Dark as Day by Charles Sheffield Page A

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 π 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