

# The Signal

By William Young

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

William Young at Smashwords

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Chapter 1

Carla Lombard stared through the window of the lab, up into the nighttime heavens and the twinkling stars above. Silence, again. For twenty years she had been coming to the Owens Valley Radio Site to plumb the universe for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and every year she had ended her trip the same way, with nothing to show for it. For a moment, she caught her reflection in the window, a translucent version of herself staring back at her above a mug of herbal tea, but then her eyes focused back on the dark sky above the radio telescopes, not perturbed one bit by the silence of the sky.

"Nothing from any of you, again. How typical," she said to herself, sipping from her mug.

Carla turned from her reflection and surveyed the lab, a cramped space with a dozen terminals and various charts and calendars pinned to the walls, most of them out-of-date, remnants from previous groups trying to co-ordinate their efforts to find something new in the universe. Graduate students and doctoral candidates were scattered at computers, reviewing the latest data and looking for clues pointing at some life in outer space. Carla glanced at the clock on the wall and shook her head knowingly: they'd all stay until they fell asleep at the terminals if she didn't shoo them out of the room every night. She had been like that too, long ago, as a graduate student desperate for answers from the universe. Now, life was different; she didn't care if outer space had anything to say to her.

"Okay, guys, it's almost ten o'clock. Let's shut the system down and let the computers do the work," Carla said. The students emerged from their own private data cocoons, in which they were oblivious to the hums from the computers or the clicks on terminals. "I'm going to The Rose. As usual, the first round is on the university, so feel free to join me."

Carla paused for a half-moment as the students finally found their way to full attention on her, their reveries broken and reality back. "But if you want to stay..."

The Rose was nothing like a flower. It was a large room with wooden booths, a long bar with a brass rail, fake stained glass windows behind the bar, bottles of gin and vodka standing in columns and rows on low risers. Indeed, it more resembled an Elks Lodge built in the 1950s and never remodeled. Carla and her team – she liked to think of the members of the annual trip to the Owens Valley site as a team, rather than students – sat at a long table, several pitchers of beer before them, a pair of pizza boxes empty. They had been talking about politics and current events and had come to the conclusion that none of them really knew what was going on in the world because they spent so much time wondering what was going on in the universe.

"You know what's weird, there's a presidential race going on right now and the only thing I really know is that the president is running again," Peter Jenkins said. "My dad asked me what I thought about Hartman and I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. And then I thought, 'election,' I've never even voted and I'm not sure if I'm even registered."

Gloria Flores, a doctoral student in her early 30s, leaned forward in her chair and assessed Peter. "How old are you?"

"Twenty-four," Peter said.

"You're twenty-four and never voted?" Gloria said mock-incredulously. "Tell me you're not still a virgin, too."

The rest of the team smiled at Peter as he took the rib good-naturedly.

"Hey, I haven't always been an astronomy geek. I was an undergrad for four years, I had a life, once," Peter said. "And, anyway, spending all your nights pointing things into the sky kind of occupies the same time spot dating would."

Barrett Smythe leaned in and laughed, "Well, you'll have a couple of weeks off soon enough. Maybe you can work something into your love life between Sunday and the start of the semester."

"I was kind of thinking I'd register to vote," Peter said.

Gloria Flores smiled broadly and said, "Well, then, I guess I better tell you that Hartman is the president on the television show The Oval Office, not the real president in the White House."

Peter looked confused. "But I don't even watch that show."

"You probably read an issue of Entertainment Weekly and thought it was Time," Barrett Smythe said.

The table erupted in friendly laughter and Carla felt a warm glow of pride within her. Her team was like family, and it felt good when the family was bonding and enjoying each other's company, not feuding over misplaced decimal points or time on a telescope. Carla tilted the last of her beer into her mouth and set the pint glass down on the table. She glanced at her watch and then surveyed the table.

"Well, I've got just enough time to call home and say good-night, so I'll see all of you tomorrow," Carla said, standing from her chair amid a chorus of well wishes.

It was cold in the parking lot, and Carla shrugged tighter into her light windbreaker, hoping for heat. She slipped her cell phone from a pocket and pressed in the numbers for home.

Hundreds of miles away, Bill Lombard reacted to the trill of the phone and checked the caller ID.

"Hey, honey, how was your day?"

"Same as yesterday. Yours?" Carla asked.

Bill sighed audibly. "I found a bag of pot in the saddle bag on Jenny's bike."

"What?"

"Yeah."

Carla stared into the darkness of the horizon beyond the parking lot. "How'd you find that?"

"She asked me to tighten the chain on her bike, and while I was lifting it, it just fell out of the saddle bag under the seat," Bill said matter-of-factly. "That and a pipe like the one you had in college. And a lighter."

For a moment, Carla stung at the reference to her college life and her weekend marijuana use. She hadn't smoked pot since before Jenny had been born, giving it up when trying to get pregnant the first time. She'd never missed it. But now, just weeks from when her first-born child was due to fly the coop for her own college journey, Carla couldn't help but think that her daughter would embrace the wrong aspects of her freedom.

"Aww, Christ. What'd you do?" Carla asked.

Bill chortled. "I switched out the pot with some tobacco from a Macanudo I tore apart. I want to see what she does when she realizes I'm on to her."

Carla rolled her eyes and stared up into the night sky in disbelief. "So, you switched out a bad habit for another bad habit?"

"Well," Bill started, then paused. "It's not like she's going to take up cigar smoking because I pulled a switch on her. And, anyway, she starts college in a couple of weeks, I figured we ought to let her know we're not as dumb and out-of-it as she thinks we are.

"I'm sure she'll notice the difference right away. I think. Pot leaves and cigar tobacco don't look the same," Bill said, uncertainty creeping into his words. "Maybe it'll scare her straight."

Carla sighed. "Yeah, I know, but it's one thing to smoke pot on the weekends in college, it's another thing to stash it in your mountain bike and go for daily rides," Carla said. "I thought she was exercising, dammit, not riding out into the woods to get high."

"Well, when she goes out on her ride tomorrow, she'll know the jig is up," Bill said. "And you'll be home in a couple of days, so, maybe we should talk to her when you get back."

Carla looked back up into the night sky, searching for answers. She knew so much about how the heavens worked, and so little about how people did. Oddly, she had never noticed the irony in this.

"How're the boys?" She asked.

"Nate is fine, and Johnnie is scheduled to pitch tomorrow, so that's good," Bill said. "He's wanted to start all season, and now he gets his chance. We worked on his slider tonight after dinner, but I think he should really just stick to fastballs and curves. He hasn't had the experience on the mound to add another pitch, yet.

"I'll video it and you can watch when you get back."

Carla smiled at the thought. "Do that. I want to see it."

"About when do you think you'll be back?" Bill asked.

"Before dinner."

"Well, I hope you have good hunting while your season lasts," Bill said.

"Thanks honey," Carla said, closing her phone and walking to her car.

Chapter 2

Tom and Mary Gibson strolled through the main display tent of the Bucks County Grange Fair, Tom pushing a double-stroller with their two toddler children. Mary stopped frequently to check the wares of the local artists, normally hand-made jewelry, photographs, or paintings of landscapes past and present. Tom was bored almost immediately, as he guessed he would be after Mary had proposed the idea after breakfast.

"You want to look at stuff about farming?" Tom had said, suddenly seeing his afternoon matinee evaporating before his eyes. "I mean, it'll be farm animals and plows and tractors, what's to see?"

Mary had looked at him thinly, as if he didn't get it, and he hadn't gotten it. "It'll be a 'family day activity,' Tom, something we need to do... as a family."

And right then another unspoken requirement of married life became apparent to Tom. Five years and two kids into the venture, Tom hadn't realized he would have to cede so much of himself to the enterprise. He'd had to quit smoking when Mary did, the morning she'd produced a plus sign on a pregnancy stick, although he had walked outside the house and lit up a cigarette in both celebration and bewilderment. He'd only walked outside to be one with the world, but, weeks later, after Mary had actually quit smoking for good, she had asked him to either quit or smoke outside permanently because she didn't like the smell of the house when he smoke inside. Ultimately, he quit the day his son was born, smoking a cigar outside the hospital with another newly-made father.

"I think the kids are enjoying the trip here," Tom said, looking down at the two toddlers sitting idly in the stroller.

"We're starting a tradition, Tom," Mary said, using a tone of voice women reserve solely for husbands, before her attention was grabbed by shiny objects behind glass. "Oh, I'm going to look at this case, there might be something interesting in it."

Tom watched as his wife drifted a few feet away and engaged the saleswoman in conversation, pointing at earrings and necklaces inside the case. Tom stared around the tent and then down at the children, wondering if the new family tradition was taking root with them. He pushed the stroller down to the next artisan and looked disinterestedly into the case at the wares. And then he pushed the stroller a few more feet and stopped dead in his tracks.

"Wow," Tom said, unconscious of the fact he was speaking and not thinking. "Ham radio?"

On the other side of a long collapsible table, Lincoln Feathers sat on a folding chair, seemingly oblivious to the world if you judged by the expression on his face the first instant Tom stopped before him, but the words from Tom's mouth changed the man's demeanor, and Lincoln lit up full of ceremony and circumstance.

"At your service," Lincoln said, standing and sticking his hand into the void between him and Tom. "I'm Whiskey Three Four Niner Tango."

Tom stared at the man's hand for a second, unsure what the heck had just happened. He recognized the need for action and shook the man's hand.

"What do your friend's call you?" Tom asked.

"Niner Tango," Lincoln said.

Tom paused and smiled, a bit confused, still, over what was going on between him and the man across the table from him. Tom glanced around for a clue and noticed a wedding band on the man's hand.

"What's your wife call you?" Tom asked.

"Late for dinner, usually," Lincoln said.

Tom, flustered, resorted to the direct approach. "I'm Tom Gibson."

The man smiled. "Lincoln Feathers, nice to meet you."

Tom shook the man's hand awkwardly, not getting a good grip and feeling foolish about the seconds that had passed while Lincoln had held his hand in the gulf between them.

"I thought this stuff went out of style with the Internet's arrival," Tom said.

Lincoln brightened. "Oh, no, it only made us more popular."

"More popular?" Tom asked.

"Of course, now people can look us up online and find out how to join in on the fun," Lincoln said.

"Wouldn't you guys rather just email each other, instead?" Tom asked, glancing about to see what Mary was up to. She was still at the artisan's stand, examining necklaces.

"About what?" Lincoln said.

"About all the stuff you're saying into your radio. You could use and instant message client and do it all in real time, or tie a mic into it and it's just like you're using your radio," Tom said.

"And where'd be the fun in that?" Lincoln asked.

Tom shrugged in a friendly manner. "Well, I suppose you could come up with some sort of skin for the IM interface that would make it look like you're using a radio, and you'd still be talking to the same people you always talk to."

Lincoln smiled affably. "Except I'd be using a computer instead of an actual radio, which is the whole point of using the radio. If I wanted, I could just call people on the phone."

"So what's the purpose of using an old radio to reach people somewhere else?" Tom asked.

"Well, Tom, it's really about finding people like yourself. Someone else out there who wants to bounce radio waves off the sky and see where they go. The randomness of finding someone you'd have never found through any other way, and the thrill of connecting to a transceiver a mile or a thousand miles from where you are," Lincoln said patiently, explaining for the thousandth time the point of the hobby to a befuddled questioner.

"And, anyway, this isn't an old radio. I bought it brand new just six months ago. It's state-of-the-art."

Tom suddenly felt foolish. "Sorry, I didn't mean—"

Lincoln waved his hand through the air politely, shutting down Tom's apology.

"No, I know what you meant. I get this all the time from people who've never been around an amateur radio enthusiast, but it's more popular now than ever. It's a hobby, that's all, not some call for people to revert to an earlier age," Lincoln said, reaching down to the table and pulling a business card from a stack and handing it to Tom.

"Here, take this. Some friends and I meet the first Saturday night of the month to run a couple of sets and see who we turn up. Mostly, though, it's an excuse to get away from the family and drink Scotch," Lincoln said, noticing Mary had finished her discussion at the jewelry booth and looking at her husband. "And this Saturday is the first of the month. Come and bring a single malt. There are a couple of guys who'll talk behind your back if you bring a blend, even if it's a good one. They're snobs, but they're friends."

Mary stopped by the ham radio booth and gave the two men a quizzical look, the look on Tom's face giving away something, but she wasn't sure what. She looked at Lincoln, who was smiling guiltily, although Mary couldn't quite make out why. She looked down at the radio on the table between the two men, and then turned to Tom.

"You're not going to buy that, are you?" Mary asked, her voice tinged with a blend of sarcasm and incredulity.

"No," Tom said too quickly. "No, I was just talking with him about it."

"Good, I don't think I want you buying any more gadgets until you can figure out how to program the universal remote control," Mary said with a measure of good cheer and wifely condescension. She knew her man and his limitations.

Tom looked at Lincoln, and Lincoln smiled back knowingly, having been in the same spot a million times in his own marriage.

"Thanks for the invite, I may just take you up on it," Tom said.

Tom and Mary pushed the stroller away from the booth. Mary looked over her shoulder back at Lincoln, who was again sitting, and turned to Tom.

"Take him up on what?" Mary asked.

"He and some of his ham radio buddies get together once a month to hand out at his place and – as he put it – bounce radio waves off the sky," Tom said.

"Just like you and the Internet, only less often," Mary said.

"Yeah, though I get the idea it's mostly a guy's night out."

"Why do you say that?"

"He told me to bring a bottle of Scotch if I go."

Mary paused for a second and tilted her head at Tom. "Well, that makes it a lock, I'm sure."

Chapter 3

Dante Holmes, aka "Scots Tape," was at work in his home recording studio, putting some finishing touches on his latest single. He sat before a small bank of computer equipment and musical devices, listening to the song, stopping it frequently to adjust a level here and there, or to insert a new sound track. But no matter what he did, the result was not what he wanted.

"Aww, shit. I need a sound," Dante said to himself. "Why the hell don't I have the sound?"

Dante lived in a modest apartment, and his recording studio consisted of a corner of the living room stuffed with equipment and wired into a nearby walk-in closet. The closet had been re-fitted to be a recording studio, and the walls and ceiling were covered with sound-dampening material. The look was cheap, but meticulously done. Dante didn't have the cash for even a pretend professional home studio, but he didn't do anything half-assed if it was him doing the work, and the room showed it, even if it was covered in a composite of egg crates and Styrofoam.

Dante started the song over again while digging through his computer files looking for a sound. He dragged a file into a mixing program and dropped it in, then managed it with another software tool. He listened. He frowned.

The phone rang.

"Aww, Christ!"

Dante pushed his chair away from the computer equipment and started walking to the phone, picking it up without checking the caller ID.

"Hello?" Dante said.

"Dante, you comin' to work today?"

Dante's stomach dropped out as he looked over at the clock on the stove in the kitchen. He was late for work. Again. He shook his head at his absent-mindedness.

"Sorry, yeah, I'll be there in twenty."

Dante put the phone down and walked over to his computer and shut down the mix software. The song would have to wait. Among the equipment was a ham radio, and he turned that on and adjusted some software click boxes on his computer to record random chatter from the ham radio frequencies for a concept album he was currently calling "Bounced Sound." He had no idea what the album would sound like, but was gathering huge amounts of broadcast sound in the hopes of finding something in it to create a truly ground-breaking musical concept.

Dante entered the music and electronics store and looked around for his boss. As he made his way to the time clock, co-workers nodded hello to him and he began to feel comfortable with being late, a chronic condition for him. He didn't want to be late for work, but he considered making music his real work so he easily forgot about the bread-and-butter side of life, the part which required him to do something for someone else. He pushed through the doors to the backroom and pulled his swipe card from its slot on the wall, swishing it through the card reader. It beeped to initialize the beginning of his shift.

"I've got to record that sound," Dante said softly, to himself, for the thousandth time.

From behind him came the voice of his manager. "Nice of you to show up, Dante."

Dante turned and looked apologetic. "Yeah, sorry, I was-"

The manager waved him off. "Forget it. This is the third time this month you've been more than thirty minutes late. I don't mind all the five and ten minute days, but when you're this late, you're makin' someone else late for something. The next time, don't bother comin' in at all."

Several hours later, Dante and co-worker Kendell Watson, aka fireARM, sat in a sandwich shop down the road from the store, eating on their dinner break from work. Kendell was also an aspiring musician, and the two were talking about their current projects.

"It's gonna be unbelievable, fire. I amaze myself sometimes with what I've been puttin' together," Dante said between bites of an Italian hoagie loaded with jalapeno slices. "People are going to have epiphanies listenin' to it."

"I believe it, Scots, but you have to get real with your time management at work. Tony will fire your ass without thinking about it, and you're someone he likes. You can't be late all the time," Kendell said.

Dante shrugged and ate a French fry. "Ehh, he ain't really gonna fire me, he's just making me know he's the boss, and I got no problem with that," Dante said, pausing to consider. "I hope he won't fire me, I need the store discount. And the paycheck, of course.

"But that's not even what I'm thinking about these days. The music, I'm telling you it's going to be totally different than anything you've ever heard before. I can't explain it in words, but I'll let you listen to a rough mix of a song sometime in the next few weeks, once I get it closer to sounding like what's in my head. I just need to find the right sounds."

The two sat in silence a few moments and ate their sandwiches, each inside his head and thinking about music. Kendell drummed his fingers on the table and looked up at Dante.

"You gonna keep Kaylinne on vocals?" Kendell asked.

Dante considered this for a moment. "I dunno. Depends on whether I have to release it myself on the Internet or if I can get a deal. I get a deal, I'm gonna get a better vocalist," Dante said. "Kaylinne is good, but she's not professional grade, you know."

Kendell tilted his head to the side for a moment in disbelief. "Yeah, but if everyone in the shop keeps using her as their vocalist, she's gonna end up getting the deal and the rest of us will still be working in the shop."

Dante shook his head. "Nah. If she makes it, all of us make it, too, because we made her."

"Maybe, but she'll be the star and we'll be getting the scraps."

Dante cocked his head to the side. "What are we getting now?"

Chapter 4

Carla pushed through the front door of her home and trudged through the foyer and down the main hall of the house, a bag of luggage strapped over each shoulder. She dropped the bags at the foot of the staircase and sifted through the mail on the small table nearby, happy to be returned to the normal routines of home life. She loved searching for extra-terrestrial life every summer, but it always made her miss home life even more.

