Free Second Chance by David D. Levine

place.
    There were what Mari called “anomalous indications of biological activity.” Might be life, might be something else, but something was generating oxygen there. The atmosphere might even be breathable—cold and thin, but capable of sustaining human life. Perhaps.
    Too bad we didn’t have any way of landing there. Adding a lander to the mission, never mind the gene banks and other colonization equipment some had insisted should be included, would have raised the weight of each module above what the boost lasers could push to Tau Ceti. But we could drop one of the atmospheric drones. The nearest satellite with drone capability was orbiting Balzac and could be in position in a couple of weeks. We told it to make all deliberate speed.
    While we were waiting for that data, the question remained open: where was the oxygen coming from?
    The problem drew Mari and I together. We built on each other’s ideas, shot theories back and forth, argued over the meaning of the data. But though we had probably exchanged more words in a matter of hours than we had in the whole rest of the time we’d been at Tau Ceti, we were still uncomfortable with each other—emotionally reserved, overly sensitive to each other’s personal space, shying away from any kind of physical contact. And when we realized just how long we’d been working without sleep, we went to our rooms with only a very formal good-night. Still, it was a start.

    -o0o-

    Over the next few days, between sessions with Mari on the anomalous composition of Bianchon’s atmosphere, I continued to tackle the lack of communication from Earth. But all the dead ends I’d run into before were still dead. I tried a couple of techniques to resynchronize the satellites’ clocks, or compensate for the lack of synchronization, but no matter what I did the result was the same: nothing.
    Finally, after much introspection and prayer, I asked Bobb for help. He was in Gamma systems bay, cleaning the air filters—a messy chore he happily abandoned to help me.
    “Have you tried a Fourier analysis on the data from one satellite?” he asked.
    “Uh...”
    Talking with Bobb was much harder than I’d expected it to be... harder even than with Mari. Maybe it was because he was so much bigger than me. Some part of my brain kept wondering what I would do if he tried to jump me. I kept reminding myself that this fear was ridiculous, but it was deeply ingrained. Love thy neighbor, I reminded myself.
    “I don’t think there’s enough signal there for that to be worthwhile,” I said at last.
    “Maybe not. But it’s still worth a try.” He wiped his grimy hands on a towel and headed down to the work bay.
    Once we set up the Fourier transform, it took only a few minutes to run. The result, as I’d feared, was inconclusive—natural radio noise from the Sun was the dominant factor in the signal, and any artificial signal from Earth was drowned out even after processing. We really needed to combine the signals from several satellites to augment the resolving power of their little radio dishes, but without a solid timestamp on the data that wasn’t possible.
    Bobb’s face grew thoughtful. “What about a natural timestamp?”
    I understood immediately. “I don’t know if there are any pulsars in the data.” But if there was one, we might be able to use its regular radio pulses as a natural clock to line up the signals from the different satellites.
    “Only one way to tell...”
    We signed up for the big dish on Cassiopeia —although I considered the whole system suspect, it had the potential to give us a quick positive—and pointed it toward Earth, then set up routines to troll the data for a faint regular pulse in the appropriate frequency range.
    In some ways, doing the work with Bobb was more comfortable than working with Mari. We had similar skill sets, so it was more cooperative than mutually instructive. But the fact that I’d seen Bobb and Matt together was like a constant