“Maybe. Do you see any other options?”
“No. On the other hand, I have had scant opportunity to seek them. What promises did you make to the person who contacted you from Ligon?”
“Persons. There were two of them. I promised only to get back to them. I said I could not make a decision for you.”
“Very well. Tell them that you have spoken with me, and that I have authorized you to open negotiations on my behalf.”
Magrit couldn’t believe agreement had come so easily. “You just want me to make the best deal I can, and you’ll sign off on it?”
“If you choose to think of it that way. I have only one other request, and then I must attend to important work which cannot be delayed.” Bat’s dark eyes almost closed, so that Magrit could read no expression there. “I know that you have both the talent and the temperament for hard negotiation. Make this a tough one.”
“Bat, do you think it’s just you who hates people pushing you around? Come take a look at the color of my guts. I hate these bastards, and I don’t even know them. Trust me, I’ll give them a tough negotiation. And if you can find anything to give me leverage, don’t wait. I’ll have your call as top priority.”
Bat’s early employment evaluations had been replete with terms such as “dirty,” “gluttonous,” “arrogant,” “slovenly,” “disobedient,” and “indolent.” Bat regarded those evaluations as unjust and scurrilous. He was not indolent.
As soon as Magrit was gone, he went through to the kitchen stores and returned with loaded dishes of peppermint candy, orange jujubes, marzipan, and Turkish delight. This was sure to be a long session.
He set parameters, provided the authorization for unlimited expenditures, and initiated a search of the Seine.
Before a man could fight back, he needed weapons. Long before Magrit concluded any negotiation, Bat intended to know more about Ligon Industries than any other human in the solar system. A large organization, like any other large structure, possessed a weakest point. Bat intended to find that point for Ligon Industries.
And what would he do then? Bat did not know. He operated using an ancient dictum: It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. But he was going to do something.
10
D-V-I. Detect, Verify, Interpret. Those were the three legs on which SETI rested. Without all three, any effort was flawed. Fail to detect, and you had nothing. Fail to verify what you thought you had found, and you still had nothing.
The most galling experience, however, would be success at detection and verification, followed by a long-term failure to interpret. You knew you had a signal, you knew it was artificial, you knew it came from far outside the solar system. But what, for Heaven’s sake, did it mean? If you couldn’t answer that question, you had better be ready for a lot of skepticism.
“We’ve detected a signal from the stars.”
“Really? What does it say?”
“We have no idea.”
“Oh. Thank you. Let us know when you do.”
That was interpretation, something far in the future. Milly, in her first rush of innocent enthusiasm, had believed that great future might not be far away, since detection was over and done with. Now she was learning the extent of her error.
Jack Beston had assembled five people for the meeting. One was the enigmatic Zetter, who as usual seemed to prefer silence to speech. Milly had seen the others around the L-4 Station, but had never been introduced to them. In fact, in her absorption with her own work she had barely noticed them. She was certainly noticing them now. She also wished that she had thought to go to the bathroom before the session started. Maybe it was nervousness, maybe it was anticipation, but she felt a growing internal discomfort.
“Salisbury.” Jack addressed a thin man with a black, drooping mustache and liquid dark eyes. “Is it there in the analog?”
The Ogre was more polite than Milly had ever seen him. He seemed cool, almost abstracted, until you noticed the left hand in the pocket and heard the constant jingle of keys or coins.
Salisbury nodded. “If it’s there in the digital, it’s there in the analog.”
That was a guarded, conservative answer. It represented an approach that Milly was learning to appreciate. The basic signals from space, either radio waves or neutrino pulses, arrived in analog form. They went through an analog-to-digital conversion before computer analysis and display. All the usual problems of A-to-D might be introduced in the process. You could get clipping effects from using an insufficient number of digital bits, or you could get aliasing, a frequency shift caused by the use of the wrong sampling rate. You could lose information, or you could create spurious “information” when none was present. Tim Salisbury was not saying there was or was not a signal — that was not his area of expertise. He was merely saying that the presence or absence of a signal was not the consequence of analog/digital conversion.
“Right.” Jack didn’t offer his usual third-degree interrogation, but turned to the woman on Milly’s right. “Tankard?”
Milly decided that rank had its privileges, even here. Hannah Krauss, Milly’s usual supervisor, was noticeable by her absence. These were Jack Beston’s most senior and trusted workers, and they looked like they didn’t take shit from anyone. As for Pat Tankard, if she had once been a vulnerable junior employee, Milly doubted that she had ever been troubled by the Ogre’s unwanted sexual advances. Tankard’s dark hair was cropped to less than an inch, she wore gold bands on the ring fingers of both hands, and her muscular left biceps carried a holographic tattoo that read from one angle, “Ellen,” and from another displayed the image of a slender long-haired blonde.
“If there are artifacts in the data, they are not the result of anything that Milly Wu did.” Pat Tankard smiled at Milly in a reassuring way. Her voice was a honeyed baritone, which Milly now realized she had heard in the shower rooms, crooning old-fashioned romantic ballads. Tankard went on, “I applied every operator in my own preferred order, which was generally not commutative with the order applied yesterday. If there was a signal, there is still a signal. Whatever was there, is there.”
The order in which you performed operations could generate the illusion of a meaningful signal. Something as simple as a change from Cartesian to polar coordinates in a two-D array might produce “meaningful” patterns that went away when you made the conversion at a different point in the processing.
It was one step nearer to detection. Milly ought to be feeling some reassurance. Instead she experienced a rising tension, and the pressure in her bladder was definitely uncomfortable. She also felt a queasiness, like that of the first few minutes in zero-gee, when the stomach rose to push up against the diaphragm. How much longer could she sit here in order to hear Jack Beston’s final decision?
Milly decided that before she would leave, she would sit until she threw up or her bladder burst. The precedent for the latter was not promising. Tycho Brahe, the last of the great pre-telescope astronomers, and an eccentric task-master far more formidable than Jack Beston, had been unable for reasons of protocol to rise and leave a court banquet before the duke did so. He had suffered a burst bladder as a result, and died a few days later.
“Kruskal?”
Jack’s voice broke into Milly’s thoughts. The woman across from her nodded. “If it derives from a process of natural origin, it is one unknown to science.” She was squat, olive-skinned, and plump, with an accent that suggested that she had arrived at the Jovian L-4 station from somewhere in the Inner System — probably Earth, and probably from one of the observatories still situated on the Andean cordillera.