She set the mail down and walked the rest of the way through the house and into the kitchen, glancing at a clock on the wall before opening a cabinet and pulling down a bottle of vodka. She mixed herself a vodka tonic, cutting a lemon slice into it, and took a deep sip from the drink. She walked back through the house to the foot of the stairs and paused to listen: sounds of typing on a computer keyboard were barely audible, and she smiled. She started up the steps softly, listening as she went, then the sound from the room changed from typing to laser blaster fire. She smiled.

Bill glanced at the clock on the bottom right portion of his computer monitor and stopped typing. He listened. He heard nothing. He turned in his chair and looked over his shoulder at the doorway. Nothing. He pressed the ALT and TAB keys on his keyboard and switched over to an online alien invasion game, clicked through a few menu options, and waited to spawn onscreen. His avatar appeared and he began sneaking through the online maze, shooting at other avatars as he worked his way through the level. Suddenly, his character was killed and the screen switched to a view from his killer's position. Bill waited to re-spawn and pushed his chair back from the desk.

"Frickin' mouse," Bill said to himself.

"He got you fair and square, lamer," Carla said from behind him.

Bill turned in his chair and smiled broadly. "No way. The mouse totally stuck."

"Why is it every time I sneak up on you I find you playing a game instead of writing? This is maybe why you haven't written a best seller?" Carla said with a smile.

Bill rolled his eyes. "The third stair up from the bottom squeaks and I always hear you coming and click over so you won't read over my shoulder."

Carla smiled knowingly, "Uh-huh," and turned and walked out of the room.

Bill quickly clicked over to a Web site tracking the sales of his most recent novel, turned in his chair, and shouted down the hallway, "Incendiary Landing is at 36,000 copies so far, honey. That's not chicken feed."

Carla smiled and turned into her daughter's room. Jenny wasn't in it, and Carla shook her head briefly before turning and walking back downstairs, the sounds of laser blaster fire filling the air.

Carla walked into the backyard and sat down on a chair on the patio. She stared up into the blue sky and took a sip from her drink when Jenny rode her bike into the yard and braked to a stop. Jenny hopped off, smiled at her mother, and Carla beamed back at her.

"Hi, Mom, you're back," Jenny said as she walked her mountain bike through the grass.

"Hey, Jenny, I just got in. How was your ride?"

A flit of guilt washed over Jenny's face. Jenny shrugged.

"It was good," Jenny said. "Me and Teri rode up to Druid Knoll and then on the path around the lake."

Carla ignored the grammatical mistake and leaned forward in her chair. "You're not taking ecstasy, E, X, or anything else are you?"

Jenny froze in embarrassment. "MOM!"

"Honey, we're going to talk about this later, you know."

Jenny deflated. "Yeah, I know."

Jenny walked her bike over to the garage door and walked into the house in silence, not looking at Carla. Carla took a deep pull from her drink as she wondered how that conversation would begin, and when, and then stared back up into the blue skies and clouds.

"Maybe it's the same everywhere."

Chapter 5

Colonel John Hibbens sat before a bank of ultra-modern computer screens in the loneliest post the Air Force had to offer. The equipment in the room was the highest technology available to the Air Force, but the structure in which it sat was old and windowless, constructed in the aftermath of World War Two as an afterthought and re-invented with a purpose after the so-called alien crash in Roswell in 1947. Hibbens ignored the data on the screens before him, updated by-the-second, ignoring it has he always had. He was a disbeliever, an agnostic, perhaps, of the entire SETI idea. He knew that that was what got him into this spot; his commanders knew he would be thorough and skeptical, without preconceptions.

Hibbens knew there was no rational reason to believe aliens had ever visited Earth. This was something to which he was privy to Top Secret information, knowing the true details of the Roswell crash as only someone in his unit could.

First, the distance to from Earth to the next planet is so far that the travel time would almost ensure that no life form could endure it. He had read much on the subject by experts in the field – including among them science fiction stories he initially found boring but later came to love as a genre - and had pondered the idea many times, even writing his own analyses over-and-over again on the many long shifts he sat in his office, wondering what response would be warranted should alien contact be made. Given the improbability of it all, his official paper on the necessary response was terse: No official response to the possibility of alien contact is warranted at this time. His commander had rejected that one-page document, and Hibbens had had to spend several long nights typing out a more acceptable 37-page document detailing why there was no reason to create a document detailing how the United States should react to an extra-terrestrial encounter. That report had had to be amended by a staff-written 94-page report detailing the many "what if" scenarios that could arise were the Earth contacted by an extra-terrestrial species before his commander would accept it and push it up the chain-of-command.

Second, any life form that could attempt it – that had the technology to do so – would know that it would take generations of life forms to complete the mission, and there was no known way of creating a mission team capable of such action. At least, there was not with humans. Extrapolating human behavior to other life forms had been deemed idiotic by Hibbens, since there was no reason to assume they would think like humans. There was no knowable reason why any extra-terrestrial species capable of inter-stellar space flight through the vast distance of space would choose Earth to visit, or even know it existed.

Third, given the first two problems, there was no upside to trying: to wit, by the time the space travelers spent the tens of thousands of years in transit, the planet they left would be vastly different by the time any generation of travelers could return to tell the tale of first contact. Even if the travelers to Earth were placed in cold sleep both ways, the people on their home planet would be separated by at least millennia on both ends of the journey. Indeed, those on the sending planet would likely regard those on the mission to Earth as a fable to describe the folly of arrogance, not as a scientific mission to achieve prosperity or inter-species co-operation. Not to mention that the species on the planet they were attempting to contact would have evolved enormously in the mean time and either become hostile to extra-terrestrials or open to their arrival, or died off as a result of any of a million possibilities. There was no upside to making such a journey given the possible technology, real or imagined, and Hibbens figured it would be better for humans to give up on meeting ET and concentrate on shorter-term goals.

Hibbens' office was on the secret Area 51 base in Nevada. It was in an out-of-the-way spot on the base, and was tiny. There were ten people in the office, each working at a computer. There were three shifts of ten men, working around the clock to monitor the SETI labs across the globe, and Hibbens had always been astounded to find out there were infrequent overt and covert operations run by the Air Force to access other SETI projects around the planet. It made no sense to Hibbens that SOCOM units would be dispatched to put software patches on foreign SETI outfits, but he had no say in it. Hibbens merely ran the sideshow, as those in the know in the military referred to his unit and the disinterested men and women reviewing data on their computers, assessing the various SETI projects. Hibbens assumed they were as bored with their jobs as he was with his, but they all knew that success with this unit was a gold star on their records, proof that they were worthy of the most top secret rating the government had to offer, and, therefore, access to a different and more rewarding career path.

Captain Jim Forrestal closed the browser he had been reading, stodd, and walked to where Hibbens was sitting. Forrestal was an Air Force special forces trained airman who couldn't believe the super-top-secret post to which he'd been assigned was monitoring university students' attempts to find extra-terrestrial life, but, then, he thought that allowed him to believe he'd seen all the idiocy the military had to offer. He'd signed up to do the most dangerous jobs the military had to offer out of a sense of duty to the country and a need to do something few in the military could do, and that desire had proven irony to its fullest, at least in the sense that few in the military were as highly trained as he was to do nothing with his training.

"Sir."

Hibbens looked up. "Yes?"

"I just finished reviewing the latest CalTech survey. As usual, they got nothing," Forrestal said.

"Thank you, Jim. Who's up next at the facility?"

"A group from the University of Pittsburgh has the next four days, then a collection of schools from the UK," Forrestal said.

"Well, then, captain, update the scoreboard," Hibbens said disinterestedly.

Forrestal smiled slightly and walked across the room to a white board mounted to a wall beneath an aged, yellowed dot matrix computer-printed sign that read: SETI Say What? He picked up a marker and eraser, wiped away the blue "relax" and wrote a red "relax."

At the end of the afternoon, Hibbens walked out of the building and into the parking lot and paused to watch a small aircraft hovering over a nearby runway on the other side of a tall, razor-wire tipped chain-link fence. The craft zipped up, hovered, moved laterally, hovered, then moved diagonally downward where it stopped in a hover inches above the ground. Hibbens smiled as he watched a group of technicians manipulate a computer console on the side of the runway.

"And people think you have to be an alien to invent this stuff," Hibbens said to himself, pulling out a keychain from his pocket and clicking a button on it, auto-starting his car.

Chapter 6

Tom stared in bewilderment at the variety of radios lining the walls of Lincoln's garage, a structure long-ago converted over from housing automobiles and yard tools into a radio room and lounge. A series of tables against the back wall hold ham radios, computers, and other high-tech radio equipment Tom had never heard of before. Three of Lincoln's friends sat before a pair of state-of-the-art radio sets - Jed, Grover and Charles – who were working the radios, sending out radio calls and trying to find someone listening on the other end of a signal. All of the men were already drinking Scotch. Lincoln approached Tom with a winning smile.

"I'm glad you came," Lincoln said, shaking hands with Tom. He noticed Tom's bottle and nodded to it.

Tom raised it for examination, and Lincoln smiled, again.

"The Balvenie Double Wood, a good choice," Lincoln said, taking the bottle and motioning for Tom to follow him to a side table with bottles and glasses on it. "Take your pick," Lincoln said, waving a hand before the glass tumblers.

Tom bent over and examined them, noticing immediately that each had a pewter animal wrapped around the base of the glass. Tom glanced at Lincoln's hand and noticed a leopard curled around the tumbler's base.

"All the big cats are taken, I'm afraid," Lincoln said. "I've got the leopard, Jed has the cheetah, Grover is the lion and Charles is the tiger. Pick well, though, because it's your official glass once you do, and nobody else is allowed to drink from it."

Tom looked back at the table and selected the one with a rhinoceros. "Is this one available?"

Lincoln nodded. "All of them are. So far, there's only four of us in the club; you stick around, you'll be number five. Fill it with whatever's on the table."

Tom poured in a couple of fingers worth of MacAllan twelve year and followed Lincoln to another table, where Lincoln paused over an assortment of cigars.

"Cigar?"

Tom shook his head. "Nah, thanks. I smoked cigarettes until my first son was born, then I quit."

Lincoln gave the barest of noticeable eye rolls. "I've got cigarettes, if you want. I never quit."

Tom paused for a moment and thought about it, then shook his head. "Mary'd kill me."

"Suit yourself, but you're still going to go home smelling of smoke," Lincoln said. "You didn't turn into an anti-smoking Nazi since quitting, I hope?"

Tom smiled. "No. I'm still waiting for Big Tobacco to announce that they've had a secret lab at work for decades that's finally found the cure for lung cancer so I can start back up. I still think a cigarette is the best accompaniment to an ice cold martini."

Lincoln nodded. "And a Macanudo is the perfect pairing with fine single malt. But there's no peer pressure here."

At one of the sets in the back of the room, Grover suddenly came to life, having made a connection with a far off radio operator, and the others grew quiet.

Grover spoke into the microphone, "Whiskey eight niner kilo, come in, over."

"Whiskey three four niner tango, we read you Lima Charlie," said a voice from the speaker. "What're you drinking tonight?"

Grover smiled. "Rotgut, as usual."

"Laphroig, I presume," the voice came back.

"Lagavulin, actually, how about you," Grover asked.

"Some crap from Kentucky," the voice said.

Tom turned to Lincoln and gave him a quizzical look. Lincoln smiled and tilted his head for effect, "It's whisky for the Whiskey Men."

Chapter 7

Dante stood near his mixing set-up, a version of a song he was working on blaring from the speakers. His eyes were closed so as to not see the reaction from Kaylinne, who sat on the couch in the living room listening to her performance. If physical beauty mattered, Kaylinne is star material already, and it was clear that the song writers using her for her vocals were employing her for more than just her vocal talents, although Dante had never made a move on her.

The song ended and Dante bent over the computer. "Before you say anything, I just want to say I think your vocals are perfect."

Kaylinne's eyes bugged out and she leaned forward on the couch. "Scots Tape! It's not perfect. You changed the levels all over the place, I sound like I'm singing on some sort of merry-go-round with my voice coming in and out like that."

Dante turned to face her and put his arms up. "KL, come on! It's called "bounced sound" for crying out loud. That's the concept I'm working on. It's perfect," Dante said, staring at Kaylinne for a few moments before weakening. "Well, almost, sure. It needs some work, yeah, but it's almost perfect. I want your voice soaring in and out. It's just missing something, some sort of sound I haven't found, yet."

Kaylinne rolled her eyes. "What was that other stuff you mixed in real low? It sounded like somebody doing the alphabet or something."

Dante shrugged. "Its call signs for ham radio operators."

Kaylinne screwed up her face. "Ham radio call signs?"

Dante nodded. "Yeah, guys out there using ham radios to talk to each other and shit like that. Just something I'm trying out. Might not make it to the final cut, though. You have to listen to a lot of boring crap to get a good snippet to mix into the background."

Dante turned and tapped a few keys on the computer keyboard, and a moment later the speakers played the beginning of a conversation.

"This in uniform eight three oscar, howya doing hotel three?"

"Doing fine, I got my daughter here right now and she'd like to say something," Uniform three said. "Go ahead, honey."

Dante clicked on stop and looked at Kaylinne. "His daughter doesn't say anything interesting, and the conversation goes on for like fifteen minutes."

"And you're recording this why?" Kaylinne asked.

"Because this stuff is out there, I guess. Just people talking into the air, and you can capture it. I dunno, just because it hasn't been done before. You know, the sound of the planet, of people talking to people all over the world or just next door," Dante said. "I'm thinking I'm going to sample commercial radio, television, anything I can grab from the air, anything that's bouncing through the sky. And, then, I want to take all that sound and turn it into music. Not just by sampling it, but re-working it into music."

Dante stopped himself and noticed the clock on the wall. "Jeez, let's get of here. It's Saturday night and I don't want to spend it all in here."

Kaylinne looked up, "Who's spinning?"

"firearm, why?"

Kaylinne played dumb. "Just curious."

Dante softened. "He's gonna play it for sure. It's good. It's gonna be fantastic. Come on, he's not going to spin it until he knows you're there."

Kaylinne shrugged, stood, and followed Dante to the door of the apartment, giving a last glance back at the radio equipment and shaking her head in disbelief at Dante's most recent muse.

Chapter 8

Carla and Bill sat on their back deck, enjoying the early evening, cocktails sitting on the table between them. Bill maneuvered a cigar in his fingers, took a puff, and blew the smoke upward into the night air. He was glad his wife was back and life had returned to normal. He didn't exactly hate the yearly week of "total dad 24/7" when he had to do everything for their three children, but it was always much more work than he anticipated. And, finding marijuana in Jenny's bicycle saddle bag had only increased the difficulty level. Bill relaxed and took another puff.

"You know, one of the things that gives me comfort in life is knowing that there's some other guy out there my age drinking a single malt and smoking a cigar," Bill said.

Carla smiled wickedly. "Why? Because it somehow makes your smoking more acceptable in society?"

"No," Bill said too quickly, pausing to consider his cigar. "Well, maybe. I've never thought of it that way.

"I mean it more as a universal constant: guys like me aren't anomalies, we're the norm. This is life. At the end of the day, on a perfectly normal Saturday evening like this one, part of the embroidery of life is unwinding with a drink and a cigar," Bill continued. "I might not agree with his politics, his music sensibilities or his taste in fiction, but I'll know one thing: he's a normal guy. And we'll just sit and chat about cigars and Scotch all night and agree on that."

"What if he drinks cheap blends and smokes flavored blunts?" Carla asked.

Bill shrugged. "Doesn't matter. Boil it down; it's the same thing, just an appreciation for it at a different level. Not a worse level, just different. You don't have to be able to afford the finest to enjoy the situation, and the situations are the same."

Carla tilted her head up and looked into the night sky, glancing from star to star as they twinkled. "What about up there? Think there are people up there doing the same?"

Bill looked up. "Sure. There's probably a plane flying into L-A-X with a guy jonesing for the chance to light a cigar to go along with his mini-bottle of Dewar's in his hotel room."

Carla turned in her chair and stared incredulously at her husband. "No. Not up 'there,' I mean way out there. Around one of those distant points of light. Do you think they have drinks and cigars and politics and all the other stuff we have down here?"

"You know I do," Bill said, grabbing his glass and walking to the railing of the deck. He leaned against it and looked up.

"It's a universal constant. Not Scotch. Not cigars. But this activity of actually enjoying life. Of living, of trying to send your kids off into life right," Bill said. "If the people you're looking for up there actually live any way we can imagine, then, yeah, some of them are sitting around their version of home, relaxing, and looking up into their night sky wondering the same thing.

"I mean, you know this, life can't be just this, just here. Even if there isn't a god with a master plan, we can't be the only ones. I don't believe we are. It wouldn't make sense."

Carla shrugged slightly and took a sip of her drink. "It doesn't have to make sense, Bill," Carla said softly. "There's at least one possibility that we are the only intelligent, sentient species in the universe. We could be alone."

Carla looked up. "Right now, we are alone."

Bill took a deep puff on his cigar and held the smoke in his mouth a moment, felt the tingle of nicotine on his lips and cheeks, and exhaled slowly. He turned to Carla.

"But you don't really believe that possibility is the reality," Bill said. "You can't keep looking at millions of stars and really think there's nothing else up there."

"Oh, really?" Carla said.

"Yeah, Bill said, a trace of a smile on his lips. "Or you wouldn't keep looking."

Chapter 9

Peter Jenkins stepped out his apartment building and into the brisk morning air of his neighborhood. There was no traffic on the streets and the early foot traffic was limited to joggers, dog walkers and those unfortunate enough to have to make their way to work on Sunday morning. Peter walked to the pile of newspapers dumped at the building's entrance and picked one up, tucked it under his arm and began his way down the sidewalk to the nearby coffee bar.

He pushed through the doors of The Daily Dose and swam in the aroma of coffee, the scent Peter felt most defined the goodness of the planet. It was rich, intoxicating and luxuriant, a smell that had taste and a tactile element, a smell that worked it's way over the pores of your body just standing in it. Whoever decided to turn a coffee bean into a beverage however-many-thousands of years ago was owed a debt all subsequent generations would never be able to repay, and if all that could be done to immortalize that person was to create a lasting advertizing campaign image of Juan Valdez, well, that was good enough for Peter. At least people would know someone had come up with the idea.

Peter walked up to the coffee bar and stood in line, looking up at the menu. He always got the same thing, so why he looked was always a mystery to him, though he often wondered when a new item might be put on it that he'd want to try. On the other side of the counter, Chloe took notice of him and moved toward him.

