“You’ll be a long way from home,” her stepfather had said, just before Milly left Ganymede. “Make friends there, so you won’t feel lonely.”
Sure. But how, with eccentrics like these?
Maybe Milly was one herself. This wasn’t what she had expected when she signed up to come to the L-4 location and the Argus Project, but Hannah Krauss’s warning after her first couple of weeks in some ways matched her stepfather’s. “The work here is challenging and interesting, but it’s lonely. Try to make friends, and find activities outside your work. Do you know the occupational hazards of mathematicians, logicians, and cryptanalysts?”
“Depression?”
“Depression, yes. Also insanity, paranoia, and suicide. And isolation increases the odds.”
Now they warned you, when you were already here. Milly examined the screen in front of her. She could process the cell that she had just loaded in endless different ways. It came in as a long string of binary digits, anything from a million to billions of 1’s and 0’s. She could transform that to any number base, introduce any breaks that she liked, look for repeating strings, present the data factored into two- or three-dimensional arrays, transform the results to polar or cylindrical or any other orthogonal set of coordinates, examine the Fourier transforms and power spectra of the result, cross-correlate any section with any other, compute the sequence or image entropy, seek size or shape invariants, and display any or all of those results in a wide variety of formats. In the first few days she had developed her own preferred suite of processes, with a shell of operations to run their sequence automatically. All she had to do was sit, observe the results, and allow her imagination to run free in its search for oddities, or—there was always hope—meaningful patterns.
While she worked, spectral figures from the past wandered through Milly’s mind. They were her heroes and heroines. Here was Thomas Young, the universally gifted nineteenth-century Englishman who moved so easily from medicine to physics to linguistics. He had taken the multi-language inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone to gain a first handle on interpreting Egyptian hieroglyphics. The polymath Young had dismissed his work casually, as “the amusement of a few leisure hours.” Here was the Frenchman, Jean-François Champollion, finishing the work that Young had begun, and writing his book on the subject that had so fascinated Milly at seventeen—the same age at which Champollion had been made a full professor at Grenoble.
A century later than Champollion, the quiet American classicist Alice Kober had patiently begun to unravel the mysteries of the Cretan language, Linear B, work that after her early death was completed by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick. By Chadwick’s side, as a fellow worker at an English classified facility during wartime, stood the enigmatic and tragic figure of Alan Turing. Turing, with his rumpled clothes, dirty nails, and unshaven face, had been a nonpareil cryptanalyst, as well as the godfather of all the computers that now surrounded Milly. His life had ended with the suicide that Hannah Krauss warned of for workers in cryptanalysis. Behind Turing, a century earlier, stood another computer godfather, Charles Babbage, himself a noted cryptanalyst who had cracked the “unbreakable” Vigenère cipher and who straddled the line between genius and eccentricity.
The godmother for Milly’s own field, the interpretation of signals from the stars, had been born a generation later than Turing. Jocelyn Bell, when she was no older than Milly herself, sat alone day after day and night after night studying radio telescope signals, until one day she came across curious repeating patterns of electronic noise that she had named “scruff.” For a time, Jocelyn Bell and her research supervisor believed that what she had found was what Milly now longed so desperately to see: synthetic signals from far across the galaxy, sent by intelligent beings. They even—in private if not in public—called them “LGM objects,” the initials standing for Little Green Men. Jocelyn Bell’s actual discovery, of natural signals sent out by the rapidly rotating neutron stars known as pulsars, was a great surprise and a great event in the history of astrophysics; but it must also have been, in some ways, a disappointment.
And that, Milly reflected, was both the promise and the curse of SETI. If you did discover a pattern, the odds were long against it being what you hoped. Far more likely, you had accidentally come across a natural phenomenon. Nature had a thousand ways of producing a signal with some repeating pattern. Almost everything in space—planets, moons, stars, galaxies—rotated, and each had its own magnetic field. The combination of field and spin could spit pulses of electromagnetic energy in any direction, across thousands or millions of light-years. Discovery of a new such phenomenon might be a great scientific event, but it was not a message from intelligent aliens.
