"The Gates" - читать интересную книгу автора (Connolly John)

XI In Which We Encounter the Scientists Again

NO GOOD EVER COMES of someone sticking his head round his boss’s door, a worried expression on his face and a piece of paper in one hand that, if it could talk, would shout, very loudly, “Bad! This is bad! Run away now!”

But thus it was that when Professor Stefan, CERN’s head of particle physics, saw Professor Hilbert hovering on his doorstep, with both a) a worried expression; and b) a piece of paper that, despite being white and bearing only a series of numbers and a small diagram, also managed to look worried, he began to feel worried too.

“What is it, Hilbert?” said Professor Stefan in the tone of one who would rather not know what “it” is at all, thank you very much.

“It’s the portal,” said Professor Hilbert. He had always liked the sound of that word, which fit in with his theories of the universe. Anyway, since they still didn’t know for certain what it was, he could call it anything he liked.

“So you’ve found out what it is?”

“No, not exactly.”

“Do you know if it’s ongoing?”

“We’re not sure.”

“Have you even found out if that’s actually what opened?”

“Oh, we know it opened,” said Professor Hilbert. “That part’s easy.”

“So you’ve proved that it exists.”

Professor Stefan liked things to be proved before he accepted the fact of their existence. This made him a good scientist, if not a very imaginative one.

“Er, no. But we strongly suspect that it exists. A portal has been opened, and it hasn’t closed, not entirely.”

“How do you know, if you can’t find it?”

A smile of immense satisfaction appeared on Professor Hilbert’s face.

“Because we can hear it speak,” he said.

If you listen hard enough, there’s almost no such thing as silence: there’s just noise that isn’t very loud yet. Oh yes, in space no one can hear you scream, or blow up a big spaceship, because space is a vacuum, and sound can’t travel in a vacuum (although think how dull most science fiction films would be if there were no explosions, so pay no attention to grumps who criticize Star Wars because you can hear the Death Star explode at the end-spoilsports) but otherwise there is noise all around us, even if we can’t hear it terribly well. But noises aren’t the same as sounds: noises are random and disorganized, but sounds are made.

Deep in the LHC’s command center, a group of scientists was clustered around a screen. The screen displayed a visual representation of what had occurred on the night that the collider had apparently malfunctioned. The scientists had painstakingly re-created the circumstances of that evening, restoring lost and rewritten code, and had attempted to trace, without success, the trajectory of the unknown energy particle, which now expressed itself as a slowly revolving spiral.

“So this is what you think happened to our collider,” said Stefan.

“It’s still happening,” said Hilbert.

“What? But we’ve shut down the collider.”

“I know, but I suppose you could say that the damage, if that’s what it is, has been done. I think-and I stress ‘think’- that, somehow, enough energy was harnessed from the collider to blow a hole between our world and, for want of a better term, somewhere else. When we shut down the collider, we took away that energy source. The portal collapsed, but not entirely. There’s a pinhole where there used to be a tunnel, but it’s there nonetheless. Listen.”

Beside the screen was a speaker, currently emitting what sounded like static.

“It’s static,” said Professor Stefan. “I don’t hear anything.”

The static whooshed slightly, its pattern changing as though in response to the professor’s words.

“We wanted you to hear the signal before we cleaned it up,” explained Hilbert.

“Signal?” said Stefan.

“Actually a voice,” said Hilbert, flipping a switch, and instantly the static was replaced by something that Professor Stefan had to admit sounded a great deal like a low voice whispering. The professor didn’t like the sound of that voice at all, even if he had no idea what it was saying. It was like listening to the mutterings of a madman in a foreign tongue, someone who had spent too long locked in a dark place feeling angry with all those responsible for putting him there. It gave the professor, who was, as we have already established, not an imaginative man, a distinct case of the collywobbles. Its effect on the other listeners was less disturbing. Most of them looked excited. In fact, Dr. Carruthers appeared to be having trouble keeping his tea cup from rattling against its saucer, his excitement was so great.

Professor Stefan leaned in closer to the speaker, frowning. “Whatever it is, it sounds like the same thing being said over and over. Are you sure it’s not someone’s idea of a joke? Perhaps there’s a bug in the system.”

Hilbert shook his head. “It’s not in the system. We’ve checked.”

“Well, what’s it saying?”

Professor Hilbert looked puzzled. “That’s the thing,” he said. “It’s a known language. We’ve had it examined. It’s early Aramaic, probably from around one thousand B.C. We’ve established that it’s a version of the same language we found embedded in our code.”

“So it’s coming from somewhere on Earth?”

“No,” said Professor Hilbert. He pointed at the image of the Event. “It’s definitely coming from somewhere on the other side of that. Professor, we may just have proved the existence of the multiverse.”

Stefan looked doubtful. “But what’s it saying?” he repeated.

Professor Hilbert swallowed. What might have been worry creased his face.

“We think it’s saying, ‘Fear me…’”