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enough to pass for a fresh-faced kid, but that won’t save you. Jack Beston finds you attractive—yes he does, don’t argue with me. I know the signs. And so far as I can tell his only two interests in life are the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the seduction of new female workers. You can feel free to refuse—”
    “I damned well will!”
    “—although he won’t easily take no for an answer. Also, if you do decide that he’s attractive, and sleep with him, you’ll find that it doesn’t bring any special out-of-bed privileges. Don’t look for special favors from Jack Beston. He’ll still be the Ogre when it comes to work.”
    “You know all this, for a fact?”
    The corners of Hannah’s ultra-mobile mouth turned up and down again in a fraction of a second. “Believe me, Milly, I know. And don’t bother to tell me I was stupid, because I don’t think I was. There’s not too many things to do around here apart from work, and JB doesn’t hold grudges when it’s all over. Nor do I. I’m just saying to you, watch it. He’ll come sniffing, sure as Sunday. Keep hating him, and that’s fine. It’s when you feel sympathy for the Devil that you’re in trouble.”
    Hannah didn’t offer a chance for more questions, but stepped through into the great cube of the signal reception room. At first, Milly did not follow her. She had been here before, but again she wanted to feel the thrill, the prickle of awe creeping along her spinal column and up into her hind brain.
    This was it . Here, in this room, thirty-four billion separate signals, culled from narrow parts of the neutrino and electromagnetic energy spectrum, and from all parts of the heavens, came into convergence. Here, the myriad signals were sifted and sorted and searched, in the quest for anomalies that stood out from the rest, the deviation from random noise that cried out, “Look, look at me. I am a message!”
    Six years ago, when she was seventeen, Milly had encountered another message, one passed down from the very dawn of SETI. A century and a half ago, Frank Drake had sent a string of 1’s and 0’s to his colleagues, inviting them to decipher its meaning. Not one of them had succeeded.
    But Milly had, proceeding from prime factors of an array of numbers, then to a picture, then to an interpretation. She could trace her presence here directly to the emotional rush of that day. It had been a fork in her personal road, the moment when the pleasures of mastering the Puzzle Network faded before the challenge of messages from the stars.
    Now there was no guaranteed signal, but in its place a near-infinity of possible ones. The distributed observing system around the L-4 Argus Station still explored the ancient water-hole of the early investigators, between the spectral lines of neutral hydrogen and the hydroxyl radical, and to that they had added the preferred zone of neutrino resonance capture, a region undreamed of in early SETI work.
    The work took on new complexity when you could not be sure that a possible signal was a signal, and all the time the detection equipment became more sensitive and sophisticated. Is something there? That question was harder to answer than ever. Milly wondered about the comparison. Which was more difficult to decipher: A signal sent by humans to humans, deliberately obscure and challenging their ingenuity, but with a promise that it was a signal? Or a message from aliens, designed to be clear, struggling to be heard, wanting to be transparent in meaning, and sent to any life form who might be listening?
    What would Frank Drake say now, if he could be here to regard his legacy? The original listening had been done for just two stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, on a minimum of radio frequencies, for a period that was no more than one tick on the great celestial clock. Drake would probably just shake his head and smile a secret little smile. He was a scientist and a realist, but he had an element of fey,