‘On the nail,’ Gibson said. ‘A subnuclear particle unknown to present-day science. There could be millions of them passing through our bodies now.’ Gibson’s froglike face had acquired a fanatical look.
‘Where are these particles supposed to come from?’
‘Hell, Tom, they were created in the Big Bang. They must have been.’
‘Yes, all right, Charlie, I believe it. In fact, I believe everything you’re telling me.’
Freya asked, ‘Okay, Charlie, but why in the hinterlands? Why not someplace civilised like the Alps?’
‘The Alps have been taken: a rival team got into the Mont Blanc tunnel long before us. Likewise the Gran Sasso in the Italian Apennines. And the karst limestone here-abouts has very little natural radioactivity. Anyway, our technique needs an underground lake. It’s worth a little sojourn in the Carpathian hinterlands to solve one of the greatest scientific mysteries of the age.’
‘And pick up a Nobel Prize in passing.’
‘Provided we beat the competition.’
‘You just did,’ said Freya.
Gibson said, cryptically, ‘Except that we got more than we bargained for. Follow me again.’
Gibson marched out of the library, half-ran back along the corridor and up broad stairs. He turned left and stopped at an oak door, puffing slightly.
He paused, his hand on its large wooden knob, and blinked. ‘The stuff on the other side of this door will change your life. This is your last chance to walk away.’
‘My goodness, Charlie, this is dramatic stuff.’ Petrie’s tone was light, but he was tense with excitement.
‘Okay — you had your chance. Welcome to Wonderland.’
Gibson opened the door.
Petrie stared into a large room, almost bare apart from a square central table around which were half a dozen chairs embroidered with some royal insignia. On the table were six computer terminals. Windows on the right opened out to a snowy wooded landscape. At the far end of the room, wood panelling had been slid aside to expose a bank of television screens. Two people were standing at a screen, obscuring it. They turned, and Petrie formed instant impressions.
There was Miss Dominatrix. A long-haired female, midthirties, spinsterish, with a long thin face and an intense, dedicated look. She was dressed in black sweater and slacks, and fashionless trainers. She was devoid of makeup but wore sapphire earrings.
Gibson made the introductions. ‘Well, at last we have our mathematician, Thomas Petrie, and our astronomer, Freya Størmer. The team’s complete. Tom and Freya, this is Vashislav Shtyrkov and Svetlana Popov.’
Svetlana alias Miss Dominatrix had an unexpectedly warm smile. ‘Cracow University, Poland. I just join up the wires.’
‘Svetlana’s modesty is out of place,’ Gibson said. ‘She’s a first-class experimentalist.’
The two women were shaking hands. ‘I know, Charlie, I just like to hear you say it. You must wonder what you’re getting into, Freya.’
‘It’s all very clandestine. I think Tom and I are in the hands of paranoid lunatics.’
Shtyrkov approached and extended a powerful hand to Petrie. He had a deep bass voice, with a slightly breathless edge. ‘Moscow State University. I do particle physics. Freya is right, I’m a paranoid lunatic. As will you be after a day or two here. So, you’re our Irlandets?’
‘Anglichanin,’ Petrie corrected him. He turned to Gibson expectantly.
Gibson beckoned Petrie over to the terminals on the wall and pointed to the one on the left. ‘What do you make of this?’
Petrie and Freya sat down on Hapsburg embroidered chairs and found themselves staring at an array of numbers, arranged into three columns. Petrie pressed the ‘down’ arrow on the keyboard and scanned the rapidly tumbling columns, his eyes trying to make out patterns.
The patterns were there. As the columns skimmed past, the numbers rose and descended in waves, some large, some small, some fast, some slow. They interacted like Bach fugues, sometimes merging into breakers, sometimes abruptly turning into columns of zeros.
Shtyrkov was looking over Petrie’s shoulder. ‘You saw the printout in the hall?’
‘Uhuh. This is a lot more complicated. It must be more than one particle, which is impossible from what Charlie was saying. There must have been dozens of them.’
‘Not dozens, Tom. Billions.’
Petrie stopped scanning. He looked at Gibson.
Svetlana was lounging back at a desk, playing with a pencil. ‘At any instant each litre of water in that lake had a particle in it.’
Petrie turned back to the terminal and resumed the scan. ‘But if a particle crosses the lake in a ten-millionth of a second … how long did this go on?’
Gibson spoke over Petrie’s other shoulder. ‘Thirty-seven minutes. There were about half a dozen leaders. They arrived every few seconds. Then it started. Two thousand, two hundred and twenty seconds of this, and then it stopped. No tail-off or fading away: there was just suddenly nothing.’
‘The lake glowed.’ Shtyrkov’s eyes had a strange, almost insane gleam.
Freya turned to Gibson. ‘Just what are we dealing with here?’
There was a brittle silence.
Petrie sensed something. ‘So each detector was picking up light from all the particles passing through, and you have fifty thousand detectors each firing numbers into your hard drive ten million times a second, and you want me to turn these numbers into particle tracks through the lake.’ He puffed out his cheeks. ‘That’s a mammoth job.’
Gibson shook his head. ‘Oh no, Tom, that’s not what we want from you at all.’
Svetlana said, ‘You see, we’ve already done that.’
‘I linked in to Moscow State University,’ Shtyrkov said. ‘It’s the central node for a nationwide grid of computers. I was able to use idle time on every computer in Russia which holds hands with the Moscow link. No, we have computed the particle tracks. And the tracks through the lake are where you come in.’
Petrie looked around, bewildered. ‘If this was a burst of particles from some source, surely they just came in on random parallel lines, like a stream of buckshot?’
Shtyrkov grinned. ‘No again, Tom. Not at all. You see, the particles arrived in a pattern.’
‘What?’
The grin became demonic. ‘Yes, a pattern.’
Petrie felt his skin prickling.
7
The Shtyrkov Conjecture
‘Hold on. You can’t mean an intelligent pattern. You can’t possibly mean that.’
Shtyrkov said, ‘But I do, Tom.’
Gibson was peering at the mathematician through narrowed eyes. ‘I have to apologise for Vash. He’s clearly mad.’
Shtyrkov folded his arms and leaned back with a condescending smile.
‘But you asked me out here anyway.’
‘It’s a million to one shot, Tom. No, it’s a billion to one, a trillion to one. But suppose … In a moment of fantasy, just suppose’ — Gibson’s voice was a strange blend of hesitancy, fear and greed — ‘that he’s right.’
‘It would be the discovery of all time,’ Svetlana said. Her voice was almost hoarse; Petrie suspected she hadn’t slept for a day or two.
‘A signal, coming from an intelligence beyond the Earth,’ Petrie said to nobody. ‘Jesus.’
‘From Jesus?’ Shtyrkov snorted. ‘I doubt it, but you can never be sure.’
‘Where do I come in?’ Freya asked.
Gibson turned to her. ‘If this is an intelligent signal, we need to know where it came from.’
‘Imagine going to the public and saying, “Hey, we’ve detected an ET signal but we don’t know where it came from”,’ Svetlana pointed out. She was nervously tapping her pencil on the desk.