Emprise by Michael P. Kube-McDowell Page A

finished, but she had made a beginning. One word, nine units of the message—but still more than the group had managed. She felt a pang of guilt at having meddled, but that faded quickly. The satisfied smile did not fade from her lips until she was asleep.
    But there was no sympathetic magic in Agatha’s touch, and the committee continued to be stymied. Agatha’s eagerness to see them repeat her discovery faded quickly as argument and recrimination continued to dominate their work sessions. The sight of her father becoming livid with little provocation made her uncomfortable enough to stop her spying, not wanting to bring his anger down on her.
    The end of June saw Schmidt return to Germany, ostensibly to retrieve some personal and professional effects for his indefinitely prolonged stay. Agatha thought perhaps the trip was also a way of relieving the tensions which had begun to carry over into Crown House’s daily rhythms. Her father used Schmidt’s absence as a reason to cancel all work sessions, which apparently met with the approval of rest of the committee. The safe remained locked and its contents undisturbed. Even Agatha let it be, having nothing to prove and much to lose if her father discovered her.
    Yet in contrast to his treatment of the committee, Eddington was newly solicitous toward his daughter. He displayed a sudden interest in exploring the city with her, and on weekends, they pedaled out into the countryside. Agatha did not understand the new turn, but accepted it, and the two gained a closeness they had not formerly known.
    But Schmidt’s return in July brought a quick end to that pleasant interlude. Her father hastily scheduled a work session for that evening, and browbeat a travel-weary Schmidt into several hours of preparatory work on the safe’s contents. With the time that had passed and even Winston present, Agatha made an exception to her vow to leave the committee alone. Moments after the library door closed after them, she was settled in the dining hall with her notepad.
    Eddington had settled on the divan beside Anofi.
    “How was Germany, Josef? You know, I’m still hurt you didn’t take me with you,” she said playfully. Across the room Winston snorted.
    “Can we get on with this?” her father said crossly. “Of course, Larry,” Aikens said soothingly. “Go ahead. You called this meeting.”
    “It seems to me we’ve reached a turning point. If after reviewing what we’ve done, we can think of no new approaches or no tacks we’ve missed, then we must decide: were we wrong and searching for some meaning where there is none, or should we admit that the problem has bested us and look for other help?”
    “That makes more sense than what I was hearing at the last few meetings,” Anofi said, with a sharp look at Schmidt across the room.
    “I agree that we’re stalled,” said Aikens, and Schmidt nodded wordlessly.
    “I took the liberty of preparing something of an outline,”
    Eddington said, unfolding a paper from his breast pocket, “so if there’s no objection—”
    “Go ahead,” Winston said with a wave of the hand. He seemed bored.
    Eddington looked down. “There are 333 pulses in the message—though some of you have grown reluctant to call it that. Our recording includes two and a half repetitions of that sequence, with no indisputable beginning or end. Some of you suspect there are none. Considering both length and frequency as variables, the pulses are of twenty-two varieties—eleven at the higher frequency, and eleven at the lower. The shortest pulse is some 1/13 of a second, the longest exactly 1 second. All the others are multiples of the shortest pulse, which some of us have taken to mean that their basic time unit is 1/13 of a second.
    “The most common pulse is the one we call A5—the A wavelength, five times the basic duration. It occurs forty-five times. The least common is B11 , which appears only once. Though they would fit the pattern, there is no