Free The Lure by Bill Napier Page A

than ET?’ Alarm and greed mingled in Gibson’s pale face.
    Petrie put the mug on a table. ‘Come through to the office.’
    The office smelled slightly of stale sweat. Petrie threw up the cartoon picture of the lake and rotated it to orient his little audience in three dimensions. Then he fired particles through the lake, tapping at the keyboard to progressively slow down the flow. As the movie slowed, the stream appeared at first like a blizzard sweeping through the lake at a shallow angle. And then, with further slowing, individual trajectories became distinguishable, patterns began to appear, complicated and swirling, with blank periods in between.
    And then Petrie explained about turning the lake so that it was face-on to the flow, and replacing each particle track by a point so that at any instant the lake was covered by a pattern of dots. And then he zoomed in on some of the fine structure and explained about the four-base arithmetic. And then he told them how he had stacked the microseconds of time on top of each other so that each slice of time became a thin slice in a jelly, so that the stacked slices defined a solid, three-dimensional structure. And then a century passed while Petrie tapped in a final set of instructions until, on the screen, slowly rotating and beyond any possibility of mistake or misinterpretation, was the double helix of DNA.
    Shtyrkov sang, quietly. Gibson said, ‘Oh man.’
    Petrie left it on the screen, tumbling slowly, hypnotising them; even menacing them. He felt his limbs covered with goosepimples. ‘I don’t know whether it’s even remotely human, but it’s surely biological.’
    There was a long silence, eventually broken by Shtyrkov. ‘How much time does this represent?’
    ‘The first minute of the transmission.’
    ‘Meaning?’
    ‘It’s only three per cent of the message. We have another thirty-six minutes to analyse.’
    Gibson said again, ‘Oh, man.’
    Freya said, ‘They gave us this up-front for a reason.’
    ‘Yes,’ Shtyrkov said. ‘They didn’t want us to miss it. That’s their starting point. They’re saying, “Hey, we’re life forms just like you.”’
    ‘Is this a hoax?’ Gibson asked hoarsely.
    Petrie looked up. ‘If it is, you’re not in on it, Charlie. You’re as white as a sheet.’
    ‘Look at us all,’ Freya said.
    ‘No, I mean someone monkeying with the equipment. Or something.’ But Gibson’s voice trailed off as the absurdity of his own suggestion got through to him.
    ‘Hey, Charlie, the lake glowed.’ Svetlana was speaking quietly, as if all emotion had now been drained out of her.
    ‘An external input of some sort? From a satellite? Look – I know it’s stupid.’
    ‘No, no, you’re right, Charlee. We have to think it through,’ Shtyrkov said. ‘We must eliminate everything, even stupid ideas. Keep them coming.’
    ‘What sort of particles were these?’ Petrie asked. ‘Can you tell?’
    Svetlana pointed to a far corner of the lake. ‘Can you zoom into that?’
    Petrie obliged.
    ‘Now go back to the original trajectories, not the points.’
    A cluster of parallel lines appeared.
    ‘Now turn them. Look at the lines face-on.’
    The lines shrank, turned back into points.
    ‘Right. Absolutely straight, no curvature. In that corner, Tom, about twenty metres under the water, we have a dipole magnet that weighs half a ton and gives us forty thousand gauss. If we swam anywhere near it with anything metal we’d be pulled under. If the particles were charged their tracks would bend near the magnet.’
    ‘And they don’t.’
    ‘Exactly, so they’re not cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are charged, they’d be deflected. We have half a dozen magnets like that under the water and we can do more checks if you like.’
    ‘Okay, Svetlana, if they’re not cosmic rays, what then?’
    ‘This time yesterday I’d have called them dark matter.’
    ‘And today?’
    ‘A neutral particle penetrating half a mile of rock? Unknown.’
    ‘A