Dark as Day

23

Progress review meetings at Argus Station were held every Tuesday morning, starting at midday. This was Monday, ridiculously early in the, morning. Why was she being summoned to the conference room?

Milly — just out of bed, hair falling into her eyes, without breakfast, starved of caffeine, less than half-awake — answered the call and hurried to the meeting. Despite all her efforts, she arrived ten minutes later than requested. She entered, braced for a tongue-lashing from Jack Beston.

On the threshold she paused, bewildered. The room was empty. A gruff voice from behind her said, “Yes, you’re at the right place. We’re all late. Go on in, and let’s get things moving.”

She turned. Jack Beston was behind her, his usually ruddy face pale and taut. With him was the mystery woman, Zetter.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Jack said. He seemed to be talking to Milly, not Zetter. “Even before we left Odin Station, I knew that the bastard was up to something.”

Milly could tell from the intonation that ‘bastard’ was being used with a different meaning. It was now a description, not a name.

“Zetter,” Jack went on. He waved the two women to hard-backed chairs, and settled himself on a third with his arms folded over the back. “You tell her.”

Zetter’s vulpine face was uneasy, as though revealing information to anyone but Jack Beston himself was an unprecedented and dangerous activity. “We have received information from Odin Station,” she said. The sharp nose twitched. “Soon after you two left, Philip Beston sent a secure message to certain senior members of the Puzzle Network.”

“Secure, but not secure enough,” Jack said. “You’ve heard of the Puzzle Network, Milly?”

“Yes.” This was no time for Milly to go into details. She was too eager to learn what the Bastard had said.

“In brief,” Zetter continued, “Beston has proposed a working collaboration between Odin Station and the Puzzle Network. They would form a joint venture for the interpretation of the SETI message. He will make available to them everything that he and his team are able to discover. The Puzzle Network team, in return, will channel any results that they obtain to him, on an exclusive basis.”

“Putting it another way,” Jack said, “we’re screwed. The Bastard has signed up the top brains in the System at this kind of problem. Those characters work on fancy intellectual problems for pleasure. I don’t know how good they are, but I have to assume they’re the best.”

“They are,” Milly said. “The absolute best.”

“Then we’re doubly screwed. They’re nuts, but they’re smart nuts. The worst sort.” Jack slumped into a chair, his chin cupped in his hands. After a moment he looked up. “How come you know so much about this, Milly Wu? Did the Bastard come crawling around you, trying to get you involved?”

That was uncomfortably close to the truth. Milly headed in a different direction. “I know the Puzzle Network because I used to be part of it: In fact, I was Junior Champion three years running. I only dropped out when I found that thinking about SETI was occupying more and more of my rime.”

“That right?” Jack Beston’s eyes half closed to green slits. “Three years running?” Milly could hear the mental relays clicking over. “Zetter, that’s all for now. I need a few private words with Milly Wu.”

The thin face hardened, and Zetter’s mouth compressed to a tight line. “You wish me to leave?”

“You got it.”

“But our… source. What instructions do I provide?”

“Say, keep looking and listening. We’re going to handle the rest from here.”

Zetter nodded and did not reply, but as she left she gave a glare of hatred that Milly felt she had done nothing to deserve.

“Now, Milly.” Jack Beston humped his chair over closer. “If you were champion three years in a row, in your Puzzle Network days you must have built up quite a reputation. You must still have close friends there.”

There were things that you never said to your boss, no matter what the provocation. Here came one of them: “The hell with that, Jack Beston. I won’t do it.” Maybe it was lack of morning caffeine. “Not if you go down on your hands and knees and grovel.”

“I just might do that. But Milly, listen to me for a minute.” He eased his chair a few inches closer. “You started this whole thing. It’s called the Wu-Beston anomaly, but everybody remembers the Wu rather than the Beston. Which is as it should be. But you know, and I know, that detection is only part of the story, and not the biggest part. Nobody today remembers who dug up the Rosetta Stone, what they recall are the people who used it to decipher hieroglyphics. The Bastard knows this, just as well as we do. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s been thinking this way for years, he’s such a sneaky devil.

“But now suppose that you were part of the Puzzle Network team that worked on the interpretation of the signal. Your name would be associated with every phase of the work: detection, verification, interpretation. For all of history, the only name anyone would associate with the first SETI signal would be Milly Wu.”

“And Jack Beston. What would he get out of this?”

“The satisfaction of knowing he’d beaten the Bastard on all fronts. And Milly, you have no idea how sweet that would be. Can you do it? Can you become involved in the Puzzle Network interpretation effort?”

