Dark as Day

6

Humans had been listening for messages from the stars for a hundred and fifty years. What were the chances that you, Milly Wu, would here-and-now discover the first one ever?

Milly told herself, all the time, that the odds were enormously against her; and yet, every morning, as she sat down in her little cubicle she felt an odd frisson of expectation.

It was her third week of work, and the routine was already familiar. Incoming signals from all wavelengths went first to the central “mill” of the station, for basic processing and reduction to a standard format. The mill was fully automated, and no human played any part in the operation.

Next came a series of computations and tests, again without human involvement, designed to discover deviations from randomness. There is a fine line between a signal that is unpredictable but well-determined, and one that is totally random. For example, the digits of such numbers as ? or e or Euler’s constant, y, form an infinite sequence in any number base you care to choose. You can calculate each element of that sequence, such as the number-string that begins ?’s base-10 representation, 3.14159265358979323846… for as long as you have time and patience. No matter where you stop, at the millionth or the billionth or the trillionth digit, there will always be a specific and unique next digit. The number ? is therefore well-determined, with absolutely nothing random about it. At the same time, no matter how far you go, the next digit cannot be predicted from what you have already.

Of course, if you were to discover the first thousand or ten thousand digits of ?, to any number base, in a signal received from space, that would be another matter. It would provide proof, without doubt and without the need for any other information, that an alien intelligence was broadcasting to the universe.

Milly had known all that, long before she applied for a position with Project Argus. It was also a safe bet that the Argus computers, billions of times faster and more accurate than any human, were screening for untold millions of digit sequences drawn from pure mathematics and physics.

So what did this leave for humans to do? Exactly what Milly was doing now: using the human ability, so far unmatched by any machine, to see patterns.

Every morning, the mill produced a variable number of signals with some element of strangeness. Every morning, eighteen humans in their separate cubicles were provided a quota of data sets for individual examination. No one in the analysis group knew how many signals the mill produced on any particular day for human inspection, and all assumed that on some occasions two or more people would be given the same data. In principle no data set was more than one day old, but Hannah Krauss had told Milly that new arrivals would often in their first weeks be given an old anomaly, to see what they made of it. Jack Beston calibrated and compared the quality of people as well as signals.

He was more than an Ogre, he was a paranoid Ogre. Milly and her fellow-workers at the Argus Station could eat together if they wished and interact socially as much as they liked. What they were not supposed to do, ever, was compare notes about their work. Anomalies were not to be advertised, nor were they a subject for group discussion. They were to be reported directly to Jack Beston.

The data for individual analysis were divided into what on the L-4 station were known as “cells.” As Milly pulled in the first cell of the day, she reflected that she too might as well be in a cell. Worse than that, she was in solitary confinement. The cubicle to her left was occupied by a mournful-faced woman in her middle fifties who apparently had no other existence than work. Lota Danes was never in the dining area, and no matter how early Milly came to her cubicle, the door of the neighboring cubicle was always closed and the red sign outside showed that it was occupied. The hyperactive man who sat on Milly’s other side was at the other extreme of behavior. Simon Bitters kept random hours, popped in and out of his cubicle all the time, stuck his head now and again into Milly’s own little partition, placed his right index finger on the end of his nose, then ducked out again without a word. He apparently spent the whole of his working days wandering the station. Milly wondered how he ever fulfilled his daily quota. But apparently he did, otherwise Jack Beston would have shredded him at the weekly review meetings.

“You’ll be a long way from home,” her stepfather had said, just before Milly left Ganymede. “Make friends there, so you won’t feel lonely.”

Sure. But how, with eccentrics like these?

Maybe Milly was one herself. This wasn’t what she had expected when she signed up to come to the L-4 location and the Argus Project, but Hannah Krauss’s warning after her first couple of weeks in some ways matched her stepfather’s. “The work here is challenging and interesting, but it’s lonely. Try to make friends, and find activities outside your work. Do you know the occupational hazards of mathematicians, logicians, and cryptanalysts?”

“Depression?”

“Depression, yes. Also insanity, paranoia, and suicide. And isolation increases the odds.”

