Time
‘What’s that? A tribe mark?’
‘No.’ Younger shrugged. ‘It’s only chalk. He does it himself. He renews it every day.’
‘What does it mean?’
But Younger had no answer.
She told Younger she would return the following day with tests, and maybe she should meet Michael’s parents, discuss release forms and the compensation and conditions the Foundation offered.
But Younger said the boy’s parents were dead. ‘It ought to make the release easier,’ he said cheerfully.
She held up her hand to the boy, in farewell. His eyes widened as he stared at her hand. Then he started to babble excitedly to Younger, plucking his sleeve.
‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘It’s the gold. The gold ring on your hand. He’s never seen gold before. Heavy atoms, he says.’
She had an impulse to give the boy the ring – after all, it was only a token of her failed marriage to Malenfant, and meant little to her.
Younger noticed her dilemma. ‘Don’t offer them anything. Gifts, money. A lot of people come here and try to give the shirt off their backs.’
‘Guilt.’
‘I guess. But you give one money, they all want it. They have no ambition, these fellows. They sit around with their beer and their four wives. They’re happy, in their way.’
She remembered that Younger had talked about the baboon in the trash in exactly the same tone of voice.
Mindi, the slim girl-child, now returned, carrying a plastic bowl of fresh water. She looked anxiously to Younger, and would not meet Emma’s eyes.
If she was thirteen, Emma thought, the girl was of marriageable age here. Maybe Stef Younger was finding more compensation in his life here than mere altruism.
It was a relief to climb into the car, to sip cool water and brush ten-million-year-old Kalahari dust out of her hair.
That night, she had trouble sleeping. She couldn’t get the image of those bright-button village kids out of her head. Mute inglorious Miltons, indeed.
On the way here Emma had done some more digging into the Milton Foundation.
Milton turned out to be a shadowy coalition of commercial, philanthropic and religious groups, particularly Christian. The Foundation was international, and its Schools had been set up in many countries, including the US. The children were in general separated from their families and homes, and spirited away to a School perhaps half a world away. In fact – so some journalists alleged – children were being moved from School to School, even between countries, making monitoring even more difficult.
Not everybody welcomed the arrival of a School full of children labelled as geniuses. Nobody likes a smart ass. In some places the Schools and children had actually come under physical attack, and there were rumours of one murder; the Foundation, she had learned, spent a remarkable amount of its money on security, and almost as much on public relations.
And there were darker stories still of what went on inside the Schools.
Emma’s doubts about associating Bootstrap with the initiative continued to grow. But she knew that until she came up with a stronger case for pulling back she was going to be overruled by Malenfant himself.
She wished she understood Cornelius and his shadowy associates better. She didn’t yet grasp how this program fitted in with Eschatology’s wider agenda: the end of the world, messages from the future … She had the intuition that what they were seeking wasn’t just smart children, but something much more strange.
And she wondered if that was exactly what she had found here in Africa.
She stepped onto her balcony.
Looking up at the stars, Michael’s stars, she could tell she was far from home. She recognized Ursa Major. But the familiar childhood panhandle shape was upside down, and its pointer stars were pointing below the horizon. And when the Moon rose, it climbed straight up into the sky, heading for a point somewhere over her head. Not only that, it was ripped up sideways; the Man in the Moon’s forehead was pointing north.
But it wasn’t the Moon that was tipped; it was herself; for she had flown around the belly of the planet, which was thereby proven to be round. It was a startling thought.
I should travel more, she thought.
How was it possible for a kid on the fringe of the African bush to figure out so much fundamental physics?
If she and Malenfant had had kids, she supposed, she might have a better instinct on how to handle this situation. But she didn’t, and the whole world of children, damaged or super-intelligent or otherwise, was a mystery to her.
… On a whim, she unfolded her softscreen and looked up the properties of gold.
She learned that relativistic effects, the strange and subtle effects of very high speeds and energies, determined the colour of gold.