“No. That would be impossible, I’ve been away from it for too long.” But even as she spoke, Milly could imagine an approach.

She had not, as she suggested to Jack Beston, totally burned her bridges. In fact, less than six months ago she had heard from one of the Masters, Pack Rat, an older man with a taste for adolescent girls and a definite fondness for Milly (Puzzle Network Masters had to be smart, but no one said they had to be moral). He had sent her a puzzle, and invited her to have dinner. She had solved the puzzle the same day that it arrived, returned her answer, and declined the other invitation. But she felt sure that the door was open. Pack Rat had as good as told her that she was still a prime candidate for Master level in the Network.

Jack Beston was watching her closely. He was not, as Hannah Krauss had told her often enough, a man who easily took no for an answer. Rather, he took whatever he wanted. Milly, on the other hand, had taken as much of some things as she ever would.

She said abruptly, “Suppose I’m wrong, and it turned out to be possible for me to become involved in the Puzzle Network’s interpretation work. Then I would have to leave here. There’s no possible way that your brother would send information to Argus Station.”

“Of course he wouldn’t. We would have to travel to wherever the information center was located.”

“We. What do you mean, we? Who are you talking about?”

“The two of us. You and me. Now that we have a verified signal, our interpretation team can carry on here very well without me.”

“I believe that. But what would you do on Ganymede? Carry my bags? Because I can assure you of one thing: no one is admitted to the higher levels of the Puzzle Network without a track record and sponsors.”

His face went from pale to bright red. Milly was ready for the Ogre’s patented bellow of rage, but it never came. Instead, Jack took a deep breath, then said quietly, “I’m sure you are right. If I go to Ganymede, I will do whatever is most helpful in interpreting the signal.” And then, more intensely, “Milly, you have to understand how I feel. This SETI project is terribly important to me. I’ve devoted most of my life to it, and I can’t stand the idea of being anywhere but at the center of the action.”

“When I came here I was willing to devote my life to this, too. But I almost quit in the first few weeks. You’ve been running the place for too long, Jack Beston. It’s your money, and it’s your project, and Argus Station is your station.”

“Well?” He seemed bewildered. “Who else would you have run it?”

“That’s not the point. You feel that because you’re the boss you’re entitled to treat everyone like dirt. And maybe you are — while you are here. But if you were to go with me to Ganymede, and it’s a big if, I wouldn’t take your bullying anymore.”

“Have I bullied you?”

“What! Of course you have. You’ve bullied everybody. People only stay because they’re in love with the work. Did you know that when we were over at Odin Station, Philip Beston asked me to come and work with him?”

“My brother? The bastard!”

“That’s right, the Bastard. And I have to tell you, I was tempted.”

“But you told him no.”

“That’s right. I told him no.” Milly would never mention what else she had told Philip Beston — that Jack was worth ten of him. “Now I’m telling you no. No more treating me like a child. No cussing me out or cutting me down in front of other people. And not just me. Try giving all your staff the respect they deserve. They are competent, they are hardworking, and they have earned your respect.”

A month ago, those words would surely have been followed by Milly’s instant dismissal. Now she sensed that the dynamics had changed. Jack Beston needed her more than she needed the Ogre.

She knew she was right when he leaned forward to rest his chin on his forearms, crossed along the back of the chair. His green eyes gazed up at her through bushy red eyebrows, and he said, “I’ll tell you one person who’s certainly competent, and that’s Hannah Krauss. She read through your entire background, and she told me: ‘I recommend that we make an offer, only don’t kid yourself about what you’re getting when you hire this one. She’s young, but she’s a tiger. She’ll cause you trouble.”

“I’m not a tiger.” Milly remembered Uncle Edgar’s words. “Let them think you’re a mouse, girl. Just don’t tell them what those black and yellow stripes are, and keep your mouth closed when you smile.”

“Fine.” Jack stood up. “You’re not a tiger. I’ll remind you of that when we get to Ganymede.”

“You’re not going to fire me?”

“I guess I’m not.” Jack had an unreadable little smile on his face. “Not today, at any rate. I may not be as smart as Philip—”

“The Bastard.”

“The Bastard. But I do know when to keep quiet. Mean-while, there is other excitement this morning. The clean-up team worked all night, and first thing this morning they called to tell me they have the final signal as tight and tidy as it will come. Want to take a look?”

“Yes! My God, yes.”

