Madigan gasped and began to swear. Florinda muttered, "No, it's all right. It's all right. Look at the display charts." Everything on the illuminated display charts was nominal. At that moment a voice on the P.A. spoke in the impersonal tones of a croupier, "We have lost cable communication with Johannesburg."
Madigan began to shake. He decided to murder Florinda Pot (and he pronounced it "Pot" in his mind) at the earliest opportunity. The other experimenters and NASA people turned white. If you don't get a quick fix on your bird, you may never find it again. No one said anything. They waited in silence and hated each other. At 1: 30 it was time for the craft to make its first pass over the Fort Myers tracking station, if it was alive, if it was anywhere near its nominal orbit. Fort Myers was on an open line, and everybody crowded around Florinda, trying to get their ears close to the phone.
"Yeah, she waltzed into the bar absolutely stoned with a couple of MPs escorting her," a tinny voice was chatting casually. "She says to me—Got a blip, Henry?" A long pause. Then, in the same casual voice, "Hey, Kennedy? We've nicked the bird. It's coming over the fence right now. You'll get your fix."
"Command 0310!" Florinda hollered. "0310!"
"Command 0310 it is," Fort Myers acknowledged.
That was the command to start the satellite transmitter and raise its antenna into broadcast position. A moment later the dials and oscilloscope on the radio reception panel began to show action, and the loudspeaker emitted a rhythmic, syncopated warble, rather like a feeble peanut whistle. That was OBO transmitting its housekeeping data.
"We've got a living bird," Madigan shouted. "We've got a living doll!"
I can't describe his sensations when he heard the bird come beeping over the gas station. There's such an emotional involvement with your first satellite that you're never the same. A man's first satellite is like his first love affair. Maybe that's why Madigan grabbed Florinda in front of the whole blockhouse and said, "My God, I love you, Florrie Pot." Maybe that's why she answered, "I love you too, Jake." Maybe they were just loving their first baby.
By Orbit 8 they found out that the baby was a brat. They'd gotten a lift back to Washington on an Air Force jet. They'd done some celebrating. It was 1:30 in the morning and they were talking happily, the usual get-acquainted talk; where they were born and raised, school, work, what they liked most about each other the first time they met. The phone rang. Madigan picked it up automatically and said hello. A man said, "Oh. Sorry. I'm afraid I've dialed the wrong number."
Madigan hung up, turned on the light and looked at Florinda in dismay. "That was just about the most damn fool thing I've ever done in my life," he said. "Answering your phone."
"Why? What's the matter?"
"That was Joe Leary from Tracking and Data. I recognized his voice."
She giggled. "Did he recognize yours?"
"I don't know." The phone rang. "That must be Joe again. Try to sound like you're alone."
Florinda winked at him and picked up the phone. "Hello? Yes, Joe. No, that's all right, I'm not asleep. What's on your mind?" She listened for a moment, suddenly sat up in bed and exclaimed, "What?" Leary was quack-quack-quacking on the phone. She broke in. "No, don't bother. I'll pick him up. We'll be right over." She hung up.
"So?" Madigan asked.
"Get dressed. OBO's in trouble."
"Oh Jesus! What now?"
"It's gone into a spin-up like a whirling dervish. We've got to get over to Goddard right away."
Leary had the all-channel printout of the first eight orbits unrolled on the floor of his office. It looked like ten yards of paper toweling filled with vertical columns of numbers. Leary was crawling around on his hands and knees following the numbers. He pointed to the attitude data column. "There's the spin-up," he said. "One revolution in every twelve seconds."
"But how? Why?" Florinda asked in exasperation.
"I can show you," Leary said. "Over here."
"Don't show us," Madigan said. "Just tell us."
"The Penn boom didn't go up on command," Leary said. "It's still hanging down in the launch position. The switch must be stuck."
Florinda and Madigan looked at each other with rage; they had the picture. OBO was programmed to be Earth-stabilized. An Earth-sensing eye was supposed to lock on the Earth and keep the same face of the satellite pointed toward it. The Penn boom was hanging down alongside the Earth sensor, and the idiot eye had locked on the boom and was tracking it. The satellite was chasing itself in circles with its lateral gas jets. More lunacy.
