Timescape

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

THE NOISE LEVEL IN THE NMR MEASUREMENTS began to rise. Each day it was a little higher. Usually Gordon would notice the change in the first data-taking of the morning. He attributed it at first to the slow failure of a component. Repeated checking of the obvious points in the circuitry turned up nothing. Testing of the nonobvious didn’t help, either. Each day the noise was worse. At first Gordon thought this might be a new sort of “spontaneous resonance” effect. The signal was too choppy to tell, though. He spent more time trying to lower the signal/noise ratio. Gradually it came to take up most of his working day. He began to come in nights. He would sit before the on-line oscilloscope and watch the traces. Once, when he had a meeting early the next morning, he slept overnight in the lab. A Fourier decomposition of the noise spectrum showed certain harmonic components, but this clue led nowhere. Meanwhile, the phase-averaged noise level rose.

“Gordon? This is Claudia Zinnes.”

“Oh, hello. I hadn’t expected to hear from you so soon.”

“We have had some delays. This’s and thats’s. Nothing fundamental, but I wanted you to know we should be on the air within a week.”

“Good. I hope…”

“Yes. Yes.”

A Santa Ana wind was blowing outside. It pushed with a dry, heavy hand through the low coastal mountain passes, bringing the desert’s prickly touch. Brush fires broke out in the hills. The red wind, some natives called it. To Gordon, sealed in his air-conditioned lab, it was a mild surprise as he left for home late at night; the air seemed thick and layered, ruffling his hair.

He remembered this hot, dry touch the next day as he walked across to the chemistry building. Ramsey, unable to reach him in his office, had left a message with Joyce, the department secretary. Gordon crossed between the buildings on the ornate hexagonal tiered bridge. Entering the land of chemistry brought a sweet-sour aroma, too strong and many-flavored for the air system’s whine to banish. He found Ramsey in a forest of flasks and tubes, talking quickly and precisely to a graduate student. Ramsey titrated a solution as he spoke, pointing out color shifts, adding a drop of milky stuff at a crucial moment. Gordon found a welcome chair and sagged into it. This jungle of clamps and slides and retorts seemed possessed of more life than a physics lab; the knocking of pumps and ticking of timers was a complicated heart, pacing Ramsey’s earnest search. On the wall hung a chart of the gigantic molecular chain that carbon dioxide descends to become carbohydrate; a ladder forged by photons. A liquid scintillation counter muttered, tocktocking through a series of isotopically labeled flasks. Gordon shifted, finding a ledge to lean on, and toppled a Lily cup. Nothing spilled. He inspected it and found a sludge of coffee, thick as glue and mottled by mold. All things here were alive. He had a sudden vision of this glassy palace as a wilderness of nucleic acids, responding to the dry brush of red wind outside. His NMR lab seemed silent and sterile by comparison. His experiments were insulated from the pulse of the world. For the biochemists, though, lite cooperated in the study of itself. Ramsey himself looked more vital, squinting and hovering and talking, an animal padding through the lanes of this chemical jungle.

“Sorry, Gordon, had to finish that—say, you look kinda worn out. This weather got you down, fella?”

Gordon shook his head and rose, following Ramsey to a side office. A slight giddiness swarmed through him. Must be the air in here, he thought. That, and the Santa Ana, and his shallow, momentary sleep of the night before.

Ramsey was already several sentences ahead of him before Gordon registered the fact. “What?” he said, his voice a croak from the dryness.

“I said, the clues were all there. I was just too blind to see them.”

“Clues?”

“At first I was just looking for preliminary data. You know, something to kick off a grant, get the funding agencies interested. Defense, I guess. But that’s the point, Gordon—this is bigger than DOD now. NSF should go for it.”

“Why?”

“It’s big, that’s why. That line, ‘enters molecular simulation regime begins imitating host’—that’s the giveaway. I took a solution like the one that message described. You know, land runoff stuff, pesticides, some heavy metals—cadmium, nickel, mercury. Threw in some long-chain molecules, too. Had a grad student make them up. Lattitine chain, like the message said. Got a friend at DuPont to loan me some of their experimental long-chain samples.”

