Dragon's Egg Read Free Page A

to blur. Her job for her thesis was to find another periodic variation in that complex pattern that would indicate that there were five (or more) black holes. Failing that, she needed to prove that there were only four. (At least she had been able to get her peripatetic advisor to agree that a well-documented negative result would be an adequate thesis.)
    However, she was worried. The scruff was blurring the data, ruining a good portion of it. It wouldn’t have made much difference if the good part had shown some new pattern and she could have ferreted out a new black hole to add to the Sun’s problems. However, it was now pretty obvious that she would have to be content with a negative thesis, and this noise was going to make it difficult to convince the examining committee that there were only four black holes in the Sun. She stared at the noisy portion as her arms rapidly slid the long sheet of paper across the table.
    “I shouldn’t complain about this antique spacecraft,” she said. “But why did it have to start stuttering now?”
    She moved along the trace. The scruff got worse, then slowly faded away. When she got to the clear section, she started to measure the amplitude averages again. In a way it was good that the computer was not blindly working on this data. She had enough sense to ignore the noisy parts, and thus end up with a very clean spectrum. But if the computer had been handling the data, it would have folded the scruff inwith the good data and the resulting spectrum would have had a lot of spurious spikes that would have given the examination committee plenty of ammunition. Jacqueline finished her data analysis late in the evening. She looked at the neat figures in the notebook.
    “That is the hard way to analyze data,” she said to herself. “Tomorrow it gets worse, when I have to read it all into the computer. I hope old Saw-face has loosened the purse strings by then.” Jacqueline glanced wearily at the long tumbled ribbon of paper on the floor and, swirling it around, finally found a loose end and started to roll it up.
    “Up and down with a double hump, triple hump, bump—repeat twice more, then scrufffffff, then up and down with a double hump, triple hump, bump—repeat twice more, then scrufffffff …” Jacqueline stopped her semiautomatic mouthing of the pattern on the roll. She quickly gathered up the whole pile of paper and carefully carried it to one end of the long room and stretched it out on the floor. She then went to one end and strode rapidly along it, looking for the noisy portions. “The scruff is periodic!” she exclaimed.
    The noise seemed to have a period of about a day, and, as she went from one end of the roll to the other, it slowly drifted with respect to the more regular periodic bumps that were the meat of her thesis. She had previously thought that the noisy portions were due to random malfunctions of the spacecraft, but now the periodic nature of the scruff made her look elsewhere for the cause.
    “It could be that the spacecraft develops an arc in the transmitter for a few hours every day, but that doesn’t sound very likely,” she said. She finished rolling up the paper and, carrying the roll with her, went into the communications lab. The first thing she looked up was the spacecraft log. Fortunately, that informationwas in the general library file and the computer would let her look at that without charging her. She flashed the log backwards, page by page. Most of the entries had her name entered:
    J. CARNOT: ESA: ACCOUNT SAW-2-J: LFR DATA DUMP
    “I seem to be the only one using this satellite,” she said.
    Finally she came to an engineering note. Once every few days or so, during slack periods, the spacecraft engineers at the CCCP-NASA-ESA Deep Space Network communications center would take the spacecraft through its engineering check list.
    POWER 22% NOMINAL
    X-BAND DOWN-LINK 80% NOMINAL
    K-BAND DOWN-LINK DEAD
    ATTITUDE CONTROL DEAD
    SPIN RATE 77