The Lure

14 Kanchenjunga

‘You people are nuts.’ Little patches of damp have appeared under the armpits of Gibson’s shirt. ‘Am I supposed to go to the British government and tell them that aliens have beamed us a picture of a virus?’

Shtyrkov says, ‘It’s obviously a virus. They like to be icosahedrons.’

Petrie says, ‘We can test it. Your little coloured spheres, Svetlana.’

‘Yes. Each is a cluster of dots, hundreds of them.’

‘These dots should be proteins.’

‘Tom, I wouldn’t recognise a protein if it hit me on the nose.’

‘It’s a string of amino acids.’

‘That’s all right then.’ Svetlana is looking defiant.

‘Right. We need a biochemist.’

Gibson says, ‘No. There’s no time. And we have enough outsiders.’ He attempts a conciliatory smile at Freya and Petrie but it comes out as a leer. ‘Nothing personal.’

‘Svetlana and I will learn biochemistry tonight,’ Shtyrkov says.

Petrie says, ‘Will it take you all night?’

‘Even genius has limits. Tom, you try to decipher fresh bits of the signal.’

‘I’ll try to identify the source,’ Freya says.

‘It’s why you’re out here,’ Gibson reminds her. ‘I’ll get back to the press release.’

Shtyrkov warns Gibson: ‘You and I contact our governments simultaneously, Charlee. No jumping the gun.’

Apart from a scowl, Gibson makes no response.

Petrie says to nobody, ‘This is the biggest thing in history.’

Freya says, ‘I’d kill for a coffee.’

6 p.m. Freya says, ‘We can rule out 47 Ursa Majoris. It’s way outside the error circle.’

A little later, Petrie takes to pacing up and down like a caged lion. There is a clear patch of floor near the centre of the room, and he criss-crosses this at random, looking over at the dancing patterns taunting him on his screen. From time to time he sits on the edge of his chair, still staring at the dots.

At random, he has cut into the signal about a minute down the line. Here the patterns are different. The biology was snowflakes in a blizzard, random swirls, sometimes a handful of dots, sometimes thousands. Random and yet not random. But here, further down the signal, things are in stark contrast. The salami technique, stacking slices of time to create a figure, doesn’t work. Here the patterns are harsh and geometric. There are pentagons and pyramids, abacuses in three dimensions and jagged cliffs in four. And yet sometimes, as he pushes the movie on, the harsh geometry dissolves and the blizzard reappears.

An alien mind, reaching out to me. What are you saying? What are you telling me? What do you mean?

6.50 p.m. After forty minutes of sitting and pacing, Petrie mutters something about the theological library and disappears. He returns without explanation an hour later. The restless pacing resumes.

8.30 p.m. Shtyrkov and Svetlana say that the virus theory is looking good. The little spheres look like proteins made up of amino acids, but they don’t know enough to identify any of them or even to say if they are of a known type.

Close to midnight, they announce that the signal contains the codings for hundreds of viruses, maybe thousands. There is a brief discussion of what could possibly motivate the signallers to beam information of that sort. There are other structures of some molecular complexity, in their thousands, but they can make no sense of them. By this time Petrie, still doing the walk, is starting to mutter.

12.40 a.m. Gibson leaves the room and returns with a tray of mugs and biscuits. Snow is fluttering down, the flakes catching the light as they pass the windows.

Petrie keeps disappearing and reappearing, muttering and sometimes walking up and down with his hands on his head, his face screwed up in concentration. Now and then he scribbles on paper and then, often as not, darts out of the room, sometimes with a groan of despair. Nobody pays him any attention.

2.05 a.m. Freya’s program runs to its conclusion. She tidies up some numbers and consults star charts. The signal has come from one of two small regions of sky, in opposite directions. One of them contains a few ordinary stars. The other is deeply disturbing. She looks around furtively; everyone is busy at terminals, except for Petrie, who is still pacing, lost in his world of patterns. She thinks he looks mad, like Rasputin or somebody. She decides to keep her finding to herself until she has searched the Net for every scrap of information about the candidate sources.

3.15 a.m. Gibson finishes the first draft of his press release with a sigh. He makes a show of walking up and down, holding the paper in front of him, and reading it with every sign of adoration. Petrie seems not to see him but somehow they avoid collision. Gibson puts his hands on Svetlana’s shoulders, looks at her screen, and asks: could the double helix be human? On the face of it the question is mind-bogglingly silly, but after the day’s surprises nothing seems too bizarre. Svetlana says they’ll get on to it.

Petrie disappears again. He is beginning to look wild-eyed, but then so are the others.

