“Wait for me,” Clark said, moving now from the threshold of the control room where he had been standing with Emma and where Timo remained.
“It’s fine,” Dan said.
Clark shook his head. “You don’t leave my sight.”
“Fine.”
After a short and smooth ascent, Dan stepped out into the observatory’s ring-shaped lookout tower. Looking east, he saw a vast array of radio telescopes.
“Jesus,” Clark said, more confused than impressed. “It looks like they’re growing a crop of giant satellite dishes.”
Alessandro briefly explained why these radio telescopes didn’t look like “the regular kind of telescopes” that Clark and many others were exclusively familiar with.
“But why did your boss say “the telescope” when there are loads of them?” Clark asked, thinking that Louisa’s English had been too good for a pluralisation error like that to slip by.
Alessandro smiled broadly. “Check the other side,” he said. “You might spot the big one.”
Clark walked round the elevator pillar, not sure what to expect. When he got there, he stopped, not sure what he was looking at. “There is no way…” he said, not even sure how to finish the sentence.
“The largest in the world,” Alessandro replied. He and Dan walked to join Clark. “For a few more months, at least.”
Unlike Clark, Dan knew all about the observatory’s colossal radio telescope. But knowing about it was different from seeing it, as the astounded look in his eyes could attest.
“How big is that thing,” Clark asked.
“400 metres across,” Alessandro said proudly. “The one they’re building in China will be 500 metres. Arecibo is 305.”
Arecibo was the word on Dan’s lips as he looked out at the magnificent feat of engineering. The Cavalieri Observatory’s huge dish, fixed into the ground, was unmistakably inspired by its Puerto Rican counterpart which Dan had first seen in the movie adaption of Carl Sagan’s Contact, still by an immeasurable distance his favourite work of fiction.
As Clark stared incredulously at “the big one”, as Alessandro affectionately called it, Dan and Alessandro discussed Timo’s long-term goal of constructing an orbital observatory unencumbered by atmospheric radiation and weather. Understandably, the primary obstacles were political rather than financial or technical.
“Did you hear that?” Clark suddenly said.
Dan and Alessandro rushed to his side, concerned by the urgency in his voice. Neither of them had heard anything.
All three stood silently.
“Dan!” Emma’s voice called up, very faintly. Three more words followed.
“Did she just say what I think she said?” Dan asked.
Clark nodded. “I heard it.”
Alessandro ran back to the eastern side of the lookout and pressed a button on the desk-level console. “Please repeat,” he said in a slow, clear tone.
“I said I heard it, too,” Clark replied.
“Shut up,” Dan said, nudging him. “He’s talking to Emma.”
Emma’s voice then rang loudly through a speaker above Alessandro: “I said they found it! They found the sphere!”
Dan sprinted to Alessandro’s side. Clark stood stunned, staring out at the giant telescope. Alessandro, previously so energetic and animated, wore an expression that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a ventriloquist’s dummy.
“Who’s they?” Dan spoke into the microphone, not sure whether he should be celebrating the sphere’s discovery or worrying that it would never be seen again. Alessandro’s face regained focus, keen for the answer to the same question that had momentarily paralysed him.
“Argentina,” Emma said.
The relief hit Dan like a bucket of ice water.
“It’s happening right now,” Emma continued. “Get down here!”
Without any thought or pre-planned coordination, Dan and Alessandro both grabbed hold of each other’s upper arms and started jumping around. Alessandro initiated a quadrisyllabic sports-like chant of Ar-gen-ti-na; within seconds, Dan was chanting it too.
Clark hurried round from the other side of the lookout tower, took one look at the two of them jumping around like idiots, and immediately joined in.
D minus 13
Seafront
Miramar, Argentina
Miguel Perez and his overworked arms fought fatigue to keep his binoculars positioned perfectly on the conspicuous formation.
The news had filtered through official channels almost an hour earlier that the search party had discovered the sphere less than a mile from shore, and Miramar’s beach and promenade were already more crowded than they had been at any other point in Miguel’s week-long vigil.
TV viewers on the other side of the world had a better view than the people on the coast, of course, given the zooming power of the cameras at the networks’ disposal and the willingness of some newscopter pilots to flout the zonal restrictions for the sake of capturing the priceless footage.
But Miguel Perez and his fellow sea-watchers had something better than a view; they had an experience. And thanks to the powerful binoculars gifted to him by the reporter from ADLTV, Miguel had something of a view, too.
He watched patiently as a cordon of small dark boats surrounded the much larger ship, with one medium-sized white boat in-between. This cordon formed very suddenly and was like nothing that had come before. Miguel demanded strength from his tired arms as a feeling swelled within him that something was about to happen.
His binoculars couldn’t discern acute details like the faces of any of the people in the open boats, but the upper bodies of two people wearing yellow wetsuits or fishing overalls were clearly visible against the dark blue of the large ship, just to the side of its identifying “0012” mark.
Miguel kept his nervous fingers as still as he could to steady his view as the people in yellow overalls moved quickly from one side of their boat to the other. One of them then raised both arms, signalling something to the larger ship, before both disappeared into the water.
Hectór, Miguel’s neighbour since the start, leaned over to pass on the whispers from the back of the crowd. “They say the sphere is being pulled by the white boat,” he said.
“Two divers just jumped out of it,” Miguel replied, keeping his hands steady.
Hectór yelled this latest news into the air, bringing another increase in both noise and anticipation levels.
A few minutes passed, feeling like hours to the sea-watchers.
