The Signal

by William Young

  Lincoln continued to listen, trying to determine what was going on with the frequency in question, when his wife, Theresa, wandered into the studio. She sniffed the cigar smoke in the air and shook her head.

  “You’re not drinking Scotch already, are you?” Theresa said.

  Lincoln laughed and turned in his chair. He glanced at his watch.

  “Nah, not for a couple more hours. You know it’s first Saturday.”

  Theresa smiled and rolled her eyes. “First Saturday. I wish I’d have thought of something like that.”

  “You’ve always been welcome to join,” Lincoln said. “I know I’d like having you around.”

  Theresa shook her head slightly. “Yeah, Scotch, cigars and your friends, that’s a winning combination for me on a Saturday night. I think I’ll make-do with a glass of wine and a warm bath.”

  “Remember when we used to spend Saturday nights in?” Lincoln asked. “We’d have a couple of cocktails, listen to music or watch a video, and then head up to the bedroom for you know. What’d we call that? House arrest date night, I think.”

  Theresa laughed. “House arrest date night. Yeah, that was a time, wasn’t it? Three kids and no money for a baby-sitter, but enough money for a bottle of vodka and a movie rental. I don’t know, sometimes I miss those days, when I think about them, with the kids here and we used to wonder when we’d see each other because one of us was always at work while the other was home.

  “Now, I see you all the time and I think, was life better, then, when it was harder, or is life better, now, because it’s easier?” Theresa said, walking into the room and surveying the units of her husband’s obsession.

  “I don’t know if it’s easier, it’s just different. We always knew the kids would leave, it’s what kids do. Hell, if they hadn’t, one of us would have been pestering them to leave at some point,” Lincoln said. “Children are great as kids, but when they become adults, you want some space from them.”

  Theresa was going to say something witty about that, but then noticed the noise coming from the speakers and furrowed her eyebrows.

  “What are you listening to?” She asked.

  Lincoln shrugged. “I don’t know. Someone seems to be broadcasting some pretty crappy classical music on one of the frequencies.”

  “Classical?” Theresa said. “It sounds more like jazz played on tree trunks and hub caps.”

  “Well, it’s bad either way,” Lincoln said.

  Theresa looked around the room, turned and walked out of the studio without any further words. Lincoln watched her go and realized it was a moment of non-connecting like so many in any marriage, a transient conversation meant to do nothing more than simply imply a relationship constant, that the two were still one, even if they were on two different, but parallel, courses. Lincoln sighed to himself and wandered over to the table of Scotch bottles. He had been hoping for an invitation for sex.

  “Well,” Lincoln said under his breath, “I guess that’s the green light to start, if she thinks I already have.”

  Chapter 16

  Dante was working at his computer-studio, headphones on, listening to a rough cut of a track he was working on. He kept listening, rewinding, and starting it over again at the same point, dropping in new sounds or changing effects, attempting to get the sound in his head onto the recording. It wasn’t going well, but it never did. Music never came easily or quickly for him because he was never good enough for himself. He drummed his fingers on the table and stared around the room.

  “The sound has to exist,” he said softly under his breath, “because I can hear it in my head.”

  Just then, he noticed the “recording” light on his amateur radio set was lit and he made a curious face at it. He moved his mouse to change the sound input to his headphones from his computer to the ham set, and his face dropped in confusion. He took the headphones off and set them down, unplugging them from the jack. He stood and turned the speakers on and stared at them in disbelief.

  From them came the strangest noises he had ever heard, a jazz quartet using homemade instruments constructed out leftover parts from a junkyard and played to the accompaniment of a road construction crew hard at work with jackhammers made of wood. He scratched his head and furrowed his brow as he stared at the speakers.

  “What the hell is that?”

