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-Francois 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 Chad-wick. 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” Vigenere 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? 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 display, 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.”