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deep inside, that led him to label his project Ozma , a name with more than a touch of magic and a hint of exotic mystery. Maybe more than surprised he would be disappointed, that they had looked so long and so hard and found nothing.
    Nothing yet. Where are they? Be patient, Frank, and old Enrico Fermi. They are there. We are going to find them .
    The smaller room beyond, in contrast to the one where Milly stood, was completely shielded from external signals. Within it the anomalies, the potential messages, the scores or hundreds daily culled from raw inputs, were sent to be analyzed. It is one of the curious results of information theory that the possible information carried within a signal is proportional to its randomness, to its unpredictability . If something is totally predictable, then by definition you know its content exactly and it can tell you nothing new. If the incoming signal is totally unpredictable, on the other hand, then in principle every single bit of data is a potential message. There had to be a fine line: enough regularities to announce intelligent design (a sequence of prime numbers, the Pythagorean theorem, a sequence of squares, the digits of pi), yet enough variation to offer information. How would an alien intelligence draw the line?
    Milly crossed the big receiving chamber and stood on the threshold of the inner sanctum. Hannah had vanished. Milly had not been looking for her for minutes, and did not know where she had gone. That was all right. For the moment there was neither need nor desire for company. She was at a nexus, the focus of a torrent of information streaming in from every direction and distance in space, from everywhere in the galaxy and beyond it. The chamber was silent, but her inner ear discerned a mighty rushing river of data, rain-fed by the whole universe.
    And the Ogre, with his insults and his coarse manners? Screw Jack Beston. She had not come here for him, she was here for this .
    Milly was starting toward one of the work stations, where she could grab a batch of anomalies and analyze them to see if anything there spoke of purposive signal, when at that moment she saw him. He was standing in the center of the room, no more than ten meters away. Clearly, he had no idea that she was there. His head was tilted to one side, looking slightly up. The green eyes were slitted half shut. The expression on his face was nothing like the one she had seen and hated in the review meeting. It was rapt, it was concentrated, it was yearning.
    Strangest of all, Milly could read that look. Jack Beston heard the cosmic roar of the swirling galaxy, beating in from all around them. But he was not listening for that. He was listening, with all his heart and soul, for something that he could not hear. Within the whirlwind, a still small voice .
    Jack Beston wanted to hear the message, the one that would tell him that all this dedication of spirit and mighty labor was not in vain.
    Milly could suddenly see inside him, as clearly as if Jack were lit from within by lightning. She looked, she understood, she yearned in just the same way to hear that same small voice. She felt connected .
    And, like it or hate it, she felt a first faint stirring of sympathy for the Devil.

3
    EARTH, YEAR 2097,
    SEINE-DAY MINUS ONE

    Seine-Day would be huge in the Jovian system, perhaps bigger yet at the L-4 and L-5 Trojan locations, and most important of all as a unifying influence on the expanding Outer System.
    On Earth, however, huddled in close to the Sun and with old war wounds still unhealed even after thirty years, Seine-Day could not compete with other worries.
    Worries such as the application. The written part had been submitted three weeks earlier. The oral examination would be held one hour from now, by an interviewer who had ridden a high-gee vessel all the way from Ganymede. Janeed Jannex stared east toward the rising sun and wondered if it would be worth showing up to meet the man. There must be tens or