The Signal

by William Young

  The phone rang.

  “Aww, Christ!”

  Dante pushed his chair away from the computer equipment and started walking to the phone, picking it up without checking the caller ID.

  “Hello?” Dante said.

  “Dante, you comin’ to work today?”

  Dante’s stomach dropped out as he looked over at the clock on the stove in the kitchen. He was late for work. Again. He shook his head at his absent-mindedness.

  “Sorry, yeah, I’ll be there in twenty.”

  Dante put the phone down and walked over to his computer and shut down the mix software. The song would have to wait. Among the equipment was a ham radio, and he turned that on and adjusted some software click boxes on his computer to record random chatter from the ham radio frequencies for a concept album he was currently calling “Bounced Sound.” He had no idea what the album would sound like, but was gathering huge amounts of broadcast sound in the hopes of finding something in it to create a truly ground-breaking musical concept.

  Dante entered the music and electronics store and looked around for his boss. As he made his way to the time clock, co-workers nodded hello to him and he began to feel comfortable with being late, a chronic condition for him. He didn’t want to be late for work, but he considered making music his real work so he easily forgot about the bread-and-butter side of life, the part which required him to do something for someone else. He pushed through the doors to the backroom and pulled his swipe card from its slot on the wall, swishing it through the card reader. It beeped to initialize the beginning of his shift.

  “I’ve got to record that sound,” Dante said softly, to himself, for the thousandth time.

  From behind him came the voice of his manager. “Nice of you to show up, Dante.”

  Dante turned and looked apologetic. “Yeah, sorry, I was-“

  The manager waved him off. “Forget it. This is the third time this month you’ve been more than thirty minutes late. I don’t mind all the five and ten minute days, but when you’re this late, you’re makin’ someone else late for something. The next time, don’t bother comin’ in at all.”

  Several hours later, Dante and co-worker Kendell Watson, aka fireARM, sat in a sandwich shop down the road from the store, eating on their dinner break from work. Kendell was also an aspiring musician, and the two were talking about their current projects.

  “It’s gonna be unbelievable, fire. I amaze myself sometimes with what I’ve been puttin’ together,” Dante said between bites of an Italian hoagie loaded with jalapeno slices. “People are going to have epiphanies listenin’ to it.”

  “I believe it, Scots, but you have to get real with your time management at work. Tony will fire your ass without thinking about it, and you’re someone he likes. You can’t be late all the time,” Kendell said.

  Dante shrugged and ate a French fry. “Ehh, he ain’t really gonna fire me, he’s just making me know he’s the boss, and I got no problem with that,” Dante said, pausing to consider. “I hope he won’t fire me, I need the store discount. And the paycheck, of course.

  “But that’s not even what I’m thinking about these days. The music, I’m telling you it’s going to be totally different than anything you’ve ever heard before. I can’t explain it in words, but I’ll let you listen to a rough mix of a song sometime in the next few weeks, once I get it closer to sounding like what’s in my head. I just need to find the right sounds.”

  The two sat in silence a few moments and ate their sandwiches, each inside his head and thinking about music. Kendell drummed his fingers on the table and looked up at Dante.

  “You gonna keep Kaylinne on vocals?” Kendell asked.

  Dante considered this for a moment. “I dunno. Depends on whether I have to release it myself on the Internet or if I can get a deal. I get a deal, I’m gonna get a better vocalist,” Dante said. “Kaylinne is good, but she’s not professional grade, you know.”

  Kendell tilted his head to the side for a moment in disbelief. “Yeah, but if everyone in the shop keeps using her as their vocalist, she’s gonna end up getting the deal and the rest of us will still be working in the shop.”

  Dante shook his head. “Nah. If she makes it, all of us make it, too, because we made her.”

  “Maybe, but she’ll be the star and we’ll be getting the scraps.”

  Dante cocked his head to the side. “What are we getting now?”

