An xt called stanley, p.4
An XT Called Stanley, page 4
“I was looking for Seth French,” Rick said, turning away from us to look around the room.
“I haven’t seen him,” Roger said coldly.
I pushed out the remaining chair so that Rick could join us.
“He might be at the cafeteria across the alley,” Roger suggested.
“He never eats there,” Rick said, pulling his beard while he debated what to do.
“Why don’t you sit down and join us,” Tom Harvey suggested. “I’m Tom Harvey,” he said as Rick started to sit down. “I’ve come up to play on Max’s team.”
“You’re going to work on the top secret Sagittarius project?” Rick said.
For a moment Tom studied Rick’s bearded face trying to fathom the sarcasm in his remark. “We haven’t taken out an ad in the Times or anything,” Tom answered. “But I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s top secret.”
“Oh, but it is,” Rick asserted.
“The project’s been classified,” Roger said.
“A signal that any Boy Scout can pick up, and it’s been classified?” Tom said in disbelief.
“A Boy Scout can’t pick it up now,” Rick said. “Seth French arranged to have the signal jammed.”
“What the hell is going on?” Tom asked.
“Seth says the signal is dangerous. It could lead to an alien takeover if anyone listens to it.”
“Are you serious?” Tom asked.
“He’s written a paper on the subject,” Rick replied. “According to him this is just the way an aggressive and technically advanced civilization would take over the galaxy. They send out a radio signal that enslaves unsuspecting civilizations, much the way a virus takes over the DNA of the cell it invades.”
“Is that what you think?” Tom asked.
Rick pulled on his beard for a moment. “Seth French is my boss.”
With that Tom leaned back and laughed. “Well said.”
“Seth French has been trying to stop the Sagittarius project,” Rick explained. “He says if you build the super brain it will take over.”
“Super brain,” I said. “What super brain?”
“That’s what we’re all here for,” Tom said, leaning back in his chair and putting his hands on his stomach. “The signal Rick recorded in January was a set of instructions for building a super brain, a super computer that will be light-years ahead of anything we have. You see, Bob, with thousands of light-years between us and them, it makes for a rather slow dialogue, so they’ve sent us plans for a computer that can talk to us.”
“Really,” I said with rising excitement. “And we’re going to build it.”
“Well,” Tom said. “There’s always the Andrews phenomenon.”
“The Andrews phenomenon?” I asked.
“Philip Andrews was a mathematician who taught at Harvard, before your time, Bob. He was a fine mathematician. I think he won a Fields Prize in critical solutions to something or other. Anyway he was a very good mathematician but a terrible teacher. Once he was assigned an elementary mathematics course to teach. You know, one of those remedial courses for people who hate math. Well the story is he went to the department chairman and asked him what he was supposed to teach. And the chairman said, ‘The usual stuff, logarithms, trigonometric functions, simultaneous equations.’ At the end of the first week he went back to the department chairman and said, ‘What do I teach the second week?’”
Rick and I started laughing and Roger smiled.
“The students were totally lost,” Tom continued after a moment. “They all stormed the Dean’s office and demanded a free credit in math. Andrews was never allowed to teach an elementary math course again, which was fine with him. But the point is, Andrews was like that. He just assumed that everyone was as good at mathematics as he was.”
“Now an advanced civilization could very easily be subject to the Andrews phenomenon,” Tom continued. “They could be so smart as to forget just how stupid we might be.”
“Max says there’ll be no problem,” Roger spoke up. “He says we can build it in a couple months.”
“We’ll see,” Tom said philosophically. “Now I think this lady wants to take our order.”
After lunch we went to Max’s office. It was three times the size of mine. It had a large desk topped with smooth black glass, two deep blue couches, three upholstered green chairs, a large black glass coffee table and several large green plants. One wall displayed a large three-dimensional view of Earth.
Rick explained to me that the image was a live view of Earth as seen from New Hope’s cameras. New Hope is in a geosynchronous orbit, which means it circles the Earth exactly once every twenty-four hours, always staying over the same meridian, 90° west longitude. Although New Hope does not move east or west with respect to the rotating Earth, it does move north and south in a twenty-four hour cycle. At six o’clock in the evening, New Hope time (same as Chicago time), New Hope reaches its northernmost point over the thirtieth parallel. This is just over New Orleans. At six in the morning, New Hope is at its southernmost point over the thirtieth parallel south of the equator. This is over the Pacific Ocean two hundred kilometers west of Chile. The timing of New Hope’s orbit is worked out so that the one hundred and twenty-six power stations, staffed and operated from New Hope, are closest to the ninety-six receiving antennas scattered over North America at six o’clock in the evening, the time of peak consumption. New Hope has payed for itself three time over in cheap power. The money accounted to New Hope each day for the billions of kilowatts of microwave energy beamed down is but a small fraction of their fair market value. But I shouldn’t digress into the politics of space.
The view of Earth from Max’s office was spectacular. The only color in the universe visible from New Hope is Earth. Everything else is black sky studded with stars or blinding glare from the sun. Perhaps the view gave Max a feeling of power, but it only made me homesick. I realized on that bright blue-green marble under those white swirling clouds it was undoubtedly damp and miserable as it usually is in March, but nevertheless I wished I were down there looking up at those dark clouds from below.