  Chapter 17

  Tom was watching television idly in the living room, his youngest child sitting beneath a baby toy, pawing at the dangling stuffed animals. As with most Saturday afternoons, Tom was wasting the time doing nothing, ignoring chores and wishing he could see a matinee of whatever film had opened the previous night. That, though, was forbidden, since Mary loved going to the movies as much as he, so he had settled on the History Channel. Mary walked in and gave him a curious look.

  “Are you going to Lincoln’s house tonight to fiddle with the radios?” Mary asked.

  Tom looked up at her and wasn’t sure how to respond. Technically, he knew it was okay, that she’d granted him ongoing permission to do the activity, only he wasn’t sure he wanted to cash in all his permission slips on this particular activity. Indeed, he’d spent much time over the last month thinking about whether he should make that his regular “me” activity, and was conflicted. What if something better came along?

  On the other hand, he rarely saw his “real” friends much any more, all of them finding themselves similarly caught up with the routines of work and family lives, and he could go online whenever and immerse himself in the constantly updating data-stream, living a life online that was, at times, more interesting than the one he lived in reality. It had not occurred to him to use the first Saturday radio night as a cover to do anything else.

  “Yeah, I think so,” Tom said. “I was planning on it, is that okay?”

  Mary smiled. “Yeah, of course. Just watch how much you drink.”

  Mary walked further into the room and stood near the baby, wrinkled her nose, and glared disapprovingly at Tom. Mary picked the baby up, sniffed its rear-end, gave Tom another glance and walked out of the room, stamping up the stairs to the baby’s room and the changing table within. Tom looked around the room and gave the unseeing world a “what the heck was that about?” look.

  Tom walked up the driveway of Lincoln Feather’s house and paused at the door to the studio. This was it. If he went in a second time, he was committed, at least for the short run, to hanging out with a bunch of forty- and fifty-year-old men, drinking Scotch, and talking about ham radio. And sex. And whiskey. And cigars. Tom could only talk knowledgeably about one of the topics, and on the first visit he had chosen to say nothing beyond the general and obvious.

  Then he looked down at the bottle of Scotch he’d brought and wondered if the expenditure was worth it. After his first visit, he realized he’d over-spent on his Scotch purchase and this time had gotten a cheaper single malt, Auchentoshen.

  “I wondered if we’d see you again,” Lincoln said, coming up from behind.

  Tom turned and smiled weirdly. “You didn’t get my email?”

  Lincoln chuckled. “Email? I haven’t checked that in days. Nobody emails me, really. The kids call on the phone and the rest of the world calls on the ham set,” Lincoln said, motioning to the bottle in Tom’s hand and nodding approvingly. “I guess the old tech just sticks to me.”

  They walked into the studio and over to the liquor table. Lincoln set the Auchentoshen down amidst the bottles and suddenly Tom felt cheap, noticing the bottles the others had brought. And then a thought struck Tom from out of the blue and he couldn’t stop his mouth from saying the words.

  “I’m starting to think you’re using your friends to stock your bar,” Tom said.

  Lincoln laughed softly. “You’re welcome any night of the week, Tom. This room is yours as much as mine, so long as you stock it.”

  Tom hadn’t thought of that, hadn’t considered the idea of the possibility that Lincoln could be more than a once-a-month friend, and inside, Tom sudde
nly felt embarrassed.

  Lincoln motioned to the table. “Which one were you last time?”

  Tom pointed. “The rhinoceros.”

  Lincoln handed him the glass. “The third time is the charm. Until then, it’s technically still up for grabs.”

  There was a commotion in the back of the studio as Grover, Jed and Charles started fidgeting earnestly with the buttons and dials on the various ham sets they had been monitoring. Tom ignored them and poured himself a glass of Scotch while Lincoln turned slightly and observed his friends.

  “Linc, the signal went dead,” Grover said, taking off his headphones and pushing away from the bank of radios.

  “What?” Lincoln said.

  “Yeah. Silent channel, now,” Grover said.

  Lincoln walked over to the radio sets and flipped a speaker switch on and listened to the silence. He gave Grover a curious look and tuned back and forth a few times to make sure.

