Charles Sheffield - Dark as Day

“They once did. From what I’ve heard they were a perfect combination, Philip extremely sneaky and better on theory, Jack with the edge when it came to design of detection equipment. But Jack was two years younger, and you know how it is with brothers. Philip had been used to bossing Jack around when they were kids, but by the time Jack was nineteen he wouldn’t take it anymore.”

“He decided he’d rather dish it out.”

“Maybe. But you’re just pissed right now because of what he said to you. Don’t let it bother you. Didn’t you hear how he spoke to everybody?”

“I don’t care. Nobody has the right to talk to people like that.”

“Jack thinks he does.”

They were about to enter the main chamber for signal reception and initial scanning, and Hannah paused on the threshold. “Milly, there’s one other thing I want to say before we get to where others can hear. You look young enough to pass for a fresh-faced kid, but that won’t save you. Jack Beston finds you attractive — yes he does, don’t argue with me. I know the signs. And so far as I can tell his only two interests in life are the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the seduction of new female workers. You can feel free to refuse—”

“I damned well will!”

“—although he won’t easily take no for an answer. Also, if you do decide that he’s attractive, and sleep with him, you’ll find that it doesn’t bring any special out-of-bed privileges. Don’t look for special favors from Jack Beston. He’ll still be the Ogre when it comes to work.”

“You know all this, for a fact?”

The corners of Hannah’s ultra-mobile mouth turned up and down again in a fraction of a second. “Believe me, Milly, I know. And don’t bother to tell me I was stupid, because I don’t think I was. There’s not too many things to do around here apart from work, and JB doesn’t hold grudges when it’s all over. Nor do I. I’m just saying to you, watch it. He’ll come sniffing, sure as Sunday. Keep hating him, and that’s fine. It’s when you feel sympathy for the Devil that you’re in trouble.”

Hannah didn’t offer a chance for more questions, but stepped through into the great cube of the signal reception room. At first, Milly did not follow her. She had been here before, but again she wanted to feel the thrill, the prickle of awe creeping along her spinal column and up into her hind brain.

This was it. Here, in this room, thirty-four billion separate signals, culled from narrow parts of the neutrino and electromagnetic energy spectrum, and from all parts of the heavens, came into convergence. Here, the myriad signals were sifted and sorted and searched, in the quest for anomalies that stood out from the rest, the deviation from random noise that cried out, “Look, look at me. I am a message!”

Six years ago, when she was seventeen, Milly had encountered another message, one passed down from the very dawn of SETI. A century and a half ago, Frank Drake had sent a string of 1’s and 0’s to his colleagues, inviting them to decipher its meaning. Not one of them had succeeded.

But Milly had, proceeding from prime factors of an array of numbers, then to a picture, then to an interpretation. She could trace her presence here directly to the emotional rush of that day. It had been a fork in her personal road, the moment when the pleasures of mastering the Puzzle Network faded before the challenge of messages from the stars.

Now there was no guaranteed signal, but in its place a near-infinity of possible ones. The distributed observing system around the L-4 Argus Station still explored the ancient water-hole of the early investigators, between the spectral lines of neutral hydrogen and the hydroxyl radical, and to that they had added the preferred zone of neutrino resonance capture, a region undreamed of in early SETI work.

The work took on new complexity when you could not be sure that a possible signal was a signal, and all the time the detection equipment became more sensitive and sophisticated. Is something there? That question was harder to answer than ever. Milly wondered about the comparison. Which was more difficult to decipher: A signal sent by humans to humans, deliberately obscure and challenging their ingenuity, but with a promise that it was a signal? Or a message from aliens, designed to be clear, struggling to be heard, wanting to be transparent in meaning, and sent to any life form who might be listening?

What would Frank Drake say now, if he could be here to regard his legacy? The original listening had been done for just two stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, on a minimum of radio frequencies, for a period that was no more than one tick on the great celestial clock. Drake would probably just shake his head and smile a secret little smile. He was a scientist and a realist, but he had an element of fey, deep inside, that led him to label his project Ozma, a name with more than a touch of magic and a hint of exotic mystery. Maybe more than surprised he would be disappointed, that they had looked so long and so hard and found nothing.

Nothing yet. Where are they? Be patient, Frank, and old Enrico Fermi. They are there. We are going to find them.

The smaller room beyond, in contrast to the one where Milly stood, was completely shielded from external signals. Within it the anomalies, the potential messages, the scores or hundreds daily culled from raw inputs, were sent to be analyzed. It is one of the curious results of information theory that the possible information carried within a signal is proportional to its randomness, to its unpredictability. If something is totally predictable, then by definition you know its content exactly and it can tell you nothing new. If the incoming signal is totally unpredictable, on the other hand, then in principle every single bit of data is a potential message. There had to be a fine line: enough regularities to announce intelligent design (a sequence of prime numbers, the Pythagorean theorem, a sequence of squares, the digits of pi), yet enough variation to offer information. How would an alien intelligence draw the line?

Milly crossed the big receiving chamber and stood on the threshold of the inner sanctum. Hannah had vanished. Milly had not been looking for her for minutes, and did not know where she had gone. That was all right. For the moment there was neither need nor desire for company. She was at a nexus, the focus of a torrent of information streaming in from every direction and distance in space, from everywhere in the galaxy and beyond it. The chamber was silent, but her inner ear discerned a mighty rushing river of data, rain-fed by the whole universe.

And the Ogre, with his insults and his coarse manners? Screw Jack Beston. She had not come here for him, she was here for this.

Milly was starting toward one of the work stations, where she could grab a batch of anomalies and analyze them to see if anything there spoke of purposive signal, when at that moment she saw him. He was standing in the center of the room, no more than ten meters away. Clearly, he had no idea that she was there. His head was tilted to one side, looking slightly up. The green eyes were slitted half shut. The expression on his face was nothing like the one she had seen and hated in the review meeting. It was rapt, it was concentrated, it was yearning.

Strangest of all, Milly could read that look. Jack Beston heard the cosmic roar of the swirling galaxy, beating in from all around them. But he was not listening for that. He was listening, with all his heart and soul, for something that he could not hear. Within the whirlwind, a still small voice.

Jack Beston wanted to hear the message, the one that would tell him that all this dedication of spirit and mighty labor was not in vain.

Milly could suddenly see inside him, as clearly as if Jack were lit from within by lightning. She looked, she understood, she yearned in just the same way to hear that same small voice. She felt connected.