"Hey, Peter, you're back," she said with a smile.

"Yeah, a week, now," Peter said.

"A week? I haven't seen you in here in almost a month," Chloe said.

Peter took no notice of this observation. "Been busy. No time to step out of the apartment. Woke up early and figured I'd come down with the laptop and paper and –"

Chloe let a half-giggle out and waved her hand at him, "The usual, then?"

Peter paused. "Uhh, yeah. You remember?"

"Pete, you come in here every morning like clockwork and order the same thing. You think a couple of weeks off are going to make me forget?" Chloe asked.

Peter was befuddled, not sure why – he checked her name tag – Chloe would have made a note of what he ordered, and how often. He made a vague sort of "yeah, sure" body language gesture to her and Chloe responded reassuringly with a head-bob.

"Coming up," Chloe said. "Go, sit, I'll bring it to your table."

Peter was unsure what had just happened, but nodded and walked to a nearby table in the café. He sat down and booted up his laptop, checked the WiFi linkup, and logged onto the Internet.

"So, any aliens out there?" Chloe said as she set down a large cup of coffee and a chocolate-chocolate chip muffin.

"Hunh?"

"Your trip," Chloe said, straightening up.

"Oh, no, nothing," Peter said, trying to remember if he had told her something. "Another summer trip to the site and the aliens don't bother to call. Typical."

"Do you really think they're out there?" Chloe asked, leaning back a bit and trying to look non-threatening and interested in the answer.

Peter took a sip of coffee and suddenly realized he was supposed to have something cool to say, that he was being flirted with – even if only for a better tip – by a cute girl. It was only measurable in microseconds, but Peter resorted to the only default position his memory had in store, which ended up as a mangled quote from the movie "Contact."

"Yeah," Peter said. "What would be the point of the universe if we were the only ones here? That's a waste of a lot of space."

Chloe tilted her head and laughed.

Chapter 10

Mary Gibson walked into the guest room of her house and looked at Tom, sleeping in the guest bed. She walked closer to him and smelled it – tobacco – emanating from his hair, his pile of clothes on the floor nearby, and wrinkled her nose in... distaste. She prodded Tom through the comforter.

"Hey, Tommy-boy, time to get up. We have church in an hour," Mary said, shaking Tom's legs.

Tom rolled over in bed and moaned softly. He opened his eyes. Closed them. Mary smiled.

"You didn't get drunk last night, did you?" Mary asked, her tone supporting and humorous, as if she had expected such an outcome, which she had.

Tom moaned softly, again.

"You shouldn't have driven home, then," Mary said.

"Drunk?" Tom asked rhetorically.

Mary didn't say anything; she just sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed Tom's legs.

"For me... anymore... yes," Tom said, his eyes closed. "According to the state, no. At least, I don't think so."

Tom sat up in the bed and rolled over to where his legs dangled off the bed. Mary rubbed his back for a moment and then started stroking the back of his neck with her fingernails.

"Why'd you sleep in here?" Mary asked.

"Lincoln and the others were all smoking cigars and I didn't want to crawl in bed and have you make me get out and take a shower," Tom said, scratching his head. "Showering the smoke smell off would've been entirely out of the question last night."

"Hon, if I ever ask you to do something like that at that hour of the night, you just tell me to go back to sleep. I don't want to become one of those kinds of naggy wives," Mary said. "We both used to smoke, so it's not like I don't know the smell and, anyway, it's not like you were smoking, right?"

Tom waved his hand slightly. "No, no, not me. They offered, but, well, I've never smoked a cigar and I would've felt stupid pretending to know what I was doing."

Mary smiled. "Well, I guess you could have smoked a cigar if you needed to look cool in front of the guys."

Chapter 11

Kendell and Dante walked down a city street on the way to work, their matching store uniforms giving nothing away as to the fiery musical creativity in their minds, which they were, at present, discussing.

"Kaylinne's 'n my song went down like crazy last night," Kendell said, amazed, still, at the dance floor response to his single.

Dante grunted out a muted laugh. "I knew it would."

"It jumped the place like nothing before," Kendell said.

Dante shrugged. "I told you it was good, but would you listen to me?"

Kendell angled his head at Dante. "I did listen to you; you're the one who said to add the extra bass line."

"Worked, didn't it?" Dante said.

"Shit, yeah, Scots, and I'm glad for the input," Kendell said as they walked past a Korean BBQ street vendor and Kendell stopped to order.

After they had started walking, again, Kendell stopped walking in mid-bite and his shoulders sagged. "We're going to be so screwed if we keep using her."

"Nah, man, if anything, she's gonna open the door for us," Dante said, patting Kendell on the back. "People love the way she sings. Like I keep saying, we keep using her, so we must know something's good about her."

"Yeah, but the industry will just swoop in and take her," Kendell said, tossing his empty stick into a nearby trash can. "They won't care about us. I'm sure they have a thousand Puffy's and Jay-Zs just sitting around. Who needs a Scots Tape or a fireARM?"

Dante laughed. "Kaylinne does. She's never going to forget us if she makes it, because we helped make her. I keep telling you that, fire, you have to have trust me. She doesn't write her own songs, she doesn't pick her own songs, she just sings whatever anybody like you and me can pay her to sing. I mean, hell, she even cuts songs with Peepster Pro, and that fool couldn't cut a new version of Jingle Bells that would get kindergarten kids to dance."

Kendell laughed hard at the thought, remembering Christmas from two years past. "Damn, I almost forgot what you and Kaylinne did with that song a couple of years ago. I thought for sure that was going to break you out, it was so damn original. The dance floor was so packed almost nobody could dance to the song."

"Yeah," Dante said, thinking back.

"You know, Scots, Kaylinne told me last night you were using a ham radio to make music. What's that about?" Kendell asked. "Don't you need a license to use a ham radio?"

"Not to listen," Dante said. "At least, I don't think so. I don't have a mic for it, and I'm not broadcasting, so what's the crime in listening?"

"Yeah, but what's the point?"

Dante stopped and turned to Kendell. "Fire, its sound. Bounced sound. That's the point. There are people out there sending out signals in the blind, hoping anyone will listen, and I'm listening."

"Okay, but does it make good music?" Kendell asked.

Dante paused. "No, not most of it. But if you listen long enough, you hear stuff that's real, authentic, and potentially musical. And you can use that," Dante said. "Damn, Kendell, that's the thing that really gets me."

"What?"

"That everything around us is making sound, but we can't hear most of it. I'm walking and my shoes make noise, my heart's beating and that makes noise, probably the nerves in my brain make some sort of noise doing whatever the hell it is they do, I don't know, like maybe when my stomach tells my brain I'm hungry, the nerves in my brain make a noise while moving that information."

Kendell laughed. "Scots, that's your stomach grumbling. Anyone close enough to you can hear that."

Dante smiled. "Yeah, right. Not what I mean, though. I mean, the entire world is making noise right now," Dante said, waving his arms out at the cityscape around them. "And if you know what to look for, you can turn it into something other than noise, static, and garbage. I guess that's what I'm trying to do now: turn all that into something that makes sense.

"But the major part of that is the intentional sound we create and send out on airwaves every day. I mean, you can't hear it without a radio or a TV, but it's there, right now, burning through the atmosphere. One moment, quiet, turn on the radio, you got sound.

"I want to take all that sound traveling around and turn it into something nobody's ever heard before," Dante said. "Shit, fire, do you know the sun makes sound?"

Dante and Kendell reached the front doors to the music shop and stopped. Kendell turned to Dante.

"That's gonna be one hell of a bill for sampling tracks, Scots, or a helluva lot of lawsuits," Kendell said.

Dante tilted his head in disbelief and pushed through the doors and into the shop. Kendell looked around for a moment and then glanced up into the sky.

"The sun makes sound? Why the hell does nobody hear nothing, then?"

Chapter 12

Hibbens walked quickly into the room and surveyed the team at work. This could be a nightmare, Hibbens thought, as he watched the various crew members working furiously at their work stations. Hibbens was so sure he'd never have to deal with this moment that he'd never really spent any time wondering what it would be like to deal with this moment, and, yet, here he was, in the moment. Hibbens spotted Captain Forrestal and approached him.

"What've we got?" Hibbens asked.

Forrestal raised his eyebrows curiously. "Signal."

Hibbens nodded sagely, indicating that he was on top of the situation, although he knew he wasn't, that he was weeks behind where he should be if only he'd bothered to actually consider the possibility that ET might return the phone call. ET phone home. Hibbens shook his head unnoticeably and wondered if he should take a cigar break.

"Is it fake?" Hibbens asked.

Forrestal shrugged. "We don't know."

"Are the lines running?"

"Yes, sir, we're on three at the moment," Forrestal said.

"And?"

"It'll be a while until we know."

Hibbens shook his head, this time noticeably. "We don't have a while. If this isn't already all over the Internet, we're lucky, but we won't be lucky for long. Start the other three lines"

Forrestal regarded Hibbens curiously. "Of course, but, sir, protocol is to run-"

Hibbens cut him off. "I know, Jim, but this is the first time we've ever had to run a single line, let alone three, outside of an in-house simulation, which means we need to err on the side of the getting-our-shit-straight-quickly, Hibbens said. "We aren't the only ones who got this signal, and some of the people who got it are going to rush to judgment PDQ, so we're going to need the semblance of an answer to the question I'm going to be asked in a vanishingly small amount of time.

"And I have to be able to answer that question with something other than an 'I don't know,'" Hibbens said, his brain roiling with uncertainty. "And you're sure, absolutely sure, it's not some geek astronaut on the international space station?"

Forrestal didn't know what to make of the sudden hyper-complexity of his superior, but he suppressed his emotions and listened. "We ruled that out within the first thirty seconds, but, still, Colonel, this could be some jerk bag in Denmark hacking into a satellite feed and seeing who he can screw with."

"Which is why we need to know, now," Hibbens said.

Hibbens looked around the room, realized nobody had heard anything, and motioned Forrestal to a corner of the room.

"This isn't about us looking like idiots for over-reacting or under-reacting. This is about dollars. We're listed in the Air Force budget as a routine intelligence gathering unit, but our strength is listed as wing size, not the flight we really are. That's the only way they can justify us," Hibbens said. "That's also why there are no enlisted men below E-6 on staff. We're a cadre, a 'break glass in case of emergency' unit. If we can't figure this out quickly, then we're going to have a shitstorm of Air Force constituencies arguing over whether to send us the men and equipment needed to solve this signal, and nobody is going to want to do that because all that extra money in our so-called unit's budget currently gets spent elsewhere on this base."

Forrestal paused. He had never thought about the unit as anything other than some weird, oddball leftover remnant from an earlier time when serious people took the idea of intergalactic UFOs seriously. It had never occurred to him that the unit was a useful line-item in the Air Force budget that allowed for black operations to be funded.

"You mean we're not a real unit really looking for signal?" Forrestal asked.

Hibbens shook his head, "No." He paused for a moment and then said, "Yes."

Hibbens looked around to see if anyone was in ear shot, and motioned to Forrestal to take a few steps further away from the nearby work stations.

"Listen, we're a backdoor money channel for the really secret stuff, but for verisimilitude, we monitor organizations looking for signal, just in case there's anybody in Congress who wants to come and check us out," Hibbens said. "But the protocols in place had to allow for a real plan to react to an actual signal if one ever showed up, and if one does, then people in Congress and the Pentagon are going to want to know what this unit is doing, and we're suddenly going to have to look like a real unit."

"So, we're not really looking for signals from aliens?" Forrestal asked.

"We? Hell, Jim, all we do is monitor the people who are looking so that we don't get caught with our pants down. The US Air Force doesn't give a crap about flying saucers aside from the ones it builds and tests here," Hibbens said. "But all those UFO kooks who hang out trying to get a peek at what we do here on the base think that the Air Force is looking for aliens in the sky, and since people think we do that, the Air Force pretends we do that.

"But I'm sure you've noticed we don't have any kinds of telescopes or radio equipment here in our comfy little shack, and that's because we're not actually looking for anything," Hibbens said. "If we actually get a legitimate extraterrestrial radio signal intercept, we're going to be the proverbial dog that caught the car it was chasing."

"How's that, sir?" Forrestal asked.

"What're we going to do with it now that we've got it?" Hibbens said.

Chapter 13

Carla Lombard sat on a chair in her living room, reading a thriller. Thrillers were the only novels she read anymore, aside from the early drafts of her husband's mid-list science fiction novels, because they were easy reads and easily forgotten afterword. If they had any hidden meaning, any metaphor, she didn't care and didn't look for them. She had long ago given up reading fiction for anything other than idle pleasure, a way to kill a set amount of time and escape to a different place. And, since her life was anything other than that of the stuff of thrillers, she filled her brain's downtime with car chases, gun fights and intrigue. It wouldn't be long before her primary reading material was the often-dull papers generated by her students, and she needed some outlet to live vicariously.

The phone rang. She ignored it, certain Bill, Jenny or one of her boys would bounce to the nearest handset, as it was likely any of them would be the intended call recipient. The phone rang twice more and she realized nobody was going to get it, so she dropped her book and walked to the nearest handset, examined the caller ID and wondered who the hell was calling.

"Hello?" she said disinterestedly into the phone.

"Doctor Lombard, we've got signal," said a breathless Peter on the other end of the line, his voice infused with excitement.

"Peter?" Carla asked.

"Yeah. The site is picking up ET signal right now," Peter said. "Has been for two hours."

Carla looked around her living room, trying to make sure she was still living in her own reality. "Peter, what are you talking about?"

"Owens Valley, its recording signal from somewhere outside our system," Peter said, the words crushed together into one long multi-syllabic word.

Carla had no idea what Peter could be talking about. She walked over to her laptop on the coffee table and pressed the space bar to bring it to life.

"Hold on a second," she said as the screen came to life and she clicked her way to a schedule of Owens Valley users. "Peter, There's nobody at the site monitoring signal. It's on maintenance."

"I know," Peter said. "It's a long story, but a couple of the days we were there, after you left, I would hack into the system and set up a bot to monitor what the other teams were getting—"

Carla was annoyed and cut Peter off. "We already get that data automatically. Everybody posts it on the Web just like we do."

"Yeah, I know, but not in real time," Peter said. "Anyway, I was trying to figure out how to put a bot in there that would send the system results directly to my home computer-"

"What the hell for?" Carla asked, cutting Peter off, again. "You're not supposed to tamper with the system, who knows what the hell you could do to the software, Peter."

This had no affect on Peter's enthusiasm. "I know, I know, but while I was snooping around I found an invisible directory totally by accident, and I managed to open it an there was a bot in there already, sending out the information in real time," Peter said.

Carla cocked her head to the side. "What?"

"Yeah. Somebody else already did it, not that I'm surprised too much, but a little, sure," Peter said. "So, about ten minutes ago I checked and found out that the site has been getting a signal for the past two hours."

Carla gazed around the room, unsure what to make of what Peter was telling her. That one of her prize students was manipulating the facility's software was a major concern to her that could get him expelled, that he was admitting it to her and telling her that the site was picking up off-world signal was bewildering in its ridiculousness, but that there was someone else who had previously done the same thing for whatever unknowable reason astounded her. Who, outside of an overly-excited grad student, would want the real-time information from the site, when there would be nothing that the information could be used for until it had been analyzed? It would be nothing more than raw data, and the data might be nothing more than a solar flare or some other noise-producing stellar bit of insignificance.

"Who else is getting the data?" Carla asked.

"No idea," Peter said, "but it's going somewhere, encrypted beyond belief."

Encrypted? Who'd encrypt radio telescope observations, Carla wondered, especially since anybody who observed such data published it if it was anything worth something.

"NASA, probably," Carla said into the phone, thinking out loud.

"What?" Peter asked.

Carla regained her composure. "You're getting it on your computer?"

"Yeah," Peter said. "What do you want to do about the signal?"

"Give me your address and I'll Mapquest it and be there in however long it takes to get there," Carla said.

Chapter 14

Peter Jenkins lived in a typical graduate student's apartment: it was small, cluttered with books, and strewn with clothes and random non-garbage debris. He had no idea he lived in disorder, and no female had ever visited his apartment so as to be able to express an opinion on it. His few male friends that visited were incapable of noticing the level of disarray in Peter's apartment because their own apartments looked similar.

If his mother hadn't instilled in him knowledge that kitchens are cleaned after every use, his kitchen would've likely been piled high with dishes, flatware and pots and pans. That Peter most of the time ate ready-made microwave meals in easily disposable containers saved him from the onus of a filthy kitchen. The only room cleaned with any regularity was the bathroom, and that was because Peter had a curious fixation with cleanliness in that room, a clarity of purpose that public restrooms only reinforced, so he cleaned it every Saturday morning. He was naked in there, after all, and even his bodily requirements weren't oblivious to him in their effects on the space.

The one obsession obvious to anybody entering the living room was how it was centered on Peter's computer system, a first-class set-up networked to a pair of console gaming systems and a 22-inch LCD flat panel computer monitor. Next to that, his bookshelf of digital media held only a handful of actual compact disks, but scores of video games and movie DVDs.

After Professor Lombard had been buzzed in the apartment's security door, Peter looked around the room for the first time in ages and wondered if he should tidy up. Right after thinking that, he was unsure what to tidy up and comforted himself that the bathroom was clean, should his professor need to use it. Probably clean, anyway.

Peter let his professor into his apartment after she knocked, and she took a few steps in and stopped to survey the room.

"My husband lived like this when I met him," Carla said, staring at the disarray. "Only, he had a much bigger music collection than you have. You're not much into music, are you?"

Peter sat down at his computer and began clicking his mouse through a maze of log-ins, entering passwords and user names. "Whaddya mean?"

Carla motioned to his CD collection. "You've got nothing, and nothing to listen to it on."

Peter looked over for a moment out of distraction, unsure what his professor was referring to, and saw the small array of compact music disks on the shelf.

"Oh, I download everything off the net and my PC has a kickin' sound system," Peter said. "Although I mostly listen to tunes on my iPod."

Carla looked around at the room, again, and noticed there were wireless 5.1 surround speakers mounted to the walls, a subwoofer stashed in a corner. Peter was a typical male in prioritizing the important aspects of his life, and his entertainment system trumped the room's appearance. Maybe, she thought, he wasn't as scatterbrained as he came across.

