The Lure

7 The Shtyrkov Conjecture

‘Hold on. You can’t mean an intelligent pattern. You can’t possibly mean that.’

Shtyrkov said, ‘But I do, Tom.’

Gibson was peering at the mathematician through narrowed eyes. ‘I have to apologise for Vash. He’s clearly mad.’

Shtyrkov folded his arms and leaned back with a condescending smile.

‘But you asked me out here anyway.’

‘It’s a million to one shot, Tom. No, it’s a billion to one, a trillion to one. But suppose … In a moment of fantasy, just suppose’ — Gibson’s voice was a strange blend of hesitancy, fear and greed — ‘that he’s right.’

‘It would be the discovery of all time,’ Svetlana said. Her voice was almost hoarse; Petrie suspected she hadn’t slept for a day or two.

‘A signal, coming from an intelligence beyond the Earth,’ Petrie said to nobody. ‘Jesus.’

‘From Jesus?’ Shtyrkov snorted. ‘I doubt it, but you can never be sure.’

‘Where do I come in?’ Freya asked.

Gibson turned to her. ‘If this is an intelligent signal, we need to know where it came from.’

‘Imagine going to the public and saying, “Hey, we’ve detected an ET signal but we don’t know where it came from”,’ Svetlana pointed out. She was nervously tapping her pencil on the desk.

‘The public would go ape,’ Gibson said. ‘So would our colleagues.’

‘We know the direction the particles passed through the lake,’ Svetlana said.

‘Exactly?’ Freya asked.

‘No. Roughly.’ Svetlana drew a box in the air with her pencil.

‘How big is the error box?’

‘We want you to tell us,’ Gibson interrupted the conversation between the two women. ‘And identify candidate sources, narrow them down to one if it’s humanly possible. The home planet.’

‘Why me for the decoding?’ Petrie asked. ‘There must be thousands of good cryptanalysts around.’

‘This isn’t code-breaking, at least I hope it’s not. It’s more a question of making sense out of patterns. I heard you in Uppsala last year. Making sense of complex patterns is your business. Me, I can only visualise things in two dimensions.’

The Russian’s heavy frame stirred in the chair. ‘There’s an intelligent signal in there, Tom. But Charlee is too stupid to see this and I can only think in two and a half dimensions. We need a peculiar mind, like yours.’

Gibson nodded. ‘It’s down to you. Prove or disprove Vashislav’s conjecture.’

‘But you don’t believe it.’

‘Do you know what Charles Darwin said?’

‘No, Charlie. What did Charles Darwin say?’

‘He said that Nature will tell you a direct lie if she can. I think Vashislav is being lied to, and that there must be some natural explanation for this weird event.’

‘So why did you ask us out here? Why alert the Prime Minister?’

‘Because Darwin also said something else.’ Gibson jabbed a finger at Petrie. ‘Every scientist should now and then carry out a fool’s experiment, something which nobody in their right mind would expect to yield a result. Because if it does work out, against all expectations, the payoff is fantastic.’

Petrie grinned. ‘Well, you’ve got the fool.’

‘Another thing Darwin said. He said maybe the people in the Gran Sasso or the Mont Blanc tunnel got the same signal as us, and maybe they’re working like hell on it, and maybe they’re going to beat us to it with an announcement, at which point Charlie Gibson will climb the tower of this frigging castle and jump off head first.’

‘Charles Darwin said that?’

‘He absolutely did. Origin of Species chapter three, paragraph three. One other trifling matter,’ Gibson said, showing his teeth. ‘This is Tuesday, in case you’ve lost track. We have the castle until the weekend. In the highly unlikely event of there being anything in Vashislav’s conjecture, I’ll need to know it by then. I’ll want a public announcement made next week.’

Shtyrkov explained. ‘Svetlana has some mad idea that once we’ve dispersed, one of us will try to steal the thunder from the others.’

‘The announcement has to be made as a team,’ Svetlana said in a determined voice.

Petrie turned to Shtyrkov. ‘I see what you mean, Vashislav. You’re all paranoid lunatics.’

Freya said, ‘Tom, we’d better get started.’

‘Can I work alone? I concentrate better that way. I can talk to myself, walk up and down and so on.’

Gibson said, ‘You can have the theological library. In fact, you can have the entire Hapsburg Empire if it will get us the answer. Take one of the Alphas. What about you, Freya? Are you a social misfit too?’

Freya was already tapping at a keyboard. ‘I’m a party-goer, Charlie. Here is fine.’

The Alpha was heavy but Shtyrkov shared the weight, while Gibson trailed behind with a terminal. After some fussing Petrie found plugs near a walnut desk. He cleared the computer printouts from the floor and the central table. Gibson disappeared and returned with a ream of A4 paper and a small disk. ‘Watch out for the cleaners,’ he said. ‘Security!’

At last Petrie was alone. He took the time to absorb his amazing new office.

