Anomaly (7 page)

The size of the slab was daunting, and he found himself wondering if this was such a good idea. But there was the football, less than ten feet away.

He held out the balloon, allowing the breeze to catch it, watching as it drifted close to the anomaly. As the balloon passed into the imaginary sphere stretching out from the upturned intersection, it turned and pulled toward East 45 Street. Teller was pleased to see that the balloon didn't pop. It made the transition between different gravitational orientations with ease. This might actually work, he thought.

Teller crouched as he approached the vertical mass of concrete, rock and dirt. He reached out with his hand, reaching through what he thought of as an invisible barrier, but there was nothing unusual. It felt no different at all. He touched the intersection on the other side. The road felt like a rough concrete wall.

Teller knelt down and leaned inside the anomaly. Immediately, he had to put his hand out to stop himself from falling head first into the wall that was the slow moving intersection. Gravity sucks, he reminded himself. With both hands on the concrete, he climbed up and onto the slab, falling forward clumsily on his shoulder, but he was in.

“You OK?” called Mason, already seeing he was fine.

“Yeah, I'm good,” replied Teller, turning around and sitting inside the anomaly on the concrete.

For a few seconds, he felt disoriented, a little dizzy. The world looked strange. He felt like he was sitting upright, with the balloon still pulling taut above him, but the rest of the world was now sideways. He stood up slowly, steadying himself. His inner ear was spinning slightly.

“You guys look funny,” he called out.

“You look pretty weird yourself,” replied Cathy, excited at seeing him standing sideways within the intersection. He looked like some bizarre kind of spiderman walking along a wall.

“The whole world looks like it's falling over,” he said, walking over and picking up the football. “The buildings look like the under-hang of some giant, surreal cliff. And all you guys look like you should be falling down, skidding away.”

“Hah,” cried Mason.

“How does it feel to live your whole lives sideways?” Teller asked, trying to be funny.

Susan was jumping up and down giggling with excitement.

“How does gravity feel?” called out Dr Anderson.

Teller jumped in the air a few times. Finch caught the motion on video. From where they were standing it looked like he was jumping out horizontally and flying back into what looked to be more of a concrete wall than a once bustling road.

“Feels fine,” he said. “It's not like walking on the moon or anything. It feels normal. No different to walking on Earth.”

Hmm, there's a thought, he realized, he was talking about the anomaly as though it were something that wasn't on Earth.

Teller tossed the ball out of the anomaly and watched as it rolled along the ground on the other side. To him, it looked as though it was rolling up a wall.

“OK, Neil Armstrong,” replied Mason. “I think we've had enough excitement for one day. Time to come home.”

Teller looked at the balloon still pulling upwards on the string.

“You said there was a concentration of hydrogen in the center of this thing?” he called out.

“Yeah,” replied Dr Anderson.

“I have an idea,” said Teller, turning away from them and walking toward the center of the circular slab.

“What are you doing?” cried Mason. “Get back here.”

“Just a moment,” replied Teller. “I have a simple experiment in mind. Watch closely. Hey, Bates, make sure the mass spectrometer is running.”

“Teller,” yelled Mason, while Dr Bates talked frantically with the NASA team over the radio.

Teller stood in the middle of the intersection. He was up on his tiptoes with the balloon stretched high above his head. He let go of the balloon and it sailed upwards from his perspective, sideways from their perspective. On reaching the center of the anomaly, it popped, bursting in a flash. The string, along with a few bits of rubber fell slowly back to the concrete slab beside him.

Teller looked up. There, in the center of the anomaly, was a soft glowing sphere. He smiled. For Teller, at least, this was no longer an anomaly.

“What the hell have you done?” cried Mason as Teller jumped down off the slab.

Teller landed a little awkwardly, falling sideways and almost crashing into the ground. That was going to take some getting used to, he thought. He was so excited he barely realized Mason was angry with him. He looked up at the Director of National Security, saying, “What?”

