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think I'm going to be able to make it. Make excuses for me, would you?"
"Will do, sir."
"Oh, and Bob..." Shannon's voice rose suddenly as a thought struck him.
The adjutant looked up just as he had been about to cut the call. "Sir?"
"Get here as soon as you've done that. I've got a message that I want
couriered down to the surface."
"Couriered?" The adjutant appeared surprised and puzzled.
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"Yes. It's to go to one of the engineers at Pithead. I can't explain now, but
the matter is urgent. If you don't waste any time, you should be able to make
the nine o'clock shuttle down to Main. I'll have it sealed and waiting by the
time you get here. Treat this as grade X-ray."
The adjutant's face at once became serious. "I'll be there right away," he
said, and the screen went blank.
Shannon received a brief call from Pithead shortly before lunch, advising that
Carizan was on his way up to Jupiter Five via Ganyniede Main Base. When
Carizan arrived, he brought with him a printout of a ifie of data, supposedly
relating to tests performed on the Ganymean beacon, that had materialized in
the computers at Pithead that very morning after coming in from Earth over the
link and being relayed down to the surface. The engineers at Pithead had been
puzzled because the ifie header was out of sequence and contained references
that didn't match the database indexing system. And nobody had known anything
about any tests being scheduled of the kind that the header mentioned.
As Shannon had anticipated, the file contained just numbers- many groups of
numbers, each group consisting of a long list of pairs; it was typical of the
layout of an experimental report giving readings of interrelated variables and
would have meant nothing more to anybody who had no reason not to accept it at
face value. Shannon called together a small team of specialists whose
discretion could be trusted, and it didn't take them long to deduce that each
group of pairs formed a set of datapoints defined by x-y coordinates in a
256-by-256 matrix array; the hint had been there in the crossword. When the
sets of points were plotted on a computer display screen, each set formed a
pattern of dots that looked just like a statistical scattering of test data
about a straight-line function. But when the patterns of dots were superposed
they formed lines of words written diagonally across the screen, and the words
formed a message in English. The message contained pointers to other ifies of
numbers that had also been beamed through from Earth and gave explicit
instructions for decoding them, and when this was done the amount of
information that they yielded turned out to be prodigious.
The result was a set of detailed directions for Jupiter Five to transmit a
long sequence of Ganymean communications coding groups not into the UNSA net
but outward, toward coordinates that lay beyond the edge of the solar system.
The contents of any replies received from that direction were, the directions
said, to be disguised as experimental data in the way that had thus been
established and communicated to Navcomms via the laser link.
Shannon was weary and red-eyed due to lack of sleep by the time he sat down at
the terminal in his stateroom and composed a message for transmission to
Earth, addressed to Dr.
Victor Hunt at Navcomms Headquarters, Houston. It read:
Vic, I've talked to Vince Carizan, and it's all a lot clearer now. We're
running some tests on it as you asked, and if anything positive shows up I'll
have the results sent straight through.
file:///F|/rah/James%20P.%20Hogan/Hogan,%20James%20P%20-%20Giant's%20Star.txt
(15 of 137) [2/4/03 10:56:13 PM]
file:///F|/rah/James%20P.%20Hogan/Hogan,%20James%20P%20-%20Giant's%20Star.txt
Best wishes, Joe
Chapter Five
Hunt lounged back in the pilot's seat and stared absently down at the toytown
suburbs of
Houston while the airmobile purred along contentedly, guided by intermittent
streams of binary being directed up at it from somewhere below. It was
interesting, he thought, how the patterns of movement of the groundcars,
flowing, merging, slowing, and accelerating in unison on the roadways below
seemed to reveal some grand, centrally orchestrated design
-- as if they were all parts of an unimaginably complex score composed by a
cosmic Bach.
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But it was all an illusion. Each vehicle was programmed with only the details
of its own destination plus a few relatively simple instructions for handling
conditions along the way; the complexity emerged as a consequence of large
numbers of them interacting freely in their synthetic environment. It was the
same with life, he reflected. All the magical, mystical, and supernatural
forces invoked through the ages to explain it were inventions that existed in
the minds of misled observers, not in the universe they observed. He wondered
how much untapped human talent had been wasted in futile pursuit of the
creations of wishful thinking. The Ganymeans had entertained no such
illusions, but had applied themselves diligently to understanding and
mastering the universe as it was, instead of how it seemed to be or how they
might have wanted it to be. Maybe that was why the Ganymeans had reached the
stars.
In the seat next to him, Lyn looked up from the half-completed crossword in
the
Interplanetary Journal of a few days earlier. "Got any ideas for this-'It
sounds like a lumberjack's musical number.' What do you make of that?"
"How many letters?" Hunt asked after a few moments of thought.
"Nine."
Hunt frowned at the ifight-systems status summaries being routinely updated on
the console display in front of him. "Logarithm," he said after another pause.
Lyn thought about it, then smiled faintly. "Oh, I see sneaky. It sounds like
'logger rhythm.'"
"Right."
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