Chapter 1
A Sundered World?
When physicists came upon the idea that the atom is built like a solar system, the atoms of various chemical elements differing in the mass of their suns (nuclei) and the number of their planets (electrons), the notion was looked upon with much favour. But it was stressed that ‘an atom differs from the solar system by the fact that it is not gravitation that makes the electrons go round the nucleus, but electricity’ (H.N. Russell). Besides this, another difference was found: an electron in an atom, on absorbing the energy of a photon (light), jumps to another orbit, and again to another when it emits light and releases the energy of a photon. Because of this phenomenon, comparison with the solar system no longer seemed valid. ‘We do not read in the morning newspapers that Mars leaped to the orbit of Saturn, or Saturn to the orbit of Mars,’ wrote a critic. True, we do not read it in the morning papers; but in ancient records we have found similar events described in detail, and we have tried to reconstruct the facts by comparing many ancient records. The solar system is actually built like an atom; only, in keeping with the smallness of the atom, the jumping of electrons from one orbit to another, when hit by the energy of a photon, takes place many times a second, whereas in accord with the vastness of the solar system, a similar phenomenon occurs there once in hundreds or thousands of years. In the middle of the second millennium before the present era, the terrestrial globe experienced two displacements; and in the eighth or seventh century before the present era, it experienced three or four more. In the period between, Mars and Venus, and the moon also, shifted.
– Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, 1950
one
Even up here by the giant Arecibo radio dish the pollution was noticeable. Today, a great brown cloud of nitrogen dioxide squatted over the valley in which lay the mighty eye. Although it was noon, there was an all-pervading twilight gloom.
His eyes stinging, Mark Tompion shouldered his way past the guards and the NO SMOKING signs. He waited until he was on the other side of the airlock before removing his gas mask. He looked at it ruefully, then tossed it into a nearby disposal unit. Only a couple of years back there would have been no need for him to wear a mask of any type, but then the Puerto Rican government had designated the sparsely populated region a Pollution Disposal Area; now great underground pipes from as far away as Los Angeles spewed out their corrupting air twenty-four hours a day. Even the toughest gas masks lasted for no more than two or three trips up from the residential quarters to the lab areas.
His lab was a small one, shared with a microcomputer terminal and built into solid rock many metres below the dish. As he made his way towards it he had to pass through the laboratories of several of his colleagues. Some of them looked up and smiled, but his acknowledgements were automatic: he had never been a very sociable man, and of recent weeks his mind had been almost totally preoccupied with the curious radio emissions detected as coming from the region of 61 Cygni. Unless some new arcane type of pulsar had shown itself – and it seemed impossible to devise any kind of mechanism which would support such a theory – the signals were intelligent: they meant something.
He flopped down on the chair in front of his console and looked at it bleakly. He had studied the figures it displayed so often that they no longer meant anything to him.
There was a tap at the door.
‘Come,’ he grunted.
The woman who entered was statuesquely built, and yet her demeanour was modest. Her hair, as black as night, shone in a perfect frame about her oval face. Her faintly pouted lips and her lustrous brown eyes suggested docility, yet Tompion knew that Dr Lise Panther was the finest mathematician alive, with the sole exception of himself. He also thought she was kinda cute.
‘Yes, Dr Panther?’ he said impatiently.
‘Hi, Professor Tompion,’ she responded, dropping a wodge of calculations onto his already cluttered desk. ‘I’ve been having another look at the data on the 61 Cygni signals, and I think I’ve come up with something.’
Suddenly Tompion was alert. ‘By thunder, but this sounds interesting!’ he rasped. ‘Fetch us both a coffee and tell me about it.’
In moments she returned and found room for the plastic cups of steaming fungal coffee among his disorderly papers; then, to his immense pleasure, she sat down. It was a movement full of the most enticing curves, yet carried out with all the shy grace of a young faun.
‘Spill,’ he said.
‘Well, you know that the sets of signals seem to be of two kinds?’
‘Yes.’
‘Just let me recap for a moment, though. The type A signals are streams of very rapid pulses, regularly spaced. You wouldn’t think you’d be able to make out anything intelligible from them.’
‘Exactly. I can’t.’
‘In fact, when we first picked up the signals we thought we’d got just another pulsar, except for two things. First of all, the pulses come at a rate of over twenty thousand per second, which would seem to be an impossibly high rate of rotation even for a very young pulsar – anyway, we’d probably have seen the supernova explosion if it had been that young.’
‘True, true,’ urged Tompion. He couldn’t understand why she was going through all this basic stuff. Everybody knew what a pulsar was – it was the incredibly dense, rapidly rotating remnant left over after a large star had exploded as a supernova. The pulsar’s magnetic field reacted in such a way with surrounding particles that radio waves were generated; if the Earth happened to lie in the right ‘line of sight’ it would receive a radio pulse with each rotation of the pulsar – hence the name. Everybody knew this . . . but Dr Panther was notorious for her habit of explaining everything from the ground up.
Nevertheless, he was impatient. ‘The other thing that we noticed was that there were breaks in the pulses, lasting about a second and a half each. We know all this, Dr Panther. Please go on.’
‘OK, well let’s look at the type B signals. These are totally different. For one thing, they’re a lot slower, and they seem to correspond much more to the sort of signal that we’ve been sending over the years: patterns of dots and dashes, not unlike the Morse Code.’
‘Yes, yes, go on.’ Tompion wondered what she’d look like without any clothes on.
‘I thought it might be a good idea to stand back from the whole pattern of signals a little. I immediately saw that very long bursts of type A signals would be interspersed with single groups of type B. Moreover, in each group of type B signals there are exactly 4,753 dots and dashes, taken all together. Every fifth group of B signals repeats.’
