nothing.
A few of the telescopes, the duty officer could see, were devoted to picking up some missed data in Hercules. The remainder were aiming, boresighted, at an adjacent patch of sky, the next constellation east of Hercules. To people in the eastern Mediterranean a few thousand years ago, it had resembled a stringed musical instrument and was associated with the Greek culture hero Orpheus. It was a constellation named Lyra, the Lyre.
The computers turned the telescopes to follow the stars in Lyra from starrise to starset, accumulated the radio photons, monitored the health of the telescopes, and processed the data in a format convenient for their human operators. Even one duty officer candies, a coffee machine, a sentence in elvish runes out of Tolkien by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford, and a bumper sticker reading BLACK HOLES ARE OUT OF SIGHT, Willie approached the command console. He nodded pleasantly to the afternoon duty officer, now collecting his notes and preparing to leave for dinner. Because the day's data were conveniently summarized in amber on the master display, there was no need for Willie to inquire about the progress of the preceding hours.
“As you can see, nothing much. There was a pointing glitch—at least that's what it looked like—in forty- nine,” he said, waving vaguely toward the window. “The quasar bunch freed up the one-tens and onetwenties about an hour ago. They seem to be getting very good data.”
“Yeah, I heard. They don't understand…”
His voice trailed off as an alarm light flashed decorously on the console in front of them. On a display marked “Intensity vs. Frequency” a sharp vertical spike was rising.
“Hey, look, it's a monochromatic signal.”
Another display, labeled “Intensity vs. Time,” showed a set of pulses moving left to right and then off the screen.
“Those are numbers,” Willie said faintly. “Somebody's broadcasting numbers.”
“It's probably some Air Force interference. I saw an AWACS, probably from Kirtland, about sixteen hundred hours. Maybe they're spoofing us for fun.”
There had been solemn agreements to safeguard at least some radio frequencies for astronomy. But precisely because these frequencies represented a clear channel, the military found them occasionally irresistible. If global war ever came, perhaps the radio astronomers would be the first to know, their windows to the cosmos overflowing with orders to battle-management and damage-assessment satellites in geosynchronous orbit, and with the transmission of coded launch commands to distant strategic outposts.
Even with no military traffic, in listening to a billion frequencies at once the astronomers had to expect some disruption. Lightning, automobile ignitions, direct broadcast satellites were all sources of radio interference.
But the computers had their number, knew their characteristics and systematically ignored them. To signals that were more ambiguous the computer would listen with greater care and make sure they matched no inventory of data it was programmed to understand. Every now and then an electronic intelligence aircraft on a training mission—sometimes with a radar dish coyly disguised as a flying saucer camped on its haunches—would fly by, and Argus would suddenly detect unmistakable signatures of intelligent life. But it would always turn out to be life of a peculiar and melancholy sort, intelligent to a degree, extraterrestrial just barely. A few moths before, an F- 29E with state-of-the-art electronic countermeasures passed overhead at 80,000 feet and sounded the alarms on all 131 telescopes. To the unmilitary eyes of the astronomers, the radio signature had been complex enough to be a plausible first message from an extraterrestrial civilization.
But they found the westernmost radio telescope had received the signal a full minute before the easternmost, and it soon become clear that it was an object streaking through the thin envelop of air surrounding the Earth rather than a broadcast from some unimaginably different civilization in the depths of space. Almost certainly this one was the same thing.
The fingers of her right hand were inserted into five evenly spaced receptacles in a low box on her desk.
Since the invention of this device, she was able to save half an hour a week. But there hadn't really been a great deal to do with that extra half hour.
“And I was telling Mrs. Yarborough all about it. She's the one in the next bed, now that Mrs.
Wertheimer passed on. I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I take a lot of credit for what you've done.”
“Yes, Mother.”
She examined the gloss on her fingernails and decided that they needed another minute, maybe a minute- thirty.
“I was thinking about that time in fourth grade—remember? When it was pouring and you didn't want to go to school? You wanted me to write a note the next day saying you'd been out because you were sick. And I wouldn't do it. I said, “Ellie, apart from being beautiful, the most important thing in the world is an education. You can't do much about being beautiful, but you can do something about an education. Go to school. You never know what you might learn today. ” Isn't that right?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“But, I mean, isn't that what I told you then?”
“Yes, I remember, Mom.”
The gloss on her four fingers was perfect, but her thumb still had a dull matte appearance.
“So I got your galoshes and your raincoat—it was one of those yellow slickers, you looked cute as a button in it—and scooted you off to school. And that's the day you couldn't answer a question in Mr.
Weisbrod's mathematics class? And you got so furious you marched down to the college library and read up on it till you knew more about it than Mr. Weisbrod. He was impressed. He told me.”
“He told you? I didn't know that. When did you talk to Mr. Weisbrod?”
“It was a parent-teacher meeting. He said to me, “That girl of yours, she's a spunky one. ” Or words to that effect. “She got so mad at me, she became a real expert on it. ” “Expert. ” That's what he said. I know I told you about it.”
Her feet were propped up on a desk drawer as she reclined in the swivel chair; she was stabilized only by her fingers in the varnish machine. She felt the buzzer almost before she heard it, and abruptly sat up.
“Mom, I gotta go.”
“I'm sure I've told you this story before. You just never pay attention to what I'm saying. Mr.
Weisbrod, he was a nice man. You never could see his good side.”
“Mom, really, I've gotta go. We've caught some kind of bogey.”
“Bogey?”
“You know, Mom, something that might be a signal. We've talked about it.”
“There we are, both of us thinking the other one isn't listening. Like mother, like daughter.”
“Bye, Mom.”
“I'll let you go if you promise to call me right after.”
“Okay, Mom. I promise.”
Through the whole conversation, her mother's need and loneliness had elicited in Ellie a wish to end the conversation, to run away. She hated herself for that.
Briskly she entered the control area and approached the main console.
“Evening, Willie, Steve. Let's see the data. Good. Now where did you tuck away the amplitude plot? Good. Do you have the interferometric position? Okay. Now let's see if there's any nearby star in that field of view. Oh my, we're looking at Vega. That's a pretty near neighbor.”
Her fingers were punching away at a keyboard as she talked.
“Look, it's only twenty-six light-years away. It's been observed before, always with negative results. I looked at it myself in my first Arecibo survey. What's the absolute intensity? Holy Toledo. That's hundreds of janskys. You could practically pick that up on your FM radio.
“Okay. So we have a bogey very near to Vega in the plane of the sky It's at a frequency around 9. 2 gigahertz, not very monochromatic: The bandwidth is a few hundred hertz. It's linearly polarized and it's transmitting a set of moving pulses restricted to two different amplitudes.”
