The Signal

by William Young

  Bill said good-bye and hung up the phone, and thousands of miles away Dante stood in his apartment wondering what the hell had just happened.

  Chapter 39

  Bill set the phone handset down on the railing of the deck’s fence, set his cigar in an ashtray and headed into the house. Inside the kitchen, he noticed Carla pouring vodka and tonic into a glass filled with ice.

  “Can you make me one?” Bill asked.

  Carla smiled at him and took down another glass from the cupboard and fixed him a drink. Bill pursed his lips for a moment as he accepted the cocktail from her, and she made a weird look for him.

  “You might want to make yours just a little bit stronger,” Bill said, sipping his drink.

  “Why, is something wrong?” Carla asked.

  Bill shook his head slightly. “I, uhh, just had an interesting conversation with a Dante Johnson about that song your student gave you.”

  “Who’s Dante Johnson?”

  “He’s DJ Scots Tape,” Bill said.

  Carla was totally confused about what Bill was leading her to, and it made no sense that he would have called a musician about a song he’d written. Then again, Bill was known to do some pretty off-character things from time to time if it meant getting some authentic detail into a story he was writing.

  “Oh,” Carla said, tilting a sip of vodka tonic into her mouth. “And?”

  “He said he didn’t broadcast the unedited source material we heard over the Internet last summer,” Bill said. “He said he recorded it from a live ham radio broadcast.”

  “Live?” Carla said. “On a ham radio frequency?”

  Carla had never bothered to check where in the frequency range the signal had come in because she had initially thought it to be a fake, and had never changed her mind. And because she had listened to the signal on a re-routed webcast on her computer, it hadn’t occurred to her to even bother considering the original carrier frequency because she had just assumed it was a computer hoax, not a live radio broadcast.

  “But that would mean-“ Carla started.

  Bill cut in. “Oh, yeah.”

  Chapter 40

  Carla stood in a computer lab on campus, her student team assembled around her. They had been listening to the signal from start to finish, taking notes and wondering – each in his or her own way – how they had failed the basic scientific testing process they were supposed to enforce. Only Peter felt anything close to vindicated, although his last-minute conversion to Doubting Thomas sickened him. He had known it was genuine all along, he had just misinterpreted the data. Not that the song had helped any, although it now made a certain amount of sense to him.

  Peter almost couldn’t bear to think about how the entire scientific community had almost willingly blinded itself to the obvious because the signal hadn’t looked like what anyone had been expecting. That anyone should have expected an alien signal to look like something recognizable as an alien signal irked Peter, because he’d been made to feel foolish for so many months in trying to win converts to his argument. He had been right. Being right, however, didn’t seem likely to gain him any notice in the scientific community and also meant he was going to have to take another stab at his graduate thesis, seeing as he had just finished rewriting it to support the contention that the signal was fake, not genuine.

  “Obviously, we’re going to have to figure out what this signal is, where it came from and what information it contains,” Carla said.

  Gloria Flores, flush from the realization that there was actual scientific work to be done that nobody else had ever done before, interrupted immediately out of enthusiasm.

  “Well, if your DJ is right, it’s mostly music,” Gloria said. “Who’d broadcast music at us?”

  Barrett Smythe rolled his eyes and spoke up. “I wouldn’t worry about that. If he’s right about that, then that portion is just filler, maybe a cultural thing or a religious thing for the sender’s species. The important thing would be to focus on the non-music portions of the broadcast.

  “I don’t know how to go about trying to figure out if it’s a primer or a just some ‘hi, how are ya’ spiel to lessen the anxiety of receiving the broadcast, but we’re going to need to break it down into its specific elements.”

  Carla raised a hand to calm her team down. Everyone was excited, and everyone knew that once word got out that the signal was genuine, every astronomy unit at every university with the resources would be working on it full-time, each eager to claim the prize of figuring it out. Everyone in the room knew the scientific importance and potential history-making of the moment they were all involved in.

  “I agree, Barrett, that we need to concentrate on the non-music portion of the signal,” Carla said. “I’m getting Peter’s recording duplicated and will send it out to other labs for their analysis with what we know so everyone is working from the same starting point.

  “It’ll probably take years before we figure out anything, especially if we don’t get another broadcast to check this one against. I’m sending out our initial work-up of the signal findings to NASA tomorrow, and, with any luck, that’ll bump up our funding after the feds spend a couple of months talking to themselves about whether we’re deluded or on to something serious.

