20
“A new signal,” Vargas said. “Slightly different. We began getting it last night.”
“Wait right there,” said Krug. “I’m coming.”
He was in New York. Almost immediately he was in Vargas’ Antarctic observatory, high on the polar plateau at a point equidistant between the Pole itself and the resorts of the Knox Coast. There were those who said that the transmat era had cheapened life in one way while enriching it in another: the theta force allowed one to flick blithely from Africa to Australia to Mexico to Siberia in a moment’s merry dance, but it robbed one of any true sense of place and transition, of any feel for planetary geography. It transformed Earth into a single infinitely extended transmat cubicle. Krug had often resolved to take a leisurely tour of the world from the air, and see desert shading into prairie, forest into bare tundra, mountains into plains. But he had not managed to find the time.
The observatory was a series of pleasant glossy domes sitting atop an ice-sheet two and a half kilometers thick. Tunnels in the ice linked dome to dome, and gave access also to the outlying apparatus: the vast dish of a radio telescope’s parabolic antenna, the metal grid of an X-ray receiver, the burnished mirror that picked up relayed transmissions from the orbiting observatory high above the South Pole, the short, stocky multiple-diffraction optical telescope, the three golden spikes of the hydrogen antenna, the fluttering airborne webwork of a polyradar system, and the rest of the devices with which the astronomers here kept watch on the universe. Instead of using refrigeration tapes to insure that the ice would not melt beneath the buildings, they had employed individual heat-exchange plaques for every structure, so that each building was a little island on the great glacier.
In the main building things hummed and clicked and flashed. Krug did not understand much about this equipment, but it seemed properly scientific to him. Technicians ran eagerly about; an alpha high on a dizzying catwalk called numbers to three betas far below; periodically there was a crimson surge of energy within a glass helix twenty meters long, and numbers leaped on a green and red counting mechanism at every discharge.
Vargas said, “Watch the radon coil. It’s registering the impulses that we’re getting right now. Here — a new cycle is starting — you see?”
Krug contemplated the pattern of surges.
“That’s it,” Vargas said. “Now a six-second pause, and then it starts again.”
“2-5-1, 2-3-1, 2-1,” Krug said. “And it used to be 2-4-1, 2-5-1, 3-1. So they’ve dropped the 4-group altogether, they’ve moved the 5-group to the front of the cycle, they’ve completed the 3-group, they’ve added a pulse in the final group — damn, Vargas, where’s the sense? What’s the significance?”
“We don’t detect any more content in this message than in the last. They’ve both got the same basic structure. Just a minor rearrangement—”
“It’s got tomean something!”
“Perhaps it does.”
“How can we find out?”
“We’ll ask them,” Vargas said. “Soon. Through your tower.”
Krug’s shoulders slumped. He leaned forward, gripping the smooth cool green handles of some incomprehensible device jutting from the wall. “These messages are 300 years old,” he said blackly. “If this planet of theirs is like you tell me it is, that’s like 300 centuries here. More. They won’t even know about the messages their ancestors sent out. They’ll be mutated out of all recognition.”
“No. There has to be continuity. They couldn’t have reached a technological level that would allow them to send transgalactic messages at all unless they were able to retain the achievements of earlier generations.”
Krug swung round. “You know something? This planetary nebula, this blue sun — I still don’t believe it could have intelligent beings living there. Any kind of life — no! Listen, blue suns don’t last long, Vargas. It takes millions of years for the surface of a planet just to cool enough to get solid. There isn’t that much time, a blue sun. Any planets it’s got, they’re still molten. You want me to believe signals coming from people who live on a fireball?”
Vargas said quietly, “Those signals come from NGC 7293, that planetary nebula in Aquarius.”
“For sure?”
“For sure. I can show you all the data.”
“Never mind. But how, a fireball?”
“It’s not necessarily a fireball. Maybe some planets cool faster than others. We can’t be sure how long it takes them to cool. We don’t know how far the home world of the message-senders is from that sun. We’ve got models showing the theoretical possibility that a planet can cool fast enough, even with a blue sun, to allow—”
“It’s a fireball, that planet,” said Krug sullenly.
Defensive now, Vargas said, “Perhaps. Perhaps not. Even if it is: must all life-forms live on a solid-surface planet? Can’t you conceive a civilization of high-temperature entities evolving on a world that hasn’t cooled yet? If—”
Krug snorted in disgust. “Sending signals with machines made of molten steel?”
“The signals don’t have to be mechanical in origin. Suppose they can manipulate the molecular structure of—”
“You talk fairy tales to me, doctor. I go to a scientist, I get fairy tales!”
“At the moment fairy tales are the only way of accounting for the data,” Vargas said.
“You know there’s got to be a better way!”
“All I know is that we’re getting signals, and they undoubtedly come from this planetary nebula. I know it isn’t plausible. The universe doesn’t have to seem plausible to us all the time. Its phenomena don’t have to be readily explicable. Transmat wouldn’t be plausible to an eighteenth-century scientist. We see the data as best we can, and we try to account for it, and sometimes we do some wild guessing because the data we’re getting doesn’t seem to make sense, but—”
“The universe doesn’t cheat,” Krug said. “The universe plays fair!”
Vargas smiled. “No doubt it does. But we need more data before we can explain NGC 7293. Meanwhile we make do with fairy tales.”
Krug nodded. He closed his eyes and fondled dials and meters, while within him a monstrous raging impatience sizzled and blazed and bubbled.Hey, you star people! Hey, you, sending those pulses! Who are you? What are you? Where are you? By damn, I want to know!
What are you trying to tell us, you?
Who are you looking for?
What’s it all mean? Suppose I die before I find out!
“You know what I want?” Krug said suddenly. “To go outside, to that radio telescope of yours. And climb up into the big dish. And cup my hands and shout at those bastards with the numbers. What’s the signal now? 2-5-1, 2-3-1, 2-1? It drives me crazy. We ought to answer them right now. Send some numbers: 4-10-2, 4-6-2, 4-2. Just to show them we’re here. Just to let them know.”
“By radio transmission?” Vargas said. “It’ll take 300 years. The tower will be finished soon.”
“Soon, sure. Soon. You ought to see it. Come see, next week. They’re putting the gadgets in it now. We’ll be talking to the bastards soon.”
“Would you like to hear the audio signal coming in, the new one?”
“Sure.”
Vargas touched a switch. From speakers in the laboratory wall came a dry cold hiss, the sound of space, the voice of the dark abyss. It was a sound like a cast-off snakeskin. Overriding that withered sound, seconds later, came sweet upper-frequency tones.Pleep pleep. Pause.Pleep pleep pleep pleep pleep. Pause.Pleep. Pause. Pause.Pleep Pleep. Pause.Pleep pleep pleep. Pause.Pleep. Pause. Pause.Pleep pleep. Pause.Pleep. Silence. And then again,pleep pleep, the new cycle beginning.