And if what you saw was not natural, then it was most likely a man-made signal, thrown out casually and carelessly by some human activity within the solar system.
Like now. Milly had on her screen a power spectrum with well-defined peaks. Something was generating blips of energy at regular intervals, and it certainly looked like a signal. It also came from a definite direction in space.
She skipped back a day to examine earlier data from the same direction. The pattern vanished. However, observations were made in all directions, through the full 4 π of solid angle around the station. She asked the computers to seek a match in a widening cone around the direction of the signal. It took maybe thirty seconds, and there it was: two almost identical power spectra, one day apart, and from directions three degrees apart in the sky. Conclusion: the source, whatever it was, lay within the solar system. No signal source at interstellar distances could move through three degrees of arc in one day, unless it was traveling at least a hundred times as fast as light.
Curse that one, cross it off, note it in the log, and pull in the next data cell. Like everything presented to the eighteen analysts, this one had been flagged by the computers for special treatment. However, it was contrary to Jack Beston’s policy to pass onto the analyst the nature of the computer report. He argued that such information encouraged mindless agreement, and inhibited free association and pattern recognition.
Milly activated her program suite, to see what it could do with this one. It had just begun to run when she heard a jingling sound from behind her. It made her feel very uncomfortable. Jack Beston was standing outside the open door of her cubicle. He moved very quietly, but he had the habit of jingling whatever was in his pocket, coins or keys, so you could not accuse him of creeping up on you.
She swiveled her chair around. He was there, his head to one side, watching her displays. He had a little half-smile on his face and his green eyes were closed to slits. Without saying a word he stepped inside her cubicle and stood staring at the screen.
Didn’t the man have any manners? No wonder everyone on the Argus Project was so rude, when its leader set the tone for the whole place.
“Hm—hm.” Milly coughed, deliberately drawing his attention to her. “I’m trying to work in here, sir. You’re interfering with that. I would prefer that you leave.” She didn’t insert the customary “respectfully” but if that got her fired, what the hell. Jack Beston looked too much like Aly Blanes for comfort, and sexy Aly was half the reason she had left Ganymede.
If Beston heard her, he didn’t show any sign of it. His eyes were still fixed on the screen, although there was no way that the display could be intelligible to him. This was Milly’s own set of program protocols, their outputs tuned to her way of thinking.
If Jack Beston understood that, he gave no sign of it. He watched the outputs parade across the screen, the input data transformed in a thousand separate ways.
“It’s inside the solar system,” he said at last. “A long way out of the ecliptic, though, so my guess is we’ve got some joy-riding clowns waltzing around the Egyptian Cluster at high solar latitude. Illegal, and they’re bound to be caught, but they never learn.” He checked a device on his wrist. “Recent, too. Nothing there two days ago.”
He turned away from the displ
ay, as though suddenly it had lost all interest, and went on, “You’re working very hard, Milly Wu. Also, you know what you’re doing.”
It was a compliment, but not much of one. She burst out, “How can you possibly know what the data show? 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 unde
rshirt, 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 had no notion of the combination of factors that suggested to Milly an extra-solar signal of non-natural origin. So what the devil was he doing?
She waited, eyes tired and stomach growling. She had eaten nothing since discerning the first hint of the anomaly, and that had been before midday. Her last meal had been breakfast. No wonder she felt dizzy and hollow.
How long was she supposed to stand and do nothing? The hell with the man, it was her anomaly. She reached out, opened the door, and stepped into the little cubicle. Jack Beston was sitting rigid in front of the display. The results that Milly had left on it had disappeared. In their place was an unintelligible image—not numbers or graphs, but swirls of color.
He had heard the door open, and he turned. Milly stood her ground, half expecting a curse. Then she saw his face. For the first time since she had met him, his green eyes were fully open, and they were looking through her and beyond her.
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