There was a long strained silence. Dr. Smith stared down at his notepad. Dr. Lewis licked his lips and concentrated on the ceiling tiles. Van Meurs mumbled something under his breath. Through the silence Suzanne could hear her career splintering and crashing down around her ears. Any instant now one of these men would open his mouth and her Ph.D wouldn’t be worth the paper it was printed on.
“She’s right, you know,” came a quiet voice at her elbow.
“Eh?” Dr. Smith’s eyes jerked down the table to rest on F. Gary Rhine.
“I said she’s right. The best explanation for the data we’ve got is that there is intelligent life on Jupiter that intercepted the probe and is trying to communicate with us.”
“Isn’t that a rather extreme conclusion to draw from the communications glitch?” Lewis asked in a carefully neutral tone.
“It’s not a glitch.”
He ticked off the points on his fingers:
“Something intercepted the probe at the cloud tops and held it there at least until the batteries ran down and it stopped transmitting. Something interfered with the signal at irregular intervals by moving between the transmitter and Galileo. Then, at an eclipse of Europa, we’ve got the signal shot back to us. Deliberately sent back.”
“Analysis indicates the signal is probably random,” said Van Meurs frostily.
Rhine’s smile was almost satanic. “Yeah, but the framing bits aren’t. Whatever it is duplicated our packet structure. Only you didn’t see that because the packets had been stripped off before you were given the data to analyze.”
“But the contents were not duplicated,” Van Meurs said.
“Nope, not the content. That changed almost frame to frame while the probe was sending and they probably didn’t understand it. So they sent values in the observed ranges in there.”
“That takes a fantastic coincidence, that something would be on hand to catch it.”
“Not as much as you think. There’s the probe, floating down like a big fishing lure, it’s going to attract anything curious for hundreds of miles around. Hell, for all we know something snapped it up like a trout on a fly.” He shrugged. “That doesn’t matter. The important thing is, it’s life, it’s intelligent and it wants to say ‘howdy.’ ”
He scanned their faces. “Oh, don’t look so shocked. People have been playing with the idea for decades. Hell, there have even been science fiction stories written around it. Arthur C. Clarke did one years ago.” He grinned ironically. “As well as some more respectable speculation.”
He glared around the room. “The problem with you damn people is you never talk to each other. This whole damn place is organized like a protocol stack with every layer a black box to all the other damn layers.
“You,” he pointed to Van Meurs, “knew all about the flight profile. You,” he pointed to Lewis, “knew about the echo. But you don’t talk except at these damn meetings so you never put it together.” He jerked a nod at Suzanne. “She talks to everyone so she figured it out.”
Smith dug frantically through the printouts.
“But why wait until the eclipse? And why along the path?”
Rhine shrugged. “Ask me again in a couple of years. We’ll know more then.”
“Gentlemen,” Smith announced, “do you realize what this means? It’s the biggest boost for planetary science in the history of space exploration. Why, why, it’ll easily triple our budgets!”
Van Meurs pursed his lips. “If it’s real.”
“For the moment let us proceed as if the phenomenon is real,” Dr. Smith said magisterially. “Why, the possibilities are,” his eyes shone at the thought of all that money, “mind-boggling.”
Suzanne’s head had been swiveling between the participants like a spectator at a tennis match. Rhine touched her shoulder and motioned toward the door. Unnoticed, the pair left the conference room. As they slipped out the door one of the participants was using his putative status on the new project to demand a reserved parking space.
“Shouldn’t we have stayed?” Suzanne asked as the noise faded behind them. “I mean, they might have more questions.”
“They’re beyond fact gathering. Now they’re down to the part that really interests them—how they can make the most out of this. They’ll be arguing about how to spin this until sometime tomorrow morning.”
“But suppose they decide there’s nothing to it after all?”
Rhine grinned a particularly nasty grin. “It doesn’t matter. By this time tomorrow it will be out on the Internet and all over the world.” The grin got even broader and Suzanne developed a sneaking suspicion who the first person to post the news would be. “Hell, woman! How much equipment do you think it takes to get a radio signal to Jupiter? Or hear one coming back? Hams all over the world will set the stuff up in their backyards and every one will be able to hear the results.”
“But what about them?” She tossed her head toward the conference room they had just left.
“They’re irrelevant, but don’t tell them just yet. No reason to hurt their feelings. Meanwhile, I’ve got a friend I want you to meet. A guy by the name of Ed Steveberg in the VLA group. We’ve got us a SETI program to map out. Oh yeah, and there’s another guy, Larry Collins, you should probably talk to pretty soon.” F. Gary Rhine threw a companionable arm around Dr. Suzanne Quinlan’s shoulders. She saw there were tears in his eyes. “God!” he roared down the empty corridor, “I love this job!”
Editor’s Note: This story is a sequel to “Symphony For Skyfall” in our July 1994 issue.