Milly thought. She decided that Philip Beston must be a moron, if he imagined that she was doing this work for money. Fame, maybe — she still thrilled when she heard Wu-Beston anomaly. But money, no way. Second, Philip Beston was a scoundrel. All that talk about no one caring who the Beston was in “Wu-Beston” translated clearly to one fact: he wanted people to think that he, Philip Beston, was the Beston referred to. A safe way to do that was to switch Milly to his project on Odin Station before interpretation had begun and even before verification was completed.
He was looking at her expectantly.
“I’ll think about it,” she said. “In fact, I have thought about it, as much as I need to.”
“Well.”
“I’ve concluded that Jack’s name for you is exactly right. You are Philip the Bastard. The sort of bastard who will do his best to steal from his own brother. Jack can be an Ogre when it comes to work, but he’s worth ten of you.”
There was a term for what she had just done: burning your bridges. But astonishingly, Philip Beston seemed not at all put out.
“That brother of mine,” he said, “I just don’t know how he does it. Works his people to death, insults them every chance he gets — and he still has you eating out of his hand. What’s his trick, Milly? Did he do the little-lost-boy act, making you feel that he’s all nervous and vulnerable and insecure? That worked for him very well with me when we were little, until I realized it was all a total sham. Brother Jack knows exactly how to manipulate people, always has.”
Nervous and vulnerable and insecure. The words described uncannily well the impressions that Milly had formed of Jack Beston during the trip out from Argus Station.
Either Philip Beston was totally confident of his assessment, or he was uninterested in Milly’s response. Before she could answer he had turned and was heading for the door.
“My instincts tell me that we are close to array alignment.” He seemed to be talking to himself more than to Milly. “Let’s find a place where we can see what’s going on.”
Milly doubted that it was instinct — far more likely he was wearing an intra-aural receiver — but his words made her tingle all over. She hurried after him. When your whole life hung on the next few minutes, what Jack and Philip Beston thought of each other or did to each other was down in the noise level.
The room that he led her to was empty, but well-provided with virtuals. Milly saw three display volumes. The first was an open space view of the antenna array, now fixed in position or hunting so imperceptibly that the human eye could not tell the difference. The second virtual was obviously of the control room, with half a dozen staff members eyeing output tables or talking excitedly to each other. The third virtual showed Jack Beston, sitting where Milly and Philip had left him, and intently studying what she assumed were miniature versions of the other virtuals.
Philip Beston said quietly, “Where do we stand, Laszlo?”
One of the control room figures looked up from his monitor. “We have lock on, and it’s quite tight. Our rms signal maximum lies 0.6 arc seconds away from the coordinates reported by the Argus Station. We find exactly the same pattern for signal fall-off with angle — a circular normal distribution with sigma of 1.3 arc seconds.” His voice had remained flat and factual when quoting statistics, but his final words took on a different and more animated character. “It’s there, Philip, absolutely no doubt about it. It’s there, it’s definite, it’s clear, and it is at interstellar distance. Our estimate has a most probable value of 25.8 light years, and at the very least the distance is 19 light years.”
“Target star?”
“None. It looks as though the signal is being generated in open space. That’s no particular surprise, we’ve always thought that a system of interstellar relays would make sense.”
He was saying things that Milly, and certainly Philip Beston, knew already. Given the excitement that he — and everyone else in all the virtuals — must be feeling, it was not surprising if Laszlo did a little babbling.
“You listening, Jack?” Philip Beston said. And at Jack’s slow thoughtful nod, he added, “Congratulations, brother. You already had detection, now it looks like you have a shot at strong verification. That would mean there’s just one left.”
Jack nodded again. “Yep. Just one. The big one.”
“Do you want to send the announcement, if this holds up?”
“It will. Let’s send this one together. It’s the third one that I’m going to send solo.”
“Let’s just say that one of us will be sending it solo. Race you to the corner, eh, brother?” Philip flipped a switch, and the virtual of Jack vanished. “Some things change, but I guess that some things never do. For twelve years, Jack has been telling anyone who would listen that the idea of a big SETI project was his and his alone. It wasn’t, but I’ve given up arguing. Jack seems determined to spend his life trying to prove he’s better than I am.”
Milly said, “Maybe he is.”
“And maybe he just has you wrapped around his little finger. When you see through him, or when things at Argus Station start to go bad, you give me a call.” The wide, innocent blue eyes fixed on Milly. “I will still be here. And maybe you’ll give me a chance to prove I’m not the bastard that Jack makes me out to be.”
Verification. Milly had assumed after the first meeting with Philip Beston’s staff that the whole job was as good as over. She should have known better.
Three more days of hard-slog checking were needed, of everything from measures of proper motion of the source to an attempted interferometric analysis of its spatial extent, before both brothers agreed: the parallax as observed from Jovian L-4 and Jovian L-5 was real. The origin was so far away that it acted as a point source. The signal came from somewhere well outside the solar system.
In those three days, Philip Beston said nothing to follow up on his suggestion that Milly ought to change sides and work on Odin Station. Only at the final farewell did he hold her hand for a moment longer than necessary, and say softly, “When you decide you’d like to be on the winning side, you know who to call.”
Jack Beston could not possibly have heard, but he was in a foul mood as The Witch of Agnesi pulled away from Odin Station for the return trip. Milly couldn’t see why. They had confirmation of a signal, and a significant time advantage over Philip Beston when it came to interpretation.
But when she said that to Jack, he merely gave her a slit-eyed green glare. “He knows we have a lead, and he knows that we found the signal and he didn’t. Given all that, he’s far too cheerful.”
“Maybe he’s putting on a show for the staff of Odin Station. They must be feeling pretty crushed.”
“No.” Jack shook his head. “You didn’t grow up with the Bastard, the way I did. He doesn’t put on shows. He’s got something up his sleeve. Something to do with signal interpretation.”
“Do you have any idea what it might be?”
“Not a clue.” Jack stared intently out of the forward port, as though willing the ship to fly faster to Argus Station. “We’ll find out when he hits us with it.”