Jack shook his head. “Not for me. Milly, you go if you feel interested.”
Milly nodded.
Philip took her by the arm. “If I may make so bold … I consider this a reasonable decision on both your parts. I suspect that my brother knows the inside of Odin Station as well as anyone here, despite the fact that this is his first visit.”
That comment, Milly felt sure, was intended for Jack more than her. Both brothers had been spying on each other in every way possible for years. Milly wondered if she would see the “insider” whom Zetter had indirectly referred to in Milly’s first staff meeting with the Ogre. One thing for sure: if she did see that insider, there would be not a hint to suggest a relationship with Jack Beston and Odin Station.
Milly allowed Philip Beston to lead her through the interior. She saw the detection analysis teams, although only through glass partitions, and she was not invited to go in and meet them; she saw the door marked INTERPRETATION TEAM ONLY, and speculated on the activity that might be going on within; she looked out of ports, through which she could view the big distributed antenna arrays, now turning, little by little, to optimize for the acceptance of a signal from a particular direction in space.
Not just any particular direction, either. Her direction, the direction of the Wu-Beston anomaly.
Philip Beston was obviously proud of his equipment and his work team, but Milly was taking in what she saw only with some peripheral area of her brain. The central part of her attention was focused on the verification procedure which was now beginning, and on the question that would be answered in the next few hours: How far away is the detected signal?
The massive arrays of detectors at Argus Station and Odin Station could pinpoint the direction of a distant source to half an arc second or better. The two stations were separated by about 1.3 billion kilometers, one ahead of and the other trailing Jupiter by sixty degrees in the planet’s revolution around the sun. Because of that long baseline, Odin Station, Argus Station, and the distant signal source formed the vertices of a very tall and narrow triangle. Observing the directions of the source as seen from the two observing stations provided the tiny angle at the apex of that extended triangle. Angle information, together with the length of the baseline between the stations, was enough to determine the distance of the signal source.
In practice, the observations provided only a lower limit for distance. If a source was too far away, no angular difference would be observed as seen from Jovian L-4 and Jovian L-5 points, which left the actual distance undefined. However, that result would be quite satisfactory to Milly. It would establish that the signal source, wherever it was, was far out among the stars and not in the immediate neighborhood of the solar system.
Milly knew the numbers by heart. The angle of the source direction relative to the baseline joining Jovian L-4 and Jovian L-5 was 32 degrees. If the parallax—the difference in direction of the source as seen from Odin Station and from Argus Station—was one second of arc, then the source must be at a distance of fifteen light years. A measured parallax of half a second of arc would mean the source was twice as far away, at least thirty light-years. One-tenth of a second of arc was beyond the resolving power of the arrays at the two observing stations. All you could say then was that the signal emanated from somewhere at least fifty light-years distant.
Philip Beston must have noticed Milly’s incomplete attention. He glanced at his watch. “You’ve probably seen as much of this as you want to, and I’m sure you have other things on your mind. We won’t have results for another half hour or so. Would you like to go back to your rooms? Or could I interest you in a light snack and perhaps a cup of tea?”
Milly did feel that she ought to get back to Jack. On the other hand, what would they do then? Sit around, stare at each other, and wait? That was not the most thrilling way of spending time until the results came through.
“I think that a cup of tea would be very acceptable.”
Her hesitation must have showed, because Philip smiled. “It’s a tough choice, isn’t it? Do you enjoy the company of the Ogre, or do you spend even more time with the Bastard? But that’s not a fair question. I suspect it’s the lure of refreshment that sounds interesting, not the pleasure of my company.”
He was fishing. Milly didn’t mind that, but she didn’t feel like encouraging him. No one had said anything to her about Philip Beston’s attitudes toward young women, but heredity was a powerful force. She smiled back, said “A cup of tea and something to eat with either you or Jack would be very pleasant,” and left the next move up to him.
They had passed some kind of dining room on the brief tour of Odin Station. Philip nodded and led her not in that direction, but to a different, smaller, and more private room. He closed the door carefully as they entered. Food and drink were already laid out on a credenza, which made Milly wonder how much his offer had been planned in advance. She took her lead from Philip, helped herself to a sugary cake and a glass of hot green tea, and sat opposite him at a low glass-topped table that kept their separation to a comfortable meter.
Philip ate in silence for half a minute or so. He was a slow and neat eater, like Milly herself. At last he said, “You must have done a spectacular job. I mean, the Wu-Beston anomaly. It’s not like the Ogre to share credit unless he realized that anyone looking at the work would deduce that the discovery was yours, and yours alone.”
Milly sipped tea and said in a neutral voice, “Jack has always been more than fair with me.”
“Are you sure of that? Jack has always had a bit of a reputation for stinginess. You might say it’s none of my business, but how much financial reward did he give you for the discovery?”
Milly stared. It was not a subject that had ever come up for discussion.
“The terms set out in the bequest for use of inherited money are quite specific,” Philip went on. “There are ample funds to reward the discoverer of a genuine SETI signal, and there would be no difficulty in justifying such use. And, of course, even more substantial rewards are available for the fortunate individuals who can interpret a received signal. I assume that Jack told you about all this?”
