Chapter Seven

Hunt brought his hands up to his shoulders, stretched his body back over his chair, and emitted a long yawn at the ceiling of the laboratory. He held the position for a few seconds, and then collapsed back with a sigh. Finally he rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, hauled himself upright to face the console in front of him once more, and returned his gaze to the three-foot-high wall of the cylindrical glass tank by his side.

The image of the Trimagniscope tube was an enlarged view of one of the pocket-size books found on the body, which Danchekker had shown them on their first day in Houston three weeks before. The book itself was enclosed in the scanner module of the machine, on the far side of the room. The scope was adjusted to generate a view that followed the change in density along the boundary surface of the selected page, producing an image of the lower section of the book only; it was as if the upper part had been removed, like a cut deck of cards. Because of the age and condition of the book, however, the characters on the pages thus exposed tended to be of poor quality and in some places were incomplete. The next step would be to scan the image optically with TV cameras and feed the encoded pictures into the Navcomms computer complex. The raw input would then be processed by pattern recognition techniques and statistical techniques to produce a second, enhanced copy with many of the missing character fragments restored.

Hunt cast his eye over the small monitor screens on his console, each of which showed a magnified view of a selected area of the page, and tapped some instructions into his keyboard.

"There's an unresolved area on monitor five," he announced. "Cursors read X, twelve hundred to thirteen eighty; Y, nine ninety and, ah, ten seventy-five."

Rob Gray, seated at another console a few feet away and almost surrounded by screens and control panels, consulted one of the numerical arrays glowing before him.

"Z mod's linear across the field," he advised. "Try a block elevate?"

"Can do. Give it a try."

"Setting Z step two hundred through two ten . . . increment point one . . . step zero point five seconds."

"Check." Hunt watched the screen as the surface picked out through the volume of the book became distorted locally and the picture on the monitor began to change.

"Hold it there," he called.

Gray hit a key. "Okay?"

Hunt contemplated the modified view for a while.

"The middle of the element's clear now," he pronounced at last. "Fix the new plane inside forty percent. I still don't like the strip around it, though. Give me a vertical slice through the center point."

"Which screen d'you want it on?"

"Ah . . . number seven."

"Coming up."

The curve, showing a cross section of the page surface through the small area they were working on, appeared on Hunt's console. He studied it for a while, then called:

"Run an interpolation across the strip. Set thresholds of, say, minus five and thirty-five percent on Y."

"Parameters set . . . Interpolator running . . . run complete," Gray recited. "Integrating into scan program now." Again the picture altered subtly. There was a noticeable improvement.

"Still not right around the edge," Hunt said. "Try weighting the quarter and three-quarter points by plus ten. If that doesn't work, we'll have to break it down into isodepth bands."

"Plus ten on point two five zero and point seven five zero," Gray repeated as he operated the keys. "Integrated. How's it look?"

On the element of surface displayed on Hunt's monitor, the fragments of characters had magically assembled themselves into recognizable shapes. Hunt nodded with satisfaction.

"That'll do. Freeze it in. Okay—that clears that one. There's another messy patch up near the top right. Let's have a go at that next."

*

Life had been reduced to much this kind of pattern ever since the day the installation of the scope was completed. They had spent the first week obtaining a series of cross-sectional views of the body itself. This exercise had proved memorable on account of the mild discomfort and not so mild inconvenience of having to work in electrically heated suits, following the medical authority's insistence that Charlie be kept in a refrigerated environment. It had proved something of an anticlimax. The net results were that, inside as well as out, Charlie was surprisingly—or not so surprisingly, depending on one's point of view—human. During the second week they had begun examining the articles found on the body, especially the pieces of "paper" and the pocketbooks. This investigation had proved more interesting.

Of the symbols contained in the documents, numerals were the first to be identified. A team of cryptographers, assembled at Navcomms HQ, soon worked out the counting system, which turned out to be based on twelve digits rather than ten and employed a positional notation with the least significant digit to the left. Deciphering the nonnumeric symbols was proving more difficult. Linguists from institutions and universities in several countries had linked into Houston and, with the aid of batteries of computers, were attempting to make some sense of the language of the Lunarians, as Charlie's race had come to be called in commemoration of his place of discovery. So far their efforts had yielded little more than that the Lunarian alphabet comprised thirty-seven characters, was written horizontally from right to left, and contained the equivalent of upper-case characters.

Progress, however, was not considered to be bad for so short a time. Most of the people involved were aware that even this much could never have been achieved without the scope, and already the names of the two Englishmen were well-known around the division. The scope attracted a lot of interest among the UNSA technical personnel, and most evenings saw a stream of visitors arriving at the Ocean Hotel, all curious to meet the coinventors of the instrument and to learn more about its principles of operation. Before long, the Ocean became the scene of a regular debating society where anybody who cared to could give free rein to his wildest speculations concerning the Charlie mystery, free from the constraints of professional caution and skepticism that applied during business hours.

