No crazier than the very fact of our being down here, Asher thought. "Please continue."
"Very well. First, I had to break the string of zeros and ones down into individual commands. I made the assumption that the initial values, five zeros and five ones, were placeholders to signify the length of each instruction-each digital 'word' thus being five bits in length. That left me with fourteen five-bit instructions." Marris tapped a key, and the long string of numbers vanished, to be replaced by a series of ordered rows:
Asher stared at the screen. "Awfully short for a computer program."
"Yes. Clearly, it would have to be a very simple computer program. And in machine language-the most basic, and universal, of digital languages."
Asher nodded. "And then?"
"When I got to my office this morning, I wrote a short routine that would compare these values against a master list of standard machine-language instructions. The routine assigned all possible instructions to the values, one after another, and then checked to see if any workable computer program emerged."
"What makes you think these-whoever is sending us the message uses the same kind of machine language instructions that we do?"
"At a binary level, sir, there are certain irreducible digital instructions that would be common to any conceivable computing device: increment, decrement, jump, skip if zero, Boolean logic. So I let the routine run and went on with my other work."
Asher nodded.
"About twenty minutes ago, the routine completed its run."
"Did those fourteen lines of binary translate to any viable computer programs?"
"Yes. One."
Asher felt his interest suddenly spike. "Really?"
"A program for a simple mathematical expression. Here it is." Marris punched another key, and a series of instructions appeared on his monitor.
Asher bent eagerly toward it.
"What does the program do?" Asher asked.
"You'll notice that it's written as a series of repeated subtractions, coded in a loop. That's the way you do division in machine language: by repeated subtraction. Well, it's one way-you could also do an arithmetic shift right-but that would require a more specialized computing system."
"So it's a division statement?"
Marris nodded.
Asher felt surprise and mystification mingle with the sudden, intense excitement. "Don't hesitate, man. What's the number they're dividing?"
"One."
"One. And it's being divided by what?"
Marris licked his lips. "Well, you see, that's the problem, sir…"
26
The door was one of a half dozen along the corridor in the northeast quadrant of deck 3. It bore the simple legend RADIOLOGY-PING.
Commander Korolis nodded for one of the accompanying marines to open the door, then stepped inside. Glancing over the commander's shoulder, Crane made out a small but well-equipped lab. If anything, it was too well equipped: most of the available space was crammed with bulky instrumentation. Just inside the door, an Asian woman in a white coat was sitting before a computer, typing rapidly. She looked up at Korolis's entrance, then stood, smiled, and bowed.
Korolis did not respond to her. Instead, he swiveled around, one eye staring disapprovingly at Crane, the other looking at some point over his left shoulder.
"This should serve your purposes," he said. He glanced around the lab once more-as if mentally checking off items Crane might steal-then stepped back into the hallway. "Post guard outside," he said to the two marines, then turned his back and walked away.
Crane watched the commander's retreating form for a moment. Then he nodded to the marines and entered the lab, shutting the door behind him. There was a low squeal of rubber as the grommeted seal around the door snugged tightly into place. He then approached the female scientist, who was still standing at her lab table, smiling.
"Peter Crane," he said, shaking hands. "Sorry to barge in like this, but I don't have a work space down here and they said this lab had a light table."
"Hui Ping," the woman replied, her smile displaying brilliant white teeth. "I've heard of you, Dr. Crane. You are looking into all the sickness, right?"
"Right. I just need to examine a few X-rays."
"It's no problem; feel free to use anything." Hui was small and thin, with sparkling black eyes. She spoke flawless English with a strong Chinese accent. Crane guessed she was about thirty years old. "Light table's over there."
Crane glanced in the indicated direction. "Thanks."
"Let me know if you need anything."
Crane walked over to the light table, snapped it on, and then drew out the X-rays he'd just ordered on several of the workers in the Drilling Complex. It was as he suspected: no problems. The radiographs were depressingly unremarkable. Everything looked clear.
Over the last twenty-four hours, he had performed informal examinations on several people from the Drilling Complex. And he'd found their complaints were like those in the non-classified section of the Facility: amorphous and maddeningly diverse. One complained of severe nausea. Another, blurred sight and visual field defects. Some complaints appeared psychological-ataxia, memory lapses. None of the cases seemed in any way severe, and-as usual-there was no interrelation. Only one was genuinely interesting: a female worker who had exhibited remarkable disinhibition of character. Normally a timid, quiet teetotaler, she had over the last few days become profane, aggressive, and sexually promiscuous. The day before, she'd been confined to quarters after being found drunk while on shift. Crane had interviewed the woman and spoken to her coworkers, and would send a comprehensive report to Roger Corbett for evaluation-suitably filtered, of course.
Crane pulled the radiographs from the light table with a sigh. He had ordered MRIs and taken blood, and he would send them to the lab for analysis. But he feared the results would be the same as before: inconclusive. A part of him had hoped for a breakthrough here. Although the last thing he wanted to see was more illness, if there had been a disease cluster in the Drilling Complex-where the real work was being done-that would have provided a clue. But they seemed no worse off than their fellows upstairs.
No: it was clear to him that Spartan's sudden concern was not due to severity but selection. Before, only non-essential people had been affected, and the admiral had shown little interest. But now that people directly responsible for the digging were falling ill, Spartan was sitting up and taking notice.
He snapped off the light table. Even if these new complaints proved inconclusive, they had given him a major break: he now had access to the classified levels of the Facility. This effectively doubled the number of people he could monitor, not to mention more opportunities for seeking out possible environmental factors.
Hui Ping looked over. She was a study in black and white: black hair, eyes, and glasses; white lab coat and pale, almost translucent skin. "You don't look happy," she said.
Crane shrugged. "Things aren't fitting into place as quickly as I'd hoped."
Ping nodded as she pulled on a pair of latex gloves. "That goes for me, too." Her glossy hair, cut short, shook as she moved her head.
"What are you working on?"
"That." And Ping pointed toward the far side of a hulking piece of equipment.
Crane walked over, peered around its edge. To his surprise he saw another of the thin sentinels-twin to the one Asher had shown him-hovering in midair, shimmering with myriad shifting colors. The same whisper-thin beam of pure white light led from the object's upper edge up to the ceiling of the room.
"Jesus," Crane said, awed. "You've got one."
Ping laughed lightly. "They're not exactly rare. More than twenty have been retrieved so far."
Crane looked at her in surprise. "Twenty?"