Syzygy

The plump little man stood up good-humoredly. "What about those little green men?" he asked.

Rainy almost dropped the pointer she was holding. "I beg your pardon?"

"I'm sorry. I guess I'd better speak up," he grinned. "The thing is, all this morning we were listening to Dr. Sonderman over there telling us how lucky we were we didn't have Mount Saint Helens blowing up in our laps every other day, and then those young people came and entertained us with some other stuff about how the world was coming to an end, and, well, I just wondered if you were going to cheer us up some more. "

There were a few smiles in the audience, but more scowls—unfortunately the scowls all came from scientists. Rainy managed a smile of her own. "Not at all, Senator," she declared. "Newton-8 is purely a science experiment. We are simply now in a position to see the planet Jupiter—" "Yes, I know about Jupiter," he said courteously. "But aren't you the young lady who said that little men from space were coming to call on us any minute?" "Certainly not, Senator! I—"

He persisted, "But I have right here—" he fished a paper out of his briefcase—"a copy of a document that reports to be your thesis for your master's degree." He put on his spectacles and studied it. 'Uh-huh, your name's right on it—of course, it was just 'Georgia Raines' then, but that's you, isn't it? Let's see, here. The title says, A Numerical Estimate of Intervention Events from Extra- Terrestrial Sources. Seems to have a whole lot of troublesome things in it, Miz Keating," he added, flipping slowly through the pages.

Rainy laughed shakily. "Oh, that," she said. "Yes, that's mine, Senator. Of course, I had to write something to get my degree, and I was more or less limited by what my degree advisor would accept. But there certainly aren't any little green men in it. The paper is an attempt to quantify the probabilities of some event outside the earth that will affect humanity deeply. There have been many such in the past, as I'm sure you're aware. For example, there was the Lower Cretaceous episode, when apparently almost all higher life forms on Earth became extinct at once and—"

"Lower what was that, Miz Keating?" "Lower Cretaceous, Senator. That's a geological term. It refers to a time about sixty-five million years ago, when apparently some great disaster—"

"Miz Keating," the senator said good-humoredly, "it's that word apparently' that does me in every time, not to mention that other word sixty-five million years ago'. You ever hear of the Golden Fleece award, Miz Keating?"

She saw Tommy Pedigrue nudge his brother, who took pity on her. "Bert," he said, reaching over to touch the other senator's shoulder, "that's all very interesting, but as I understand it there's a very important event coming up in just a few minutes—"

"That's all right, Towny," said Marcellico, chuckling, and sank back into his seat. "I don't want to miss that. Please accept my apologies and go on, Miz Keating. I was only trying to clarify something in my own ihind."

Rainy glanced at her watch, biting her lip to regain control. She smiled politely. "Just above the monitor," she said, "you'll see a drawing of the position of the sun, Jupiter, and Newton-8 as they are right now. It's not to scale, of course. As you can see, our spacecraft is rapidly approaching its rendezvous point, the position from which it will observe the planet cross the disk of the sun. Please give us the pictures as they are received now, Marguerite." The technician nodded. The screen went to black, with a very bright spot the only thing visible in the center of it. Rainy went into her pitch.

"What I'd specially like to emphasize," she said, smiling warmly at Senator Marcellico, "is that this is like being given a whole new spacecraft free. Newton-8 finished paying for itself when it exited the Saturn system. Every bit we get now is pure profit—Senator?"

Townsend Pedigrue was leaning forward for attention. His expression was amiable enough as he said, "Please feel free to interrupt me whenever you need to for this demonstration. Like Senator Marcellico, I always worry when I hear certain words, and one of them is that word 'free', Miz Keating. Isn't it so that we still have to pay for the radio receivers, and all this fascinating looking hardware, not to mention a salary for your own good self?"

Rainy maintained her smile. "That's right, Senator, the ground support still has to be maintained. But the spacecraft itself is worth three hundred million dollars. That's paid off. We're getting information from a volume of space never before explored, and it's on the house. Let me show you some of it."

She nodded to Marguerite, who turned up the audio gain. A soothing hiss came from the loudspeakers. Rainy listened for a moment and said, "That's the sound of neutral hydrogen. Newton-8 is programmed to scan a whole band of frequencies, something like those radios that zip through the police and fire frequencies and only stop when there's an actual transmission. Newton listens to each signal until it can match it against its data store. If it is something already on record, like this neutral hydrogen emission, it will drop it and go looking for something else. Give it a second—"

On track, the sound changed.

"There it goes," she said, satisfied. "Let's see what it finds next."

There was a staccato teep-teep-teep from the audio speakers, the hunting cry of the frequency scanner as it sought a new source. Then it locked and delivered a warbling hiss which Rainy quickly identified as the song of the hydroxyl radical; then another, then another. Rainy watched the audience carefully. She had made her main points already, and it was only necessary to let them sink in. Maybe to reinforce them from time to time? She focused her attention on the row of other committee aides and said, "I think you'll be interested in the way Newton-8 deals with emergencies. For instance, we had a failure in the radioisotope thermoelectric generator, so we're limited to solar power. At Newton's distance from the sun, there isn't much of that. But we managed to command an extension of the solar electric panels—the things that look like wings on the model. We get about twenty-two watts, which is enough to run the important instruments full-time and the rest when they are needed."

"That doesn't sound like enough for a radio broadcast from, what did you say? Two and a half billion miles away?" It was one of the women whom Rainy had not met, an aide to the minority leader of the committee. At the last moment Rainy came up with the name.

"We don't need much, Miz Landro," she said. "The data transmission only takes eight watts of radiated power on the one-millimeter wavelength. At that rate, we expect to continue data acquisition and tracking capability for an indefinite period—maybe another twenty years. "

Eve Landro said frostily, "Does that mean you want to spend the next twenty years on the public payroll?"

It had been a mistake to open those top two buttons after all, Rainy realized. "Well," she said warmly, "there's the information, Ms. Landro. We can take it, or we can let it go to waste— What is it, Marguerite?"

The radio technician was signaling distress, and Rainy could hear why. There was a new sound coming from the speakers. Rainy frowned, trying to identify it. It was at the threshold of hearing, and quite unlike anything her spaceship had ever produced for her before. "Turn up the gain, Marguerite!" she ordered. But even at maximum amplification there was more background noise than signal.

Once Rainy had heard a Moog synthesizer concert in which the human voice had been superimposed on the frequencies of a rock band. What she heard now reminded her of that—though what she heard could not be human language, or even any language at all, considering where it came from. It was as though an animal's cry had been blended with the whines and rumbles of a machine on the verge of breaking down. "Check the telemetry!" she cried to Marguerite; and then, collecting herself for the sake of her audience, "Either we're getting a new kind of signal that's right outside of my experience ... or there's a malfunction of some sort. "