“Okay. What do the numbers mean?”
“I’m getting to that. Over here, is a journal found in the same place as the other one, written more recently, in Latvian. I can’t read any of this either, but if you look here…”
Ed pointed to a line on the eighteenth page of the log, buried in a long series of other numbers. It had taken him nearly two days to find it.
“It’s the same number,” Sam said.
“Yes, it is.”
“What do numbers like that stand for?”
“They’re altitude and amplitude for the antenna. This is saying where to point it.”
“Okay. I don’t understand the connection between a Soviet scientist and a Latvian one. I know the observatory was built by the Soviets and all, but they were using it for spying. I’m assuming the people using it later weren’t looking for the same thing.”
“They weren’t. And it’s more complicated than that, because all this is telling us is what the settings were on the antenna. It has nothing to do with what they were aiming it at.”
“Why wouldn’t it? The antenna hasn’t moved.”
“Yeah, but the planet does. It’s not enough to know how they positioned the antenna. I need to know at what time of day and what time of year. I’m not seeing any of that in these notes, but that could be because they’re using words to describe it instead of numbers. I can only read the numbers.”
“You just went and found two numbers in common between the two books,” Sam said. “That doesn’t seem like very much at all.”
“These are very precise numbers.”
“Yeah, but there are a whole lot of very precise numbers on these pages. Maybe they both found Neverland.”
Ed laughed, but mostly out of confusion. “What?”
“Second star on the left and straight on ‘til morning, man. This is all I know about astronomy.”
“Right. I like that. So, let’s say they did both find Neverland.”
“I was using it to make my point, not yours,” Sam said. “They could have been looking at the same thing, and the same thing could be no big deal.”
“Yes, no, I understand your point, but let me finish making mine. The numbers start to repeat in both books.”
Ed flipped ahead in each log to point out the repetition.
“All right, what does that mean?”
“It means from this point, in both logs, they started adjusting the satellite to the same coordinates the same number of days apart.”
“They were adjusting the antenna to track the same thing.”
“That’s what I think.”
“Any other numbers repeat?”
“Yes, but only going backward, not forward. The Soviet appeared to concern himself with narrowing down a search of some sort before landing on this number. The Latvian was simply recording historical use of the telescope by different teams. In both cases, once this number was logged, not a whole lot else happened in the books.”
“Okay. I’m almost convinced.”
“Here, maybe this will help.”
Sam pushed the photo of the Algernon log book across the table.
“Notes are in English this time. Is this from Algie?”
“Yep.”
“Different numbers.”
“Same pattern. And Algernon has time and date.”
Sam sat down in one of the other chairs. There were four, around the square table, and everything was bolted to the floor. Ed was very much looking forward to having a chair he could move and tilt and adjust.
“All right,” Sam said. “If Algernon found the same thing, I’m guessing there’s enough information in this log to figure out what part of the sky they were pointing at. So the next thing is to get a hold of a big telescope and look at that spot and figure out what they found.”
“I already know what they found. They found a signal. Look.”
He showed Sam the article from six years ago. It was an announcement from the university that owned the Latvian telescope, declaring the discovery of a signal from their newly established SETI project.
“This is it?” Sam asked. “A non-random signal from deep space? What’s that mean?”
“It means they thought there was an intelligence behind the signal.”
“Aliens. Someone found an alien radio station.”
“Something like that.”
“And this wasn’t international news?”
“It happened at kind of a crazy time. Look at the date.”
“Oh.”
It was the same week as the announcement of a spaceship touching down in Sorrow Falls.
“Yep. And you probably remember, the whole world went crazy around then. Maybe they really did find a message from an alien species, and maybe nobody cared. The thing is, there’s no record of a follow-up. Nothing published, anyway. Usually, that means it wasn’t confirmed.”
Sam took a look at the piles of log books, including the one from Algernon. Ed noted once again that underestimating Sam’s native intellect was probably a mistake: he was making the same connections Ed already had. Possibly faster.
“You confirm something like this by having someone else look at it, don’t you?” he asked.
“Yes, you do,” Ed said.
“Like another telescope. Did Latvia ask someone at Algernon to do that?”
“No, they didn’t. But they may have asked someone in Australia to. I just got a confirmation that another observatory went vacant sometime in the past month.”
“In Australia.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“Why Australia and not California?”
“Algernon is a secret facility. What they probably did was ask for confirmation from observatories all over the planet. The idea would have been to capture the signal over the entire 24-hour time-frame, which would mean the ask went out to three or four telescopes. The Aussies would have been a part of that request, but Algie wouldn’t have been, because Project Algernon was focused on espionage. If anything, they intercepted the request and verified it on their own.”
“Okay. So Algie might have caught the same signal as Latvia and Australia, and the reaction at each facility was to wait for five-and-a-half years and then evacuate in secret. How does that make sense?”
