Jan laughed. “That’s what my advisor told me, back in the eighties. So there’s always hope.”

“Do you plan to go back?” Russ asked. Under the circumstances, a question with no right answer.

“I keep up my reading at the library, A.J. and Aph.J.,” it said carefully. “My interest in astronomy is undiminished, especially globular clusters and star formation.” It realized it was sounding too much like a college professor, but it had been a professor a lot longer than it had been a lab technician. Or a dwarf or a prostitute, for that matter. “But it would be hard to go back to being a student. I’ve been a working woman for too long.” Thirty-one of the past ninety-four years, if being a female shark counted.

“The SETI aspect of working here fascinates me,” it continued. “I never had any course work in it, except as part of radio astronomy. So it would be interesting as a learning experience, even if nothing ever comes of it.”

He nodded and exchanged another look with Jan. “You know what we’ve been doing the past couple of months.”

“The planetary environments thing. I saw the Nova show about Venus; that was incredible.”

“Well…” Russ put his fingertips together and tapped twice. “This is secret. The whole world will know before long, but we’re still sorting out what to say, the timing. You can keep a secret.”

“Absolutely.”

“We got a response from the artifact.”

The changeling articulated a variety of physiological reflexes, that for a change reflected its actual state: pupils dilating, sweat popping, a sharp intake of breath: “During the Jupiter simulation?”

Jan nodded. “Jupiter. At first we thought it was just a glitch. You know we use pi squared as the factor from one frequency to the next?”

“Yes; that was interesting.”

“What the artifact did was repeat the message, the first half of it, but at ten times the frequency.”

The changeling nodded. “So it knows digits.”

“It may know how many digits we have,” Russ said.

“At first we thought it was a transmission mistake,” Jan said. “It was the acoustic phase, tapping out the message. It’s done automatically, with a small solenoid-driven hammer. The response, ten times faster, was in the middle of our stock message.”

“It was recorded but initially ignored,” Russ said. “One of the techs, Muese, was analyzing it as a kind of feedback noise—that’s happened before—and then realized it had to have come from the artifact.”

“We were up in the infrared by then,” Jan said, indicating a distance with one hand over the other, “but we went back to the acoustic mode, returning the faster signal it had sent. It responded with a long burst, twelve minutes.”

“Saying?”

Russ shook his head. “We don’t have the faintest. Not a clue. But it’s not random.”

They seemed calm, but the changeling could hear their pulses. Jan spoke carefully. “You’d think an intelligent creature, an intelligence of some kind, would respond in the same code.” She looked at the pretty woman with a studied casualness that said this is a test. “Why do you suppose it didn’t?”

The changeling paused longer than it needed. “One, Occam’s razor: it didn’t understand that the first series was a code. It was just being like a mynah bird. But the second ‘message’… the factor of ten is interesting, but maybe it, or whatever manufactured it, had ten appendages.

“I’ll ask the obvious. Have you done Zipf analysis? Shannon entropy?”

Jan and Russ looked at each other, and Naomi chuckled.

“The Zipf slope is minus one,” Russ said quietly, “so the message isn’t just noise.” Dolphin calls and human languages generate a slope of minus one; it can’t occur by chance.

“The Shannon entropy is scary,” Jan said. “It’s twenty-sixth order.”

“Wow,” the changeling said, excitement growing. Human languages only had ninth-order complexity. Dolphins were fourth order. “So it didn’t make up its own version of the Drake message?”

“We hoped for that,” Russ said, “but it doesn’t meet the first requirement: the two primes that would tell us the proportions of the information matrix.”

“We did the obvious,” Jan said, still testing.

The changeling stared at her. “Assumed the matrix would be the same size as yours, or the product of two other primes. But that didn’t work.”

“Not quite,” Russell said. “We finally figured out that it’s three primes multiplied together. That sort of ups the ante.”

Jan nodded and leaned forward, elbows on the table. “You know, this organization is only weakly hierarchical. That is, Russ and Jack Halliburton call the shots; direct and define what the rest of us are going to do. At the working level, well, it’s pretty chaotic. That’s the way we want it.

“This isn’t like some R D enterprise, where you can assign duties and work to a timetable. We’re all wandering in the dark, in a sense, going on intuition.

“Even old people like Russ and me know that education and experience can get in the way of intuition. When we hire people at your level, it’s with the understanding that, although much of your work will be routine, there’s always room for your input. The woman you may replace was always coming up with off-the-wall ideas, and sometimes they were helpful.”

“Why did she leave?” the changeling asked.

“Illness in the family, her daughter. She might be back once things settle down, but it looks like a long watch.”

“Meanwhile, we need someone like you,” Russ said. “You’re not likely to… this is embarrassing. But the woman she replaced had to leave to have a baby. Likewise, we’re about to lose our receptionist to motherhood.”

“I can’t have children,” the changeling said, not adding except by fission. It reddened and touched its lips.

“We didn’t mean to pry,” Jan said, giving Russ a sharp look.

“Of course not, no.” He looked like a man who desperately needed some papers to shuffle through. Instead, he studied the inside of his empty coffee cup.

“Oh, I’m not sensitive about it,” the changeling said. “It’s only biology. Simplifies my life.

“If I do get the job, what would the job be, at this stage? It doesn’t sound like gas chromatography or spectroscopy are on the menu right now.”

“Not now, not anymore.” Russ took the cup over to the coffee urn and filled it. “Your CV mentioned cryptography.”

“One course and some reading.” A lot more, actually, in another life. When it had studied computer science at MIT, everyone was interested in it.

Jan tapped twice on her notebook and studied the screen. “It’s not on your transcript.”

“I just sat in. My advisor vetoed it as frivolous. She would’ve killed me if she’d known I was doing that rather than advanced differential equations.”

“Been there,” Jan said.

“Might have been a lucky choice,” Russ said. “It’s what you’ll be doing for awhile, I think.

“With this pesky data string from the artifact, we’re dividing into two groups. One, the one you’d be in, will try to decipher the message. The other’s keeping after the artifact with a series of more complex messages, along the lines of the first one. That’ll be Jan’s group.”

“You’re keeping it in house? Keeping the government out?”

“Absolutely. We’re a profit-making corporation, and there just might be an obscene profit in whatever this thing has to say. Better be, to justify what Jack’s sunk into it.”

“If we were in the States,” Jan said, “the government might be able to step in on grounds of national security. But there’s not much they can do here. Jack’s even a Samoan citizen.”

“You do have a NASA team,” the changeling said.

“I’m on it,” Jan said. “And we used NASA space suits, and they got us the use of the military laser that made things so interesting a couple of months ago. But our agreements with them are carefully drawn up, and the deal with the individual employees, well, it’s kind of mercenary.”