“Could you find the labeling numbers the message gave?”

Ramsey frowned. “Nope, that’s the puzzler. This buddy of mine says they don’t have anything’ called that. And Springfield claims they don’t have an AD45 pesticide, either. Your signal must’ve got messed up there.”

“So you couldn’t duplicate it.”

“Not exactly—but who needs exactly? What these long-chain babies are is versatile.”

“How can you be—”

“Look, I took the batches down to Scripps. Took Hussinger out to lunch, talked up the project. Got him to give me some sea water testing troughs. They’re first class—constant temperature and salinity, steady monitoring, the works. Lots of sunlight, too. And—” he paused, compressing a smile—“the whole damn thing came true. Every bit.”

“The diatom bloom part, you mean?”

“Sure, only that’s a later stage. Those long-chain bastards go like Poncho, I tell ya. That sea water started out ordinary, super-saturated with oxygen. After two months we started getting funny readings on the oxygen column. That’s a measurement of the oxygen budget in a vertical column of water, maybe thirty meters high. Then the plankton started to go. Just crapped out on us—dead, or funny new forms.”

“How?”

Ramsey shrugged. “Your message says ‘virus imprinting.’ Mumbo-jumbo, I think. What’s virus got to do with sea water?”

“What has a pesticide got to do with plankton?”

“Yeah, good point. We don’t know. That other phrase you had—’can then convert plankton neuro jacket into its own chemical form using ambient oxygen content until level falls to values fatal to most of the higher food chain’—sounds like somebody knows, right?”

“Apparently.”

“Yeah, ’cause that’s smack on what we found.”

“It scavenges the oxygen?”

“And how.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Spreads like a sonofabitch, too. That mixture turns the plankton into itself, seems like. Makes some pretty lethal side products, too—chlorinated benzenes, polychlorinated biphenyls, all kinds of crap. Have a squint at this.”

A photograph, produced with a flourish from a folder. A lean fish on a concrete slab, eyes glazed. Its lips bulged, green and laced with filaments of blue. A pale sore beneath the gills.

“Lip cancers, assymetries, tumors—Hussinger turned white when he saw what it did to his sample stock. See, he usually doesn’t worry about pathogens getting into the troughs. Sea water is cold and salty. It kills disease-carriers, all except some…”

Gordon noticed the pause. “Except what?”

“Except some viruses, Hussinger said.”

“Uh huh. ‘Virus imprinting.’ And these fish—”

“Hussinger isolated my troughs and stopped it. All my sample fish died.”

The two men stared at each other. “I wonder who’s using it down in the Amazon,” Ramsey said softly.

“Russians?” The possibility now seemed quite real to Gordon.

“Where’s the strategic advantage?”

“Maybe it’s some kind of accident.”

“I dunno… You still don’t know why you’re getting this over your NMR rig?”

“No.”

“That Saul Shriffer crap—”

Gordon waved it away. “Not my idea. Forget it.”

“We can’t forget this.” Ramsey held up the fish photo.

“No, we can’t.”

“Hussinger wants to publish right away.”

“Go ahead.”

“You sure this isn’t a DOD thing you’re working on?”

“No, look—that was your idea.”

“You didn’t knock it down.”

“Let’s say I didn’t want to expose my source. You can see what happened when Shriffer got hold of it.”

“Yeah.” Ramsey peered at him, a distant and assessing look. “You’re pretty sly.”

Gordon thought this was unfair. “You brought up the DOD angle. I said nothing.”

“Okay, okay Tricky, though.”

Gordon wondered if Ramsey was thinking to himself, Shifty Jew. But he caught himself as he thought it. Christ, what paranoia. He was getting to sound like his mother, always sure the goyim were out to get you.

“Sorry about that,” Gordon said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t work on it if I didn’t, well…”

“Hey, that’s okay. No big deal. Hell, you put me onto a fantastic thing. Really important.”

