by J. Blanes
Now, at the farmhouse, he saw their worried faces and felt guilty for not having shared his findings before he had left at dawn. They helped him unload the supplies from the pickup, and after that, they all gathered at the kitchen. Albert was starving. He hadn’t eaten anything since he’d left, so he prepared a simple dinner for himself, as Keira and Dylan had already had theirs.
“Are you going to tell us where you went today?” Dylan asked, impatient, while Albert was still preparing his dinner.
“I’ll show you as soon as I’ve eaten. I’m really starving.”
“Show us?” Keira gave him a puzzled look.
“Yes, show you,” Albert replied enigmatically.
Meanwhile, they spoke about other ordinary things, like the weather and how Dylan and Keira had spent the day. They also talked about tomorrow’s plans. Dylan wanted to go fishing again, and Keira agreed, but she didn’t want to go to the same place, as she did not want another close encounter with a bear. Albert just nodded or assented absently to everything with a simple “OK” or “yes” while his mind wandered, lost in other thoughts.
“Come with me. I want to show you something,” he said after eating his dinner, and before they could say anything else, he rushed out of the kitchen. Keira and Dylan had to hurry to keep up with him.
They followed him in silence, intrigued about his weird behavior. He led them to a door at the back of the main room. The door was locked, which Keira found odd, because she knew that none of the doors in the house, not even the bathrooms doors, had locks. Albert unlocked it with a key he had in his pocket, and pushed it open.
Behind the door, everything was dark, except for the first steps of a stairway going down. He used a switch next to the door to turn on the lights. Keira expected a dim, yellowish light from an old, dusty light bulb. Instead, a bright, fully illuminated basement glowed at the end of the stair. They followed Albert downstairs and found themselves in a spacious, remodeled basement room.
“This is my man cave,” Albert announced proudly, his right arm extended toward the room.
He had transformed the basement into a sophisticated computer center. All kinds of electronic equipment covered the whole basement and its walls. Dylan counted more than fifteen computers and saw as many TV monitors, along with weird electronic panels and a maze of cables falling from the ceiling in every corner of the room. It reminded him of NASA’s Houston control center he had seen on a documentary, but on a smaller scale.
“Wow! What the hell is this?” he exclaimed in astonishment. A guy in a private home, with a room like this, was beyond his comprehension.
“This is where I play with my computers,” Albert answered vaguely.
“Meaning?” Dylan insisted.
“Meaning that this is where I program, calculate, think, plan, imagine, expand, or whatever you want to call it,” he explained, leaving Dylan as ignorant as before. Albert was visibly uncomfortable. It was the first time he had let anybody inside this room, and now that they were here, it felt like an intrusion to him, an invasion of his treasured privacy.
“You never told us about it before,” Keira interrupted them.
“This is the place where I hide when I want to be alone and escape the world, my secret lair, and it wouldn’t be if I were telling everyone where it was, don’t you think?” Albert immediately regretted having said that. “I’m sorry,” he apologized.
“Do you want us to leave?” Keira understood Albert feelings, and she didn’t want to impose on him.
Albert composed himself. “I’m not used to have other people down here…Don’t touch that, please!” he suddenly yelled at Dylan, startling him as he was about to lay a finger on an electronic panel that had caught his attention with its bright, flashing lights. “It’s sensitive to the static electricity on your body,” Albert explained. “You could ruin it just by touching it.” He was having second thoughts about having them here, especially Dylan.
“So, this is where you monitor the alien signals you told us about, right?” Keira distracted his attention with another subject.
“That’s right.” Albert moved to one of the computers and sat on the only chair available in the whole room. “In fact, it’s the reason why you’re here.” He typed in some commands, and the computer monitor showed a screen with lots of graphs. “Do you see this?”
Keira and Dylan stood behind him, staring at the screen with no clue whatsoever about what they were supposed to see.
“I see lots of numbers and graphs,” Dylan said.
“I mean, do you see this almost-flat line here?” Albert pointed to a graph where a wavy line slightly moved up and down. Keira and Dylan nodded.
“This line,” he added, “is how it is supposed to be, with no sharp turns up or down. Now, look at what happened last night.” He pushed himself to slide his chair to the table next to the computer, almost invisible under the pile of disorganized papers on top of it. He scrambled through the papers until he found one with more graphs printed on it. “Look at that group of signals.” He handed the paper to them.
They both studied the graphs on the paper. They all had the same wavy structure as the one on the screen, except the group that Albert highlighted. “This one is different,” Dylan remarked.
“Yes. Last night, exactly at midnight”—Albert put special emphasis on the word “exactly”—“I received the first group of signals that you can see there, and it lasted exactly fourteen seconds.” Again, he emphasized “exactly.”
“What does it mean?” Keira asked, intrigued.
