Emprise by Michael P. Kube-McDowell Page B

news of your friend,” he said as he reached them. “Apparently he has quite lost his grip, became depressed, tried to kill himself. They’re keeping an eye on him at Maudsley. If you succeed here, the staff may want to talk to you on our return.”
    “If we’re not, will they just give him a razor?” asked Anofi sotto voce.
    “Thank you for informing us,” Aikens said.
    “I’m very sorry not to have better news. Were there any signs?”
    Aikens thought quickly of Eddington’s volatility, his treatment of Agatha, his possessiveness about the message, and his obsession about its contents. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, there were. He was living on the edge. The trial must have pushed him over.”
    “I am sorry to hear that,” he said, and paused. “Jenkins tells me that the unit we brought with us is rack-compatible with the INTELSAT equipment. I’m not certain I understand, but he assures me that means the electronics will be ready by the time the dish is reoriented.”
    Aikens looked at his watch. “I’ll set it up to allow ninety minutes. We can always chase it if we run late—it’ll be in the sky for several hours yet.”
    While Schmidt peered over the shoulders of the technicians installing the receiver, Anofi saw to the recording equipment, and Aikens supervised the repositioning of the dish. The last was accomplished not by hand, as Aikens had predicted, but with an electric hand drill placed in fittings on the dish cradle—one for altitude, one for azimuth.
    An hour and a quarter later, they were all gathered in the station’s crowded control room. “We’re set up to record the data on that minicomp over there, but you’ll see it here on this display,” Anofi said, pointing to a large monitor. Two flat oscilloscopelike traces tracked across the screen, one near the middle and one at the bottom.
    “That’s a real-time display of the output from the receiver at the two frequencies the message used—1455 megahertz and 1525 megahertz,” she said. “It’s flat now because the unit is off. When we turn it on we’ll get some small amount of noise and, we hope, the waveforms of the message.” She looked at Aikens, and he nodded. She twisted a knob at the console and looked up at the screen expectantly.
    The traces became ragged lines, with many small peaks and valleys. “Well, there’s the noise,” she said, frowning.
    “We have about ten minutes before the source passes the telescope’s line of sight,” Aikens said quickly. “We don’t know the angular size of the source. If we pick it up four minutes early, it’s two degrees; two minutes, one degree; one minute, half a degree. If it’s a point source we may only get it on the fly.”
    “Should have it by 2:12, then,” said one of the INTELSAT technicians.
    They waited, first in silence, then with a buzz of whispered conversations as the trace continued to display nothing but noise. The voices stilled briefly again at 2:07, when an INTELSAT man switched on an overhead speaker and filled the room with an unmodulated hiss.
    “The voice of the Universe,” Schmidt said to himself.
    At 2:10, with the hiss now grating and the trace still flat, Aikens rose to stand over the console by Anofi. Behind him the conversations rose to normal speaking levels.
    “I thought we’d have it by now,” he said to her.
    “So did I. It is a small dish.”
    “It’s big enough. It should be a strong signal.”
    “It’s not there,” she said quietly as 2:10 came and went without incident.
    “Or we’re not.” He turned to the others. “I’m going to advance the dish several degrees to give us an opportunity to recheck the signal path.” Picking up the drill, he headed out the door. A Royal Marine trailed after him.
    They watched a second time for the twitch in the traces which would mean the interception of the signal. This time there was less expectation and more skepticism. Aikens snatched a glance at King William from time to time. What little