Milly’s continued silence was its own answer.
“Hmm.” Philip Beston rubbed his forefinger around the rim of his empty glass. “Pardon me if I say so, but one way or another I suspect that you are being royally screwed over by brother Jack. I want to make a suggestion—it is just a suggestion, but I’d like you to think about it over the next few hours, and tell me how you feel. All right?”
Milly felt she had to do more than sit, stare, and nod. “What sort of suggestion?”
“You’ve made a major discovery. It is officially known as the Wu-Beston anomaly. Now, to the average person in the solar system, one Beston is as good as another. They don’t know if it’s Wu-Jack or Wu-Philip Beston, and they don’t care. And to that same average person in the solar system, there is little to choose between Argus Station and Odin Station—both are at the outer edge of nowhere. You did not, I assume, sign a long-term contract to work with Jack?”
Milly shook her head.
“Which means you are free to leave at any time. Now, if you were to come here and work for me, I can assure you of three things. First, you will be given full and continuing credit for your discovery. Second, I will arrange for you to receive the maximum permissible financial reward for that discovery, including a quadrupling of your present salary. And third—which will in the long run be far more important than either of the first two—you would occupy a senior position on the interpretation team at Odin Station.” Philip placed his glass on the table in front of him. “Never forget this, Milly. Detection is important, verification is no less so; but full fame and public recognition will go to the person or team who can interpret the signal from the stars. Don’t you want to be the one who can say what it means, and point out its value to the human race? Think about it.”
Milly thought. She decided that Philip Beston must be a mo
ron, if he imagined that she was doing this work for money. Fame, maybe—she still thrilled when she heard Wu-Beston anomaly. But money, no way. Second, Philip Beston was a scoundrel. All that talk about no one caring who the Beston was in “Wu-Beston” translated clearly to one fact: he wanted people to think that he, Philip Beston, was the Beston referred to. A safe way to do that was to switch Milly to his project on Odin Station before interpretation had begun and even before verification was completed.
He was looking at her expectantly.
“I’ll think about it,” she said. “In fact, I have thought about it, as much as I need to.”
“Well.”
“I’ve concluded that Jack’s name for you is exactly right. You are Philip the Bastard. The sort of bastard who will do his best to steal from his own brother. Jack can be an Ogre when it comes to work, but he’s worth ten of you.”
There was a term for what she had just done: burning your bridges. But astonishingly, Philip Beston seemed not at all put out.
“That brother of mine,” he said, “I just don’t know how he does it. Works his people to death, insults them every chance he gets—and he still has you eating out of his hand. What’s his trick, Milly? Did he do the little-lost-boy act, making you feel that he’s all nervous and vulnerable and insecure? That worked for him very well with me when we were little, until I realized it was all a total sham. Brother Jack knows exactly how to manipulate people, always has.”
Nervous and vulnerable and insecure. The words described uncannily well the impressions that Milly had formed of Jack Beston during the trip out from Argus Station.
Either Philip Beston was totally confident of his assessment, or he was uninterested in Milly’s response. Before she could answer he had turned and was heading for the door.
“My instincts tell me that we are close to array alignment.” He seemed to be talking to himself more than to Milly. “Let’s find a place where we can see what’s going on.”
Milly doubted that it was instinct—far more likely he was wearing an intra-aural receiver—but his words made her tingle all over. She hurried after him. When your whole life hung on the next few minutes, what Jack and Philip Beston thought of each other or did to each other was down in the noise level.
The room that he led her to was empty, but well-provided with virtuals. Milly saw three display volumes. The first was an open space view of the antenna array, now fixed in position or hunting so imperceptibly that the human eye could not tell the difference. The second virtual was obviously of the control room, with half a dozen staff members eyeing output tables or talking excitedly to each other. The third virtual showed Jack Beston, sitting where Milly and Philip had left him, and intently studying what she assumed were miniature versions of the other virtuals.
Philip Beston said quietly, “Where do we stand, Laszlo?”
One of the control room figures looked up from his monitor. “We have lock on, and it’s quite tight. Our rms signal maximum lies 0.6 arc seconds away from the coordinates reported by the Argus Station. We find exactly the same pattern for signal fall-off with angle—a circular normal distribution with sigma of 1.3 arc seconds.” His voice had remained flat and factual when quoting statistics, but his final words took on a different and more animated character. “It’s there, Philip, absolutely no doubt about it. It’s there, it’s definite, it’s clear, and it is at interstellar distance. Our estimate has a most probable value of 25.8 light years, and at the very least the distance is 19 light years.”
“Target star?”
“None. It looks as though the signal is being generated in open space. That’s no particular surprise, we’ve always thought that a system of interstellar relays would make sense.”
He was saying things that Milly, and certainly Philip Beston, knew already. Given the excitement that he—and everyone else in all the virtuals—must be feeling, it was not surprising if Laszlo did a little babbling.