“What do you think you were doing in there?” Mason demanded again.

“Saying hello,” replied Teller nonchalantly. He was more interested in what Bates and Anderson had to say. They were both on the radio.

“So, is it lithium?” he asked.

“It's lithium,” replied Anderson with a smile.

“I knew it,” cried Teller, pumping his fist in the air. “We've made contact.”

“What?” yelled Mason, but his phone was ringing. It was the White House. He walked off to one side to take the call. Bates and Anderson started walking briskly back toward the main NASA observation trailer, Teller and the others raced to keep up.

“What just happened?” asked Susan, seeing her teacher's excitement and becoming wrapped up in it herself, but not understanding why.

“Yeah, what was all that about?” asked Cathy. Finch was still filming the soft glow at the heart of the anomaly as it lit up in the dim light of the early evening.

Mason was back from his phone call. Whatever the president had to say it was short and sharp.

“Teller,” he said. “Tell me you haven't done something stupid.”

“On the contrary,” replied Bates, speaking on behalf of Teller. “I think our elementary school teacher has had a stroke of genius. We might actually have some answers for you and the President.”

“Really?” replied Mason, not sure whether he was more curious, more angry, or more confused by what had just happened. Bates and Anderson already understood what was happening at the heart of the anomaly, as did several of the other NASA scientists. Finch made sure he was capturing the discussion on video.

“Take a look at this,” said Teller. “It will explain everything.”

Teller sat down in front of one of the computers set up in front of the research trailer and brought up a Google image search for pioneer plaque.

“What we have here,” began Anderson, pointing at the anomaly and unable to contain himself, “is a probe, probably a Von Neumann probe.”

“Precisely,” said Teller.

“OK, back it up a little,” said Mason.

Teller pointed at the image of an engraved golden plaque on the screen before them. The image of a man and a woman, both naked, was etched in front of the rough outline of the Pioneer space probe. To one side, a series of lines with dots and dashes all converged on a single point, the location of the Sun. Above that, were two circles while below was a crude depiction of the planets in the solar system, with the path the Pioneer spacecraft had flown as it left Earth and swung by Jupiter on its way out into deep space.

Teller composed himself, wanting to speak clearly and not end up tying his tongue in knots.

“When we became capable of interplanetary space flight the first thing we did was to send out a probe, something to explore the solar system on our behalf. But that's not all we did. On both the Pioneer probes and the Voyager probes we included messages, token gestures really, but messages intended for an alien intelligence. And with those messages we included a key, something that any technologically advanced civilization would be able to decipher.”

“I don't see what this has to do with the anomaly,” said Mason, rather impatiently.

“You will,” replied Bates.

Anderson smiled, grinning from ear to ear.

“OK, look at this image. Look at what we sent out as a message to any aliens passing by,” said Teller.

Mason looked, but from the blank look on his face it was clear he didn't see anything significant.

“The key,” Teller continued, “is these two small circles at the top. To us, they're the least significant aspect of the plaque. But, in reality, they're the most important part of the whole message because they're the key to understanding all the measurements in all these other diagrams. And what key did we use?”

“Hydrogen,” said Mason, as it began to dawn on him.

“Exactly,” replied Teller. “We used the transition state of an electron in orbit around a single proton, an excited hydrogen atom. We used hydrogen as our starting point to communicate with any extraterrestrial intelligence. We used something every alien civilization would recognize because it is the most common element in the universe, because it's the most simple element in the universe, and because it represents a common point of understanding between us and them.”

“And so the anomaly,” Mason began.

“The anomaly is using the same principle to communicate with us.”

“I don't understand,” said Cathy. She'd followed the argument so far, but there was a world of difference between a golden plaque and a massive sphere distorting gravity.