Let me explain the problem. Unless OBO was Earth-stabilized, its data would be meaningless. Even more disastrous was the question of electric power which came from batteries charged by solar vanes. With the craft spinning, the solar array could not remain facing the sun, which meant the batteries were doomed to exhaustion.
It was obvious that their only hope lay in getting the Penn boom up. "Probably all it needs is a good swift kick," Madigan said savagely, "but how can we get up there to kick it?" He was furious. Not only was $10,000,000 going down the drain but their careers as well.
They left Leary crawling around his office floor. Florinda was very quiet. Finally she said, "Go home, Jake."
"What about you?"
"I'm going to my office."
"I'll go with you."
"No. I want to look at the circuitry blueprints. Good night."
As she turned away without even offering to be kissed Madigan muttered, "OBO's coming between us already. There's a lot to be said for planned parenthood."
He saw Florinda during the following week, but not the way he wanted. There were the experimenters to be briefed on the disaster. The director called them in for a postmortem, but although he was understanding and sympathetic, he was little too careful to avoid any mention of congressmen and a failure review. Florinda called him the next week and sounded oddly buoyant. "Jake," she said, "you're my favorite genius. You've solved the OBO problem, I hope,"
"Who solve? What solve?"
"Don't you remember what you said about kicking our baby?"
"Don't I wish I could."
"I think I know how we can do it. Meet you in the Building 8 cafeteria for lunch."
She came in with a mass of papers and spread them over the table. "First, Operation Swift-Kick," she said. "We can eat later."
"I don't feel much like eating these days anyway," Madigan said gloomily.
"Maybe you will when I'm finished. Now look, we've got to raise the Penn boom. Maybe a good swift kick can unstick it. Fair assumption?"
Madigan grunted.
"We get twenty-eight volts from the batteries and that hasn't been enough to flip the switch. Yes?"
He nodded.
"But suppose we double the power?"
"Oh, great. How?"
"The solar array is making a spin every twelve seconds. When it's facing the sun, the panels deliver fifty volts to recharge the batteries. When it's facing away, nothing. Right?"
"Elementary, Miss Pot. But the joker is it's only facing the sun for one second in every twelve, and that's not enough to keep the batteries alive."
"But it's enough to give OBO a swift kick. Suppose at that peak moment we bypass the batteries and feed the fifty volts directly to the satellite? Mightn't that be a big enough jolt to get the boom up?"
He gawked at her. She grinned. "Of course it's a gamble."
"You can bypass the batteries?"
"Yes. Here's the circuitry."
"And you can pick your moment?"
"Tracking's given me a plot on OBO's spin, accurate to a tenth of a second. Here it is. We can pick any voltage from one to fifty."
"It's a gamble all right," Madigan said slowly. "There's the chance of burning every goddamn package out."
"Exactly. So? What d'you say?"
"All of a sudden I'm hungry," Madigan grinned.
They made their first try on Orbit 272 with a blast of twenty volts. Nothing. On successive passes they upped the voltag
e kick by five. Nothing. Half a day later, they kicked fifty volts into the satellite's backside and crossed their fingers. The swinging dial needles on the radio panel faltered and slowed. The sine curve on the oscilloscope flattened. Florinda let out a little yell, and Madigan hollered, "The boom's up, Florrie! The goddamn boom is up. We're in business."
They hooted and hollered through Goddard, telling everybody about Operation Swift-Kick. They busted in on a meeting in the director's office to give him the good news. They wired the experimenters that they were activating all packages. They went to Florinda's apartment and celebrated. OBO was back in business. OBO was a bona fide doll.
They held an experimenters' meeting a week later to discuss observatory status, data reduction, experiment irregularities, future operations, and so on. It was a conference room in Building 1, which is devoted to theoretical physics. Almost everybody at Goddard calls it Moon Hall. It's inhabited by mathematicians—shaggy youngsters in tatty, sweaters who sit amidst piles of journals and texts and stare vacantly at arcane equations chalked on blackboards.
All the experimenters were delighted with OBO's performance. The data was pouring in, loud and clear, with hardly any noise. There was such an air of triumph that no one except Florinda paid much attention to the next sign of OBO's shenanigans. Harvard reported that he was getting meaningless words in his data, words that hadn't been programmed into the experiment. (Although data is retrieved as decimal numbers, each number is called a "word.") "For instance, on Orbit 301 1 had five readouts of 15," Harvard said.
