Complete Stories (26 page)

“Face it, I was zonked. I’ll be the first to admit it. It’s incredible the effect that a little extra nitrogen in your bloodstream has. But I saw this bright spot back in the canyon and it looked like…like an altar. I was thinking of a movie I saw on TV one night,
The Idol’s Eye
. It felt like I was in some alien temple to steal treasure.” Morris gave Jane a special smile. He was proud to have done something unexpected for once. “So I entered the temple of the deep and there I found it, snagged in a big branch of white coral. Look, Julie.”

Morris took the striped cone out from his pocket and laid it on the table by Julie’s plate. Julie, a sexy, full-lipped woman in her early thirties, picked the cone up and examined its tip.

“It’s so sharp. There’s a sort of curly wire at the tip. Maybe it’s a part from some crashed airplane’s radio. Don’t resistors have stripes like that?”

Andrew took the cone. “That’s a thought, Julie. There was that big plane-crash this winter. The smugglers.”

“How did you know they were smugglers?” asked Jane.

“They never radioed for help. And no one could ever trace them. Some of the villagers saw the plane go down at night, all lit up.” Andrew turned his attention back to the little striped cone. “You know, it’s smooth enough to be man-made. And that really does look like a wire at the tip. Why don’t we smash it open?”

“
No
!” cried Morris. “It’s mine.”

“Yeah?” taunted Andrew. “And what about my thirty-seven-dollar knife? While I was swimming down to rescue Morris, he was busy breaking my knife. And meanwhile Jane was hallucinating some new kind of giant fish. What a zoo. These two were worse than the Kansans…and that’s going some.”

“Tell them about the Kansans,” urged Julie.

Andrew gave Morris back his cone and launched into a series of linked tales about the various wackos he’d guided into the depths. Julie chimed in with details. Once they got started, Andrew and Julie could talk all night. There was still no decent TV reception on Grand Turk, and the residents were accustomed to passing the evenings in endless yak-sessions.

Jane and Morris got to bed around midnight, exhausted and full of beer. One of the nightly thunderstorms was wandering around in the distance. Jane fell asleep quickly.

At four A. M. something woke her. She lay there wondering what, then remembered that there was supposed to be someone in bed with her. Where was Morris? She lay there for a minute, listening to the rain on Andrew’s tin roof. The sound of the water made her thirsty.

She found Morris at the kitchen table, bent over a sheet of paper, making notations. His free hand held the striped cone pressed to his ear.

“Jane.” He set the cone down, then picked it up again, eyeing it in wonder. “This is unbelievable. The pattern of stripes and the pattern of sound…they’re the same. This thing is specially designed to code up a certain string of numbers. The pattern is a noisy fractal.”

“What are you talking about? It’s four in the morning.”

“Look. Look at the rings on this thing.” He held the cone out to her. There were three solid black strips around it. Between the solid stripes were lots of smaller black and white stripes.

“So what. It looks like a coon-tail.”

“How many of the big black rings are there?”

“Three.”

“Right.
Three
. Now look at the two areas in between the big stripes.”

“They look like each other.”

“Right again. Note that each of them is cut in half by a smaller black stripe.
One
small black stripe in each. That makes a bunch of sub-areas, all identical. Each of these is, in turn, cut by
four
tiny black stripes. It goes on.” Morris displayed a magnifying glass. “I’ve got the first few levels:
three
,
one
,
four
,
one
,
five
. Now listen to it, Jane. The sound is the same pattern.” He proffered the cone.

Dutifully, Jane held it to her ear. “sss-s-s-s-s-ss-s-s-s-s-sss-s-s-s-s-ss-s-s-s-s-sss,” went the cone. There was a pause, then the sound repeated itself: “sss-s-s-s-s-ss-s-s-s-s-sss-s-s-s-s-ss-s-s-s-s-sss.” Three loud hisses, each of the intervals broken up by a quieter hiss, and each of the subintervals broken by four still quieter hisses.
Three
,
one
,
four
.

