Islands in different parts of the world? Was that where people had run to? Or were these military bases reporting to and receiving orders from HQ? It was bloody infuriating not to know what was happening elsewhere. Communication with the outside world had dwindled as everyone withdrew into secrecy and suspicion, as remote and isolated from one another as tribes of headhunters in the depths of the Borneo jungle. The global village was no more. The Tomb itself never transmitted for fear of hostile outsiders locating their position.
Ron Maxwell came in carrying a stack of magnetic tapes. Tall and thin and buzzing with nervous energy, he was Stan to Hegler's Ollie. He wore a brown one-piece coverall with an oxygen counter on the left breast pocket: Below a certain percentage it turned blue, then purple, then black. Some had audio circuits attached that trilled like songbirds.
"When are they due back?" asked Maxwell, dropping the tapes with a clatter onto his half of the console. He peered amiably at Chase through tinted spectacles.
"The deadline is nine o'clock tonight," Chase replied. Maxwell's daughter Fran was with the reconnaissance party that Dan was leading. "I should think they'll be back before then. Art's been telling me about your daily soap opera; pity we can't follow the plot."
"Maybe we can't," Maxwell said, brandishing one of the tape reels, "for the simple reason that it's in another language."
"What?" Chase stiffened. Surely they weren't back to the nonsense about aliens again? And why hadn't Hegler mentioned this? He got the feeling that private lines of research were going on all around him that he knew nothing about.
"Computer-speak." Ron Maxwell flipped the reel and caught it in his bony fingers. "We dusted off the weather-modeling computer--it hasn't been used for three years--and ran some of the tapes. Had to teach it Morse code first, and we're dealing with an unknown program, yet the computer recognized a distant cousin when it heard one. Overjoyed to hear a friendly voice. You could almost see its diodes glowing with pleasure."
"It was able to interpret the tapes?"
"Ah--no," Maxwell admitted, perching himself on the corner of the desk and swinging a lanky leg.
Hegler said tartly, "It didn't tell us anything we didn't already know."
"If it didn't break the code, what did it do?" Chase demanded.
"That's not so," Maxwell objected, carrying on the conversation over Chase's head. "We know--" He broke off, sighed, and spoke instead to Chase. "The messages from Emigrant Junction to the islands appear to be coded binary data: a master computer instructing other computers what to do. The answering messages are the computers feeding data back to the master computer."
"Data about what?"
"We don't know. Highly technical information for sure, but until we understand the program we can't say."
"As I said, we're no nearer interpreting the messages than we were before," Hegler put in, sounding pained and weary. "They could be military, scientific, or a new recipe for hamburger."
"Do you think you'll crack it eventually?"
"Bound to," Maxwell asserted, full of confidence. "All we need is time and that's one thing we've plenty of. Come back in three months and we'll have the answer."
"Might have," Hegler rejoined, twiddling the dial.
Chase stood up and eyed them both keenly. "You do realize this is absolutely vital. You've
Hegler looked over his shoulder and Maxwell stopped his leg in midswing.
"Why's that?" Hegler said.
"So we can start up in competition to McDonalds," Chase said.
When he told Ruth about it later, her reaction was, "I don't see the point, Gavin. What are they hoping to prove?"
"They don't want to prove anything. They're investigating a problem, or more accurately a mystery, that's all."
They were sitting in the recreation room that they shared with ten others, Nick Power and his family among them. There was no shortage of living space in the complex--in fact there was too much of it-- though communal sharing of facilities was necessary in order to save energy. There had been a suggestion to depressurize the corridors and stairways, but Chase thought it might be too dangerous. Most of the available energy went toward maintaining a breathable sealed environment; it was their most worrying problem.
"We know things are getting worse," Ruth said drably. "We don't need instruments to tell us that--just step outside."
"You don't think we ought to continue our investigations?"
