“I have an idea,” she said at last. “We have a signal source with no meaningful signals. What if we’ve spent the last five years detecting signals without a source and discarding them as meaningless static? After all, the Sphere puts out a lot of noise.”
“We all know that,” Bernhardt said, with just a trace of impatience.
“Yes, but we know it too well,” Sianna said. “I’ve been working on data for the CORE project, and every time there’s anything in the radio bands that we don’t understand, it gets charted as an ‘EM anomaly’ or a ‘transient event’ like the ones Dr. Sakalov mentioned. Once we name something, we assume we understand it, and we ignore it.”
“So you’re saying Gruber’s people have eliminated a lot of real signals, called them noise or static instead?” Bernhardt asked.
Sianna shook her head. “No, not her people—her computers. All the initial data processing is automated. If the computer is told that datapoints with thus-and-such characteristics are garbage, it discards every subsequent datapoint with the same profile. The humans running the data-processing system never even get to see that stuff unless they wade through all the raw data manually.”
“And we just got through saying that going through even the non-rejected data we have after twelve hours could take a week,” Bernhardt said.
“Yes sir. But if you’ll pardon the expression, it’s possible that searching that non-rejected data makes about as much sense as what the drunk did when he dropped his keys on a dark street.”
“I beg your pardon?” Bernhardt said.
Sakalov let out a dry chuckle. “The young lady has indeed attended my lectures, Wolf. It is an example I often use. The drunk drops his keys in the dark, but searches for them under a street lamp, where the light is better.”
“So you are suggesting that the Lone World is transmitting its orders at frequencies we don’t even know we aren’t looking at?” Bernhardt said.
Sianna nodded. “It’s possible,” she said. “After all, we don’t know for sure what a command signal from Charon Central looks like.”
“Quite so,” Sakalov said. “We assume it will in large part resemble the signals intercepted in the Solar System and the signals we have intercepted as they are sent between lower-function Charonians— except it’s obvious the command signals don’t resemble those signals completely, or else we would have spotted them by now.”
“So what could they be?” Bernhardt asked.
Sakalov nodded toward the notepack that Sianna was holding. “Anything in there, or maybe a dozen other things that aren’t there. Or maybe the command signals are expressed as some complex phase relationship between two seemingly unrelated signals.” Sakalov shrugged. “Maybe they’re meant to be read backwards. Or maybe they are modulated or digitalized at such a high—or low—rate of speed we didn’t recognize them as signals.”
“Too fast I can understand,” Bernhardt said. “But too slow?”
“It would be damned tough to recognize a Morse code message if the dots were two weeks long and the dashes were a month.”
“Hmmph.” Bernhardt turned toward Sianna. “So, now that you have said we must comb through all the parts of the haystack that we thought we could ignore, where do you suggest we start?”
“With the vague stuff,” Sianna said. “There’s lots of well-explained natural sources, but the rejected-data log is full of things labeled ‘General Static’ and ‘Unspecified Transient EM event.’ If we have a look at all that—”
“And then compare that against any old rejected data,” Wally said, cutting in eagerly. “We could look at stuff from what we now know to be the Lone World’s orbital track,” he went on, leaning forward eagerly. “I bet we’ve got a big old stack of old data labeled ‘static’ that came from the Lone World—even though we didn’t know the Lone World was there until just a little while ago.”
“Yes! Right!” Sianna said.
Sianna stood up and started pacing excitedly. “For five years we’ve been observing the Sphere, and for all that time there’s been this tiny, hard-to-see dot going around it, sometimes at the edge of the Sphere as seen from Earth, sometimes in front of it, sometimes behind. We’re bound to have picked up all sorts of stuff from the Lone World without knowing what it was.” She paused for a second and thought. “Hey, data coming from the now-known coordinates of the co-orbital R-H sets too! They’d make a perfectly good signal-relay network.” She paused in her pacing and turned toward Dr. Sakalov. “The data archives will still have all that, won’t they?”
“They never erase anything down there,” Dr. Sakalov said, quite cheerfully. “Tell me, Wally: do you think that you could set up a search that would find what we’re looking for?”
“Sure I could,” Wally said. “All it would take is a good ArtInt searching for vague source coding in the old data, correlating the backtracked orbital coordinates in question. Next we run that against Gruber’s new data, and then…” His voice trailed off as he caught the boss’s eye.
Bernhardt glared at Wally and then at Sianna with something of the irritation and impatience he was famous for. “None of this has very much to do with why I wanted to see you all.”
“It doesn’t?” Sianna asked, suddenly feeling quite deflated. She sat back down in her chair.
“No, it doesn’t,” Bernhardt said. “Oh, I suppose there is a tangential connection, but it is merely—” Bernhardt stopped dead and shook his head. “Dear God, now you have me doing it. No. We will stay on the subject this time. In my job, sometimes I have to act like a scientist with a theory, and sometimes like a general fighting a war. A scientist would wait until there was proof that the Lone World was Charon Central. A general has to take more chances than that, gamble that the proof will be forthcoming. I have to take a chance like that now.
“As you know, the SCOREs are on their way—and we all know the probable aftermath of their arrival. We must assume that, once they get here, it will be impossible to launch anything off Earth. As you know, we have a massive effort under way to resupply our off-Earth assets before that time. We are launching everything we can toward NaPurHab. Food, equipment, fuel, what have you. I have already ordered Terra Nova to break off her attempt to land a prize crew on a CORE. She has confirmed that she intends to return to Earth space and dock with NaPurHab.
“From there, she intends to proceed, however her captain sees fit, toward precisely one goal. If Captain Steiger decides to pursue the immediate goal at once, so be it. However, I would expect that she will instead invest in months, perhaps years, of research, study, rehearsal and simulation. However, sooner or later, she is to proceed toward the Lone World, land on that planet, and attempt to seize control of the Multisystem.”
“Good God,” Sakalov said. “But how has there been time to plan this, work out procedures?”
“There hasn’t,” Bernhardt said. He stood up and turned to face the window wall, a mere thickness of glass between him and the deep canyons of Manhattan. “We have been setting up the resupply mission for weeks, based on standing contingency plans, ever since we spotted the incoming SCOREs.
“But that is almost incidental. If the Lone World is Charon Central, and if we can somehow get to it and make it ours, even if we merely find a way to kill it, cripple it—then we will have won. The risks are great, and there are any number of guesses piled on guesses. But if I wait until I am sure of my facts, then we will have lost the moment. The SCOREs will have reached Earth, and God only knows what happens then.