Flood Rising

42

It took him a moment to realize that he wasn’t alone. He dropped his burden, a thick sheaf of accordion-folded computer paper, on his desktop and glanced over his shoulder at the man seated in the chair by the door.

The glance told him what the man was not.

Not a member of the mathematics department or even, to the best of his knowledge, a faculty member.

Not a student — he was too old and too well dressed.

Not a visiting professor — too young and too well dressed. The man’s clothes and bearing marked him as an outsider, not merely a stranger in the physical sense, but someone completely unfamiliar with the environment and culture in which he now found himself, unaware of just how out of place he was.

A lawyer.

The man stood and extended a hand. “Are you Dr. Helio Soter?”

Soter was a little surprised to hear the correct pronunciation of his name. Most people meeting him for the first time mangled it—Heel-ee-oh Saw-ter being the most common. Sometimes he would patiently explain: “The ‘h’ is silent and the ‘e’ sounds like a long ‘a’. Ay-lee-oh. And Soter rhymes with ‘motor’ not ‘water.’”

He wondered if it was a bad sign that this stranger, who looked an awful lot like a lawyer, already knew how to say his name correctly, but the man had offered his hand. Soter took it. “I am. What’s this about?”

“You are needed for an estimate, sir.”

It took Soter a few seconds to grasp that the man was not asking for him to perform a mathematical task. “You’re from ONE?”

The man’s cheek twitched a little, as if Soter had spoken out of turn, but he nodded. “Please, come with me.”

“I’m giving a lecture in ten minutes. You’ll have to—”

“Cancel it.” The man’s tone indicated that further debate would be futile.

Ten minutes later, when he should have been introducing himself to a hall full of graduate students, Soter found himself in the passenger seat of a Ford Granada, the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shrinking in the rear view mirror. He made no inquiries about where they were going or what was expected of him. The driver seemed a very tight-lipped sort of fellow, and someone would answer Sotor’s questions soon enough. After all, he couldn’t very well give them an estimate if they didn’t provide data.

An estimate. He found the euphemism rather amusing. He routinely used estimation in the course of his mathematical and statistical research, so it was almost ironic that the men from ONE — the Office of National Estimates — would utilize his expertise in formulating their predictions about world affairs. Indeed, the process of correlating intelligence and drawing probable conclusions was highly mathematical in nature, so all other things being equal, it was probably an appropriate term. Unfortunately, there were factors that always remained elusive in any equation — human variables — and that made all the difference between a well-founded estimate and a best guess.

ONE, a division of the Central Intelligence Agency, had been founded in the aftermath of the biggest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor — the Communist invasion of the Republic of Korea in 1950. It had resulted in a two-year long open conflict, and an ongoing state of war that persisted nearly thirty years later. The problem had not been a failure of intelligence, but rather a failure to draw accurate conclusions — estimates — based on available information. In the three decades that had followed, ONE had broadened their scope of influence somewhat to include operations, which Soter supposed, was a way of making sure that inaccurate estimations could be steered back on track. But that didn’t concern the mathematician. His job was simply to deal with the numbers.

The Granada pulled up at the Hotel Eliot, and the driver let Soter out. “They’re waiting for you,” the man said. “Room 237.”

Soter nodded and headed inside. Clandestine meetings in hotel rooms were standard for ONE, even when the subject of the estimate did not seem to warrant extraordinary secrecy. The meetings weren’t that much of an inconvenience, and they paid him well.

He took the stairs to the second floor. A short walk down the hall brought him to the door, which opened before he could knock. A man he did not recognize — older than the driver, and wearing an even better suit — stood aside and motioned for him to enter.

The room was heavy with cigarette smoke, but Soter saw three more men seated at a small table. One of them stood up and gestured for Soter to take his chair. He did not recognize any of the men, and while that wasn’t unusual — he had never dealt with the same person twice — it was strange to see so many representatives of ONE in the same place.

A single sheet of paper lay on the tabletop in front of him. A cursory glance revealed numbers, or more precisely typed digits. There were a lot of 1s, but a few 3s and 4s. The arrangement looked like a scatter plot of statistical data, but without a context, Soter couldn’t begin to guess at their significance. Someone had drawn a circle around a vertical column of six digits…no, not just digits. There were letters as well, but only in the circle.

