That produced Bat’s longest hesitation so far. At last he said, “Your predictive model is new and intriguing, and it offers mysteries of inconsistency which so far I am unable to resolve. My instincts suggest that such a resolution could have far-reaching consequences. Certainly, this belongs on the four-sigma list.”
Bat paused, studying Alex as though the two men were just being introduced. The shaved black head nodded a few millimeters. “Before your arrival I had heard much about the Ligon family; all of it was, I am sorry to say, highly negative. You fail to fit my preconceptions. You have a genuine interest in and talent for intellectual problems. I would not find the prospect of another meeting, when I am on Ganymede, intolerable.”
One step at a time. Alex told himself that he had agreed to come here only because the family had pushed him, and he had never expected to succeed. Now when he returned to Ganymede he could report to Prosper Ligon and the others that, despite insane interference from Cousin Hector, he had made real progress. Rustum Battachariya had agreed to meet with Alex again — on Ganymede!
Magrit Knudsen was not there to provide Alex with a more striking evaluation of the situation. An agreement to meet again was the highest accolade that Bat ever offered to anyone. Alex had engaged Bat’s attention in the most powerful way possible: he had provided a puzzle too subtle and intricate to be solved at once.
In Bat’s upside-down universe, what could not be solved at once was not an annoyance; rather, in the best circumstances it would provide a source of ongoing pleasure and satisfaction for months or years to come.
23
Progress review meetings at Argus Station were held every Tuesday morning, starting at midday. This was Monday, ridiculously early in the, morning. Why was she being summoned to the conference room?
Milly — just out of bed, hair falling into her eyes, without breakfast, starved of caffeine, less than half-awake — answered the call and hurried to the meeting. Despite all her efforts, she arrived ten minutes later than requested. She entered, braced for a tongue-lashing from Jack Beston.
On the threshold she paused, bewildered. The room was empty. A gruff voice from behind her said, “Yes, you’re at the right place. We’re all late. Go on in, and let’s get things moving.”
She turned. Jack Beston was behind her, his usually ruddy face pale and taut. With him was the mystery woman, Zetter.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Jack said. He seemed to be talking to Milly, not Zetter. “Even before we left Odin Station, I knew that the bastard was up to something.”
Milly could tell from the intonation that ‘bastard’ was being used with a different meaning. It was now a description, not a name.
“Zetter,” Jack went on. He waved the two women to hard-backed chairs, and settled himself on a third with his arms folded over the back. “You tell her.”
Zetter’s vulpine face was uneasy, as though revealing information to anyone but Jack Beston himself was an unprecedented and dangerous activity. “We have received information from Odin Station,” she said. The sharp nose twitched. “Soon after you two left, Philip Beston sent a secure message to certain senior members of the Puzzle Network.”
“Secure, but not secure enough,” Jack said. “You’ve heard of the Puzzle Network, Milly?”
“Yes.” This was no time for Milly to go into details. She was too eager to learn what the Bastard had said.
“In brief,” Zetter continued, “Beston has proposed a working collaboration between Odin Station and the Puzzle Network. They would form a joint venture for the interpretation of the SETI message. He will make available to them everything that he and his team are able to discover. The Puzzle Network team, in return, will channel any results that they obtain to him, on an exclusive basis.”
“Putting it another way,” Jack said, “we’re screwed. The Bastard has signed up the top brains in the System at this kind of problem. Those characters work on fancy intellectual problems for pleasure. I don’t know how good they are, but I have to assume they’re the best.”
“They are,” Milly said. “The absolute best.”
“Then we’re doubly screwed. They’re nuts, but they’re smart nuts. The worst sort.” Jack slumped into a chair, his chin cupped in his hands. After a moment he looked up. “How come you know so much about this, Milly Wu? Did the Bastard come crawling around you, trying to get you involved?”
That was uncomfortably close to the truth. Milly headed in a different direction. “I know the Puzzle Network because I used to be part of it: In fact, I was Junior Champion three years running. I only dropped out when I found that thinking about SETI was occupying more and more of my rime.”
“That right?” Jack Beston’s eyes half closed to green slits. “Three years running?” Milly could hear the mental relays clicking over. “Zetter, that’s all for now. I need a few private words with Milly Wu.”
The thin face hardened, and Zetter’s mouth compressed to a tight line. “You wish me to leave?”
“You got it.”
“But our… source. What instructions do I provide?”
“Say, keep looking and listening. We’re going to handle the rest from here.”
Zetter nodded and did not reply, but as she left she gave a glare of hatred that Milly felt she had done nothing to deserve.
“Now, Milly.” Jack Beston humped his chair over closer. “If you were champion three years in a row, in your Puzzle Network days you must have built up quite a reputation. You must still have close friends there.”
There were things that you never said to your boss, no matter what the provocation. Here came one of them: “The hell with that, Jack Beston. I won’t do it.” Maybe it was lack of morning caffeine. “Not if you go down on your hands and knees and grovel.”
“I just might do that. But Milly, listen to me for a minute.” He eased his chair a few inches closer. “You started this whole thing. It’s called the Wu-Beston anomaly, but everybody remembers the Wu rather than the Beston. Which is as it should be. But you know, and I know, that detection is only part of the story, and not the biggest part. Nobody today remembers who dug up the Rosetta Stone, what they recall are the people who used it to decipher hieroglyphics. The Bastard knows this, just as well as we do. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s been thinking this way for years, he’s such a sneaky devil.
“But now suppose that you were part of the Puzzle Network team that worked on the interpretation of the signal. Your name would be associated with every phase of the work: detection, verification, interpretation. For all of history, the only name anyone would associate with the first SETI signal would be Milly Wu.”
“And Jack Beston. What would he get out of this?”
“The satisfaction of knowing he’d beaten the Bastard on all fronts. And Milly, you have no idea how sweet that would be. Can you do it? Can you become involved in the Puzzle Network interpretation effort?”
“No. That would be impossible, I’ve been away from it for too long.” But even as she spoke, Milly could imagine an approach.
She had not, as she suggested to Jack Beston, totally burned her bridges. In fact, less than six months ago she had heard from one of the Masters, Pack Rat, an older man with a taste for adolescent girls and a definite fondness for Milly (Puzzle Network Masters had to be smart, but no one said they had to be moral). He had sent her a puzzle, and invited her to have dinner. She had solved the puzzle the same day that it arrived, returned her answer, and declined the other invitation. But she felt sure that the door was open. Pack Rat had as good as told her that she was still a prime candidate for Master level in the Network.
Jack Beston was watching her closely. He was not, as Hannah Krauss had told her often enough, a man who easily took no for an answer. Rather, he took whatever he wanted. Milly, on the other hand, had taken as much of some things as she ever would.
She said abruptly, “Suppose I’m wrong, and it turned out to be possible for me to become involved in the Puzzle Network’s interpretation work. Then I would have to leave here. There’s no possible way that your brother would send information to Argus Station.”
“Of course he wouldn’t. We would have to travel to wherever the information center was located.”
“We. What do you mean, we? Who are you talking about?”
“The two of us. You and me. Now that we have a verified signal, our interpretation team can carry on here
