The Lure Part 4

'Yes, but like I say thats not why youre here. By no means.

Some Austrian prince, all haughtiness and whiskers, was glaring down at them from the panelled wall. Petrie continued, 'No doubt youll get round to telling us.

'Were trying to solve the dark matter problem.

'Whats that?

'Groan, Gibson said. 'Nothing special, just the biggest mystery in the Universe, thats all. Okay, let me do this in words of one syllable. We can weigh galaxies from their mutual orbits, knowing the strength of gravity. They turn out to be ten times more ma.s.sive than wed expect from their luminosities. That is, a typical galaxy has ten times more ma.s.s than the sum of all its stars. Thats a big discrepancy.

'You mean, out there, gravitys stronger than you think?

Gibson looked as if he was fighting a sudden pain.

Freya laughed. 'You shouldnt say things like that, Tom.

'Why not?

'Its heresy. The law of gravity is sacred.

'So whats the party line?

Gibson said, 'The solution is obvious. There must be a lot of dark matter inside galaxies. It has gravity but it doesnt s.h.i.+ne.

'The problems much worse than Charlie is telling you, Freya volunteered. 'When you get to big cl.u.s.ters of galaxies, say hundreds or thousands of them, you find that theyre flying around at speeds vastly in excess of whats expected from their visible ma.s.s. Something invisible is stopping these cl.u.s.ters from flying apart.

'How do you measure their speeds? You dont see them moving?

'No, but their light is s.h.i.+fted to the red or blue pro rata with their velocities, like the change in pitch of a train whistle when it pa.s.ses. You find that the dark stuff in cl.u.s.ters has to be about ninety-five per cent of the total ma.s.s. What were saying here is that the whole of astronomical science is devoted to only five per cent of whats out there.

'Right. So rather than change the law of gravity, which is sacred, you a.s.sume that theres some exotic new type of particle. Invisible but with ma.s.s. If you find it, you have a handle on the missing ninety-five per cent of the Universe.

'On the nail, Gibson said. 'A subnuclear particle unknown to present-day science. There could be millions of them pa.s.sing through our bodies now. Gibsons froglike face had acquired a fanatical look.

'Where are these particles supposed to come from?

'h.e.l.l, Tom, they were created in the Big Bang. They must have been.

'Yes, all right, Charlie, I believe it. In fact, I believe everything youre telling me.

Freya asked, 'Okay, Charlie, but why in the hinterlands? Why not someplace civilised like the Alps?

'The Alps have been taken: a rival team got into the Mont Blanc tunnel long before us. Likewise the Gran Sa.s.so in the Italian Apennines. And the karst limestone here-abouts has very little natural radioactivity. Anyway, our technique needs an underground lake. Its worth a little sojourn in the Carpathian hinterlands to solve one of the greatest scientific mysteries of the age.

'And pick up a n.o.bel Prize in pa.s.sing.

'Provided we beat the compet.i.tion.

'You just did, said Freya.

Gibson said, cryptically, 'Except that we got more than we bargained for. Follow me again.

Gibson marched out of the library, half-ran back along the corridor and up broad stairs. He turned left and stopped at an oak door, puffing slightly.

He paused, his hand on its large wooden k.n.o.b, and blinked. 'The stuff on the other side of this door will change your life. This is your last chance to walk away.

'My goodness, Charlie, this is dramatic stuff. Petries tone was light, but he was tense with excitement.

'Okay you had your chance. Welcome to Wonderland.

Gibson opened the door.

Petrie stared into a large room, almost bare apart from a square central table around which were half a dozen chairs embroidered with some royal insignia. On the table were six computer terminals. Windows on the right opened out to a snowy wooded landscape. At the far end of the room, wood panelling had been slid aside to expose a bank of television screens. Two people were standing at a screen, obscuring it. They turned, and Petrie formed instant impressions.

There was Miss Dominatrix. A long-haired female, midthirties, spinsterish, with a long thin face and an intense, dedicated look. She was dressed in black sweater and slacks, and fas.h.i.+onless trainers. She was devoid of makeup but wore sapphire earrings.

Gibson made the introductions. 'Well, at last we have our mathematician, Thomas Petrie, and our astronomer, Freya Strmer. The teams complete. Tom and Freya, this is Vas.h.i.+slav Shtyrkov and Svetlana Popov.

Svetlana alias Miss Dominatrix had an unexpectedly warm smile. 'Cracow University, Poland. I just join up the wires.

'Svetlanas modesty is out of place, Gibson said. 'Shes a first-cla.s.s experimentalist.

The two women were shaking hands. 'I know, Charlie, I just like to hear you say it. You must wonder what youre getting into, Freya.

'Its all very clandestine. I think Tom and I are in the hands of paranoid lunatics.

Shtyrkov approached and extended a powerful hand to Petrie. He had a deep ba.s.s voice, with a slightly breathless edge. 'Moscow State University. I do particle physics. Freya is right, Im a paranoid lunatic. As will you be after a day or two here. So, youre our Irlandets?

'Anglichanin, Petrie corrected him. He turned to Gibson expectantly.

Gibson beckoned Petrie over to the terminals on the wall and pointed to the one on the left. 'What do you make of this?

Petrie and Freya sat down on Hapsburg embroidered chairs and found themselves staring at an array of numbers, arranged into three columns. Petrie pressed the 'down arrow on the keyboard and scanned the rapidly tumbling columns, his eyes trying to make out patterns.

The patterns were there. As the columns skimmed past, the numbers rose and descended in waves, some large, some small, some fast, some slow. They interacted like Bach fugues, sometimes merging into breakers, sometimes abruptly turning into columns of zeros.

