The end of our downward journey brought us to an area of space beyond description. I happened to be pilot in command when we dropped to sublight. The red X on the navigation display flashed on and off, letting us know we’d arrived. The view out the front windows was so profound we had to stare a few minutes just to believe it. Danica sat beside me, speechless for the first time. The crew did not wait for permission to unbuckle. They hung at the portals, stone silent.
Space was so far removed from anything we had ever seen, its unknowns sparked a touch of fear within us. There was an orange and brown nebula to port, a cat’s eye nebula to starboard, a red giant far in the distance back dropped by the orange and yellow wisps of an ancient, giant stellar explosion. The place seemed to lack the familiar orderliness to which systems usually adhere. Here, rogue planets were everywhere on our scan screens. Orbiting a large gravitational body was apparently optional rather than compulsory. A multitude of nearby suns were causing a continuous exchange of planetary bodies from one system to another, based on which sun bragged the greatest mass and closest tangent.
RJ came forward. “Adrian, I don’t think the outboard cameras are enough for this place. We need to bring out the HQ handhelds and shoot through the windows.”
“I agree, but could you ask Erin and Paris to do that so you and Wilson can get setup for scanning. You see how much is out there?”
“It is crowded. It’ll take forever to get reflections on everything.”
“That’s not counting what we can’t see. That’s why I’m saying you and Wilson need to get on it.”
“They should finish snapping pictures about the time we’re ready to scan.”
“Tell them we’ll be rotating on the Y and Z axis so the Nav computer can do its mapping. They should be able to get shots all around. Advise them to tie in with the flight deck on headsets and we’ll coordinate with them.”
“Wow. This place is really something.”
Danica and I went about setting up the Nav computers for mapping, and the ship for incremental rotation. When the rotations began, the Nav computers took longer than normal; extra time needed to plot the movement of so many secondary bodies. It was a two-hour data collection, and when it was done the processing lights on the Nav control panel were whirring like a light show as computers tried to analyze and store all that had been recorded. Wilson and RJ finally took over, and a much longer wait began as they hunted for signs of a Nasebian scan signature.
With maneuvering complete, Danica begged off for her rest period. I twiddled my thumbs and considered the uneventful flight deck shift ahead. Instant popcorn can be a great past time in weightless boredom. When the ventilation fan circulating the flight deck is in its off phase you can hang pieces of popcorn in any multi-dimensioned design that comes to mind. I have created small planetary systems with asteroid belts and constellations more complete than they actually are, a privilege of popcorn artistic license. When the circulation fan inevitably kicks in, it all becomes a wonderful illustration of cosmic chaos. Such artistic endeavors are a serious violation of flight deck protocol, but only if you are caught before you can eat the evidence.
As Erin brought me a fresh bag from the galley, RJ and Wilson were in their engineering seats laughing.
“What’s the joke?”
Wilson answered, “Freakin’ RJ, Adrian. There’s a pulsar way the hell off to our port side. It’s too far to be any danger, but it’s making one of the other bodies look as if it’s emitting an old-fashioned A.M. carrier wave. You know, like 1950’s radio. While I was distracted, RJ modulated it with his impression of Jack Benny and for a minute, I actually thought I had picked up Jack Benny. It’s a dirty trick, RJ.”
RJ gave his best innocent look.
“You guys are seriously working the scans, right? You’re not having a void relapse or anything, right?”
“Hey, we’re on it. Have no fear.”
“But no breadcrumbs yet?”
RJ said, “Breadcrumbs everywhere. It’ll be a while.”
Several hours later, they came to me with less than I’d hoped for. “We need to make some small jumps,” declared Wilson.
“There are so many sources, and so much interference, we just have to look at it from different positions. It’s the only way,” added RJ.
“Small jumps wouldn’t be a problem, would they?” asked Wilson.
I shook my head. “No, but when we ask for a flight path the Nav computer takes quite a bit of time anticipating where everything will be in relation to us. In the post-mapping tests we’ve run, it sometimes gives us drop out points not exactly where we wanted, but close. It does its best to find us a straight line that approximately gets us there. How much accuracy will you need?”
“No, no,” said Wilson. “We don’t need any precision. We just need to see things from a complementary angle. Distance and angle are all we need.”
With cameras and other loose items stowed, we strapped everyone back in and made the necessary series of jumps to add dimension to our scans. It took most of a day. Later, I emerged from my sleep period to find RJ and Wilson still at it after more than twenty hours. They saw me and floated over, hair askew, beard shadow, wrinkled flight suits. “We’re ready to start evaluating hits,” said RJ.
“How many targets?” I asked.
“Fifteen to start with,” replied Wilson.
“Fifteen? That many?”
“Would we kid you at a time like this?”
“Are they close together?”
“Far apart,” replied RJ.
“Does Danica have the coordinates?”
“Yep,” said Wilson.
“Then go to bed, both of you.”
The first target was a barren rock the size of Jupiter. Synchronous orbit was so far out we could study half the planet at a time without flying over it. Erin and Paris ran the search program left set up by the other two. They were quick studies. Erin gave us the news. “This ball is so mineral-rich it looks like there are composite metals everywhere,” she said. “But there’s nothing down there artificial at all. No atmosphere. No nothin’.”
