Vega had been low in the sky an hour or so before dawn when the computer triggered an understated alarm. With some annoyance, Willie put down what he was reading—it was a new textbook on Fast Fourier Transform Spectroscopy—and noticed these words being printed out on the screen: RPT. TEXT PP. 41617-41619: BIT MISMATCH 0/2271. CORRELATION COEFFICIENT 0.99+ As he watched, 41619 became 41620 and then 41621. The digits after the slash were increasing in a continuous blur. Both the number of pages and the correlation coefficient, a measure of the improbability that the correlation was by chance,
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