Shtyrkov was looking over Petries shoulder. 'You saw the printout in the hall?

'Uhuh. This is a lot more complicated. It must be more than one particle, which is impossible from what Charlie was saying. There must have been dozens of them.

'Not dozens, Tom. Billions.

Petrie stopped scanning. He looked at Gibson.

Svetlana was lounging back at a desk, playing with a pencil. 'At any instant each litre of water in that lake had a particle in it.

Petrie turned back to the terminal and resumed the scan. 'But if a particle crosses the lake in a ten-millionth of a second ... how long did this go on?

Gibson spoke over Petries other shoulder. 'Thirty-seven minutes. There were about half a dozen leaders. They arrived every few seconds. Then it started. Two thousand, two hundred and twenty seconds of this, and then it stopped. No tail-off or fading away: there was just suddenly nothing.

'The lake glowed. Shtyrkovs eyes had a strange, almost insane gleam.

Freya turned to Gibson. 'Just what are we dealing with here?

There was a brittle silence.

Petrie sensed something. 'So each detector was picking up light from all the particles pa.s.sing through, and you have fifty thousand detectors each firing numbers into your hard drive ten million times a second, and you want me to turn these numbers into particle tracks through the lake. He puffed out his cheeks. 'Thats a mammoth job.

Gibson shook his head. 'Oh no, Tom, thats not what we want from you at all.

Svetlana said, 'You see, weve already done that.

'I linked in to Moscow State University, Shtyrkov said. 'Its the central node for a nationwide grid of computers. I was able to use idle time on every computer in Russia which holds hands with the Moscow link. No, we have computed the particle tracks. And the tracks through the lake are where you come in.

Petrie looked around, bewildered. 'If this was a burst of particles from some source, surely they just came in on random parallel lines, like a stream of buckshot?

Shtyrkov grinned. 'No again, Tom. Not at all. You see, the particles arrived in a pattern.

'What?

The grin became demonic. 'Yes, a pattern.

Petrie felt his skin p.r.i.c.kling.

7.

The Shtyrkov Conjecture 'Hold on. You cant mean an intelligent pattern. You cant possibly mean that.

Shtyrkov said, 'But I do, Tom.

Gibson was peering at the mathematician through narrowed eyes. 'I have to apologise for Vash. Hes clearly mad.

Shtyrkov folded his arms and leaned back with a condescending smile.

'But you asked me out here anyway.

'Its a million to one shot, Tom. No, its a billion to one, a trillion to one. But suppose ... In a moment of fantasy, just suppose Gibsons voice was a strange blend of hesitancy, fear and greed 'that hes right.

'It would be the discovery of all time, Svetlana said. Her voice was almost hoa.r.s.e; Petrie suspected she hadnt slept for a day or two.

'A signal, coming from an intelligence beyond the Earth, Petrie said to n.o.body. 'Jesus.

'From Jesus? Shtyrkov snorted. 'I doubt it, but you can never be sure.

'Where do I come in? Freya asked.

Gibson turned to her. 'If this is an intelligent signal, we need to know where it came from.

'Imagine going to the public and saying, "Hey, weve detected an ET signal but we dont know where it came from", Svetlana pointed out. She was nervously tapping her pencil on the desk.

'The public would go ape, Gibson said. 'So would our colleagues.

'We know the direction the particles pa.s.sed through the lake, Svetlana said.

'Exactly? Freya asked.

'No. Roughly. Svetlana drew a box in the air with her pencil.

'How big is the error box?

'We want you to tell us, Gibson interrupted the conversation between the two women. 'And identify candidate sources, narrow them down to one if its humanly possible. The home planet.

'Why me for the decoding? Petrie asked. 'There must be thousands of good crypta.n.a.lysts around.

'This isnt code-breaking, at least I hope its not. Its more a question of making sense out of patterns. I heard you in Uppsala last year. Making sense of complex patterns is your business. Me, I can only visualise things in two dimensions.

The Russians heavy frame stirred in the chair. 'Theres an intelligent signal in there, Tom. But Charlee is too stupid to see this and I can only think in two and a half dimensions. We need a peculiar mind, like yours.

Gibson nodded. 'Its down to you. Prove or disprove Vas.h.i.+slavs conjecture.

'But you dont believe it.

'Do you know what Charles Darwin said?

'No, Charlie. What did Charles Darwin say?

'He said that Nature will tell you a direct lie if she can. I think Vas.h.i.+slav is being lied to, and that there must be some natural explanation for this weird event.

'So why did you ask us out here? Why alert the Prime Minister?

'Because Darwin also said something else. Gibson jabbed a finger at Petrie. 'Every scientist should now and then carry out a fools experiment, something which n.o.body in their right mind would expect to yield a result. Because if it does work out, against all expectations, the payoff is fantastic.

Petrie grinned. 'Well, youve got the fool.

'Another thing Darwin said. He said maybe the people in the Gran Sa.s.so or the Mont Blanc tunnel got the same signal as us, and maybe theyre working like h.e.l.l on it, and maybe theyre going to beat us to it with an announcement, at which point Charlie Gibson will climb the tower of this frigging castle and jump off head first.

'Charles Darwin said that?

'He absolutely did. Origin of Species chapter three, paragraph three. One other trifling matter, Gibson said, showing his teeth. 'This is Tuesday, in case youve lost track. We have the castle until the weekend. In the highly unlikely event of there being anything in Vas.h.i.+slavs conjecture, Ill need to know it by then. Ill want a public announcement made next week.

Shtyrkov explained. 'Svetlana has some mad idea that once weve dispersed, one of us will try to steal the thunder from the others.

'The announcement has to be made as a team, Svetlana said in a determined voice.