The same pen had also drawn circles around a 6 and a 7, and then to the left of the numbers scrawled a single word: Wow!

Soter studied the characters in the circle a moment longer, then took another look at the paper itself. There were no indentations on the page from the ballpoint pen that had drawn the circles and written the exclamation. It was, he realized, a copy made on a Xerox machine.

“What is it?” he asked, looking up.

The man across the table took a long drag on his cigarette, then said, “You tell us.”

So that’s how it’s going to be, Soter thought. He looked at the paper again, ignoring the handwritten modifications and focused on the printed values instead. “Okay. This is a computer printout. The digits probably represent numbers—”

One of them men at the table snorted. “No kidding.”

“Numbers have a discrete value,” Soter explained, “while digits or numerals are merely symbols that may indicate numbers, or something else entirely.” He pointed to the printout. “Here. Read left to right we have ‘111’ but does that signify one hundred and eleven, or is it three separate figures, each with a value of one? Or are the digits a substitution cipher? Perhaps we should replace 1 with the letter A…”

He trailed off, no longer caring about making his point. The circled column of numbers told him that the figures were meant to be interpreted vertically, and that each character was a separate value. Something about the circled string looked very familiar.

“Each character is a number,” he said again, this time with more confidence. “The use of letters would indicate numerical values greater than nine. The numbers in the circle are actually…give me a pen.”

A pen was passed over, and Soter quickly began writing an alphanumeric key.

When he had found a numerical value for each letter in the sequence, he wrote out a new set of numbers:

“Okay, these are the actual values of the alphanumerical characters.” Soter hastily sketched a graph and plotted the points in order.

One of the men at the table shook his head and muttered, “Damn, that was fast.”

Soter met the gaze of the smoking man. “You already knew this, I take it?”

“We’re not trying to be coy, Dr. Soter. It’s important that we get your unbiased impressions.”

The other man — the one who had been impressed by his speed — added, “When you hear where this came from, it’s going to blow your mind.”

Soter thought about the hand-written note on the print-out and decided that the man wasn’t merely being dramatic. “Well, if I had to guess, I’d say it’s a frequency table.”

“Radio frequencies.”

It was an odd thing to say, and odder still, it didn’t sound like a question. “No. In this case, it’s the frequency of whatever event these data are recording. These numbers all add up to one hundred, so this is probably an expression of percentages. Most are in the middle…average. That’s the peak here. The sum of these two values in the middle is fifty-six, slightly more than half. Further out, you have two smaller groups that are slightly above or below average, and then out on the edges, even smaller groups that are extremely above or below average.” He shrugged. “This is a textbook probability curve.”

The smoking man’s face drew into a frown, and he snatched the paper. After studying it for a few seconds, he shook his head. “I’ll be damned. They do add up to a hundred. How did they miss that?”

Soter glanced at the assembled group. “Gentlemen, I can continue to make uninformed guesses if you’d like, but I suspect I’ll have better luck making sense of these data if you’ll tell me where they came from.”

The men in the room looked at each other for a moment, and arrived at a silent consensus. The smoking man spoke again. “Dr. Soter, the data here are radio frequencies, received at a listening station in Ohio. You were correct in pointing out that the digits are not precise numerical values. They are actually indicators of signal intensity. The highest value there — thirty — indicates a signal that is thirty times stronger than normal. So you see, it’s literally a frequency table, but not in the sense you thought it was.”

“I don’t think you brought me here just for some anomalous radio signal. What’s really going on?”

“The listening post I refer to is the Big Ear radio telescope, part of the Ohio State SETI project.”

SETI! Soter recognized the acronym immediately. “This is a transmission from space? From extraterrestrials?”

“It is from space,” the smoking man confirmed. “It appears to originate somewhere in the constellation of Sagittarius. It’s too soon to say if there is an intelligence behind it, but it is remarkable for several reasons. To begin with, the peak intensity of the signal was about 1420.4 MHz. To give you a frame of reference, that’s in the Ultra High Frequency range. HAM radios operate in the 1300 MHz range. This signal — we’re calling it the Wow! Signal for obvious reasons — happens to fall at the precise bandwidth of hydrogen, which is the sort of thing astronomers look for as an indicator of extraterrestrial intelligence.