  “In any case, in a couple of days, it’s going to be a foot race to figure out this signal. Or, and let me stress this point, debunk the proposition. It’s still possible we’re being manipulated by a DJ looking for media coverage, so we need to come at this thing with Occam’s Razor and every scientific explanation we can muster. We need to analyze every pro and con.”

  Peter couldn’t help himself. “But, you’ve got the guy’s source tape. You know he recorded it. I recorded it. The site recorded it. We’ve got the actual signal that went out over the airwaves.”

  Carla nodded. “Peter, we live in the computer age, anything can be forged by someone smart enough and with the right technology. We’re scientists, we don’t want to made fools of, so let’s make sure we look at all the fakery angles.

  “And, of course, we’re going to have to comb through the transmission data and figure out where the signal actually came from. This means figuring out how to monitor ham radio signals and what to look for in them. There’s a lot on our plate, so let’s start breaking up into teams and coming up with game plans for each one.”

  Chapter 41

  General Hibbens sat in his office clicking through the various military blogs on the secure net, wondering if any word of his work had leaked out of the secret hearing he’d been in. He was sure some Congressional staffer had had to have let it out that he and his team thought they were chasing down the origins of an actual off-world radio broadcast, and he figured there’d be widespread disbelief that the military would take such a thing seriously.

  Oddly, he hadn’t come across any mention of the hearing before the Senate panel, either on the Internet or in the mainstream media. He leaned back in his chair and concluded nobody must be able to make sense of what was going on so nobody wanted to look foolish by associating with his work. That was a relief, since he still didn’t know what he had on his hands other than a couple of hours of recorded sound that his experts said contained identifiable speech.

  There was a light rap on the frame of his door and he looked up to see Major Forrestal entering his office carrying a tablet PC.

  “Well, Ben, what’ve you got for me, now?” Hibbens asked.

  Forrestal paused before the general’s desk. “Well, general, the word is out.”

  Hibbens closed his eyes. “Oh?”

  “Yes, sir,” Forrestal said. “A large file was sent out by CalTech to sixteen other universities containing the entire broadcast of the signal and their initial analysis of it.”

  Forrestal paused and smiled, waiting for Hibbens to open his eyes. Hibbens looked up at him and cocked his head in an unamused ‘don’t be cute’ pose.

  “They figured out what the non-language portion of the signal is,” Forrest
al said.

  Hibbens leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. “They did? What do they think it is?”

  “Music.”

  Hibbens laughed. “Doesn’t sound like music to me.”

  Forrestal touched the screen of his computer and “Enter the Ether” spilled out of the speaker. Forrestal waited a few moments and then stopped the playback.

  “You can explain the similarity to me later,” Hibbens said. “What do they think the language portion is?”

  “They don’t know, although one of the possibilities they’ve recommended investigating is spoken language,” Forrestal said.

  Hibbens drummed his fingers on the edge of his desk. “Well, we’ve got a couple of months on them, but it’s only a matter of time, now.”

  Chapter 42

  It was the first Saturday of the month, and the usual suspects were all gathered in Lincoln’s radio studio, their glasses filled with single malts, the radios tuned. Lincoln and Tom stood together, lighting cigars.

  “I think that’s great that your wife got you a radio,” Lincoln said. “Now, I can finally talk to you.”

  Tom laughed. “Lincoln, I live six miles away. You can call me. Or text me. Or email me. Damn, you could probably send me smoke signals with your cigar.”

  Tom puffed mightily and got his cigar lit, exhaled a cloud of smoke into the room, and felt the initial rush of nicotine through his lips and cheeks.

  “Hell, if you stood on top of the water tower by the airport, you could probably use semaphore and get hold of me,” Tom said.

  Lincoln smiled and laughed. “And what’d be the fun in that?”

  Tom rolled his eyes. “Now, I actually have to learn how to use the set and get licensed. I mean, I know my wife meant well, but, hell, I come here for the night away from my family, not to talk on a radio.”

  “I’ve noticed,” Lincoln said.

  “That’s a compliment,” Tom said.

  “I know.”

  Tom shrugged. “But she thinks I come here because you interested me in ham radio, so she got me one. She should’ve gotten me a case of Lagavulin.”