"It might be cable cross-talk," Madigan said. "Is anybody else using 15 in his experiment?" They all shook their heads. "Funny. I got a couple of 15s myself."
"I got a few 2s on 301," Penn said.
"I can top you all," Cal Tech said. "I got seven readout of 15-2-15 on 302. Sounds like the combination on a bicycle lock."
"Anybody using a bicycle lock in his experiment?" Madigan asked. That broke everybody up and the meeting adjourned.
But Florinda, still gung-ho, was worried about the alien words that kept creeping into the readouts, and Madigan couldn't calm her. What was bugging Florinda was that 15-2-15 kept insinuating itself more and more into the all-channel printouts. Actually, in the satellite binary transmission it was 001111-000010-001111, but the computer printer makes the translation to decimal automatically. She was right about one thing; stray and accidental pulses wouldn't keep repeating the same word over and over again. She and Madigan spent an entire Saturday with the OBO tables trying to find some combination of data signals that might produce 15-2-15. Nothing.
They gave up Saturday night and went to a bistro in Georgetown to eat and drink and dance and forget everything except themselves. It was a real tourist trap with the waitresses done up like Hula dancers. There was a Souvenir Hula selling dolls and stuffed tigers for the rear window of your car. They said, "For God's sake, no!" A Photo Hula came around with her camera. They said, "For Goddard's sake, no!" A Gypsy Hula offered palm reading, numerology and scrying. They got rid of her, but Madigan noticed a peculiar expression on Florinda's face.
"Want your fortune told?" he asked.
"No."
"Then why that funny look?"
"I just had a funny idea."
"So? Tell."
"No. You'd only laugh at me."
"I wouldn't dare. You'd knock my block off."
"Yes, I know. You think women have no sense of humor."
So it turned into a ferocious argument about the feminine mystique, and they had a wonderful time. But on Monday Florinda came over to Madigan's office with a clutch of papers and the same peculiar expression on her face. He was staring vacantly at some equations on the blackboard.
"Hey! Wake up!" she said.
"I'm up, I'm up," he said.
"Do you love me?" she demanded.
"Not necessarily."
"Do you? Even if you discover I've gone up the wall?"
"What is all this?"
"I think our baby's turned into a monster."
"Begin at the beginning," Madigan said.
"It began Saturday night with the Gypsy Hula and numerology."
"Ah-ha."
Suddenly I thought, what if numbers stood for the letters of the alphabet? What would 15-2-15 stand for?"
"Oh-ho."
"Don't stall. Figure it out."
"Well, 2 would stand for B." Madigan counted on fingers. "15 would be O."
"So 15-2-15 is. . .?"
"O.B.O. OBO." He started to laugh. Then he stopped. "It isn't possible," he said at last.
"Sure. It's a coincidence. Only you damnfool scientists haven't given me a full report on the alien words in your data," she went on. "I had to check myself. Here's Cal Tech. He reported 15-2-15 all right. He didn't bother to mention that before it came 9-1-13."
Madigan counted on his fingers. "I.A.M. Iam. Nobody I know."
"Or 'I am?' I am OBO?"
"It can't be! Let me see those printouts."
Now that they knew what to look for it wasn't difficult to ferret out OBO's own words scattered through the data. They started with 0, 0, 0, in the first series after Operation Swift-Kick, went on to OBO, OBO, OBO, and then I AM OBO, I AM OBO, I AM OBO.
Madigan stared at Florinda. "You think the damn thing's alive?"
"What do you think?"
"I don't know. There's half a ton of an electronic brain up there, plus organic material; yeast, bacteria, enzymes, nerve cells, Michigan's goddamn carrot. . ."
Florinda let out a little shriek of laughter. "Dear God! A thinking carrot!"
"Plus whatever spore forms my experiment is pulling in from space. We jolted the whole mishmash with fifty volts. Who can tell what happened? Urey and Miller created amino acids with electrical discharges, and that's the basis of life. Any more from Goody Two-Shoes?"
"Plenty, and in a way the experimenters won't like."
