The analysis isn’t halfway finished.”
“Experience, and a thousand disappointments. I’ve been working on this for all my adult life. Sometimes I think I’ve seen everything that humans and the galaxy have to offer. Except what we’re looking for. A real SETI signal.”
“It’s there.” Milly wouldn’t stand for that style of negative thinking. “It’s there, and we’ll find it.”
“Good for you, Milly Wu.” Finally, he was looking right into her eyes. “Look, I told you you’re working hard, and I think you’re working too hard. I can see it in the bags under your eyes, and in your hands. You need a break. Would you care to have dinner with me tonight?”
A great compliment, to tell her how battered she was looking. Would she like a break? Of course she would. But there was Hannah, sitting on her shoulder and warning: “His two interests in life are the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the seduction of new female workers. You can feel free to refuse—”
“I don’t think I can go to dinner, thank you. I have too much work to do.”
It didn’t faze him at all. He stood, one hand in his pocket jingling keys or coins, the other touched to his brow. The little smile was still on his face. “That’s up to you. But if you care to change your mind, I’ll be in my quarters until six. You know where they are. Keep up the good work, Milly Wu.”
The sheer presumption of the man. He assumed that she would know where his quarters were. She did, of course, because Hannah had given her the complete tour. But what an arrogant bastard.
Milly turned back to her work. She was trembling and her mind felt fuzzy. She ought to eat. A couple more cells, and then she would take a rest. The results of the latest data cell were appearing, and the most damnable thing about them was that Jack Beston had called it exactly right. Some ship was bouncing around in the Egyptian Cluster, far out of the ecliptic, with no more idea of radio silence than an interplanetary call girl. The final evidence was unmistakable. But how had Jack Beston, with nothing but a few fragments of information, known?
Experience, he had said. Well, all the rumors confirmed that he had plenty of that, and in more areas than one. Lecherous creep. I should have stayed on Ganymede.
Milly had always prided herself on her power of concentration, but the effort to turn her attention back to her work took all her willpower.
The next cell was simple and should have been caught by the computer. The SETI array had picked up signals from a vessel in transit from Dione to Hyperion. All the clues were there — orbit close to the ecliptic, moving source, standard frequencies. It made you wonder just how much you could rely on the pre-screening programs. Maybe that’s the place where someone ought to tell Jack Beston to invest some effort. Not that the Ogre was likely to listen.
Milly rolled in the data for the next cell. Last one, then something to eat. This one looked different, so different that she ran her entire shell of standard programs without gaining any feel for the reason it had come through as an anomaly. The evidence accumulated slowly, and it was all indirect. First, the source was again far out of the ecliptic, and this time it came from nowhere near the Egyptian Cluster. That reduced the chance of accidental shipping signals by a factor of hundreds. Signal frequency and signal type were equally odd. Rather than being in the “water hole” between the neutral hydrogen and hydroxyl ion emissions, this was at dizzyingly high neutrino energies, where the resonance capture probability was correspondingly high. The trouble was, no human-made generator could fire a modulated neutrino beam at those energies.
Something was there. The question was, message or mirage? The universe was quite capable of producing energies so far beyond human ranges that the mechanisms themselves were still in debate.
Thoughts of food forgotten, Milly settled down to work harder than she had ever worked. It was an axiom of SETI: no matter what you think you’ve found, you haven’t. Go back, take another look at the data, and see what you’ve been doing wrong.
Milly transformed, inverted, deleted, amplified, and computed cross-correlations until her head spun. The anomaly persisted. It seemed to be outside the solar system, though there was inadequate parallax from recent motion to determine just how far outside. The signal also provided repetitive sequences. One of those, factored from a one-dimensional input data stream to a 2-D array using a product of primes, revealed a pattern of 1’s and 0’s that hinted at the outline of a circle. Deviations were so small that they looked like signal discretization error. Milly could imagine no natural process that would lead to that result. And the imagined circle had strings attached to it, filaments of binary digits which hinted at an internal structure of their own.
It was close to midnight when she gave up. She could make no sense of what she was seeing; or rather, she could make sense in exactly one way, and it was the one that all her instincts and knowledge of history told her was too good to be true.
What now? Should she do something with what she had found, or ought she let it simmer in her brain and take another look at everything in the morning, when she was less tired? The whole history of SETI was riddled with peaks of excitement, followed a few hours or days later by troughs of disappointment when a signal was not repeated, proved to have arisen within the solar system, or had some natural explanation. It was known as the “Wow effect,” named after a famous incident in the first decades of SETI when an impressive but fleeting anomaly was seen once — and never again.
Jack Beston’s own words from one of the weekly review meetings finally convinced her. He had offered a warning. “We operate here in the classic ‘hurry up and wait’ mode. I’ve been working the Argus Project for ten years. I expect I’ll be running it ten, twenty, thirty, forty years more — maybe until they drag me out of here feet- first. But don’t let that fool you into thinking that anything we find isn’t urgent. There’s no prize in this game for coming second. If you think you’re working hard, you can bet somebody on the Odin Project is matching you, hour for hour. They are a competent group, they’re well-funded, and they are well-organized.”
It showed respect for Philip Beston, the first time that Milly had ever heard Jack say anything positive about the Bastard.
“Don’t come to me with every half-assed idea or suspicion,” Jack had continued. “Check it out six ways forward, then six ways backward. But if it still checks out — almost everything won’t, I’ll guarantee that — you bring it to me, and only to me. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing, night or day, sleeping or waking, taking a bath or taking a crap, you come get me at once.”
At once.
Milly fixed her outputs in their final form and exited her cubicle. She did have the sense to close the door after her. If others at the Argus Station learned how far out on a limb she was going, she would be a laughing stock.
The station corridors were silent and dimly lit, powered down for what was by convention the sleeping period. Milly slowed her pace as she came closer to her destination. She felt sure she was going to look like a fool, if not to the whole station then at least to one person.
She knocked and pushed the door open. Jack Beston was inside, and he was not asleep. Wearing loose pants and an undershirt that revealed just how thin he was, he was sitting bolt upright at a small desk and staring at a large sheet of paper that seemed all mathematical symbols. He looked up, startled by Milly’s entry. His initial look of annoyance was replaced by a smile.
“Well, this is a surprise. It’s a bit late for dinner, but there are other diversions even at this hour. Why don’t we—”
“I want you to come with me. You have to look at something.”
An ogre he might be, but he was no fool. He caught the edge in Milly’s tone and stood up at once. “Lead the way.”
In his undershirt, with no shoes?
“I think I’ve found something,” Milly said. “If I’m reading it right—”
“Ssh. First rule of SETI, you can lead the way but you can’t lead the witness. Show me what you have. Don’t talk about it.”
He was, thank God, taking her seriously. There was no hint of mockery or derision in his tone. Milly hurried back through the quiet corridors, using her hands and feet to increase her speed in the low-gravity environment of the Argus Station. She could sense Jack right behind her, probably skeptical but still impatient.
“There.” Milly, opening the door to her cubicle to reveal the display, felt that she was allowed at least one word. He nodded, pushed past her — and closed the door before she could follow him in.
What was she supposed to do now? Milly stood and waited, simmering with anger and frustration. He didn’t know how to run the suite of programs that she had developed. He had no idea what tests she had performed. He