“I'm a teacher, a grade school teacher,” said Teller. “At times, I come across kids that can't read when they first come to school, so I start teaching them from the most basic of books. A is for Apple, and that kind of stuff. It has to be something easy to understand, a primer. But from there the child will develop progressively as they learn more. And one day, they'll be able to read Shakespeare. In the same way, the anomaly is communicating with us using a primer, the most basic book that describes the universe around us, the periodic table of elements. It's using the ABCs of the universe to talk with us.”

“Whoa,” said Mason. “You're saying it's alive.”

“Not alive,” replied Teller. “At least, I don't think so, not in the sense we would use of organic life. But there is intelligence. It spoke to us in the simplest language it could, saying, one proton, one electron. By releasing the balloon, we responded with helium, the next element in the periodic table, so it responded with lithium, the third distinct element.”

“So it's tit-for-tat,” said Mason, trying to get his head around the concept.

“Essentially, yes,” said Teller. “What's the next element? Isn't it one of the noble gases?”

“No,” replied one of the scientists standing by them. “It's a while before we start hitting the nobles. The next element would be beryllium. If we respond to lithium with beryllium the anomaly should respond with boron.”

“Ah, yes,” said Teller, scratching his head as he tried to remember the early sequence in the periodic table.

“So you don't think this thing is alive?” asked Mason, repeating his earlier question in a different manner. “Why not?”

“Well, robotic probes are capable of going so much further than a manned space craft. They're much simpler and lighter, so they can reach further. And, really, there's not that much need for physically being present, not with advanced machinery like this, especially given the phenomenal distances and the amount of time involved in traveling from one star system to the next, not to mention the risks associated with that. So they'd avoid a lot of headaches by sending a probe, something like an advanced version of Pioneer or Voyager.”

“Makes sense to me,” added Bates. Anderson nodded in agreement.

“You're getting all this, right?” Mason asked, looking at Finch.

“Oh, yeah.”

“So that,” said Mason, pointing behind himself at the soft glowing sphere at the center of the anomaly, “that's not something to be worried about?”

“Not at all,” replied Dr Anderson. “It's just the lithium reacting with the moisture in the air, and it's small, it's contained. It's roughly the size of a basketball.”

“We've got to get more elements together,” said Dr Bates.

“I'm on it,” one of the NASA scientists said, disappearing into the trailer and jumping on the phone.

“You said it was a probe?” added Mason, turning back toward Teller.

“Yes, sir.”

“So what is it probing? What does it want?”

“I don't know,” replied Teller.

“Guess,” said Mason. It was an order, not a question.

“Well, at a guess, it's going to start off by establishing a baseline with us. It's going to keep working up the periodic table until we can no longer reply.”

“Why can't we reply?” asked Mason.

“Well, once you get into the heavy elements there are gaps. We can produce most elements in a reactor core or a particle accelerator, but some of them have such short half-lives we'd never be able to stabilize them long enough to get them to the anomaly in any kind of reasonable volume. And then there's a whole bunch of elements we've never seen. They're theoretically possible, but we haven't been able to produce them. So the probe will pretty quickly come to understand our limitations, which makes sense, from its point of view.”

“How?” asked Mason.

He was asking a lot of open-ended questions, thought Teller, but this was good. Even if it was still largely speculative, at least they were starting to make some progress, exploring the possibilities.

“Probes like this are probably sent everywhere,” added Bates, expanding on the principle of a Von Neumann probe. “Their makers would understand that they would inevitably intersect with other civilizations at various stages of their development. This could have arrived during the Iron Age, or the Bronze Age, or during the Age of Enlightenment, before we had reached a level of technical innovation where we could interact with it.”

“Yeah,” added Anderson, seeing where Bates was going with this. “So it would have to have a lot of patience. It would probably be content to stay in its initial turn-your-world-upside-down novelty stage for several millennia as it waited for the inhabitants to reach the point where they stopped worshiping it as some kind of deity and started talking with it. The anomaly is probably programmed to wait patiently until the host species can isolate hydrogen and helium as distinct elements and start an intelligent conversation.”