Peter entered a few more commands on his keyboard and the room was suddenly filled with a very strange sounding idea of music. Or melodic noise. Carla was startled by the initial sounds that came from the speakers surrounding her, and she turned quickly toward Peter, who obviously didn't realize how loud his speakers were set at. Carla mimed turning a knob down and Peter adjusted the volume.

"What the heck is this?" Carla asked.

"This is the signal," Peter said, closing his eyes for a second to listen to it.

Carla paused and listened. It was anything other than what she thought "signal" would sound like, and she'd thought long and hard over the years about what to expect, before she stopped expecting, before she realized the distances in space were too great, the obstacles too severe, for anyone on Earth to listen to intentional alien sound.

"This is," Carla paused for the word, trying to attach some sort of aural definition to the sounds her ears were processing, "music."

She listened a moment more. "Really bad music, or really avante garde music or whatever you want to call it, but it's not signal."

Peter turned the sound down a bit further and turned in his chair. "Doctor Lombard, I'm telling you this is what Owens is picking up. This is the signal. This is signal."

Carla shook her head softly, as if her entire life's work had suddenly been made a joke. She looked around the room at the speakers as they pulsed out the strange sounds, and shrugged. She listened for a few seconds more and realized she had wasted a trip to her student's apartment on the vague, long-dormant hope that maybe, somewhere in the heavens, somebody was trying to get a message through to Earth. She knew Peter wasn't lying to her, but she also knew that Peter didn't know enough, yet, to know that he was being played.

"No, Peter, this is not signal," Carla said, using a voice mothers use to console children over first failed relationships. "This is some hacker piping his personal music collection into the SETI computers. This is some kid in Irvine or Antwerp who figured out how to hack the system and import some – I don't know – some 'music' experiment he wants to get famous from.

"This is Kraftwerk remixed."

Peter thought for a second about what "Kraftwerk" was, and then muttered under his breath, "Chemical Brothers, maybe," before he pointed to his computer monitor.

"Yeah, but Doctor Lombard, this is coming right from the site, right from the equipment, and the equipment says its coming from up there," Peter said, pointing through his ceiling.

Carla deflated. "Aww, Peter... Jesus. We're not looking for music, Peter. That's not what we're looking for. We're looking for alien signal. You know, something alien. This," Carla paused and motioned to the sounds around them, "this is some DJ in Europe trying to really screw with all the concepts of melody and harmony that thousand of composers over hundreds of years have established as musical laws.

"This," she pointed at a speaker, "this is a prank."

Peter paused the sound.

"I'll see you in class, Peter," Carla said.

Peter watched as his professor turned and exited his apartment, and he waited a moment before turning the sound up on the speakers. He listened for a few moments and stared up through his ceiling, wondering why Carla would have been so hostile to the idea that this noise, this whatever-it-was, could be signal. He drummed his fingers on the desk and stared at the information coming from the radio site, indicating the signal was from off-world.

Chapter 15

Lincoln Feathers sat before his bank of radios smoking a cigar, fiddling with one of the sets. There was something wrong, and he was trying to figure out what it was. He tuned through several frequencies and made a couple of communications checks with far-off operators, trying to determine if any of the people he usually talked with were listening. So far, nothing. It was as if his radio friends were taking the day off, worldwide. Then he tuned back to the station he was wondering about and paused.

"What the heck is this?" Lincoln said, puffing cigar smoke into the air.

He sat back in the chair and listened, again, to the weird, strange, non-melodic "music" pouring from the speakers. This wasn't permitted on the ham radio wavelengths, although it did happen, usually when some anti-amateur radio activist tried jamming a frequency for some idiotic reason. Lincoln hated those people, usually super-tech-savvy computer geeks who thought ham radio was an obsolete, antiquated hobby. Why this bothered anybody was beyond Lincoln's ability to ken.

"Now, that's just not right," Lincoln muttered. "Who the hell's broadcasting crappy classical music on licensed airwaves?"

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 suddenly 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. Then, "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.

"Jesus, what the hell else do I need? Didn't anyone else on the frickin' planet record any of it?" Peter said to the monitor.

From behind him, there was a polite laugh.

"You're chasing your white whale, I see," Carla said.

Peter turned in his chair and shrugged. "I guess so."

Carla tried to remain soft. "Peter, it's nothing."

"Well, probably, but it just doesn't make sense that the SETI computers would pick up a radio broadcast originating from Earth. Aren't they programmed against that?" Peter asked.

"No, but the software screens them out, normally," Carla said. "That's why it was hackers: they cracked the software. I'm sure that's been fixed by now."

"Yeah, sure, but that little bot I found is still in there, though."

Carla shrugged. "There's a lot of code to be gone through, I'm sure. Either they missed it or haven't gotten to it, yet."

"Or, it's still there on purpose. Who do you think wrote it in there, and where does it send the information? It's a real-time bot, meaning somebody wants access to all the SETI monitoring anybody does when they're doing it," Peter said.

"Well, you put in a similar bot, so I'd have to say it's someone like you, somewhere else, with a burning curiosity about what everyone else is doing," Carla said. "Peter, come on, if it was an alien signal intended for us, it would've lasted longer than a couple of hours. If it was a prankster, it would've lasted until he got bored and pulled the plug. You know, about a couple of hours."

"Yeah, I know, Occam's Razor," Peter said.

Chapter 22

Dante wore headphones and tinkered with dialog boxes on his mixing program, adjusting levels, pausing, and re-adjusting. On the couch behind him, Kaylinne sat watching music videos on the television, occasionally flitting her eyes over to Dante to check his progress, but mostly to analyze his posture. She could tell he was excited by the way he sat hunched forward over the keyboard and mouse, constantly pressing buttons and clicking the mouse.

This was the way it always went with Dante. He'd call Kaylinne to announce he'd finished a song, and then when she arrived to listen to his cut, he'd be back to work jiggering some aspect of it. It could be hours before his "finished" track was finished, and Kaylinne had learned to bide the time with the television. She'd learned long ago that, for whatever reason, he worked best in the final moments of mixing when she was there in the room, as if she were his muse and he needed her on hand for inspiration.

Whether it was this way for any of the other singers Dante worked with, Kaylinne did not know. She had never asked.

Dante listened to something in his headset and muttered under his breath. "I think that's it."

He clicked a few more buttons, changed a few more onscreen settings, clicked play and listened for a while, his eyes closed. "Aww, yeah, that's it alright."

Dante turned in the chair, removed the headphones and stood up. "Yo, Kaylinne, listen to this."

Kaylinne glanced at the clock – ninety minutes had gone by – and muted the television with the remote. She turned to face Dante and Dante made a tiny public demonstration of glancing at the clock, too, before giving Kaylinne a look that said, "aww, man, c'mon." Kaylinne half-rolled her eyes and Dante turned back to the computers, clicked a button and turned the speakers up.

The room was filled with music the likes of which nobody had ever heard, a harmonious cacophony of melody and rhythm that rose and fell in gentle waves, quickening by the second into a dance club groove for many long seconds, a tribal sound of vaguely-drum-like noises topped by a raging symphony of unidentifiable instruments. Then Kaylinne's vocals cut in, and she leaned forward, awestruck by what she heard.

The song burst into full force just after the forty second mark, and both Dante and Kaylinne found themselves subtly dancing in place, Kaylinne nodding her head with the beat and tapping her right foot softly. Dante stood and swayed slightly in place, his eyes closed, his head tilted upward. And then, after four minutes and seven seconds, the song quickly faded out to silence.

Dante opened his eyes and looked hesitantly at Kaylinne.

"Scots, that's brilliant," Kaylinne said, standing up off the couch and closing the gap between them. "Where'd you come up with that melody? What instruments are those? Where did you get that idea? I mean, the music I sang to was totally different than this."

Dante shrugged. "I didn't come up with any of it."

"What are you talking about?" Kaylinne asked.

"Well, I mean, sure, I made the song and put all the sounds together and all, but all the sounds and melody, everything musical are sounds I recorded off the ham radio a couple of months ago."

"I didn't think there was music on ham radio," Kaylinne said absent-mindedly.

"I don't know about that, but there was music on it in the summer, so I recorded a couple hours of it," Dante said. "It was the strangest music you've ever heard played on instruments I couldn't recognize, but if you listened to it, it was... I dunno, kinda mystical in a weird, primitive sense.

"Hell, the music barely sounded like music at first, but after I listened to it a couple of times, I started to find the beat, the melody, everything. After that, I just figured out how to cut it into pieces on the computer and separate the different parts. Then it was just a matter of mixing it the right way."

Kaylinne stared at Dante in mild disbelief. "You telling me that you didn't write this music on your keyboard or sample somebody else's stuff?"

Dante nodded.

"So what's the source music sound like?" Kaylinne asked.

Dante turned to his computer and clicked through several window options, highlighted Radio Song #1 and clicked play. A strange, unmusical sound coursed from the speakers, a sound unlike any music either of them had heard before. Dante let it play and looked at Kaylinne, who made a face of bewildered disbelief.

"You're telling me that's a song?" Kaylinne said.

Dante nodded. "Yeah."

Kaylinne shook her head. "That's not music, Scots, that's... I don't know, industrial noise or the sound of a construction site working while a children's orchestra is playing nearby."

Dante smiled. "Like I said, it took a couple of listens for me to start making sense of it, but there's a musical structure to it. I have no clue what the instruments are they're using, but they're clearly homemade and experimental. I mean, they make sounds you just don't hear anywhere else."

Dante clicked off the music and highlighted Weird Radio Noise #1 and selected play. An entirely different sort of sounds emitted from the speakers. Dante gave Kaylinne a curious look as he watched her listen.

"Now, this isn't music," Dante said. "I don't know what it is, but music it ain't. It sort of sounds like someone trying to play a pipe organ made out of wood and cheese cloth, but there's no rhythm, no melody, there's nothing musical to it. Unless that's the point. But if that's the point, then, why bother?"

"So, you have no idea who made this stuff?" Kaylinne asked.

"Nope," Dante said.

"That's weird stuff," Kaylinne said.

"Yeah, it sucks the way it is, but I figured out how to make it cool," Dante said. "It's going to suck if it somebody's real music and they come looking for royalties, though. This song is going to drop big."

Chapter 23

Colonel John Hibbens stood in the parking area outside his unit headquarters puffing on a cigar, watching the work crews erecting a razor-wire topped fence around the perimeter of his building. The fence separating his outfit from the main base had been taken down, and a new, modern structure was being erected behind his dilapidated World War II era building. He fingered the new security badge on his uniform, one granting more access to the Area 51 facilities than he and his staff had previously had. In a weird sort of way, he had hit the big time inside the Air Force.

Hibbens stared down the access road that brought him to and from the base every day, an out-of-the-way and seldom used road except by those in his unit. At any moment, he was expecting his commander to drive down that road and inspect his unit, the first time in the history of the unit that a higher up would visit the outpost, though Hibbens didn't know that. He suspected it, but there was no way for him to know.

Hibbens played with the cigar stub, rolling it through his fingers and pressing its sides, and wondered if his commander knew how to get to the unit. Hibbens only met with his commander once a year, and only then as a formality and at his commander's office. All three times had been essentially the same conversation, and Hibbens had assumed his primary role in running the unit was to make sure the unit remained black, unheard of, anonymous. Now, various elements of the Air Force command structure were requesting daily briefs on the progress his unit was making with the signal, and Hibbens could tell that Forrestal was deeply irritated with having to write the reports.

Hibbens noticed a two-car motorcade appear in the distance down the road, a small dust plume erupting behind it. He took a large puff of the cigar, held it for several seconds, and exhaled a cloud of smoke into the air. He flicked the cigar stub pinwheeling through the air and watched as it crashed onto the asphalt with a small spray of orange ashes. He fished through his pocket for a packet of mints and popped one into his mouth and then walked into the listening station.

Hibbens walked into the main bay of the building and stopped, watching his staff work vigorously at their computer terminals, trying to figure out from where the signal had originated. The staff had doubled in the last few months, and the sign at the head of the room now read "ET Say What? - ?" This is not how Hibbens wanted his career to end, hijacked by a computer prankster looking to make a fool of some university professor by hacking into a secure computer system and broadcasting hideously unlistenable music for hours before vanishing into thin air.

Forrestal walked up to Hibbens and, for a moment, Hibbens again realized how his failure was a boon for others: Forrestal had been promoted to major and his staff now consisted of two captains and four lieutenants as well as a doubling of the enlisted men. The Air Force was taking this seriously, even if, so far, his unit had produced nothing to merit it.

"I take it the general is on his way?" Forrestal asked.

"Yeah."

Forrestal looked around quickly. "What are you going to tell him?

Hibbens gave Forrestal a bewildered look, barely shrugging his shoulders and turning his palms out. "That depends on what he wants to know."

Chapter 24

Brigadier General Michael Bardem walked into the main bay area of Unidentified Extraterrestrial Intrusions Unit 1 and immediately signaled with a quick wave of his hand to the airman in charge not to announce his arrival. Bardem wanted no fanfare, no acknowledgment of this visit. Bardem had seen some pretty under-equipped units in the Air Force in his twenty-three years, and this one easily ranked among them. It rankled him that he had had to suddenly divert funds to build the unit a newer facility, but now that he saw the converted barracks, he wondered how the unit had not been disbanded in earlier years, and replaced with something more plausible. Nobody would believe this building housed a top-secret extra-terrestrial monitoring unit, not even the crazies who populated the Internet with oddball conspiracies that the Air Force had extra-terrestrials in captivity on Area 51.

Bardem surveyed the room and noticed Hibbens was bent over a computer, conferring with an airman. The other staffers in the room were similarly at work, doing whatever it was the unit did. Bardem didn't know. He had always assumed the men assigned to this unit took it as a joke, a weird holiday post where they didn't have to do anything for their tour, but watching them now, he realized they took it seriously. Maybe that was Hibbens' work ethic expressed through his men, although the few times he had met with Hibbens, he had gotten the vibe that Hibbens thought the unit was a sleight-of-hand joke. It was, but Bardem had made sure he hadn't let on to that appreciation.

Hibbens looked up and walked briskly over to the general, motioning for him toward a small office nearby. The two officers walked into Hibbens' office and Bardem closed the door behind them.

"So, how are you doing, John?" Bardem asked.

"I'm not getting much sleep, general," Hibbens said matter-of-factly. "Other than that, everyone here is overworked and frazzled."

Bardem was fully up to date on the status of the unit's work, but he wasted no time, still, in pressing his subordinate for an answer to the question everyone in the know was asking.

"So, where did the signal come from?"

"We don't know, sir," Hibbens said, "but everything's a guess until we can get a good, long listen. Even better would be some data from some other site on the planet that monitored it so we can triangulate a point of origin. Until then, general, all we can do is guess."

"Colonel, it's time to best guess this, then," Bardem said. "I've got a dozen senators asking me questions, and me telling them it might be a computer hacker isn't going to work much longer, because they expect us to be better and smarter than that, given the money we spend.

"Worse, the press is onto this, although they don't know what they're looking for. So, before they find someone who tells them something outrageous or accurate, I need your best guess as to where this signal came from."

Hibbens walked away from his desk and paused, suddenly thinking about his career. He glanced out the window and realized this was the last stop for him in the Air Force. He looked at Bardem.

"General, the best we can tell, based on what we actually know, is that the signal came from somewhere in outer space," Hibbens said.

"Outer space?" Bardem said. "Where in outer space, exactly?"

"Yeah. That's the problem," Hibbens said. "Or, should I say, the problem is there's nobody who can figure out which, if any, satellite was hacked.

"We already know which satellites were where, and we've gone through all the ones that were in a position and capable of transmitting such a signal, but nobody has been able to find the slightest fingerprint of a hijacked transmission.

"Plus, the transmission came in on a frequency that's reserved for ham radio, so nobody's sure what to make of it, since that kind of transmission wouldn't normally have come from outside the atmosphere. But the real problem making hacking an issue is that we discovered an unofficial monitoring bot in the software at the SETI site run by CalTech, and nobody knows who installed it or when, although it seems likely some CalTech person put it in there for some reason.

"We left it in to see what happens to it, since whoever put it there presumably knows our software is there, although they wouldn't know it was put there by us."

"Okay, so like I asked, what's the best guess?" Bardem asked.

Hibbens paused, considering.

"I'm asking you to guess, colonel," Bardem said. "You don't have to be certain, and you don't have to be right, but you can guess, can't you?"

Hibbens knew there was no safe guess to give, that either way, there was no way of knowing, for sure, where the signal had come from.

"Well, yes, general, but what I really need to explain is that I think it was a hacker, but my gut tells me it was from up there, somewhere," Hibbens said, pointing up.

Bardem had known he wouldn't get an answer, and he smiled wickedly, briefly, at what he had just been told.

"Okay, your CYA explanation is it was a hacker, but your best guess is that it came from outer space," Bardem said. "I got that right?"

Hibbens nodded. "That would be about right."

"So, are you fifty-fifty on that?" Bardem asked.

"I'd say more like seventy-thirty," Hibbens said, "in favor of outer space."

Bardem gave Hibbens a long look. Hibbens' career had been solid and unnoticeable to this point, and Bardem respected Hibbens for not wanting to go out on a limb and risk his career on refereeing a call on where the signal had come from. Bardem knew that the scientific community thought it a fraud, but Bardem also knew that nobody could prove it to be a fraud, which meant there was a chance it was legitimate. Bardem also knew that Hibbens' unit was never supposed to really be able to figure out the answer to this problem, because this was never supposed to be a problem. That it was had changed everything, and there were suddenly-interested parties in various constituencies trying to figure out what the signal meant and how to respond to it. If the signal was the result of a hacker, then more needed to be done on computer security; if the signal was the result of alien broadcast, well, then, nobody knew what to do, but those that didn't know what to do knew something needed to be done.

Bardem reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a small box. He tossed it onto the table. Hibbens looked down and saw a pair of silver stars through the cellophane wrapper. He gave Bardem an astounded look.

"Well, general, you'd better figure out some answers, because you're going to have to answer to more than just me from now on," Bardem said. "There are a few senators who'd like to know what's going on. Since you're an unofficial secret unit, you couldn't be promoted in public, although the Air Force will put you on the list of new generals when whoever does that figures out how to do it. It's effective immediately, so pin your stars on, John. I don't envy your situation, especially if word of this signal gets out of our community."

Hibbens was stunned. He stared at the box of general's stars on his desk, then looked up to Bardem.

"I thought you were coming here to relieve me," Hibbens said.

