The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

THE PIROKIN EFFECT Larry Eisenberg

On Friday the eleventh of July, 1962, Irving Pirokin, a ham radio operator working his twenty-watt rig out of a restaurant kitchen on lower Second Avenue, picked up a succession of unusual clicks while scanning the forty-megacycle band. Mr. Pirokin’s instinctive reaction was to take down these clicks as a message in International Morse Code, and the letters J T S A L appeared again and again on his note pad. Before Mr. Pirokin could pursue the matter, he was called out to his post as waiter by the owner of the restaurant, an impatient beefy-faced gentleman with a foghorn voice.

When his tour of duty had ended, Mr. Pirokin returned anxiously to his set and monitored the same band of frequencies with great care, but to his intense disappointment, he could detect no signals. However, on the following (and successive) Fridays, he was able to receive the same repetitive series of clicks at about the same time of day. His curiosity piqued by this mystery, he wrote to his cousin, Sam Pirokin, in Philadelphia. Sam, by one of those great coincidences that enrich real life, is also a ham operator working his rig out of a kitchen where he, too, functions as a waiter. He was elated to find that he was also able to detect the clicks, almost identical in sequence to those his cousin Irving was receiving in New York.

Baffled but excited by the cryptic JTSAL, Sam, who was then in attendance at a night school in cryptography, showed the “message” to his instructor, Bertram Luftmensch, a man who had steeped himself in the lore of code-cracking for the past twenty years. Although Mr. Luftmensch prepares a daily coded column for a local Philadelphia newspaper wherein the crossing out of certain letters reveals some advice for the reader, he nevertheless took time out of his demanding schedule to work on the problem posed by Sam Pirokin. Although Luftmensch tried every trick of the trade, he could not make sense out of the letter sequence, JTSAL.

And thus the matter languished for several weeks, with Irving and Sam still receiving the clicks but unable to explain their meaning or origin. One Sunday morning, Mr. Luftmensch noticed that his son was using as a bookmark in his high-school Hebrew grammar, the very sheet of paper on which he had worked over the J T S A L sequence. Opening the volume, Mr. Luftmensch took note of the Hebraic alphabet and with sudden inspiration decided to juxtapose the English alphabet alongside the Hebrew.

Using this device, he found that the message JTSAL, read as LASTJ from right to left in the Hebrew manner, became in Hebrew characters, (Israel).

With tremendous excitement, he communicated his findings to Sam Pirokin, who immediately put through a long-distance call to a candy store in New York, which promptly called down his cousin Irving. Irving was at first unbelieving, but when the import of the discovery penetrated his core of disbelief, he reacted with a first-rate suggestion. Irving proposed that he and Sam employ directional antennae to attempt to localize the source of the signals.

Although the finances of these two men are generally unstable, relying as they do primarily on tips and the uncertain tempers of innately hostile diners, they each did manage to procure at considerable expense, a highly directional array of antennae able to focus a beam to within one or two degrees of arc. On the very next Friday, by means of crude triangulation, Sam and Irving determined that the origin of the clicks was not some Israeli source (as they had expected), but appeared to come from a position in the sky, roughly corresponding to the position of the planet, Mars.

Irving was so unnerved by his discovery, that he could neither eat nor sleep for days. The weakness engendered by his regimen produced a purpose tremor in his right hand that made it hazardous for him to lower a plate of hot soup, and indeed resulted in the near scalding of a customer. It was obvious of course that for the first time a clear-cut indication of the existence of sentient human life on Mars had come to the fore. But why was the message in Hebrew? Irving Pirokin decided to break the pact of secrecy which he and cousin Sam had tentatively entered into, and he showed the translated message to his brother-in-law, Ephraim Zeitz, now Dr. Zeitz, then a theological student specializing in the history of the Lost Tribes of Israel.

Zeitz poured himself into his project, using his time and resources without stint and finally came up with the theory, which, with certain minor changes, is still considered the most likely explanation of the affair of the clicks.

“As is well known,” writes Dr. Zeitz, “the image of ‘a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night,’ could well have represented a primitive atomically energized rocket. We know from the Old Testament how preoccupied the Israelites were with survival, inasmuch as the general evil-doings of mankind had already led the Lord to the near annihilation of mankind by flood. It is quite logical, therefore, that a more advanced group of Israelites, the Lost Tribes, were not transported by Tiglathpilaser as is popularly supposed. By utilizing methods of locomotion involving their atomic knowhow, they managed to breach the barrier of space travel and land on other planets, among them Mars.”

Dr. Zeitz sent an elaboration of this position to the Pentagon, where a prematurely negative response was elicited. But when a field investigator verified the clicks at Irving Pirokin’s receiver, the full machinery of the military was belatedly put into motion. Despite all attempts at keeping the story secret, it was broken to the press by a relative who received twenty-five dollars for scoring a news beat for the metropolitan tabloid in question. It was in this way that the military missions of hostile powers first became apprised of the cryptic clicks.

It soon became apparent that the only place where the mysterious signals could be detected was either at Sam’s rig or at Irving’s rig. But this phenomenon was easily explained by the vagaries of the layers of the Ionosphere, which often produce these apparent freaks of unique reception. More disturbing was the torrent of criticism which began to erupt in an attempt to demolish the hypothesis of Dr. Zeitz.

“Surely Mars cannot hold these Israelites,” wrote one scholar. “The surface temperature of Mars is too high to sustain life and the absence of C0₂ in the atmosphere would make the preparation of carbonated water, a staple in the ancient Hebrew diet, impossible.”

“But,” rebutted Dr. Zeitz, “it is this very lack of C0₂ in the atmosphere that proves my hypothesis. Carbon dioxide is rare on Mars because it is being collected and confined to vessels of carbonated beverage which are sealed.”

In the interest of complete honesty, we must make mention of those German scholars who have raised the counter hypothesis which conjectures that the Hyksos were the space migratory group. Utilizing what little is known of the Hyksos alphabet, they have decoded the message to read “streitwagen,” the German word for “chariot,” the invention of which is commonly credited to the Hyksos.

The debate rages on and the military intelligence groups of both East and West are now engaged in exhaustive surveys of the Martian question. At the present writing, it is almost certain that the West is in the driver’s seat, chiefly on the data furnished by the Pirokins.

And what of the Pirokins, themselves? They are both still hard at work on their odd jobs.

“Even a scientist must eat,” says Irving Pirokin. But they are not lionized by their neighbors. Perhaps the familiarity of daily, intimate contact makes the breeding of contempt inevitable.

Max Flenner, a neighborhood haberdasher who is admittedly not on good terms with Irving since he was the recipient of the soup-spilling incident, says the following: “Irving was always weak in the head. Every Friday they chop liver in the back and he picks up the clicks.” We shook our head in doubt.

“That hardly accounts for the same signals being picked up by his cousin in Philadelphia.”

Mr. Flenner raised his eyebrows in disdain. “They don’t chop liver in Philadelphia?”