In light elements, electrons orbited the nuclei of atoms at a few hundred miles per second – fast, but only a few per cent of the speed of light. But in elements with massive nuclei – like uranium, lead or gold – the electrons were dragged around at a large fraction of the speed of light, and relativity effects became important.
Most metals had a silvery lustre. But not gold. And that was because of the strange high-speed phenomena Michael seemed intuitively to understand, relativity time dilation effects operating deep within the gold atoms themselves.
She took off her ring and put it on the balcony before her. The stars were reflected in its scuffed surface. She wondered what Michael had seen as he stared into her ring.
When she got back to the States she found Malenfant had found out about the accelerator project clearances, and had holed himself up at Fermilab … where Dan Ystebo claimed, almost immediately, to have results.
She flew straight on to Illinois.
New York Times:
From an unpromising grade school in a run-down neighbourhood at the heart of New York City has come what may prove to be the most striking example yet of the recent wave of brilliant children
A group of children here – average age just eight – seem to have come up with a proof of the mathematical statement called the Riemann hypothesis. This is concerned with the distribution of prime numbers
The result has electrified, terrified, astonished, according to temperament. The children at this New York school are the first to attract serious attention as a potential national resource from the academic and business communities and the federal government.
And it has also become the first to require round-the-clock armed guards.
The news of this obscure mathematical result has crystallized the fear some people seem to be forming over these super-kids. Police were forced to head off a mob that marched out to the school: angry, scared, evidently with ugly intent, a mob that had even included some of the parents and older brothers and sisters of the children themselves …
Emma Stoney:
Fermilab turned out to be thirty-five miles west of Chicago, close to a town called Batavia. From the air Illinois was a vast emptiness, studded by lost-looking little towns. Disoriented, jetlagged, she glimpsed Fermilab itself, the perfect circle of the collider ring set amid green tallgrass prairie, presumably replanted.
She wasn’t sure what she had expected of a super-science lab like this. Something futuristic, maybe, a city of glass and platinum where steely-eyed men in white suits made careful notes on super-advanced softscreens. What she found was an oddly park-like campus littered by giant constructions, like the abandoned toys of some monster child.
This artificial landscape, the huge constructions, made a startling contrast with the bare bleakness of Africa. But the concrete was cracked and streaked with rust and mould. This was an ageing, underfunded place, she thought, a lingering dream of a more expansive age.
But here and there she saw the sleek, cool curves of the Tevatron itself, a three-mile-wide torus within which subatomic particles were accelerated to a substantial fraction of the speed of light.
The main hall was called Wilson Hall, a surreal sixteen-storey sculpture of two towers connected by criss-crossing bridges. Inside there was a gigantic atrium stocked with trees and shrubs. Malenfant was waiting for her there. There were black stress rings around his eyes, but he was agitated, excited. ‘What do you think? Quite a place –’
‘It’s a technocrat’s wet dream.’
‘They rebuilt the prairie afterwards, you know. They even have a herd of buffalo here.’
‘We’re not here for the buffalo, Malenfant. Shall we get this over?’
He grinned. ‘Wait until you see what we got here, babe.’
He led her deeper into the complex, and into the cramped and jumbled technical areas. She found herself squirming past gigantic, unrecognizable pieces of apparatus. There were steel racks everywhere, crammed with badly-packed electronic instrumentation, and cable bunches over the floor, walls and ceilings; in some places they were bridged by little wooden ladders. There was a smell of oil, shaved metal, cut wood, cleaning solvents and insulation, all overlaid by a constant clamouring metallic noise. There was none of the controlled cool and order she’d expected.
Malenfant brought her to what he called the muon laboratory. This was some way away from the accelerator ring itself; it seemed that beams of high-speed protons were drawn off from the ring and impacted into targets here.
And here they found Dan Ystebo, wearing a smeared white coat over a disreputable T-shirt, hunched over softscreens spread out on a trestle-table. The screens were covered with particle-decay images and charts of counts, none of which Emma could understand.
Dan’s broad face split into a grin. ‘Yo, Emma. Have you heard? …’
Malenfant said, ‘One step at a time. Tell her what you’re doing here, Dan.’
