The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell Page A

use orbiting observatories?"
    "Liz doesn’t have enough funding or clout for access. But you can do a lot with land-based data. So. Anyway, you get a consensus on the schedule and then you hope it doesn’t rain or something, because that messes things up. Sometimes if there’s a narrow window, we gut it out and do the work even if conditions are bad. Do you want to know about that now?"
    "Later, please. Just an overview for now."
    "Sure. Let’s see. Once we decide to go ahead, I have to check the noise floor." She looked up. "That means I see if the target region is emitting a signal strong enough to be detected above the background noise. All electrical equipment generates electrical noise—electrons banging around in the metal of the equipment itself. We chill the receivers down in liquid helium to keep them really cold, because cold slows down the movement of the electrons and that reduces the not—" The stare again. "Right. You know that. Okay. If the target signal is really faint, we go around turning stuff off. Computers we aren’t using for the shoot, lights, air conditioners, whatever. Then I choose a calibration signal—a known radio source. I shoot that to tune the system up."
    "How do you choose the calibration target? Briefly, please."
    "There’s a huge catalog on-line and we pick one near the target signal. Usually I just look at the signal using a virtual oscilloscope. We know what a signal from a calibration source is supposed to look like."
    "And if the signal differs from expected?"
    All business, Emilio said. Well, she has to eat …
    "Mr. Quinn. If the signal differs from the expected?" she repeated, dark brows raised, stylus poised.
    "That’s where the art comes in. Each one of these dishes is essentially handmade. They all have quirks—cabling problems, grounding problems. The weather affects them, the time of day, the ambient noise. You have to get to know a piece of equipment like this. And then when you’ve eliminated everything, you have to use your intuition about what could be causing distortions or interference or stray signals. One time," he said, warming up again, "we thought we had an ET signal, extraterrestrial. We got it every few months but nobody else could confirm. Turned out it was the ignition of this one old school bus and we heard it every time the kids from that school came up here on a field trip."
    The Stare. It already had a capital letter in his mind. "Listen," he said seriously, "I’m not just wasting your time telling funny stories. You have to know about stuff like this or your program is going to claim it’s found intelligent life on Mars. And everyone knows there’s only Australians there, right?"
    She smiled, in spite of herself. "Ah," said Jimmy shrewdly. "I see you’ve worked with Australians."
    For a moment, she struggled to return to sobriety but finally laughed. "There’s no such thing as beer too warm to drink," she said with a very good Australian accent. Jimmy laughed then as well but, wisely, did not press his luck.

    "H OW’S IT GOING? " George Edwards asked her, a month or so after she started. They met for lunch frequently, Sofia saving up questions to ask him on the days when he came to the dish.
    "Slowly. Mr. Quinn is very cooperative," Sofia conceded, looking up at George from the thick coffee mug she held in both small hands, "but easily distracted."
    "By you," George ventured, to see how she’d react, knowing that Jimmy was miserably besotted with a woman whose only interest seemed to be a relentless deconstruction of his brain, cell by cell. Sofia simply nodded. No blush, George noted, no compassion. She’s not a romantic, that’s for sure.
    "It makes things difficult. Animosity is easier to deal with," she said, glancing across the cafeteria at Peggy Soong. George grimaced: Peggy could be a pain in the ass. "On the other hand, infatuation is preferable to condescension.