“Last night I came down here to check everything before I went to bed, as I do every night. I was doing routine checks when my phone alerted me that something had happened to that computer.” He pointed at the computer next to him. “I programmed all computers to alert me on my cell when an anomaly occurs,” he explained, “usually some kind of failure in the computer hardware. But this time, it was different; it warned me because it had received an abnormal group of signal values from one of the parabolic antennae.” He grabbed the paper from Dylan and picked out the first group of lines protruding from the graph. “This one…
“At first, I thought it was a malfunction from the antenna, so I went up and checked all the connections, switches, and boards. Everything seemed fine, so I thought it was probably some kind of electronic glitch. They happen sometimes. Then, my phone alerted me again: the same computer, the same group of signal values. Now I was intrigued, and dumbfounded.”
“You, dumbfounded?” Keira couldn’t believe it. “It must be a first for you.”
Albert smiled and leaned back in the chair. “No, not at all, but it doesn’t happen often.”
“And what did you do next?”
“I performed some tests on the antenna and the cables. I also reset all the switches and boards, and the computer, and ran diagnostics software on all of them. Nothing, all results negative. And do you know what happened then?” He paused and slowly leaned forward again.
“You received another alert!” both said.
“Exactly, and I was baffled. Therefore, I decided to take a closer look at the strange signals. The first thing that shocked me was that I received the first signal exactly at midnight, and when I say ‘exactly’, I mean up to the millisecond.” He grabbed a pencil and started writing on a paper. “It was twelve, zero minutes, zero seconds, zero everything down to the millisecond.” He wrote all the numbers.
“What if your computer had the time wrong?” Keira asked. “Mine is always delayed.”
“I have my computers synchronized with an atomic clock that belongs to NASA. It could be possible, but not likely.” Albert’s answer gave little room for doubt. “Anyway,” he added, “it was also one of the first things that occurred to me, and I checked the time on the computers and equipment involved.”
“You definitely have to show me later how to do it,�
�� Keira replied, amused, taking away some drama to Albert’s serious explanation.
Albert was not so amused. For him it was a serious matter, so serious it had required the revelation of his secret room. “If you don’t want to hear it, just tell me,” he complained, feeling hurt.
“Come on! Don’t be so touchy,” she said. “We’re already here; just tell us the rest of the story.”
“You’re right, but no more comments of this kind, please; it’s important to me, OK?” He stared inquiringly at both of them, and they nodded in consent.
“The second shock came when I realized that each signal was exactly the same, not only in value but also in duration—and you know what I mean with ‘exactly’…”
“Yeah, we know, down to the millisecond,” Dylan unconsciously interrupted, and Albert glared at him. If looks could kill, he would have suffered a horrifying death.
“I…I mean, you asked, and…and…I was showing you I was listening,” Dylan stammered.
Albert took a deep breath and calmed himself. “As I was saying,” he continued, “their duration was exactly the same, fourteen seconds. And the third and last shock came when I realized the signals were coming at exactly”—he stared at Dylan when he said the word—“at exactly twenty-minute intervals, and they did so for three consecutive hours. Since then, no more signals until now.”
“Why did you leave this morning then?” Keira saw no relation between the signals and his departure. She was very intrigued.
“There’s no way that those signals are of natural origin. If my equipment worked fine, there were only two other options: man-made or…” Albert paused, as if he himself couldn’t believe it could happen.
“Or you had your alien signal,” Keira finished for him.
Albert nodded. “To discard the man-made option, I reviewed satellite positions and looked for possible meteorological probes, planes, anything that could be in the section of the sky where the antenna pointed to.” Albert stood up, frustrated, reliving the moments of last night. “There was nothing in that section of the sky. I checked and rechecked that a million times. There was nothing,” he repeated, “and much less anything that stayed there for three consecutive hours.”
“Shouldn’t you be happy about this?” Dylan wondered why Albert was so upset. “I mean, it’s the alien signal you were expecting, isn’t it?”
“There’s more,” Albert revealed. “If you want to say to the world and the scientific community that you’ve received an intelligent signal from space, you’d better have confirmation from other sources, and proof of it.”
“That’s reasonable,” Keira agreed.
“So, I’m not alone in this project. I partnered with an astronomer, a friend of mine who works for NASA. He’s also monitoring the same section of space that I’m monitoring. If I receive a signal, he will receive it too, and vice versa. This way we can confirm each other’s discoveries.”
“And?”
“And I called him last night, and he told me he had received nothing, nada.” Albert sounded discouraged. “I couldn’t believe it.”
“Then how did he explain the signals you received?” Keira wondered.
“He told me someone must have hacked my computer,” Albert said, “or I made a mistake and overlooked something.”
“I don’t think so,” Keira said adamantly. “He just proved he doesn’t know you well enough. First, I’m sure you have your computers more protected than those at the Pentagon, and second, you never overlook anything.”
“It could also be that someone is pulling an elaborate prank on me,” Albert said, scratching his head.
“How could someone do that?”
“That’s the problem. I don’t know,” he confessed. “Maybe some kind of remote-controlled balloon with some kind of emitter attached to it, even though it would be almost impossible to maintain the correct position for so long. There must be other ways, but I can’t think of one that could do it for three straight hours with such accuracy.” He stared blankly at the floor.