"Relieve you?" Bardem said. "Hell, John, there's not another officer in the Air Force who'd want to have to figure this out. Well, not another officer in the force who knows about this unit, that is. You're going to have some unforeseen resources pouring in here pretty quickly, so you might want to figure out how you're going to use them, because if this signal is nothing, there are other people out there who will cry murder to get their funding back.

"I don't know what answer I'd like more to the question. If we were hacked, that's bad news for a lot of people, but if the signal is real, that's uncertainty for everybody and nobody wants to deal with that," Bardem said.

Hibbens stood still, uncertain about the sudden turn of events. Bardem softened a bit.

"Do you have any real information on the signal's origination?" Bardem asked.

"Well, we have four hours, thirteen minutes and nine seconds of total signal recorded, and judging from the data, well, it came from the middle of nowhere," Hibbens said.

Hibbens stood in the parking area and watched as Bardem got into his staff car and was driven away, a plume of dust rising like a rooster tail when the car met the dirt road. Hibbens pulled a cigar from his pocket and fingered it, staring into the distance. He pulled out a cigar tool, cut off the tip and lit the cigar, taking a couple of deep puffs and considering the orange tip.

"I am so fucked," Hibbens said.

Chapter 25

Peter walked into the coffee shop and ordered a mocha cappuccino at the counter before finding a table and setting up his laptop. He logged onto the Internet and began sifting through blogs and tech sites still speculating on the nature of the signal. Interest in the signal had waned in the months that had passed, and more and more of those still interested in it had decided the signal had to be fake, the work of some hacker. Most people in the scientific community had decided that the signal had to be a fake because any real signal beamed to the earth would contain some sort of simplistic code easily identified and cracked by those on the receiving end, and nobody had been able to figure out a code structure to the signal.

Peter found this argument appealing and logical, but it still didn't do anything to dissuade him from thinking the signal was genuine. Maybe he was looking at it from the wrong angle. If it were a code, maybe it was Sudoku instead of a crossword and he and everyone trying to crack it were doing so with the wrong tools. Peter had actually posted online that he thought maybe the signal was more like a Rubik's Cube and needed to be twisted somehow to determine a pattern that could be identified, but that had gotten him a light amount of ridicule, since the Rubik's Cube was an earthly invention no alien could conceivably predict we had if they had something similar.

There was a light tap on his shoulder followed by, "Hey, Pete, mind if I join you?"

Peter turned in his chair and saw Chloe standing behind him, smiling. "Hi, Chloe, uh, yeah, sure."

Peter motioned to the other chair at the table. "Are you coming or going?"

Chloe stared blankly at him for a moment. "Coming? Going?"

Chloe sat down and brightened. "I'm just waiting for some friends, so, I guess I came here to wait so I could go. So, both, really."

"Anything fun in store for your evening?" Peter asked.

Chloe shrugged. "That depends. Clubbing can go either way, though I'm hoping for fun. What about you?"

Peter waved his hand at his laptop. "This, I guess."

Chloe smiled. "And what's 'this'?"

"Ahh, yeah, research for my doctoral thesis," Peter said.

Chloe tilted her head in faux amazed shock. "On a Friday night?"

"Yeah."

Chloe leaned over the table and smiled quickly. "Why not come out with us?"

Peter stared at her for a second, not imagining that his mouth would say the word his brain was thinking, "Clubbing?"

"You say it like you've never," Chloe said.

"Yeah, I've never," Peter said

For a brief moment, the disconnect between the two worlds Peter and Chloe lived in was apparent to both of them, and the awkward silence affirming that fact sat in the air between them, a proof that two people could live in the same time-space but live entirely different kinds of lives. But then Chloe's eyes brightened and she grabbed Peter's hands.

"Then, come on," Chloe said. "You have to. It'll be a blast. We'll have a couple of cocktails; do a little dancing, stay up a little too late. It'll be fun. You have to."

Peter wasn't sure what to do with the sensation of Chloe's hands grasping his on the table. His entire brain activity had suddenly focused intently on the pressure her hands were putting on his, and he could think of nothing else other than how good that felt. And then his mouth chose to say words.

"I don't think I'm dressed for it," Peter said, half-aware of his voice, half-aware that his hands had now been held by a girl's for almost thirty seconds, the first instance of such contact in years. "Plus, I've got my laptop and my coffee..."

Peter looked at Chloe's eyes, his brain focusing on the soft pressure of her hands on his, his mouth still talking. "And I'm pretty sure I don't dance."

Chloe released his hands and sat up in her chair. "Change. I'll make my friends wait for you. I know you live close or you wouldn't be a regular. And, I'll teach you to dance. That's easy."

Peter paused to think this over. He was immediately pre-embarrassed at thought of him clubbing, of being taught to dance, of dancing at all, in a club, in front of people. Indeed, the thought mortified him. But, he had harbored a secret attraction to Chloe for months, and the feel of her hands in his, however brief that had been, suddenly made him think differently about the prospect. He wanted to spend time with her, only, not the kind of time she was offering. He didn't know what to do.

"Come on, Pete, it'll be fun," Chloe said.

Chapter 26

Peter stood near the bar, a drink in hand, and stared out of the corner of his eye at Chloe and her three friends. Never had he been in the company of four females dressed so provocatively, so sexily, and it was all he could do to try to actively pretend to ignore the situation. Peter was only marginally dressed better than in the coffee shop, having exchanged his T-shirt for a button-down oxford, but he was totally unaware that he has not dressed for the scene. Peter merely put on one of his "good" shirts; shirts for a "special" occasion like a departmental function at the school or, rarely, a situation in which he wanted to look more put-together were he able to find himself talking with a girl at a party. It had never occurred to him that he should have had clothes to wear for going to clubs, or, even, clothes to attract girls. For Peter, he had normal clothes and special clothes, and he almost never wore the latter.

Peter observed the churning mass of dancers and felt totally out of place. Never once had there been a thought originating in his mind that he should check out such a place, and his total knowledge of these kinds of places was derived from movie scenes set in dance clubs. He couldn't understand the appeal of immersing oneself in an environment where the music was so loud it was impossible to talk, and the crowd so thick it was impossible to walk. Not to mention the expense of even entering the building coupled with the cost of drinks. That this appealed to anyone mystified him.

"See, its fun," Chloe said, sidling up to him and smiling brightly.

Peter nodded. "Yeah, it looks fun."

Chloe leaned in close and whisper-shouted into Peter's ear. "Don't worry, you're with four chicks, you'll look like you know what you're doing."

Peter half-chuckled. "Oh, yeah, that's what'll it look like, I'm sure."

Chapter 27

Tom Gibson stood outside on his deck with a cigar and a glass of Scotch, looking up into the night sky. The issue of the signal had never resonated with him, but he had kept up his monthly visits with The Whisky Men only because it had added some strange dimension to his life. While the others in the group had been fascinated with trying to figure out who tried to drown out a channel for the better part of an afternoon one day several months ago, Tom luxuriated in the more mundane conversations about marital life, sex, children, whiskey, and sex, the other dominant conversational topics of the group.

He was both inspired and repelled by the realization that Lincoln, who Tom guessed to be about sixty, still had frequent sex with his wife. That Lincoln was totally forthcoming about the generalities of his sex life semi-disturbed Tom, but the fact that Lincoln had the same exact problems after thirty-some years of marriage consoled Tom on some level, and he had come to realize that the old saw about not getting laid after you got married was true, and not just a weird joke old married men told young about-to-be married men. Nobody in the group had any insight into how that truism came to be fact, but all agreed that it was, indeed, a part of the natural order of things in the modern world.

The glass door slid open behind him and he heard Mary walk out onto the deck.

"You know, when we quit smoking when we got pregnant, I didn't think you'd take up cigars, later," Mary said.

Tom turned. "Me either."

"I can't wait until I'm done breastfeeding," Mary said.

Tom smiled. "Why, are you going to start smoking cigars?"

Mary rolled her eyes and stared at the glass of Scotch in Tom's hand. "No. I'm going to have a drink."

Tom shrugged. "Well, have one, the studies all say that-"

Mary cut him off. "Yeah, you and your studies. I'm not going to drink while I'm breastfeeding."

"I know."

"So why do you encourage me all the time?" Mary asked.

"Well, you know, the studies all say that-"

Mary cut him off again. "I know, I know. You and your Internet-generated research. I think you want your now de-alcoholed wife to drink a couple so you can take advantage of her because she's a cheap date now."

"Well..."

"Uh-hunh," Mary said. "So, how's the whole ham radio thing been going? You've been to several meetings, are you going tomorrow?"

Tom took a puff on his cigar and glanced up into the sky. Mary was more interested in what he did with Lincoln and The Whiskey Men than he was even though he never had much of anything to tell her about what he did with the other men. He couldn't relay their conversations because that would be impolite to them, and aside from that, it was all just sitting around talking on radios.

"Yeah, I think I'll go," Tom said. "The ham stuff is kinda lame, I think. I think they all know I think that it's lame, but they don't mind having me around because I bring decent Scotch.

"I know I'm not ever going to buy a radio, though, because I could care less about talking to people in Bosnia or Uzbekistan or any of the other people they talk to when we get together.

"But, they're a neat bunch of guys, and they're people I'd have never met otherwise, and I think that meeting people like them is important in some way."

"Important?" Mary said. "What do you mean?"

Tom thought for a moment and pursed his lips. "Well, not important, but... they give my life a weird dimension it never would have had otherwise. I mean: ham radio, what the heck is that about in the computer age?

"It's weird. It's like, I don't know, like an anachronism or something. They're totally out of place in the modern world. It's almost as if they're Civil War re-enactors. They maintain a tradition no longer useful or necessary just because of the romance of it, although, to tell the truth, I can't see any romance in radio equipment."

Mary smiled. "And, yet, you're in love with your computer."

Tom laughed. "Honey, I'm in love with the Web. I'd leave my computer for a better one in a heartbeat."

Tom and Mary exchanged knowing glances and were silent for several moments.

"But what's really weird is that Lincoln and the guys can't stop talking about who sent the weird broadcast out over the airwaves a couple of months ago," Tom said. "The first thing they do when they get there is tune through the frequencies looking for it."

"The one that might be from outer space?" Mary asked.

Tom rolled his eyes. "Yeah, although it's mostly only Internet kooks who think that's where it came from. Lincoln doesn't think that, though, he thinks it has to be some bad faith operator screwing with the system, so he keeps looking for it so that he can report it to the FCC or whoever so the government can find the guys. He's very serious about how-"

Mary cut Tom off, again. "Do you think it might have come from outer space?"

"I don't know; I didn't hear it," Tom said, considering. "But I would think that the government or some scientists would've figured that out by now. Lincoln wasn't the only person to hear it, and I know from some sci-tech blogs that there are some astronomers and astrophysicists who've listened to it, and most of them think it was either junk radio noise created by some unexplained astronomical event, or, more likely, some computer hacker trying to make a name for himself."

"Wouldn't it be neat to know if it did come from another planet?" Mary asked.

Tom cocked his head to the side for a second. "Why's that?" he asked, before realizing what Mary was really asking. "Oh, sure, you mean, the whole 'we're not alone' and all that."

"Exactly," Mary said. "Just think of the things they could tell us about life. About what it all means. Maybe they'd have some answers. We could ask them what they think about God."

Tom took a sip of his Scotch and tapped some cigar ash over the rail of the deck and onto the grass of the back yard.

"God?" Tom said absently, wondering why his wife would want to ask an alien species about that. Tom and Mary were faithful churchgoers, but outside of that, Tom kept God in a box that didn't interfere with the daily rigors of his work as an insurance salesman or his status as a husband and father. He turned to Mary.

"God? I think we'd ask them about computers or rocket engines or the cure for the common cold, first," Tom said, regarding his wife with curiosity. "Why would we ask them about God?"

"Because if they believe in the same God we do, or that anybody on this planet believes in, we'd know which religion is right. We'd know what to believe in. We'd know something about His plan," Mary said, her voice full of conviction. "God wouldn't put intelligent life on other planets and not have them believe in Him, would He?"

Tom thought about that for a moment, the first moment of his life he'd ever bothered to consider the interstellar aspects of a supreme being. He took a puff on his cigar and wondered if God would put Christians and Hindus and atheists on other planets; he wondered if God's plan was to have His Son die on all of them to save each planet and provide a path to Heaven. The idea boggled the mind: would God create a universe in which thousands or billions of intelligent, sentient species were each forced to come to terms with ancient beliefs in a God, often with competing belief systems at work simultaneously, or would God create worlds with one coherent, universal belief system and pit those planet's religious beliefs with another planet's totally contrarian belief systems? And, would Planet A ever meet Planet B and realize they either did or did not believe in the same God?

Tom took a deep pull from his glass of Scotch, let the peaty flavor melt over his tongue and warm his throat, and turned to Mary.

"Honey, that's something you'd have to ask Pastor Don after church on Sunday."

Chapter 28

Shortly after his promotion to general, Hibbens' unit began seeing an immediate influx in personnel and equipment, the likes of which no previous unit commander had ever imagined. Until a very short time ago, Hibbens had never bothered to imagine what the unit could be, how it could be shaped into something other than a feint to the budgetary process, an illusion used to deceive the alien abduction believers and UFO conspiracy theorists. That his unit was now real in some uncertain sense unsettled Hibbens, because results would be expected, results that could not be measured against any real projected outcomes.

Hibbens was in the middle of briefing two new colonels to his unit on their mission when the realization of his promotion and his future once again took center stage in his consciousness. Hibbens was extremely happy that his career had made him a general. He had entered the Air Force Academy almost three decades earlier with the goal of someday being a general, although his dream of being a fighter pilot had been crushed before graduation. His eyesight had steadily gotten worse during those four years, edging him out of that elite profession and forcing him into another career track.

He had chosen to pursue intelligence, and it had put him here, in this room, twenty-some years later, briefing a pair of awestruck colonels about the possibility of an alien signal interception: alien in the extraterrestrial sense. Neither of the colonels had known this was the reason for their sudden assignment to the unit. When their jaws dropped mid-briefing, Hibbens could tell they were excited by the prospect of being on the team that determined if the origin of the signal was extraterrestrial and, he assumed, on being on the team that decoded the signal.

But it was Hibbens' career that was suddenly at risk. If the signal was authentic, he would be the head of a very prestigious, very secret operation with a large budget and the best personnel the Air Force could muster. If the signal were from off-world, history would remember Hibbens and his work in finding the origin of the signal and the work to decode it. If the signal was false, the work of a computer hacker trying to humiliate whoever, Hibbens knew he would quickly be shown the door to retirement and labeled an incompetent. The only consolation in that assessment was that nobody outside the Air Force would know it had been he who had been fooled.

The seconds passed and Hibbens returned to reality, re-acquiring the attention of his two new subordinates, neither of whom had considered his brief silence anything of note.

"Now, I've got to be in DC in six days for a briefing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and they're going to want to know what I think is going on, and what we're doing about it. This means I need to know more than what we know now, which is clearly impossible, so I'm going to need some best guesses on how a ham radio frequency got hijacked and used to broadcast the noise I played you earlier.

"Our default thinking mode on this is to assume somebody hacked into a broadcast satellite and hijacked a signal, but we're not going to insist on that as orthodoxy. If it's something else, it's something else, and any hints, clues or guesses as to what it might be are welcomed," Hibbens said, pausing to fix them both with his eyes. "Wild guesses are encouraged."

This last sentiment was not lost on Hibbens, who was merely passing on the advice of General Bardem. So far, nobody had wanted to guess wildly, especially Hibbens, because pinning the signal on an alien intelligence and later finding out it was a Swedish computer hacker with a hatred of ham radio would ruin the career of anyone who stood on that ground. Hibbens had no real hope that either of his two new colonels would risk their careers in such a way, especially after having just been cleared for the highest security the Air Force had to offer and finding themselves in one of the worst buildings the Air Force had to offer. Hibbens assumed they wanted to find a way to explain the signal in a terrestrial way as quickly as possible, thereby avoiding any harm to their careers, and expediting their return to reassignment elsewhere.

At least now they knew what it was they were up against, having spent the last few hours listening to the signal and getting briefed about it. Neither colonel could possibly be sitting before him enthusiastic about the opportunity to crack the signal, as Hibbens was not, and that task was already in his lap.

"Colonel Thibideaux, your unit will continue to monitor all available monitoring stations to determine if anything else has been compromised, as well as continued analysis of the information coming in live.

"Colonel Taylor, your unit has been analyzing the data we've stored and is trying to make sense of it. Keep making sense of it, even if it doesn't make any."

Hibbens paused and looked at his two new subordinates, unsure if they were stunned by their new jobs. They both stared at him stoically.

"Questions?" Hibbens asked.

The two colonels – one male, one female – stared back at him. They had been plucked from premier units in Air Force intelligence and sent here, at a moment's notice, and now that they knew the game, they weren't sure of the rules. Hibbens understood this implicitly, having been the subject to the same circumstance only a few years earlier. Only then, he had been told to manage a top secret unit that did nothing. He was now asking other professionals to do something.

Thibideaux spoke first. "Well, general, how many sites is my unit monitoring? And, what are we looking for?"

Hibbens nodded thoughtfully. "Every known SETI radio, x-ray, and telescope site on the planet. You're looking for something that might seem to come from somewhere other than planet Earth."

"Every site?" Thibideaux asked.

"Every," Hibbens said flatly, "including a top secret monitoring site in China and an open-secret site in Siberia. Major Forrestal can fill you in on the details."

Thibideaux rolled his eyes unconsciously before speaking, and Hibbens let it slide. "How are we monitoring a secret site in China?"

Hibbens shrugged. "I don't know, colonel, I just know we are. They don't tell me everything, either."

Hibbens glanced at his two new colonels and could tell they were overwhelmed by the odd nature of their new jobs. Hibbens nodded encouragingly.

"I understand you'll have a lot of questions. Come. Ask," Hibbens said. "We're a loose collar unit here, so don't think there's a boat to rock if you have an idea that sounds unorthodox or at odds with the current thinking. You're going to find yourselves asking a lot questions about things you never thought you'd have to ask questions about, so ask them. But right now, I need some answers."

Thibideaux and Taylor closed the door behind them and slowly made their way down the hallway, each thinking similar thoughts about what they had just been told.

"I've been in the Air Force for eighteen years and I've never heard a peep about this unit, and now I'm in it," Taylor said. "You'd have thought that that many years in code breaking and I'd have heard some rumor from somebody."

