Interrupt Read Online Free PDF

their desks. They’d been up for thirty-six hours straight before last night. Marcus was exhausted, too. Nevertheless, he’d woken early to call the East Coast and Colorado. His mind hadn’t allowed him to rest. He wanted to get back to work. He needed his staff.
    Steve Church was the only person in the shoebox-shaped room, a small, prefabricated structure. The walls were aluminum and glass. The furniture consisted of six cheap desks and eight good chairs, although each desk held its own computer and expensive flat-screen displays.
    “I told everyone to be here,” Marcus said.
    Steve looked up from his Mac. Even with the AC cranked to a frosty sixty-eight degrees, Steve was bleary-eyed, and Marcus wondered if his friend had slept.
    “I just got off the phone with SWPC,” Marcus said. “They think I’m crazy.”
    “They’re right,” Steve said.
    “Nothing’s wrong with our software.”
    “There must be.”
    Marcus shook his head uneasily. “Two observatories confirmed our data. It’s the satellites that can’t hear it. And if we move past the idea that we’re getting false reads, we may be in trouble.”
    Marcus and Steve were senior astronomers with the Hoffman Square Kilometer Field, a radio telescope array in the mountains north of San Francisco. Marcus was black. Steve was white. Otherwise, Marcus felt like they might have been brothers. Both of them were in their mid-forties, although they dressed like kids in T-shirts and jeans. Steve had a crop of beard stubble he’d let go for two days. Marcus wore a BEAM ME UP pin given to him by Steve’s wife, harking back to a time when they’d been as fresh as the crew of
Star Trek
. Now both men had potbellies (Marcus more so than Steve) and receding hairlines (Steve more so than Marcus), and yet their relaxed appearance could not mask the intensity he felt.
    Marcus took the computer beside Steve. He began to type, then, half-consciously, he paused to survey the desktop.
    Marcus had a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He was notorious for rearranging the junk on any desk into neat geometries—keyboard, mouse pad, sticky notes, pens. He shaved when Steve did not. He changed his socks when Steve did not. His ex ridiculed him for being an anal robot, but that he’d brought order to her life was precisely why Janet had been attracted to him in the beginning.
    He aligned three pens and a binder with a cold, stale cup of coffee. Then he rattled on his keyboard, opening the files he’d developed since sunrise.
    Outside the control room’s broad windows, the brown California hills were a stovetop warming in the sun. None of the worn, dirty peaksof the Coast Range lifted higher than five thousand feet, and the landscape consisted of weeds, brush, and scattered oak and pine trees. Their array was more commanding. The terrain was dotted with thousands of white six-meter dishes identical to those used for commercial television. The Hoffman Square Kilometer Field and another like it in Australia were the cutting edge in radio astronomy, with more channels and capabilities than anything else on the planet.
    Marcus pointed at his files. “The signal creep is subtle, but it’s there,” he said. “I think the sun is experiencing a rise in microflares.”
    Steve answered with tired irritation. “We anticipated a lot of background chatter when we built the array. What if the software is creating patterns that don’t exist?”
    “Our system’s one hundred percent. The programmers and I ran a dozen integration checks.”
    “It would be better if those guys were here.”
    Marcus shrugged. Their lead programmers lived in Silicon Valley. They’d consulted with him online despite his connection failing twice. The net had been spotty all morning. Marcus had asked them to drive to the array but was met with excuses. No one wanted to stay in the mountains. Their programs often ran for weeks, so the site staff were a few postdoctoral kids in their twenties. Marcus and