Now they warned you, when you were already here. Milly examined the screen in front of her. She could process the cell that she had just loaded in endless different ways. It came in as a long string of binary digits, anything from a million to billions of 1’s and 0’s. She could transform that to any number base, introduce any breaks that she liked, look for repeating strings, present the data factored into two- or three-dimensional arrays, transform the results to polar or cylindrical or any other orthogonal set of coordinates, examine the Fourier transforms and power spectra of the result, cross-correlate any section with any other, compute the sequence or image entropy, seek size or shape invariants, and display any or all of those results in a wide variety of formats. In the first few days she had developed her own preferred suite of processes, with a shell of operations to run their sequence automatically. All she had to do was sit, observe the results, and allow her imagination to run free in its search for oddities, or — there was always hope — meaningful patterns.

While she worked, spectral figures from the past wandered through Milly’s mind. They were her heroes and heroines. Here was Thomas Young, the universally gifted nineteenth-century Englishman who moved so easily from medicine to physics to linguistics. He had taken the multi-language inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone to gain a first handle on interpreting Egyptian hieroglyphics. The polymath Young had dismissed his work casually, as “the amusement of a few leisure hours.” Here was the Frenchman, Jean-Francois Champollion, finishing the work that Young had begun, and writing his book on the subject that had so fascinated Milly at seventeen — the same age at which Champollion had been made a full professor at Grenoble.

A century later than Champollion, the quiet American classicist Alice Kober had patiently begun to unravel the mysteries of the Cretan language, Linear B, work that after her early death was completed by Michael Ventris and John Chad-wick. By Chadwick’s side, as a fellow worker at an English classified facility during wartime, stood the enigmatic and tragic figure of Alan Turing. Turing, with his rumpled clothes, dirty nails, and unshaven face, had been a nonpareil cryptanalyst, as well as the godfather of all the computers that now surrounded Milly. His life had ended with the suicide that Hannah Krauss warned of for workers in cryptanalysis. Behind Turing, a century earlier, stood another computer godfather, Charles Babbage, himself a noted cryptanalyst who had cracked the “unbreakable” Vigenere cipher and who straddled the line between genius and eccentricity.

The godmother for Milly’s own field, the interpretation of signals from the stars, had been born a generation later than Turing. Jocelyn Bell, when she was no older than Milly herself, sat alone day after day and night after night studying radio telescope signals, until one day she came across curious repeating patterns of electronic noise that she had named “scruff.” For a time, Jocelyn Bell and her research supervisor believed that what she had found was what Milly now longed so desperately to see: synthetic signals from far across the galaxy, sent by intelligent beings. They even — in private if not in public — called them “LGM objects,” the initials standing for Little Green Men. Jocelyn Bell’s actual discovery, of natural signals sent out by the rapidly rotating neutron stars known as pulsars, was a great surprise and a great event in the history of astrophysics; but it must also have been, in some ways, a disappointment.

And that, Milly reflected, was both the promise and the curse of SETI. If you did discover a pattern, the odds were long against it being what you hoped. Far more likely, you had accidentally come across a natural phenomenon. Nature had a thousand ways of producing a signal with some repeating pattern. Almost everything in space — planets, moons, stars, galaxies — rotated, and each had its own magnetic field. The combination of field and spin could spit pulses of electromagnetic energy in any direction, across thousands or millions of light-years. Discovery of a new such phenomenon might be a great scientific event, but it was not a message from intelligent aliens.

And if what you saw was not natural, then it was most likely a man-made signal, thrown out casually and carelessly by some human activity within the solar system.

Like now. Milly had on her screen a power spectrum with well-defined peaks. Something was generating blips of energy at regular intervals, and it certainly looked like a signal. It also came from a definite direction in space.

She skipped back a day to examine earlier data from the same direction. The pattern vanished. However, observations were made in all directions, through the full 4? of solid angle around the station. She asked the computers to seek a match in a widening cone around the direction of the signal. It took maybe thirty seconds, and there it was: two almost identical power spectra, one day apart, and from directions three degrees apart in the sky. Conclusion: the source, whatever it was, lay within the solar system. No signal source at interstellar distances could move through three degrees of arc in one day, unless it was traveling at least a hundred times as fast as light.