“The spike in intensity was caused by the rotation of the Earth. The signal was constant, but the telescope’s window of observation was only oriented toward the source for seventy-two seconds. That was five days ago. On successive passes, the Big Ear failed to detect the signal again.”

Soter digested this for a moment. “What do you want from me?”

“It is critically important that we determine whether or not this signal is a broadcast from an alien intelligence. If it is, we need to figure out what it’s saying. I don’t need to tell you that mathematics is a universal language. If anyone can decode this transmission, it’s you.”

Soter reached out for the paper, looked at it again, then shook it in the air. “This isn’t a transmission. There’s nothing to decode here.”

“Dr. Soter, in thirty seconds, you saw a pattern that no one else did.”

“That isn’t a pattern,” Soter protested. “It’s a fluke. A coincidence.”

“Do you really believe that?”

Soter tapped the circled values. “You said it yourself. These numbers weren’t part of the transmission. They were generated by the computer program that monitors the intensity of the signal.”

“If the intelligence behind this transmission understood our capabilities, what better way to send a message?”

“In order to do that…in order to produce that exact sequence of values, it would require precise synchronization — to the nanosecond — as well as knowledge of the precise calibration of our equipment, and all that across light years of space. This signal might have originated years ago, centuries even. It would require extraordinary computing power, advanced intelligence, to say nothing of the ability to see into the future.”

“That’s exactly what concerns me, Dr. Soter.” The man stubbed out his cigarette. “Take this apart. Assume that there’s a message here. Find it. Can you do that?”

Soter frowned and looked at the paper again. What if the man was right? What if there were other patterns hidden in the signal?

Don’t think of them as numbers. They are symbols. What do they represent? Spatial coordinates? Dates? Times? Elements on the periodic table?

“I can’t do it alone. I’m going to need experts — astronomers, cryptologists, xenobiologists.”

“We’ll put together a team…wait, xenobiologists? What’re those?”

“It’s a new field. Theoretical biology, predicting how life might evolve on other worlds.”

The man grunted. “You’ll have whatever you need.”

“It could take a while. And I have other obligations.”

“Not any more. This is your number one priority now, Dr. Soter.”

To his complete surprise, Soter was not the least bit bothered by the prospect.

43

“We have made contact!” Jerry Zavada shouted, waving a newspaper as he swept into the room where Soter had set up his office.

Soter felt his pulse quicken. He had resigned himself to the failure of this latest attempt to interpret the Wow! Signal, but now it seemed that Zavada, the computer engineer, had discovered some new insight.

In the newspaper? That didn’t make any sense.

“Here!” Zavada laid the tabloid on the desk and tapped a headline. It read: “Message From the Stars.”

Soter had seem similar headlines when news of the Wow! Signal had gotten out, but this seemed to be referring to something that had happened just two days earlier. He began reading aloud.

“Residents of Southampton received a shock Saturday evening when their local news broadcast was interrupted by a mysterious transmission, purporting to be a message from an intergalactic visitor. Over the next few minutes, viewers heard the ‘voice of Asteron’—” He stopped abruptly.

“The voice of Asteron? Seriously, Jerry?”

Zavada chuckled. “Just trying to lighten the mood.”

Soter threw the paper down in disgust. The tabloid lay atop the thick printout he had been reviewing. The story of a hoaxster hijacking a television broadcast to spout hippie propaganda, and the data from their survey had one thing in common: neither contained an actual message from an extraterrestrial intelligence.

He had known, from the moment he had accepted this crazy assignment, it would probably amount to nothing. The odds against the Wow! Signal actually being a transmission from an alien life form were…well, astronomical. And the likelihood that there was an actual message contained in the data was an order of magnitude less probable. Yet, as he and the team had worked the angles, the emerging patterns had made a believer out of him. It really did seem as if someone had placed an intergalactic, long-distance call to the planet Earth. He was sure of it, just as he was sure that the Wow! Signal also contained the key to answering that call.

He still recalled the day he had met the small team of geniuses and experts, all of whom were, like him, more interested in solving the mystery of the signal than actually proving the existence of extraterrestrial life. “We are working under the assumption that whomever sent this message knows what our capabilities are. So what are the data telling us?”

