very well without me.”
“I believe that. But what would you do on Ganymede? Carry my bags? Because I can assure you of one thing: no one is admitted to the higher levels of the Puzzle Network without a track record and sponsors.”
His face went from pale to bright red. Milly was ready for the Ogre’s patented bellow of rage, but it never came. Instead, Jack took a deep breath, then said quietly, “I’m sure you are right. If I go to Ganymede, I will do whatever is most helpful in interpreting the signal.” And then, more intensely, “Milly, you have to understand how I feel. This SETI project is terribly important to me. I’ve devoted most of my life to it, and I can’t stand the idea of being anywhere but at the center of the action.”
“When I came here I was willing to devote my life to this, too. But I almost quit in the first few weeks. You’ve been running the place for too long, Jack Beston. It’s your money, and it’s your project, and Argus Station is your station.”
“Well?” He seemed bewildered. “Who else would you have run it?”
“That’s not the point. You feel that because you’re the boss you’re entitled to treat everyone like dirt. And maybe you are — while you are here. But if you were to go with me to Ganymede, and it’s a big if, I wouldn’t take your bullying anymore.”
“Have I bullied you?”
“What! Of course you have. You’ve bullied everybody. People only stay because they’re in love with the work. Did you know that when we were over at Odin Station, Philip Beston asked me to come and work with him?”
“My brother? The bastard!”
“That’s right, the Bastard. And I have to tell you, I was tempted.”
“But you told him no.”
“That’s right. I told him no.” Milly would never mention what else she had told Philip Beston — that Jack was worth ten of him. “Now I’m telling you no. No more treating me like a child. No cussing me out or cutting me down in front of other people. And not just me. Try giving all your staff the respect they deserve. They are competent, they are hardworking, and they have earned your respect.”
A month ago, those words would surely have been followed by Milly’s instant dismissal. Now she sensed that the dynamics had changed. Jack Beston needed her more than she needed the Ogre.
She knew she was right when he leaned forward to rest his chin on his forearms, crossed along the back of the chair. His green eyes gazed up at her through bushy red eyebrows, and he said, “I’ll tell you one person who’s certainly competent, and that’s Hannah Krauss. She read through your entire background, and she told me: ‘I recommend that we make an offer, only don’t kid yourself about what you’re getting when you hire this one. She’s young, but she’s a tiger. She’ll cause you trouble.”
“I’m not a tiger.” Milly remembered Uncle Edgar’s words. “Let them think you’re a mouse, girl. Just don’t tell them what those black and yellow stripes are, and keep your mouth closed when you smile.”
“Fine.” Jack stood up. “You’re not a tiger. I’ll remind you of that when we get to Ganymede.”
“You’re not going to fire me?”
“I guess I’m not.” Jack had an unreadable little smile on his face. “Not today, at any rate. I may not be as smart as Philip—”
“The Bastard.”
“The Bastard. But I do know when to keep quiet. Mean-while, there is other excitement this morning. The clean-up team worked all night, and first thing this morning they called to tell me they have the final signal as tight and tidy as it will come. Want to take a look?”
“Yes! My God, yes.”
“I thought you would say that.” He was studying her face. “Before we go over there, though, I have another suggestion. You have the look of a starving woman. You and I should go and hunt up some breakfast. While we eat you can tell me everything else that I’m doing wrong. There’s no better way to begin the working week.”
The final signal was a string of twenty-one billion binary digits. It had been received over and over, until two weeks ago it had finally ceased. Now that direction in the sky offered nothing but the random white-noise hiss of the interstellar background.
The signal was still not ready for analysis. First, it needed correction. A more sophisticated version of the Bellman’s rule — “What I tell you three times is true” — was applied to find and correct dropped, added, or errant digits. The repeated strings were compared, digit by digit, and rare discrepancies corrected by majority rule. Arnold Rudolph, looking even more ancient and tiny than ever, had reviewed the final output, and given it his seal of approval. The sequence was error-free.
“But as to what that means…” Rudolph stared at the others in the room. “You now pass into an area in which I claim no expertise. I will say only this, which I am sure has already occurred to all of you: a sequence of twenty- one billion binary digits could encode the entire human genome, three times over.”
In addition to Milly and the Ogre, Pat Tankard and Simon Bitters were also present. No one laughed. Arnold Rudolph was referring to a suggestion almost as old as SETI itself: the notion that the first message from the stars might be the prescription not for a universal encyclopedia, nor a complex series of machines, but the information needed to build a living organism. That made the major assumption that alien life, like life in the solar system, would be built around a four-letter molecular code. Assign binary digit pairs to nucleotide bases; say, (0,0) = adenine, (0,1) = cytosine, (1,0) = guanine, and (1,1) = thymine; then any sequence containing an even number of binary digits was equivalent to a segment of a DNA molecule. You would make that DNA molecule, put it into a suitable environment for replication, and see what developed.
No one on Argus Station laughed at Arnold Rudolph’s comment; on the other hand, no one took it too seriously. The idea would be checked — a billion possibilities would be checked during the interpretation effort — but the general feeling was, the game couldn’t possibly be that easy. The search for a signal had taken a century and a half. The search for meaning might take as long.
There was another argument against the idea of the signal being biological. Turn the situation around and ask, how valuable would it be to send off to the stars the genetic description of a human? Even if some alien group were able to decipher the signal and provide an appropriate environment in which an embryo might grow, at the end of all that effort they would have a newborn baby. The aliens would know how a human lived and functioned, but nothing at all about what humans as a species had learned. Far better to send information about science and the technologies which aliens might find valuable.
Jack Beston stared at the screen, where the first infinitesimal section of the signal sequence was displayed. It appeared like a totally random string of 0’s and 1’s. “We’ll try the biological approach, of course, even if we all think it’s an unlikely answer. We can’t afford to overlook something just because it resembles the way we developed. But I suspect we’re more likely to make progress with physics or mathematics.”
That too was standard orthodoxy. Biological organisms would tend to be specific to their planetary origins. Physics and mathematics should be the same all over the universe.
The others looked at Jack Beston, waiting for more direction. When he offered none, Pat Tankard said hesitantly, “We already know that the total sequence length has a moderate number of factors — it’s certainly not prime, and it’s not highly composite. I was thinking of taking a look at partition theory and prime factorization of parts of the array. See if any of the two-dimensional arrays look anything like a picture.”
Jack nodded. “That’s very good, Pat, but maybe we shouldn’t stick with two-D. For all we know, our unknown signaller comes from avian stock, and thinks naturally in three dimensions. Or one dimension.”
After another brief silence, Simon Bitters, who had been wandering around the room in his usual restless way, returned to the rest of the group, put his index finger on the end of his nose, and said, “The whole signal repeats with twenty-one billion periodicity, but I was thinking that maybe not all of it is information. There may be marker sub-sequences, things like stop-start codons that indicate where something with meaning begins and ends. We need to look for short repeat sequences, patterns that don’t actually mean anything but that repeat over and over. I thought I would go through and examine local entropy, then see if that leads me to repeat markers.”
“Very logical.” Beston stared again at the maze of digits on the screen, and shook his head. “Good luck. But all of you, I wouldn’t start on any of this until you’ve had some rest. Chance favors the prepared mind, but discovery favors the rested one. And remember, we’re in this for the long haul. We may get lucky in a few months, but chances are we’re years away from knowing what you’ve got there.” He turned to Milly. “Anything else, before we let these hard-working people get some sleep? They’ve been up all night.”
