The Filter Trap (14 page)

After an exhaustive search of the road, the three pilots reconvened by the sun-splashed side of the Keck Observatory.

“Find any of those stragglers Doctor Sands worried about?” Lee asked.

“Nope,” Nana said and LARS shook her head.

“I’d say we found a nice view, though,” Nana said.

“No better place to die,” said LARS.

“What makes you so morose?” asked Lee.

“The captain of the Teddy. What if he’s right and this is just the beginning? If we’re all gonna die in some fireball or black hole or something I’d rather not have to tag along with the eggheads that’ll tell us about it in excruciating detail and start the countdown.”

“Woah, calm down.” Lee patted LARS on the shoulder. “Maybe it’s good news they’re here to find.”

“I don’t think so, boss,” Nana said. “This is like goin’ to the hospital and findin’ out you got terminal cancer. You really want to know how many days you got to live? I’d rather go off and enjoy myself.”

“Damn it you two! This is what SIMI died for. The captain said something else, didn’t he? He said he’s jealous that we’d go out fighting! Whatever they think is coming, he was damn certain that we’d get off this rock in time to get back in the hot seat and do what we do best.

“We should appreciate this plush assignment, considering we could be following bloodhounds down holes to pull people from rubble in Waikiki instead. I took us down over that triage center for a reason. Be glad you’re not down there with them.”

“Yeah,” LARS replied sarcastically. “If we were, we might be doing our jobs: saving lives!”

“These scientists might do more to save lives than we could ever do down there,” Lee reminded them.

The group stood silent for a moment against the cold curve of the telescope building.

“One hell of a sunset,” LARS sighed.

“And from a new sun no less,” added Nana.

They watched the yellow ball fall beneath the clouds surrounding the mountaintop until it lit them from beneath with a momentary pink glow.

“You know, you guys were honest about your feelings, and I appreciate that. If we’re going to end up in combat again together I gotta have my own confessional.”

“What are you talking about, RF?” LARS asked.

“If the world’s gonna end, I have to be honest with you two. If I get the chance, if he’s still alive, I’m going come out to my dad, and to everyone else.”

The other two pilots burst out laughing.

“That wasn’t an attempt at a comedy routine. Why are you laughing?”

“Lee, we always knew,” Nana said and LARS nodded. They put their arms over their squad leader’s shoulders.

LARS muffed Lee’s hair. “I mean why else did you think the colonel called you Fairy?”

“I figured, but I didn’t want to come clean. Catholic school guilt lingers long and this job is cutthroat enough. I didn’t want to show any signs of weakness.”

“Weakness?” LARS laughed. “Girl, you’re the toughest pilot I ever met, inside and out. I don’t give a shit who’s in your bed as long as you got my back in a fight.”

“I got a confession of my own.” Nana held tighter. “Franks told you he called you Fairy because your maneuvering in tight turns is about the best he’s ever seen, like a fairy, right?” Nana waved his finger around, buzzing like a cartoon bee.

“Before we left, the colonel told me why he really gave you that call-sign. The Franks’ had a son that came out in the 90s and the conversation didn’t end well. He died in an accident soon after, so the colonel had to learn the truth about unconditional love the hard way.”

“So he assuaged his guilt by pillorying me?”

“No,” Nana sighed. “It wasn’t for your thick skin. It was a reminder for guys like me who got blasted by you in drills that strength and skill doesn’t discriminate. He was proud of you, who you were up there,” Nana pointed at Lee’s head, then her heart, “and in here. He thought of you as a daughter, or more like the son he’d never get to be proud of again.”

“That cantankerous old bastard.” Lee started to tear up. “He sure kept it close to the vest, this ‘family’ business. Before we left Hickam the colonel said we need to be like family, and you don’t keep secrets from family. When we lost SIMI I knew I should have been honest with you all.”

“I ain’t never seen you cry before, boss,” Nana chuckled.

“It’s just the wind.” LARS smirked at Nana.

As night fell, the shrill wind whistled colder between the two telescopes.

“Speaking of which, it’s fucking cold out here. Let’s go check on the docs.”

The door opened before them.

Allan stuck his head out, MRE in hand.

“How the hell do you eat these?”

Lee demonstrated how to open an MRE. “Allan, you look nervous. What were you cooking up in here while we were out in the cold?”

“We’re not sure which is more shocking; what we’ve learned or what we haven’t. We are a long way from where we’re supposed to be, but we can’t get a read on anything,” Allan said.

“No recognizable constellations yet,” Jill added.

“Ever going to tell us what the coordinates on that tablet were for?” Lee asked.

“That’s the thing we
have
learned,” Allan answered. “Interesting readings at those coordinates. We’re recalibrating one of the big scopes right now to get a better look. The images should come through soon. Things will get even better after the wind dies down and the air cools outside.”

“You mean that
wasn’t
cool yet?” Nana asked.

“It can get down into the teens easily, and winds of fifteen miles per hour.”

“But the colder the wind, the clearer the sky, and the stronger the radio signals come in,” said Jill. “It’s
really
interesting stuff.”

“Radio signals?” Lee asked. “Is NORAD giving you more stuff to do now? Do they want to talk to us?” She motioned towards herself and the other two pilots.

“Not what I meant,” answered Jill. “We’ve got signals coming from space over radio wavelengths and infrared like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”

“We’ve been trying to figure out the source while waiting,” Allan added, “but it’s near impossible without any star maps of this system. We suspect it’s coming from the coordinates, but we need more data. The system is moving and compiling, otherwise we wouldn’t have time to eat.”

“Not a Eureka moment?” asked Lee.