“I thought you would say that.” He was studying her face. “Before we go over there, though, I have another suggestion. You have the look of a starving woman. You and I should go and hunt up some breakfast. While we eat you can tell me everything else that I’m doing wrong. There’s no better way to begin the working week.”

The final signal was a string of twenty-one billion binary digits. It had been received over and over, until two weeks ago it had finally ceased. Now that direction in the sky offered nothing but the random white-noise hiss of the interstellar background.

The signal was still not ready for analysis. First, it needed correction. A more sophisticated version of the Bellman’s rule — “What I tell you three times is true” — was applied to find and correct dropped, added, or errant digits. The repeated strings were compared, digit by digit, and rare discrepancies corrected by majority rule. Arnold Rudolph, looking even more ancient and tiny than ever, had reviewed the final output, and given it his seal of approval. The sequence was error-free.

“But as to what that means…” Rudolph stared at the others in the room. “You now pass into an area in which I claim no expertise. I will say only this, which I am sure has already occurred to all of you: a sequence of twenty-one billion binary digits could encode the entire human genome, three times over.”

In addition to Milly and the Ogre, Pat Tankard and Simon Bitters were also present. No one laughed. Arnold Rudolph was referring to a suggestion almost as old as SETI itself: the notion that the first message from the stars might be the prescription not for a universal encyclopedia, nor a complex series of machines, but the information needed to build a living organism. That made the major assumption that alien life, like life in the solar system, would be built around a four-letter molecular code. Assign binary digit pairs to nucleotide bases; say, (0,0) = adenine, (0,1) = cytosine, (1,0) = guanine, and (1,1) = thymine; then any sequence containing an even number of binary digits was equivalent to a segment of a DNA molecule. You would make that DNA molecule, put it into a suitable environment for replication, and see what developed.

No one on Argus Station laughed at Arnold Rudolph’s comment; on the other hand, no one took it too seriously. The idea would be checked — a billion possibilities would be checked during the interpretation effort — but the general feeling was, the game couldn’t possibly be that easy. The search for a signal had taken a century and a half. The search for meaning might take as long.

There was another argument against the idea of the signal being biological. Turn the situation around and ask, how valuable would it be to send off to the stars the genetic description of a human? Even if some alien group were able to decipher the signal and provide an appropriate environment in which an embryo might grow, at the end of all that effort they would have a newborn baby. The aliens would know how a human lived and functioned, but nothing at all about what humans as a species had learned. Far better to send information about science and the technologies which aliens might find valuable.

Jack Beston stared at the screen, where the first infinitesimal section of the signal sequence was displayed. It appeared like a totally random string of 0’s and 1’s. “We’ll try the biological approach, of course, even if we all think it’s an unlikely answer. We can’t afford to overlook something just because it resembles the way we developed. But I suspect we’re more likely to make progress with physics or mathematics.”

That too was standard orthodoxy. Biological organisms would tend to be specific to their planetary origins. Physics and mathematics should be the same all over the universe.

The others looked at Jack Beston, waiting for more direction. When he offered none, Pat Tankard said hesitantly, “We already know that the total sequence length has a moderate number of factors — it’s certainly not prime, and it’s not highly composite. I was thinking of taking a look at partition theory and prime factorization of parts of the array. See if any of the two-dimensional arrays look anything like a picture.”

Jack nodded. “That’s very good, Pat, but maybe we shouldn’t stick with two-D. For all we know, our unknown signaller comes from avian stock, and thinks naturally in three dimensions. Or one dimension.”

After another brief silence, Simon Bitters, who had been wandering around the room in his usual restless way, returned to the rest of the group, put his index finger on the end of his nose, and said, “The whole signal repeats with twenty-one billion periodicity, but I was thinking that maybe not all of it is information. There may be marker sub-sequences, things like stop-start codons that indicate where something with meaning begins and ends. We need to look for short repeat sequences, patterns that don’t actually mean anything but that repeat over and over. I thought I would go through and examine local entropy, then see if that leads me to repeat markers.”

“Very logical.” Beston stared again at the maze of digits on the screen, and shook his head. “Good luck. But all of you, I wouldn’t start on any of this until you’ve had some rest. Chance favors the prepared mind, but discovery favors the rested one. And remember, we’re in this for the long haul. We may get lucky in a few months, but chances are we’re years away from knowing what you’ve got there.” He turned to Milly. “Anything else, before we let these hard-working people get some sleep? They’ve been up all night.”

Milly shook her head and allowed Beston to lead her outside. Once the door to the room was closed, he stopped right in front of Milly.

