She sat there on the bottom of her tank and worried at the puzzle, perfectly aware of what she was really doing: struggling to keep her mind off another little problem. No matter how the propulsion system worked, she was going to be in a hell of a mess when this rock piled into Mars.
Chancellor Daltry was demonstrating a fair talent for running tight meetings, Larry decided. Things were moving right along.
And Larry was also getting the very clear impression that Daltry was going to be the one making the final decisions here.
“I now call on Dr. Marcia MacDougal,” the chancellor said. “We have heard some stunning facts today, but I believe Dr. MacDougal can match them. I had the opportunity to talk with her before the meeting, and I must say that she has come up with some remarkable results. Dr. MacDougal.”
Larry watched the wiry, ebony-skinned woman stand and cross to the audiovisual controls at the far end of the room. She was plainly nervous. “Thank you, Chancellor. I’ve made what I think might be a real breakthrough—but I don’t know what it all means. I know this will sound backwards, but I think it might be best if I start at the end, and then jump back to the beginning and work my way forward.”
She plugged a datablock into place and punched a few buttons. The lights dimmed and an image appeared in the air over the table. A massive sphere, the color of old dried blood, hung in the air, spinning slowly. Larry frowned and stared at it. A red dwarf star? But why so dim? And why were its edges so well defined?
Then he noticed faint lines etched into the surface of the object, barely visible against the dark background. “Could you enhance those surface lines a bit?” he asked. Marcia worked the controls and the lines brightened.
“Longitude and latitude,” someone in the darkness said.
“That’s what I thought, at first,” Marcia said. “It’s as good a guess as any, I suppose.”
“What the hell are we looking at?” Lucian’s voice asked.
“A movie,” MacDougal replied. “A three-dee, alien movie. What it’s a film of, I don’t know. Watch for a moment.”
Suddenly the sphere’s rotation began to wobble, skewing about more and more erratically. Two spots on its upper surface began to glow in a warmer red, and suddenly flared up and flashed over into glare-bright white. The flare was over as soon as it began. Two blinding-bright points of light swept out of the sphere’s interior and vanished out of the frame. The sphere itself was left behind, tumbling wildly, with a pair of massive, blackened holes torn through its surface.
The image blanked, and then the sphere reappeared, unbroken and whole. “The sequence loops at that point,” Marcia said. “It was repeated at least a hundred times, far more often than any other message unit. That suggests to me that whatever that showed us was damned important to the Charonians.”
“To the who?” Larry asked.
Marcia shrugged. “The aliens. I had to name them something. The Ring of Charon was what woke them up, so Charonians seemed as good as anything.”
“Where did these images come from?” Raphael asked.
“From the wormhole,” Marcia replied. “It was sent, as a binary-code signal, by whatever is on the other side of the wormhole. And I’m sorry, Hiram, but I’m convinced that’s what the Earthpoint mass is. I don’t know who or what on this end is supposed to see it.”
“How was it sent?” Lucian asked.
“Forty-two-centimeter radio signals, sent in burst patterns. Answering the twenty-one-centimeter signal coming from the Moon.”
“How could radio pass through a wormhole?” Lucian asked.
“Mostly because there’s nothing to stop it, as I understand it,” Marcia said. “A wormhole isn’t as much a hole as a door, a way of putting two planes of normal space next to each other. Once that door’s open, anything that can pass through normal space—matter, energy, radiation, whatever—can cross the wormhole.”
“Hell’s bells, if you can drop planets through the hole, what’s a few lousy radio waves?” someone asked.
Radio waves. An idea suddenly started tickling at the base of Larry’s mind, but the conversation steamrollered on, and he lost his train of thought.
McGillicutty stood up and leaned in toward the hologram to get a better look. The grim red of the sphere made his face into something forbidding and sepulchral. “I knew you were working on cracking their signals, Marcia, but I had no idea you had gotten so far. You should have come to me for help. With imagery this complex, you had to make some choices and interpretations you’re not trained to make. How solid is this? I mean, how reliable could this be?”
“It’s close, very, very close to what was sent,” Marcia replied in a steely voice. “I’d say the colors, for example, are within angstroms of the intended value. Aside from bringing the latitude and longitude lines up when you asked, I haven’t enhanced or manipulated it at all. Time scale and physical scale, I have no idea on. This could be a record of a beach-ball-sized object popping— or a planet or a star being wrecked. All I know is it seems to be important to the Charonians.”
“What in God’s name is it?” Raphael asked in the darkness.
The room was silent for a long time. “This is a damn sophisticated four-dee image,” McGillicutty said at last, in a voice that seemed to be louder than it had to be. “How the hell did you manage to crack it?”
Marcia laughed, a low, throaty chuckle that came from the darkness, and a gleaming flicker of teeth flashed. “I told you I thought it would make sense to start at the end,” Marcia said. “I wanted to show you that I really had something before I explained how I got it. I know it seems amazing that I could come up with images and data so fast—even more so when I have no idea what the data mean. I wish I could take credit for cracking the enemy’s codes—but I can’t. These messages were designed to be decoded.
“In fact that’s the thing that worries me the most. Your invaders, Dr. Raphael, have done worse than deliberately ignore us. I get the distinct impression that it has never even occurred to them that we might be a threat, or even an issue. I think it would be a major effort of will for them even to realize we exist. They send messages back and forth right in front of us, the way we might talk about taking the dog to the vet while he’s in the room. We assume dogs can’t possibly understand people, and maybe they assume people can’t possibly understand Charonians. Maybe they’re right. I don’t know what they’re saying.”
Again, awkward silence blanketed the room. This time McGillicutty’s grating voice was almost a relief. “Dammit, MacDougal, how the hell did you unbutton this message?” He wasn’t going to let that question go.
“Arecibo technique,” Marcia replied. “A big old radio telescope they used in the twentieth century. On Bermuda or Cuba or someplace. It’s an old, old idea. The idea was to send out a binary message based on simple enough concepts and images that a totally alien culture could understand it. Something you could plot to graph paper—fill in a square for a binary on, leave it blank for a binary off to form pictures.
“A lot of your first message would consist of basic concepts of number, size, atomic structure in schematic form, that sort of thing. Count from one to, say, ten, then run the beginning of the prime-number series, maybe demonstrate the Pythagorean theorem by drawing a right triangle. Once you’ve sent enough for them to get the idea, maybe you send an outline sketch of what your species looks like, or a map of your planet or solar system. Your radio wavelength could provide a linear scale to give the size of any image you drew.