Caldwell, of course, knew everything that was said by anybody at the Ocean and what everybody else thought about it, since Lyn Garland was present on most nights and represented the next best thing to a hot line back to the HQ building. Nobody minded that much—after all, it was only part of her job. They minded even less when she began turning up with some of the other girls from Navcomms in tow, adding a refreshing party atmosphere to the whole proceedings. This development met with the full approval of the visitors from out-of-town; however, it had led to somewhat strained relationships on the domestic front for one or two of the locals.

*

Hunt jabbed at the keyboard for the last time and sat back to inspect the image of the completed page.

"Not bad at all," he said. "That one won't need much enhancement."

"Good," Gray agreed. He lit a cigarette and tossed the pack across to Hunt without being asked. "Optical encoding's finished," he added, glancing at a screen. "That's number sixty-seven tied up." He rose from his chair and moved across to stand beside Hunt's console to get a better view of the image in the tank. He looked at it for a while without speaking.

"Columns of numbers," he observed needlessly at last. "Looks like some kind of table."

"Looks like it . . ." Hunt's voice sounded far away.

"Mmm . . . rows and columns . . . thick lines and thin lines .,. Could be anything—mileage chart, wire gauges, some sort of timetable. Who knows?"

Hunt made no reply but continued to blow occasional clouds of smoke at the glass, cocking his head first to one side and then to the other.

"None of the numbers there are very large," he commented after a while. "Never more than two positions in any place. That gives us what in a duodecimal system? One hundred and forty-three at the most." Then as an afterthought, "I wonder what the biggest is."

"I've got a table of Lunarian-decimal equivalents somewhere. Any good?"

"No, don't bother for now. It's too near lunch. Maybe we could have a look at it over a beer tonight at the Ocean."

"I can pick out their one and two," Gray said. "And three and . . . Hey! What do you know—look at the right-hand columns of those big boxes. Those numbers are in ascending order!"

"You're right. And look—the same pattern repeats over and over in every one. It's some kind of cyclic array." Hunt thought for a moment, his face creased in a frown of concentration. "Something else, too—see those alphabetic groups down the sides? The same groups reappear at intervals all across the page . . ." He broke off again and rubbed his chin.

Gray waited perhaps ten seconds. "Any ideas?"

"Dunno . . . Sets of numbers starting at one and increasing by one every time. Cyclic . . . an alphabetic label tagged on to each repeating group. The whole pattern repeating again inside bigger groups, and bigger groups repeat again. Suggests some sort of order. Sequence . . ."

His mumblings were interrupted as the door opened behind them. Lyn Garland walked in.

"Hi, you guys. What's showing today?" She moved over to stand between them and peered into the tank. "Say, tables! How about that? Where'd they come from, the books?"

"Hello, lovely," Gray said with a grin. "Yep." He nodded in the direction of the scanner.

"Hi," Hunt answered, at last tearing his eyes away from the image. "What can we do for you?"

She didn't reply at once, but continued staring into the tank.

"What are they? Any ideas?"

"Don't know yet. We were just talking about it when you came in."

She marched across the lab and bent over to peer into the top of the scanner. The smooth, tanned curve of her leg and the proud thrust of her behind under her thin skirt drew an exchange of approving glances from the two English scientists. She came back and studied the image once more.

"Looks like a calendar, if you ask me," she told them. Her voice left no room for dissent.

Gray laughed. "Calendar, eh? You sound pretty sure of it. What's this—a demonstration of infallible feminine intuition or something?" He was goading playfully.

She turned to confront him with out-thrust jaw and hands planted firmly on hips. "Listen, Limey—I've got a right to an opinion, okay? So, that's what I think it is. That's my opinion."

"Okay, okay." Gray held up his hands. "Let's not start the War of Independence all over again. I'll note it in the lab file: 'Lyn thinks it's a—'"

"Holy Christ!" Hunt cut him off in midsentence. He was staring wide-eyed at the tank. "Do you know, she could be right! She could just be bloody right!"

Gray turned back to face the side of the tank. "How come?"

"Well, look at it. Those larger groups could be something like months, and the labeled sets that keep repeating inside them could be weeks made up of days. After all, days and years have to be natural units in any calendar system. See what I mean?"

Gray looked dubious. "I'm not so sure," he said slowly. "It's nothing like our year, is it? I mean, there's a hell of a lot more than three hundred sixty-five numbers in that lot, and a lot more than twelve months, or whatever they are—aren't there?"

"I know. Interesting?"

"Hey. I'm still here," said a small voice behind them. They moved apart and half turned to let her in on the proceedings,

"Sorry," Hunt said. "Getting carried away." He shook his head and regarded her with an expression of disbelief.

"What on Earth made you say a calendar?"

She shrugged and pouted her lips. "Don't know, really. The book over there looks like a diary. Every diary I ever saw had calendars in it. So, it had to be a calendar."

Hunt sighed. "So much for scientific method. Anyway, let's run a shot of it. I'd like to do some sums on it later." He looked back at Lyn. "No—on second thought, you run it. This is your discovery."

She frowned at him suspiciously. "What d'you want me to do?"

"Sit down there at the master console. That's right. Now activate the control keyboard . . . Press the red button—that one."

