by Nick Cook
‘So what could have caused this?’
‘If there wasn’t power remaining in the control room, I would have said it might have been some sort of massive power surge from the national grid. So maybe this is down to a rat chewing through a critical cable, something like that.’
‘How hard will it be to fix?’
‘No idea – hours, days maybe. We won’t know for sure until the maintenance team has run a thorough diagnostic on Lovell. And that means we’re going to have to deal with a lot of pissed-off post-docs and research fellows, whose projects will be bumped in the meantime. It also means that you’re not going to get to listen to that of pulsar of yours any time soon.’
I swatted the air. ‘That really doesn’t matter, Steve. After all, there will be other nights…’
Steve’s gaze narrowed on me. ‘As we can’t do anything else right now, do you fancy taking this experience to the next level?’
‘You have a hidden flask of coffee on you?’
‘I had something even better in mind.’
‘A margarita?’
He smiled, opened a metal locker, grabbed a couple of harnesses from it and handed one to me.
‘What about our shared vertigo problem?’
‘I think mine is way worse than yours, and as you haven’t already vomited like I did the first time I came up here, I think you’ll more than cope with heading for the summit.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yes, but once again that’s another little secret for our list. This will be my way of making the failure of this evening up to you.’
I smiled at him. ‘In that case, let’s get going.’
We stepped back outside on to the gantry and made our way towards the metal staircase at the far end.
As we climbed the staircase and went up through a hatch, I braced myself. Above us, the yacht-like mast of the central receiving antenna stretching up towards the stars came into view and I found myself standing at the centre of Lovell’s giant metal dish. My sense of vertigo had vanished because the curved panelling of the bowl rose around us like a stadium without any seating, meaning we could no longer see the ground far beneath us.
‘Are you really ready to do this?’ Steve asked, his head-torch beam flicking over the bowl as he grabbed the opportunity to inspect it.
‘What else am I going to do now that you’ve dragged me up here?’ I replied with a smile.
He grinned and clicked the carabiner from his harness on to the railing. I followed his lead.
Then the really hard part came: the final ascent towards the summit of the metal Everest.
My brief rediscovered confidence flowed away when, after a few flights of ladders, we rose above the lip of Lovell’s metal bowl to reveal the landscape again. As my blood pounded in my ears, Steve started to hum ‘Stairway to Heaven’ again as he climbed the last ladder towards the radio telescope’s focus box.
‘The next time I say you need to confront your fears, just kick me,’ I said.
Steve didn’t reply.
Without any structure to shelter us the wind buffeted me as it tried to find gaps in my jacket. By the time we’d reached the last rung and I stepped on to a small platform around the focus box, my teeth had started to chatter.
I rested my hand on the metal container, inside which was the Multi-Beam Receiver – mounted at the exact focal point of Lovell’s bowl. It was an inspiring thought to know that all those faint radio whispers from the stars were being bounced from the metal dish back to this device.
I ignored the nagging tug of queasiness in my stomach and made myself look out at the night landscape. ‘It really is spectacular up here, Steve.’
‘If you say so,’ he replied with a grimace as he stared straight ahead at the focus box.
‘I really appreciate it.’
‘No problem.’ He managed a small smile as his eyes clung on to me, looking anywhere but down. ‘So how about the traditional initiation selfie? You’ll have to take it as I’m almost paralysed with fear.’
‘No problem, although I would have refreshed my make-up back down there if you’d let me know beforehand.’
‘Don’t worry, you look gorgeous.’
I couldn’t help myself. ‘Do I?’
Steve glanced away as he took out his phone and switched on the camera, then handed it to me.
I held it up so we both filled the screen. ‘Best cheesy grin please.’
Steve looked a fraction less terrified. I was feeling increasingly comfortable up here and put on my best practised selfie smile as I pressed the button and the phone’s screen briefly flashed to illuminate us.
I knew it was definitely a shot for Instagram, but for a moment all I could see was a great big white rectangle burned into my vision. I blinked hard to clear my eyes, and noticed a glimmer of light dancing along the edges of each of the metal bowl’s panels.
‘What are you scowling at, Lauren?’ Steve asked.
‘Can you see some strange light covering the dish right now?’
He glanced back down briefly before his eyes snapped back to me. ‘No, but I can hear a strange noise. Maybe that’s triggering your synaesthetic ability.’
‘What noise?’
‘Listen carefully and you’ll hear it.’
I tuned in to the night-time sounds: the quiet moan of the wind, the noise of a car driving along the road in the distance… Then the faintest buzzing scratched the edge of my hearing.
‘I can hear it now,’ I said.
Steve nodded. ‘Sounds like some sort of electrical discharge noise to me.’
‘Do you think this is linked to the power spike?’
‘It could be.’
The buzzing grew steadily louder until it seemed to be coming from all around us, no doubt the acoustic effect amplified by the dish. The noise was accompanied by a smell similar to burnt cinnamon.
‘The last time I heard something like this was when a transformer in an old amp of mine decided to blow up,’ Steve said.
