36
ALICE GLANCED AT THE WALL CLOCK AS ROGER COULTON arrived at George’s LEM office. It was just after nine o’clock on Sunday morning. Roger looked a bit hungover as he stood in the doorway, unfocused and rather disheveled. He absent-mindedly rubbed a spot on the inside of his thigh.
“Good morning, Roger,” said Alice. “Sorry we had to abandon you at P. J.’s. I presume George told you about our successful Snark hunt last night.” She didn’t want to advertise the fact that she had been in bed next to him when George had made the call.
“He certainly did,” Roger said. “Hours ago.” He yawned. “So you two have actually managed to isolate George’s mystery particle, which is now embedded in a scintillation counter. And you’ve discovered that it gives off a blue glow.”
Alice pointed to the unit on George’s desk. The scintillation cylinder now had a lighttight metal cap mounted on its narrow end. “A blue glow that flashes,” she said.
“A single wavelength blue glow that flashes,” George added. “I decided we might get a clue from the optical spectrum of the glow, so this morning we looked at the light with a small grating spectrograph. That turned out to be interesting. The thing has only one spectral line: bright blue, with a wavelength of 439.7 nanometers, if I did the calibration right.”
“What atomic transition makes such a line?” asked Roger.
“I don’t know,” said George. “I tried looking it up on the Web in an atomic physics database, but there was no match.”
“Curious,” said Roger.
“It gets even more curious,” said George.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Alice added.
George frowned at her, then smiled. “To come to the point, Roger, the thing flashes. And this morning we discovered that even when the blue light seems to be continuous, it has a time structure. It’s sending binary code at about ten kilohertz,” he said.
“What?” Roger turned, studying the two of them. “Is this a joke?”
“Perhaps it is,” said George, “but I assure you that it isn’t my joke. Alice first noticed that the flashes came in groups with the sequence 2-3-5-7-11-13-17-19-23-29-31-37, the first 12 prime numbers. And the binary stream gives the first 144 prime numbers in binary code.”
Alice suddenly had a terrible thought. What if all of this was a joke, a joke on her? Perhaps they had found out that she was here under false pretenses and decided to teach her a lesson by preparing an elaborate hoax to make the woman science reporter look foolish. It wouldn’t even have to be all that elaborate, a simple battery-powered microprocessor concealed in the scintillator thing to make the blue light flashes under the control of a program. George and Roger could both be in on it, and maybe others, too. Perhaps even the Snark event had been staged for her benefit.
She thought more about this possibility, then began to relax. They’d have to be awfully good actors, she decided. And how could anyone know that she would notice the flashes last night? No, it’s probably not a hoax, she decided. In any case, she had no choice but to go along with the thing for the moment, play her assigned role, and watch carefully.
Alice looked closely at Roger, who had been silent for a while. He now looked much more alert, she thought. Apparently he had recovered from his hangover.
“Can I have a look at the time structure?” he asked finally.
“Thought you’d never ask,” said George. He showed Roger a sheet containing several parallel traces of rectangular peaks and valleys. “I synched this plot at what I think is the starting point. The ones and zeros below the trace are a rendering in binary and hex. That’s the preamble. After the primes, it goes into another mode that we haven’t been able to penetrate.
“The overall pattern is that it makes the flashes, then the binary primes, then followed by the other stuff. That sequence repeats about every five minutes. The stuff that comes after the binary primes is different each time, though it may repeat, too, after a while.”
Roger smiled. “It’s very likely that the 12 and 144 carry the implication of a base-12 number system. But… what the hell could this Snark thing be?”
George turned to Alice. “You discovered the flashes, and you’ve had as much time to think about this as I have. What’s your guess as to what the Snark is?”
Alice was caught by surprise by the question. “Calling on the students, Professor George? I detect your academic tendencies surfacing,” she said. She opened her notebook and flipped pages. “But, okay, if you want class participation, here’s my list of what we know about the Snark. It came out of an energetic particle collision. It seemed to bring along its own energy. Its ionization track shows that it has a big electric charge, and its lack of magnetic deflection indicates that it’s very heavy. It spits quarks as it goes along, which has something to do with color. At rest it emits blue light at a single frequency. It flashes and it sends a series of prime numbers and a lot of additional code. Did I miss anything?”
“You’re doing fine,” said George. “I might add that the Snark is much more massive than any known particle, but nevertheless it seems to be stable. Continue.”
“From the flashes I must assume we’re dealing with a signal,” said Alice. “I once did a story on SETI. The claim of the experts I interviewed was that the sequence of primes indicates a message generated by intelligence rather than some product of a natural phenomenon. Okay?”
George shrugged. “We’ll accept that as at least a working hypothesis,” he said. “Keep going.”
“Okay,” said Alice. “The first possibility, it seems to me, is that the Snark might be a tiny mechanism for playing back a prerecorded message.”
“Wait a moment,” said Roger. “Do we know how large this thing is?”
“Small,” George said. “We tried looking at it this morning with a good optical system, but all that could be seen was a diffraction-limited blue spot. It’s certainly smaller than the dust grains the system was resolving.”
“We know it induced those quark jets,” said Roger. “That suggests to me that its size is probably subnuclear. So it can’t be a playback device,” he concluded.
Alice frowned. “How do you know that, Roger?” she asked.
“Any message must be stored in the form of structure,” he said. “And a structure must be an arrangement of components. What, then, are the components? Atoms? Much too big. Nuclei? Neutrons and protons? Or perhaps quarks or leptons? What forces could possibly fix them in such a structured arrangement? Or read them out and produce a playback? There are no forces that could do that. Conclusion: There is no such structure.”
“For an open-minded theorist, 1 fear you may be verging on the dogmatic, Roger,” said George. “We’re dealing with a new phenomenon here, and we can’t absolutely rule out previously unknown forces. But I agree with the sense of your conclusion. It seems unlikely that the Snark could be a self-contained playback device.”
“And I suppose,” said Alice, “that the same argument also applies to my second alternative, which is that the Snark is a self-contained intelligence that’s trying to communicate with us.” “Indeed,” Roger said. “That would require even more structure.”