Free Analog SFF, June 2011 by Dell Magazine Authors

transparent, or was it something else?
    "You're correct,” she said. “Arecibo transmits and Green Bank reads the faint echoes. We could transmit ourselves"—she pointed up at the instrumentation arm—"by replacing one of the receiver modules with a transmitter, but that would hardly be radio quiet. My work involves the radar mapping of Titan, and we partner with Arecibo to do it."
    "Titan? Just how sensitive is this scope?"
    "If there were a cell phone on Titan, with the GBT I could listen to the call.” Barring other complications, and that topic was coming. “We need to move along, Marcus. The weekly science lunch is not to be missed."
    Especially because you are on deck.
    * * * *
    Patrick Burkhalter toted his cafeteria tray to the residence hall's second floor, where he found the social lounge half filled. Many of his colleagues were already seated and eating. Others surrounded Valerie Clayburn and her guest, meal trays in hand, intercepted before they could find a table. With maybe eight thousand people in the entire county, everyone welcomed new faces. But visitors and outsiders comprised very different categories, and after eight years here Patrick remained an outsider.
    "Hey,” he offered as he took an empty seat. Tamara Miller glanced his way, nodded, and went back to her conversation with Liam Harris. Something about intergalactic dust.
    Patrick went to work on his country-fried steak, mashed potatoes, and gravy. His choices would do nothing for his waistline or his cholesterol, but who did he have to impress?
    Or to live for? That was a thought depressing enough to make him set down his fork.
    Their guest got perhaps two minutes with his lunch before Valerie began tapping her water glass with a butter knife. “Hi, everyone. We have a visitor, as you may have noticed."
    Not to mention that she had put out the word to make sure the tech staff all came today. Would she get the outcome for which she so obviously schemed? In Patrick's experience, manipulating scientists and engineers worked about as well as herding cats.
    "Hello,” the chorus rang out raggedly, from around the collection of short, narrow tables arrayed in a U.
    Valerie said, “Our visitor, Marcus Judson, works at NASA Goddard on the demonstration powersat project. I'm hoping he'll tell us about it."
    Patrick refocused on his lunch while others murmured their encouragement.
    Judson kept his response short, and Patrick approved. You didn't know you were today's featured attraction, did you?
    "So what do you think, folks?” Valerie prompted. “How will powersats affect us here?"
    And the games began.
    "A powersat is a huge noise generator,” Aaron Friedman said. “And because it's sky-based, that's noise from which we can't hide."
    "The power beam is focused.” Judson slid away his tray, the meal all but untouched, clearly perceptive enough to see what was coming. “The downlink won't come anywhere near here."
    "Doesn't matter,” Aaron persisted. “Well, aiming will help, but not enough. The satellite shapes the beam with phased-array techniques, right? So there are unavoidable side lobes to the main beam. That's basic math. Even sixty dB down, there'll be a lot of noise."
    Engineers and astronomers set aside lunches to argue about phased arrays: their pointing accuracy and failure modes, the frequency distributions apt to show up within the noise, and whether sixty decibels was the expected attenuation for a side lobe. Of course even sixty dB down from one gigawatt left a kilowatt of noise.
    Judson kept thanking people for their comments. Mostly he let the staff argue among themselves, jotting notes on paper napkins—and looking ticked off.
    This was not a mugging, exactly. More like an intervention, or maybe an inquisition. When Patrick tried to catch Valerie's eye, she looked away.
    Patrick knew all about inquisitions by the tech staff. That had been his introduction to Green Bank, too, if for a different reason. Judson would go home