3.20 a.m. Shtyrkov mentions that they haven’t eaten. He is ignored. He says, my sugar level’s going down. He gets the same response.

5.15 a.m. Svetlana turns her chair to face the centre of the room and gives a dissertation on genetics. She tells her bone-weary little audience that the human body contains a hundred million million cells, except for Vash who has twice as many as everyone else, and they’re called cells because to the early microscope men they looked like the cells of medieval monks. And each cell contains a nucleus a tenth of a millimetre across and inside each nucleus are long strands that look like worms called chromosomes, which you can just see under a powerful microscope — not that I’ve ever seen them. There are forty-six chromosomes and they occur in twenty-three pairs.

With you so far, says Gibson, leaning back in his chair and rubbing an overnight stubble.

She says that these chromosomes are made up of a long folded molecule called DNA. This DNA is like a twisted ladder, the famous double helix, with the two spines of the ladder made up of sugars and phosphates; and each spine has letters sticking out from it, one letter on each rung so that each rung has two letters, drawn from Tom’s set of four A,C,G,T.

Biochemistry sounds easy, Gibson declares.

This is how DNA turns baby food into a growing human, Svetlana tells them. The ladder unwinds and splits down its length to make two strands and the letters on the rungs are exposed. One of the strands, with its exposed letters, is active which means that each set of adjacent three letters along it attracts an amino acid but I don’t want to overload your brain, Charlie, not at this hour.

But I’m still with you, Gibson insists.

Very good, Charlie. The way a strand gets its amino acids involves messenger RNA and transfer RNA and migration out of the nucleus to fish for the amino acids in the baby food, and lots of those three-letter words acting together create chains of amino acids called polypeptides, and lots of polypeptides combined make up proteins. Since biochemistry is easy, Charlie, I expect you’re still with me and you now understand that the whole genetic code, the thing that defines you, is like a book written in three-letter words from a four-letter alphabet.

But you can only get so many three-letter words from a four-letter alphabet, Gibson says.

Sixty-four, she confirms. The book of Charlie Gibson has a vocabulary of only sixty-four words. The book of life likewise.

So how come life is so varied? Why don’t you look like a zebra?

Because you can write a very long book with sixty-four words. I said the DNA ladder was folded. There are six feet of DNA in the nucleus of a human cell. The genome is the whole code, spread around the forty-six chromosomes. There are three billion words in the genome. If I wrote the words of your genome out in normal book size it would stretch from here to London, like a thousand Bibles written out on a single line. You’re really a wonderful human being in spite of everything, Charlie.

Why forty-six?

Who knows? Apes have more than us.

Okay, so there’s this monk in a cell, and he’s swallowed forty-six worms. And Lo! the worms turn out to be long twisted ladders, and these ladders have the Book of Life written upon them in three-letter words, unto the billionth degree. But where do you go from there, Svetlana? How can you tell if that thing — Gibson points to the double helix, still tumbling on screen — is human?

The human genome’s been mapped, Charlie, all three billion words. Vash tells me the signal has clusters within clusters and so on, and if we go to the right order of clusters we’re down to the atoms, like one dot for hydrogen, twelve for carbon, sixteen for oxygen and so on. He thinks if we look at the right hierarchy of clustering — not too deep, not too shallow — we’ll be at the molecular level and we’ll be able to match it against the human genome. The human genome exists on the Web and we can access it. We’ve already started on that. We’re trying to automate the comparison to save ourselves a few centuries’ work.

So why aren’t you getting on with it? I want to know if that thing’s human or not. Freya, what have you found? And where the hell is Petrie?

Shtyrkov: Stop! Charlee, calm down. It’s six o’clock and we’re played out.

Gibson: Are you people forgetting what day this is? Thursday! Saturday’s our last full day here and I want to announce this in London on Monday. Freya, I want a progress report today. Twelve noon.

6.01 a.m. Gibson staggers off.

In the theological library, the sound of a vacuum cleaner brings Petrie back to the real world. A middle-aged woman, with jeans, sneakers and a yellow sweater, gives him a friendly nod as she swings the industrial strength machine over the long carpet.

He has problems standing up. Into the corridor. The castle is crawling with cleaning ladies, polishing, vacuuming, dusting, swarming, dissolving. The door to the computer room is closed and a sheet of paper sellotaped to it has Cizim vstup zakázán written in big Biro letters. The room is empty, the computers switched off, and not a scrap of paper in sight.

At the foot of the stairs, swaying on his feet, Petrie finds himself staring up at the north ridge of Kanchenjunga.