“So what the hell is down there that acts like a delay line?”
“We don’t know yet. If it’s a point source it’s fairly far down into the atmosphere. Who knows what kind of weird structures are in there?”
“What if it’s coming from the cloud tops?” The Rhino interjected.
Steveberg thought for a minute. “Best thinking at the VIA is that it isn’t. If it was at the cloud tops it’s not a point source, more like a band following the shadow of the eclipse. Why?”
“Because that deep in the atmosphere you’re not likely to get any effect from the eclipse. You would on the cloud tops.”
“But that means you’ve got a radio source several thousand kilometers long on top of the clouds.”
“Anyway?” he went on, “it’s not true that you won’t get an effect from the eclipse down in the clouds. There are probably tidal effects, for example.”
The Rhino didn’t reply, but he didn’t look happy either.
F. Gary Rhine stayed late in his office that night, going over the data and fighting a growing conclusion.
“Oh shit,” he implored Murphy and whatever other deities might exist. “Don’t do this to me! In a few months I can retire. I’m too old for this.”
He recalled the debacle when British radio astronomers detected regular radio pulses. No, it wasn’t a message from Little Green Men, just an unknown astrophysical phenomenon.
Maybe some fool was spoofing him. It looked like one of those signal processing exercises where the instructors deliberately blanked part of the message. But if so it was a very elaborate spoof. In the weeks since the probe he had obtained originals of the data from all the observing stations and gone over it bit by bit.
Well hell, he wasn’t an astrophysicist. Let them explain it. Meanwhile, he only had a few more months until retirement. His windmill tilting days were well behind him.
Somehow that wasn’t comforting.
Suzanne Quinlan sipped coffee in her postage-stamp balcony and looked out over the parking lot to the brown hills beyond. It was twilight, but not dark enough to see the stars yet, and Jupiter wouldn’t rise for a while.
Something had happened out there. Something important, she knew, but what? What could possibly have caused the probe to act in that way?
The Rhino was right. This new signal wasn’t random, but it was gibberish, something that didn’t quite make sense, like a child’s babbling attempt to imitate his elder’s speech.
That led her back to the thought she’d been avoiding all day. What if there was some kind of purpose behind the repeat? Something out there to send the signal back?
Neat theory, it explained everything. It was also crazy. Suzanne had grown up reading science fiction. She had vicariously contacted a thousand alien races and now maybe, just maybe, she actually stood on the threshold of acting out her wildest dreams. The idea was so attractive she knew it had to be wrong.
It was also dangerous. She was in no position to advance a theory like that. She had no standing, no credibility and no tenure to protect her.
By nature Suzanne Quinlan was not confrontational. In graduate school she had perfected the fine art of getting along by going along, and above all by keeping her head down and avoiding negatives.
“If I even mention the possibility they’ll say it’s stress and send me home,” she muttered. After that she’d be lucky to get a job teaching astronomy at a junior college. Or maybe she could get a job on one of those TV astrology hotlines, foretelling the future on the basis of the voices from the stars.
She set the coffee cup down and realized she was hot and sticky from the smog and late afternoon Sun. A shower could take care of that, but nothing she knew could deal with the little itch that was growing in her brain.
“God, I love this job!” she muttered as he headed for the shower.
Another day, thought Suzanne Quinlan, another meeting.
The Anomaly Committee, as it was universally known, had been meeting regularly for months now, and rather to her initial surprise, Suzanne had found herself representing her group on it.
By now she understood perfectly well what was going on. The committee was purely symbolic—a collection of scapegoats designed to appease the eventual wrath of The Powers That Be. The probe was a failure and the politically skilled were disassociating themselves from the project before that sank in. The men and women at the very top were too closely connected to the project to have that luxury, and the people on the front line were too committed to disown their child. But at the middle and lower levels managers were oozing away like jellyfish, sucking the greenhorns and the lower level people in to fill the void. Clearly this was not going to be a shining spot on any one’s resume, especially the ones holding the ball when the news really broke.
For the principal investigators and the others at the top, it didn’t much matter. Their reputations could stand the strain and many of them were near retirement anyway. But the middle-level and lower people were a different story. Associating with the data analysis of the Jupiter probe might mean they’d end up teaching astronomy at the high school level. After weeks of being stuck in these meetings there was a part of Suzanne Quinlan that couldn’t see that as a bad thing.
Suzanne had found herself spending an average of one afternoon a week in a conference room with a collection of the old, the weak, the outmaneuvered, and the expendable. Although there were no place cards, they were ranked around the table by status with Dr. Smith, the chairman, at the head, flanked by Dr. Lewis and Prof. Van Meurs, and sifting down from there.
Down at the foot of the table, next to Suzanne Quinlan, sat F. Gary Rhine, in case someone wanted some details about the communications network. So far no one had.
As the committee members settled in, Suzanne concentrated on the scheduling data in the folder before her. There was nothing new there, but then there hadn’t been anything new in the last couple of weeks from anyone. They were simply going through the forms and everyone knew it. She noticed that perhaps one-third of the committee members were absent and damned the Catholic conscience that drove her to attend these stupid useless meetings.
After a few preliminaries, Dr. Smith opened the meeting for comments.
“The most likely hypothesis still appears to be a transmitter malfunction,” Dr. Lewis said carefully.
The temperature in the room dropped a good ten degrees. “We cannot model any likely failure mode that reproduces the characteristics,” Van Meurs said frostily.
“What about the echoed signal?”
someone else asked.
“We have several theories that might account for that,” said Dr. Portajee, “including the possibility that something rather like an organic semiconductor is formed in Jupiter’s atmosphere at certain levels.”
Smith pursed his lips. “Speculative,” he pronounced.
“Our computer simulations show—” Portajee began.
“Boundary conditions,” someone further down the table murmured.
“I move we establish a subcommittee to examine the question,” said Wilson.
“You mean a sub-sub-committee,” someone else said. “Logically it should fall under the atmospherics committee.”
“But a separate sub-committee—”
“Boundary conditions. What were the simulation’s boundary conditions?”
“Information theory suggests—”
“Life,” someone said loudly.
Every one stopped and stared at the foot of the table. In horror Suzanne realized the voice had been hers. Instead of muttering it under her breath she had said it out loud.
“Yes, ah, Mzz Quinlan?” Dr. Smith said.
Suzanne Quinlan took a deep breath. “Life. Intelligent life in the clouds of Jupiter.”