The thin face hardened, and Zetter’s mouth compressed to a tight line. “You wish me to leave?”
“You got it.”
“But our… source. What instructions do I provide?”
“Say, keep looking and listening. We’re going to handle the rest from here.”
Zetter nodded and did not reply, but as she left she gave a glare of hatred that Milly felt she had done nothing to deserve.
“Now, Milly.” Jack Beston humped his chair over closer. “If you were champion three years in a row, in your Puzzle Network days you must have built up quite a reputation. You must still have close friends there.”
There were things that you never said to your boss, no matter what the provocation. Here came one of them: “The hell with that, Jack Beston. I won’t do it.” Maybe it was lack of morning caffeine. “Not if you go down on your hands and knees and grovel.”
“I just might do that. But Milly, listen to me for a minute.” He eased his chair a few inches closer. “You started this whole thing. It’s called the Wu-Beston anomaly, but everybody remembers the Wu rather than the Beston. Which is as it should be. But you know, and I know, that detection is only part of the story, and not the biggest part. Nobody today remembers who dug up the Rosetta Stone, what they recall are the people who used it to decipher hieroglyphics. The Bastard knows this, just as well as we do. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s been thinking this way for years, he’s such a sneaky devil.
“But now suppose that you were part of the Puzzle Network team that worked on the interpretation of the signal. Your name would be associated with every phase of the work: detection, verification, interpretation. For all of history, the only name anyone would associate with the first SETI signal would be Milly Wu.”
“And Jack Beston. What would he get out of this?”
“The satisfaction of knowing he’d beaten the Bastard on all fronts. And Milly, you have no idea how sweet that would be. Can you do it? Can you become involved in the Puzzle Network interpretation effort?”
“No. That would be impossible, I’ve been away from it for too long.” But even as she spoke, Milly could imagine an approach.
She had not, as she suggested to Jack Beston, totally burned her bridges. In fact, less than six months ago she had heard from one of the Masters, Pack Rat, an older man with a taste for adolescent girls and a definite fondness for Milly (Puzzle Network Masters had to be smart, but no one said they had to be moral). He had sent her a puzzle, and invited her to have dinner. She had solved the puzzle the same day that it arrived, returned her answer, and declined the other invitation. But she felt sure that the door was open. Pack Rat had as good as told her that she was still a prime candidate for Master level in the Network.
Jack Beston was watching her closely. He was not, as Hannah Krauss had told her often enough, a man who easily took no for an answer. Rather, he took whatever he wanted. Milly, on the other hand, had taken as much of some things as she ever would.
She said abruptly, “Suppose I’m wrong, and it turned out to be possible for me to become involved in the Puzzle Network’s interpretation work. Then I would have to leave here. There’s no possible way that your brother would send information to Argus Station.”
“Of course he wouldn’t. We would have to travel to wherever the information center was located.”
“We. What do you mean, we? Who are you talking about?”
“The two of us. You and me. Now that we have a verified signal, our interpretation team can carry on here 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.