Tompion caught his breath. Now that she had said it, it all seemed so obvious. Still, if this was all that she had done, it hardly explained the look of demure satisfaction which had crossed her face.
She straightened her spectacles, pushed back her hair, and picked up an unwieldy pile of computer printouts.
‘Then I thought it would be interesting to look at the type A signals. You see, it struck me that we’d sort of ignored them a lot because there didn’t seem to be much that you could discover from a massive series of identical pulses. But I wondered if maybe we weren’t being a little too oversimplistic in dismissing them like that: I mean, if the aliens were sending type B signals expecting to communicate with us, they wouldn’t waste their time sending the A signals if the A signals didn’t mean something.’
Tompion nodded agreement. It was something which had been nagging away at the back of his own mind.
‘But what could they mean?’ he demanded.
‘I decided that the key must lie in the number of A pulses in each sequence. So I put the whole thing through Multichip and came out with this.’
She tossed a sheet of printout over to him, and he looked at it blankly. There was a column of figures on it. The first few lines read:
1
96
4,560
142,880
3,321,960
61,124,063
His eyes scanned to the bottom of the sheet, down to the last few lines:
61,124,063
3,321,960
142,880
4,560
96
1
‘So what?’ muttered Tompion numbly.
‘Don’t you see? There’s a symmetry about it.’ For a moment she looked almost impatient. Even though Tompion was the finest living mathematician in the world, with the solitary exception of herself, she often found it astounding that he was totally innumerate: perhaps in the field of mathematics which he had single-handedly invented, and which no one but himself understood, you didn’t need numbers.
‘A symmetry,’ repeated Tompion, with awe.
‘Yeah,’ she said, crossing her legs, an act which she had discovered always woke him up. ‘Between each set of B pulses there are exactly 97 sets of A pulses. The first and the 97th set each consist of a single pulse; the second and the 96th each consist of 96 pulses; the third and the 95th are each of 4,560 pulses . . . and so on, and so on. Doesn’t that remind you of something?’
Tompion stared at the paper. If you turned it sideways, it reminded you of the Nile Delta, and that reminded him of the summer vacation he’d once spent in Egypt with a curvaceous little red-haired belly-dancer called Lil, and that reminded him of . . . but he guessed that Dr Panther was talking mathematically.
‘No,’ he replied, honestly.
‘Honestly,’ he added.
Panther sighed. She’d have to start him all over from the very beginning.
‘You remember back at school,’ she began, ‘when they taught you about Pascal’s Triangle?’
‘Yes,’ he agreed, after a moment.
She wondered about giving him a quick lecture on the Binomial Theorem, but decided against it (he’d probably never even heard of Jacques Binomial, the seventeenth-century French mathematician who had formulated it). Instead, she got to her feet and undulated across to the blackboard.
‘The first few lines of Pascal’s Triangle look something like this.’ She scribbled with the chalk.
1
1 2 1
1 3 3 1
1 4 6 4 1
1 5 10 10 5 1
Tompion watched attentively. Women in tight blue jeans always did something for him – and the numbers looked interesting too.
‘I won’t do all the rows in between,’ she confessed with an almost guilty cough, ‘but you find, Professor, that when you get down to the 96th row it starts off like this: 1 / 96 / 4,560 / 142,880 / 3,321,960 / 61,124,063.’ Her hand moved rapidly as she wrote the numbers up on the board.
‘Wow!’ he said.
‘Exactly, Professor! What the aliens are trying to tell us with their type A pulses is to think about the 96th row of Pascal’s Triangle!’
‘Wow!’ he repeated, slapping his open palm on the desk. ‘Dr Panther, that’s remarkable. You’ve done it again. My congratulations.’
He sat back and watched happily as she returned to her own seat. There were a couple of moments’ silence and he felt his enthusiasm beginning to waver, then to plunge.
‘Well . . . uh . . . all this is very interesting, Dr Panther, but I don’t see that it actually gets us very far. I mean, these aliens are obviously some kind of religious nuts . . .’
‘What?’ She sat bolt upright, and her mouth dropped open to reveal her even rows of pristinely white teeth.
‘Well, yeah, it seems obvious to me,’ he said patronizingly. ‘Clearly they worship this Pascal guy and have a fanatical urge to broadcast the 96th line of his triangle to everyone else in the Universe. Or maybe we’re the 96th planet they’ve tried to contact, or something.’ He leant forward, put his elbows on the desk, cupped his chin (damn! – he’d forgotten about that coffee), and grinned expansively at her. ‘It all seems very simple to me, my child.’
‘I’m not sure that I wholeheartedly agree with your interpretation, Professor,’ she began, but he would have none of it.
‘Let’s leave it at that for the moment,’ he said, waving her towards the door. ‘I’ll draft a press release on the subject – or, no, better . . . you draft it for me.’
Her magnificent forehead was lined with worry as she made her way out of the room. Her own deductions from the signals were rather different . . . but she knew that it was no use arguing with Tompion when he was in his big-daddy state. Her best plan would be to draft a release along the lines of her own theory, give it to him, and hope that he wouldn’t read it before passing it out to the newsmen. It was a practice she used often. After all, he was so busy, his mind so often on higher mathematics.
Still, her brow was furrowed as she closed the door gently and strolled off down the corridor.
In the lab behind her, Tompion reached delightedly for the telephone. He knew the President would be more than pleased to hear about these latest developments. He keyed the button marked ‘President’ on the phone, and then began to punch in his security coding, 9441. 9 – that was the curly one near the bottom. 4 was harder but – yes, there it was, on the left-hand side of the – um – second row. And 4 again . . .