  Chapter 4

  Carla pushed through the front door of her home and trudged through the foyer and down the main hall of the house, a bag of luggage strapped over each shoulder. She dropped the bags at the foot of the staircase and sifted through the mail on the small table nearby, happy to be returned to the normal routines of home life. She loved searching for extra-terrestrial life every summer, but it always made her miss home life even more.

  She set the mail down and walked the rest of the way through the house and into the kitchen, glancing at a clock on the wall before opening a cabinet and pulling down a bottle of vodka. She mixed herself a vodka tonic, cutting a lemon slice into it, and took a deep sip from the drink. She walked back through the house to the foot of the stairs and paused to listen: sounds of typing on a computer keyboard were barely audible, and she smiled. She started up the steps softly, listening as she went, then the sound from the room changed from typing to laser blaster fire. She smiled.

  Bill glanced at the clock on the bottom right portion of his computer monitor and stopped typing. He listened. He heard nothing. He turned in his chair and looked over his shoulder at the doorway. Nothing. He pressed the ALT and TAB keys on his keyboard and switched over to an online alien invasion game, clicked through a few menu options, and waited to spawn onscreen. His avatar appeared and he began sneaking through the online maze, shooting at other avatars as he worked his way through the level. Suddenly, his character was killed and the screen switched to a view from his killer’s position. Bill waited to re-spawn and pushed his chair back from the desk.

  “Frickin’ mouse,” Bill said to himself.

  “He got you fair and square, lamer,” Carla said from behind him.

  Bill turned in his chair and smiled broadly. “No way. The mouse totally stuck.”

  “Why is it every time I sneak up on you I find you playing a game instead of writing? This is maybe why you haven’t written a best seller?” Carla said with a smile.

  Bill rolled his eyes. “The third stair up from the bottom squeaks and I always hear you coming and click over so you won’t read over my shoulder.”

  Carla smiled knowingly, “Uh-huh,” and turned and walked out of the room.

  Bill quickly clicked over to a Web site tracking the sales of his most recent novel, turned in his chair, and shouted down the hallway, “Incendiary Landing is at 36,000 copies so far, honey. That’s not chicken feed.”

  Carla smiled and turned into her daughter’s room. Jenny wasn’t in it, and Carla shook her head briefly before turning and walking back downstairs, the sounds of laser blaster fire filling the air.

  Carla walked into the backyard and sat down on a chair on the patio. She stared up into the blue sky and took a sip from her drink when Jenny rode her bike into the yard and braked to a stop. Jenny hopped off, smiled at her mother, and Carla beamed back at her.

  “Hi, Mom, you’re back,” Jenny said as she walked her mountain bike through the grass.

  “Hey, Jenny, I just got in. How was your ride?”

  A flit of guilt washed over Jenny’s face. Jenny shrugged.

  “It was good,” Jenny said. “Me and Teri rode up to Druid Knoll and then on the path around the lake.”

  Carla ignored the grammatical mistake and leaned forward in her chair. “You’re not taking ecstasy, E, X, or anything else are you?”

  Jenny froze in embarrassment. “MOM!”

  “Honey, we’re going to talk about this later, you know.”

  Jenny deflated. “Yeah, I know.”

  Jenny walked her bike over to the ga
rage door and walked into the house in silence, not looking at Carla. Carla took a deep pull from her drink as she wondered how that conversation would begin, and when, and then stared back up into the blue skies and clouds.

  “Maybe it’s the same everywhere.”

  Chapter 5

  Colonel John Hibbens sat before a bank of ultra-modern computer screens in the loneliest post the Air Force had to offer. The equipment in the room was the highest technology available to the Air Force, but the structure in which it sat was old and windowless, constructed in the aftermath of World War Two as an afterthought and re-invented with a purpose after the so-called alien crash in Roswell in 1947. Hibbens ignored the data on the screens before him, updated by-the-second, ignoring it has he always had. He was a disbeliever, an agnostic, perhaps, of the entire SETI idea. He knew that that was what got him into this spot; his commanders knew he would be thorough and skeptical, without preconceptions.

