to learn about them. At school, he found that he was usually able to solve problems better than his maths teachers, and the same had often been true at university.
He knew, and didn’t care, that it was an addictive drug. Sometimes his problem-solving was achieved through sheer logic, more often it came in an intuitive leap after hours or weeks of concentrated thinking. As he entered adulthood he found that the things which excited young men of his age left him cold. What did he care about who was dating whom or wearing what designer clothes? Why did the latest sports label on trainers matter? Why should he follow the progress of some team except perhaps as an exercise in random walk theory? Girls were interesting in a visceral way, but none of them could compete with Erdos’s brilliant proof of the prime number theorem or Ramanujan’s wonderful formulae for pi. Strangely, he seemed to attract the opposite sex. He had no idea why but guessed that they saw him as a challenge.
Of course, now there was that damned Norwegian female.
To Petrie, whose working days and nights were spent on the edge of the possible, problem-solving at the limit of his ability, the logic of his position was simple, indeed trivial, to handle.
Dozing on his bed, he heard low voices and footsteps, and then the click of a car door. And then the muffled sound of a big engine, and tyres crunching over gravel.