Listening to the tone, he thought again of Lise Panther. A strange woman, ever anxious to shun the limelight. He knew, and she knew – and he knew she knew, and so on – that he wouldn’t drag her name into any announcements of this dramatic new discovery. It was one of those little courtesies he always liked to display – accommodating her habitual shyness.
And she was beautiful as well as brilliant. One day he must ask her if she’d like to have coffee in the staff canteen with him. If only someone would tell her about her halitosis . . .
The other party answered.
‘Mr President . . .’ Mark Tompion began.
two
1945 . . .
The mincing little figure with the toothbrush moustache leaned over the crumpled bodies, ensuring that they were really dead. His heart missed a beat as he checked for the pulse of Eva – his darling Eva – and found that there was none. The other corpses were similarly lifeless.
Chuckling happily, he darted over to a cupboard in the corner of the room, and staggered back carrying a heavy canister of gasoline.
Scheissen! but the cap had been screwed on tightly. Beads of sweat appeared on the world’s most notorious forehead as he strained at it, his nervously sweating fingers slipping over the unsympathetic metal. His beady little eyes rolled as he tried yet again . . . and there – yes, that was it: the cap had shifted.
It took him only a moment to unscrew it. He threw the cap into a far corner of the room, and began to pour out the highly inflammable liquid. He took especial care to make sure that the corpses were adequately soused, then treated the rest of the room and the cheap bureaucratic furniture more cavalierly. When he reached the door he tossed the empty canister towards the heap of crumpled humanity in the centre of the room and cackled insanely.
Yes, yes, they had known that just along the corridor there was a secret room housing the Reich’s final triumphant invention, the time machine. What they had not known – because he had never told them – was that it was capable of taking only one lucky person into the future. And so they had gone to their deaths like sheep, in the innocent belief that he had brought out the sub_machine gun only for an innocuous game of Russian roulette.
He slammed the door. Earlier in the day, he had built into its hinges a timing device which would, in twenty minutes or so, strike a match inside that charnel house of death. Twenty minutes was more than enough time for him to install himself in the time machine and leave for pastures new – out there in the uncharted wastelands of the future.
He scuttled along the drab grey corridor, his eyes alight with glee. At the far end he paused outside the unmarked door and tapped the correct combination on it impatiently.
It swung open.
The interior of the room instantly sprang into full illumination. There, in one corner, stood the time machine, its sharp parasol gleaming evilly.
But there was no time for description. As the door swung shut behind him he leapt across to the wall where a single red lever projected aggressively. With one movement of his hand he hauled it downward, into the ‘on’ position – and lights came on all over the machine.
Five minutes – that was all it would take for the machine to be fully warmed up.
He pulled a diving suit from a nearby cupboard and, with excited clumsiness, clambered into it. When he was sure that all the hermetic seals were correctly adjusted, he lugged an oxygen bottle across to the time machine, which had begun to hum high-pitchedly with anticipation.
He leaped over its edge-wall and landed adroitly in its bicycle-like seat. Placing the oxygen bottle in its socket, he fitted it to the intake pipe of his diving suit.
A single red light began to flash – on, off, on, off . . . and he knew that the moment had come.
With trembling fingers, Adolf Hitler leaned forward and spun the dial of the chronometer. He was on his way to the future!
The lights in the room dimmed as the time machine drew on full power. And then, all of a sudden, they were no longer before his eyes . . .
three
Colonel Bart Malone was lying frenziedly on top of Comrade Dimpla, fumbling drunkenly at the seals on her spacesuit. (Or perhaps she was on top of him, he mused hazily – it was so difficult to tell because, of course, there’s no ‘up’ in space.)
‘Bart. Oh, Bart,’ she breathed huskily. ‘If you don’t climb off of me, I’m going to break your back.’
His eyes focused for a moment. ‘Don’t say that to me, honey,’ he slurred with a rueful grin. ‘You know that you ’n’ I have been wanting each other since the moment we clapped eyes on each other.’
His body was like a limp sack of potatoes as she tossed it across the control cabin of the Mary Poppins. He looked up dazedly as she stood over him, still trying to push back that unruly lock of blonde hair.
‘Where I come from, Colonel Malone’ – her voice was full of Slavic sarcasm – ‘the testicles of rapists are used as golfballs. I would advise you to keep your clammy hands to yourself – or even use them to attend to the laser.’
‘Why sure, honey,’ he said with a cocky, undefeated smile. ‘Anything you say.’ His firm chin puckered with amusement.
Her glare was unrelieved.
Driving the alcohol smog from his mind by use of a mantra taught to him by an ancient oriental Zen master, he crawled over to the X-ray laser he had ingeniously conjured up out of the remains of his still. As he fiddled with the nuts and bolts he reflected that he had been wise to insist upon bottling a few crates before dismantling his last little construction.
There was a very long, gravid silence.
‘Hey, honey, uh, how’re we gonna know when they’ve picked up our signal?’ Malone smirked appealingly.
‘Colonel Malone, that is a stupid question!’ snapped Dimpla.
‘Yeah, well, that’s the whisky for you . . .’
‘The answer is obvious! We must build an X-ray telescope in order to be able to pick up their responses.’
Malone scratched his curly pate.
‘There seems to be a problem, babe,’ he muttered darkly, although an optimistic grin was not far beneath the surface. ‘The only useful piece of electronic equipment we had here on the Mary Poppins was the radio – it made a great still, and now with any luck it’ll make a great X-ray laser. But it can’t be both an X-ray telescope and an X-ray laser at the same time.’
