The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [13]
His position at the dish was about as low as it could be, among the scientific staff. Whenever the telescope wasn’t being used for something serious, Jimmy ran the standard SETI routines, monitoring the skies for alien radio transmissions. You could tell how low a priority the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence had become simply by noting that it was Jimmy who got stuck with the job. Most of the time, though, he processed requests to collect radio signals from targeted coordinates. A light astronomer would see something interesting and ask Arecibo to check out the same region of the sky so the two types of observations could be compared. Automated as Arecibo was, some actual real live person still had to receive the request, schedule the use of the dish, see that the work was done, take a look at the results and route the data back to whomever’d asked for it. It was not exactly secretarial; it wasn’t Nobel Prize stuff either.
So the question was, why spend money on a first-rate vulture like Sofia Mendes when a perfectly adequate hack could automate his job for less?
After his master’s at Cornell, Jimmy got the Arecibo job because he was willing to work cheap, because he’d been shrewd enough to study both Japanese and Spanish, and because he had some strengths in both light and radio astronomy. He loved his work and he was good at it. At the same time, he could see that much of what he did was amenable to automation. He understood that Masao Yanoguchi was under the gun to bring down costs at the dish because the lunar mining program looked like it was going to be a washout after all and the surest way to cut costs was to eliminate human beings from the process.
Yanoguchi had managed the Arecibo operation ever since ISAS, the Japanese Institute for Space and Aeronautical Science, purchased the radio telescope from the U.S. government. Arecibo was a frill, in the larger context of Japan’s space industry, but Jimmy knew that there was vast Japanese satisfaction in owning it. Twice, the United States had attempted to force Japan to play by the West’s rules with a decisive move to block Japan’s access to raw materials and markets. Twice, the U.S. was stunned by the explosive reaction: the conquest of Asia in the first instance, the conquest of space in the second. And this time, there’d been no fatal mistake, like not bombing the shore facilities at Pearl Harbor.
Jimmy had taken a couple of courses in Japanese culture and he tried to apply what he learned but even after working at the Arecibo dish for almost a year, he found it hard to think of the Japanese as wild gamblers. And yet, his professors insisted, their entire history proved they were. Time after time, the Japanese had risked everything on a titanic throw of the dice. The horrific consequences of that single mistake at Pearl Harbor had made them the world’s most calculating, meticulous and painstaking gamblers, but gamblers nonetheless. Westerners who understood this, one prof had commented in a wry aside, could occasionally propose a crap game and win.
Jimmy cut himself when the idea came at last, and laughed out loud and danced a little while he dabbed at the blood. Masao Yanoguchi was not going to fire him, at least not right away. Peggy the Hun would not eviscerate him and might even give him some credit for brains. He might get Sofia Mendes as his vulture, and he thought Emilio would be pleased. And hell, now that he thought of it, he might even have a topic for a doctoral thesis.
"You’ve done it again, Quinn," he crowed to his bloody reflection and finished up quickly in the bathroom, anxious to get to the dish.
"COME IN, MR. Quinn." Masao Yanoguchi waved Jimmy through his open office door. "Please, have a seat."
They