Fourteen to go. By the third day we had made eight more jumps and crossed off eight more sources from the radio soup around us. RJ and Wilson remained adamant about their target selection. As we waited on orbit around one particularly yellow and green gas giant whose turbulent atmosphere sparkled as though it had tinsel in it, I began to have misgivings. I feared we would find nothing on any of the targets and would be forced to jump deeper along the same heading, a prospect that would lessen our odds significantly. I wondered if the Nasebians would be satisfied if we returned with the news nothing had been found.
Wilson sat drumming his fingers wearing a headset, while RJ diagnosed the latest prospect. Wilson suddenly sat up stiffly, turned, and shoved RJ from behind. RJ rotated around with a mild expression of annoyance.
“Do you really think you’re going to get me with the same crap twice? Your nuts, Smith,” said Wilson.
RJ made his trademark humph sound. “Excuse me?”
“Come on. Give it up. There’s no way.”
“To what are you referring might I ask, since you’ve interrupted this scan which must now be started over?”
“The radio. How could you think I’d fall for that again?”
“Wilson, my dear friend. What are you talking about?”
“Oh come on! The radio. I’ve got it again. A.M. 1650 on your dial. News at 6:00. You’ve got to be joking. You think I’m stupid or something?”
RJ was not buying it. “Oh, I see what’s going on here. You’re setting me up. You’re trying to get me back. You’re going to hand me the headset with an A.M. radio thing you’ve created and make me think we really have found some A.M. radio out here. Nice try. Really. It was worth a shot.”
“You’re trying to say you didn’t do this? How gullible do you think I am?” Wilson paused, pulled the headset back over his ears and listened. He spoke too loudly. “This is
really good, though. When did you have the time to do all this? It’s a good announcer’s voice, too.”
RJ looked confused. It surprised me. I reached over from the pilot’s seat, tapped Wilson on the shoulder, and pointed to the overhead speaker. He nodded and selected it.
It was a fluent, gravelly voice, punctuated by static, fading in and out, broadcasting news.
RJ looked at me wide-eyed. “Holy crap!” He caught himself and gave a distrusting look at Wilson as though the joke was about to break. Wilson sat with his hands on the earphones listening intently.
RJ looked at me again. “Holy crap!”
Except for an occasional word or two, you could not make out the dialogue. It was too weak and buried in noise. The rest of the crew became aware and began gathering outside the flight deck to listen.
RJ fumbled around and grabbed his own headset. He pulled them on and tilted his head forward to listen. His eyes widened. “It’s real! My God, it’s real! Track it. We need to track it.”
Wilson sneered. “Oh come on. This has gone far enough. It’s English for Christ’s sake. That’s impossible. Give me a break.”
RJ ignored him and began furiously typing in commands at his station. “It has to be close. It’s A.M. Attenuation modulation. Too weak to carry very far. It’s breaking up pretty badly but if I can just get a lock long enough…”
Wilson began to look perplexed. RJ twisted at controls while listening intently to the phones.
“That’s it! It’s target number four, our next target!” RJ waved his hands furiously. “Everybody strap in. Let’s go!”
I held up one hand. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. What’s actually going on here? Are we really picking up a radio transmission in English from a planet millions of miles away on the other side of the void, or is this some kind of freak singularity process that’s new to us?”
RJ would not calm down. “It’s radiating from a planet, Adrian, not a black hole. It’s an artificially generated signal. There’s no other way.”
“It’s English, RJ. It’s got to be a black hole freak of nature.”
“You can only have one or the other, Adrian. The source is coming from a planet, not a black hole.”
“So you actually think we’ve located an inhabited planet with technology using English? Do you see how crazy that sounds?”
“Let’s go see!”
“Just hold your horses. If this place actually turns out to be inhabited, and I really doubt that, we can’t just go barging in there not knowing what we’re doing. We’ll make the jump but stay far enough away until we can get an idea of what’s going on. It could still be some cosmic anomaly we just don’t know about, some kind of time-shifted transmission from Earth that got here by accident. Like a bottle in the ocean or something. So let’s just keep our cool and gather data. Then we’ll see.”
RJ’s enthusiasm was not dampened in the least. Wilson continued to look befuddled. The others began preparing for the jump. Danica went back to the sleeper compartments to wake Shelly and Paris and tell them the news. RJ’s coordinates appeared on my screen before I could ask.
It was a short jump. I brought the ship out of light an A.U. from the planet. Lots of blue, not so much green and brown. Two moons, opposite sides of the planet, nearly identical orbit. It made me wonder what the tides were like.
The entire crew was up and completely enthralled. With two antenna arrays tuned we could hear the radio transmission fairly clearly. A diversity of space noise still interfered, but we could tell what they were saying. It was indeed English, and after a few minutes of listening it became clear this was not an Earth transmission. Some of the dialogue was foreign to us. There seemed to be slang we had never heard before. Some words were mispronounced. To cap off our confusion, a weatherman closed his forecast by saying, “So it should be another glorious day on Mother Earth,” a reference that stunned us all.
Chapter 34