‘The answer is so simple that you will kick yourself in the back of the head when I tell it to you,’ said the plucky young Russian cosmonaut, smoothing her spacesuit over her thighs. ‘It will take our message towards Earth just over eleven minutes to reach there. It will take them some time to locate an X-ray laser which they can orientate in such a way as to transmit back to us – say twenty minutes. Then its signal will take another eleven minutes to reach us. That gives you over forty minutes to convert the X-ray laser into an X-ray telescope!’
‘Say, funny-face!’ wisecracked Malone cheerfully. ‘I’ve had an even better idea! Why’n’t we tell them, as part of our message, to transmit back to us using an optical laser – in visible light? Then we could actually see their message just by looking out the porthole!’
But the perfectly formed Russian was staring out through the very porthole towards which he had gestured.
‘Look!’ she gasped.
‘Oh, don’ be silly, honey-pie,’ laughed Malone. ‘We haven’t even started transmitting yet . . .’
But the words died in his throat as his gaze followed the line of her pointing finger. Even his erection wilted – or so he thought: it was difficult to tell because, of course, there’s no such thing as ‘up’ in space.
For now they could both see, not a million kilometres away, an awe-inspiring sight – one of the most bizarre objects known to Man.
It was a comet. A small comet, but a comet just the same. It seemed to be travelling on a course parallel with theirs, but moving rather more swiftly. NASA had sent a bunch of unmanned probes to investigate comets in the years gone by, and both of the spacers had seen many photographs of the results – but they were only too aware of the fact that they were the first human beings to witness a comet in real life, close up. It was a sobering experience.
‘It’s beautiful,’ said Malone, his voice suddenly no longer slurred.
‘Quite beautiful,’ echoed Dimpla.
Neither of them could have told, afterwards, how long they stood there watching the silent majesty of the comet, although the computer’s log showed that it was fully a minute.
Against the intense background of black space penetrated by the diamond-hard lights of millions of stars moved a ghostly luminance, at whose heart lay a coruscatingly bright nucleus – so bright that the two astronauts had to shield their eyes against it. It seemed as if there were violent upheavals taking place within this brilliance; yet a terrible silence reigned. It was hell without the screaming.
‘There’s something odd about that comet,’ said Dimpla, after a time.
‘What do you mean, babe?’
‘Well, it doesn’t have a tail.’
‘Maybe it’s not close enough to the Sun yet?’
‘No,’ she said, biting her lip. ‘I don’t think so. At the very least, it should have some form of rudimentary tail – even just some degree of elongation – because of the effect of the . . . oh, what is it that you call it in your language? . . . the electrically charged particles which stream out from the Sun.’
‘The solar wind,’ prompted Malone.
‘Thank you. And there’s another funny thing about this comet. Comets always shine just by the light from the Sun which they reflect, but I am sure this comet is too brilliant for that.’
‘Maybe it’s just because we’re so close to it?’
‘No, Colonel Malone. I do not think that that is the answer. There seem to be reactions going on in the main body of the comet. I do not think that they can be solely a result of turbulence.’
‘But what else could they be, babe?’
‘I do not know.’ Her brow crumpled and she stroked her dainty nose thoughtfully. ‘Unless . . . unless . . .’
‘Unless what, honey?’
‘Yes, that would explain the oddities.’
‘What would explain them?’ Malone’s voice was rising to a shout.
‘This could be – an antimatter comet!’
Malone’s mouth dropped further open. He knew very well what antimatter was – it was exactly like matter, except that all the electrical charges of its constituent particles were reversed, so that instead of negatively charged electrons its atoms had positively charged positrons, and so forth. He knew also that there was very little antimatter in Earth’s part of the Universe; which was just as well, since matter and antimatter annihilate each other with colossal explosive energy when they meet. If there were an antimatter comet in the Solar System, it could cause untold havoc.
‘Hey, baby, this thing could be dangerous!’
‘Very dangerous, Colonel Malone.’
‘I don’t know much about astronomy, honey-babe,’ said Malone with a quirky smile. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance of this damn’ comet falling into the Sun, is there?’
‘I think not – although we don’t know much about the way in which gravity acts between matter and antimatter objects. On the other hand, if it passed very close to the Sun, the friction caused by its reactions with the particles in the Sun’s outer atmosphere could be considerable. It might slow the comet down enough for it to fall.’
Malone stared at his hands and breathed heavily.
‘And then what would happen, honey?’ he murmured.
‘I do not know. It is not a question which has ever come up before. I think this is the first antimatter comet ever known to mankind. Obviously there would be a tremendous explosion, but without knowing the mass of the comet it is impossible to predict just what effect that would have. It might be nothing more than a large solar flare – which would be serious enough for the people of Earth, for our planet would be bathed in high-energy radiation.’
Her cheeks glistening with horror, she drew a delicate palm across her brow.
‘On the other hand . . .’
‘Yes? Tell me the worst, babe.’
‘If our comet is a massive one, the explosion might rip the Sun asunder!’
‘Now tell me the good news,’ half-sobbed Malone.
‘There is some good news,’ said Dimpla, simply.
‘What?’
‘There is absolutely no evidence to show that this comet will fall into the Sun. Even if it were heading straight for the Sun, as it appears to be, the chances are very high that it would never survive the journey.’
‘Whaddya mean?’
‘It could be destroyed either by the solar wind and meteoritic particles stripping it away layer by layer, like an onion, or it could hit a larger object – such as an asteroid or even a planet – and annihilate itself in one glorious burst.’ She smiled reassuringly at him. Poor little hick American boy, she thought. You just don’t understand that there’s a great big Universe out here which has never heard of the Stars and Stripes or McDonald’s or Abraham Lincoln . . .