‘If this is linked to the power spike, then maybe we should head back to the control room to see what the readouts can tell us.’
‘Good plan,’ Steve replied.
We both began to descend.
Five minutes later we’d reached the floor of Lovell’s bowl.
As I stepped on to the metal surface I could feel the faintest vibration through the balls of my feet. That couldn’t be a good sign.
I’d begun unclipping my carabiner from the railing when a bright green spark leapt straight out from the ladder on to my exposed right hand and a teeth-grinding burning sensation swept over my skin.
‘Shit!’ I sucked on my fingers.
Steve stared at me. ‘Are you OK, Lauren?’
‘Just an electrical shock. I’ll live.’
‘But that shouldn’t happen. This whole structure is earthed because of the threat of lightning strikes.’
‘Try telling that to my fingers,’ I said, flapping my hand to get rid of the tingling sensation.
Steve took his gloves off and offered them to me.
‘What are those for?’
‘If there’s some sort of electrical fault responsible for this, you’ll need to keep your hands insulated from the metalwork till we’re down on the ground.’
‘And what about you?’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about me.’
I frowned at him. ‘No, I don’t need you to go all “knight in shining armour” on me. Give me your scarf and I’ll use that to insulate myself from the structure.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I insist.’
‘OK…’ He handed me his scarf to me.
I wrapped the heavy knitted wool round each of my hands, leaving a length between them long enough for me to still be able to manoeuvre down the ladder.
The crackling sound grew louder over our heads.
‘Let’s get a move on,’ Steve said.
‘You’ll get no argument from me on that.’
<
br /> We quickly descended through the hatch and ran back down the stairs to the gantry.
My gums had started to tingle by the time we’d reached the next ladder and as we began to climb down the entire metallic structure glowed with a faint green aura around us, thanks to my synaesthetic vision. And instinct told me that it wasn’t a good sign.
The ten minutes of that descent felt like the longest of my life, as I clung on to the rungs of the ladder through the slippery fabric of Steve’s scarf.
The buzzing rose to a shriek as we neared the bottom of the last ladder.
‘It sounds as if something really is about to blow,’ I said.
‘We should get clear, just in case,’ Steve replied.
I leapt off the ladder a metre above the ground and Steve landed next to me. With a deafening crackle huge sparks flew out from Lovell’s bowl.
‘Run!’ Steve shouted.
We were both racing to the control room when a blinding flare of light made our bodies cast long shadows ahead of us. We spun round to see hundred-metre-high bolts of lightning leaping from the bowl straight up into the sky with crackles of energy.
Steve placed his hands on his head. ‘Holy crap, this just isn’t possible.’
‘I know it isn’t, but it’s still bloody happening.’
He nodded and we both sprinted towards the control room again.
Chapter Three
We hurtled back inside to be met by even more warning lights blinking on Lovell’s main control panel.
Steve stared at one of the monitors. ‘Bloody hell, that power spike is now sitting at over one thousand volts. No wonder we’re seeing all those energy discharges from Lovell itself.’
‘But where’s all this power coming from?’
Steve shrugged as he squinted at the inverted lightning storm dancing out from Lovell’s dish, many of the bolts earthing themselves across the Jodrell Bank site. ‘This is making less and less sense by the minute.’
‘So what do we do now?’ I asked.
‘The only thing we can do. I’m going to kill all power feeds to Lovell just in case there’s a power relay stuck open, although that still wouldn’t explain the number of volts we’re currently registering.’ He flipped up the cover on the emergency shutdown button and pressed it. The only thing that happened was a small insignificant red light joined the constellation of others on the control panel.
We both stared at the lightning storm still leaping up from the radio telescope.
Steve blew his cheeks out. ‘OK, this is seriously freaking me out now.’ He peered at a monitor, then clicked a button and scowled as he pushed it a few more times. ‘And will you look at this? Somehow the Multi-Beam Receiver is still online and isn’t responding to commands to shut it down.’
‘But that’s also impossible. Even if there’s a short circuit somewhere, the automated systems should have kicked in.’
‘Exactly. I’m open to any ideas you may have at the moment, because I have nothing.’
A totally crazy idea had occurred to me and I wrapped my arms round myself. It was so crazy I didn’t want to risk voicing it. I shook my head.
‘Oh, come on, Lauren, I know you well enough to see when you’re holding something back.’
I sighed. ‘OK, just remember that you did ask… What if Lovell is being swamped with some sort of incredibly powerful signal that’s causing all these phenomena we’re witnessing?’
‘Including self-powering the radio telescope systems and taking over control of the Multi-Beam Receiver?’
‘I’m just throwing ideas out here, Steve.’
He drummed his fingers on his lips. ‘No, you’re right. We should consider every possibility, however unlikely, because certainly none of the usual explanations fit.’ He peered out at the lightning display. ‘To start with, if this is a signal, it would have to be ridiculously strong to create what we’re witnessing out there.’
‘So let’s check to see if this is a signal.’ I grabbed the mouse and opened up the live capture window.
My mind whirled as I looked at the graphs that appeared. Hundreds of sine waves bounced up and down the screen, the data so dense there was hardly any blank space between the dancing lines.