Curse that one, cross it off, note it in the log, and pull in the next data cell. Like everything presented to the eighteen analysts, this one had been flagged by the computers for special treatment. However, it was contrary to Jack Beston’s policy to pass onto the analyst the nature of the computer report. He argued that such information encouraged mindless agreement, and inhibited free association and pattern recognition.

Milly activated her program suite, to see what it could do with this one. It had just begun to run when she heard a jingling sound from behind her. It made her feel very uncomfortable. Jack Beston was standing outside the open door of her cubicle. He moved very quietly, but he had the habit of jingling whatever was in his pocket, coins or keys, so you could not accuse him of creeping up on you.

She swiveled her chair around. He was there, his head to one side, watching her displays. He had a little half-smile on his face and his green eyes were closed to slits. Without saying a word he stepped inside her cubicle and stood staring at the screen.

Didn’t the man have any manners? No wonder everyone on the Argus Project was so rude, when its leader set the tone for the whole place.

“Hm — hm.” Milly coughed, deliberately drawing his attention to her. “I’m trying to work in here, sir. You’re interfering with that. I would prefer that you leave.” She didn’t insert the customary “respectfully” but if that got her fired, what the hell. Jack Beston looked too much like Aly Blanes for comfort, and sexy Aly was half the reason she had left Ganymede.

If Beston heard her, he didn’t show any sign of it. His eyes were still fixed on the screen, although there was no way that the display could be intelligible to him. This was Milly’s own set of program protocols, their outputs tuned to her way of thinking.

If Jack Beston understood that, he gave no sign of it. He watched the outputs parade across the screen, the input data transformed in a thousand separate ways.

“It’s inside the solar system,” he said at last. “A long way out of the ecliptic, though, so my guess is we’ve got some joy-riding clowns waltzing around the Egyptian Cluster at high solar latitude. Illegal, and they’re bound to be caught, but they never learn.” He checked a device on his wrist. “Recent, too. Nothing there two days ago.”

He turned away from the display, as though suddenly it had lost all interest, and went on, “You’re working very hard, Milly Wu. Also, you know what you’re doing.”

It was a compliment, but not much of one. She burst out, “How can you possibly know what the data show? The analysis isn’t halfway finished.”

“Experience, and a thousand disappointments. I’ve been working on this for all my adult life. Sometimes I think I’ve seen everything that humans and the galaxy have to offer. Except what we’re looking for. A real SETI signal.”

“It’s there.” Milly wouldn’t stand for that style of negative thinking. “It’s there, and we’ll find it.”

“Good for you, Milly Wu.” Finally, he was looking right into her eyes. “Look, I told you you’re working hard, and I think you’re working too hard. I can see it in the bags under your eyes, and in your hands. You need a break. Would you care to have dinner with me tonight?”

A great compliment, to tell her how battered she was looking. Would she like a break? Of course she would. But there was Hannah, sitting on her shoulder and warning: “His two interests in life are the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the seduction of new female workers. You can feel free to refuse—”

“I don’t think I can go to dinner, thank you. I have too much work to do.”

It didn’t faze him at all. He stood, one hand in his pocket jingling keys or coins, the other touched to his brow. The little smile was still on his face. “That’s up to you. But if you care to change your mind, I’ll be in my quarters until six. You know where they are. Keep up the good work, Milly Wu.”

The sheer presumption of the man. He assumed that she would know where his quarters were. She did, of course, because Hannah had given her the complete tour. But what an arrogant bastard.

Milly turned back to her work. She was trembling and her mind felt fuzzy. She ought to eat. A couple more cells, and then she would take a rest. The results of the latest data cell were appearing, and the most damnable thing about them was that Jack Beston had called it exactly right. Some ship was bouncing around in the Egyptian Cluster, far out of the ecliptic, with no more idea of radio silence than an interplanetary call girl. The final evidence was unmistakable. But how had Jack Beston, with nothing but a few fragments of information, known?