‘I don’t know that reassures me much, baby,’ said Malone slowly. ‘You’d better toss me a spanner so’s I can make the final adjustments to the laser.’
She passed the tool to him, her eyebrows raised questioningly into elegant arcs.
‘We’ve gotta warn Earth,’ gritted Malone. ‘We’ve gotta.’
‘But they have probably discovered the comet already.’
‘Yeah, but they might not’ve. And the longer the warning they get, the better. This could spell the biggest disaster in the history of the world – much worse than what we envisaged happening when the Mary Poppins crashes!’ He swore softly as he tightened a connection.
‘Oh no . . . you don’t mean . . .?’
‘Yeah, baby, I see you got it now. That comet’s following a path parallel to ours. And we’re likely to hit Earth. The comet might beat us to it!’
Dimpla’s mouth formed a perfect ‘o’ of horror. ‘And in that case . . .’ she breathed.
‘Yeah, funny-face,’ replied Malone gutturally, ‘if that happens . . . the Earth will explode!’
four
Tompion was on the telephone when Panther stepped into his office. His face was suffused with fury and frustration, and he was shouting.
‘I don’t give a fuck what you say, buster! You just find me some goddam mathematician who can translate the Bible into binary notation! The President says we’ve gotta reply to them!’
He looked up at Panther and made a face. Covering the mouthpiece and holding the squawking earpiece well away from him, he said: ‘Yeah. What is it?’
‘I’ve brought the press release for your OK.’
Tompion glanced at the first few lines. Everything seemed to be all right. ‘That looks fine. Look, Dr Panther, I’m really tied up. This bastard from Cornell doesn’t seem to have heard that “the impossible takes a little longer”. Know what I mean?’
Lise Panther gazed past the proud upthrust of her generous bosom at him, and smiled.
From the New York Times, 22 November 1989:
COMMUNICATION FROM ALIENS CONFIRMED
‘Now All We Have To Do Is Find Out What They’re Saying’ – Tompion
REPORTS IN FROM THE radio dish at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, confirm informed rumours that have been circulating for some weeks. Early in September intelligent signals were received from the star 61 Cygni.
61 Cygni is a star in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan. For many years it has been known that it possesses both a Right Ascension and a declination, writes our Science Editor, Art G. Throb, and that it is in fact not a single star but two small stars in close orbit about each other, each of them having a mass a little over half that of our Sun. Also it has been known for many years that the system contains an invisible companion, which could be a planet.
However, until now it has not been thought that 61 Cygni was a likely abode for intelligent life – or even life of any kind. This is because planets of double stars experience temperature changes that do not seem conducive to the evolution of life. Also, the combined luminosity of the two stars is only about one-eighth that of our Sun, and the two stars are separated by about six times the mean distance of Pluto from the Sun. Even if a planet could find a stable orbit around the brighter of the two stars, it would still have to be over fifty times closer to the star than is Mercury to our Sun in order to be as warm as is the Earth.
Nevertheless, the signals have come. Radio astro_nomers at Arecibo, working in a team under Prof Mark Tompion, initially maintained silence about the pulses. They were concerned lest premature announcement might lead to public hysteria; also that they might in fact be radio emissions from some hitherto unknown astronomical object.
But now their doubts are over. ‘Working from internal evidence within the signals themselves,’ said shock-haired Prof Tompion, 39, in a press announcement released yesterday, ‘my assistant, Dr Lise Panther, immediately realized that the extraterrestrials were giving us instructions as to how to construct a triangular grid, with a base of 97 units.’
He explained that pictures could be fabricated upon such a grid – and that indeed some of the messages received gave instructions as to how to do exactly that.
‘We’ve drawn the pictures,’ he remarked, ‘but as yet we have no idea as to exactly what they mean. Our systems analysts are working on that project right now.’
As yet, there has been no statement from the White House, but informed sources there say that . . .
Tompion pounded his desk savagely with his right fist. His left was holding aloft a crumpled copy of the New York Times. His face was convulsed with fury.
‘Just what in hell is this goddam gibberish?’ he screamed.
Panther was impassive. ‘I thought you’d read the press release,’ she murmured disingenuously.
‘I never read anything about this numerical nonsense!’ thundered Tompion. His shirt buttons were beginning to burst, one by one. ‘And it says nothing here about Pascal!’
‘For the sake of the press release, I did simplify your original theory a little,’ admitted Panther. ‘I assumed that you’d notice this when you read the announcement, and amend it if necessary.’
He glared at her balefully, standing there, her head downcast modestly. 36-25-32 – she could have been any of these ages: it was impossible to tell. As he eyed her a ghastly realization came over him.
‘Just sit down for a moment, Dr Panther. I’ve a couple of phonecalls to make.’
He groped blindly for the instrument, and began pressing buttons.
‘Look – Sheila – get on to that translator, will you? Tell him he can lay off. I don’t care if he has got halfway through Leviticus – we don’t need the damn’ thing any more. Dammit – just tell him!’
He turned back to face Panther, who had now sat down. It was the one bright moment in a helluva morning. ‘Got anything else you want to tell me?’
‘Well, yes, Professor Tompion,’ she said hesitantly. ‘I think I have. We’ve had cryptanalysts at work on the five triangular pictures, and they think they are beginning to understand them.’
‘Are you sure? I mean, the whole thing still seems very questionable to me.’
