Doctor Po-selem tossed and turned in bed that night. He woke up three or four times, turned on a small lamp, and scribbled something onto the note pad he always kept by the bed.
His wife snuggled close and put her arm around him. “A new theory, Chris?”
“Hi, Honey. Sort of. More like . . . a way of saying something that I haven’t tried before. And every time I get it written down, it looks wrong.”
“Maybe morning light will bring clarity.”
“I hope so.”
The next day, Doctor Po-selem gave two physics lectures, but knew his mind wasn’t on them.
His students could tell too, and one of them asked if something was bothering him.
He affirmed, and apologized, but didn’t elaborate.
An hour later, he was glad to get home, and immediately sat down in front of the altar he had been assembling for the past six or seven years. It now contained twenty-three little statues of gods from around the world, seventeen religious symbols, and various other objects and tools, from an incense burner to a holy-water sprinkler, all of which he had studied in depth, but few of which meant much to him personally.
He lit a candle on the altar, then grabbed a note pad and began scribbling
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down phrases as they came to him. Frowns and grimaces revealed that none were quite right.
When a sheet became too full, he lit it from the candle and placed it in a small iron pot that already contained old ashes.
“Hi, Dad!” a teenage voice interrupted from behind.
“Hi, Son. How was school?”
“Not bad. I think I aced the chem test.”
“Great! Need a homework buddy?”
“Naa. Going skate-boarding with Jeremy. Besides, I can tell you’re communing with the gods of time-travel theories, or whatever.”
“Yeah, I guess I am. They’re . . . just not being very forthcoming today.”
“Hang in there!”
“Thanks, Son. Have fun with Jeremy!”
Once the house was again quiet, Doctor Po-selem scribbled one more phrase, burned the sheet, then sat silently with a dejected expression.
On Wednesday, after his first lecture but before the grad students arrived for seminar, Doctor Po-selem closed his office door, looked up a telephone number, and dialed.
“Hi, Shawn, it’s Chris Po-selem.”
“Good morning, Chris!”
“You know that sentence I get to put on the plaque on the space probe next month?”
“With the deadline coming up, I’ve hardly been able to think about anything else for the last two weeks! You wouldn’t believe how many people are offended by the rule that their sentences can’t be offensive to others.”
Chris chuckled. “My question is sort of about that.”
“Shoot. Got the rules right in front of me.”
“Is it okay if my sentence is encrypted, so it will just look like gibberish?”
Shawn was silent for a long moment. “Wow. You got me, there. It hasn’t come up. Everyone else WANTS the world to know what they said.”
“That’s what I figured. So . . . does that break any rules?”
“Well . . . first let me say that as soon as they’re published, day after launch day, every nerd in the world would set his mind to breaking your encryption
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. . .”
“Of course. I don’t have my final wording yet, but I’m using some strict criteria, and it won’t offend anyone.”
“Okay, it looks like you are slithering through the very thin gray area between Rule Seven and Rule Eight. But I warn you, if anyone decodes it, and is offended, I’ll give them your lecture schedule.”
Doctor Po-selem laughed deeply. “Fair enough!”
“Deadline is Friday at five!”
“I know. Thanks, Shawn.”
“Bye!”
Early Thursday morning at three something, Chris suddenly sat bolt-upright in bed and groped for the lamp.
“Theory properly worded,” his wife mumbled, still half asleep.
“I think so,” he said as he began scratching with the pencil, only to discover he was using the wrong end.
A minute later, finally able to focus his eyes, he succeeded in getting the sentence down. Actually, he admitted to himself, it was three sentences, but by using semicolons, one of the few punctuation marks allowed, he could make it into one.
He stared at it while his wife slept. In one sentence of less than one hundred characters, it said everything that needed to be said. It followed all the criteria he had set for himself from his personal and professional values, and from the advice of Priscilla’s team. And it wouldn’t offend a fly, even the most sensitive fly.
Now he just had to encrypt it so well, somehow, that no one on the planet would ever know what it said.
With a sigh, he placed his note pad on the bed-side table and fell into a deep sleep.
“Foreign languages?” a female voice said after Doctor Po-selem dialed a campus number.
“Hi, this is Doctor Chris Po-selem over in Physics. Do you have anyone who knows dead languages, like maybe one of the old native languages?”
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“That would be me. Doctor Jean Bo-hilson, at your service!”
“Jean, I have an urgent situation. Could I bring a tray from the cafeteria, with whatever you’d like, to your office sometime today, in exchange for a little help? I need to put a sentence into the most obscure language I can find.
It could even be pre-literate, as long as I can capture the spoken words in our alphabet.”