Jane sat the cone down and nodded at Morris. “You’re right. The patterns are the same. Can we go back to bed?”

“Jane, don’t you see? If the patterns are the same, then it can only be because they mean something. There’s an endless string of digits coded up in this thing. I think it must be an alien artifact. I can’t wait to hook the wire up to a signal analyzer.”

“How would an alien artifact get here?”

“Didn’t you hear what Andrew said about an unidentified airship crashing last winter? It must have been a UFO. Those giant whale-like fish you saw…they might be the aliens! This cone is packed with alien information! I’ll decode it with my new program!”

And decode it he did. As soon as they got back up to Boston, Morris rushed into his lab and hooked the cone’s little wire up to his computer. The cone began feeding out an endless sequence of digits, apparently the same digits as were coded up in the nuances of its shading. Breaking the code was not easy, but once a very large sample of the numbers had been examined it was possible for Morris’s decoding program to produce results. On May 9th the first print-outs appeared.

That day, when Jane came by to pick up Morris, she found him in the computer room, surrounded by a crowd of people: graduate students, professors, and a reporter from the Boston
Globe
.

“You’re saying that you have a whole library of books written by extraterrestrials?” queried the reporter. “Can you show me the books?”

Morris and the other graduate students laughed happily.

“That’s the library,” Morris said, pointing. “Right there.”

The striped cone rested on cushioned supports in a plexiglass box. The curly little hair of a wire at the cone’s tip was fixed to a cable leading into the lab’s incredibly powerful CRAY-3 gigaflop computer. The machine’s ink-jet printer was running. A secondary knot of excited scientists stood flipping through the pages of the print-out. Not wanting to disturb Morris, Jane walked over and asked them what they were reading.

“What I’m reading?” exclaimed one of them, a distinguished mathematics professor named Slade. Morris had taken Jane to a party at his house once. “I’m reading the solution to the Riemann Conjecture. I’ve spent my whole life working on this problem and now your husband’s decoding program has found the answer in a goddamn seashell from outer space.”

“Aren’t you glad?” said Jane. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

“No,” cried the professor. “It’s a disaster! I’ve lived for nothing!”

“Don’t be a fool, Slade,” interrupted one of the others. “What if it prints out a cure for cancer?”

“What makes you think that giant space-fish suffer from cancer?” snapped Slade. “And even if they did, why should we be able to understand their cure? Most of this stuff is gibberish. Only mathematics is the same for everyone. Only the mathematicians are going to be out of a job.”

Slade’s prediction proved false. Over the next couple of weeks, information poured out of the cone at an ever-increasing rate. Morris located a section of the code which served as a sort of index to the rest of it. Like some tiny horn of plenty, the cone disgorged not only brilliant mathematical monographs, but also new theories of physics, strange alien philosophies, and a complete history of the creatures who had built it.

Each day the newspapers and TV shows were filled with all of the newest facts about the extraterrestrials:

They call themselves the “Leutians.” They inhabit a world orbiting Barnard’s Star, a world completely covered with water. The water is as atmosphere for them; they float above their planet’s sea-bed like blimps over mountains. With no need for shelter, Leutians do not have our concept of society. Information is exchanged not by crowding together, but rather by long, powerful songs which reverberate the deeps for leagues and leagues. Owing to an existence in a sea’s constant flux, the Leutian world-view is quite essentially different from ours. They lack, for instance, our belief in the primacy of time over space. The events of a typical Leutian story or myth are organized not in terms of temporal occurrence, but rather in terms of spatial location. Most Leutian physics is still incomprehensible for us. Leutian mathematics places much more emphasis on geometry than on algebra; yet they have the answers to virtually every mathematical puzzle which we have ever proposed. Leutians have three sexual genders, the extra sex serving an enzymatic purpose. Their religion is very odd: rather than regarding God as large and powerful, the Leutians view Him as small and simple. In their discussions of God, the Leutian books refer to some hidden knowledge known only as the Joke. We do not yet know what the Joke is.