Experience, he had said. Well, all the rumors confirmed that he had plenty of that, and in more areas than one. Lecherous creep. I should have stayed on Ganymede.

Milly had always prided herself on her power of concentration, but the effort to turn her attention back to her work took all her willpower.

The next cell was simple and should have been caught by the computer. The SETI array had picked up signals from a vessel in transit from Dione to Hyperion. All the clues were there — orbit close to the ecliptic, moving source, standard frequencies. It made you wonder just how much you could rely on the pre-screening programs. Maybe that’s the place where someone ought to tell Jack Beston to invest some effort. Not that the Ogre was likely to listen.

Milly rolled in the data for the next cell. Last one, then something to eat. This one looked different, so different that she ran her entire shell of standard programs without gaining any feel for the reason it had come through as an anomaly. The evidence accumulated slowly, and it was all indirect. First, the source was again far out of the ecliptic, and this time it came from nowhere near the Egyptian Cluster. That reduced the chance of accidental shipping signals by a factor of hundreds. Signal frequency and signal type were equally odd. Rather than being in the “water hole” between the neutral hydrogen and hydroxyl ion emissions, this was at dizzyingly high neutrino energies, where the resonance capture probability was correspondingly high. The trouble was, no human-made generator could fire a modulated neutrino beam at those energies.

Something was there. The question was, message or mirage? The universe was quite capable of producing energies so far beyond human ranges that the mechanisms themselves were still in debate.

Thoughts of food forgotten, Milly settled down to work harder than she had ever worked. It was an axiom of SETI: no matter what you think you’ve found, you haven’t. Go back, take another look at the data, and see what you’ve been doing wrong.

Milly transformed, inverted, deleted, amplified, and computed cross-correlations until her head spun. The anomaly persisted. It seemed to be outside the solar system, though there was inadequate parallax from recent motion to determine just how far outside. The signal also provided repetitive sequences. One of those, factored from a one-dimensional input data stream to a 2-D array using a product of primes, revealed a pattern of 1’s and 0’s that hinted at the outline of a circle. Deviations were so small that they looked like signal discretization error. Milly could imagine no natural process that would lead to that result. And the imagined circle had strings attached to it, filaments of binary digits which hinted at an internal structure of their own.

It was close to midnight when she gave up. She could make no sense of what she was seeing; or rather, she could make sense in exactly one way, and it was the one that all her instincts and knowledge of history told her was too good to be true.

What now? Should she do something with what she had found, or ought she let it simmer in her brain and take another look at everything in the morning, when she was less tired? The whole history of SETI was riddled with peaks of excitement, followed a few hours or days later by troughs of disappointment when a signal was not repeated, proved to have arisen within the solar system, or had some natural explanation. It was known as the “Wow effect,” named after a famous incident in the first decades of SETI when an impressive but fleeting anomaly was seen once — and never again.

Jack Beston’s own words from one of the weekly review meetings finally convinced her. He had offered a warning. “We operate here in the classic ‘hurry up and wait’ mode. I’ve been working the Argus Project for ten years. I expect I’ll be running it ten, twenty, thirty, forty years more — maybe until they drag me out of here feet-first. But don’t let that fool you into thinking that anything we find isn’t urgent. There’s no prize in this game for coming second. If you think you’re working hard, you can bet somebody on the Odin Project is matching you, hour for hour. They are a competent group, they’re well-funded, and they are well-organized.”

It showed respect for Philip Beston, the first time that Milly had ever heard Jack say anything positive about the Bastard.

“Don’t come to me with every half-assed idea or suspicion,” Jack had continued. “Check it out six ways forward, then six ways backward. But if it still checks out — almost everything won’t, I’ll guarantee that — you bring it to me, and only to me. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing, night or day, sleeping or waking, taking a bath or taking a crap, you come get me at once.”

At once.

Milly fixed her outputs in their final form and exited her cubicle. She did have the sense to close the door after her. If others at the Argus Station learned how far out on a limb she was going, she would be a laughing stock.

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.”