  “I wonder what made them quit?” Grover asked.

  “I wonder what the point was,” Lincoln said. “All that pointless noise and not a word about why.”

  Chapter 18

  Carla and Bill were sitting in Carla’s home office when the signal went quiet. They looked at each other for a moment. Even though Carla had left Peter’s apartment fully convinced the sounds she had heard were not alien, by the time she had gotten home and told her story to Bill, she had decided to listen on her own. That, and Bill wanted to hear the sounds that had so convinced one of her students.

  “What just happened?” Carla asked.

  Bill shrugged. “Did the modem go down?”

  Carla checked and shook her head, “Nope.”

  “Maybe it was just your hacker quitting for the day,” Bill said.

  “Shit, I hope we just didn’t download the world’s worst computer virus,” Carla said.

  “Well, we certainly listened to the world’s worst music,” Bill said. “I’m with you on this.”

  Carla turned to look at Bill. “How so?”

  “I think your student has an over-active imagination,” Bill said. “If aliens were going to contact us, I think they’d have sent better music.”

  “You think that was supposed to be music?” Carla asked.

  “I don’t know what it was supposed to be, but it sounded sort of like it had a musical element to it, albeit one that defies all the rules of music as we know them,” Bill said. “But it didn’t have a rhythm or melody, it was sort of more like a drum circle in which all of the drummers were competing against each other rather than working in concert. I don’t know, maybe it was industrial noise played backwards.”

  Chapter 19

  Inside the building which housed the U.S. Air Force’s top secret SETI monitoring unit, the entire staff was sitting at their computers, working furiously to determine the point of origin of the now dead signal. Hibbens paced the room while the various airmen tried to determine the status of the transmission.

  “Holy Christ, what just happened?” Hibbens asked the room, before turning toward a specific airman. “Sergeant Perkins, is the system still viable?”

  Perkins checked a dialog box on his computer and looked up at Hibbens. “We’re still running normally, sir.”

  Hibbens turned and walked over to Forrestal, who was standing near the back of the room looking at information on a pair of flat panel LCD monitors.

  “Care to speculate on what the heck just happened?” Hibbens asked.

  Forrestal tilted his head at the monitors and pursed his lips a moment while considering.

  “Maybe you were right about it being a hacker kid somewhere just out testing his skills, and now he’s done,” Forrestal said.

  “Well, until we figure that out, we’re going to be here,” Hibbens said, motioning for Forrestal to follow Hibbens to his office. Inside, Hibbens closed the door.

  “What’s the telemetry on this?” Hibbens asked.

  “Well, technically, it’s from outer space,” Forrestal said.

  “What’s technical about it?”

  “Well, for the amount of time we’ve been monitoring it, we can’t put it anywhere in our system, or any nearby system, so it’s hard to say where it’s coming from,” Forrestal said. “It seems genuine, but we can’t rule out the possibility that some hacker is screwing with the computers to make it seem like it’s coming from outer space.

  “I mean, we’re not actually receiving the signal ourselves, we’re getting it piped in from second-party off-site computers that are monitoring radio telescopes, and there’s no way to verify the security of those particular systems.”

  Hibbens shook his head slightly. “I need better than ‘we can’t tell where it’s coming from.’”

  “I understand, sir, but with the signal offline now, all we can do is run the data through simulations and check the software for violations,” Forrestal said. “And running checks on the off-site non-proprietary systems we’re monitoring covertly is going to take time, if we’re even able to do it.”

  “Shit,” Hibbens said softly. “First things first, we have everyone check our system. Let’s make sure we weren’t hacked or duped or any other such thing. That’s more important than if the signal was legitimate. We need to make sure we weren’t the target of this signal. If we’re in the clear, it’ll help make our case that we’re secure and still operating black.

  “If we check out green, then we start doing what we can with the off-site systems we’re monitoring. Find out if they were hacked and the signal faked and, if not, then we work on figuring out where in the galaxy this signal came from.”

