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"Good," Rick applauded. Ben chuckled. "On the same day that Kerama invited you to come, I had a call from the Interpol clearinghouse in Paris, a relay from the San Francisco police. A wealthy collector of early Egyptian objects in San Francisco had been bragging that he had just purchased a genuine necklace that had belonged to one of the early Pharaohs. We requested the Americans to investigate."
The strange signal came while the telescope was pointing only in one direction. Rick asked Winston, "Could it really be coming from a single source in outer space?" Winston shrugged. "We've thought of that. If the source remained fixed, we'd accept it as the most logical explanation. But since Kerama and Farid first noticed the signal it has shifted its apparent location by many degrees.
Somewhere in Cairo there must be a company that used X-ray or gamma-ray photography to check large castings. It was a very common method of industrial quality control. Farid or Kerama would know of one, and he could arrange to have the cat X-rayed! It could be done immediately. Pleased with the idea, he paid attention to his surroundings for the first time since leaving the museum.
However, we have demonstrated that it isn't true. The system is working so perfectly that I must congratulate you. It is seldom that anything so complex functions as well in the early stages." Winston paused thoughtfully. "Of course Dr. Kerama realized that it would be highly unusual to have internal circuit trouble cause such signals.
This was unusual, since the radio telescopes ordinarily recorded the incoming signals in trace form on Sanborn strips. "We don't want to overlook any possibility," Dr. Kerama said. "This is without precedent, and we are not sure how to proceed. Dr.
His first experience with it had been in making permanent records of telemetered signals from rockets. A technician asked, "Sir, do these peaks occur no matter how the antenna is pointing?" Kerama shook his head. "No. If you will examine the peaks in terms of time and the co-ordinates, you will see that they began at a particular point during a sweep of the sky.
That's what Kerama and Winston are checking now. There's not a great deal for you to do until they're through. In a half hour we'll start to swing the antenna to see if we get an increase in the signal by a change in direction. Until then, why not take it easy?" "We will." Rick took the opportunity to tell Farid of the incident at the museum that morning.
"It is," Dr. Kerama agreed. "What's more, the calculated velocity was simply incredible. The only velocities we know of that approximate it are those of galaxies at the very limit of our instruments." Rick said what was on his mind. "It was a spaceship. What else would travel across normal star directions giving out signals?" He grinned sheepishly.
There was an air of excitement at the project when the boys arrived there the following morning. Everyone was busy on equipment, or studying Sanborn tracings. Winston and Kerama were working a slide rule while Farid read figures. The boys waited until Winston gave a number, which Kerama marked on the pad he carried. Then the scientist looked up and gave the boys a big grin.
Today, it was a handful of skilled workers plus machinery. "Now," Farid said, "let's get back to the control room. Kerama is going to review the situation for the staff. Some of them are new on the job." As Farid and the boys rejoined the others, Dr. Kerama was pointing to a series of peaks on the Sanborn tracings.
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