Alice leaned against the wall opposite the flatscreen. She had seen the images enough times to have memorized them all by now. She was growing impatient.
On the lab bench rested the now-famous Snark scintillator unit. It was connected to several cables that led to an electronics rack standing beside the bench. The electronics provided the signals and protocol for connecting the device to the local area network. As far as the network was concerned, the Snark was now just one more node.
George sat at the old-fashioned computer terminal, looking up at Roger.
“What are you waiting for, George?” Alice asked. She had a sense of being present at a historic moment. She thought again about the Snark book she intended to write and wondered what kind of advance it might bring.
“This is the moment of truth, Roger,” he said. “When I hit this computer key, we will have done something irreversible. We will have revealed ourselves to an alien civilization that must be far more advanced than we are. We’ll signal them that we exist and wish to communicate. Once I hit the key, the world becomes a different place. Do I really want to do it?”
Alice made rapid notes, not wanting to miss anything.
Roger looked at George. “Your options are very limited, I’m afraid. The rumors of our work have been going out like a tidal wave. Many people in other places attended the seminar this morning using remotes, and the computer mail is flying. I predict that by tomorrow there will be an Internet discussion group devoted exclusively to speculations and news about the Snark. I predict that soon an army of reporters will converge on the laboratory, with bureaucrats from a whole array of federal agencies not far behind. I think there are only two choices. You can initiate communications right now, or you can let a bunch of State Department or military bureaucrats do it. Your choice, George.”
George bit his lip and shook his head. “Shit!” he said and hit the return key.
“That may become a famous quote, George, like ‘Damn the torpedoes — full speed ahead!’ or ‘One small step for a man…’” Alice said, writing more in her notebook.
“Let the record show,” said Roger, “that George said, ‘I initiate this contact in the name of all humankind,’ before he hit the final keystroke.” He grinned.
The message that Roger, Wilson Mulligan, and their rapidly assembled team of SETI experts had prepared began to flow into the Snark. It had not been necessary to prepare it from a cold start. The community of radio astronomers, mathematicians, psychologists, and others interested in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, despite their battles with former Senator Proxmire and other members of Congress, had been refining a basic strategy for establishing contact with an alien civilization for the past four decades. Parts of that plan, of course, were irrelevant. There seemed little point in communicating to residents of another universe the coordinates of pulsars near the solar system, for example. But most of the approach was directly applicable to the problem of contact: the sequence of smooth transitions from mathematics to physics to chemistry to biology to language to culture. A distillation of this approach, distilled to a bit-stream, was now flowing down the cables and through the Snark, to emerge in another universe.
Alice backed away from the wallscreen and studied it. There was no change in the sequence of diagram. It was presently tracing the last few lines of the Snark version of the periodic table of the elements, one of the diagrams it had repeated in roughly two-hour intervals for the past week. The nuclear chemists were fascinated by this diagram, which extended to element number 128, some seventeen positions beyond the place where our own periodic table of known elements terminated.
Perhaps, Alice thought, Roger was right and the communications link, if one were possible at all, would require months or years, even centuries to establish. How short could a wormhole path be that connected one entire universe with another? This could be a long wait.
The periodic table diagram on the flatscreen had just completed. Alice watched it, anticipating that the next diagram, which depicted atomic orbits and transitions, would be displayed. But the flatscreen remained unchanged, with no update trace proceeding across the top, and the oscilloscope beside it now showed a green blur. Alice glanced across the room to the electronics rack. Angry red lights were flashing from the data-processing modules there.
“What the hell?” muttered one of the electronics technicians as he punched at the controls of an oscilloscope. The screen of the scope flashed green and fluttered, then stabilized in a fixed trace. It showed a sequence of up-and-down rectangular traces. At the left of the screen the square-cornered swings were widely spaced, but as they progressed across the screen they grew closer and closer together until they merged into a continuous blur of blue haze.
“That’s a different pattern,” Alice said, remembering the sequence of regularly spaced ones and zeros that the Snark had been producing for the past ten days.
“Yes,” said George. He turned to Roger. “It’s a good thing you wouldn’t bet with me,” he said. “We’ve made contact. They’re obviously telling us to transmit faster.”
40
IT HAD BEEN A BUSY WEEK FOR ALICE, GEORGE thought. She had backed up the SSC laboratory’s press release about the Snark discovery with her personal account, which had been distributed internationally by Associated Press. At the press conference the day after the seminar, she had been designated as pool reporter to feed new information to the reporters who had converged on the laboratory to cover the story. And her Search article on the Snark discovery had been the magazine’s featured cover story for the week.
George had framed an enlarged copy of the Search cover. It now hung on the wall of the Snark laboratory opposite him. In the bookshelf below it was a copy of Time bearing its own cover heralding the discovery. He noticed that Alice was thumbing through a similar copy of Newsweek.
“How did Newsweek treat us?” he asked.
“Not bad,” she said, “but they did garble a few key points. They seem to think that Roger is also a member of the LEM collaboration. By the way, how is Roger? Any news?”
“I called the hospital this morning,” said George. “He’s at his apartment resting now. The doctor told me that his second seizure was worse than the first. I’m very worried.” Roger’s brilliance had been essential to the Snark contact. The doctors seemed to be having trouble establishing what his medical problem was.
George stroked his beard as he studied the terminal display. The Snark was simultaneously communicating with him, racing like a wildfire from database to database on the Internet, asking a continuous string of questions to various experts, and filling the latest in a series of ultra-high-density one-terabyte holographic optical platters.
The first level of the Snark download, about a terabyte of easily decoded information on the science, mathematics, biology, culture, arts, history, and philosophy of the race of Makers, had already been transmitted and was being widely distributed and analyzed. Now the second-level transmission was in progress. More detailed information about the Makers’ culture and science, along with information about the other civilizations that the Makers had contacted, was being received. The SSC data analysts on Team Snark were processing these new tapes offline and making the information they contained available on the Internet as quickly as they could, which was not nearly fast enough to satisfy the information-starved world tied into the network.
George pressed a switch and spoke into the microphone before him on the desk. “Tunnel Maker?” he said.