Bat now took an orange, popped it whole into his mouth, and placed the bowl on the desk in front of him. It was logical to continue the discussion, pointing out to Milly how her work dove-tailed with some of his own thoughts on deciphering other elements of the signal; but other matters were going to intrude. Alex Ligon was already late, and although his message had been terse and guarded, it implied final results from Bengt Suomi and the Ligon Industries’ team of scientists.
Milly knew nothing of any of this. She read Bat’s scowl differently. She said, “Thank you for the food and thank you for listening,” and started toward the door.
“One moment.” Bat held up a pudgy hand. “I would like to pursue your ideas further, but in the near-term I am otherwise engaged. If you would be free to return…”
“Tomorrow?” Milly’s face showed mixed feelings of pleasure and disappointment. She had done something new — even elegant. Food and drink had restored her, so that she was in no mood for sleep. And she had a chance that might never be repeated, an opportunity to work one-on-one with a leading Master of the Puzzle Network.
But Bat was frowning and shaking his close-cropped round head. “I was not thinking of tomorrow. I had in mind, say, one hour from now. If you were to return then, my other meeting should be concluded.”
Milly nodded. “One hour. If you become free before then I will be in Cubicle Twelve.”
And she was gone.
Bat nodded approval. It was nice to deal with someone who knew how to make up her mind. Milly Wu’s results were indeed elegant. However, they added to a strange suspicion that had been stirring for days in the base of his brain.
Bat settled back in his seat and closed his eyes. He sensed that the world-lines were converging, and each one might require hard thought. It was one of those rare occasions when he envied Mord’s capability for parallel processing.
The waiting message was, as Milly had expected, from Jack Beston. She made sure that the cubicle door was closed, invoked her own code, and was met by Jack’s green-eyed glare. His excited tone matched his expression. “Milly, I’m delayed at L-4. I have no idea how long I must stay here. Call on a tight security circuit and insist on talking to me. I’ll explain.” Problems at Argus Station? But Jack sounded more pleased than alarmed. Milly asked for a secure line and waited impatiently as it was established. When the connection was completed, to her annoyance the face that appeared on the display was not Jack. It was Zetter, looking, as usual, ready to cook and eat her own grandmother. Except that now her thin face wore an expression of ill-disguised triumph.
“Yes?”
“I’m returning a call. I need to speak with the Ogre.”
“He is unavailable.”
“Station security can reach him at any time. You know that better than anyone. That’s you. I don’t think Jack Beston would like to hear that I tried to reach him, and you blocked my call.”
It was a power struggle, pure and simple, the kind of thing that Milly loathed. Zetter glared hatred out of the display, then vanished.
Milly watched the clock. In less than thirty seconds Jack’s face appeared.
He greeted her with, “Anyone with you?”
“I’m alone, in a secure environment.”
“Good. Let’s hope that the Bastard can’t tap into a secure line. I believe that this time he’s made a big mistake.”
“How?”
“He made a deal with the Puzzle Network when he didn’t need to. Milly, I have good news.” Jack glanced from side to side, as though even in his own station he worried about being overheard. “We’re starting to crack the signal. Not all the signal, of course, and only partial results where we have them at all. But Pat Tankard and Simon Bitters are making progress. The whole job will still take years, but we’re beating the Bastard. We’re moving ahead of him.”
“Are you sure? Do you have an information pipeline into Odin Station?”
“Not a reliable one. Zetter still has hopes, though.” Jack was frowning. “What’s your problem, Milly? I thought the news would make you ecstatic. We’ve always agreed that detection is good and verification is better, but until you have interpretation you’re not even halfway up the mountain.”
“I haven’t changed my mind. But Jack” — when had she started to call him Jack, rather than sir or Mr. Beston, or even the Ogre? — “it’s not happening only on Argus Station. The Puzzle Network group here is making progress, too. My guess is that your brother’s team is moving along just as quickly. All of us overestimated the difficulty of making some initial sense out of part of the signal.”
Jack’s scowl turned him back into his usual Ogre self. “Don’t kid yourself, Milly. The Bastard’s team are idiots, nothing but trained monkeys. If they have any results, it’s because they are taking them from the Puzzle Network. What has your group found so far?”
That was a tricky question. Milly was working for Jack Beston and the Argus Station, but she felt honor-bound to abide by the rules posted at the Puzzle Network: Nothing that we receive from Odin Station should be sent anywhere else. It may be shared internally, but must be treated as privileged information.
She could not be sure what information, other than the raw signal, the Puzzle Network had received from Philip Beston. Perhaps the fundamentals of signal partitions and the mathematical basics had originated at Odin Station. Milly didn’t share Jack’s wishful thinking that his brother had assembled a team of incompetents.
The one safe area was her own results. Bat had assured her that they were new, which meant they could not have originated in the Bastard’s analysis center.
She provided a quick review of what she had found. Jack’s frequent interruptions for clarification gave her a new appreciation for Megachirops. Her explanations to him had been a hurried and muddled first attempt, yet he had grasped methods and results without asking a single question. As she spoke she heard a loud bang on the door, which she ignored.
When she finished, Jack shook his head. “Interesting, but nothing at all like what we have. Not in the same part of the signal, not in the same area of knowledge. Remember we once talked of using the biological approach, coding the nucleotide bases of DNA?”
“We did. I was skeptical, because it would require that alien evolution follow the same biochemical pattern as ours. But I’ve seen the same suggestion of biological coding made here by a Puzzle Network Master.”
Milly felt a twinge of conscience as she said that — the final comment strayed beyond her own work — but she was reassured when Jack replied, “We’ve gone farther than a suggestion. Pat Tankard and Simon Bitters took some old work of Arnold Rudolph on quaternary codes. They applied it to a forty-million-bit chunk of signal between two sections that we feel sure are image format. The idea was to see if binary digit pairs might match nucleotide bases. Of course, there’s no way of knowing in advance which of the four nucleotide bases corresponds to any particular pair of binary numbers. So Tankard and Bitters took every possible combination of two zeroes and ones. For each case they scanned the whole signal section, looking to see if any recognizable sequence came up again and again. And it did. For one base-to-binary-pair assignment, a ten-letter sequence, GGGCAGGACG, cropped up again and again. It’s used in basic gene-swapping, and it’s present with slight variations in everything from bacteria to humans. This region of the SETI signal is riddled with it. Do you see what this means, Milly?”
She did, very clearly. “The aliens who sent the message are close to us in chemistry and structure. If we have the GACT code, we can look for and read out whole-organism genetic profiles.”
“You bet. And then we may be able to make them! We have the information to build alien life forms, not just learn about them. Now you see why I’m not on my way to Ganymede. We’re on a round-the-clock schedule here, and I’ve got to stay and keep everybody hustling.”