The Lure

22 The Frog

Petrie tried to convince himself that his random walk round the castle was to clear the mental cobwebs.

He wandered into the theological library, dazzling with baroque, shining with antique globes, but empty. He strolled into the computer room. Svetlana and Shtyrkov were at a screen filled with some weird, patterned shape. She was pointing to something, and murmuring quietly as if the room was full of ghosts who didn’t want to be disturbed. There was nobody else. Into the kitchen and then the bar and the dining area: deserted.

He climbed nimbly up the broad stone stairs on to the terrace. There was a blue sky and a nip in the air. At some stage the overnight rain had turned to snow and there was a thin covering everywhere. Hanning had cleared it from a table and he was sitting at it with an early morning beer. Nineteen sixties’ pop was coming from an elderly transistor radio on the table. The Cabinet Office observer was flicking through sheets of paper and didn’t look up.

Petrie strode over to the parapet and looked out across the panorama. Trees, snow-covered fields, distant mountains. He walked to the south side and there she was at last, in the courtyard. The collar of her long black coat was turned up and she was pacing up and down, making a trail of footsteps in the snow, hands in pockets and breath steaming in the cold air. He wondered where she lived. Did she have a boyfriend? Was it possible such a good-looking girl didn’t have a boyfriend? Or was she spoiled for choice, picking them up and putting them down on a whim? Or a partner. These days you didn’t get married, you had a partner. Petrie ached to know.

Charlie Gibson came into view. He was walking stiffly, his head bowed, looking like a worried old man. There was an exchange of greetings and then Freya smiled and put her arm in Gibson’s, and they walked slowly past the witch’s hat and out through the front entrance.

A surge of black jealousy swept through Petrie. He crossed the terrace, ignoring Hanning’s greeting, and took the steps two at a time. Out into the cold morning air, half-running. At the front gate he slowed down, breathing heavily, and told himself not to be an idiot. They were about a hundred yards ahead, on the path and deep in conversation.

Because of a couple of bad experiences, Petrie had never been comfortable with women. Just the presence of an attractive female made him nervous. It gave him a strange, contradictory surge of emotions, just seeing her smooth skin, long blonde hair and the outline of well-formed breasts underneath the coat. And sure enough, as he caught up with them, and Freya turned and smiled, he felt like a small boy caught stealing apples. Gibson’s face, by contrast, was grim. Petrie wondered if the man saw him as a rival, but no, his expression was too overtly serious.

‘Ah, Tom, just the man. Charlie’s going through the tortures of the damned.’ Freya’s breath was steaming in the cold air.

‘Me too. We’re nearly out of time.’ He felt his heart thumping in his chest.

Gibson’s voice was harsh. ‘It’s not the time factor. I think maybe we should kill the whole thing.’

‘What?’

‘Erase all evidence. Pretend the signal never happened.’

Petrie was silent. For some seconds he wondered if the burst of radiation was beginning to affect Gibson’s mind too. But Charlie Gibson, although upset, was still being Charlie Gibson.

The physicist said, ‘How would you communicate with a frog?’

‘I don’t know. Why would I want to?’ Petrie fell in beside Gibson, and they walked slowly across the snow.

‘Exactly.’

‘You mean, we’re frogs?’

‘What’s bugging me is this: how can we ever hope to get inside an alien mind? Maybe they’re wired up differently, maybe their minds work in some way we can’t even imagine. Maybe there’s no way to know what they’re really thinking.’

‘Charlie’s worried that maybe they’re sharks, not frogs,’ Freya explained.

Gibson unconsciously cracked his knuckles. ‘A Great White disguising itself as Kermit.’

‘An intelligent Jaws, with malice in its heart?’

‘Exactly. What’s driving them to signal us?’

‘Altruism, Charlie. We’ve reached the stage where we can be helped and they just want to do that.’

‘So out there everybody holds hands and sings mantras round a big galactic camp fire? That’s optimistic, Tom, very save-the-whales, very western liberal. Tell me, have you ever tried to do your own thinking?’

Petrie checked his temper; it was clear that Gibson was deeply upset. He settled for icy politeness. ‘Are you saying they need us for food or what?’