  Hibbens knew there was no rational reason to believe aliens had ever visited Earth. This was something to which he was privy to Top Secret information, knowing the true details of the Roswell crash as only someone in his unit could.

  First, the distance to from Earth to the next planet is so far that the travel time would almost ensure that no life form could endure it. He had read much on the subject by experts in the field – including among them science fiction stories he initially found boring but later came to love as a genre - and had pondered the idea many times, even writing his own analyses over-and-over again on the many long shifts he sat in his office, wondering what response would be warranted should alien contact be made. Given the improbability of it all, his official paper on the necessary response was terse: No official response to the possibility of alien contact is warranted at this time. His commander had rejected that one-page document, and Hibbens had had to spend several long nights typing out a more acceptable 37-page document detailing why there was no reason to create a document detailing how the United States should react to an extra-terrestrial encounter. That report had had to be amended by a staff-written 94-page report detailing the many “what if” scenarios that could arise were the Earth contacted by an extra-terrestrial species before his commander would accept it and push it up the chain-of-command.

  Second, any life form that could attempt it – that had the technology to do so – would know that it would take generations of life forms to complete the mission, and there was no known way of creating a mission team capable of such action. At least, there was not with humans. Extrapolating human behavior to other life forms had been deemed idiotic by Hibbens, since there was no reason to assume they would think like humans. There was no knowable reason why any extra-terrestrial species capable of inter-stellar space flight through the vast distance of space would choose Earth to visit, or even know it existed.

  Third, given the first two problems, there was no upside to trying: to wit, by the time the space travelers spent the tens of thousands of years in transit, the planet they left would be vastly different by the time any generation of travelers could return to tell the tale of first contact. Even if the travelers to Earth were placed in cold sleep both ways, the people on their home planet would be separated by at least millennia on both ends of the journey. Indeed, those on the sending planet would likely regard those on the mission to Earth as a fable to describe the folly of arrogance, not as a scientific mission to achieve prosperity or inter-species co-operation. Not to mention that the species on the planet they were attempting to contact would have evolved enormously in the mean time and either become hostile to extra-terrestrials or open to their arrival, or died off as a result of any of a million possibilities. There was no upside to making such a journey given the possible technology, real or imagined, and Hibbens figured it would be better for humans to give up on meeting ET and concentrate on shorter-term goals.

  Hibbens’ office was on the secret Area 51 base in Nevada. It was in an out-of-the-way spot on the base, and was tiny. There were ten people in the office, each working at a computer. There were three shifts of ten men, working around the clock to monitor the SETI labs across the globe, and Hibbens had always been astounded to find out there were infrequent overt and covert operations run by the Air Force to access other SETI projects around the planet. It made no sense to Hibbens that SOCOM units would be dispatched to put software patches on foreign SETI outfits, but he had no say in it. Hibbens merely ran the sideshow, as those in the know in the military referred to his unit and the disinterested men and women reviewing data on their computers, assessing the various SETI projects. Hibbens assumed they were as bored with their jobs as he was with his, but they all knew that success with this unit was a gold star on their records, proof that they were worthy of the most top secret rating the government had to offer, and, therefore, access to a different and more rewarding career path.

  Captain Jim Forrestal closed the browser he had been reading, stodd, and walked to where Hibbens was sitting. Forrestal was an Air Force special forces trained airman who couldn’t believe the super-top-secret post to which he’d been assigned was monitoring university students’ attempts to find extra-terrestrial life, but, then, he thought that allowed him to believe he’d seen all the idiocy the military had to offer. He’d signed up to do the most dangerous jobs the military had to offer out of a sense of duty to the country and a need to do something few in the military could do, and that desire had proven irony to its fullest, at least in the sense that few in the military were as highly trained as he was to do nothing with his training.

  “Sir.”

  Hibbens looked up. “Yes?”

  “I just finished reviewing the latest CalTech survey. As usual, they got nothing,” Forrestal said.

  “Thank you, Jim. Who’s up next at the facility?”

