“Makes sense,” Doob said. “One high-gee maneuver might cause the ice to break apart. When was the last time they communicated?”
“On the X band? The real radio? A few weeks after they left. Almost two years ago. But clearly they’re still alive. So it must have been radio failure.”
“Well, let’s go with that theory,” Doob suggested. “Jury-rigging a new radio that would transmit over such a distance would be kind of hopeless. The best they could hope for would be to cook something up that might work when they got closer . . . and to settle for lower bandwidth.”
“My dad used to talk about spark gap transmitters,” Dinah said. “It was a technology they used—”
“Back before transistors and vacuum tubes. Yes!” Doob said.
Dinah telegraphed down:
DOES QET SOUND LIKE AN OLD TIME SPARKY TO YOU?
Rufus returned:
YES COME TO THINK OF IT
“They took some of my robots with them,” Dinah said. “All they would have to do is jot down the MAC addresses on those units’ interface boards, and they’d have sort of a crude proof of identity. As a matter of fact . . .” and she began to pull up some of the records she had made, almost two years ago, of the robots and part numbers issued to Sean and his crew. Within a few minutes she was able to verify that the MAC address that had come in via Morse code a few minutes ago matched one on a robot that had been taken to Ymir.
“Who has access to the file you just consulted?” Doob asked, still in devil’s advocate mode.
“Are you kidding? You know how Sean is with the encryption and everything? All of this stuff is locked down. I mean, I’m sure the NSA could get in, but not some random prankster.”
“Just checking,” Doob said. “It seems awfully roundabout, is all I’m saying. Why doesn’t he just broadcast something like ‘Hey, Dinah, it’s me, Sean, my radio’s busted’? That would seem easier.”
“You have to know Sean,” Dinah said. “Look. Anything he sends out over that channel is getting broadcast to basically the entire Earth. It’s going to go up on the Internet . . . everyone’s going to know his business. He has no idea what the situation is. There’s no Internet up there and his radio’s been out for a long time. He doesn’t even know if anyone is alive up here. Or if there’s been a military coup or something. He doesn’t want to come back here if we’ve turned into the Klingon Empire.”
“I think you’re right,” Doob said. “He’s going to ease into it, test the waters.”
Forty-five minutes later Dinah was taking down a new message from QET. It started with RTFM5, then the number 00001, and went on as an apparently meaningless series of random letters.
“The only part I understand is ‘read the fucking manual,’” Dinah said, “followed by the number five.”
“Did he bring any manuals up with him?”
“He brought a bunch of stuff,” Dinah said, “from the engineers in Seattle, and left some of it here . . .”
“You have a faraway look in your eye, Dinah . . .”
“I remember asking him, ‘Why did you print that stuff out, why not use thumb drives like everyone else,’ and he said, ‘Owning your own space company brings some perks,’” Dinah said.
She found them after a few minutes’ rummaging in storage bins: half a dozen three-ring binders, volumes 1 through 6 of the Arjuna Expeditions Employee Manual. The entire stack was a foot thick.
Doob whistled. “Given the cost per pound of launching stuff into space, this is probably worth more than the Gutenberg Bible that showed up last week.”
They went straight to volume 5, which for the most part looked like any other corporate employee manual. But in between the sexual harassment policy and the dress code was a half-inch-thick stack of pages with no readable content at all. Random sequences of capital letters had been printed all over them, in groups of five, column after column, row after row, all the way down each page. Each of these pages had a different number at its top, beginning with 00001.
“This is the boy adventure secret code shit that Larz always used,” Dinah said. “But I’ll be damned if I know—”
“I’m embarrassed to say that I know exactly what this is,” Doob said. “These are one-time pads. It’s the simplest code there is—but the most difficult to break, if you do it right. But you have to have this.” And he rattled page 00001 in his hand.
Once Doob had explained how it worked, Dinah was able to begin decrypting the message by hand, but in a few minutes Doob had written a Python script that made it easy to finish the job. “I came here thinking I was going to have a drink and a chat about asteroid mining,” he said.
“Oh, stop grumbling—this is way more interesting!” Dinah said.
The message read:
TWO ALIVE. THRUSTING AT FULL POWER. SEND SITREP.
“There were six in the original crew, right?” Doob asked.
“Something must have happened,” Dinah said. “Maybe they hit a rock or something, damaged the antenna, lost some people. Maybe the radiation got to them.”