Gibson said, ‘Darwinian selection is ruthless. The strong survive. Why shouldn’t that work out there as well as down here? Maybe the meek have been weeded out and the aliens go around on motor bikes with safety pins in their noses. Tom, maybe we have to suppress all this. It never happened, okay? Let’s keep our heads down.’

Petrie stared, aghast. ‘But Charlie, the Prize!’

‘I know. I know. Why the fuck do you think I’m like this?’ The snow was ankle-deep. Gibson kicked viciously at it.

Freya adopted a matter-of-fact tone. Petrie thought she was doing it deliberately to calm the excited physicist. ‘Charlie thinks it could be a lure, designed to see if we’ve reached the stage where we might become a threat.’

‘Freya, how can we possibly be a threat to creatures thousands of years ahead of us, maybe millions?’

Gibson said, ‘We’re not, not now. But give it a thousand years. It might make sense to zap us now while we’re confined to a single planet. Give it a few hundred years and we’ll be spread around and it will be too late to stop us. And a civilisation a million years old probably looks ahead at least a thousand years.’

‘Are you seriously telling us we should keep quiet about this discovery? Kill it?’

‘I’m beginning to think that way.’

‘Oh boy,’ Petrie said. ‘Oh boy oh boy.’

Freya said, ‘The critical issue is whether the signallers have a moral code, and if so what that code is.’

Gibson’s voice rose an octave. ‘Freya, how can we ever know about something like that? I just do Çerenkov radiation. I’d pull in a theologian except he’d come in waving a lot of religious crap and anyway there isn’t time.’

Ahead of them, a couple of children were heaving a sledge up the road. A large Alsatian dog was jumping through the snow, its tongue hanging out.

Gibson continued, ‘Look at our own evolution. It’s been tooth and claw from the start. Human societies just continue in that vein. Whenever there’s been contact between two cultures, the strong one has always overwhelmed the weak. This goes at least back to the Neanderthals. If we go public with this, someone on Earth will fire off a reply, guaranteed. It could be just what the signallers need: proof that we’re into the subnuclear stage, where we need to be squashed before we get any further.’

Petrie said, ‘Come on, Charlie, that’s just a flight of fancy.’

‘You think so? Do you want to risk humanity’s future on it? And who are we to do that?’

‘But that’s the trap we’re in, Charlie. We go public or we don’t go public. Either way we make a decision that affects humanity’s future.’

Freya changed sides with Gibson so that she was now between the two men. The Alsatian was leaping towards them, leaving an irregular trail in the pristine snow. A small child was pursuing it, shouting, ‘Zlato! Zlato! Dâle!’ Come here!

Freya said, ‘My brother has a husky. I put on skis and he pulls me over the lake when it’s frozen.’

‘Your brother?’ Gibson asked.

‘The husky, stupid.’

Petrie made a snowball and threw it at the boy. The Alsatian charged off, and the child managed to grab it by the collar.

Freya said, ‘I know what’s holding you back, Charlie. You’re thinking there’s one Universe, with one Big Bang, and it’s transient. The stars will eventually burn out, the embers will cool and life will die out. You’re thinking if life is just a spark in a bonfire then so are moral values. They’re just a social glue. Right?’

‘Right,’ Gibson said, with a touch of aggression.

Freya continued, ‘So you’re thinking, if the Universe is just a big heap of burning ashes, okay, and there’s no absolute morality, then maybe we do have survival of the meanest.’

‘On the button.’

‘Maybe this is a civilisation anticipating trouble and getting rid of it in plenty of time. I know you hate to think this, Charlie. I know you’re terrified you’ll have to shut up about this discovery. You’re churned up because you want the fame, the Nobel, the immortality.’

‘I do.’ Gibson was in anguish. ‘I want all of that.’

‘But you’re out of date, Charlie. The Universe isn’t like that at all.’

‘Not like that?’ Charlie’s tone was pathetic.

‘Not at all. That’s Victorian, it’s yesterday’s philosophy.’

‘And today’s?’

She squeezed Charlie’s arm and Petrie’s black jealousy resurged. ‘Let me tell you about a big mystery. A huge mystery, a monster thing, the central mystery of the Creation.’