Thibideaux nodded. "Yeah, you'd think. I'm not sure I want to know how they keep a lid on this place. Everybody on the planet knows this base does top secret stuff, but nobody knows what kind of stuff. You surely can't believe what you read – I don't – and I really don't now that I know this."

"If our government is spending this much money making sure we aren't surprised by aliens from other planets, you have to wonder what else it's up to," Taylor said.

Thibideaux laughed. "Yeah, and if we're spending this much money looking for aliens in outer space, it makes you wonder what we're missing down here."

Chapter 29

Colonel Taylor drummed her fingers on her desk and stared at the pair of officers standing on the other side of her desk, amazed at their now-finished presentation.

"You're sure?" Taylor asked.

Captain Don Ferguson nodded his head and said, "Absolutely, ma'am.

"Stay right here and get your briefing ready. I'm going to get the general," Taylor said.

Taylor picked up her phone and punched in the numbers, waited a moment and was surprised when General Hibbens answered his own phone. This made her pause for a half-moment as she had expected a non-commissioned officer to deal with. Without that barrier, she was suddenly unsure of the protocol at work.

"General Hibbens, I think I've got something you're going to want to hear right now," Taylor said.

"What is it?" Hibbens asked.

"My code breakers think they've made a discovery that I think you should hear," Taylor said.

"Where are you?" Hibbens asked.

"Conference room one," Taylor said.

"I'll be there in a moment," Hibbens said.

Taylor waited for Hibbens to hang up on her, put her phone down, and surveyed the team before her. "Get your presentation ready, the general will be here in a minute."

In his office, Hibbens hung up his phone and shook his head in exasperation. For months, his team of code breakers and analysts had been poring over the data and had discovered nothing. Now, four days into her position, his new colonel was claiming to have made some sort of breakthrough warranting his immediate attention.

"Holy Christ," Hibbens said to the room. "Four days on the job and she has something urgent for me to see. Four days? This kind of crap is going to have to end."

Hibbens stood out of his chair and walked out of his office into the main bay area and motioned Forrestal over to him.

"General?" Forrestal said.

"Major, I have a colonel problem," Hibbens said.

"A colonel problem?" Forrestal asked.

"Yes. Colonel Taylor has just urgently requested my attention to some piece of analysis her team has come up with, and she's only been here four days. So, from now on, I want an initial finding to be vetted through you, first, and if you think it warrants my attention, then you bring it to me and I'll call the meeting with them."

Forrestal furrowed his eyebrows for a split second. "Starting now?"

Hibbens shook his head. "No, after this. We've been doing this a while, so not much excites us. They're brand new and excitable," Hibbens said. "We need to calm them down a bit."

Forrestal smiled slightly. "Yes, sir."

Hibbens entered Conference Room One and took a seat at the table. He immediately could tell that the people about to brief him were both nervous and excited, and somewhere deep inside of him, Hibbens felt excited. He knew it would end up being nothing, but he was suddenly interested in hearing a new explanation of what the signal might be. So far, he'd listened to forty-seven briefings where he had been told what the signal could be, and in every instance, nobody had been able to make the prediction come true.

None of the failures mattered, though, at least not for the moment. If his unit were ultimately unable to parse the signal into something useful, the money and manpower would quickly dry up, and he'd leave the unit for civilian life much the way he had entered it years earlier: an under-staffed black line item in the Air Force budget. On the plus side, though, he'd at least have retired as a general, something that seemed highly unlikely to him just a few months ago, when he figured he'd be lucky to find himself transferred to a real posting and not shuttled off to another bureaucratic office position where he would wait out his years and retire in anonymity.

Hibbens tapped the table and looked at the staff standing before him. He turned to Taylor and said, "Okay, colonel, what have you got?"

Taylor motioned to Ferguson to begin.

"Well, general, we've been going over the content of the transmission and we've broken it down into two elements," Ferguson said, tapping a button on a laptop networked to a large flat screen computer monitor.

"The first element is unintelligible. It's random and apparently meaningless and sounds like arrhythmic noise, but the second element, which appears less frequently and at random points for various lengths of time, well, general, we've identified that element as a language," Ferguson said.

Hibbens leaned forward slightly. "A language? Which one?"

"We don't know," Ferguson said, suppressing a shrug. "So far as we can tell, it's not any of the major spoken tongues known on the planet, though it could be some aboriginal language, or a dead tongue or a dialect of some lesser-known language that we're not familiar with. That'll take weeks to figure out, or, maybe, months or years."

"Well, then how did you figure out that it was even a language?" Hibbens asked.

"The sound patterns replicate in a discernable pattern, indicating that they must be words, and there are definite signs of rules in play which determine how the sounds relate to other sounds," Ferguson said. "Basically, words and sentences."

Ferguson clicked a button on the laptop and maneuvered a mouse for a moment, and suddenly the room was filled with sounds from the speakers. While the sounds played, Ferguson made hand gestures to indicate where the patterns existed, punctuating the sounds with points of a finger into the air as if he were a music conductor. After a minute, Ferguson stopped the playback and returned his focus on Hibbens.

"The sounds in those clips have most of the same elements in them, transmitting to the listener the same idea, only slightly different each time," Ferguson said.

Hibbens glanced at Taylor quickly before looking back to Ferguson. "How do you mean, captain?"

Ferguson turned the palms of his hands up and shrugged slightly. "Well, not knowing what it really says, I can only analogize."

Ferguson tapped on the laptop for a moment and two English transcriptions of sound patterns displayed on the monitor. The words were not actual words, but phonics-like depictions of sounds. Hibbens suddenly realized he was wasting his time.

"The first bit is sort of like hearing the sentence 'My dog is brown and furry' and the second sentence would be a re-working along the lines of 'I have a furry brown dog,'" Ferguson said, tapping the laptop and letting the two sound clips play one after the other. "It's the same information, just related differently."

Hibbens had suddenly changed his mind. Maybe this captain was on to something. It was the first bit of actual logical analysis of the signal he'd heard to date and it still didn't tell him anything about what the signal was.

"Well, that's interesting," Hibbens said, "but why no luck with the other element?"

"Well, sir, the other elements, they, too, are of various lengths and sound patterns, but they follow a more complex set of rules, inasmuch as they follow rules at all," Ferguson said. "The elements are much longer, and while you can almost determine a logic to them, that logic can't be translated into speech patterns or a recognizable language known to us at this juncture.

"It could be some sort of harmonic interference with the transmission, an intentional effort to confuse the listener with illogical information, overlapping various data streams through simultaneous broadcasting to a single frequency, or, well anything. Or, nothing," Ferguson said. "Somebody could simply have taken some actual sound patterns and mixed them together in an attempt to create jibberish based on actual language."

Hibbens absorbed this and stared at the faces looking toward him, wondering what kinds of questions he should ask. He turned to another captain standing to the side and asked him a question.

"You agree with this analysis?" Hibbens asked.

Captain Ron Tugel stepped forward and nodded. "I do, sir."

Hibbens looked around the room again; reasonably assured he had just been told, again, that nobody knew what the hell it was they were listening to. He returned to Tugel.

"Captain, all the experts have told me that we should be looking for some sort of decipherable numerical code in any alien-based signal, something that would establish intelligence and intent on the part of the sender, and yet you guys are all telling me you think this is words," Hibbens said. "Why are we doing language instead of math?"

Tugel flitted his eyes to the other members of the team for a slight second, hoping someone would take the question away from him before answering.

"Well, sir, there is a general belief that that would be the case, that any alien signal would contain some basic and easily decodable cipher," Tugel said. "But we're just not seeing that in the data. If there are numbers in there, they're extremely well hidden, which means that they aren't meant to be decoded, which means that this signal isn't a numbers-based transmission.

"Maybe the words we're seeing are numbers, but we won't know that until we have a better understanding of the rules set that's at work with the words," Tugel said.

Hibbens nodded and turned his attention to Taylor.

"What kind of staff increase are we going to need to change weeks, months and years into days or weeks?" Hibbens asked.

"Well, general, we'd need to tap just about everyone at any language department at any major university. The language isn't Spanish or Chinese or Mongolian or even a known made-up language like Klingon," Taylor said. "We've ruled out more than 200 languages so far –"

Hibbens leaned forward in his chair, astounded, and cut Taylor off abruptly. "In four days you've ruled out 200 languages?"

Ferguson said, "Two-hundred and thirty eight, general."

Hibbens glanced at Ferguson, opting not to interject protocol into the meeting, and turned back to Taylor. "How?"

"Just by running the signal through the database," Taylor said. "And, that's all of the languages in the database, so, at this point, we're talking about physically taking copies of the sound pattern to various experts and playing it for them."

Hibbens sighed, exasperated at the sudden nature of the challenge. Outsourcing the signal to academics was not exactly what he or his superiors wanted to do. It would make the signal legitimate, somehow, if the experts realized what they were dealing with.

"So, what needs to happen?" Hibbens asked.

Taylor picked up a sheet of paper from near the laptop and put it on the table before Hibbens.

"We have a list of 347 linguists trained in various languages and language analysis," Taylor said.

"Theoretically, if we could get all of them a copy of the speech pattern this week, we'd know if it was any known or knowable language in however long it took them to do the work."

Hibbens scratched his chin. "What's the best guess on that?"

"Well, it's academia, general, so you're talking weeks or months, depending on the person," Taylor said. "Plus, there's the presumed need for secrecy, so we'd have to come up with a cover story for why we need this analyzed so quickly, and no matter what we tell them, some of them will not eagerly work with us because, while they're on our list, they don't know they're on our list, so a military request for a translation will be met with some measure of disdain, at best."

Hibbens rose from the chair and paced the room. He looked out a window at the desert and wondered if anybody else on the base ever had to deal with real life intruding on their top secret projects. He felt a sudden intense need for a cigar.

"Major Forrestal, get Colonel Taylor 347 copies of the recognized language sections of the transmission in whatever formats she thinks she needs," Hibbens said, turning and nodding to Taylor before turning his gaze to Forrestal, "by 1600 hours tomorrow."

Hibbens strode across the room and exited without another word.

Chapter 30

Dante and Kendell sat before Dante's computers, listening to Dante's latest three songs, all based on the captured sounds from the signal. They both had headphones on and had been paying attention to the sounds in the songs, and how Dante had managed to make them musical. Kendell was impressed, and as the final song finished, he kept his eyes closed as he took off the headphones and composed his thoughts.

Kendell waited for Dante to take off his headphones and then stared in disbelief at his friend.

"Scots, those are maybe the most unique, innovative and ground-breaking songs I think I've ever heard," Kendell said. "Kaylinne told me about the one she did, but who the hell is that on the other two?"

Dante smiled. "Me."

"You!"

"Yeah, I tweaked my vocals to try to match the source material," Dante said, playing down his sense of pride that he'd impressed his friend.

"It's awesome," Kendell said, "but it's weird. It sounds like you're some sort of... I don't know. It's almost like you're singing like English isn't your normal language."

Dante walked over to a selection of jackets on hooks on a wall near the door, pulled a coat down and shrugged into it. Kendell picked his coat up from the couch, slipped into it and followed Dante out of the apartment. Dante locked the door to the apartment and the two of them made their way down the stairwell and out onto the city streets, Kendell peppering Dante with questions about how Dante manipulated his vocals to sound so weird.

"I did it on purpose, fire, I don't know what to tell you," Dante said as they made their way down the street, city traffic buzzing by on the streets. "I kind of tried to – I don't know – to imagine an alien singing in English in an alien karaoke bar. It was sort of like imagining what it must sound like to hear somebody in Tokyo singing Britney Spears, knowing all the word sounds of English, but not able to speak English, but loving the sound of the music.

"It took me about a dozen takes on each song to get it right, and I'm still not sure I've got what I'm looking for, and there's no way I can actually go to Tokyo to sit in a karaoke bar and listen to Japs sing songs in English that they don't know what the words mean."

Kendell glanced at Dante, wondering why Dante thought his songs weren't perfect after Kendell had just praised them as perfect.

"Naw, you got it right, Scots, trust me," Kendell said. "What're you going to do with Kaylinne's track? Are you going to re-record it with you on vocals?"

Dante shook his head. "No way, it's perfect. I put it up on the Web a couple of days ago and it's already been downloaded a couple hundred times. So, that's good."

Kendell stopped and stared at Dante. "You getting any money off that?"

"Nah, but that song'll get me a deal, so, I'm okay with giving away some of the milk if I can eventually sell the cow," Dante said.

The two stopped at the corner at a "don't walk" indication on a light on the street lamp, and Kendell turned to Dante.

"Well, what do you want to do?" Kendell asked.

Dante shrugged and watched the traffic pulse through the intersection, his mind momentarily wondering if there was music to such motion. How would the movement of traffic sound, if it could be sounded out, he wondered. Not horns and brake screeches, but sound as a meter, as something that could be understood. There had to be a pattern that could be understood musically.

Kendell lightly punched Dante in the shoulder, recognizing his friend had drifted from the conversation.

"Yo, what do you want to do?" Kendell asked.

"I want so see if anybody's gong to play my song tonight," Dante said.

Kendell tilted his head in disbelief. "Hey, somebody's been downloading it. Stands to reason somebody's gonna play it. Let's go."

Chapter 31

Tom stood in the doorway of Lincoln's radio studio holding the rhinoceros tumbler, a cigar smoldering in his other hand. Behind him, Lincoln, Grover and Charles were finishing up a radio conversation on one of the ham sets, a conversation that had instantly bored Tom and caused him to wander off to his new position, where he was looking up at the evening sky and the first few stars poking through the atmosphere.

"Make your wish," Lincoln said from behind him.

Tom barely shook his head. "Nah, I've got everything I want."

Lincoln smiled. "Me, too, but I keep on wishing."

Tom stepped through the door to the outside and turned to face Lincoln. "For what?"

Lincoln shrugged. "That depends on what I'm thinking about at the moment. Maybe for my kids to be happy, or for someone to get well if they're sick, or for the Sooners to win the national championship again."

"The Sooners?" Tom said mock incredulously. "Sheesh, I'm drinking with the enemy."

"Aww, crap, you're a Texas fan," Lincoln said, turning his head over his shoulder and shouting into the studio. "Hey, Grover, Tom here's a Texas man."

Grover turned from the ham set he was fiddling with and frowned deeply at Tom before flitting his eyes to Lincoln. "Well, then, tell him he's got to bring Johnnie Blue from now on if he wants to drink with us. He's going to need a lot of good will."

Lincoln smiled and walked through the doorway and into the yard.

"You know, Johnnie Blue is a blend," Tom said.

"Yeah, but it's expensive, and Grove's been wanting to taste it for a while to see if it holds up," Lincoln said. "And, don't worry, Jed's a Texas man, too, he's just not here tonight to stick up for you."

Tom smiled and took a puff on his cigar. He was unsure how to puff on the cigar as the muscle memory of smoking cigarettes urged him to inhale the smoke, and the one time he'd allowed himself a small inward drag had created a coughing fit worse than the last time he'd had a bad cold, and his throat burned in a way he never remembered from his first attempts at smoking a cigarette. Just holding the cigar smoke in his mouth felt, somehow, unsatisfying, a cheap imitation of inhaling a cigarette. Looking at the cigar in his fingers, he wondered why anybody had invented the cigarette and why the rules of inhaling had changed with the addition of "ette." Hell, he wondered with a smile, how many different things did the original harvesters of tobacco do with the plant before figuring out it was only good for smoking?

"Have you heard anything about that music broadcast you listened to a couple of months ago?" Tom asked, not because he had any real interest, but it was the only subject of conversation that had persisted within the group since he'd joined.

Lincoln shook his head. "No, apparently it was a one shot deal," Lincoln said, puffing on his own cigar. "It doesn't happen often, but every once-in-a-while some clown decides he has to break the rules and broadcast music or a radio play or some such crap.

"I don't know what kind of thrill it gives those kinds of people. I mean, if you want to be an entertainer on the radio, use commercial radio, that's what it's there for."

Tom looked back up at the sky and the stars twinkling through and suddenly remembered a conversation he'd had with his wife about the signal. He thought twice about it before deciding it wasn't the stupidest avenue of conversation he could possibly pursue with Lincoln, and turned back to him.

"My wife said the strangest thing about it," Tom said. "I guess she'd read something on the Internet about it being investigated by the government as a possible communication from extra-terrestrials."

Lincoln guffawed mightily. "Space aliens?"

Tom nodded. "Yeah."

"Why the heck would they try and talk to us on a ham freq?" Lincoln said.

"Like I would know, I just come for the scotch," Tom said.

"I figured that out a while ago. You can't possibly be interested in the conversations we have," Lincoln said. "You get terribly quiet when we talk about sex or politics."

Tom didn't know how to respond to this, and it was true. Several moments evaporated into the night air as the two men more or less stood in silence next to each other, neither sure which way to go next. So, Tom made a gesture with his cigar.

"So, is it possible, do you think?" Tom asked.

Lincoln looked long and hard at Tom, thinking over his answer.

"Aliens, you mean?" Lincoln asked.

"Yeah."

Lincoln took a quick succession of puffs from his cigar, spouting out little balls of smoke as he thought about how to answer.

"Well, technically, sure," Lincoln said. "If you were an alien you could broadcast a signal on a ham freq if you wanted – it's just a radio frequency, nothing more. It's not magic or anything that the amateur band consists of certain frequencies, it's just the way the governments of the world have chopped up the radio spectrum. They gave ham a certain section, limited us by power and other regs, and that's that.

"I mean, if it were aliens, you'd think they'd know how to get our attention, given all the spectrum we emit from this planet. I'd think they'd show up on TV."

Tom took a long puff on his cigar and stared up into the blackening sky, the last bit of blue nearly surrendered.

"What do you think they'd want to say to us?" Tom asked.

"The aliens?" Lincoln said.

"Yeah."

Lincoln made a small laugh. "Don't they always want to be taken to our leader?"

Tom laughed back. "If they were really watching our TV, wouldn't they already know who that is?"

Lincoln tapped cigar ash onto the ground. "Hell, you'd hope so, but depending on what they're watching, they might not know. Everything on broadcast TV since ever has been beamed into space. Just based on duration of broadcast frequency, they might think Johnny Carson was the leader of the planet."

Tom gave Lincoln a curious look. "Carson? He's been retired for years."

Lincoln nodded. "But he was on TV forever. If you were sitting out there monitoring our TV broadcasts, how would you know who was in charge? By frequency of airtime? Any given president is on TV a couple of minutes here and there, mostly. Carson was on five nights a week for something like thirty years.

