Charles Sheffield - Dark as Day

The station corridors were silent and dimly lit, powered down for what was by convention the sleeping period. Milly slowed her pace as she came closer to her destination. She felt sure she was going to look like a fool, if not to the whole station then at least to one person.

She knocked and pushed the door open. Jack Beston was inside, and he was not asleep. Wearing loose pants and an undershirt that revealed just how thin he was, he was sitting bolt upright at a small desk and staring at a large sheet of paper that seemed all mathematical symbols. He looked up, startled by Milly’s entry. His initial look of annoyance was replaced by a smile.

“Well, this is a surprise. It’s a bit late for dinner, but there are other diversions even at this hour. Why don’t we—”

“I want you to come with me. You have to look at something.”

An ogre he might be, but he was no fool. He caught the edge in Milly’s tone and stood up at once. “Lead the way.”

In his undershirt, with no shoes?

“I think I’ve found something,” Milly said. “If I’m reading it right—”

“Ssh. First rule of SETI, you can lead the way but you can’t lead the witness. Show me what you have. Don’t talk about it.”

He was, thank God, taking her seriously. There was no hint of mockery or derision in his tone. Milly hurried back through the quiet corridors, using her hands and feet to increase her speed in the low-gravity environment of the Argus Station. She could sense Jack right behind her, probably skeptical but still impatient.

“There.” Milly, opening the door to her cubicle to reveal the display, felt that she was allowed at least one word. He nodded, pushed past her — and closed the door before she could follow him in.

What was she supposed to do now? Milly stood and waited, simmering with anger and frustration. He didn’t know how to run the suite of programs that she had developed. He had no idea what tests she had performed. He had no notion of the combination of factors that suggested to Milly an extra-solar signal of non-natural origin. So what the devil was he doing?

She waited, eyes tired and stomach growling. She had eaten nothing since discerning the first hint of the anomaly, and that had been before midday. Her last meal had been breakfast. No wonder she felt dizzy and hollow.

How long was she supposed to stand and do nothing? The hell with the man, it was her anomaly. She reached out, opened the door, and stepped into the little cubicle. Jack Beston was sitting rigid in front of the display. The results that Milly had left on it had disappeared. In their place was an unintelligible image — not numbers or graphs, but swirls of color.

He had heard the door open, and he turned. Milly stood her ground, half expecting a curse. Then she saw his face. For the first time since she had met him, his green eyes were fully open, and they were looking through her and beyond her.

“Well?” Her own voice sounded as weak and nervous as she felt.

Gradually, his eyes focused. He nodded. “It’s possible. My own tests are… interesting. We may have found something.” He frowned. “Credit where credit is due. You may have found something. But don’t get your hopes up high. I put the chance at one percent. I’ve felt this close before, a dozen and more times, and it never held up. This one seems to be extra-solar, but we need a history and a parallax to give us a distance estimate. Did you run a historical search?”

“Partial. I looked back three months, and I couldn’t find any trace of it.”

Milly understood the significance of Jack’s question. The multiple receivers at Argus Station could pinpoint the direction in space from which a signal was coming, and if that direction was changing rapidly then the source had to be inside the solar system. However, a slow-moving signal source was not sufficient evidence to prove that it was of extra-solar origin. To determine the distance of something many light-years away, you needed to look at it from two directions. That implied at least two different observations, taken from locations far enough apart in space to provide adequate parallax. The movement of the Argus Station itself, as it orbited in the same plane as Jupiter, would eventually provide that separation. But one full revolution of the station around the Sun, like one revolution of Jupiter itself, took a full twelve years.

Milly felt her spirits drop. She knew the three stages of SETI as well as anyone: D-V-I — Detect, Verify, Interpret. What she had done was, at best, Stage 1. Did that mean they would have to wait years and years, to obtain a long enough baseline for verification that this was truly at stellar distance?

Jack’s face betrayed his own mix of emotions. He acted casual, but she could see that he was enormously excited. After a few moments he said, “Damnation.” And then, “Tonight we say nothing to anybody. Tomorrow we show this to the second-tier analysis group” — Milly didn’t know there was a second-tier analysis group — “and see what they decide.”

Milly said, “And then? The long baseline observation…”

“And then,” Jack stood up. “And then, if we’re all agreed on a probable detection, we have no choice. We’ll need verification. You and I will have to make a trip.”

“To Ganymede?” Milly had in mind some vague notion of establishing their priority — her priority? — proving that she and the Argus Station were the first to discover a signal from the stars. But couldn’t such a claim be made simply by sending a signal? She said again, “Do we actually need to go to Ganymede?”

Jack was shaking his head. “Forget Ganymede. Unless all this falls apart when we take a closer look, tomorrow we head for the Odin Station at Jovian L-5.” He gave Milly a grim smile. “A treat for you. You get to meet the Bastard.”

You couldn’t prowl in zero-gee. If you could, Janeed would have been doing it. She was alone in the twenty-meter emergency room of the big orbital platform, with nothing to do but wait and worry.

The platform was designed to handle arrivals with space-sickness, everything from food poisoning to pure-oxy flash fires to cerebral edemas caused by too-low pressures or vacuum blow-out. Today, however, there had been no emergencies. The center was busy with routine physical examinations, for Janeed and Sebastian and a score of other people preparing themselves for a high-acceleration run from Earth to Ganymede.

Janeed’s physical exam had seemed like no physical at all. A battery of machines had clicked and clucked at her while she stood in front of them. That took maybe ten minutes. Then there was the pill. It was round and the size of her thumbnail, and she had swallowed it only on her third try. Even then she needed the assistance of a gulp of water.

The technician, a cheerful blond man whose delicate bones suggested that he spent most of his days in micro-gee environments, had apologized. “The PO used to be quite a bit smaller.”

“PO?”

“Peristaltic Observer — the pill. It used to be only as big as a pea, but they just put in a whole new suite of sensors to monitor liver enzymes and perform real-time blood chemistry. I’ve complained about the size, and they’ve promised a version half as big in maybe a month. But for now…”

But for now, the natural peristalsis of Jan’s alimentary canal was transporting the marble-sized pill, with its formidable suite of sensors, along the length of her digestive tract. Tomorrow the PO would be naturally excreted, bearing a complete record (including color images) of every inch of her from throat to anus.

Even with the pill, the physical was quicker and simpler than Jan had expected. She was in and out in less than half an hour. So were the others. They had emerged from the medical center and headed off to their own quarters to prepare for the flight out.