‘Am I in for a Norse saga?’

Freya said, ‘If only the epic poets had got hold of this story…’

Petrie said, ‘I think my toes are falling off.’

She laughed. ‘All right, Tom, I’ll keep it brief. Hydrogen burns inside stars to give us helium.’

Gibson decided to take offence. ‘Freya, I know I’m not a high-flier like Tom here, but credit me with knowing something.’

‘It burns with efficiency 0.007.’

‘What has double-o-seven got to do with answering the signal?’

‘If it was double-o-eight the hydrogen would all have burned to helium by now and we’d have a Universe made of nothing but gas for balloons. If it burned at efficiency double-o-six we’d have a Universe made of nothing but hydrogen and just a little helium.’

As she warmed to the theme, Freya began to wave her arms dramatically. ‘But you can’t have life in a Universe made just of hydrogen or helium. For life you need complexity, you need to build up heavy elements, carbon, oxygen, phosphorus and so on. You cook them up inside stars and to do that, the hydrogen has to burn with just the right efficiency, point zero-zero-seven, neither more nor less. Somehow the atomic properties of hydrogen have been perfectly fine-tuned for building the heavy elements we need for life.’

Gibson was red-faced. Petrie wasn’t sure if it was the cold air, or the physical exertion of ploughing through the deepening snow, or the mental exertion of following Freya’s modern saga. ‘That’s remarkable, but where are you heading?’

‘Patience, as you kept saying to us a couple of days ago. If gravity was even slightly stronger than it is, the stars would burn up so fast there would be no time for life to evolve. If the Universe expanded even slightly faster than it does, it would have dispersed before matter had a chance to collapse into stars and planets. If it didn’t have just the right irregularities implanted in it, just after the Big Bang, we’d either be sucked into black holes or dispersed as a rarefied gas with no stars, no planets and no life. And so on and so on. There’s a whole string of coincidences; get any one even slightly wrong and you’d have no life.’

‘Freya, okay! But so what?’

Petrie cringed, but Freya continued, ‘Charlie, don’t you get it? The Universe has been fine-tuned to the nth degree to support life. Nobody knows how or why. Some things we may never understand. That’s the monster mystery. One of the big questions.’

‘That’s quite something, Freya, in fact it’s mind-boggling. But I don’t see how it relates to the motives of the signallers.’

‘Think about it, Charlie. For some reason the Universe is structured so as to be friendly to life. Maybe even life itself has built the Universe that way.’

‘Now that’s really pushing the boat.’

‘Whatever. But the Universe isn’t just dying embers with life getting a grip where it can. Life is central to it. The cosmos is a living entity.’

‘Oh, man!’ Gibson’s complexion was an alarming red.

‘This damn cold. It’s getting to more than my toes,’ Petrie volunteered.

‘Some power, some force, call it what you will, has worked things this way. What’s the sense in having a Universe built to be friendly to life but with no life in it? And whatever this force is, it couldn’t allow one dominant life form anywhere to eliminate all others as they arise. It’s just not consistent with the way the cosmos has been structured. Whatever’s out there, Charlie, it’s not tooth and claw. Not on the cosmic scale. The Universe is wild but it loves life.’

Stress was now flowing out of Gibson like water from a kettle, and he began to glow with such radiance that Petrie thought he might melt the snow around him. ‘It’s Kermit then. Not Jaws.’

Petrie pulled his collar up round his neck. He thought Freya’s argument was more poetry than science but if it made Charlie happy he wasn’t going to argue. He drove the point home: ‘It’s Kermit, Charlie. And that delicious weekend in Stockholm.’

The children were on the sledge, flying down the road at what to Petrie was a scary speed. The Alsatian was bounding behind them, tail flying.

Freya shivered. She linked arms with both men. The physical contact, even through the layers of clothing, gave Petrie a thrill. She said, ‘It’s getting cold.’

Gibson was now almost delirious with relief. ‘Yeah. And when an Eskimo says that, you can believe it.’

They turned back, Petrie beginning to wonder if the physicist’s outlook on life was, so to speak, politically correct.