Rick was saying something about the live view of Earth when Max came in. I would never have called him Max right off just us surely as I would never have called him Dr. Stanton after he had instructed me to call him Max. He was much shorter than I expected, but he was powerfully built. His neck was so broad that when he turned to look at you he turned his whole body. He had salt and pepper hair cut very short and broad hands with short stubby fingers.
“Hi,” he greeted Tom effusively. “You know, there’s so much baloney I have to attend to, I didn’t even have time to meet you. Those bureaucrats have a way of taking over.”
“Don’t I know it,” Tom said, shaking his head. They were obviously old friends.
“I’m Max,” he said, coming up to me and shaking my hand with a firm grip. “And you’re Bob. Are you all settled in? How’s everything going?”
“Fine,” I said.
“I trust Jean showed you around.”
I nodded.
“Now, where did they put you?”
“My office? It’s just down the hall.”
“No, your apartment.”
“Its off Ninth Alley,” I answered.
“Ninth Alley! Why the hell did they put you there? Roger, you should have told me they put Bob over there.”
Roger smoothed his precisely parted black hair before speaking.
“Is there a problem with Ninth Alley?” he asked with an air of concern.
“You know we’re all over on Fourth Alley,” Max scolded. “I’ll have a word with the Housing Office. I’ll get this straightened out.”
“My apartment’s fine,” I said.
“But you should be over on Fourth Alley with the other Institute scientists.”
I could hardly say no.
Having discussed the location of my apartment, Max went over to his desk and turned to face us. “Gentlemen,” he began, “Today we begin one of the most significant ventures of this century. But before we begin there is one unfortunate piece of business we have to attend to.”
We all looked at each other during the ensuing silence. Finally, Max spoke again, “Rick, as of today you are no longer a part of this group. I’ve instructed Reems that you’ve been dropped from the project.”
I expected Rick to get angry. And given his size and apparent strength, making him angry didn’t seem a wise course of action. But all he did was shrug. “O.K.,” he said. “If that’s the way you want it.” And before Max could say another word he was out the door.
“I’m sorry I had to do that,” Max said in a tone that made it perfectly clear that he wasn’t. “But one thing we can’t have is loose tongues. Everything we discuss is strictly confidential. Anyone who doesn’t like it can get out.”
No one got out. On that note the Sagittarius project began.
CHAPTER II Gestation
…And so the “High Frontier” was born, not in a quest for new industry and opportunity, as the government would have us believe, but out of a need for hostages for our military hardware. So next time you see one of those ads touting the opportunity which knocks at New Hope, remember what they are really offering: an opportunity to be hostage to the murderous weaponry which orbits over our heads.
From U.S. Times article on the politics
of space.
When I’d been a graduate student at Harvard I’d talked about my research with anyone who’d listen. Usually the honor fell on Oscar Robinson’s ears. He was also a student of Sara Morse. Often I’d caught him in the graduate lounge and regaled him with my latest earth-shaking discovery.
“What about white noise filtering?” he’d ask.
“Details,” I’d say. “Mere details.”
But those details more often than not sunk me. I’d put up bright beautiful balloons and Oscar would shoot them down. For a day or so I’d mourn over the wreckage and then I’d be at it again with another idea. If Oscar couldn’t shoot it down I knew I really had something.
Now I was working on a classified project and Max made it perfectly clear that we weren’t supposed to talk to anyone. For me it was hard to take. Imagine how musicians would feel about being asked to play in a secret orchestra that never gave public performances and you may understand how I felt. Here was the most exciting discovery of the twenty-first century and we couldn’t talk about it.
We all sat around in Max’s office while he set up the Sagittarius file. Roger drummed his fingers on the coffee table and fidgeted with his tie. Tom leaned back in his chair and ran his fingers through his nonexistent hair until he spotted the long dark metal object on the coffee table. “Do you know what this is?” he said, brightening.
Roger shrugged, suggesting either that he knew what it was or didn’t care. I reached for it and Tom handed it over to me. It was heavier than I expected. It was thirty-two centimeters long with a red arrow painted on one end and a display screen on the other end. I couldn’t figure it out.
“It’s a space scale,” Tom explained. “Suppose you’re outside in your space suit and you’ve got a glass girder whose mass you want to determine. Now you can’t weigh it, there being no gravity, so you simply put the red arrow of the space scale against one end of the girder and press the little button there. Let’s try it on Max’s coffee table.”
I placed the red arrow against the top of the table and pressed the button. There was a loud pinging sound that so startled me I almost dropped it. Tom reached over and took the space scale from me. “According to this,” he announced, “This table has a mass of over nine hundred and ninety-nine metric tons.” He laughed and added, “Well, the table is rather firmly attached to the rest of New Hope. You know how it works?” he asked me.
I shook my head.
“Inertia,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “It measures the recoil…”
“You can play with that later,” Max said sharply. “I’ve got the file ready.” He stood up behind his desk and squarely faced us like a general addressing his troops.
Tom put the space scale down and turned toward Max. “I’m all ears,” he said, obviously anxious to see what Max had to show us.