“It doesn’t. That’s where I’m stuck.”
“But this isn’t everything,” Sam said. “This is only what you went in knowing. You came out of Latvia knowing another bunch of things.”
“Yeah, I know. And I can’t see how all of that’s connected either. Someone impersonated an army general, talked to you until you shot him, and now you remember Violet Jones.”
“There was a little more to it than that.”
“I don’t mean to discount what you reported, but the vague sense that someone is poking your mind isn’t exactly a scientific observation.”
Sam sighed.
“What if there was something in the signal?” Sam asked.
“Like what?”
“Like I don’t know what. An idea, right? We’re already dealing with sentient ideas here. Hell, this Violet Jones person is one of them. Maybe all these missing people have the same idea now, and that idea has to do with Annie.”
“Sam, you have to keep in mind that whatever signal they picked up, it was sent eons ago. I don’t know precisely where these coordinates are, but we’re probably not talking about local space. Any message that was encoded in the signal—assuming it was a message—would have been sent before any of us were born. There’s simply no way it pertains directly to Annie, or to anything contemporary.”
“Yeah, well… you say that based on the physics we know about already. Seems to me there’s a lot of physics we don’t know about kicking around.”
“Hang on.”
Sam had given Ed an idea. He started going through his bag on the floor, which was where all the things on the tabletop lived when they weren’t out in the open.
“What is it?” Sam asked.
<
br /> “Physics we don’t know, you said.”
“Yeah…”
Ed found what he wanted. It was a picture of an equation. He put it down in front of Sam.
“What’s this mean?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know. Nobody knows. I’ve shown it to a dozen people with advanced degrees, and they all say it’s gibberish, the sort of thing Hollywood writes on chalkboards when they want people to think they’re looking at an important equation.”
“I don’t even know how they could tell the difference.”
“Me neither, so I asked. This symbol here…” he pointed to something that looked a little like an exclamation point inside of a triangle, “…it doesn’t mean anything. They all agreed that it’s possible the symbol represents a constant, because then the other parts of the equation almost do make sense. But basically, they all said this is the work of a crazy person.”
“Did this come from Algernon?”
“Yeah, it did.”
Ed pulled out his cell phone and scrolled through the saved photos.
“And this came from Latvia.”
“Same equation.”
“Right.”
“So, two crazy people, half a world apart, come up with the same invented mathematical gibberish,” Sam said.
“It was the first sign the two sites were connected.”
“Okay, and you knew that. Why do you seem excited?”
Ed pulled a laptop out of the bag.
If it was to be said that Ed Somerville had a ‘method’ when it came to processing and interpreting information, that method was firmly old-school. He needed things to exist in paper form, as much as that was possible. When people wanted things on spreadsheets, he printed out the spreadsheets and made notes on the physical copies, and then translated them back into electronic form if that was a requirement. He’d become an expert in constructing Powerpoint presentations using photographs of hand-written notes, converted into images and pasted into slides.
Hard copies were so ingrained into his sensibility that sometimes he missed things that should have been obvious because one half of that thing was something he’d only seen in an electronic image.
It was also true that since Ed had become the clearinghouse for all things potentially alien, he was exposed to an enormous amount of information as a matter of routine. He always assumed if there was a connection to be made, he would eventually make that connection. This was the case when a bunch of missing people in California reminded him of a similar, unconfirmed rumor of a disappearance in the Baltic.
“I should have put this together sooner,” Ed said. “Here, have a look at this.”
Ed retrieved an image from his email storage. It was black marker on a white marker board. The board was full of a series of symbols.
“More gibberish?”
“Mostly not. But look in the corner. If we assume this was written left-to-right, top-to-bottom, the conclusion of this long chain is our equation. The symbol for the mystery constant is different here, but everything else is the same.”
“Physics we don’t know,” Sam said.
“Exactly. This was only up for a couple of hours before it was erased, and nobody took it seriously. We thought she knew we were taking pictures and decided to prank us, because… because it seemed like something she’d do.”
“Hang on. Who wrote this?”
“Annie did, Sam. This is a picture from Annie’s dorm room.”
15
Party at the End of the World
Shawn: General, I’m going to ask. It’s an unpopular question, but I’m going to ask. Are we prepared? For any eventuality? I think you know what I mean.
General: You don’t have to worry about that.
Shawn: Just to be clear. It’s been almost… three years. And what I’m asking is, have we made plans for every possible… we’ll call it a concern. In the event the worst thing you can think of were to happen—
General: We have a plan.
Shawn: Do we?
General: You don’t have to worry about that.
transcript, Sunday Morning News Hour
There was a section of lower campus known as the quads. It sat between two parking lots, the back side of Annie’s dorm, and a main street that defined the limits of the school property.
