“But as to what that means…” Rudolph stared at the others in the room. “You now pass into an area in which I claim no expertise. I will say only this, which I am sure has already occurred to all of you: a sequence of twenty-one billion binary digits could encode the entire human genome, three times over.”
In addition to Milly and the Ogre, Pat Tankard and Simon Bitters were also present. No one laughed. Arnold Rudolph was referring to a suggestion almost as old as SETI itself: the notion that the first message from the stars might be the prescription not for a universal encyclopedia, nor a complex series of machines, but the information needed to build a living organism. That made the major assumption that alien life, like life in the solar system, would be built around a four-letter molecular code. Assign binary digit pairs to nucleotide bases; say, (0,0) = adenine, (0,1) = cytosine, (1,0) = guanine, and (1,1) = thymine; then any sequence containing an even number of binary digits was equivalent to a segment of a DNA molecule. You would make that DNA molecule, put it into a suitable environment for replication, and see what developed.
No one on Argus Station laughed at Arnold Rudolph’s comment; on the other hand, no one took it too seriously. The idea would be checked — a billion possibilities would be checked during the interpretation effort — but the general feeling was, the game couldn’t possibly be that easy. The search for a signal had taken a century and a half. The search for meaning might take as long.
There was another argument against the idea of the signal being biological. Turn the situation around and ask, how valuable would it be to send off to the stars the genetic description of a human? Even if some alien group were able to decipher the signal and provide an appropriate environment in which an embryo might grow, at the end of all that effort they would have a newborn baby. The aliens would know how a human lived and functioned, but nothing at all about what humans as a species had learned. Far better to send information about science and the technologies which aliens might find valuable.
Jack Beston stared at the screen, where the first infinitesimal section of the signal sequence was displayed. It appeared like a totally random string of 0’s and 1’s. “We’ll try the biological approach, of course, even if we all think it’s an unlikely answer. We can’t afford to overlook something just because it resembles the way we developed. But I suspect we’re more likely to make progress with physics or mathematics.”
That too was standard orthodoxy. Biological organisms would tend to be specific to their planetary origins. Physics and mathematics should be the same all over the universe.
The others looked at Jack Beston, waiting for more direction. When he offered none, Pat Tankard said hesitantly, “We already know that the total sequence length has a moderate number of factors — it’s certainly not prime, and it’s not highly composite. I was thinking of taking a look at partition theory and prime factorization of parts of the array. See if any of the two-dimensional arrays look anything like a picture.”
Jack nodded. “That’s very good, Pat, but maybe we shouldn’t stick with two-D. For all we know, our unknown signaller comes from avian stock, and thinks naturally in three dimensions. Or one dimension.”
After another brief silence, Simon Bitters, who had been wandering around the room in his usual restless way, returned to the rest of the group, put his index finger on the end of his nose, and said, “The whole signal repeats with twenty-one billion periodicity, but I was thinking that maybe not all of it is information. There may be marker sub-sequences, things like stop-start codons that indicate where something with meaning begins and ends. We need to look for short repeat sequences, patterns that don’t actually mean anything but that repeat over and over. I thought I would go through and examine local entropy, then see if that leads me to repeat markers.”
“Very logical.” Beston stared again at the maze of digits on the screen, and shook his head. “Good luck. But all of you, I wouldn’t start on any of this until you’ve had some rest. Chance favors the prepared mind, but discovery favors the rested one. And remember, we’re in this for the long haul. We may get lucky in a few months, but chances are we’re years away from knowing what you’ve got there.” He turned to Milly. “Anything else, before we let these hard-working people get some sleep? They’ve been up all night.”
Milly shook her head and allowed Beston to lead her outside. Once the door to the room was closed, he stopped right in front of Milly.
“There, see that? Nice as pie, not a harsh word from me to anybody. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” Milly hesitated. “You were polite, and agreeable. But I’m not sure that they are all right. I mean, I know they’re short of sleep, but their behavior seemed kind of odd. They’ve just finished something important. You’d never know it from their attitudes. They acted flat.”
“As if something was wrong?”
“Yes.”
“Very perceptive. Something was wrong.”
“But I couldn’t tell what it was.”
“I know absolutely what it was.”
“Was it me? Do they resent me, and the fact that I was the one who first found the anomaly?”
Jack laughed. “No, it wasn’t you, Milly. You are very smart, probably the smartest person who has ever worked at Argus Station, but they don’t resent that. Also, you have lots of dedication and drive to go with your brains. But there are still things you don’t know.”
He leaned against the wall of the corridor, stared down at Milly’s puzzled face, and went on, “You said it very clearly before we went in there. I’m an Ogre, and a monster, and I insult my staff and bully my staff and drive my staff. Now let me tell you a story. Back in the days when humans were just moving into space, there was a race between two countries to see who could be first to get human beings to the Moon.”
“I know about that. I’ve read a lot of history about America and Russia.”
“I’ll bet you don’t know what I’m going to tell you, because it was never in the official history books — just passed down by word-of-mouth. In the beginning, the Russians seemed to be well ahead. They had the first satellite, and the first man in space, and the first woman in space. Then the man who was running the American space program at the time made a decision. He chose a foreigner — a German, who had fought against the Americans in a recent war — and gave him the main responsibility for getting men to the Moon and back. He was asked, privately, ‘My God, why did you pick him? If he fails, you will be criticized by everyone in the country.’ The administrator said, “Do you think I don’t know that? But he won’t fail — he’s too arrogant to let himself fail.’ You see, Milly, the job we have here is a bit like the job they had. It’s difficult, it needs technology that’s right at the edge, and we’re in a hurry. Most people at Argus Station don’t have your self-confidence, or so much confidence in the project itself. They need somebody who shows in everything he says or does that we can’t fail — and in this game, coming in second is failing.
“Now I want to ask you a question, Milly. You heard Pat Tankard’s suggestion of examining two-D representations of the signal. What do you think of it?”
“To be honest, not very much. You can send information as images, but it’s terribly inefficient. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a high-resolution one costs you a million. Mostly you send messages as words and numbers, or their equivalent. And they are both one-dimensional data strings.”
“Exactly. So one of us — you or me — ought to have pointed out that fact to Pat. We didn’t, did we? Do you think that was doing her a service?”
“It wasn’t. But she just might be onto something.”