The Two Worlds Page 5

  The clue for 20 down was, "Argon beam matrix (5)." That didn't mean very much, so Shannon began working out some of the other clues to obtain some cross-letters in the words he had missed. The "guiding light" in 10 across turned out to be "BEACON," which was in the remainder of the clue and staring him in the face all the time as it had said: ". . . could be a confused . . ." The suggestion of an anagram had been made deliberately to mislead. He wondered what kind of warped mentality was needed to qualify as a crossword compiler. Finally the "argon beam" was revealed as "Ar" (chemical symbol) plus "ray" (beam), to give "ARRAY," i.e., a matrix. Interestingly the answer to the first clue of all, 1 across, was "SHANNON," a river in Ireland, presumably slipped in as a confirmation to him personally.

  JOURNAL CROSSWORD PUZZLE NO. 786

  (Compiler D. Maddson, Navcomms HQ, Houston)

  ACROSS

  1 Watery Irish flour (6)

  5 Find the meaning of a poem to Digital Equipment Corporation (6)

  9 Guilty of having no money after the pub! Quite the opposite (8)

  10 A guiding light in what could be a confused voyage (6)

  12 Writer, jumping into action, arrives as a profound conclusion (4,3)

  13 The ultimate in text remedies (7)

  14 Oriental rule changed by Swiss mathmatician (5)

  16 Wild riot about the point of a short preamble, colloquially speaking (5)

  17 Expert loses two-thirds but takes back art for something more (5)

  18 A separated piece (5)

  20 Continental one-fan car, maybe (7)

  21 Ringing around to abolish a right (7)

  23 Keep the elephant's head and tail in the rain (6)

  24 Dianna's lock causes heartache (8)

  25 After six months, men and I find a type of Arab (6)

  26 Surrounds North Carolina with ease, to a point (7)

  DOWN

  1 Win in a sled, perhaps? It's not fair! (7)

  2 But the arms this noted lady was advised to get wouldn't have been much good to Venus! (5)

  3 Powerful response, right from the heart? (7,8)

  4 Possibly did on gin? Can't—it's not habit-forming (3-9)

  6 A wave from a charge of the Light Brigade (15)

  7 Hydrogen makes harmony in turbulent star-care (9)

  8 Norman's head in the lake? No—some other guy (5)

  11 Let's fit a date to reorganize the experimental results (4,4,4)

  15 It sounds like a lumberjack's musical number (9)

  19 Hoover, initially in trust over the South, urges progress (7)

  20 Argon beam matrix (5)

  22 Deposit nothing in the smaller amount (5)

  The complete message with the words placed in the same order as the numbers that Hunt had given now read:

  DECODE DISTRESS BEACON TEST-DATA-FILE ARRAY.

  Shannon sat back in his chair and studied the final result with some satisfaction, although it so far still told him far from everything. It was evident, however, that it had something to do with the Ganymeans, which tied in with Hunt's being involved.

  Some time before the Shapieron appeared out of the depths of space at Ganymede, the UNSA missions exploring the Jovian moon system had discovered the wreck of an ancient Ganymean spaceship from twenty-five million years back entombed beneath Ganymede's ice crust. In the process of experimenting with some of the devices recovered from the vessel, Hunt and a group of engineers at Pithead—one of the surface bases on Ganymede—had managed to activate a type of Ganymean emergency transmitter that utilized gravity waves since the propulsive method used by Ganymean ships precluded their receiving electromagnetic signals while under main drive; that was what had attracted the Shapieron to Ganymede after reentering the Solar System. Shannon remembered that there had been a suggestion to use that same device to relay the news of the surprise reply from the Giants' Star on to the Shapieron after its departure, but Hunt had grown suspicious that the reply was a hoax and had vetoed the idea.

  That had to be the "Distress Beacon" in Hunt's message. So what was the "Test-Data-File Array" that Shannon was supposed to decode? The Ganymean beacon had been shipped to Earth along with many other items that various institutions had wanted to experiment with firsthand, and the researchers conducting those experiments usually made a point of sending their results back to Jupiter via the laser link to keep interested parties there informed. The only thing that Shannon could think of was that Hunt had somehow arranged for some information to be sent over the link disguised as a file of ordinary-looking experimental test data purportedly relating to the beacon and probably consisting of just a long list of numbers. Now that Shannon's attention had been drawn to the file, the way the numbers were supposed to be read would hopefully, with close enough scrutiny, make itself clear.

  If that was it, the only people likely to know anything about unusual files of test data coming in from Earth would be the engineers down at Pithead who had worked on the beacon after it was brought up from beneath the ice. Shannon activated the terminal on his desk and entered a command to access the Jupiter Five personnel records. A few minutes later he had identified the engineering project leader in charge of that work as a Californian called Vincent Carizan, who had joined J5 from UNSA's Propulsion Systems and Propellants Division, where he had worked for ten years after obtaining a master's degree in electrical and electronic engineering at Berkeley.