Dan took a breath. ‘Making neutrinos. We’re slamming the Tevatron’s protons into a target to make pions.’
‘Pions?’
‘A pion is a particle, a combination of a quark and its anti-quark, and it is unstable. Pions decay into, among other things, neutrinos. So we have our neutrino source. But it should also be a source of advanced neutrinos, neutrinos coming from the future, arriving in time to make our pions decay …’
‘Backward ripples,’ Emma said.
‘Exactly – hopefully modified, and containing some signal.’
‘How do you detect a neutrino?’
Malenfant grunted. ‘It isn’t easy. Neutrinos are useful to us in the first place because matter is all but transparent to them. But we have a full-scale neutrino detector: a ton of dense photographic emulsion, the stuff you use on a camera film. When charged particles travel through this shit they leave a trail, like a jet contrail.’
‘I thought neutrinos had no charge.’
‘They don’t,’ said Dan patiently. ‘So what you have to look for is a place where tracks come out but none go in. That’s where a Tevatron neutrino has hit some particle in our emulsion. You get it? You have a mass of counters and magnets downstream of the emulsion, and you measure the photons with a twenty-ton lead-glass detector array, and the results are stored on laser discs and analysed by the data acquisition software –’
He talked on, lapsing continually into jargon she couldn’t follow.
But then they started talking about the neutrinos themselves.
Neutrinos, it seemed, barely existed: no charge, no mass, just a scrap of energy with some kind of spooky quantum-mechanical spin, fleeing at the speed of light. Spinning ghosts indeed. Most of them had come out of the Big Bang – or the time just after, when the whole universe was a soup of hot subatomic particles. But neutrinos didn’t decay into anything else. And so there were neutrinos everywhere. All her life she would be immersed in a sea of neutrinos, a billion of them for every particle of ordinary matter, relics of that first millisecond.
At that thought she felt an odd tingle, as if she could feel the ancient, invisible fluid that poured through her.
Now humans had sent waves rippling over the surface of that transparent ocean. And the waves, it seemed, had come reflecting back.
Dan talked fast, as excited as she’d ever seen him. Malenfant watched, rigid with interest. ‘Essentially we’ve been producing millisecond neutrino pulses,’ Dan said. He produced a bar chart, a scrappy series of pillars, uneven in height. ‘Anyhow, up until yesterday, we were just picking up our own pulses, unmodified. Then – this.’
A new bar chart, showing a long series of many pulses. Some of the pulses, now, seemed to be missing, or were much reduced in size.
Dan picked out the gaps with a fat finger. ‘See? On average, these events seem to have around half the neutrino count of the others. So half the energy.’ He looked at Emma, trying to see if she understood. ‘This is exactly what we’d expect if somebody downstream has some way of suppressing the advanced-wave neutrinos. The apparent retarded neutrinos then would have only half the strength –’
‘But it’s such a small effect,’ Emma said. ‘You said yourself neutrinos are hard to detect. There must be other ways to explain this, without invoking beings from the future.’
‘That’s true,’ Dan said. ‘Though if this sustains itself long enough we’re going to be able to eliminate other causes. Anyhow, that’s not all. We have enough data now to show that the gaps repeat. In a pattern.’
Malenfant growled, ‘This is new to me. A repeating pattern. A signal?’
Dan rubbed his greasy hair. ‘I don’t see what else it could be.’
‘A signal,’ said Malenfant. ‘Damn. Then Cornelius was right.’
Emma felt cold, despite the metallic stuffiness of the chamber.
Dan produced a simplified summary of several periods of the pattern, a string of black circles and white circles. ‘Look at this. The blacks are full-strength pulses, the whites half-strength. You get a string of six white. Then a break of two black. Then an irregular pattern for twelve pulses. Then two black, six white, and a break. Then another set of twelve black-whites, “framed” by the two black and six white combination. I think we’re seeing delimiters around these two strings of twelve pulses. And this is what repeats: over and over. Sometimes there are minor differences, but we think that’s caused by the experimental uncertainty.’
Malenfant said, ‘If it’s a signal, what does it mean?’
