The Lure (12 page)

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.

15

The Observer

The angel had Freya’s face and long blonde hair, and its wings spanned the sky. It was scattering counters at amazing speed in geometric patterns over the numbers on the roulette table. There was something behind the pentagons and butterflies and intersecting doughnuts, some unifying concept trying to get out, but as Petrie’s dream faded, the idea slipped frustratingly back into his unconscious mind. A bedside clock told him he had been asleep for four hours.

The corridor was deathly quiet. There were no cleaners, and his colleagues, he supposed, were still asleep. He had the entire Hapsburg castle to himself.

He took the stairs two at a time down to the first floor. Icy air was wafting along the corridor and he saw that the door to the terrace had blown open. He walked along to close it and was surprised to see footsteps on the thin powdery snow which had settled overnight on the terrace. Someone had crossed to the battlement wall, walked alongside it and turned back to the door. He followed the trail, looking over the parapet. There was nobody to be seen and no vehicles other than the blue Dormobile belonging to Gibson and his colleagues, snow-dusted and tucked in a corner. Tyre tracks in the snow were probably from the cleaners’ van.

Something flickered at the corner of his eye and he looked sharply up at the high tower, but there was nobody. He shivered in the bleak January sunlight, damned his imagination and turned back into the warmth of the castle.

Fresh bread, milk, vegetables and assorted groceries were piled up on the kitchen table. He filled a kettle and put a couple of slices of bread into an electric toaster.

Fed and watered, and faintly resentful of the time it had taken up, he walked along the empty corridor towards the theological library, anxious to coax back the conjecture which had come and gone in his angel dream. He was surprised to see the door to the computer room slightly ajar.

And even more surprised to see a stranger, his back to the door, tapping at Svetlana’s computer. Her notes were on the desk; the man had clearly been going through them.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

The man turned. He was in his thirties, with brown hair greying at the edges, and a tanned skin which told of years spent someplace hot. Brown, slightly watery eyes assessed Petrie through wire-framed spectacles. When he stood up Petrie saw that the man was lean and muscular, the sort who ran four miles before breakfast. His voice was English public school and surprisingly deep: ‘Going through the signal. Mind-blowing, isn’t it? But it can’t be for real.’

Petrie, taken aback, asked lamely, ‘Who are you?’

‘Hanning, Jeremy Hanning. And you must be Dr Petrie.’ The man gave a carefully judged smile. ‘I’m an observer for the Cabinet Office. I have to see what you’re all up to and report to Lord Sangster by tomorrow evening. It’s that simple.’

Warily, Petrie asked, ‘How much of a briefing have you had?’

‘The story is that you’ve been contacted by little green men.’ He nodded towards the terminal and gave an isn’t-it-silly smile.

‘And you don’t believe it. Does Lord Sangster?’

Hanning ignored the question. ‘There are five of you here, am I right? Two British, two Russians and a Norwegian.’

‘Yes. The original team was one Brit and two Russians. Freya Størmer and I were co-opted.’

‘How do you get on with the Russians?’

‘Fine.’

‘No, ah … differences?’ The man was studying Petrie closely. One eye, Petrie noticed, seemed slightly larger than the other, but he thought that might be due to a cold.

‘None – why should there be? Look, how do I know you’re not a journalist or something?’

More laughter, a touch too brittle. ‘We’ll phone Lord Sangster up, shall we? Let’s use the video circuit.’

‘First let’s get the team awake. Forgive me, but I think we have to make a communal judgement about you.’

*   *   *

There was a long teak desk at the centre of the administrator’s office. A black computer sat at the head of this desk, and a large video monitor sat atop the computer, and a wide-angle camera sat atop the monitor. Sangster’s face appeared on the screen, nearly filling it, against a background of books.

‘Simon Sangster here.’

Gibson sat at the opposite end of the table, facing the screen directly. ‘Lord Sangster, this is Charles Gibson, principal investigator on the Dark Matter Project. Good morning, sir.’

Sangster returned the greeting with a nod.

‘I have a Jeremy Hanning here. He tells me that you’ve sent him out to oversee the proceedings.’

‘Oversee is too strong a word, Dr Gibson.’ Sangster’s face was expressionless; he was making no attempt to be friendly or encouraging.

‘First, would you confirm that this is in fact Jeremy Hanning.’ Gibson played with controls on a keyboard and the camera swivelled round to Hanning.

‘Well, of course it’s Jeremy. Who else would it be?’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Back to Gibson.

‘Jeremy will assess the situation and report to me at nine o’clock tomorrow evening by the British clock. The main thing is to confirm that this is not some dreadful error and that you really have received an extraterrestrial signal. Have you identified the source?’

‘We’ll be working on that today.’

‘And I understand you say the message contains information of a biological nature.’

‘Yes.’

Petrie had a momentary, startling vision of Sangster as a calculating lizard. He put it down to a slight exophthalmic goitre coupled with deep eyelids. His lordship was saying, ‘What sort of information?’

Gibson hesitated. ‘We’ll be working on that too.’

‘I look forward to hearing from you tomorrow evening. Meantime, of course, security is everything.’

‘Agreed.’ Gibson hesitated again, licked his lips. Then: ‘But I intend to make a public announcement on Monday, whatever stage we’ve reached in our investigation.’

Later, and many times over, Gibson was to wonder why he had said that. Perhaps, he would wonder, he was unconsciously striking a blow in an ancient battle, defending a culture of openness against one of secrecy. Even as he spoke he sensed that something was wrong. Hanning cleared his throat. Shtyrkov, across the desk from Gibson, put his head in his hands.

Sangster was silent for a moment. His tone was icy. ‘That’s not your decision, Dr Gibson.’

Gibson swallowed. ‘Actually, it is. I’m the PI here.’

‘The facility is, however, financed by Her Majesty through PPARC, which falls within my department.’

‘You may finance it, Lord Sangster, but I run it.’

Damn it, Charlie, shut up. This is a disaster.

‘You may think so, but the fact that I finance it means that I also run it. HMG has ultimate responsibility for work carried out on its behalf. And there are assuredly dimensions to this discovery going beyond mere scientific interest.’

Gibson said nothing, but his face was showing open hostility.

‘Let’s not dig ourselves into trenches, Dr Gibson. We must talk through the implications of this discovery before we make it public. It’s in everyone’s interests to get this right. Jeremy, nine o’clock tomorrow.’

*   *   *

‘I won’t be done out of this.’ Gibson’s face was black with anger. ‘I’m not having this discovery announced by some bloody government minister.’

Svetlana, next to him, touched his shoulder in a gesture of sympathy.

‘That’s what’s behind this,’ Gibson continued angrily. ‘Sangster wants to pre-empt the announcement.’

‘For once I agree with you,’ Shtyrkov said.

Svetlana said, ‘So do I, Charlie. The announcement has to be made by the discoverer.’

‘Which is me. PI’s privilege.’

‘But I put twelve years into this machine,’ Svetlana said. ‘I get a slice of the cake.’

‘You do, Svetlana, of course you do.’ Charlie looked across at Shtyrkov. ‘We all do.’

Nobody mentioned that Hanning was excluded from the ‘we’; it was too obvious to need mentioning.

Petrie said, ‘You guys have been on this for years; I turned up two days ago. I don’t deserve an equal share.’

‘Tom, that’s not right,’ Shtyrkov said. ‘Your contribution deserves full recognition. Without it, where would we be? Your name goes on as part of the team. So does Freya’s.’