Signal

Part Three

“Yeh! come in!”

Dipak gingerly opened the door of his tutors study and stepped in. The stuffy little office was rather more like a stationery cupboard. Both walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled rather haphazardly with books and papers and a small dirty window in the back wall that let in a diffused light. More books and sheaves of papers were stacked up untidily on the floor and even a few on the two upright chairs in front on the Professor’s desk. The professor was grinning and gesticulating wildy from behind three large computer screens and a large laptop on his desk along with more papers covering every available space.

“Hi Dippy, come on in”, he muffled whilst stuffing his moustachioed face with a ham sandwich.

Professor Alistair McTavish was Dipak’s degree tutor here at the Imperial College. He was an ebullient and enthusiastic proponent of his subject and liked to dazzle his students with overtly dramatic performances, squeezing as much Shakespeare into quantum physics as was humanely possible. His large grizzled frame and broad shoulders were a stark contrast to the young scrawny Dipak. As a diminutive but bright member of the quantum physics group, he had been taken under McTavish’s tutelage and had truly found his forte in the subject.

However, the degree course had just concluded and Dipak had been surprised to receive a summons to see the Professor on the same day that he had just received his results — a First class degree with honours in theoretical physics.

“Mm! — what to do think of this then old bean?”

Dipak squeezed round behind the professors desk to peer at his computer screen which showed a global schematic from the preliminary findings of the Geophysics team at the University of Alaska who were studying the Old Crow gravitational event of the previous year. “Look at these results! The gravitational flux caused the whole geode to wobble!”

Dipak was impressed by the scale and speed of the gravitational shock that had spread around the planet following the event. But his eyes were immediately drawn to a series of photographs in a printed copy of the report on his desk. One showed the a night-time view over the densely forested Yukon, presumably a still frame from a webcam on the top of a…