“Did you get the new data downloads?” Ben asked.
“Just getting them now,” Roger replied. A nest of papers surrounded him, his face staring into his laptop screen. “The wireless in this hotel sucks. Even if I get it downloaded, it’s going to take time to unpack and normalize.”
It was one thing to say you had the data, but another to decode it. Never mind trying to figure out how to read the magnetic tapes or floppy disks he had Mrs. Brown hunting for. Just trying to make sense of the compression algorithms and file formats of ten years ago was proving more difficult than Ben had imagined. He would bet the other teams were having the same problems. Making sure apples were apples wasn’t easy, especially over the Grand Hotel’s feeble wireless connection, four thousand miles from the office.
“Just make it happen. This is important.” Ben clicked off the mute on his phone. “Yes, that’s right,” he yelled. “The one marked 'Red Shift 1977', that’s the one.” Mrs. Brown might be old, but she was a wizard at picking through Ben’s messes. “And you have a list of the others? Good.” He clicked mute on his phone again.
“Want to tell me what this is all about, Bernie?” Roger asked from the bed.
Bernie. Ben’s old college nickname. His students liked to use it to rile him up. “I can’t tell you. I need to see if you find it for yourself,” Ben said.
It was a valid point, one Roger would understand. A problem with searching through huge amounts of data was that, eventually, you could see almost anything you wanted. If he told Roger what he was looking for, he’d probably find it. That was Ben’s main misgiving with Dr. Müller’s hypothesis. So Ben was having Roger comb through their radial velocity searches of stars to look at the subtractive factors, see if any of them were changing significantly over time. It was a big undertaking, looking in all directions at the celestial sphere to see how the solar system was moving, and not just a snapshot, but over time.
“Okay, boss, but you owe me,” Roger said, his face bathed in the glow from his laptop screen.
Ben smiled. “Next conference in Hawaii.”
Roger’s face brightened. “Deal.”
“Oh, and could you email Susan and ask her if she could check the Red Shift, Sloan, Catalina surveys for any changes in variability of stars in vicinity of Gliese 445?”
Roger frowned, his face still glued to the laptop screen. “Changes in variability?”
Time domain astronomy—seeing changes in objects over time—was still in its infancy. “Yes, not regular variability, but any significant changes over the past decade.”
“Sure.” Roger raised his eyebrows, clearly not confident that it would be possible. “Anything for a trip to Hawaii.”
Ben pressed his ear back to the phone, clicking mute back off. “Yes!” he shouted into the phone. “Overnight the boxes to the hotel, under my name. Thank you, Mrs. Brown.”
Taking a deep breath, he hung up and looked at Roger. “I’ve got to go upstairs.”
Ben walked down the carpeted hallway outside his room and took the elevator to the top floor. He was having Roger search through the data, but Ben already had a good idea of what he’d find. He’d checked a few data points himself, in the direction suggested by Dr. Müller, and could see a growing acceleration factor. It was one that they’d fudged over as a mass of dark matter in the nearby spiral arm of the galaxy, just as Dr. Müller had described.
When the elevator door pinged at the top floor and the door opened, two large security men greeted him and repeated the biometric routine. Ben was used to it now. Fourth time today. They weren’t meeting in the ballroom anymore.
“Dr. Müller’s room?” Ben asked.
One of the gorillas pointed down the hallway. “Last door at the end.”
Most of the other teams had already moved up here, but Ben wanted to keep a little distance. He wasn’t sure who was paying for all this security. Walking to the end of the hallway, he opened the door, revealing an opulent suite with marble floors and period-piece 19th-Century furniture, the chairs and couches filled with people slouched over, staring into laptop screens. A wall of whiteboards, filled with sketches and numbers, obscured the windows looking out over Rome. The air was thick with cigarette smoke.
“Ah, Dr. Rollins,” Dr. Müller said, turning from one of the whiteboards. “Good. We were waiting for the Harvard-Smithsonian’s opinion.”
Ben strode forward into the middle of the room. “It’s not official, but yes, from my preliminary assessment, it is possible that a large mass is moving toward the solar system.”
Dr. Müller pursed his lips and nodded. “Five of the six teams have reported the same thing.” He motioned at the whiteboards.
“Might be confirmation bias,” Ben pointed out. “We need more time.”