‘Not really, Professor. You see, that’s the tremendous beauty of the system the aliens have used. The 96th row of Pascal’s Triangle is the same – in pure number terms – no matter what base you’re working to. As if that weren’t definite enough, the B signals are in sets of 4,753, which is exactly the number of “positions” in Pascal’s Triangle down to the 96th row. I don’t think there can be the slightest possibility of error.’
Tompion nodded glazedly. Much of this was too simple for him to understand. ‘OK, OK – I believe you.’
‘Interestingly enough,’ Panther continued, ‘it seems that the aliens do their arithmetic to the base 96, which might suggest that they have either six limbs with sixteen appendages each, or sixteen limbs with six appendages each – but my guess is that they have eight limbs with twelve appendages each. On the other hand . . .’ Her eyes were beginning to look dreamy.
‘Sure, sure,’ urged Tompion. ‘But let’s get back to what the cryptanalysts think the pictures mean!’
‘Of course, Professor.’ She smiled like a contrite schoolgirl. ‘I was just coming to that.’
‘Good.’
‘As far as they can theorize – and we must remember that this is all still only at the theory stage – the first four pictures take the form of an incredibly concise language lesson. The information theorists are tremendously excited about how compact the aliens have been able to make this message. If all the hypotheses are correct, then using only a total of 19,012 “bits” the things from 61 Cygni have been able to make the message conveyed in their fifth and final triangle completely unequivocal.’ She smiled again, this time with a faint hint of triumph – like a pretty girl who expects to be complimented any moment now.
‘Don’t bother me with the details of it all. Just tell me what the message says!’
Delaying the great moment for as long as possible, she slowly slid a sheet of computer printout over to him. ‘You can call it up on your monitor, if you prefer,’ she breathed, ‘by dialling code 78 573 210.’
Tompion’s head spun. So many bloody integers. ‘No, I’ll just read it off this sheet of paper – OK?’
And then his jaw dropped.
The message read: ‘YOU EARTHLING SCUM ARE THE DREGS OF THE UNIVERSE. WE COME TO ANNIHILATE YOU PAINFULLY AND RAPE YOUR PLANET.’
He could find nothing to say.
‘But I would stress, Professor Tompion,’ said Lise Panther languorously, ‘that this is all still at the theory stage.’
five
1990 . . .
Adolf Hitler arrived unheralded and unnoticed. As he had expected, his temporal motion had induced a slight change in his spatial coordinates, but he was delighted to find that this effect had not been too severe. The time machine dropped about three metres to land quite softly on mossy ground.
The sun shone palely in the winter sky as he looked around at the desolation surrounding him. As far as he could see, there was no sign of humanity – except for a few odd features which might well be the remains of crumbled walls. The countryside here was far from flat, and peculiar granitic outcrops studded the horizon. For a fleeting moment he wondered if he had arrived on another planet, then dismissed the idea from his mind as being too ridiculous. Still . . . it was uncanny, the silence.
In the far distance he suddenly noticed a bird wheeling high in the liquid grey sky – and he felt a little surge of companionship for it. It was another living thing.
Then at last there came a sound to his ears, a sound other than the soft susurration of the wind through the stubbly bushes of this wasteland. At first it was too faint for him to identify, but as it grew closer he recognized it as the purr of an internal combustion engine.
Clumsy in his diving suit, he ran up to the top of a small hillock nearby and, shading his eyes with his hands, peered around in all directions. There! There was a flash of muted sunlight on polished metal. Looking closer to where he stood, he saw that there was a narrow road – in good condition: it had clearly been well maintained.
Grinning like a schoolboy prankster, he scampered back to the time machine. It was a matter of moments to struggle out of the diving suit, throw it into the cockpit, and turn the time machine’s control to the red area marked ‘Destruct’. He stood a few paces clear, and in a couple of seconds the device disappeared with a faint implosion. He gave the emptiness a mocking wave, and hurried back to the roadside.
The automobile was closer now: he could make out that it was grey, and that its form was streamlined in an unfamiliar way. It seemed to be travelling at about thirty kilometres per hour, or perhaps even more. Squinting, he saw the silhouette of a single occupant through the windscreen.
A thought struck him. He was fairly certain that he was not in Germany – the peculiar topography about him would surely have been known to him. In that case, which country was he in? Could he speak the language?
Nervously, he waved to the automobile as it drew near, and obligingly the driver slowed down. This was going to be the difficult bit.
‘Ho,’ said Hitler as the window was wound down. It was suitably monosyllabic to pass as a greeting in any language.
‘Hello there, stranger,’ said the driver affably. In English, to Hitler’s considerable relief. It was a language he could understand and speak with reasonable fluency – he and Eva had gone to night classes to study it, in preparation for the capture of London.
‘Hello. A beautiful day, is it not?’
‘For this time of the year. Mind you, the rain yesterday was something savage. And they do say that there might be mist on high ground later this evening.’
England! It had to be England!
‘I had heard,’ replied Hitler formally.
The driver looked around him. He was a youngish man – in his late twenties or early thirties, at a guess – with long greasy hair and a matted, tangled black beard. He seemed to be wondering what to say next.
‘But you can never believe the forecasters,’ Hitler prompted.
The man looked at him curiously. ‘Who says that? You can always believe the weather forecasts. Haven’t known them to be wrong for years.’
Hitler realized that he was in danger of blundering – so soon, so soon. ‘I am old-fashioned,’ he explained desperately.
‘Reckon you must be, sir,’ said the driver with a slightly suspicious look. ‘Old-fashioned and not very well. Are you down here on holiday?’ he continued, after a moment’s pause.
‘Yes, yes,’ came the response. ‘On a walking holiday. I have only my knapsack and myself.’ He hefted the knapsack gingerly – it was full of mint German coins and notes dating from the war years, but he had no wish to tell his companion this. ‘But unfortunately I sprained my ankle a little while ago – earlier this afternoon – and I am not sure if I am going to be able to reach any accommodation by nightfall.’
