“The Wu-Beston anomaly. It looks like it may be the real thing.”

“Real or not, it rang a bell somewhere in the jungle of Macanelly’s brain. He’d heard that aliens had cropped up in one of the predicted futures.”

“That’s my fault. I included a line in one of my reports saying that they showed on one of the abandoned high-probability projections. But I never said a word about a SETI signal.”

“With somebody like Macanelly, you don’t need to. He’s dumb, but he’s persistent. Or maybe he’s less dumb than we think. He did something I’d never have thought of doing, ever. He went to the Seine, and asked to have the complete SETI sequence — all twenty-one billion bits of it, from what I gather — provided as available inputs to your predictive model.”

“That’s totally crazy. The SETI sequence isn’t a database. No one has the slightest idea if there is a real signal buried away in there. If there is, no one knows how to read it.”

“Exactly. Totally crazy. So now listen for something crazier. When Loring Macanelly ran your predictive model, with not a single change other than the model’s access to the SETI sequence, he obtained totally different results. Instead of civilization collapsing and dying out half a century from now, everything stayed in bounds and coasted along as reasonable as you could hope to see.”

Kate’s laugh at Alex’s expression was too high-pitched for comfort. “That’s right, sweetheart. Loring Macanelly found the magic trick that stabilizes your model. And Macanelly, as we’re all so fond of telling each other, is a total idiot. What do you think of that, Alex? Welcome home, and come join the madhouse.’’

25

Jan felt that she had been fighting to protect Sebastian all her life. There had been a brief vacation, the magical couple of weeks with Paul Marr on the flight out from Earth; then the OSL Achilles made its swoop through the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, and suddenly Jan was back to her old job.

“Why did you do it, Sebastian?”

It was the hundredth or the thousandth time that she had asked the question — inside her head, where there was no chance of an answer. She didn’t expect more satisfying results now, but she didn’t know what else to do.

They were still on Ganymede, in a section just four levels below the moon’s outer surface. It was labeled as a quarantine and science research facility, but so far as Jan was concerned it was a prison for Sebastian. He was not allowed to leave. It was not clear that he would ever be allowed to leave.

Jan was housed separately. Paul had urged her to come with him, to have dinner together at The Belly of the Whale restaurant and then go sightseeing in the salt-ocean caverns of Ganymede. He pointed out that no one had criticized her behavior in any way, and until a decision was made as to whether or not to proceed to the Saturn weather station, she was free to do what she liked and wander wherever she pleased. He had a week and a half free before the Achilles left on its next run to the inner system. Why not spend the time together? They would have fun and get to know each other better.

She wanted to, but she couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. She explained that until she knew what was wrong with Sebastian and understood why he had tried to open the hatch, she would be unable to enjoy anything.

She thought that Paul might try to talk her out of that and was relieved when he didn’t. But she knew, although neither of them said it, that if she left now their affair was over.

When she had told him that she was heading over to the facility where Sebastian was being held, Paul sat silent for a moment. Then he took her hands in his. “I understand, Jan. Do what you have to do. But don’t forget that you are entitled to a life, too. You are too rare and precious to throw yourself away.”

Entitled to a life. Would she ever have one? She had left Paul at a run, hurrying away before he could offer a farewell kiss, before she could change her mind.

And now, with Sebastian, she could finally ask the question directly. “Why did you do it, Sebastian? Why were you trying to open the hatch?”

He stared at her, a dreamy expression on his round face. “I don’t know, Jan. I don’t remember. I suppose I wanted to see clouds.”

“But you could have seen those through any of the observation ports. If you had opened the hatch, you would have died. Others might have died, too.”

“I know. But Jan, I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

It was true. He had never knowingly hurt anyone, and never would. But the old fear consumed her. Sebastian had major problems, and onboard the Achilles they had come horribly close to being fatal.

“We have all the medical records here.” Valnia Bloom was sitting at Jan’s side. She looked more like an anorexic corpse than ever. “Dr. Christa Matloff, who did your testing at the Earth orbital facility, sent an entire duplicate set. Sebastian, we are going to repeat every one of the tests that were done there, plus a battery of others. Is that all right with you?”

“Of course.” He seemed surprised at the question. “Anything you want to do is all right.”

Valnia Bloom flashed a sideways glance at Jan. “The tests will be both physical and mental. They will not be painful, but they may take a long time.”

“I’ll stay.” Jan answered the unspoken question. To her relief, no one was asking about the wisdom of allowing her and Sebastian to leave Earth in the first place.

What was wrong with him? Was it related to the odd neurotransmitter functions within his brain? That was possible, but it might also have something to do with the tiny inorganic nodules that had been found in the white blood cells of his body. And did both of those peculiarities relate to Sebastian’s earliest days, when as small children they had each wandered alone among the wild teratomas and devastated landscape of Earth’s northern hemisphere?

To Jan’s surprise, Valnia Bloom reached out and patted her hand. “Have faith,” she said. “We will find out. Believe me, I have as much interest in resolving this as you or Sebastian.”

Dr. Bloom spoke with confidence, but after three days Jan’s Own faith faded. With nothing else to do, she haunted the lab where Sebastian was being tested. Valnia Bloom must have spoken to the technicians, because Jan was allowed to examine any of the results and records.

Most of those were brain traces and scans, highly complicated images that meant nothing to anyone except a specialist. The most tangible evidence of abnormality was the curious dark nodules within the body cells. Jan read a batch of reports. Although they were inorganic and had no apparent function, they were never excreted from the body. When the cell in which they lived died, the tiny spheres were somehow re-absorbed into the body and in due course took up residence in a new cell. Whoever wrote this particular report had suggested that the nodules might have been present in Sebastian’s body, unchanged in form and number, since childhood.

The report also asked, why had these anomalies not been discovered long ago? Jan could answer that. When she and Sebastian had been rescued and shipped to the displaced persons’ camp in Husvik, the inhabitants of battered Earth had other things on their minds; things like survival.

In addition to a chemical analysis, a few specimens of the anomalous bodies had been carefully sheared in two. Jan took one of the high-powered microscopes and peered at the cross-section of one nodule. It formed a perfect sphere, and the spherical nature continued right through the interior. Concentric shells of material glittering prismatically under the microscope’s strong illumination, flashing in different colors like tiny rings of gemstones.

Jan could not understand most of the technical comments on the specimens that she was examining, but in one of Valnia Bloom’s reports her concluding remarks had been unusually concise and direct: The structure of each nodule is identical, simple, and well-defined. They are spheres, penetrated radially by narrow apertures that run all the way to the center. The chemical composition has been analyzed and is known absolutely. The possible functions remain a mystery.