“You listening, Jack?” Philip Beston said. And at Jack’s slow thoughtful nod, he added, “Congratulations, brother. You already had detection, now it looks like you have a shot at strong verification. That would mean there’s just one left.”
Jack nodded again. “Yep. Just one. The big one.”
“Do you want to send the announcement, if this holds up?”
“It will. Let’s send this one together. It’s the third one that I’m going to send solo.”
“Let’s just say that one of us will be sending it solo. Race you to the corner, eh, brother?” Philip flipped a switch, and the virtual of Jack vanished. “Some things change, but I guess that some things never do. For twelve years, Jack has been telling anyone who would listen that the idea of a big SETI project was his and his alone. It wasn’t, but I’ve given up arguing. Jack seems determined to spend his life trying to prove he’s better than I am.”
Milly said, “Maybe he is.”
“And maybe he just has you wrapped around his little finger. When you see through him, or when things at Argus Station start to go bad, you give me a call.” The wide, innocent blue eyes fixed on Milly. “I will still be here. And maybe you’ll give me a chance to prove I’m not the bastard that Jack makes me out to be.”
* * *
Verification. Milly had assumed after the first meeting with Philip Beston’s staff that the whole job was as good as over. She should have known better.
Three more days of hard-slog checking were needed, of everything from measures of proper motion of the source to an attempted interferometric analysis of its spatial extent, before both brothers agreed: the parallax as observed from Jovian L-4 and Jovian L-5 was real. The origin was so far away that it acted as a point source. The signal came from somewhere well outside the solar system.
In those three days, Philip Beston said nothing to follow up on his suggestion that Milly ought to change sides and work on Odin Station. Only at the final farewell did he hold her hand for a moment longer than necessary, and say softly, “When you decide you’d like to be on the winning side, you know who to call.”
Jack Beston could not possibly have heard, but he was in a foul mood as The Witch of Agnesi pulled away from Odin Station for the return trip. Milly couldn’t see why. They had confirmation of a signal, and a significant time advantage over Philip Beston when it came to interpretation.
But when she said that to Jack, he merely gave her a slit-eyed green glare. “He knows we have a lead, and he knows that we found the signal and he didn’t. Given all that, he’s far too cheerful.”
“Maybe he’s putting on a show for the staff of Odin Station. They must be feeling pretty crushed.”
“No.” Jack shook his head. “You didn’t grow up with the Bastard, the way I did. He doesn’t put on shows. He’s got something up his sleeve. Something to do with signal interpretation.”
“Do you have any idea what it might be?”
“Not a clue.” Jack stared intently out of the forward port, as though willing the ship to fly faster to Argus Station. “We’ll find out when he hits us with it.”
21
JUPITER SWINGBY
The outer regions of the solar system are remarkably empty. It is certainly possible to run into another object, particularly when flying through the Asteroid belt, but you have to be freakishly unlucky to do so. And if that other object happens to be a ship, with its own navigational control system, then the chance of collision contains such a string of zeroes after the decimal point that no rational person should worry about it.
Humans are not, of course, particularly rational. Milly’s question of the Level Four Fax aboard The Witch of Agnesi was asked a thousand times an hour, somewhere in the system; but in fact there had never been a collision of two ships whose navigation systems were in working order. The OSL Achilles, outward bound for the Jovian system and Ganymede, crossed the trajectory of The Witch of Agnesi as the latter sped between the Jovian L-4 and L-5 points, and in celestial terms they made a “close approach” of less than two mil
lion kilometers. No human on either ship was aware of that fact.
The passengers of the Achilles were increasingly unaware of anything. Janeed had heard that in pre-war times a certain form of group mania infected the passengers of ocean liners. After the first few days nothing in the world existed beyond the ship, while what happened before and after the cruise became utterly irrelevant. A wild series of random courtships and short-lived affairs was the result.
Jan had hardly believed those reports, but now she saw evidence of their truth at first-hand. Colonists were pairing off, and as the ship drove outward toward its rendezvous with Jupiter an air of continuous festivity took over.
Not only the passengers were affected. The ship’s trajectory was computer-controlled, as were most of its on-board systems. The crew had time to relax. Paul Marr was able to devote a more-than-generous amount of time to Janeed. That certainly suited Jan. Within the first two days she had decided that everything she had been told about sex was right, or possibly understated. The more you did it, the more you liked it. The real danger was that you might become an addict. Jan suspected that she might be well on the way.
Occasionally, she would worry about Sebastian. She was seeing less and less of him as the days went by. On the other hand, Valnia Bloom seemed to be with him almost constantly. They spent most of the time hidden away in her private cabin. Jan didn’t think they were engaged in a sexual relationship, but even if they were, so what? Sebastian was a strongly-built and physically mature man in the prime of life. He and Valnia Bloom were as entitled to as good a time as Paul and Jan.
When she had boarded the Achilles, two weeks going on forever ago, Jan had expected to be impatient until the moment she set foot on Ganymede. Now, as that time of arrival came closer, she was loath to leave the ship. She and Paul had vowed that this would not be the end, that they would see each other again. But in reality, how many shipboard romances survived the day of disembarkation?
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