“Gentlemen,” Max announced, “this is the alien message. But before I show it to you, I warn you that if certain jerks out there find out what we’re up to they will try and stop us. So our story is this: the alien message is a complete mystery to us. We’re trying to decipher it, but so far we’ve got nothing, not a glimmer. Understood?”
“Message received,” Tom said crisply.
Max typed an entry into the keyboard on his desk and gestured toward the large three dimensional view of Earth. We all turned just in time to see the image of Earth vanish. Now there was just a white screen with a black line across it.
“That’s it?” Tom asked.
Max made another entry and produced a white screen with two black lines on it. “These pictures are made up of black and white squares,” Max explained, enlarging a section of the picture so we could clearly see that the lines were composed of black squares. “Each of these pictures is two hundred and fifty-six squares wide. That’s just the number of channels in the alien signal. Each column of these pictures is generated by one channel of the alien signal.”
Max displayed a series of pictures. The first pictures were just lines, then triangles, squares and polygons. We were getting a lesson in geometry from an alien civilization. “So much for geometry,” Max said. “Now look at this.” There appeared a white screen covered with symbols like these:
x ⠄ ⠆ ⠦ ⠶ x ⠄ ⠆ ⠦ ⠶
xvx
x ⠄vx
⠄ xv⠄
⠄ ⠄v⠄
⠆ xv⠆
⠆ ⠆vx
⠆ ⠄v⠆
⠦ ⠆v⠄
⠦ ⠆v⠆
⠶
It was exciting to try to decipher these strange symbols. “Give us a second,” Tom pleaded when Max started to go on to the next picture.
“Okay,” Max conceded.
“Well, the ‘x’ must be their symbol for zero and the other symbols must be the digits one through nine,” Tom said.
“Very good,” Max said, impatiently scratching the back of his neck.
“And the ‘v’. must be the symbol for addition where you write the sum of the two addends below the ‘v.’ Let’s see, to write two plus four equals six you write…” Tom rushed up to the blackboard on the opposite wall and wrote,
⠆v⠶
⠄
with an electric marker.
“You get an A,” Max said, “in alien arithmetic.”
“But that can’t be,” Roger protested. “Binary is the universal language, not decimal. There’s no reason an advanced civilization would use decimal.”
Max turned his whole body to look at Roger, who was straightening the cuff of his jacket. “We’ll have to tell them to mend their ways,” Max said. “But there’s a very good reason they use decimal. They use it for our benefit.”
“Our benefit?” Tom said, almost rising out of his chair. “You mean they know we use a base ten system. But how the hell could they know that? Ten thousand years ago we didn’t have a civilization…”
“But they’re not ten thousand light-years away,” Max said. “They’re right in our own back yard. They picked up our early radio broadcasts. Rick figures they are about sixty light-years away. That means when they sent this signal they had just picked up our radio broadcasts of the early thirties.”
“Amazing,” Tom said.
“Look at this,” Max said, “if you want to see something amazing.”
There on the screen was a wiring diagram for a binary flipflop. The symbols for the transistors were different from those we use, but with that exception the diagram looked like it had come from a text book on electronics.
“This came from the signal?” Tom asked.
Max nodded.
“Incredible,” Tom said. “It’s incredible.”
“And look at this,” Max said, showing us a picture that was a mass of lines and symbols. “See this,” Max said, putting a circle around one of the symbols. “This corresponds to the binary flip-flop I just showed you. And look at this,” he said, showing us another frame. “They develop their own wiring code.”
Max showed us frame after frame of diagrams with strange symbols. For months he had kept all these incredible pictures to himself and now in his excitement he was showing them to us much faster than we could possibly absorb. We couldn’t follow the contents of the pictures but we could certainly pick up the electric excitement of this historic event. Out there was a civilization that wanted to communicate with us.
“It’s incredible,” Tom repeated when Max was through.
“It’s all here,” Max said, folding his arms across his broad chest. “They’ve given us a complete blueprint for the most advanced computer ever built by man. It’ll be smarter than we are.”
“But can we build it?” Tom asked. “Are you sure it doesn’t…”
Max unfolded his arms and held up a finger stopping Tom in mid sentence. He reached into one of his desk drawers and brought out a thin box, ten by fifteen centimeters and about a centimeter thick. At first I thought it was a small book. Max tossed it over to Tom.
“What’s this?” Tom asked.
“Punch in the numbers two, four, eight, sixteen and thirty-two.”
We all gathered around while Tom entered the numbers. As Tom entered the numbers they were displayed at the top of the board.
“Now press the question mark,” Max instructed.
Tom obeyed and the board displayed the numbers 64, 128, 256, 512 and 1024. The machine had continued the sequence Tom had entered for five numbers.
“That was an easy one,” Max said. “Try something harder.”
Tom entered a Fibonacci sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34. Then he pressed the question mark and the board continued the sequence: 55, 89, 144, 233, 377.
“How about the digits of pi?” I suggested. “3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 2, 6, 5, 3, 5,” I called out, showing off the fact that I had memorized the first ten digits of pi. Tom entered the numbers one at a time and then pressed the question mark. The board flashed zeros.