"What do I do now?"

"Type this: FC comma DACCO seven slash PCH dot P sixty-seven slash HCU dot one. That means 'functional control mode, data access program subsystem number seven selected, access data file reference "Project Charlie, Book one," page sixty-seven, optical format, output on hard copy unit, one copy.'"

"It does? Really? Great!"

She keyed in the commands as Hunt repeated them more slowly. At once a hum started up in the hard copier, which stood next to the scanner. A few seconds later a sheet of glossy paper flopped into the tray attached to the copier's side. Gray walked over to collect it.

"Perfect," he announced.

"This makes me a scope expert, too," Lyn informed them brightly.

Hunt studied the sheet briefly, nodded, and slipped it into a folder lying on top of the console.

"Doing some homework?" she asked.

"I don't like the wallpaper in my hotel room."

"He's got the theory of relativity all around the bedroom in his flat in Wokingham," Gray confided, ". . . and wave mechanics in the kitchen."

She looked from one to the other curiously. "Do you know, you're crazy. Both of you—you're both crazy. I was always too polite to mention it before, but somebody has to say it."

Hunt gave her a solemn look. "You didn't come all the way over here to tell us we're crazy," he pronounced.

"Know something—you're right. I had to be in Westwood anyway. A piece of news just came in this morning that I thought might interest you. Gregg's been talking to the Soviets. Apparently one of their materials labs has been doing tests on some funny pieces of metal alloy they got hold of—all sorts of unusual properties nobody's ever seen before. And guess what—they dug them up on the Moon, somewhere near Mare Imbrium. And—when they ran some dating tests, they came up with a figure of about fifty thousand years! How about that! Interested?"

Gray whistled.

"It had to be just a matter of time before something else turned up," Hunt said, nodding. "Know any more details?"

She shook her head. "'Fraid not. But some of the guys might be able to fill you in a bit more at the Ocean tonight. Try Hans if he's there; he was talking a lot to Gregg about it earlier."

Hunt looked intrigued but decided there was little point in pursuing the matter further for the time being.

"How is Gregg?" he asked. "Has he tried smiling lately?"

"Don't be mean," she reproached him. "Gregg's okay. He's busy, that's all. D'you think he didn't have enough to worry about before all this blew up?"

Hunt didn't dispute it. During the few weeks that had passed, he had seen ample evidence of the massive resources Caldwell was marshaling from all around the globe. He couldn't help but be impressed by the director's organizational ability and his ruthless efficiency when it came to annihilating opposition. There were other things, however, about which Hunt harbored mild personal doubts.

"How's it all doing, then?" he asked. His tone was neutral. It did not escape the girl's sharply tuned senses. Her eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly.

"Well, you've seen most of the action so far. How do you think it's going?"

He tried to sidestep to avoid her deliberate turning around of the question.

"None of my business, really, is it? We're just the machine minders in all this."

"No, really—I'm interested. What do you think?" Hunt made a great play of stubbing out his cigarette. He frowned and scratched his forehead.

"You've got rights to opinions, too," she persisted. "Our Constitution says so. So, what's your opinion?"

There was no way off the hook, or of evading those big brown eyes.

"There's no shortage of information turning up," he conceded at last. "The infantry is doing a good job . . ." He let the rider hang.

"But what . . . ?" Hunt sighed.

"But . . . the interpretation. There's something too dogmatic—too rigid—about the way the big names higher up are using the information. It's as if they can't think outside the rats they've thought inside for years. Maybe they're overspecialized—won't admit any possibility that goes against what they've always believed."

"For instance?"

"Oh, I don't know . . . Well, take Danchekker, for one. He's always accepted orthodox evolutionary theory—all his life, I suppose; therefore, Charlie must be from Earth. Nothing else is possible. The accepted theory must be right, so that much is fixed; you have to work everything else to fit in with that."

"You think he's wrong? That Charlie came from somewhere else?"

"Hell, I don't know. He could be right. But it's not his conclusion that I don't like; it's his way of getting there. This problem's going to need more flexibility before it's cracked."

Lyn nodded slowly to herself, as if Hunt had confirmed something.

"I thought you might say something like that," she mused. "Gregg will be interested to hear it. He wondered the same thing, too."

Hunt had the feeling that the questions had been more than just an accidental turn of conversation. He looked at her long and hard.

"Why should Gregg be interested?"

"Oh, you'd be surprised. Gregg knows a lot about you two. He's interested in anything anybody has to say. It's people, see—Gregg's a genius with people. He knows what makes them tick. It's the biggest part of his job."

"Well, if it's a people problem he's got," Hunt said. "Why doesn't he fix it?"

Suddenly Lyn switched moods and seemed to make light of the whole subject, as if she had learned all she needed to for the time being.

"Oh, he will—when he gets the feeling that the time's right. He's very good with timing, too." She decided to finish the matter entirely. "Anyhow, it's time for lunch." She stood up and slipped a hand through an arm on either side. "How about two crazy Limeys treating a poor girl from the Colonies to a drink?"

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 645