"Nobody else on the planet has that kind of presence on the airwaves. And, if you're an alien, how would you know what's entertainment for humans? You might think the nightly Carson broadcast was an informational lecture from the leader of the planet, complete with interviews with experts in certain fields."

"That's weird to think about," Tom said, trying to imagine what an alien would make of Carson as Karnak or any of the oddball people showing off their weird "talents."

"What, Carson as planetary leader?" Lincoln mused, puffing his cigar.

"Well, sure, but no," Tom said. "Just the fact that every broadcast made to people here on earth is going to someone else up there in space, too. It just takes a lot of time to get there."

Lincoln nodded. "It's the same here. Some alien with a TV station on Betelgeuse could be broadcasting now, and at some point in the future his programs will suddenly appear on Channel 78 or something, and somebody living in a trailer park in Ada watching a TV connected to an antenna will wonder what he's looking at."

Tom and Lincoln both stared up into the night sky, each imagining that sudden moment when a television somewhere picked up the first alien television program. Tom figured nobody would believe it was real, especially if alien television programs resembled human ones, with characters and plot lines and commercial breaks. Lincoln, on the other hand, imagined a suddenly frightened individual rushing from his trailer and pounding on his neighbor's front door.

"You know, my wife asked me a strange question a couple of weeks ago," Tom said, turning toward Lincoln. "She asked me if I thought aliens believed in God."

Lincoln turned his head away from the night sky and looked quizzically at Tom. "Oh?"

"Well, she figured that if you were an alien broadcasting in the blind, maybe you'd broadcast about God."

Lincoln smiled. "Your wife has quite an imagination, Tom. My guess is if we ever get a signal from aliens in outer space, it'll be something more banal than someone asking about God."

Tom took a sip of scotch and considered the point. "Yeah, that's what I thought at first, too, but it got me thinking. If there are aliens out there, what if they were sending out messages in the blind asking what it's all about, if there's a god, what's the meaning of life?

"I dunno, it's just weird to think about. If there is life out there amidst the stars, wouldn't it be strange if everyone was trying to find someone else to explain it all?"

Lincoln took a deep puff on his cigar, exhaled and tipped some whisky into his mouth. "What if everyone was asking but nobody had any answers?"

Chapter 32

Peter and Chloe were both leaning against the railing above a dance floor jammed with dancers. Below them, people were dancing wildly, and Peter looked down at them with less curiosity than the last few times he and Chloe had gone clubbing. He no longer felt quite as out of place in a dance club, as was evidenced by the clothing he was wearing, which was more fashionable and hip than he would have bought for himself left to his own devices. Chloe had gone shopping with him over the last few weeks to pad out his wardrobe, an activity that had both interested him and made him wonder why such a beautiful girl would waste her time on him in such a way.

Nothing obvious had made it through Peter's ability to discern the world through the lens of inter-personal relations, and Chloe had found this to be both funny and endearing. Peter was oblivious to what the world thought of him, and he was totally unaware that the world might notice him. More to the point, though, was that he might not notice her interest in him, a fact their shopping expeditions had revealed to her. Chloe could tell Peter liked her, and liked her in that way, but he was so uncertain of himself that she had had to take the first step in finding out if there was any "there" there.

Peter looked over at Chloe and she gave him a small smile. Then, again, her phone buzzed inside her pocket and she pulled it out. Peter watched as she read a text message.

"Well, now, Jessica's just canceled," Chloe said.

This meant almost nothing to Peter, but the gears in his brain churned and he put a few facts together. "That's odd, all three of them canceling at the last moment."

"Yeah," Chloe said, smiling larger than life. "That is weird."

"Yeah," Peter said.

Chloe took a quick sip from her drink and turned to stand in front of Peter. "So, I guess this makes this our official first date, then."

Peter looked at her absently. "I always thought our first date would involve dinner at a restaurant and a movie."

Chloe laughed happily, a smile erupting on her face, an expression of pure joy. "Oh, really, then why is it at a dance club?"

Peter looked at Chloe's face and the pieces suddenly fit together. Her friends had canceled as part of a plan so that the two of them could be alone for the night. Suddenly, all the daytime "friends" activities made sense to him as he realized she was getting to know him on a non-dating level, a way to make it easier for him to get to know her in ways where the possibility for a letdown, on either end, was minimized. Although it would be weeks before his mind processed all the information to that conclusion; at the moment, he was a little flustered at the notion that she had been working behind the scenes to achieve this moment.

"I, um, well," Peter said in a stumble, "I wasn't sure how to ask."

Chloe rolled her eyes dramatically. "I know."

"You knew?" Peter said.

Chloe shrugged matter-of-factly. "How many times was I going to have to sit with you at your table at the coffee shop before you said anything? I mean, you're cute, you're smart, but after a while, I figured I was going to have to make the first move.

"I mean, I totally knew you were checking me out every time you were there."

Peter was momentarily mortified. "You saw?"

"Come on, Pete," Chloe said. "I know I'm not the cutest girl in the world, but I do notice when I've got a serial-checker-outer checking me out."

Peter was now conflicted. Was it right to have checked her out at the coffee shop all those times now that he knew she had noticed? Had that put her in a weird position? Not that he could've helped it, though, as he thought Chloe was one of the more beautiful women he'd ever had any semi-interpersonal interaction with, and he'd always liked when she sat down at his table to chat.

"Sorry," Peter said.

Chloe stared at Peter for several long moments, realizing that Peter didn't entirely grasp the situation at hand. "Pete, I was checking you out, too. Didn't you notice? I mean, come on, 'hello,' how many times did I sit with you while you surfed the Web?"

"Uhh, well, to be perfectly honest with you, I thought you were just trying to make sure I was harmless," Peter said. "You know, protecting your space from some guy with a laptop by interacting with him to defuse any potential tension."

Chloe laughed hard at that explanation, not having thought that Peter would've thought so long and hard as to why she was interacting with him and Peter not realizing it might be the possibility of a physical attraction she recognized the two shared. He really was clueless, she thought, which meant he was malleable, which she didn't think, but knew somewhere deep in her soul.

"We don't have to stay here," Chloe said. "Unless you want to dance."

Peter took a pull from his drink and tried to wrap his mind around the situation. He was now officially on a date, which meant, and this was his first thought, that he might get to kiss Chloe at some point during the night. That possibility excited him, as he'd previously excluded it from the list of possible interactions he could have with her. But he didn't know what he'd want to do with her, not on such short notice, now that he was on a date, and his mind drew a blank as to the possible alternatives. The first thing that sprang to his mind, taking her back to his apartment and collecting his telescope and driving out into the countryside to show her stars and far off planets was immediately vetoed by him, as there was no way to shift gears from dance club to remote location without seeming, well, weird.

And then a new song dropped into the mix and the crowd on the dance floor reacted enthusiastically, not that Peter noticed. Instead, there was something in the song that Peter knew, and he lost all focus with reality for a moment as he listened to the music. Chloe noticed.

"Do you want to dance to this song?" Chloe asked.

Peter held up his index finger, indicating he needed a moment, and listened to the song. The dancers on the floor writhed and gyrated to the beat. There was something to the song.

"What?" Chloe asked, suddenly confused and wondering if her 'first date' declaration had derailed everything. He was clueless, after all.

"This song," Peter said, looking at Chloe. "I know this song. I've heard it before."

Chloe was indifferent. "Well, maybe two weeks ago when we were here before."

Peter shook his head. "No."

Peter listened more. "I mean, no, I've never heard this particular song before, but the substructure of the song, that I've heard a million times. It's just different, now, somehow."

Chloe was still uncertain what to make of the turn of events, having expected the night to turn differently once the dating aspect had been revealed, and responded rather matter-of-factly.

"It's probably just some DJ remix of something you know," Chloe said.

Peter was now in a different world, oblivious to the people around him, unaware of the dance club. He was focused on the music blaring from the speakers, trying to make some sense of the sounds he was hearing, divorcing them from the actual song and into their individual elements.

"Yeah, but this is different," Peter said absent-mindedly to Chloe, listening, his eyebrows furrowed in concentration. "No, I mean-"

Peter suddenly looked up at Chloe as if he had been struck by lightening or the flash of inspiration. Chloe looked back at him with curiosity, but was sure the date was a bust.

"Holy shit, it's the signal," Peter said abruptly.

"The signal? Is that the band or the name of the song?" Chloe asked.

Peter said, "Hunh?"

The two stared at each other for a second.

"It's a really long story, so I'll have to summarize," Peter said.

For some reason, this amused Chloe and she smiled. Peter took a sip from his drink and thought about how to explain something he was fairly certain Chloe was both uninterested in and unaware of.

"Okay, last summer I was out at a SETI site monitoring," Peter paused, catching himself. "Do you know what a SETI site is?"

Chloe shook her head.

"Well, it stands for 'search for extraterrestrial intelligence,' and researchers like me spend part of our time every year using certain kinds of telescopes – radio telescopes in this case – to try and find signs of life somewhere else in the universe," Peter said. "So, last summer, we were out at a site and, like usual, we got nothing.

"And, well, a couple of weeks later, we got a hit on a frequency and the source data indicated that it was, or, I mean, it could be, who knows, non-terran in origin-"

Chloe furrowed her brows. "Where's nonterran?"

The question was so odd to Peter that it didn't occur to him to laugh. In his world, everyone would have known what he meant, and he had never considered the term to be scientific or proprietary in nature.

"Umm, it means the source of the radio signal wasn't here on Earth," Peter said. "The transmission we got lasted a couple of hours and made no sense and then suddenly cut out, so everyone thinks it came from some hacker somewhere since it was broadcast on a frequency used by ham radio and there are, apparently, anti-ham radio people out there in the world agitating for the use of those frequencies for other purposes.

"Now, my professor said she thought it was a hacker or a DJ pulling a publicity stunt or something, and..."

Peter said the words and the epiphany hit him like a ton of bricks. Here he stood, in a dance club with a beautiful girl, and he had just heard a dance-mix version of the signal. And, for a few moments, he had thought the opposite of Occam's Razor, that the signal had been real, not that some musician had gamed the system for hype, had gotten noticed, in odd circles, and was now capitalizing on that with a song played in a dance club.

"And I guess she was right," Peter said softly. "I've listened to that broadcast a thousand times and this song is just a remix of that broadcast. The signal. Dammit. I thought it was real."

Chloe was totally confused. Peter's story had not made sense to her.

"Uh, Peter, it is real. You're listening to it," Chloe said.

"Yeah," Peter said absent-mindedly, listening to the song. "I mean, no, I thought this song was an actual extraterrestrial signal, not... this. It's just a dance song."

Chloe suddenly realized what Peter was talking about and felt sorry for him. It also confirmed her earlier assessment of him as someone in need of a friend outside of his circle of science nerds.

"You thought this song came from outer space?" Chloe asked.

Peter was embarrassed beyond all belief. "Well,... yeah."

Peter drained his glass of its drink and set it on the bar.

"Do you want to dance to it?" Chloe asked.

Peter smiled. "Let's."

Chloe grabbed Peter's hand and led him to the dance floor. They squeezed through the crowd and onto the huddled dance floor and started moving, when it occurred to Peter that this was the opportunity to put the signal to the lie.

"Is there any way I can find out who this song is by?" Peter shouted as he and Chloe danced.

Chloe pulled in close and put an arm around Peter. "Sure. After we're done dancing, I'll take you up to the DJ booth," Chloe whispered in Peter's ear. "My friend Keith is spinning."

Chloe pulled away into her own space and Peter shook his head and absently said out loud, though unheard by anybody, "Dr. Lombard will be so pleased to know it's only a song."

Chapter 33

Carla sat in her living room, drink in hand, finishing a catch-up conversation with her daughter, Jenny. Carla missed Jenny's presence in the house, though she always knew it would end, that her children would, over the years, ebb into the world and become their own selves. Carla liked the conversations, though, because they were now about something she had any experience in: living as an adult. The conversations she had had with her daughter previously had all been negotiations, and Carla had never been taught how to raise a child, so everything had been a white-knuckle off-the-cuff foray into a brave new world.

The thing she and Bill had realized too late was in the spacing of their children. When they'd become pregnant with Jennifer – Bill still refused to consider himself pregnant with her but had stopped arguing about the nature of a "we" pregnancy – they had wanted to see how they adapted to having a child before thinking about expanding the family. By the time Jenny was two, Bill wanted another child, but she hadn't, remembering the burdens Jenny had placed on her body. It wasn't until Bill sold his first novel that she realized they weren't going to have to rely solely on her salary that she agreed, if that could be said to be the term, to get pregnant again. And, by then, Jenny was already twelve, so they were going to be the parents of young children well into their fifties.

Carla smiled as she listened to Jenny on the other end of the phone, trying to figure out one of the basics of life: laundry.

"Separating laundry is sort of a myth, honey," Carla said. "Most of the time, you can just lump it all in there and wash it on warm and everything will come out fine. But, with new clothes in certain colors, you have to be careful because, if you mix a new red blouse in with your whites, there's a chance it'll all end up pink. Otherwise, don't worry about it. The info on the tags are guidelines, not rules."

Carla listened and rolled her eyes.

"Well, just make sure you don't put anything wool into a dryer," Carla said, "because it'll shrink. For me, as a rule, since I can never remember to look at the tag to see what a sweater is made out of, I drape them all over a line in the basement. When they're dry, you just fluff them on the air cycle in the dryer and they're fine."

Carla listened to her daughter and laughed.

"Yeah, I know," Carla said. "Doing laundry on a Saturday night isn't something anyone ever told me I would ever do in my life, either, but, believe me, you'll do a lot of things on Saturday nights that you never thought you would do. The sad truth is that Saturday nights aren't all that special, at least, not after a while."

The two chatted on the phone for a few more minutes and then they ended the conversation. Carla set the phone down and sat quietly for a moment, took a sip from her drink, and let herself miss her daughter's presence in the house. It was weird to her that someone so close to you would leave to live their own life, even though she always knew that that's what she had wanted and had always known that's what her daughter – indeed, and her sons – would want. In the end, only her husband would remain with her.

She stood from the chair and walked to the base of the stairs and cocked an ear upward, listening for sounds from Bill's study, expecting to hear him wasting time on a video game but instead hearing nothing. She walked quietly up the steps for no reason she could fathom, asking herself why she was avoiding the creaky steps, and tip-toed to the threshold of the doorway into her husband's study. Bill was sitting at his computer, typing busily, oblivious to the world that existed outside of the fictional world he was creating on his computer monitor.

"You don't usually work on Saturday nights," Carla said.

Bill typed a few more words and then turned in his chair.

"It's not a rule, you know," Bill said.

"I know."

"I was outside earlier toiling over a cigar and something hit me and I had to start writing," Bill said.

Carla smiled. "What hit you?"

"I was just thinking about that signal we listened to online a couple of months ago, that crappy song-noise thing, and I thought that would make a great idea for the next novel," Bill said.

Carla walked into the room and peered over Bill's shoulders at the monitor.

"You're on page three," Carla said.

"Yeah, it just hit me," Bill said. "It may fizzle out in a few pages and be a nothing story, or not, but I thought I'd try it out."

"What's the idea?" Carla asked.

"I don't know, yet. I'm thinking a story about a normal astronomy professor who intercepts a broadcast on an unusual frequency and determines it's from a distant solar system and how she, ultimately, decodes the signal, which is a warning that there are evil extra-galactic forces invading the various solar systems of the galaxy," Bill said, "and, as a result, she has to get the government and the UN to get Earth ready for a fight sometime in the future."

Carla was surprised. "She?"

Bill bobbed his head in acknowledgment. "You always wanted to be the hero of one of my stories."

"And to think it only took twenty-one years."

"Better late than never," Bill said.

Chapter 34

Peter stood in the hallway outside Dr. Lombard's office and wondered, again, if this was such a good idea. She already didn't believe the signal was authentic so there was no reason for him to admit to her that he had not given up the ghost until just recently. He didn't want to come across as some sort of believer, someone who would take an irrational position and stick with it just because he wanted to believe it. And that's what he had done, more or less, with the signal. Now that he knew it wasn't real, he felt foolish for having pursued it for so long, so certain of its authenticity.

He knocked lightly on the frame of the open door and walked into the room quietly. Dr. Lombard had paperwork spread out before her, marking some of it with a pen, and when she looked and saw Peter she put the pen down.

"Doctor Lombard," Peter said as acknowledgement.

Carla smiled up at him. "Peter, I skimmed the first couple pages of your paper but I haven't read it or graded it, yet."

This took Peter unawares. "My paper," he said, thinking hard about what she might be talking about until he remembered. "Oh, right."

Then he remembered the subject of his paper – the signal – and his stomach sank with embarrassment. He had tried to make an argument about the nature of any alien signal not being an intentional broadcast to an intentional recipient, but, rather, random noise accidentally intercepted by the receiver. Peter waved his hand through the air as if he were dismissing the subject.

"I'm going to need some more time to re-work it, if that's okay," Peter said. "I, umm, came across some new evidence that would change the nature of it from actual to theoretical."

Carla suppressed a laugh and smiled up at Peter.

"New evidence?" Carla asked. "I don't know that there's going to be any evidence in there at all, just speculation."

Peter shrugged in defeat. "Yeah, that's why I'm here."

"Oh?"

Peter slipped out of his backpack and placed it on Carla's desk, rummaged through it for a few seconds and pulled out a compact disk. He handed to Dr. Lombard with no fanfare or explanation.

"Put it in your CD drive and play it," Peter said, his voice flat and devoid of emotion.

Carla gave him a curious look. "And this is?"

Peter shrugged again. "You tell me."

Carla stared in disbelief at Peter for a moment before taking the disk, unsure what possible reason there could be for this exchange and his request. Still, curiosity got to her and she put the disk into her computer, waited for the autoload to bring up the relevant program, and then clicked play. Soon, a dance song began playing from the speakers near the computer monitor. Carla glanced at Peter with disbelief and, after a few moments of listening, stopped the song playback.

"It's a song, Peter," Carla said

Peter nodded. "It's the song."

Peter's obtuseness, though only a couple of minutes old, was beginning to wear thin with Carla. She had better things to do than play games with a grad student.

"Which song would that be?" she asked.

Peter closed his eyes. "The one I thought was the signal," he said, opening his eyes and fixing them on Dr. Lombard. "You were right; it was just some club DJ, apparently. Some guy called Scots Tape in New York City. He released it on the Web a couple of weeks ago, and it's breaking into the clubs right now as a hot dance track."