Emma said, ‘Binary numbers. The signals are binary numbers.’
They both turned to her.
Malenfant said, ‘Huh? Binary numbers? Why?’
She smiled, exhausted, jetlag-disoriented. ‘Because signals like this always are.’
Dan was nodding. ‘Yes. Right. I should have thought of that. We have to learn to think like Cornelius. The downstreamers know us. Maybe they are us, our future selves. And they know we’ll expect binary.’ He grabbed a pad and scribbled out two strings of 1 and 0:
1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1
0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 0
He sat back. ‘There.’
Malenfant squinted. ‘What’s it supposed to be?’
Emma found herself laughing. ‘Maybe it’s a Carl Sagan picture. A waving downstreamer.’ Shut up, Emma.
‘No,’ Dan said. ‘It’s too simple for that. They have to be numbers.’ He cleared his softscreen and began tapping in a simple conversion program. After a couple of minutes, he had it running.
3 7 5 3
1 9 8 6
They stared. Malenfant said, ‘What do they mean?’
Dan began to feed the raw neutrino counts through his conversion program, and the converted signals – live, as they were received in the film-emulsion detector – scrolled steadily up the screen.
3 7 5 3
1 9 8 6
3 7 5 3
1 9 8 6
3 7 5 3
1 9 8 6
‘Someone should call Cornelius,’ Dan said. ‘And –’
Malenfant said, ‘What?’
‘We only ran for a week before we picked this up. How did the downstreamers know when we were ready, when to switch on?’
Malenfant grinned. ‘Because they already knew when we’d be here.’
Emma didn’t share his evident glee at this result.
She felt dwarfed. She imagined the world wheeling around her, spinning as it carried her through darkness around the sun, around the rim of the Galaxy – and the Galaxy itself sailing off to its own remote destination, stars glimmering like the windows of a great ocean liner …
Messages from the future. Could it be true? – that there were beings, far beyond this place and time, trying to signal to the past, to her, through this lashed-up physics equipment?
Was Cornelius right? Right about everything? Right, too, about the Carter catastrophe, the coming extinction of them all?
It couldn’t be true. It was insanity. An infection of schizophrenia from Cornelius, that was damaging them all.
Malenfant, of course, was hooked. She knew him well enough to understand he would be unable to resist this new adventure, wherever it took him.
And how, she wondered, was she going to be able to persuade him to do any work at all, after this?
3 7 5 3
1 9 8 6
3 7 5 3
1 9 8 6
…
Reid Malenfant:
The puzzle of the Feynman radio message nagged at Malenfant, even as he threw himself into his myriad other projects. He would write out the numbers on a pad, or have them scroll up on a softscreen. He tried taking the numbers apart: factorizing them, multiplying them, dividing one by the other.
He got nowhere.
Cornelius Taine was equally frustrated. He would call Malenfant at odd time-zoned hours. Mathematics, even numerology, must be the wrong approach.
‘Why?’
What do you know about math, Malenfant? Remember the nature of the signal we’re dealing with here. Remember that the downstreamers are trying to communicate with us – specifically, with you.
‘Me?’
Yes. You’re the decision-maker here. There has to be some simple meaning in these numbers for you. Just look at the numbers, Cornelius urged. Don’t think too hard. What do they look like?
1 9 8 6
3 7 5 3
‘Umm, 1986 could be a date.’
A date?
1986: the year of Challenger and Chernobyl, a first overseas posting for a young pilot called Reid Malenfant. ‘It wasn’t the happiest year in history, but nothing so special for me … Hey. Cornelius. Could 3753 also represent a date?’ His skin prickled. ‘The 38th century – Christ, Cornelius, maybe that’s the true date of the Carter catastrophe.’
Cornelius’s softscreen image, slightly blurred, showed him frowning. It’s possible, but any date after a couple of centuries is very unlikely. Anything else?
‘No. Keep thinking, Cornelius.’
Yes…
And Malenfant would roll up the softscreen and return to his work, or try to sleep.
Until the day came when Cornelius, in person, burst into a BDB project progress meeting.