The quads only existed by accident. Some ten years earlier, another dormitory—this one was halfway up the hill—very suddenly required extensive rehabilitation due to a combination of bad historical building practices and the passage of time. In essence, the school discovered it had to be torn down deliberately, before it collapsed accidentally, as would undoubtedly happen at any time, whether it was occupied or not.
This created a problem for Wainwright, because the rooms in the dorm were already assigned. Even if they started triple-booking dorm rooms and arranging additional off-campus housing, there were still about two hundred more students than could be accommodated.
Temporary on-campus housing ended up being the solution. In a dead space between lots in the scrub-grass section of campus—where by all rights an athletic field deserved to exist—twenty-four flat, ugly, gray-green buildings were put up. As designed, these tiny monstrosities were only expected to exist through the reconstruction of the condemned dormitory: a two-year project. What was not expected was that the students assigned to the quads (the buildings were arranged in groups of four) loved the temporary buildings with a strangely unreserved passion.
This was especially true after the first year, when the people living in the quads were there by choice, rather than thrust together by chance. Each building bedded eight, which was one of the reasons the board of trustees just assumed nobody would appreciate the arrangement. Instead, it turned the area into a series of twenty-four miniature (undeclared) frat houses.
Annie had visited the quads only a couple of times, and never at night. She knew its reputation well, though. As she approached it on the night of the party, the degree to which that reputation was earned was on display in all directions.
For starters, there was a real risk she’d end up at the wrong party. There appeared to be one going on in each four-building cluster. All were happening in the middle of the shared lawns, right out in the open. The whole area felt like an enormous street festival, without the merchants. There were even bonfires, which probably made it difficult for Wainwright College to claim ignorance in regards to on-campus underage drinking, given there was a decent chance this little collection of parties could be seen from space.
As it happened, the party Duke invited her to was taking place at one of the most tactically convenient quads. It ran right next to the road. When Cora and Annie walked to it from her dorm, they took the sidewalk around rather than passing through the center, which gave Annie an opportunity to figure out where the van was parked and Cora a chance to put together escape routes, or whatever it was she did when entering a new environment.
The van was parked directly across from the passage between two of the quad buildings, so that the occupants could see into the center. Annie assumed they had Service agents on foot in various sections around the center, perhaps dressed as youths and attempting to not look obvious.
It also appeared they called in reinforcements of some sort.
The van itself wasn’t a van at all. It was a big black, rectangular thing that wasn’t quite a camper-trailer, but also not exactly a “van” of the Econoline variety. However, parked a little farther up the street was a traditional camper-trailer. Annie had spent three years looking at campers in all their glorious varieties, and so her eyes were immediately drawn to this one. It could have just belonged to someone who arrived at the school to retrieve their child at the end of the school year, but the sides and roof looked reinforced. It practically screamed undercover government vehicle.
“It’s this one here,” Cora said, as she led Annie to the passage between the buildings. The bonfire blew out Annie’s night vision for a few seconds.
�
��Yeah, okay,” Annie said. Cora stepped aside and then fell in behind Annie.
Things had been strained between them ever since Cora’s boss decided it was within her authority to call Annie selfish, and it probably wasn’t going to be changing any time soon.
There were dozens of people in the middle of the quad. The bonfire was raging rather nicely, in a proper fire pit. It looked like they were employing textbooks as kindling, which seemed improbable given the price of textbooks, but nonetheless it appeared to be true.
Annie’s eyes adjusted well enough to start recognizing people here and there. One girl she last saw at the observatory, a couple of guys from classes, and so on. She didn’t know their names, and still hadn’t gotten used to the idea that she lived in a world where not knowing someone’s name and lineage was a common occurrence.
Maybe going back to Sorrow Falls for a while really was the best thing for her.
A lot of the people there saw her and recognized her immediately, but either the novelty had worn off or something else was going on, because they weren’t doing what used to be normal, i.e., trying to take her picture or calling over friends or something. The reaction was something between indifference and… well, it felt like disgust. It was a strange vibe.
Everyone had red plastic party cups, but there was no evidence of a keg; she couldn’t see Duke anywhere; and there was unpleasant music being piped in from one of the buildings that was giving Annie a headache. She kept waiting for the day the playlist from the college radio station started to become appealing, but that didn’t seem likely to happen any time soon.
“This was a mistake,” she said to herself. She had to say it to herself since nobody was talking to her or coming near her, and Cora was too far away.
Go up and introduce yourself to someone, she thought. That was what Annie Collins did. Hiding in corners and allowing people to ignore her and avoiding contact were the sort of things Violet did. And back when Annie thought her friend was just an introvert and not an alien entity propping up a dead girl’s body, that was the advice she gave her introvert friend: introduce yourself.
The Frequency of Aliens Page 21