  Forrestal nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  Hibbens walked over to his desk and pulled out a large cigar. “I’m going to go outside and smoke this. That’ll take about an hour, when I come back in, I want a more firm answer on what the hell we were listening to today.”

  Forrestal exited the room. Hibbens tapped his pants pockets to make sure he had a lighter and cigar cutter in them, and then made his way through the operations center and out into the parking lot. He cut his cigar while he stared up into the evening sky and watched a pair of experimental aircraft zip by. He checked his watch and strolled across the asphalt and looked through the chain link fence at a series of building in an even more secret area of the Area 51 base, an area to which he did not have clearance. He looked at the buildings intently, wondering, again, what secrets were kept inside.

  Chapter 20

  Inside Lincoln’s radio studio, all of the men watched as Lincoln continued to fiddle with the radio sets, trying to recapture the signal. There had been much speculation about the nature of the signal since it quit, all of it lost on Tom. The world of amateur radio had been unknown to him until a month ago, and, now, the various speculations about who would want to disrupt a channel and for what reason meant nothing to him.

  Tom also found Lincoln’s explanation that there were a few – not many, to be sure – anti-ham radio activists in the world and who occasionally jammed a signal to be bizarre. Tom couldn’t figure out why anyone would bother, especially since amateur radio was an activity well out of sight of most people, and didn’t infringe on anybody. Although, Tom took Lincoln at his word that there were such people, fighting some rear-guard action against a technology of limited utility and widespread indifference.

  Lincoln picked up the microphone and squeezed the trigger. “Whiskey Eight Niner Kilo, come in, over.”

  Lincoln waited a moment and repeated the call.

  “This is W89K, over,” said a non-native English speaker through the speakers in the study.

  “Eight Niner Kilo, this is Whiskey Three Four Niner Tango, over,” Lincoln said.

  “I’ve got you loud and clear, what are you up to?”

  “I was wondering if you caught the weird music broadcast earlier today,” Lincoln said. “The one that sounded like a sack full of cats fighting with ball peen hammers and metal trash can lids.”

  There was a moment of silence. The
n, “Music broadcast? What are you talking about?”

  “There was a frequency incursion earlier today with some yokel jamming a channel for hours with some nonsensical music noise and I was wondering if you heard it,” Lincoln said.

  “You’re not allowed to do that, are you?” W89K asked.

  “No, you’re not,” Lincoln said.

  “Who did it?” W89k asked.

  “We don’t know,” Lincoln said. “It just happened. Then, it stopped. You didn’t hear it?”

  “No, I’ve been busy all day. I just turned on my set a few minutes ago because I knew you guys would be calling soon,” W89K said.

  Lincoln scratched his head and looked around the room at the others.

  “I wonder if anybody else heard it, or if we were the only ones,” Lincoln said.

  Grover poured himself a fresh glass of whisky and made a face. “Well, we all heard it, so we know we’re not crazy. The guy who sent it, well, him I’m not so sure about.”

  Chapter 21

  Peter sat at a workstation in a Cal Tech university lab, analyzing the data from the previous summer’s signal interception. Nobody had found evidence of it being rebroadcast, and almost nobody outside the astronomy academy had heard about it. It had slowly turned into some sort of Internet hoax, and the consensus among those who were aware of the broadcast was that it had been some hacker trying to make a name for himself in the most out-of-the-way medium possible, ham radio.

  Peter had never found those arguments convincing, since whoever would have been attempting the hoax had to know the signal would have been picked up by radio telescopes all over the world. In that sense, it would have been a world-wide phenomenon, at least in the astronomy community. Instead, it was a dud, everyone having concluded it was a fake and moving on with their work. Almost nobody on the planet was trying to figure out if the signal had been real or a hoax.

  Except for Peter, who once again called open a web browser search engine and, for the thousandth time, typed in “alien signal SETI ham radio.” A page popped open with a little over a thousand hits. He scratched his chin.