It was an airless Portakabin at the Mojave test site. Malenfant was with George Hench, poring over test results and subcontractor signoffs. And suddenly there was Cornelius: hot, dishevelled, pink with sunburn, tie knot loosened, white gypsum staining his lower legs, clinging to the fabric of his suit pants.
Malenfant couldn’t keep from laughing. ‘Cornelius, at last I’ve seen you out of control.’
Cornelius was panting. ‘I have it. The numbers. The Feynman numbers. I figured it out, Malenfant. And it changes everything.’
Despite the heat of the day, Malenfant felt goosebumps rise on his bare arms.
He made Cornelius sit down, take his jacket off, drink some water.
Cornelius brusquely cleared clutter from the tabletop – battered softscreens, quality forms, a progress chart labelled with bars and arrows, old-fashioned paper blueprints, sandwich wrappers and beer cans – and he spread his own softscreen over the desk.
‘It was staring us in the face the whole time,’ Cornelius said. ‘I knew it had to be connected to you, Malenfant, to your interests. Your obsessions, even. And it had to be something you could act on now. And what –’ he waved a hand ‘– could be a grander obsession than this, your asteroid mission?’
George Hench paced around the room, visibly unhappy.
Cornelius glanced up at George. ‘Look, I’m sorry to disrupt your work.’
George glared. ‘Malenfant, do we have to put up with this bull?’
‘Whatever it is, it ain’t bull, George. I’ve seen the set-up –’
‘Malenfant, I spent my career fending off handwaving artistes like this guy. Colour co-ordinators. Feng Shui artists. Even astrologers, for Christ’s sake. Sometimes I think the US is going back to the Middle Ages.’
Malenfant said gently, ‘George, there was no US in the Middle Ages.’
‘Malenfant, we have a job to do here. A big job. We’re going to a fucking asteroid. All I’m saying is, you need to focus on what’s important here.’
‘I accept that, George. But I have to tell you I’ve come to believe there’s nothing so important as the downstreamers’ message. If it’s real.’
Oh, it’s real,’ Cornelius said fervently. ‘And what it means is that you’re going to have to redirect your mission.’ Cornelius eyed George. ‘Away from Reinmuth.’
George visibly bristled. ‘Now, you listen to me –’
Malenfant held up a hand. ‘Let’s hear him out, George.’
Cornelius tapped at his softscreen. ‘When I began to wonder if the numbers referred to an asteroid, I thought 1986 might be a discovery date. So I logged onto the Minor Planet Center in Massachusetts.’ A table of numbers and letters scrolled down the screen; the first column, of four digits and two letters, all began with ‘1986’. ‘This is a list of all the asteroids first reported in 1986. This first code is a provisional designation –’
‘What do the letters mean?’
‘The first shows the half-month when the asteroid was discovered. The second is the order of discovery in that half-month. So 1986AA is the first asteroid to be discovered in the first half of January, 1986.’
Malenfant eyed the numbers with dismay. ‘Shit. There must be dozens, just for 1986.’
‘More in later years; asteroid watches have got better …’
‘So which one is ours?’
Cornelius smiled and pointed to the second column. ‘As soon as enough observations have been accumulated to determine the asteroid’s orbit, it is given an official designation, a permanent number, and sometimes a name.’
The official numbers, Malenfant saw with growing excitement, were in the range 3700–3800. Cornelius scrolled down, until he came to a highlighted line.
1986TO 3753 0.484 1.512 0.089 ….
The key numbers jumped out at Malenfant. 1986 3753.
‘Holy shit,’ he said. ‘It’s there. It’s real.’
‘Not only that,’ said Cornelius. ‘This little baby, 1986TO, is like no other asteroid in the Solar System.’
‘How so?’
Cornelius smiled. ‘It’s Earth’s second Moon. And nobody knows how it got there.’
George Hench stomped out to ‘go bend some tin’, glaring at Cornelius as he did so.
Cornelius, unperturbed, called up more softscreen data and told Malenfant what little was known about asteroid number 3753.