And so on. Jane and Morris began to tire of it. With the incessant round of receptions and interviews, Morris hardly had time for his new wife. And Jane herself had her own interviews to attend. After all, she was the only person who had actually seen the Leutians. Over and over she answered the same three or four questions: over and over Morris described how he had found the cone. When the government decided to organize a search for the Leutians off Grand Turk, Jane and Morris were happy to join in.

Thinking fast, Andrew had persuaded the government to buy him a five-million-dollar mini-sub. With an experienced deep-sea diver as co-pilot, Andrew explored the surrounding ocean bottom, finally finding some charred sections of the Leutian ship’s vast hull. The seekers speculated that the Leutian home-planet’s air was very tenuous, and that the creatures had been badly burned by the heat of entering the Earth’s atmosphere. The red splotches, which Jane had observed on the Leutians, took on a sinister significance.

Meanwhile a fleet of ships combed the island waters, sonars a-ping. Nothing. Andrew’s further searches were also unsuccessful. One by one, the reporters left Grand Turk. By mid-June, it felt like a second honeymoon. Though Jane wondered why Morris wasn’t eager to rush back to his machines, she postponed any inquiries. In any case, as far as money went, they were fixed for life. The U.S. government was buying Morris’s salvage rights to the cone. Instead of sponging off Andrew, Jane and Morris could now pay for the ramshackle comfort of the Turk’s Head Inn.

June 24th was a Wednesday. Jane and Morris had a pleasant lunch of daiquiris and lobster-tail salad, the lobsters fresh from Grand Turk’s waters. Happy and full, they wandered up to their room from the hotel’s shady veranda. Instead of air-conditioning, their room had a large ceiling fan, right over the big, clean bed.

“Morris,” asked Jane after awhile. “There’s something I’ve sort of wanted to ask you. Only we’ve been so happy here I didn’t dare.”

Morris smiled and kissed her. Success had mellowed him fast. “You wonder why I don’t want to rush back and play with my computer.”

“Well, yes. Don’t you have to take care of your decoding program?”

Morris made a face halfway between a grimace and a smile. “It’s not my decoding program anymore. One of the Leutian books had a better one. Nothing I could ever do with computers can match what those books have in them.”

“That must bother you. Professor Slade said something about having lived for nothing once he saw the answer to his big math problem in the Leutian books.”

“Slade. Slade’s crazy. What about lobster-tails? What about the beach?”

Jane knew Morris well enough to detect an edge of bitterness in these remarks. “But you miss the intellectual adventure don’t you, Morris? Don’t you, in a way, wish we could get rid of the cone and go back to the way things were?”

“I’m sure that someone like Slade
will
try to get rid of it,” said Morris. “But it’s impossible. There’s no way for us to lose the Leutian knowledge. That’s the Joke.”

There was a sudden pounding on their door. “Jane, Morris!” hollered Andrew’s voice. “Come quick! The Leutians have washed up on the south beach!”

Andrew drove Julie, Jane, Morris, and the lone remaining TV camera-man in his Jeep. Grand Turk’s south beach was wild and deserted, a prime place for beachcombing. Thick seaweed clotted the water, and the ocean waves beat in just as they did a million years ago. Ten meters out from shore, out where the shallows ended, lay the three bloated corpses.

Gulls and terns whirled above them, tearing off strips of the strange flesh. One of the hulks had swung around so that its tail rested on dry sand. A pack of wild dogs gathered there to fight over the meat. The Leutians’ huge purple eyes glared up at the sky like jewels in toppled idols’ heads. The smell was wild and sweet, smoke and ambergris.

“Oh,” cried Jane, “Oh, Morris, why did they leave home?”

Morris was looking up and down the beach with interest. He and Jane had never been here yet. He leaned over to examine a blue glass sphere, a fishing-float washed from who knows where.

“Why?” repeated Jane. “Why did they come?”