A shiver ran through me. ‘Tell me that’s not a fast radio burst signal?’
‘An FRB is the only thing that fits, Lauren, but the complexity of it is off the scale – not to mention its duration.’
I pointed to the strength indicator. ‘But look at the power of it – two hundred and twenty-six gigahertz. This isn’t exhibiting the usual characteristics of an FRB signal. It’s acting more like an extreme high-frequency signal, an EHF, but even then it’s at least twenty times more powerful than the strongest military hardware broadcast we’ve ever received.’
‘You’re right again. It’s across an incredibly wide radio frequency too.’
I turned to Steve. ‘There is one explanation we should be beginning to seriously consider.’
Steve clutched his head in his hands. ‘I’m so not going there, not yet at least.’
It seemed as if neither of us were prepared to voice the idea now lurking like the proverbial elephant in the room: that this was the sort of signal SETI had been searching for years for. Could we be the first to receive a signal from an alien civilisation?
‘Damn it, I need to think,’ Steve said. He grabbed his yo-yo and begun pacing up and down the room while muttering to himself. He kept flicking the yo-yo to the floor and making it return to his palm with a slap.
Steve stopped pacing to say, ‘Maybe, based at least on the sheer power of this broadcast, it could be coming from a source nearer to home.’
‘What are you saying? That someone is deliberately sending a signal and aiming it directly at Lovell?’ I asked.
‘Why not? Maybe we’ve been caught up with some sort military test of a space-based weapon designed to jam radio systems.’
‘As a woman who adores sci-fi, I would normally go for a cool tech answer. But this is so far beyond what any military force on this planet is currently capable of that it isn’t funny.’ I breathed in through my nose. ‘Are we ready to leap down the rabbit hole together yet?’
Steve shook his head. ‘No, I want to rule out every other explanation first, Lauren. You know what happened with the team who were caught up in the famous Wow! signal.’
‘Of course I do. Every astronomy student is taught how the Ohio Big Ear telescope team thought they’d captured an extraterrestrial signal.’
‘And then you also know how much rubbish they had to deal with as well.’
‘I do, but don’t forget the jury is still out on what that signal really was. And since then we’ve captured other FRB signals that no one can fully explain yet.’
‘That’s true, but nothing on this power scale and this duration,’ Steve said. ‘However, there is something I’m growing increasingly worried about. As incredible as this all is, I’m starting to get concerned that the Multi-Beam Receiver is going to be wrecked by what’s happening.’
‘But we’ve already tried everything to shut it down, Steve.’
‘Not everything. If there is a power relay stuck open somewhere in the system, I could manually sever the power conduit to Lovell with a fire axe and kill the power to the receiver.’
‘Don’t be an idiot – you could get fried to a crisp!’
‘Not if I insulate myself properly.’
I crossed my arms. ‘If you think I’m going to stand here and let you go outside and get yourself killed, you’ve got another thing coming, Steve.’
‘And I’ll never be able to forgive myself if there was something that I could have done to prevent the destruction of Lovell. Too much blood, sweat and tears have gone into it for me to allow that to happen.’
I knew Jodrell Bank was Steve’s whole life but he was talking about Lovell as if it were something alive rather than a machine that could be fixed. Maybe I wasn’t the only hopeless romantic working here.
Steve closed his eyes. ‘It may be too late by the time he gets here.’
‘Look, as much as I respect you, what happens next is his call, not yours.’ I took my mobile out and turned off the flight mode. I shrugged at Steve. ‘Something tells me that a mobile signal isn’t going to overwhelm what we’re currently capturing.’ I stared at the distinct lack of signal bars. ‘That’s strange – my phone won’t connect to my network.’
Steve took out his own phone and frowned. ‘Same here. It must be the strength of the signal disrupting the local cellular network.’
‘Then I’ll use one of the landlines.’ I crossed to one of the grey plastic phones that looked like original 1970s throwbacks and started dialling.
I waited, listening to the phone ringing for a good minute before a very pissed-sounding Graham picked up at the other end.
‘Who the bloody hell is ringing me at this bloody hour of the morning?’ he said.
‘It’s Lauren from work. We need you in here now.’
‘Why exactly?’
‘There is no easy way to explain it over the phone, Graham. You need to get here and fast, not least to stop Steve playing the hero and putting his life on the line.’
‘What the hell? Tell him not to do anything stupid till I get there.’
‘Will do.’ I put the receiver down and turned. ‘Graham said—’
Steve had vanished.
‘You damned idiot, Steve!’ I shouted as I raced outside.
Lovell was at the centre of its very own glowing energy nebula as continuous lightning arced out from it like a giant version of one of those plasma ball lights that used to be popular.
I spotted Steve, who as promised had managed to find himself a fire axe and was heading straight towards Lovell with a stride that meant business.
I sprinted after him, and despite a not insignificant difference in our heights, was ready to rugby-tackle him to the ground, if that was what it took to stop the idiot. ‘Graham said that you’re not to do anything until he gets here!’ I shouted.