“There, see that? Nice as pie, not a harsh word from me to anybody. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” Milly hesitated. “You were polite, and agreeable. But I’m not sure that they are all right. I mean, I know they’re short of sleep, but their behavior seemed kind of odd. They’ve just finished something important. You’d never know it from their attitudes. They acted flat.”

“As if something was wrong?”

“Yes.”

“Very perceptive. Something was wrong.”

“But I couldn’t tell what it was.”

“I know absolutely what it was.”

“Was it me? Do they resent me, and the fact that I was the one who first found the anomaly?”

Jack laughed. “No, it wasn’t you, Milly. You are very smart, probably the smartest person who has ever worked at Argus Station, but they don’t resent that. Also, you have lots of dedication and drive to go with your brains. But there are still things you don’t know.”

He leaned against the wall of the corridor, stared down at Milly’s puzzled face, and went on, “You said it very clearly before we went in there. I’m an Ogre, and a monster, and I insult my staff and bully my staff and drive my staff. Now let me tell you a story. Back in the days when humans were just moving into space, there was a race between two countries to see who could be first to get human beings to the Moon.”

“I know about that. I’ve read a lot of history about America and Russia.”

“I’ll bet you don’t know what I’m going to tell you, because it was never in the official history books — just passed down by word-of-mouth. In the beginning, the Russians seemed to be well ahead. They had the first satellite, and the first man in space, and the first woman in space. Then the man who was running the American space program at the time made a decision. He chose a foreigner — a German, who had fought against the Americans in a recent war — and gave him the main responsibility for getting men to the Moon and back. He was asked, privately, ‘My God, why did you pick him? If he fails, you will be criticized by everyone in the country.’ The administrator said, “Do you think I don’t know that? But he won’t fail — he’s too arrogant to let himself fail.’ You see, Milly, the job we have here is a bit like the job they had. It’s difficult, it needs technology that’s right at the edge, and we’re in a hurry. Most people at Argus Station don’t have your self-confidence, or so much confidence in the project itself. They need somebody who shows in everything he says or does that we can’t fail — and in this game, coming in second is failing.

“Now I want to ask you a question, Milly. You heard Pat Tankard’s suggestion of examining two-D representations of the signal. What do you think of it?”

“To be honest, not very much. You can send information as images, but it’s terribly inefficient. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a high-resolution one costs you a million. Mostly you send messages as words and numbers, or their equivalent. And they are both one-dimensional data strings.”

“Exactly. So one of us — you or me — ought to have pointed out that fact to Pat. We didn’t, did we? Do you think that was doing her a service?”

“It wasn’t. But she just might be onto something.”

“Just might. In this game, though, you play the odds. For Pat Tankard’s sake, I ought to have cut her down or at the very least warned her. A bit later I probably will, but now I have another question for you. You’ve heard me rant and rave, you’ve heard me cuss out my people, you’ve heard me be an absolute tyrant. So here’s my question: when I’m not around, have you ever heard anyone on the staff say anything negative about me?”

Milly thought. The odd thing was, she hadn’t. She could hardly count Hannah Krauss’s warning that Jack Beston had a lot of sexual interest in the female staff members. And even there, Hannah had made it clear that she’d had her own experience with Jack Beston, and still held him in high regard.

“No one has ever said anything bad about you. Not to me, at any rate.”

“But if I go on being wishy-washy, the way I was back in there, they’ll soon start to. They’ll begin to wonder if I’m losing it. Milly, in private with you I will be as nice as you want — as nice as you will let me be. But in our staff meetings, I have to be the same rip-roaring Ogre that people are used to. I’m going to push, and hassle, and never let anybody imagine for one moment that we won’t come out of this as the team who found and cracked the first message from the stars.” He nodded to Milly. “That’s all I have to say. Contact your friends in the Puzzle Network, see if you can finagle your way onto that team. If you do, remember I want to go with you. And yes, if I have to I’ll carry your bags.”

He headed away along the corridor, quickly, so that Milly had no chance to reply. She stood for awhile, thinking. She was not even sure what her reply would have been. Half an hour ago she had felt in full command of the situation. She was the one with the contacts, the one with the clout, the one in control. Jack Beston had no choice. He would treat her in her way, as she wanted to be treated, or she would quit and leave Argus Station.

Now she was not sure what she would do. She was sure of only one thing: Jack Beston — still an Ogre, but apparently Ogre-by-choice — was a more complex person than she had ever suspected. And because of that, all Milly’s own decisions had become more difficult.