long table. “Let’s not mess around here. You know what we came here for and what we want, and we know exactly what you want.”
Philip Beston raised an eyebrow at Milly. “I had intended to proceed with the usual civilities, and offer you refreshments after your long journey. However, if you feel the urge to get down to business at once…”
“We do.” Jack seemed as nervous as Philip was relaxed. “Are you set up already for verification?”
“As ready as we can be, given the absence of critical information. The arrays are all in position, we merely have to set them to their correct phases.”
Even Philip showed a trace of tension with those words. Milly felt the atmosphere in the room slowly tightening. The problem from Jack Beston’s point of view was quite simple. Odin Station had receiving equipment as good as that at Argus Station. There would be little to choose between them when it came to sensitivity. The big question was, to which direction in space should the array of receivers be tuned? Without that information, Philip Beston would be hunting blind.
On the other hand, as soon as Jack provided the signal direction to his brother, the two of them would be on an equal footing. Odin Station would presumably skip the detection analysis that Milly and the team at L-4 had performed; if the signal were verified, they would be equally well-equipped to tackle the all-important problem of signal interpretation.
There was a long silence. Jack Beston, having hurried so far and so fast, appeared to be having second thoughts. At last his brother prompted him: “I assume that the signal is still there? That it didn’t show up for awhile, and then go away?”
Jack merely gave him a cynical glance. Milly could see Jack’s point. If the signal had vanished, the array of sensors in Odin Station had not previously been tuned to the right direction. Therefore, there could be no verification. The signal needed to be observed simultaneously from both the L-4 and L-5 locations.
“Look,” Philip Beston said at last. “I know exactly how you feel about this. I’d feel the same way myself if our positions were reversed. But I’ve had my top team in position and awaiting your arrival for hours. If you want to change your mind, get back into your ship, and return to Argus Station…”
“No, I’m suspicious — just like you — but I’m not dumb. The signal is still there, of course it’s still there. Or at least, it was an hour ago when I checked back to base from our ship.”
“Regular light speed signals?” Philip Beston shook his head. “You know, if we wanted to do this as accurately as possible, we should arrange for entanglement between your computers and mine. That way, we would not have to compensate all the time for signal delays.”
“Sure. I’d be willing — if you would.” Jack locked glances with his brother, and after a few moments both shook their heads. Milly realized she had just witnessed a significant interaction. Entanglement of the computers would zero out communication delays; but it would also vastly increase the risk that the secret information of one station would become accessible to the other. Neither brother was willing to permit that. Clearly, each felt that he had some sort of competitive edge, even though Jack had won the first round by detecting an anomaly.
Jack was drumming his fingers on the tabletop staring at nothing. Finally he glanced up to Milly. “All right. Go ahead.”
“Provide coordinates?”
“You’ve got it.” Jack turned to Philip. “I assume it’s necessary for us to say this only once? Everything in this room is being recorded?”
“Just imagine that the positions were reversed, think how you would proceed, and assume that the same applies here.” Philip Beston had lost any trace of his original relaxed air. He was tenser than his brother as he turned to Milly. “The coordinates of the signal source, if you would be so kind.”
Milly didn’t need to consult notes. “As of 5:82:34 hours on 97/09/04, the source coordinates in the ecliptic standard reference frame of 2050 were as follows: declination, 38 degrees 22 minutes 17.3 seconds south, azimuth 231 degrees 54 minutes 52.6 seconds. The signal fall-off from the observed direction of signal maximum followed a circular normal distribution, with a one-sigma value of 1.3 arc seconds. No motion of the signal source was detected over a five week period of observation. However, for the first three weeks the array tuning was not exact, so a movement in position of less than twenty seconds of arc would have been undetectable.”
“Thank you.” Philip sounded breathless. “What is the source direction relative to an L-4 to L-5 baseline?”
“A little more than thirty-two degrees. The angle is not optimal.”
“But it’s pretty good. We lose only a factor of two in angular resolution. It will take my staff approximately ten minutes to tune our most sensitive arrays to that direction, but after that they have to make preliminary observations and perform an optimizing scan. We have maybe an hour to wait for results. During that time, I would be very happy to offer a tour of Odin Station.” Philip glanced at Jack. “There will of course be a few places that I do not feel free to show you.”
Jack shook his head. “Not for me. Milly, you go if you feel interested.”
Milly nodded.
Philip took her by the arm. “If I may make so bold… I consider this a reasonable decision on both your parts. I suspect that my brother knows the inside of Odin Station as well as anyone here, despite the fact that this is his first visit.”
That comment, Milly felt sure, was intended for Jack more than her. Both brothers had been spying on each other in every way possible for years. Milly wondered if she would see the “insider” whom Zetter had indirectly referred to in Milly’s first staff meeting with the Ogre. One thing for sure: if she did see that insider, there would be not a hint to suggest a relationship with Jack Beston and Odin Station.
Milly allowed Philip Beston to lead her through the interior. She saw the detection analysis teams, although only through glass partitions, and she was not invited to go in and meet them; she saw the door marked interpretation team only, and speculated on the activity that might be going on within; she looked out of ports, through which she could view the big distributed antenna arrays, now turning, little by little, to optimize for the acceptance of a signal from a particular direction in space.
Not just any particular direction, either. Her direction, the direction of the Wu-Beston anomaly.
Philip Beston was obviously proud of his equipment and his work team, but Milly was taking in what she saw only with some peripheral area of her brain. The central part of her attention was focused on the verification procedure which was now beginning, and on the question that would be answered in the next few hours: How far away is the detected signal?
The massive arrays of detectors, at Argus Station and Odin Station could pinpoint the direction of a distant source to half an arc second or better. The two stations were separated by about 1.3 billion kilometers, one ahead of and the other trailing Jupiter by sixty degrees in the planet’s revolution around the sun. Because of that long baseline, Odin Station, Argus Station, and the distant signal source formed the vertices of a very tall and narrow triangle. Observing the directions of the source as seen from the two observing stations provided the tiny angle at the apex of that extended triangle. Angle information, together with the length of the baseline between the stations, was enough to determine the distance of the signal source.
In practice, the observations provided only a lower limit for distance. If a source was too far away, no angular difference would be observed as seen from Jovian L-4 and Jovian L-5 points, which left the actual distance undefined. However, that result would be quite satisfactory to Milly. It would establish that the signal source, wherever it was, was far out among the stars and not in the immediate neighborhood of the solar system.
Milly knew the numbers by heart. The angle of the source direction relative to the baseline joining Jovian L-4 and Jovian L-5 was 32 degrees. If the parallax — the difference in direction of the source as seen from Odin Station and from Argus Station — was one second of arc, then the source must be at a distance of fifteen light years. A measured parallax of half a second of arc would mean the source was twice as far away, at least thirty light-years. One-tenth of a second of arc was beyond the resolving power of the arrays at the two observing stations. All you could say then was that the signal emanated from somewhere at least fifty light-years distant.
Philip Beston must have noticed Milly’s incomplete attention. He glanced at his watch. “You’ve probably seen as much of this as you want to, and I’m sure you have other things on your mind. We won’t have results for another half hour or so. Would you like to go back to your rooms? Or could I interest you in a light snack and perhaps a cup of tea?”
Milly did feel that she ought to get back to Jack. On the other hand, what would they do then? Sit around, stare at each other, and wait? That was not the most thrilling way of spending time until the results came through.