Carla drummed her fingers on her desk for a moment, unsure how to proceed. The song she had just listened to was not the signal from the summer, to her ears, and now her most signal-interested student was saying it was. Clearly, he had transferred his interest in the signal to a dance club song for a reason, she thought, though she wasn't convinced she wanted to know the reason.

"Peter, this sounds like music, not like that weird noise we captured at the site," Carla said.

Peter nodded. "I know, I know, but it's the same source material. Only, here the material has been mixed down and edited, and there's extra music layered in and some vocal tracks, but, trust me, I've listened to that weird sound enough times to know that the sample edited in this song is the same as what we heard playing through the SETI site."

Carla was curious. She clicked play on the computer and listened for a couple more moments, wondering if this latest explanation were plausible, and then stopped the playback.

"So, you were right, I guess, about it being just a hacker," Peter said.

"How'd you come to this conclusion?" Carla asked.

"I was at a club on Saturday night with my girlfriend, and she knew the club DJ so he told me who the track was by and I downloaded it yesterday and compared it to the signal."

Carla regarded Peter for a moment before speaking, not wanting to belittle him. "I'm sure your Internet friends were disappointed to find out they were fooled."

Peter rolled his eyes. "Eh, I don't think anybody thinks we were fooled. I think we all kinda knew it was unlikely. I mean, nobody could find a primer or any other structure to the signal, so..."

Peter stood there groping for words for a second, trying to find a way back to a respectable scientific position on the proposition that the signal they had heard had always been an implausible and unlikely conclusion.

"I mean, if it was an actual signal, there would have been some sort of decodable message in there, right? I mean, that's the point of sending a signal, isn't it?" Peter asked.

Carla ejected the disk from her computer and handed it toward Peter. "Well, at least you've solved your mystery."

Peter turned his palms up at the disk. He wanted nothing more to do with it. "Keep it. Consider it the first signal of unknown origin to be solved by a SETI team."

Chapter 35

Kendell and Dante were standing in an aisle of music equipment at the music store, hiding from potential customers by pretending to be busy with the equipment on the shelves. They had been talking about the unexpected underground success of Dante's most recent song release, but mostly they were in shock that Kaylinne had attracted the attention of record producers.

"I told you Kaylinne would get some sort of deal before us if we kept using her all the time, and now here she is with a record offer," Kendell said.

Dante had grown exasperated with Kendell's inability to accept reality. Kaylinne had just been offered a small-time contract to record an album on an independent label, and Kendell was upset because it wasn't he or Dante that had been signed, not happy that Kaylinne had been signed.

"It's not like she didn't earn it," Dante said, moving some boxes of guitars around on the shelf and scouting the store for the manager. "She must be on like a hundred tracks produced by everyone within fifty miles of here. It was only a matter of time."

Kendell nodded. "Yeah, but it was your song that did it. You know it, Scots, you know."

Dante thought about this for a moment. His latest track featuring Kaylinne had gone big, for him, and the song had been downloaded thousands of times. There was a smallish amount of money to be had in all those downloads, but there was no way to know if it was his song writing or Kaylinne's vocals that had sold the song.

"No, I don't know," Dante said. "Maybe it was one of your tracks, or maybe it was that killer one she did last summer with Delux."

Kendell was flabbergasted. "With Delux? That was two summers ago, man. That song you just put out is everywhere and you know that's why she got a record."

Dante considered that for a moment. "Maybe, but so what? She ain't going to forget us. Something will happen. All we got to do is sit still and not complain. I got faith in the girl, she'll keep the door open for us."

Kendell stared at his friend in disbelief, unsure where Dante's faith in Kaylinne and the music industry originated. People were screwed by the industry all the time, and it was a small measure to forget those who got you where you were. Kendell wasn't sure if Dante was naïve or if Dante knew something about Kaylinne that Kendell didn't. Kendell changed the subject.

"Tyrell told me he heard your track on the radio the other day," Kendell said.

"He told me."

"Aren't you supposed to get money for that?" Kendell asked.

Dante rolled his eyes half-way and gave a slight shrug. "I don't know. I guess. Like a nickel or a penny a play or something, but I'm not worried about that. If it gets enough plays, I'll be able to put out the record. Somebody will notice and want to make money off me, just like they noticed Kaylinne.

"The suits in the industry don't know good music, they know good money. If I look like money to them, well, then I'll get a shot."

Kendell's eyes bugged out for a moment. "Scots, you can't sell out before you get through the door."

"FireArm, I'm not selling out," Dante said. "You gotta get through the door to make any money, that's just the way it works. You want to make music, you've got to make music somebody wants to pay for; you can't just make it for yourself."

Dante looked around the store to see if anyone was listening to them. He grabbed Kendell's arm and leaned toward him.

"You gotta do what you gotta do to get in, but you gotta be true to yourself, too, which is why I'm doing what I'm doing. If that's 'selling out' to you, well, you're wrong," Dante said. "But the odd thing about your so-called selling out and making it in the industry is this: the more money you make, the more artistic freedom you get. Ain't nobody gonna tell you no after a certain point in your career, if you're successful."

Kendell nodded. "Well, maybe. I got all the artistic freedom a person could want and less than $500 in my bank accounts."

Dante smiled. "It'll come."

Kendell looked into Dante's eyes. "You sure?"

Dante let out a little laugh. "Well, yeah, something's gotta come. Maybe all I'll ever be is a guy who releases his tracks online for tiny sips from the well, but that's something. That's not nothing."

"It ain't much, either," Kendell said.

"True, but it's something," Dante said. "If I quit, then that's nothing. And I ain't going to quit. 'Bounced Sound' is gonna be big, anyway. It's like nothing nobody has heard before."

Chapter 36

General Hibbens sat uncomfortably in the chair at the long desk, his notes piled neatly before him, a pitcher of water nearby. He was flanked by Colonels Thibideaux and Taylor, who were also decked out in their Class A uniforms, notes stacked before them, as well. Hibbens and his staff had rehearsed their testimony for days before making the journey to Washington, D.C., as he wanted to ensure all three of them were on the same page on every detail.

The previous three days had consisted of endless briefings with senior officers and government officials, three days Hibbens had found to be exhaustingly excruciating. The entire chain of command was inexplicably over-curious about his findings, and he and his staff had been forced to defend their findings countless times. Nobody, it appeared, wanted to believe.

As expected, however, the Senate Armed Services Committee had eventually become aware of the work his unit had been doing, and Hibbens had been summoned to the District of Columbia to sit before it and explain what he and his unit were up to, which is the reason for the several days of briefings he had just endured. Many of those involved in the briefings now sat behind him, awaiting his testimony. Hibbens secretly thought they thought he'd recant and make this kerfuffle go away, so that nobody would have to worry about dealing with it and he could be sent back to Nevada with an emasculated agenda.

Just then the gavel sounded and the room grew quiet. Hibbens fixed his attention on the chairman and waited patiently. Senator Darnton put the gavel down, looked to his fellow panel members, and turned his attention to Hibbens.

"Thank you, general, for you and your staff coming here today. We've all read your report and listened to the material, and I must say, I'm stunned and bewildered at your conclusions," Darnton said. "Are you absolutely certain that the transmission you intercepted and analyzed is extraterrestrial in origin?"

Hibbens nodded. "Without a doubt, senator. It's from somewhere outside our system."

Darnton leaned toward his microphone. "How far out?"

"That's impossible to determine. As shown in the briefing papers, the signal's reverse trajectory takes it on a path outside of the solar system to a possible origination from, as noted in the materials, any of nineteen star systems.

"But that's only if you take it out that far. If it was an intentional broadcast directed specifically to the earth, it could have come from any intermediate source much closer."

Darnton did the best he could to hide his sarcasm, but failed. "Like from a space ship broadcasting just outside our system?"

Hibbens ignored it. "That's one possibility, yes."

Another senator on the panel leaned toward his microphone and spoke. "So, you're not sure where the signal came from?"

Hibbens looked at the senator. "No, we're not. But based on the data we've been able to gather, it came from outside our system. How far out is an unknown."

Darnton waved off the other senator and took the microphone. "Now, general, I'm curious about the findings of the broadcast. You've broken it down into several distinct portions, and you're certain that a portion of the broadcast is a language?

Hibbens nodded. "Yes, my linguistics team has managed to isolate the language elements of the broadcast transmission and have even gone so far as to isolate what appear to be words and sentences, and, to a lesser extent, some of the grammar involved."

Darnton looked up and down the conference table looking for someone to give away the game, and saw nothing.

"But you don't know what they're saying?" Darnton asked.

"No," Hibbens said, "the language bears no resemblance to any of the known languages on our planet, spoken or written."

Senator Jason Brownlee leaned into his microphone. "So, there's no way of guessing what the message might be telling us?"

Hibbens wanted to laugh at the question, since he had just answered it, but decorum required he maintain his composure.

"No, senator, none," Hibbens said. "Unless whoever sent us the signal also sends some decoding elements, we'll never know."

"What do you mean by decoding elements?" Brownlee asked.

Hibbens turned to his staff briefly to see if either of them looked eager to explain. Neither did, which didn't surprise Hibbens. These two colonels still had career options if this business with the signal suddenly blew up in their faces, and their silence here would likely keep them off the radar of those in the chain of command.

"Well, senator, that'd be up to the transmitter to determine," Hibbens said. "We're not going to be able to guess what from here, but the speculation is that there would be some sort of universal constants included in the message in a way easily decipherable to the receiver; something along the lines of basic mathematic equations, or a version of the Periodic Table, for example."

Senator Darnton looked off Brownlee, who reclined back in his chair and fidgeted with a pencil.

"And there's nothing like that in the signal you intercepted," Darnton asked, "like in that movie 'Contact' from a while back, some sort of signal hiding within the signal."

Hibbens smiled for a slight second, amused at the movie reference. Hibbens, too, had spent time watching that movie after encountering the signal, and his team had tried to figure out if there was, indeed, a hidden primer in the signal. They had not been successful in finding one. Hibbens wondered if that movie was the sum total of knowledge about extraterrestrial signals that any of the senators had. He figured it likely was.

"Not that we've been able to find as of yet, but we're still looking," Hibbens said.

"What about the unintelligible portion of the broadcast? Have you made any headway into what that might be?" Darnton asked.

Hell, Hibbens thought, the entire signal is unintelligible to him and his staff, although Hibbens figured the senator was asking about the portions of the signal that his staff figured were not language.

"Nobody on my staff has any idea what that might be," Hibbens said. "Wild guesses, some of which are in the second addendum to the initial report of the findings, but it's not the language or a derivation of it. It could be just about anything."

"It's not a mathematical primer accompanying the language portion that can be used to translate the language portions?" Senator Brownlee interjected.

Hibbens turned his head and looked at Brownlee. "No."

"You're sure about that?" Brownlee asked.

Hibbens sighed inside. He wasn't sure about anything in the signal. It could be a message of peace and universal love, a warning that the planet should prepare to surrender and be dominated by an arriving space fleet, or the SOS signal of some interstellar vessel that suffered a tragic accident somewhere in the deep recesses of the universe.

"Well, no," Hibbens said. "If it is a form of describing math, it's a form totally unfamiliar to anyone we've vetted it with, and we've had some pretty good mathematicians look at the data. My unit will continue to work on decoding the signal, but right now, all I can tell you is that we don't know what any of the signal means. We just know we're listening to authentic signal.

"Whatever this is, it's from somewhere else in the universe, and they're intelligent enough to have mastered radio broadcasting."

Hibbens hadn't expected the briefing before the committee would last as long as it had, and shortly after stripping off his jacket and tie in the Air Force's officer's quarters, he walked over to the desk and screwed off the cap to a bottle of MacAllan and poured a couple of fingers of scotch into a glass. He picked up a cigar and walked out onto the balcony, clipped it and lit it. He took several puffs off of it before taking a sip of the whiskey, and then stared up into the evening sky.

The sky was a rolling spectrum of blues, going from violet to light blue from east to west, and when Hibbens caught sight of the first star to poke through and announce itself, he smiled. Up there, somewhere, was some other version of people.

And, now, someone else in his government would have to figure out how to deal with it; Hibbens had just become a cog in the machine, and that made him happy, as he was no longer the sole person carrying the burden of what to make of the signal.

Chapter 37

Bill Lombard walked into his study with a mug of coffee and sat down at his desk, powered up his computer, and clicked open the latest story he was working on. It came on screen and he started reviewing the last few pages he'd written when he noticed the CD "Bounced Sound" laying on his desk. Carla had brought it to him days ago with the explanation that one of her students had realized that the signal was a fraud perpetrated by a New York City club DJ known as Scots Tape.

But intellectual curiosity got to Bill as he saw it on his desk while working his way through his most recent paragraphs, and he popped it out of its jewel case and slipped it into the CD drive of his computer. He took a deep sip of coffee and closed his eyes when the song started. Thirty seconds later, Bill opened his eyes and stopped the playback.

"That's the sound we heard last summer that my students thought might be actual signal," Carla said from behind him. "One of them found out a couple of weeks ago that it was just raw music that was later edited into that."

Bill swiveled in his chair. "This song was that crap we heard on the Internet?"

"Yeah," Carla said. "There's no shortage of crap on the Internet, that's for sure. Anyway, I'm off to work."

Carla crossed the room and kissed Bill lightly on the lips. "Have a good day writing."

Carla left the room and made her way down the stairs, the stairs offering up the occasional creak as proof of her progress down them, and Bill turned back to his computer. He clicked play and turned the volume of the song down, listening to the dance track as he sipped his mug of coffee. As he listened, Bill called up a web search engine and typed "DJ Scots Tape" into and waited for the results. He clicked on a couple of the links and came up with a Web page about Scots Tape by Scots Tape, who happened to be Dante Johnson of Brooklyn, New York City. Bill plugged that information into a different Web search engine and quickly had Dante's phone number and address. He printed out the page and took a long sip of coffee.

Chapter 38

Dante was sitting at the chair in front of his computers, reworking a song for his "Bounced Sound" album when the phone rang. The phone on the wall, not his cell phone, and nobody but his boss at the store and telemarketers called the phone on the wall. He glanced at it and scowled: he was sure he was off today and he had no desire to deal with a telemarketer or, he hoped, a credit collector. He thought for second and realized he wasn't behind on anything, and listened as the phone rang several more times.

And then he realized his answering machine was broken and wouldn't pick up the call, that the phone would ring until the caller hung up.

"Aww, fuck," Dante said, standing up from his chair and walking to the phone. "Goddamn answering machine piece of crap."

He picked the phone up off its dock, checked the Caller ID – unknown number – and pressed the accept call button.

"Yeah?" he said into the phone.

"Dante Johnson?" the voice on the other end asked.

"Yeah."

"I'm William Lombard, a writer in Los Angeles, and I heard a song from your 'Bounced Sound' disk, it's called 'Enter the Ether,' and I had a couple of questions, if you've got a minute," Bill Lombard said.

Dante was surprised and confused at the same time, but if a writer was calling about a song, that had to be a good thing, he thought, and he softened his tone.

"Who do you write for?" Dante asked.

"Who do-," Bill said, pausing for a moment. "Oh, I'm a novelist, I write science fiction novels."

Bill laughed into the phone and Dante wrinkled his brows at the sound.

"What? You haven't heard of me?" Bill asked.

Dante was confused. "What?"

"Sorry, just kidding," Bill said. "I mean, I am a science fiction writer and I do publish novels, so I'm not some crank caller, if that's what you're wondering. Anyway, I heard your song this morning and I was curious about something."

Dante scratched his head and wondered what the hell was going on. "Curious? About what?"

"About where it came from," Bill said. "Specifically, I guess, why you decided to broadcast the beta version of raw data on the Internet."

Dante stared around his room and wondered if someone was punking him. The guy on the other end of the phone was clearly some square white-collar loser, and whatever he was talking about was nonsense.

"Why'd I do what?" Dante said, trying to find a way to make sense of the conversation.

"I'm just curious, is all," Bill said, "but the source material you used to create your song, at least as I understand it, comes from a Net broadcast of what I'd call ambient noise, if you get my meaning."

Dante walked around his apartment listening to the man's words, wondering what the hell he was talking about and why he, Dante, hadn't hung the phone up, yet.

Bill stood on his back deck listening to Dante, wondering why the man sounded so confused about his song. Dante seemed like he had no idea about how he had created it, and Bill was wondering if he had gotten the wrong person on the other end of the phone. He took a puff from his cigar and waited for anything from Dante.

"Well, you can download the song from the Web, if that's what you're asking," Dante said.

Bill took the phone from his ear and stared at it incredulously, as if he and Dante were talking about two entirely different things.

"Ahh, no," Bill said. "Last summer, you streamed the unedited version of this song over the Internet using falsified ham radio signals routed through a communications satellite that was picked up by various sites that monitor radio frequency transmissions. Well, one site, anyway, a SETI lab here in California.

"I mean, that was you, wasn't it?"

Dante looked out a window at the street traffic and tried to make sense of what this man was saying to him, and couldn't.

"Uhh, I don't know what you're talking about," Dante said, "but I didn't stream anything on the Net anytime ever, especially not as a fake ham radio signal. I don't even know what that means, and what the heck's a SETI lab?"

Bill was now confused, and he took a moment to tap the ash from the tip of his cigar. He heard the sound of the automatic garage door rising and turned his head to see if Carla was home.

"It's, a,... umm... you didn't put the unedited version on the Web?" Bill asked. "That's, uhh, well... how did you get it?"

Dante suddenly realized that Bill Lombard was asking about the music he'd recorded on his ham radio the previous summer, the music he'd used to base his songs for 'Bounced Sound' on, and really wondered why some nobody science fiction novelist would be asking questions about it.

"Listen, I recorded it off a ham radio I've got hooked to my computer," Dante said. "I've been recording all sorts of stuff that I use as the source material for songs I'm writing. I don't know where it came from.

"Why, it's not copyrighted, is it?"

Bill chuckled. "Oh, I highly doubt it. You really recorded it live off a ham radio broadcast?"

Dante shrugged and grew frustrated. "Yeah."

Bill took a puff on his cigar. "Well, Dante, thanks for talking with me. You've just made the story I'm writing that much better. I think."

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," Forrestal 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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Also by William Young

The Divine World (Smashwords)

Monster (Smashwords)

Cities of the Dead: Stories from the Zombie Apocalypse (Smashwords)

Loverman (Smashwords)

Bensonhyphentaft (Smashwords)