The working hypothesis that emerged from that meeting was that the message was two-fold. The number values—6, 14, 26, 30, 19, 5—were determined to be celestial coordinates: 6 hours 14 minutes 26 seconds, with a declination 30 degrees 19 minutes 5seconds, which corresponded to a point in space somewhere between the constellations of Gemini and Auriga. The fact that the sum of the values was exactly one hundred might mean that a second signal would be transmitted one hundred days from the first. To test this theory, they would train a radio telescope on that region of the sky on or about November 23, and wait.

There were many problems with the hypothesis, not the least of which was that fact that the original signal had come from the opposite side of the sky. The team’s astronomer, Bill Earl, had offered a plausible explanation. “What if we’re mistaken in assuming that the Wow! Signal originated in the Chi Sagittarii group? What if it originated from a source much closer, but along that same vector? Say, from a spacecraft? It would be a simple thing for that spacecraft to move to another location in the sky for a second broadcast.”

Not everyone in the team supported the hypothesis. Xenobiologist Chris Anstead expounded the belief that the six values might represent the atomic numbers of elements — carbon, silicon, iron, zinc, potassium and boron — which perhaps might form the basis of the extraterrestrial organic molecule. Zavada, the computer expert, found the Hundred Day concept too simplistic and too convenient. “You asked us to find the message hidden in the signal,” he had complained. “This isn’t a hidden message. You’re trying to shoe-horn it to fit your pet theory. Just like those people who try to calculate the end of the world from Bible prophecies.”

It was a fair criticism, but as Soter had pointed out, it would be easier to test the hypothesis and eliminate it, than to dismiss it out of hand, and then wonder after the hundred day limit had expired whether they had missed an important opportunity.

Zavada, it seemed, had been proven right.

They had traveled to the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, aimed the enormous radio telescope receiver at the target coordinates, and started listening. Unlike the Big Ear telescope, which had received the Wow! Signal only because it happened to be pointing the right direction for exactly seventy-two seconds, the Arecibo array could be set to track a specific location for as long as it was in the sky — several hours at a time. Earl had arranged to begin the survey on the night of November 22 and to continue gathering data until the early morning hours of November 24.

The vigil had yielded nothing remarkable. They had reams of data, but no radiation spike like the Wow! Signal. Instead, there were pages and pages that looked like part of the Wow! printout outside the circle — lots of blank space and a scattering of ones.

Zavada settled into a chair on the other side of the desk, appraising Soter for several silent seconds. “Did you know that Thomas Edison tested thousands of different materials for the filaments to make a light bulb? When asked about his failures, he said: ‘I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.’”

“In other words, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

“Not exactly. You don’t keep trying the same thing over and over again.”

“We won’t be trying this again. We’ve already tied up the observatory too long. They’re about to call the cops on us.” That wasn’t quite true. Soter’s mysterious benefactors at ONE would have authorized him to use the Arecibo Observatory as long as he deemed necessary, and the astronomers lined up to do work of their own would have had no recourse. But Soter couldn’t justify staying on site any longer, not without something more concrete to go on. “I’m afraid it’s back to the drawing board.”

Zavada shrugged. “Hey, have you heard about this movie that’s out now? Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

Soter shook his head. He didn’t have time for movies.

“Might be worth taking a look at. It’s about aliens visiting Earth. They communicate with this weird musical signal.” Zavada did his best to mimic the theme.

“Music?” Soter sat up. That was an angle they had not explored. Could it be that the six values represented musical notes?

“If I were going to send a message, though,” Zavada continued, as if Soter’s apparent interest was an invitation, “I would use computer language. Just like we did with the Arecibo Message.”

The Arecibo Message was the reverse of the Wow! Signal. It was a blast of information sent from Earth in 1974—from the very facility where Soter’s team now probed the heavens — into deep space. The message, which had lasted just three minutes, was designed to establish a communication baseline — the numbers one through ten, the atomic number of several elements, the basic nucleotide structure of DNA, and so forth — all rendered into binary code, broadcast at 2,380 MHz — much stronger than the Wow! Signal — and modulated at 10 Hz.

