He stood up, easily in spite of his size. Alex, glancing again at the display, saw that the remaining bright dot of light was still there. It was close to the edge of Jupiter’s disk.

Sebastian Birch was dead. Janeed Jannex and Paul Marr were going to live. According to Bat and Bengt Suomi, everyone else was going to live, although according to some unexplained logic they all should have died.

As Alex’s adrenaline rush faded and died, his tired brain was sure of one thing only: no matter how many people in the room had some idea what was going on, one person present did not.

34

Milly functioned well on very little sleep. As a teenager that had first pleased her, then worried her when she learned of the disastrous sleepless experiments in the early part of the century. Now she simply accepted it as a piece of given good fortune, like a naturally beautiful or a naturally healthy body.

Bat had dismissed Milly, Alex, and Magrit Knudsen — there was no other word for his abrupt ending of the meeting — until he and Bengt Suomi could explain what had happened, or failed to happen, as Sebastian Birch plunged to his death on Jupiter. Milly, who had dozed on and off during the long hours of the scooter’s pursuit, now felt far too wired to sleep.

She made sure that she was on-call for Bat’s meeting, whenever and wherever it took place, and went off to her own apartment. It possessed a secure line to Jack Beston at the Argus Station, and she had something important she needed to ask him and possibly to tell him.

The system took a while to locate him, then he was glaring out of the screen at her in a green-eyed rage.

“What the hell have you been doing? I’ve left messages all over Ganymede, telling you to call.”

The Ogre was in his foulest mood. Somehow that was reassuring. She decided that, whatever happened, she would keep her own emotions under control.

She said, “I’m not sure what I’ve been doing, because the only people around here who seem to know aren’t telling. But I think that a few hours ago I came close to being killed.”

That was intended to shock him, and it did. His expression changed from anger to concern. “You were attacked?”

“Not by anything I recognized.”

That was enough for the Ogre. He had a short attention span for anything that did not directly involve the Argus Project. He said, “So long as the incident didn’t affect your work. Did you lose anything because of the Seine outage?”

“What Seine outage?”

His eyes went from half-closed to wide open. “Where the hell have you been for the past half-day, in an alternate universe? The whole Seine network went down for seven minutes. It failed here, in the Belt, on Earth — everywhere.”

“When was this?” Milly felt as though she had indeed been in a different universe, ever since the moment she staggered out of her cubicle looking for food and encountered the Great Bat.

“Six hours ago. Two this morning. We’ve been sweating blood ever since, trying to recover project data.”

If the Seine network had gone down for seven minutes in the small hours of the morning, many people might not have noticed. But a detail like that meant little to the Ogre. He had told her that Project Argus was operating around the clock.

“I wasn’t working at two this morning, Jack. But I wasn’t asleep, either. I was watching a man commit suicide. He took a ship and dived into Jupiter. No one could stop him.”

“I see. Tough break. But Milly, if that lunatic Puzzle Network gang has you sitting around and wasting your time when you should be trying to crack the signal, I won’t stand for it. There’s work to be done back here.”

Which brought Milly, rather sooner in the conversation than she would have liked, to her real reason for the call.

“Jack Beston, I want to ask you a question.”

That got his attention. Nobody on the project called him Jack Beston. To a few it was Jack, to the others it was Sir. He knew that when he was not present they called him the Ogre, but he didn’t mind that.

He said suspiciously, “Question? What question?”

“Why are you involved in SETI?”

“That’s a dumb-ass thing to ask. I don’t have time to play games.”

“I’d like an answer. You’ve been working on Project Argus for most of your adult life. What do you hope to get out of it? If you had just one wish, what would it be?”

The green eyes narrowed. Jack Beston said nothing.

“That wish could be many things,” Milly went on. “I know my own wish. I know why I left Ganymede and joined your project on Argus Station. Even if we didn’t find a signal — and I’m not sure I ever expected that we would — I loved the intellectual challenge. And if we did find a signal, that would lead to the most exciting generation in the history of the human race. A discovery as big as taming fire, or learning the techniques of agriculture.”

Jack Beston opened his mouth to speak, but still said nothing.

Milly went on, “And we did find a signal.” Remembering that moment of conviction, something is there, she felt again the shiver in her spine. “In the first days after detection, it seemed to me that we had done it. I thought that the hardest job was over. But I was wrong, wasn’t I?”

He nodded. “Detection just calls for patience. The hardest part is interpretation, the understanding of an alien mind.”

“You knew that — maybe you’ve always known it. But I didn’t. Now detection is past, and so is verification. What’s left is interpretation. When we were trying for detection, it was all right to have parallel efforts — even competing efforts. There was no duplication going on, because we were doing an all-sky survey, and Philip had put his money on the targeted search.

“But we’re past all that now. We have a signal. Understanding it, and reaching the point where we can reply to it, will take enormous amounts of effort. There’s enough work for everybody for years and years. Cooperative work, not competitive. I know cooperation is a new idea for you, so here’s my question: are you slaving night and day because you want to be able to read a message from the stars? Or is Jack Beston working mainly to beat Philip Beston, and prove that he’s a better man than his bastard brother?”

His face was absolutely unreadable. He said, “I should have listened to Hannah Krauss. She told me you would cause trouble. She was right.”

“Trouble, because I ask you what you want out of life?”

“What I want is none of your business. You’re fired, Milly Wu. You’ll not set foot again on Argus Station.”

“That’s right, get rid of anybody who dares to ask you to face the truth. Do you think I care where I live, or who I work for?” Milly was becoming emotionally charged in spite of her determination not to. “It’s what we are trying to achieve, and the people we work with, that matter. I’ll miss Hannah, and I’ll miss Simon Bitters and Lota Danes and Arnold Rudolph. My God, I’ll even miss you, though don’t ask me why. But what we’ve been trying to do is more important than any of our personal feelings. And the work will go on, no matter where I am or you are. It would go on even if we were both dead.”

He stared at her. “The needs of the project transcend any single individual, that’s true.”

“Including you.”

“Including me. All right, I overreacted. You’re not fired. But you should take a few days off. You’re tired out and stressed out, and you are overreacting, too.”

Before she could curse him down to size, as he deserved, he added, “Eat a good meal and get some rest. That’s not a suggestion, Milly Wu, it’s an order. We’ll talk about all this later.”

His image vanished, leaving Milly shouting at a blank screen, “You arrogant son-of-a-bitch! It’s not your brother who’s the bastard, it’s you. And you can’t give me orders anymore. I don’t work for you.”