‘That’s interesting,’ said the driver with a thoughtful expression. Then an idea came to him. ‘You wouldn’t be wanting a lift from me, would you?’ he asked.
‘Well, that is terribly kind of you to offer . . .’ Hitler began, but the other waved aside his words.
‘I’d be glad to oblige. In fact, why not come back to my home for the night? The missis will take a look at your ankle this evening, and mayhap it will be better by the morning.’
Hitler limped melodramatically across to the passenger door, which had been opened invitingly. He climbed in and made himself comfortable.
The driver started to move off slowly. ‘My name’s Jeb Loam,’ he said. ‘Me and the missis have been running Ambledyke Farm for nigh on five years now. Won’t ever make a fortune out of it, but we don’t do so badly. Mind you, the money’s the least of it. You’d never catch either of us wanting to move back up to the big city – not with the two little ones and a third on the way. We like the quiet life and the open air, the land where a man can call a hectare his own and taste the milk still warm and creamy from the bellies of his cows. We’re children of the rich, dark Devon soil, the missis and I and the kids – and the little one that’s on its way – and that’s the way we plan to remain.’
Having performed his introduction, he looked towards the dapper little man beside him. ‘And yourself?’
‘I am Klaus Schmidt,’ Hitler said. ‘Austrian. I am over in your wonderful country to recover from a . . . from a slight nervous exhaustion. My doctor told me to try to find as much peace and relaxation as possible.’
‘Austrian, eh?’ The farmer thought for a moment. ‘I did hear tell that there hadn’t been such a country as Austria for a few years now. That it had become a part of Hungary.’
Hitler gritted his teeth in silent rage. Gott! So many things have changed! But his outward demeanour was calm and self-possessed.
‘Of course,’ he said serenely. ‘But I was born in Austria and spent my childhood there; and, even though I have lived for many years in Paris, I will always count myself as an Austrian.’
‘I do understand that, sir,’ said Loam ruminatively. ‘I’m just like that myself. Although me and the missis have farmed all these years here at Ambledyke on the south side of Dartmoor, I always consider that I’m a north Dartmoor man, being born at Okehampton like I was.’ He picked his nose thoughtfully. ‘It’s not that the Exeter or Newton folk are so bad, you know; it’s just that city folk don’t appear to have any brains – they just have to do their best to get by on their spinal columns . . . ’Cepting yourself, of course.’
‘I know exactly what it is that you mean,’ said Hitler. His mind searched frustratedly for something else to say. Just his luck to pick a garrulous rustic.
‘That’s my herd over there,’ said Loam after a couple of kilometres or so. He gestured towards the left, and Hitler looked out of his window with feigned interest. ‘One hundred and twenty head of best Guernsey there, and all of them top milkers – well, of course, you’d expect them to be. But still it’s nice to know that the cloning really works true to form. I remember – and it was only a few years back, you know – when you had to get your cows by Nature’s process: put a bull in among them and see what happened. But two summers gone I got hold of one of them new-fangled Clonettes, killed off all of my cows except Daisy – she were always my favourite – and made myself a hundred and twenty of her.’
Still driving, he produced a pipe from one pocket, a lighter from another, and tried to get the tobacco to light. The automobile lurched dangerously all over the road.
‘That’s what I call useful technology, that is,’ remarked Loam through a cloud of greenish smoke.
‘It sounds most intriguing,’ said Hitler casually – but a gleam had come into his eye. ‘How do you operate this so-called . . . er . . . “Clonette”?’
‘Oh, it be easy enough. Nowadays, when we lose a Daisy, the missis just produces another one like out of a hat, you know . . . You just take a few cells from one of the Daisies, put it in the hopper, switch on, and a few days later – because of this here Clono-Strath stuff – you’ve got a full-size cow just can’t wait to get its teeth into some long green grass, ’specially if that long green grass be a-growing in the rich, dark Devon soil. That’s the joy of the country these days: everything’s so easy. In my father’s day, now, him as has been pushing up the daisies (no pun intended) now some sixteen years, you had to be out of bed at three in the . . .’
But Hitler was no longer listening. If only he could lay hands on Jeb Loam’s Clonette, world domination could soon be his! He dreamt of a Fourth Reich, arising to conquer the world – then, perhaps, the Universe! And no longer would it be the entire Aryan race stamping on the face of humanity, but only those of its members of the purest stock of all – himself, and his millions of clones!
It was a happy little megalomaniac who came back to reality just as Loam halted the automobile in a muddy farmyard.
A dog barked, whined and growled nearby; hens ran squawking from the intrusion. The stink was indescribable – and Hitler paled at the thought of crossing to the house through twenty centimetres of sharn in his patent leather shoes. He determined to follow in Loam’s footprints.
‘Shut up, you stupid whining bitch bastard or it’s off to the knacker’s yard for you!’ shouted the farmer affably at the dog. Tail wagging furiously, it was attempting to lick his throat, but he kicked it away amiably.
‘Don’t worry about her, Mr Schmidt,’ said Loam. ‘She won’t do you nor nobody any harm.’
The bitch squatted in the mud, growling deeply, eyes red, foaming at the mouth. It stared at Hitler’s crotch.
‘Rachel, Rachel! Where are you, you damned woman?’ cried the bluff farmer.
‘Jeb – oh Jeb!’ came the call as the door was flung open. ‘Good to see you back so soon, darling!’
The woman who emerged was clearly about six months pregnant. She had long, straight black hair, a pretty, oval face, and a smile of welcome on her lips.