  “I thought you were a Macallan man,” Lincoln said.

  “I was just picking an example,” Tom said, sipping scotch from his glass, “although this scotch Jed brought is mighty tasty.”

  Lincoln said one word. “Laphroig.”

  Lincoln took a deep puff from his cigar, blew a ghost of smoke into the air, and tipped a sip of whisky into his mouth.

  “Do you think you’d have joined the group if we’d done something else?” Lincoln asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Like if I’d been one of those home-made jewelry folks hawking handmade silver earrings,” Lincoln said.

  “Hell no,” Tom said. “I wouldn’t have even come up to your display. My wife might have, though.”

  “So, you see what I mean,” Lincoln said.

  Tom had no idea what Lincoln meant. “How so?”

  “You were drawn to ham radio because you thought it was archaic, obsolete,” Lincoln said, tapping ash into an ashtray. “Yet, you were still interested. And then you came here because I invited you, yes, to interest you in amateur radio. If you weren’t a scotch man, you would never have come.”

  Tom nodded. “Probably true.”

  “So, maybe you’re an amateur radio man and you don’t know it. It’s serendipity,” Lincoln said, pausing, changing his mind, “or synchronicity … or something. Fate, maybe. But, you’re here and now you have a set of your own. I bet you didn’t see that coming last August.”

  Tom nodded. Suddenly, there was a commotion in the back of the room, with Grover and Jed pressing the headphones tight against their ears. Charles stood up and took his headphones off and turned toward Lincoln and Tom.

  “Hey, Linc, come and listen to this,” Charles said.

  Charles switched the sound to the speakers and turned the volume up. The signal spilled from the speakers.

  “Isn’t this the same crap we heard last summer?” Charles asked.

  Lincoln turned to Tom. “Sound like aliens talking to us?”

  Tom listened long and hard to the sounds coming from the speakers until Lincoln waved to Charles to turn it off. Tom walked outside of the studio and Lincoln followed him. They stood outside in the cool air and stared up into the star-filled heavens.

  They were silent for several long moments, each consulting his glass and cigar, until Tom finally spoke.

  “What if it is?” Tom said. “What do you think they’d be saying to us?”

  Lincoln gave Tom a long, hard look, as if he almost couldn’t believe that Tom would give credence to the idea of alien beings broadcasting a transmission on a ham radio frequency. He puffed his cigar and took another sip of his scotch.

  “Why do you think they would be trying to talk to us? Who are we to them? Hell, Tom, if it is real, it’s probably just a random radio beam zipping through the universe,” Lincoln said, fingering his cigar and staring at the stars. “If I had to guess, though, I’d say it’s probably the same thing Reginald Fessenden did in 1906 when he broadcast a Christmas concert with speeches and music performances. “It was the first time in history that voice and music was transmitted by radio.

  “You have to figure that first broadcast is still beaming its way through the galaxy today and that somebody up there, if there’s anybody up there, is going to catch it on an antenna some day and wonder what the heck he’s listening to,” Lincoln said. “But I don’t think, if I have to think about it, that this signal, if it’s real, is something meant for us.”

  “Why’s that?” Tom asked.

  Lincoln pointed up into the night sky. “Those little dots up there are so far away, any radio coming from them is millions of years old. If anything actually made it here from there, it was just a happy accident, a stray beam of energy happily missing every planet, star, asteroid and speck of space dust on the way to my radio on a Saturday night in some long-dead fellow’s unimaginable future.”

  Lincoln turned and walked back into the radio shack. Tom continued to stare up into the night sky, at the stars, imagining the planets around them and the ancient civilization that might have built the first-ever radio transmitter. Tom wondered what they looked like and if they ever gathered in small groups with the equivalent of a cigar and a glass of scotch, and stared up into their heavens at the infinite universe, wondering who might be out there.

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  About the Author

  William Young can fly helicopters and airplanes, drive automobiles, steer boats, rollerblade, water ski, snowboard, and ride a bicycle. He was a newspaper reporter for more than a decade at five different newspapers. He has also worked as a golf caddy, flipped burgers at a fast food chain, stocked grocery store shelves, sold ski equipment, worked at a funeral home, unloaded trucks for a department store and worked as a uniformed security guard. He lives in a small post-industrial town along the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania with his wife and three children.

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