The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [42]
"Oh," he said. It was the longest she’d ever talked. Not exactly a date but sort of a conversation. "Are you going to George and Anne’s tomorrow night?"
"Yes. Mr. Quinn, please, can we move on?"
Jimmy replaced his headset and dragged himself back to the display. "Okay, I begin by taking a look at the flagged signals. A lot of them nowadays turn out to be coded transmissions from dope factories about five hundred kilometers out. They’re always moving around, and they change frequencies all the time. Usually the software screens them out because they’re so close to Earth, but sometimes the transmissions take an odd bounce off an asteroid or something and the signal looks as if it’s coming from far away."
Jimmy began working his way through the log, becoming absorbed in the process, talking more to himself than to Sofia. Watching him with one eye, she wondered if men ever figured out that they were more appealing when they were pursuing their own work than when they were pursuing a woman. Slavering was hardly attractive. And yet, she was surprised to recognize, she had begun to like Jimmy Quinn very much. She shook the thought off. There was no place for it in her life and she had no wish to foster whatever fancies he might be nurturing. Sofia Mendes never promised what she could not deliver.
"That’s interesting," Jimmy said. Sofia concentrated on the eyepiece image and saw a table-shaped signal. "See? There’s a signal that comes out of the background noise, stays around for—lemme look up the duration. Here. It was there for about four minutes and then it dropped off." He laughed. "Well, hell, it’s got to be something homemade. This part right here?" He pointed to the tabletop portion of the signal.
"A constant carrier frequency with amplitude modulation," she said.
"Bingo." He laughed. "It’s gotta be local. We’re probably picking up some religious broadcast from Tierra del Fuego bouncing off that new hotel Shimatzu is building. The one with the microgravity stadium?"
She nodded.
"Well, anyway, this gives me a chance to show you how I’d play around with a possible ET. See, the whole signal looks like a pulse when it’s displayed like this," he said, tracing the tabletop shape with an electronic finger. "Now. I can focus on just this section along the top of the pulse, like this, and change the amplitude scale." He did so. The formerly straight horizontal line now looked jagged. "See? The amplitude varies ... quite a bit, actually." His voice trailed off. It looked sort of familiar. "Got to be local," he muttered.
Sofia waited a few minutes as Jimmy fiddled with the signal. Triple time, she thought. "Mr. Quinn?" He flipped up an eyepiece to look at her. "Mr. Quinn, I’d like to begin with the details of the existing pattern-recognition software, if you please. Perhaps there is documentation I can work from."
"Sure," Jimmy said, killing the display, pulling off the VR equipment, and getting up. "We haven’t transferred all that old stuff. The working programs are here but nobody does much with the documentation, so it’s still archived on the Cray. Come on, I’ll show you how to access it."
WHEN SOFIA MENDES arrived at the Edwardses’ on Saturday evening, precisely on time and bearing a bottle of Golan Heights caber-net, Jimmy Quinn was already there, wired up and too loud, in stylishly bloused trousers, resplendent in a vividly colored shirt that would have fit Sofia like a bathrobe. She smiled in spite of herself at his patent pleasure in seeing her, thanked him for his compliment to her dress, and then to her hair, and not giving him any time to go further, handed the wine to Mr. Edwards and took shelter in the kitchen.
"Emilio might be a little late," Dr. Edwards told her, kissing her cheek. "Baseball game. Don’t be alarmed if he shows up in a full-body cast, dear. His team’s in second place and when it’s that close, Father Sandoz plays ball for keeps."
But Sofia heard his voice only ten minutes later, announcing the score, clearly pleased with the result. Greeting George and Jimmy on the run,