  “A group from the University of Pittsburgh has the next four days, then a collection of schools from the UK,” Forrestal said.

  “Well, then, captain, update the scoreboard,” Hibbens said disinterestedly.

  Forrestal smiled slightly and walked across the room to a white board mounted to a wall beneath an aged, yellowed dot matrix computer-printed sign that read: SETI Say What? He picked up a marker and eraser, wiped away the blue “relax” and wrote a red “relax.”

  At the end of the afternoon, Hibbens walked out of the building and into the parking lot and paused to watch a small aircraft hovering over a nearby runway on the other side of a tall, razor-wire tipped chain-link fence. The craft zipped up, hovered, moved laterally, hovered, then moved diagonally downward where it stopped in a hover inches above the ground. Hibbens smiled as he watched a group of technicians manipulate a computer console on the side of the runway.

  “And people think you have to be an alien to invent this stuff,” Hibbens said to himself, pulling out a keychain from his pocket and clicking a button on it, auto-starting his car.

  Chapter 6

  Tom stared in bewilderment at the variety of radios lining the walls of Lincoln’s garage, a structure long-ago converted over from housing automobiles and yard tools into a radio room and lounge. A series of tables against the back wall hold ham radios, computers, and other high-tech radio equipment Tom had never heard of before. Three of Lincoln’s friends sat before a pair of state-of-the-art radio sets - Jed, Grover and Charles – who were working the radios, sending out radio calls and trying to find someone listening on the other end of a signal. All of the men were already drinking Scotch. Lincoln approached Tom with a winning smile.

  “I’m glad you came,” Lincoln said, shaking hands with Tom. He noticed Tom’s bottle and nodded to it.

  Tom raised it for examination, and Lincoln smiled, again.

  “The Balvenie Double Wood, a good choice,” Lincoln said, taking the bottle and motioning for Tom to follow him to a side table with bottles and glasses on it. “Take your pick,” Lincoln said, waving a hand before the glass tumblers.

  Tom bent over and examined them, noticing immediately that each
had a pewter animal wrapped around the base of the glass. Tom glanced at Lincoln’s hand and noticed a leopard curled around the tumbler’s base.

  “All the big cats are taken, I’m afraid,” Lincoln said. “I’ve got the leopard, Jed has the cheetah, Grover is the lion and Charles is the tiger. Pick well, though, because it’s your official glass once you do, and nobody else is allowed to drink from it.”

  Tom looked back at the table and selected the one with a rhinoceros. “Is this one available?”

  Lincoln nodded. “All of them are. So far, there’s only four of us in the club; you stick around, you’ll be number five. Fill it with whatever’s on the table.”

  Tom poured in a couple of fingers worth of MacAllan twelve year and followed Lincoln to another table, where Lincoln paused over an assortment of cigars.

  “Cigar?”

  Tom shook his head. “Nah, thanks. I smoked cigarettes until my first son was born, then I quit.”

  Lincoln gave the barest of noticeable eye rolls. “I’ve got cigarettes, if you want. I never quit.”

  Tom paused for a moment and thought about it, then shook his head. “Mary’d kill me.”

  “Suit yourself, but you’re still going to go home smelling of smoke,” Lincoln said. “You didn’t turn into an anti-smoking Nazi since quitting, I hope?”

  Tom smiled. “No. I’m still waiting for Big Tobacco to announce that they’ve had a secret lab at work for decades that’s finally found the cure for lung cancer so I can start back up. I still think a cigarette is the best accompaniment to an ice cold martini.”

  Lincoln nodded. “And a Macanudo is the perfect pairing with fine single malt. But there’s no peer pressure here.”

  At one of the sets in the back of the room, Grover suddenly came to life, having made a connection with a far off radio operator, and the others grew quiet.

  Grover spoke into the microphone, “Whiskey eight niner kilo, come in, over.”

  “Whiskey three four niner tango, we read you Lima Charlie,” said a voice from the speaker. “What’re you drinking tonight?”