  Shannon's first impulse was to put a call through to Pithead, but after a minute or two of further reflection he decided against it. If Hunt had taken such pains to avoid any hint of the subject being interpretable from what went over the communications network, anything could be happening. He was still pondering on what to do when the call-tone sounded from the terminal. Shannon cleared the screen and touched a key to accept. It was his adjutant officer calling from the command center.

  "Excuse me, sir, but you are scheduled to attend the Operations Controller's briefing in G-327 in five minutes. Since nobody's seen you this morning, I thought maybe a reminder might be called for."

  "Oh . . . thanks, Bob," Shannon replied. "Look, something's come up, and I don't think I'm going to be able to make it. Make excuses for me, would you."

  "Will do, sir."

  "Oh, and Bob . . ." Shannon's voice rose suddenly as a thought struck him.

  The adjutant looked up just as he had been about to cut the call. "Sir?"

  "Get here as soon as you've done that. I've got a message that I want couriered down to the surface."

  "Couriered?" the adjutant appeared surprised and puzzled.

  "Yes. It's to go to one of the engineers at Pithead. I can't explain now, but the matter is urgent. If you don't waste any time, you should be able to make the nine o'clock shuttle down to Main. I'll have it sealed and waiting by the time you get here. Treat this as grade X-ray."

  The adjutant's face at once became serious. "I'll be there right away," he said, and the screen went blank.

  Shannon received a brief call from Pithead shortly before lunch, advising that Carizan was on his way up to Jupiter Five via Ganymede Main Base. When Carizan arrived, he brought with him a printout of a file of data, supposedly relating to tests performed on the Ganymean beacon, that had materialized in the computers at Pithead that very morning after coming in from Earth over the link and being relayed down to the surface. The engineers at Pithead had been puzzled because the file header was out of sequence and contained references that didn't match the database indexing system. And nobody had known anything about any tests being scheduled of the kind that the header mentioned.

  As Shannon had anticipated, the file contained just numbers—many groups of numbers, each group consisting of a long list of pairs; it was typical of the layout of an experimental report giving readings of interrelated variables and would have meant nothing more to anybody who had no reason not to accept it at face value. Shannon called together a small team of specialists whose discretion could be trusted, and it didn't take them long to deduce that
each group of pairs formed a set of datapoints defined by x-y coordinates in a 256-by-256 matrix array; the hint had been there in the crossword. When the sets of points were plotted on a computer display screen, each set formed a pattern of dots that looked just like a statistical scattering of test data about a straight-line function. But when the patterns of dots were superposed they formed lines of words written diagonally across the screen, and the words formed a message in English. The message contained pointers to other files of numbers that had also been beamed through from Earth and gave explicit instructions for decoding them, and when this was done the amount of information that they yielded turned out to be prodigious.

  The result was a set of detailed directions for Jupiter Five to transmit a long sequence of Ganymean communications coding groups not into the UNSA net but outward, toward coordinates that lay beyond the edge of the solar system. The contents of any replies received from that direction were, the directions said, to be disguised as experimental data in the way that had thus been established and communicated to Navcomms via the laser link.

  Shannon was weary and red-eyed due to lack of sleep by the time he sat down at the terminal in his stateroom and composed a message for transmission to Earth, addressed to Dr. Victor Hunt at Navcomms Headquarters, Houston. It read:

  Vic,

  I've talked to Vince Carizan, and it's all a lot clearer now. We're running some tests on it as you asked, and if anything positive shows up I'll have the results sent straight through.

  Best wishes,

  Joe

  Chapter Five

  Hunt lounged back in the pilot's seat and stared absently down at the toytown suburbs of Houston while the airmobile purred along contentedly, guided by intermittent streams of binary being directed up at it from somewhere below. It was interesting, he thought, how the patterns of movement of the groundcars, flowing, merging, slowing, and accelerating in unison on the roadways below seemed to reveal some grand, centrally orchestrated design—as if they were all parts of an unimaginably complex score composed by a cosmic Bach. But it was all an illusion. Each vehicle was programmed with only the details of its own destination plus a few relatively simple instructions for handling conditions along the way; the complexity emerged as a consequence of large numbers of them interacting freely in their synthetic environment. It was the same with life, he reflected. All the magical, mystical, and supernatural forces invoked through the ages to explain it were inventions that existed in the minds of misled observers, not in the universe they observed. He wondered how much untapped human talent had been wasted in futile pursuit of the creations of wishful thinking. The Ganymeans had entertained no such illusions, but had applied themselves diligently to understanding and mastering the universe as it was, instead of how it seemed to be or how they might have wanted it to be. Maybe that was why the Ganymeans had reached the stars.

  In the seat next to him, Lyn looked up from the half-completed crossword in the Interplanetary Journal of a few days earlier. "Got any ideas for this—`It sounds like a lumberjack's musical number.' What do you make of that?"

  "How many letters?" Hunt asked after a few moments of thought.

  "Nine."

  Hunt frowned at the flight-systems status summaries being routinely updated on the console display in front of him. "Logarithm," he said after another pause.

  Lyn thought about it, then smiled faintly. "Oh, I see . . . sneaky. It sounds like `logger rhythm.' "

  "Right."

  "It fits okay." She wrote the word in on the paper resting on her lap. "I'm glad that Joe Shannon had fewer problems with it than this."

