If that was it, the only people likely to know anything about unusual files of test data coming in from Earth would be the engineers down at Pithead who had worked on the beacon after it was brought up from beneath the ice. Shannon activated the terminal on his desk and entered a command to access the Jupiter Five personnel records. A few minutes later he had identified the engineering project leader in charge of that work as a Californian called Vincent Carizan, who had joined J5 from UNSA’s Propulsion Systems and Propellants Division, where he had worked for ten years
after obtaining a master’s degree in electrical and electronic engineering at Berkeley.
Shannon’s first impulse was to put a call through to Pithead, but after a minute or two of further reflection he decided against it. If Hunt had taken such pains to avoid any hint of the subject being interpretable from what went over the communications network, anything could be happening. He was still pondering on what to do when the call-tone sounded from the terminal. Shannon cleared the screen and touched a key to accept. It was his adjutant officer calling from the command center.
“Excuse me, sir, but you are scheduled to attend the Operations Controller’s briefing in 0-327 in five minutes. Since nobody’s seen you this morning, I thought maybe a reminder might be called for.”
“Oh . . . thanks, Bob,” Shannon replied. “Look, something’s come up, and I don’t 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.
“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.
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