Dan produced a simplified summary of several periods of the pattern, a string of black circles and white circles. “Look at this. The blacks are full-strength pulses, the whites half-strength. You get a string of six white. Then a break of two black. Then an irregular pattern for twelve pulses. Then two black, six white, and a break. Then another string of twelve ‘framed’ by the two black and six white combination. I think we’re seeing delimiters around these two strings of twelve pulses. And this is what repeats: over and over. Sometimes there are minor differences, but we think that’s caused by the experimental uncertainty.”
“If it’s a signal,” Malenfant said, “what does it mean?”
“Binary numbers,” Emma replied. “The signals are binary numbers.”
They both turned to her.
Malenfant asked, “Huh? Binary numbers? Why?”
She smiled, exhausted, jet-lag disoriented. “Because signals like this always are.”
Dan was nodding. “Yes. Right. I should have thought of that. We have to learn to think like Cornelius. The downstreamers know us. Maybe they are us, our future selves. And they know we’ll expect binary.” He grabbed a pad and scribbled out two strings of 1 and 0:
111D101010D1
0111110DD010
He sat back. “There.”
Malenfant squinted. “What’s it supposed to be?”
Emma found herself laughing. “Maybe it’s a Carl Sagan picture. A waving downstreamer.” Shut up, Emma.
“No,” Dan said. “It’s too simple for that. They have to be numbers.” He cleared his softscreen and began tapping in a simple conversion program. After a couple of minutes, he had it running.
3753
They stared. Malenfant asked, “What do they mean?”
Dan began to feed the raw neutrino counts through his conversion program, and the converted signals — live, as they were received in the film-emulsion detector — scrolled steadily up the screen.
1986
3753
1986
3753
1986
“Someone should call Cornelius,” Dan said.
Emma didn’t share Malenfant’s evident glee at this result.
She felt dwarfed. She imagined the world wheeling around her, spinning as it carried her through darkness around the sun, around the rim of the Galaxy — while the Galaxy itself sailed off to its own remote destination, stars glimmering like the windows of a great ocean liner.
Messages from the future. Could it be true that there were beings, far beyond this place and time, trying to signal to the past, to her, through this lashed-up physics equipment?
Was Cornelius right? Right about everything? Right, too, about the Carter catastrophe, the coming extinction of them all?
It couldn’t be true. It was insanity, an infection of schizophrenia from Cornelius, that was damaging them all.
Malenfant, of course, was hooked. She knew him well enough to understand he would be unable to resist this new adventure, wherever it took him.
And how, she wondered, was she going to be able to persuade him to do any work at all, after this”?
3753
1986
3753
1986…
Reid Malenfant:
The puzzle of the Feynman radio message nagged at Malenfant, even as he threw himself into his myriad other projects. He would write out the numbers on a pad, or have them scroll up on a softscreen. He tried taking the numbers apart: factorizing them, multiplying them, dividing one by the other. He got nowhere.
Cornelius Taine was equally frustrated. He would call Malenfant at odd time-zoned hours. Mathematics, even numerology, must be the wrong approach.
“Why?”
What do you know about math, Malenfant? Remember the nature of the signal we’re dealing with here. Remember that the downstreamers are trying to communicate with us — specifically, with you.
“Me?”
Yes. You’rethe decision maker here. There has to be some simple meaning in these numbers for you. Just look at the number, Cornelius urged. Don’t think too hard. What do they look like?
1986
3753
“Umm, 1986 could be a date.”
A date?
It had been the year of Challenger and Chernobyl, a first overseas posting of a young pilot called Reid Malenfant. “It wasn’t the happiest year in history, but nothing so special for me… Hey. Cornelius. Could 3753 also represent a date?” His skin prickled. “The thirty-eighth century… Christ, Cornelius, maybe that’s the true date of the Carter catastrophe.”
Cornelius’s softscreen image, slightly blurred, showed him frowning. It’s possible, but any date after a couple of centuries is very unlikely. Anything else?
“No. Keep thinking, Cornelius.”
Yes…
And Malenfant would roll up the softscreen and return to his work, or try to sleep.
Until the day came when Cornelius, in person, burst into a BDB project progress meeting.
It was an airless Portakabin at the Mojave test site. Malenfant was with George Hench, poring over test results and subcontractor sign-offs. And suddenly there was Cornelius: hot, disheveled, pink with sunburn, tie knot loosened, white gypsum clinging to the fabric of his suit pants.
Malenfant couldn’t keep from laughing. “Cornelius, at last I’ve seen you out of control.”
Cornelius was panting. “I have it. The numbers. The Feynman numbers. I figured it out, Malenfant. And it changes everything.”
Despite the heat of the day, Malenfant felt goose bumps rise on his bare arms.
He made Cornelius sit down, take his jacket off, drink some water.
Cornelius brusquely cleared clutter from the tabletop — battered softscreens, quality forms, a progress chart labeled with bars and arrows, old-fashioned paper blueprints, sandwich wrappers, and beer cans — and he spread his own softscreen over the desk.
“It was staring us in the face the whole time,” Cornelius said. “I knew it had to be connected to you, Malenfant, to your interests. Your obsessions, even. And it had to be something you could act on now. And what—” He waved a hand. “ — could be a grander obsession than this, your asteroid mission?”
George Hench paced around the room, visibly unhappy.
Cornelius glanced up at George. “Look, I’m sorry to disrupt your work.”
George glared. “Malenfant, do we have to put up with this bull?”
“Whatever it is, it ain’t bull, George. I’ve seen the setup—”
“Malenfant, I spent my career fending off hand-waving artistes like this guy. Color coordinators. Feng Shui artists. Even astrologers, for Christ’s sake. Sometimes I think the U.S. is going tack to the Middle Ages.”
Malenfant said gently, “George, there was no U.S. in the Middle Ages.”
“Malenfant, we have a job to do here. A big job. We’re going to a fucking asteroid. All I’m saying is, you need to focus on what’s important here.”
“I accept that, George. But I have to tell you I’ve come to believe there’s nothing so important as the downstreamers’ message. If it’s real.”
“Oh, it’s real,” Cornelius said fervently. “And what it means is that you’re going to have to redirect your mission.” Cornelius eyed George. “Away from Reinmuth.”
George visibly bristled. “Now, you listen to me—”
Malenfant held up a hand. “Let’s hear him out, George.”
Cornelius tapped at his softscreen. “When I began to wonder if the numbers referred to an asteroid, I thought 1986 might be a discovery date. So I logged on to the Minor Planet Center in Massachusetts.” A table of numbers and letters scrolled down the screen; the first column, of four digits and two letters, all began with 1986. “This is a list of all the asteroids first reported in 1986. This first code is a provisional designation—”