Dark as Day by Charles Sheffield Page B

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