Ramsey tapped the photograph. Both men stared at it, reflecting. A silence fell between them. The fish’s lips were swollen balloons, the colors horribly out of place. In the quiet Gordon heard the lab outside the small office. The regular chugging and ticking went on unmindful of the two men, rhythms and forces, voices. Nucleic acids sought each other in the capillaries of glass. An acid smell cut the air. Enameled light descended. Ticktock ticktock.

Saul Shriffer gazed out from the cover of Life with a casual self-confidence, arm draped over a Palomar telescope mount. Inside, the story was titled BATTLING EXOBIOLOGIST. There were pictures of Saul peering at a photograph of Venus, Saul inspecting a model of Mars, Saul at the control panel of the Green Bank radio telescope. One paragraph dealt with the NMR message. Beside the big magnets stood Saul, with Gordon in the background. Gordon was looking into the space between the magnet poles, apparently doing nothing. Saul’s hand hovered near some wiring, about to fix it. The NMR signals were described as “controversial” and “strongly doubted by most astronomers.” Saul was quoted: “You take some chances in this field. Sometimes you lose. Them’s the breaks.”

“Gordon, your name is in here once. That’s all,” Penny said.

“The article’s about Saul, remember.”

“But that’s why he’s in here. He’s riding on your…”

Mocking: “My success.”

“Well, no, but…”

Gordon tossed the drawing on Ramsey’s desk. “Did I give you a copy of this?”

Ramsey picked it up and wrinkled his brow. “No. What is it?”

“Another part of the signal.”

“Oh yeah, I remember. It was on TV.”

“Right. Shriffer showed it.”

Ramsey studied the interweaving curves. “Y’know, I didn’t think anything of this at the time. But…”

“Yes?”

“Well, it looks like some sort of molecular chain to me. These dots…”

“The ones I connected up?”

“Yeah, I guess. You drew this first?”

“No, Saul unscrambled it from a coded sequence. What about them?”

“Well, maybe it’s not a bunch of curves. Maybe the points are molecules. Or atoms. Nitrogen, hydrogen, phosphorus.”

“Like in DNA.”

“Well, this isn’t DNA. More complicated.”

“More complicated, or more complex?”

“Crap, I don’t know. What’s the difference?”

“You think it has some relation to those long-chain molecules?”

“Could be.”

“Those in-house names. Dupont and Springsomething.”

“Dupont Analagan 58. Springfield AD45.”

“Could this be one of those?”

“Those products don’t exist, I told you.”

“Okay, okay. But could they be that kind of thing?”

“Maybe. Maybe. Look, why don’t I see if I can figure this thing out.”

“How?”

“Well, try assigning atoms to the sites in the chains. See what works.”

“The way Crick and Watson did DNA?”

“Well, yeah, something like that.”

“Great. Maybe that’ll unravel some of—”

“Don’t count on it. Look, the important thing is the experiment. The oxygen loss, the fish. Hussinger and I are going to publish that right away.”

“Good, fine, and—”

“You don’t mind?”

“Huh? Why?”

“I mean, Hussinger says he thinks we should publish it together. If you and I want to do a paper on the message and its content; Hussinger says, that’s another—”

“Oh, I see.” Gordon rocked back in his chair. He felt worn down.

“I mean, I don’t go along with him on that one, but…”

“No, never mind. I don’t care. Publish it, for Chrissakes.”

“You don’t mind?”

“All I did was say, look into it. So you looked and you found something. Good.”

“It wasn’t my idea, this Hussinger thing.”

“I know that.”

“Well, thanks. Really. Look, I’ll follow up on this chain picture you got here.”

“If it is a chain.”

“Yeah. But I mean, maybe we can publish that. Together.”

“Fine. Fine.”

The resonance curves remained smooth. However, the noise level continued to rise. Gordon spent more of his time in the laboratory, trying to suppress the electromagnetic sputter. He had most of his lecture notes for the graduate course in Classical Electromagnetism finished, so he was free to pursue research. He abandoned his sample preparation, however, in favor of more time on the NMR rig. Cooper was still digesting his own data. The noise would not go away.