. . . And her name is Rachel, thought Hitler with dismay. I’ve got to share the same house as a Semite!
I’ve got to get to that Clonette – and fast!
six
Death never sleeps.
At the moment he is squatting with three ancient wise men around an open-air fire somewhere in the mountain fastnesses of the Tibetan Himalayas. The flickering, crackling ruddiness of the fire etches deep lines in the faces of the three old men, so that they look like no more than skulls from which depend loose flaps of flesh. Death sits farther from the fire than they do, so that when they glance towards him – as they do often – they see only a shadow in the hood where the face should be. But his eyes gleam greenly when he is unobserved.
The three men have scratched bare a patch of earth and are drawing on it with fire-hardened pointed sticks. They have drawn a crude zodiacal map and are plotting the planets onto it.
‘The fair maiden of morning and evening is in the house of the toad of the murky swamp,’ says the oldest of the three, and the other two cluck in agreement.
‘And,’ says the youngest, ‘the red man of carnage and fear has raped four-and-twenty virgins in the palace of dancing.’ All three heads nod in unison. The youngest adds: ‘He and two other men of cruelty have crossed the line into the house of frogs and pungent herbs.’
The third of them has not spoken so far this evening. This is because he is dumb. He has been signalling furiously with dancing skeletal hands, but because the light is poor no one has noticed him. Except Death, who reads in a soft monotone: ‘The King of all that is to be found in the Cosmos has entered the house of the usurer. His invisible but all-powerful Queen is in the house of provisions, eating manna and ambrosia.’
The other two ancients hardly hear him.
Once more the oldest takes up the rote: ‘The ancient farmer lies in his own house, and his daughter is there, too; entering his house now there is a fleet-footed traveller from distant climes.’
‘This I have heard,’ says the youngest. ‘He who is of the sky and yet also is the sky has entered the crowded house of the shoe.
‘Together the kings of the undersea and the underearth walk through the garden of the gravid cherries. He of the undersea speaks many words of gloom, but the king of the underearth says nothing: he is biding his time, that when that time comes he shall find more souls for his harvest. Yet he moves hither and thither, with such swiftness that even the sunlight cannot catch him. He is beyond all mortal rules; he is infinite, and yet his power is still not complete.
‘Yet the sky-people are moving, too, and in half a year he may expect them to smile favourably down upon his deeds. Yea, in half a year there will be great carnage and destruction. If he strike then, then he shall become invincible.’
The oldest speaks again, his voice dry winds moving through tinderish autumn trees. ‘Should he fail at this designated hour, he shall be forever destroyed. Yet, there shall be a time beyond that for him, when once more his name shall be on every lip, both the upper and the lower, and his dark visage a fear that lurks in every mortal heart. Truly he shall live again in that hour.’
There is a long silence, with only the crackling of the dying embers daring to pierce it. Then the oldest sage turns toward their guest.
‘We can tell you no more, Dark One, for the stars and the sky-people cannot tell us what will happen, only what may happen. What will happen is beyond our ken and control; but you have the power to affect it – you and the other sky-people, oh Dark One.’
Death nods his head.
‘You have – shall we say – served me well, my friends. Your kindness will not be forgotten – or, at least, I hope not. I shall – well, I’d like to – return to this place in – let me just see now – a cycle of the Moon. ’Til then – byeee!’
And with an eldritch screech he is gone, leaving three old men deep in prayer.
Death emerges unseen in the bright lights and bustle of central London. People walk around and even through him without noticing that he is there: the effect is a little unsettling to him, but it is a small enough price to pay for omnipotence. And his green eyes see everything around him . . . and when he sights a tall, dark-suited man carrying a heavy case he moves to follow. Within moments he is directly behind the man, eavesdropping on his thoughts.
I’d like to leave it in the office, of course, but the cleaners are so bloody careless that there’s no telling what might happen. After all, it’s potentially dangerous stuff – good job I had this old lead-lined suitcase lying around in the attic. Wish Madge wouldn’t make such a bloody fuss about it the whole time, though. She must know that the very last thing I want to do is lug so much plutonium home every evening. God! It’s nearly critical mass! And the case is bloody heavy! Hope Madge is there to meet me off the 6.15 at Gnome’s Green. Come to that, with the bloody trains so cockeyed these days, I hope I’m on the 6.15 at Gnome’s Green. Things have been so bloody crazy, it’s been months since I was on the right train home . . .
Death nods his head with satisfaction as the man disappears into the yawning abyss of Piccadilly Circus tube station; then he waves his hand and is in another part of London. It is Fleet Street, and the crowds of secretaries and clerks are thronging the evening pavements. Here he need not maintain his invisibility, for no one is looking at anyone else. Few people speak to each other as the buses and the taxis roar by.
The man whom Death is here to see comes from the door of the building belonging to one of the tabloid newspapers. He, too, carries a heavy case, nervously, frequently looking back over his shoulder as he walks. Again Death moves close to listen to his thoughts.
Terrorists hand in nearly critical mass of plutonium to the office, and that bloody shit of a two-faced editor is too scared to let it stay there. So he gets me – just because I’m his bloody science correspondent – to take it home and look after it until the banks open in the morning. Oh well, can’t be helped. I hope I get home on time for a change. Daphne gets so sodding angry when I’m late. I tell her I always try to be on the 6.15 at Gnome’s Green, it’s not my fault if the schedules are all over the shop, but she doesn’t listen, she just gets that horrid tight little look in her eyes and . . .
Death whisks himself away into that strange land of nowhereness in which he normally dwells. His smile is very broad.