It was baroque, windowless, lined with gilded, carved bookshelves reaching to the ceiling and brightly lit with overhead spotlights. There was an upper gallery accessed by a spiral staircase in a corner of the room. The books were old, although many had been rebound. They must have taken centuries to collect and had no doubt been confiscated from some monastery by some thieving emperor, maybe the guy now looking down his nose at Petrie from his white horse. He browsed at random through some of the books. Most of them were in Latin, but a few were in some unfamiliar script which he assumed to be Czech or Slovakian. They seemed to span many centuries and many topics: there were illustrated herbals, travelogues, human anatomies, atlases, military manuals, alchemists’ prescriptions, star charts and lists of wonders: two-headed cattle, serpents swallowing ships at sea, mysterious lights in the sky.

Then he sat down on a blue-upholstered chair, switched on, fed the contents of the CD into the computer’s memory, and settled down to examine the cosmic blizzard which had briefly swept through the underground lake.

At first, Petrie made no attempt to analyse what he was seeing. Svetlana had a little three-dimensional picture of the lake, in blue, complete with underground scaffolding and little red spots to mark the positions of the light detectors. A white line appeared briefly through the far edge of the lake, at an angle, while t = 00m 00.000s appeared at the top right-hand corner of the screen. Following Svetlana’s instructions in the readme file, he tapped the return button a few times, speeding the movie up. A second white line appeared at t = 03m 40.414s precisely, parallel to the first but nearer the lake’s centre. At t = 07m 20.829s a third line appeared, right of centre, making a neat right-angled triangle with the first two. It was followed a few seconds later by nine more, left to right across the lake. One-two-three near, one-two-three middle, one-two-three far; a neat rectangular grid.

It was as if the particles were being used to probe the lake, find its outline in the cavern.

Petrie dismissed the idea instantly; it was, quite simply, impossible. The apparent probing had to be luck.

He pushed the animation on a bit and was immediately faced by a white-out, the blizzard of parallel lines obscuring Svetlana’s picture of the lake and its scaffolding.

He slowed it down to the point where he could just make out the ebb and flow of individual streaks. He was now looking at snowflakes in a blizzard. He let it run, still making no attempt to make sense of it. After an hour he pressed a button and the animation froze. Time elapsed read t = 07 m 22.440 s; in real time, the flow he had been looking at for the last hour had passed through the lake in just over a second and a half.

He went back to the beginning and started again. And again he saw the right-angled triangle, the rectangular grid, the sudden blizzard. Now Petrie ran the blizzard for three solid hours, staring at the hypnotic flickering lines, while a dull ache at the back of his neck spread up over his head and down to his eyes, which began to close up.

Yes, there was a pattern. But it was the pattern of any blizzard. Pauses, swirls, brief bursts, sparse areas and concentrations. Who was to say what realms the particles had passed through on their interstellar journey, and what forces had buffeted them on the way? There was no more reason to suppose the patterns were meaningful than there was to suppose that the wind was intelligently directed. What was that Elton John song? Something about a candle in the wind.

And yet …

Something about the patterns. Groups of four. Something trying to surface. An eightsome reel dancing in his head. No, a foursome reel. No, a room full of whirling reels, patterns dancing like Tam O’Shanter’s witches. But, frustratingly, nothing that he could put into words or even formulate abstractly.

A knock on the door. Svetlana. ‘Join us for lunch?’ She saw the strain on the mathematician’s drawn face and added, ‘Have you found something?’

Petrie shook his head. Suddenly aware that his bladder needed relieving, he waved Svetlana ahead. He followed her along the corridor. She was trailing a whiff of perfume. Or maybe it was shampoo — Petrie wasn’t into the things women sprayed themselves with. She passed behind the curved stairs. Gibson, climbing them with a burger in one hand and a mug in the other, called down. ‘Found anything, Tom?’

‘Give me a chance, I’ve just arrived.’

In the kitchen, Shtyrkov was loading a dumb waiter with half a loaf of bread, butter, jam, biscuits and a plate piled with beetroot and what looked like a squashed octopus. Svetlana rattled a pot on to a big electric hob. ‘I’m making myself some pasta, Tom.’

‘No, thanks. I’ll just get back to it.’ Petrie poured himself a coffee from a bubbling percolator, helped himself to a couple of chocolate biscuits from Shtyrkov’s dumb waiter collection and disappeared back to his baroque study.

This time he ran the animation for six hours. Apart from one visit to the bathroom, and one to the kitchen for water to relieve his parched throat, he never stirred from his chair. Gradually, as the swirling patterns saturated his brain, an unwelcome image kept forcing itself forward. He tried to reject it, concentrate on the patterns, but it kept coming back. It was a memory of Sampson-Kildare, his sixth-form English teacher, a vile old lecher. The man was thrusting his wrinkled, leering face into Petrie’s, and he was croaking: ‘The mirth and fun grew fast and furious,’ while the patterns danced like Tam O’Shanter’s witches, and another image, incredible and malign, slowly crawled out from his unconscious mind.