“Let me think . . . steak sandwich medium rare, chef salad, chocolate malt, lemon cheesecake . . . uh oh, the only time I can do it is one o’clock. Other than that, I’m in and out of classes all day.”
“I’ll take it!”
“See you then!”
As soon as he got off the telephone, he stepped into the outer office of the Physics Department, and to his delight, spotted a grad student.
“Bill! Can you do my one-o’clock lecture?”
Bill’s eyes lit up at the opportunity.
Of the four languages Doctor Bo-hilson offered, Chris selected the most obscure — a pre-literate tongue that was only known through one long story-telling session, made on a very early tape recorder, by the last surviving native speaker of the language.
Although Chris could see that the letters were correct as he listened to Jean speak the words, he had great trouble pronouncing the words himself because the language placed several sounds side-by-side that no modern language dared.
Doctor Bo-hilson smiled as she took another bite of her delicious lunch.
As he walked back to his office, Chris became aware of the great value of the folded piece of paper in his pocket.
“Math Department?” a young female voice declared.
“Hi, this is Doctor Chris Po-selem over in Physics. I need to encrypt a ninety-eight-character sentence. I need it today, early tomorrow at the latest.”
“You need my Rent-A-Nerd Service! Twenty an hour, one hour minimum.
There’s a student rate, but you already said too much to get that.”
Chris took a deep breath, then remembered that the deadline he was
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rushing toward was absolute. “Okay. When can you do it?”
“I’m about to go to a class, then I’m going dancing, so it’ll have to be tomorrow at nine.”
“Where?”
“Where else? Computer room.”
Chris was not happy getting the final step done on the last possible day, but at least he would have a few hours left if something went wrong with the Rent-A-Nerd Service.
“I’m not sure of the right term, but I want it as encrypted as possible without requiring the recipient to have any other information.”
The female grad student looked at the three sentences, in an obscure dead language, separated by semicolons. “It almost looks encrypted now.”
“I know, but I want you to pretend it’s not.”
“Hmm. Can I assume any standard keys, cipher pairs, or hash tables that the recipient would try?”
“No. You must assume we have not, and cannot, communicate with the recipient.”
“That rules out all the strongest methods. We can’t use an old-fashioned code. It’s not long enough that we can trust the recipient to figure out a cipher by letter-frequency analysis. Sure, we can re-break. That’s what children do to make secret codes — I started at five.”
She demonstrated by re-writing the entire thing, putting the spaces between words at different places than originally. “I left the semicolons where they were. What do you think?”
He looked. “I like that. Is there anything else we can do?”
“We could bit-shift or byte-rotate, if it’s going into a computer.”
“No, it’ll just be printed. Engraved, actually.”
She raised her eyebrows. “We could do an old-fashioned alphabet rotate, another kids’ trick. A becomes B, B becomes C, Z becomes A. But the question remains, how many times we rotate. Is there any number the recipient might guess?”
Doctor Po-selem’s mouth suddenly opened. “Seventeen!” he blurted out almost before thinking.
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“Okay. That still leaves the uncertainly of whether we shift forward or backward. Can we trust the recipient to try a few simple variations?”
Doctor Po-selem took a slow breath, and felt like he was stepping way out onto a limb. “Yes.”
She quickly scribbled down a translation key, and about five minutes later, had all the letters shifted forward seventeen places in the alphabet.
“That’s about all we can do without more shared assumptions with the recipient. You can re-break it until you think it looks just right. I prefer small bills, but will take a twenty if that’s all you have.”
Chris smiled and dug out his wallet.
Doctor Po-selem found a grad student for his afternoon lecture. He only had a few hours to make sure his message was just right. After getting a tray full of things from the cafeteria, he marked himself Out All Day, went into his office, and locked the door.
His hands trembled as he went through the entire process again, thinking over the needs of the situation, his own strange religious values, the suggestions he had received, and the steps he had gone through, with the help of others, to make the message accessible to his deity, hopefully, but hidden from human eyes, hopefully.
Four o’clock was upon him when he realized that if he stared at his note pad any longer, he would just want to burn it. Instead, he dialed a telephone number.
“Hi Shawn, it’s Chris Po-selem. How’s that for close?”
“Hey, you’ve got a whole hour left!”
Chris laughed, releasing some of the nervousness he felt. He dictated the ninety-eight letters, spaces, semicolons, and one period, while the other man typed them into his computer. Then he waited for the other to print it out and read it back, letter for letter.
It was perfect.
“Am I the last?”
“Nope. There’s one more, and if he doesn’t call by five, I’m putting in a little poem my daughter wrote about butterflies.”
Doctor Chris Po-selem, physicist, smiled. Somehow it felt right that his
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little message would share the plaque on the space probe with a poem about butterflies.