"Why not?"
"Look at these translations. I've sorted them out and pieced them together."
333: ANY EXAMINATION OF GROWTH IN SPACE IS MEANINGLESS UNLESS CORRELATED WITH THE CORIOLIS EFFECT.
"That's OBO's comment on the Michigan experiment," Florinda said.
"You mean it's kibitzing?" Madigan wondered.
"You could call it that."
"He's absolutely right. I told Michigan, and they wouldn't listen to me."
334: IT IS NOT POSSIBLE THAT RNA MOLECULES CAN ENCODE AN ORGANISM'S ENVIRONMENTAL EXPERIENCE IN ANALOGY WITH THE WAY THAT DNA ENCODES THE SUM TOTAL OF ITS GENETIC HISTORY.
"That's Cal Tech," Madigan said, "and he's right again. They're trying to revise the Mendelian theory. Anything else?"
335: ANY INVESTIGATION OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE IS MEANINGLESS UNLESS ANALYSIS IS FIRST MADE OF ITS SUGAR AND AMINO ACIDS TO DETERMINE WHETHER IT IS OF SEPARATE ORIGIN FROM LIFE ON EARTH.
"Now, that's ridiculous!" Madigan shouted. "I'm not looking for life-forms of separate origin, I'm just looking for any life-form. We—" He stopped himself when he saw the expression on Florinda's face. "Any more gems?" he muttered.
"Just a few fragments like 'solar flux' and 'neutron stars' and a few words from the Bankruptcy Act."
"The what?"
"You heard me. Chapter 11 of the Proceedings Section."
"I'll be damned."
"I agree."
"What's he up to?"
"Feeling his oats, maybe."
"I don't think we ought to tell anybody about this."
"Of course not," Florinda agreed. "But what do we do?"
"Watch and wait. What else can we do?"
You must understand why it was so easy for those two parents to accept the idea that their baby had acquired some sort of pseudo-life. Madigan had expressed their attitude in the course of a Life v. Machine lecture at M.I.T. "I'm not claiming that computers are alive, simply because no one's been able to come up with a clear-cut definition of life. Put it this way: I grant that a computer could never be a Picasso, but on the o
ther hand the great majority of people live the sort of linear life that could easily be programmed into a computer."
So Madigan and Florinda waited on OBO with a mixture of acceptance, wonder and delight. It was an absolutely unheard-of phenomenon but, as Madigan pointed out, the unheard-of is the essence of discovery. Every ninety minutes OBO dumped the data it had stored up on its tape recorders and they scrambled to pick out his own words from the experimental and housekeeping information.
371: CERTAIN PITUITIN EXTRACTS CAN TURN NORMALLY WHITE ANIMALS COAL-BLACK.
"What's that in reference to?"
"None of our experiments."
373: ICE DOES NOT FLOAT IN ALCOHOL BUT MEERSCHAUM FLOATS IN WATER.
"Meerschaum! The next thing you know, he'll be smoking."
374: IN ALL CASES OF VIOLENT AND SUDDEN DEATH, THE VICTIM'S EYES REMAIN OPEN.
"Ugh!"
375: IN THE YEAR 356 B.C. HEROSTRATUS SET FIRE TO THE TEMPLE OF DIANA, THE GREATEST OF THE SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD, SO THAT HIS NAME WOULD BECOME IMMORTAL.
"Is that true?" Madigan asked Florinda.
"I'll check."
She asked me and I told her. "Not only is it true," she reported, "but the name of the original architect is forgotten."
"Where is baby picking up this jabber?"
"There are a couple of hundred satellites up there. Maybe he's tapping them."
"You mean they're all gossiping with each other? It's ridiculous."
"Sure."
"Anyway, where would he get information about this Herostratus character?"
"Use your imagination, Jake. We've had communications relays up there for years. Who knows what information has passed through them? Who knows how much they've retained?"
Madigan shook his head wearily. "I'd prefer to think it was all a Russian plot."
376: PARROT FEVER IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN TYPHOID.
377: A CURRENT AS LOW AS 54 VOLTS CAN KILL A MAN.
378: JOHN SADLER STOLE CONUS GLORIA MARIS.
"Seems to be turning sinister," Madigan said.