Keira had never seen Albert so defeated about anything. She realized that he was struggling inside. He had received the signal of his life, the one he had been so desperately looking for, but now that he had it, he had no way to prove it. Unless…
“What does any of this have to do with you leaving this morning?” she asked.
“Of course, my trip,” Albert said as if awoken from a deep dream. He had forgotten to tell them the last part of his discovery. “There’s something else I still haven’t told you.” He sat again in front of the computer, typed in more commands, and displayed another graph on the monitor. “This is one of the signals, zoomed in,” he explained. “Remember, all of them are exactly the same, just like this one.”
“OK,” Dylan said, looking at the graph. Many triangular peaks, one next to the other, all of the same height, were clearly visible on the screen.
“As I couldn’t sleep,” Albert added, “I looked more closely at these signals. I studied them, looking for some clues about their origin and meaning. I also ran several algorithms on them, some of them very sophisticated, trying to decipher their meaning.”
“And? You found something?” Keira asked eagerly.
“No,” Albert shook his head. “Well, at least not at first. None of the algorithms gave me any clue. I was so tired that I decided to print them and look at them with clearer eyes after resting awhile. Then, when I saw the graph printed, something occurred to me. Look at the pattern.”
“I only see lots of triangles.” Dylan wondered what this was all about. Triangles were triangles and nothing else; what other meaning could they have?
“All the triangles have the same height, which means they all have the same value. In other words, they can’t tell us anything useful apart from that value. But look at how they are grouped.”
Dylan looked closely. The triangles were arranged into eight groups, each group separated by a small horizontal line. “There are eight groups of triangles,” he said finally.
“Exactly!” Albert exclaimed.
“And what does that mean?” Dylan asked, without an inkling as to where Albert was leading them.
“At first I thought the length of each group could mean something,” Albert tried to explain in terms they would understand, “but I realized that without the right scale and units, it would be pointless. The lengths could mean anything, from feet to meters to whatever.”
“I think I follow you,” Keira said. “You discarded the height of the triangles because they’re all the same, and you also discarded the length of the triangle groups because you didn’t know the right unit of measure. Am I right?”
“You’re right, so I finally did the only thing I could do, and that was…” He paused, expecting their reactions.
“You went to bed” was Dylan’s deeply pondered answer.
Albert couldn’t help but smile. “No,” he said a little later. “I did the simplest of things; I counted.”
“Of course!” Keira exclaimed.
“Of course!” Dylan also exclaimed, but unlike Keira, he had no clue about why or what Albert counted.
“Yes, you guessed right. I counted the triangles in each group,” Albert concluded.
“OK, you counted the triangles.” Dylan was still skeptical that any of this could lead anywhere. “And then what?”
“The number of triangles in each group was 41, 18, 13, 40, 108, 20, 54, and 66,” Albert revealed.
“Perfect, eight random numbers.” Dylan’s skepticism increased.
“That’s what I thought at first, but the numbers were so low I wondered if they were geographical coordinates, you know, latitude and longitude.” Albert saw a glint of excitement in Dylan’s eyes for the first time.
“Aren’t coordinates three numbers? I studied them a long time ago, but I remember there were de
grees, minutes, and seconds.” This time Keira was the one showing a little skepticism.
“Unless you consider the last number to be part of the seconds. Look, like this.” Albert wrote on a paper the number of triangles he had counted in each group, but formatted like coordinates:
41o 18’ 13.40’’ N or S and 108o 20’ 54.66’’ E or W
“The 108 couldn’t be latitude, because latitudes only go from 0 to 90, or 0 to -90,” he explained. “The N or S and the E or W are because each of them could be north or south and east or west.”
“How did you know which one was the right one?” Keira asked.
“I didn’t,” Albert answered with a smile, “so I plotted all four possibilities on a map online. Here’s what I found.” Albert triumphantly showed them another piece of paper:
41o 18’ 13.40’’ S and 108o 20’ 54.66’’ E = the ocean
41o 18’ 13.40’’ S and 108o 20’ 54.66’’ W = the ocean
41o 18’ 13.40’’ N and 108o 20’ 54.66’’ E = Yin Mountains, China
41o 18’ 13.40’’ N and 108o 20’ 54.66’’ W = southeast from here!!!
Albert let the meaning of what they were reading sink in before speaking again. “You can imagine I went into complete shock when I realized one of the plotted points on the map was just a couple of hundred miles west of here. I don’t believe in coincidences,” he said at last.
“And this is where you went today!” Keira realized immediately. “What did you find?” She couldn’t contain her excitement.
“I couldn’t get there,” Albert said, disappointed. “It’s in a desolate wasteland, like a desert, full of dust and rocks, and without paved roads. I relied on the map from my phone, but I lost reception on my way there. I decided to continue with an old paper map that I had in the pickup, but I found the road destroyed by a landslide, and I had to come back. I got close enough to take a look with my binoculars, but I didn’t see anything unusual.” He left out the part about almost driving off the cliff; he was still too embarrassed to admit it.
