Charles Sheffield: Dark as Day

“How can I do that?”

“Your problem. Use analogies, use pictures, use metaphors, I don’t mind if you have to try poetry and dancing. But we really need this — or all your work will be ignored, just as surely as if it came from outside the organization.”

Alex stared at her. He was feeling like a fool. She was right, and so obviously right that he should have thought of it for himself. “I’ll do my best. But how will I know when I have what you want?”

“We use the Napoleonic principle.” At Alex’s raised eye-brows,-she went on, “You’ll brief Macanelly, from Pedersen’s group. Do you know him?”

“No. But I’ve heard about him.”

“Heard what about him?”

“That nobody likes to work with him. That he’s conceited, and also that he’s close to being a moron.”

“That’s what I’ve heard, too. He’ll be perfect. Napoleon used to have a special officer, a very dim one, who read all outgoing dispatches. Unless a dispatch was clear even to that man, it didn’t go out. Loring Macanelly will be our dispatch reader. When we have an explanation of what you’re doing that he can understand and repeat back to me, we’ll be happy. Won’t we? You don’t look happy.”

“Kate, I want to work on theory, and I want to develop analytic models. I consider what we are doing supremely important. But I hate this other sort of stuff, simplifying work to the point where it’s more misleading than informative, and then feeding it to half-wits.”

“You know what they say: God must be specially fond of half-wits, because he made so many of them. Will you do it?”

“I told you, I’ll do my best.”

“When you get something halfway ready, I’ll be your first half-wit.” Kate leaned back in her seat. “All right. That takes care of worries one and two. I’m not sure I have any right to ask you about worry three.”

“But you’re going to.” Alex had been vaguely upset when Kate Lonaker was appointed as his boss. She was two years younger than he, and before the end of their first brief meeting he knew she had little technical talent. Now, bit by bit, he was realizing what she had instead. More nerve than he would ever possess, and an inexplicable charm that took the edge off whatever she said.

And one other talent. How could a person do that, make you feel that they liked you and found you fascinating, without saying a single word? She was sitting there now, smiling at Alex as though he was the most interesting person in the System. And Kate could do it with anybody.

“If you’re going to ask me, then ask.”

“I will.” Kate glanced at her watch. “But I’m getting hungry. Can we talk and eat at the same time?”

“That’s fine with me.” Was she stalling? “What’s the third worry?”

“I was watching your face when your mother said that you mustn’t forget about the other thing, and she would make arrangements whenever you were ready.” Kate’s gaze, blue-eyed and sympathetic, was again fixed on Alex’s face. “As I said, it’s really none of my business, but I don’t believe that people I’m fond of should ever have to look like you looked. What is the other thing that you said you’d consider?”

Alex Ligon and Kate Lonaker held their meeting in one of the “low-rent” levels of the Ganymede interior, where most government offices are located.

Draw a line that joins Alex and Kate to the Sun. It’s a straight line, a long line, and a line of variable length, because Kate and Alex rotate with Ganymede, and Ganymede revolves around Jupiter, and Jupiter itself circles the Sun. But to one significant figure none of that matters. The distance is seven hundred and seventy million kilometers, give or take thirty million. Using that Sun-Jupiter line as base, draw two equilateral triangles in the same plane as Jupiter’s orbit. The apex of one of those triangles, trailing Jupiter in its orbit, is known as the Jovian L-4 point. The apex leading Jupiter is the Jovian L-5 point.

Both these locations are gravitationally stable. An object placed at one will remain there, co-orbiting with Jupiter. Nature long ago discovered this, and the group known as the Trojan asteroids reside there. The mathematician Lagrange proved the existence of such stable points in the eighteenth century. Humans only found a way to get there a good deal later.

Milly Wu arrived at the Jovian L-4 station most recently of all. She had flown out in an economy 0.2 Earth-gee ship, on a flight of two weeks duration; long enough to worry to excess about the adequacy of her talents, but not long enough to learn all she felt she needed to know about the Argus Project. Now, only six days after arrival, Milly was sitting in her first staff meeting and wondering how long it would take her stomach to adjust to a micro-gravity environment.

The good news was that she was not expected to do anything. “Just sit in the back and keep quiet,” her supervisor, Hannah Krauss, had said. “Answer a direct question if the Ogre addresses one to you, of course. But I don’t think that’s likely. JB is going to talk more than listen.”

The Ogre. Hannah was about twenty-four, just a couple of years older than Milly. She was alert and attractive, with a wild mop of dark curly hair, a slim figure, and a mobile face that could take on a huge variety of expressions. When she said, “the Ogre,” her whole countenance somehow adopted a look of menace and malevolence. Milly had heard bad things about Jack Beston, even back on Ganymede. But could he really be as ogre-ish as he was painted?

Milly looked, and decided that maybe he could. JB, Jack Beston, was standing in front of the group now. He was tall, red-headed, and skinny as a stim-stick. Not bad looking, if you liked skinny guys, as Milly did. But his expression cancelled any possible attraction. He was glowering at everyone and everything before a word was spoken. It made Milly wonder why she had struggled through all the horrendous aptitude tests in cryptanalysis and pattern analysis needed to bring her here. Was she all that keen to be part of the Argus Project?

She decided that she was. If anyone made contact with aliens, Milly wanted to be in the front row. But for the moment she was quite happy to follow Hannah Krauss’s advice and sit at the back. She scanned the windowless room. Minimal furnishings. Twenty-one people, fourteen women, seven men; three empty seats in her row. Sit tight, keep quiet, and try to be invisible. She placed the rectangle of the scribe plate flat on her knees, where she could make unobtrusive condensed Post-logic notes on whatever she felt needed recording.

“You’ve heard the crap the media are putting out.” Jack Beston made no introductory remarks. “The Seine is going to link everything to everything and solve every problem in the solar system. I turn that around. When the Seine is up and running — and that’s less than a day from now — nobody will be safe. Nobody will have secrets. People will use the Seine to wander all over the System and stick their nose in where it’s got no right to be. We can’t have that. I want to review where we stand on battening down on Argus information. Druse?”

A small man with a wizened face and a shaved scalp stood up. “The incoming signals all come in from open space, and we can’t do anything about that. Anyone with the right receiving equipment will get exactly what we get. But so far as we know, no one else in the System has our sensitivity, or our modulated neutrino beam detector. Except—” Druse hesitated.

“Except the Bastard.” Beston scowled. “He’s got Odin working different targets and a different set of neutrino energies, but his equipment’s as good as ours. No point in worrying about the security of incoming signals. What about the rest of it?”