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my office at once."
Keith put down his eating utensil, and looked across the table at his
wife. "I'll join you," he said, and stood up to leave. As they made
their way across the room, he realized it was the only thing he'd said
to her during the entire meal.
Keith and Rissa got into an elevator. As always, a monitor on the cab's
wall showed the current deck number and floor plan: "26," and a cross
shape with long arms. As they rode up, and the deck numbers counted
down, the arms of the cross grew shorter and shorter. By the time they
reached deck one, the arms had almost completely retracted.
The two humans got out and entered the radio-astronomy listening room.
Hek, a small Waldahud with a hide much redder in color than Jag's, was
leaning against a desk.
"Rissa, your presence is welcome"--the standard deference shown females.
A tilt of the head: "Lansing." The rude indifference reserved for
males, even if they were your boss.
"Hek," said Keith, nodding in greeting.
The Waldahud looked at Rissa. "You know the radio noise we've been
picking up?" His barking echoed in the tiny room.
Rissa nodded.
"Well, my initial analysis showed no repetition in it." He swiveled a
pair of eyes to look at Keith. "When a signal is a deliberate beacon,
it usually has a repeating pattern over a course of several minutes or
hours. There's nothing like that at work here. Indeed, I've found no
evidence of any overall pattern. But when I started analyzing the noise
more minutely, patterns of one-second duration or less kept cropping up.
So far, I've cataloged six thousand and seventeen sequences. Some have
only been repeated once or twice, but others have been repeated many
times. Over ten thousand times, for a few of them."
"My God," said Rissa.
"What?" said Keith.
She turned to him. "It means that there might be information in the
noise--it might be radio communications."
Hek lifted his upper shoulders. "Exactly. Each of the patterns could
be a separate word. Those that occur most frequently could be common
terms, maybe the equivalent of pronouns or prepositions."
"And where are these transmissions coming from?" asked Keith.
"Somewhere in or just behind the dark-matter field," said Hek.
"And you're sure they're intelligent signals?" asked Keith, his heart
pounding.
Hek's lower shoulders moved this time. "No, I'm not sure.
For one thing, the transmissions are very weak. They wouldn't be
discernible from background noise over any great distance.
But if I'm right that they're words, then there does appear to be some
discernible syntax. No word is ever doubled. Certain words only appear
at the beginning or end. of transmissions.
Some words only appear after certain other words. The former are
possibly adjectives and adverbs, and the latter the nouns or verbs they
are modifying, or vice versa." Hek paused. "Of course, I haven't
analyzed all the signals, although I am recording them for future study.
It's a constant bombardment, on over two hundred frequencies that are
very close to each other." He paused, letting this sink in.
"i'd say there's a good possibility that there's a fleet of craft hiding
inside or just past the dark-matter field."
Keith was about to speak again when Hek's desk intercom bleeped.
"Keith, Lianne here."
"Open. Yes?"
"I think you'll want to come to the bridge. A watson has arrived with
word that the boomerang has returned from shortcut Rehbollo 376A."
"On my way. Summon Jag, too, please. Close." He looked at Hek.
"Good work. See if you can narrow down the source of the signals
further. I'll have Thor take Starplex in a circular path around the
dark-matter field, scanning for tachyon emissions, radiation, thruster
glow, or any other signs of alien ships."
Keith strode onto the bridge, Rissa right behind him. They moved to
their workstations. "Trigger watson playback," said Keith.
Lianne pushed a button, and a full-motion video message appeared in a
framed-off section of the holographic bubble.
The image was of a Waldahud male with a silvery-gray hide. PHANTOM
replaced the sound of the creature's barking with English words for the
playback into Keith's ear implant, although, of course, they didn't fit
the movements of the Waldahud's mouth.
"Greetings, Starplex." The status line at- the bottom of the screen
identified the speaker as Kayd Pelendo em-Hooth of the Rehbollo Center
for Astrophysics. "The boomerang sent to the shortcut designated
Rehbollo 376A has returned. I suspect you'll want to stay where you
are, investigating the shortcut you're at now, since its appearance on
the network is unexplained. However, we thought Jag and others would be
interested in seeing the recordings made by the boomerang just before
returning home. They are appended to this message. I think you will
find them . . . interesting."
"Okay, Rhombus," said Keith. "Use the data from the boomerang to create
a spherical holo display around us.
Show us what it saw."
"A pleasure to serve," said Rhombus. "Downloading now; the display will
be ready in two minutes, forty seconds."
Lianne rubbed her hands together. "It never rains but it pours," she
said, turning' around and grinning at Keith. "Yet another new sector of
space opened up for exploration!"
Keith nodded. "It never ceases to amaze me." He got up from his chair,
and paced a little, waiting for the hologram to be prepared.
"You know," he said absently, "my great-great-grandfather kept a diary.
Just before he died, he wrote about all the great advancements he'd seen
in his lifetime:
radio, the automobile, powered flight, spaceflight, lasers, computers,
the discovery of DNA, and on and on." Lianne seemed rapt, although [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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