Some people had speculated that the Wow! Signal might be an answer to the Arecibo Message, but this was extremely unlikely. The Arecibo Message had been sent to a different part of space, and had gone out only three years earlier, not nearly enough time to be received by a civilization around a distant star, and answered.

“Frequency modulation is perfect for transmitting binary data,” Zavada continued. “It’s kind of like Morse code, only simpler. Instead of dots and dashes, you just have ones and zeroes — on and off.”

“We tried looking for a binary message,” Soter answered. Contrary to many of the news reports that had been circulated, no one had actually ‘heard’ the Wow! Signal. The only recorded data from the Big Ear was the computer printout, and that was only the mean values of signal strength calculated every few seconds. There was no recording of the signal and no way to know if it had been modulated to contain a message. “Lots of ones, but they were all in the background…”

His voice trailed off as he saw, with the same clarity that had fueled his recognition of a pattern in the Wow! Signal, that they actually had received a binary message. He pushed the newspaper away to reveal the printout of data received from the Gemini-Auriga sky survey. He looked at it and then turned it for Zavada’s inspection. “What do you see?”

“Background noise.”

Soter shook his head. “Think more literally. You see ones. A lot of ones.” As with the data from the Big Ear, the numeral ‘1’ was used to signify a faint pulse of radiation — white noise from stars and other objects that emitted very faint but detectable electro-magnetic radiation. The universe was a noisy place, but most of the noise was at a very low frequency. The radiation the telescope had detected was in the low range, but that was to be expected. It was rare to see anything greater than a four.

“Yeah, and a lot empty spaces in between.”

“Not spaces,” Soter countered. “Zeroes.”

Zavada gaped at him. “Are you saying there’s a binary code hidden in the background noise?” He didn’t wait for a response, but took the thick stack of paper and began studying it with the practiced eye of someone fluent in machine language. After a few seconds, he turned to the next page, then the next. “I’ll be damned.”

Soter moved around the desk to look over Zavada’s shoulder. “What do you see?”

Zavada took out a pen and began scribbling furiously on the margin of the printout. After a few minutes, he straightened and showed Soter what he had produced.

“There’s a repeating pattern here. Do you see it?” Zavada added some lines.

“It repeats after thirty digits, over and over again.”

“Can you tell what it says?”

“Every binary number starts with one. If the thirty digits are a single number…” Zavada did some calculations on the paper. “Six hundred seventy-eight million, seven hundred fifteen thousand, five hundred and twenty.”

Soter took the pen and wrote the number down.

It was a multiple of ten…nothing helpful there. The prime factorization was interesting though.

“It might not be one number,” Zavada cautioned. “See these long strings of zeroes? Four and five at a time? If this were my message, I’d use double-zeroes or triple-zeroes as spaces between individual numbers.”

Soter felt a tingling at the base of his neck. There was something important here. He hastily wrote out an alphanumeric key like the one he had used in interpreting the Wow! Signal. The first set of numbers didn’t work. Fifty-eight was beyond the alphanumeric range. The second set however was within the range.

“A,T,C,G,” he said aloud. There was something familiar about those letters. “And this just keeps repeating?”

Zavada leafed through the printout, nodding in the affirmative after a quick scan of each page. Then, without warning, he stopped and backtracked. “No. There’s a change here. It’s similar… Okay, it’s definitely the same four distinct values, but not in the same order.”

“The first several iterations were to give us the key,” Soter murmured. “To make sure we would notice the pattern. Can you break it down into sets using these values?” He tapped his key.

Zavada, with the eagerness of a kid opening presents on Christmas morning, began converting binary to alphanumeric.

Soter gasped. Now he knew why the four letters looked so familiar. “I need to show this to Chris.”

He was certain that the team’s xenobiologist, would confirm his discovery. They had indeed received a second transmission, from exactly where the Wow! Signal had told them to look…a message cleverly disguised as fluctuations in background radiation, a message that no one would ever notice unless they were actively looking for it…a message that contained just four discrete values, but which could be assembled to create something marvelous.

The letters, ATCG stood for adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine — the four nucleobases that formed the deoxyribonucleic acid molecule.

Someone, somewhere out in space, perhaps hundreds of light years away, had sent them a message coded in DNA.