“You mean the Wow! signal?” Jill corrected. “You know it’s ironic. Back when Jerry found that signal at Ohio State they had to record the data, shut down, and start over. Now Berkeley’s got a million home computers always on, chugging away.”

“Not anymore,” LARS pointed out.

“Yes, well, that’s just our problem up here. I wish Jerry was here to see this one. It’s a million Wow!s arriving every minute. So much that we don’t know where to start, and without more computing power we’re almost back to the Big Ear days at OSU, as a lot of the equipment here is just as old.”

“The Wow! signal was supposed to be proof of intelligent life,” Lee said, her fingers slowing on the MRE preparation. “Is this the same?”

“Listen for yourself,” Allan said, getting up from the desk and moving to another workstation.

“This is all an acoustic representation of the bits we picked up,” said Jill. “Hardly any of this is actually detectable by human ears, so we’ve scaled it up and down to fit within our audial range.”

Allan clicked a mouse. Over the desktop computer speakers played a repeating mélange of pops, fizzles, then droning low notes.

“This sounds like a noise band I used to go see,” said LARS. “It’s polyrhythmic.”

“Big words,” Nana said. “Gettin’ smarter just from being around these two. What’s polyrhythmic?”

Allan thumped one hand on the desk in 4/4 time, then the other in something closer to 5/4. “Listen for when the beats come together at intervals,” he said over his pounding. “Polyrhythmic is when you have two beats, or rhythms. Both regular in their own right, but seemingly random when combined, except for regular intervals when they actually match up.”

Allan stopped. “Sorry. I played drums in college. But if I play the signal again you’ll see what I mean.”

He clicked the mouse and the pilots listened intently. The seemingly random association of plunks and bubbles seemed to coalesce every now and then into one thump and then break off. The rhythm formed an almost tribal, trance-inducing pattern.

“Thanks for the music theory lesson, Doc. What does it mean?” asked Lee.

Jill looked at her compatriots a bit nervously. “For one thing it means it’s likely of intelligent artificial origin. A regular beat can be found in nature, from pulsars, for example, but a complex changing polyrhythmic pattern is unheard of.”

“It gets better,” Allan broke in. “Based on the strength and quality, I don’t think they’re too far away. We’ve identified multiple broadcasts, and at least two
different
languages, if that’s what these are.”

“So what? We have hundreds, if not thousands, of languages on Earth,” Lee pointed out skeptically. “If you didn’t know any better you might think the buzzing of a honeybee’s wings was a language.”

“Some biologists think it just might be,” Allan pointed at her.

Jill glanced at Allan. “Should we tell them?”

“Tell us what?”

“We know another scientist on the president’s list. Doctor Kam Douglass.”

The pilots shrugged, unfamiliar.

“MIT’s leading linguistics expert.”

“Oh, shit,” Nana said. “They need him to translate alien languages?”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have said languages; after all, I don’t think these are even verbal, unless their senses are radically different than our own. It might be better to say these are composed, written, and generated by two different types of intelligences altogether.”

“How can you tell that from a bunch of pips and pops?” Lee asked.

“They are very far apart on the spectrum. That heavy clunk you hear is on a wavelength of about 650 nanometers. Human beings start seeing radiation generated above 700. The other one, the pips and pops, that’s from the radio, and way way down at the bottom end, almost too low to detect with our instruments here.”

“Couldn’t they just be broadcasting on multiple wavelengths like we do?” asked Lee.

“Only if they really like to make things tough on themselves. Any of you have any training in radio or satellite work?”

“That’s a different part of the Air Force,” Nana said. “We fly planes. Make bad guys go boom. Try ‘splainin’ this so we can understand.”

Allan held up his index finger. “The vast majority of any Earth communication, whether electronic or verbal between humans or machines occurs in a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. If my finger was the entirety of the known electromagnetic spectrum, everything you see would fit in a band about the size of my fingernail. Everything you hear on the radio, every frequency, any satellite broadcast you’ve ever watched; UHF, VHF, FM, whatever, would fit in the width of my wedding band.

“In between you’ve got the gamut of other stuff. Things we use, but we don’t broadcast, because some of it would kill us. Gamma rays at the top, x-rays below that, ultraviolet, microwaves and so on.

“For them to be broadcasting so far apart means they’ve developed completely different equipment. Your satellite TV dish can’t take a picture for you, and your cell phone camera can’t pick up radio stations. Same difference for these signals, except they’re even farther apart than those examples.”

“Could one just be older than the other?” Nana asked.

“That was my first guess,” Jill said.

“It’s possible,” Allan agreed.

Nana smiled proudly and LARS playfully punched him. “You’re pickin’ up some smarts too.”

“But I’m betting we’re listening to different civilizations, probably on different planets. The only connector, the place where the rhythms meet, is likely only because it’s a regular code that’s transmitting. If you transpose any collection of languages from anywhere on Earth you’ll see similar sounds eventually overlapping. Same thing with this. I’m sure Kam would remind us that all language is made of repeating code. You’ll notice the overlap isn’t occurring regularly or diminishing on a curve, which means neither of these is likely a natural burst, like a quasar.”

“A what?” asked Nana.

“A black hole that emits a regular signal from the accretion disk. When mass falls in its
—
well, the short story is that because the signals never intersect at the same spots, but feature ‘code’ of repeating elements, they’re very likely generated by something alive. And very likely by two different types of living things in two different places.”

“I don’t understand,” Nana said. “You keep saying it’s likely from two different places. But you’ve only shown us reasons to believe it’s two different types of transmission and two different languages.”

“Ah, but we have one more piece of the puzzle, something you pilots should be familiar with. Think about two radar signals, Nana. If you changed direction in the air and one signal got weaker, you’d know both signals weren’t from the same plane”