  "You and me both."

  Shannon's confirmation that the message was understood had arrived two days earlier. The idea had occurred to Hunt and Lyn one evening while they were at Lyn's apartment, solving a puzzle in one of Hunt's books of London Times crosswords. Don Maddson, the linguistics expert at Navcomms who had studied the Ganymean language, was one of the regular compilers of the Journal puzzles and also a close friend of Hunt's. So with Caldwell's blessing, Hunt had told Maddson as much as was necessary about the Gistar situation, and together they had constructed the message transmitted to Jupiter. Now there was nothing to do but wait and hope that it produced results.

  "Let's hope Murphy takes a day off," Lyn said.

  "Never hope that. Let's hope somebody remembers Hunt's extension to the Law."

  "What's Hunt's extension?"

  " `Everything that can go wrong, will . . . unless somebody makes it his business to do something about it.' "

  The stub wing outside the window dipped as the airmobile banked out of the traffic corridor and turned to commence a shallow descent. A cluster of large white buildings standing to attention on a river bank about a mile away moved slowly around until they were centered in the windshield and lying dead ahead.

  "He must have been an insurance salesman," Hunt murmured after a short silence.

  "Who?"

  "Murphy. `Everything's going to screw up—sign the application now.' Who else but an insurance salesman would have thought of saying something like that?"

  The buildings ahead grew to take on the smooth, clean lines of the Westwood Biological Institute of UNSA's Life Sciences Division. The vehicle slowed to a halt and hovered fifty feet above the roof of the Biochemistry building, which with Neurosciences and Physiology formed a trio facing the elongated bulk of Administration and Central Facilities across a plaza of colorful mosaic paving broken up by lawns and a bevy of fountains playing in the sun. Hunt checked the landing area visually, then cleared the computer to complete the descent sequence. Minutes later he and Lyn were checking in at the reception desk in the building's top-floor lobby.

  "Professor Danchekker isn't in his office," the receptionist informed them as she consulted her screen. "The route-through code entered against his number is for one of the basement labs. I'll try there." She keyed in another code, and after a short delay the characters on the screen vanished in a blur of colors which immediately assembled themselves into the features of a lean, balding man wearing a pair of anachronistic gold-rimmed spectacles perched at the top of a thin, somewhat aquiline nose. His skin gave the impression of having been stretched over his bones as an afterthought, with barely enough left over to cover his defiant, outthrust chin. He didn't seem too pleased at the interruption.

  "Yes?"

  "Professor Danchekker, top lobby here. I have two visitors for you."

  "I am extremely busy," he replied curtly. "Who are they and what do they want?"

  Hunt sighed and pivoted the display around to face him. "It's us, Chris—Vic and Lyn. You're expecting us."

  Danchekker's expression softened, and his mouth compressed itself into a thin line that twitched briefly upward at the ends. "Oh, of course. I do apologize. Come on down. I'm in the dissecting lab on Level E."

  "Are you working alone?" Hunt asked.

  "Yes. We can talk here."

  "We'll see you in a couple of minutes."

  They walked on through to the elevator bank at the rear of the lobby. "Chris must be working with his animals again," Lyn remarked as they waited.

  "I don't think he's come up for air since we got back from Ganymede," Hunt said. "I'm surprised he hasn't started looking like some of them."

  Danchekker had been with Hunt on Ganymede when the Shapieron reappeared in the Solar System. In fact Danchekker had made the major contribution to piecing together what was probably the most astounding part of the whole story, the more sensitive details of which still had not been cleared for publication to an unsuspecting and psychologically unprepared world.

  Not surprisingly, the Ganymeans had made visits to Earth during the period that their civilization had flourished on Minerva—twenty-five million years before. Their scientists had predicted an epoch of deteriorating environmental conditions on Minerva in the form of an increasing concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, for which they had only a low inherent tolerance, so one of
the reasons for their interest in Earth had been to assess it as a possible candidate for migration. But they soon abandoned the idea. The Ganymeans had evolved from ancestors whose biochemistry had precluded the emergence of carnivores, thus inhibiting the development of aggressiveness and ruthlessness together with most of the related traits that had characterized the survival struggle on Earth. The savagery that abounded in the environment of late-Oligocene, early-Miocene Earth made it altogether too inhospitable for the placid Ganymean temperament, and the notion of settling there unthinkable.

  These visits to Earth did, however, have one practical outcome in addition to satisfying the Ganymeans' scientific curiosity. In the course of their studies of the forms of animal life they discovered, they identified a totally new, gene-based mechanism for absorbing CO2, which gave terrestrial fauna a far higher and more adaptable inherent tolerance. It suggested an alternative approach to solving the problem on Minerva. The Ganymeans imported large numbers of terrestrial animal species back to their own planet to conduct genetic experiments aimed at transplanting the functional terrestrial coding groups into their own species, thereafter to be inbred automatically into their descendants. Some well-preserved specimens of these early terrestrial animals had been recovered from the wrecked ship on Ganymede, and Danchekker had brought many of them back to Westwood for detailed studies.