“Cage!” Miguel shouted, surprising even himself and almost losing his view as he shot to his feet. “The big ship is raising a shark-cage!”
“They divers must have hooked it,” Hectór said, rising to his feet and wishing that he had Miguel’s binoculars. “Talk to me, Miguel. What do you see?”
“Nothing yet,” Miguel said. “The cage is rising. Very slowly. Slowly, slowly, slow—”
Hectór turned away from the sea at the abruptness of Miguel’s gasp. He looked at his neighbour. “Miguel! What do you see?”
Miguel snapped out of his stunned silence and hurriedly lifted his binoculars’ cord over his head and handed them to Hectór. “Be quick, Hectór! You have to see it!”
Hectór threw the binoculars towards his eyes like a man possessed.
Flushed with a serenity he had not felt for many years, Miguel looked away from the momentous event occurring in the sea and focused instead on his new friend, whose joyous expression made it all the sweeter.
Hectór’s reaction mirrored Miguel’s from moments earlier, for inside the shark-cage, silhouetted against the gargantuan blue ship, his eyes saw an unmistakably spherical object. The sphere reached only a quarter or so of the height of the cage, which was presumably designed to accommodate an adult human.
No details were visible, but for Hectór and Miguel, the details didn’t matter. They had both seen it with their own eyes: the moment the Kerguelen sphere emerged from the sea into a world its discovery
would change forever.
Hectór lowered the binoculars and turned to Miguel. Both men had tears in the corners of their eyes. “I can never thank you enough,” Hectór said. He tried to return Miguel’s binoculars, but Miguel shook his head and pointed to the man on the other side of Hectór, who Miguel hadn’t really spoken to but who he knew had also been there for the duration. In a few moments, the man would surely join Miguel and Hectór in considering the last seven days as the most well-spent and worthwhile of his life.
The two then watched the third man go through the same stages of awe and speechlessness as they had. Hectór hugged Miguel like a long-lost brother, still unable to put into words his gratitude for the moment that Miguel’s kindness had allowed him to share.
When they parted and looked back out to sea, Hectór, the taller of the two, put his arm around Miguel’s shoulder. “My friend,” he said, “today, we have truly seen something.”
“We have seen the truth,” Miguel replied. “Truly, Hectór; we have seen the truth.”
D minus 12
Cavalieri Observatory
Trento, Italy
The observatory’s senior researcher, Francesco Abaté, stood excitedly with Louisa and the two research assistants. All four crowded around the elevator in the control room, anticipating its descent.
As soon as the door opened, they swarmed Dan and Alessandro; the two younger researchers bouncing up and down and joining the contagious Ar-gen-ti-na chant while Louisa and Francesco laughed heartily and patted them all on the back.
Emma stood quietly beside Timo near the control room’s entrance. When Clark noticed that she was recording the celebratory scenes on her phone, he attempted to squeeze his way out of the elevator to get out of the shot. Alessandro tried to pull him back into the pack, but Clark pointed to Emma’s phone to explain. Alessandro said “ah” in understanding and let him go.
Clark walked over to Emma, stood beside her, and ruffled her hair with his hand. She elbowed him in response and fought to keep her phone steady. “He couldn’t have done it without you,” Clark whispered in her ear. Any doubts or fears he might have had about the Kerguelen sphere and its contents were entirely absent now that it had been found. This was what Dan had wanted from the start; this was what they’d been fighting for.
Alessandro, merrily aware of the camera, called Timo over to join them. Timo shook his head and held a finger to his lips; this wasn’t his moment, and he didn’t want his sometimes controversial public image to detract from this great footage of a genuine and explosive outpouring of joy.
Timo had thrown huge amounts of money at the observatory, of course, but its staff had dedicated their entire lives and careers to the kind of work it enabled. The best that most of them had ever realistically hoped for was the discovery an of unambiguously non-random signal. The prospect of finding a deliberate message was their ultimate dream, and none of them had even dared imagine that such a message might turn up in the form of a physical alien artefact.
The staff were as glad to share the moment with Dan as he was to share it with them. Alessandro, who Dan had spent the most time with, then said something to the group in Italian. Before Dan knew it, he was in the air and being carried out of the elevator.
Francesco and Alessandro supported most of Dan’s weight on their shoulders while Alessandro’s fellow research assistants used their hands in a somewhat successful effort to add stability. Dan smiled and laughed as he sat atop his human throne, but wisely called Clark over to steady his wobbling body.
“Go,” Emma said, nudging Clark forward. “People like seeing you with him, anyway.”
Clark took Francesco’s position and had to crouch slightly to reach Alessandro’s level. Emboldened by Clark’s presence and obvious strength, Alessandro unilaterally decided that they should carry Dan around the room, bumping him up and down to add to the fun. Clark didn’t have much choice other than to follow Alessandro’s first tentative steps, and before long Dan was being paraded around the control room by Clark and the staff like a winning coach by his grateful team.
Alessandro kicked off a new chant to the familiar Ar-gen-ti-na tune: “Dan-Mc-Car-thy, Dan-Mc-Car-thy, Dan-Mc-Car-thy!”
Dan blushed a little at this development and leaned towards Alessandro to ask him to chant something else. “Like what?” Alessandro asked. The rest of the group kept chanting.
“I dunno,” Dan said, still laughing at how surreal everything was. “Kerguelen?”
“Ker-gue-len,” Alessandro shouted over everyone else, pumping his left fist while still supporting some of Dan’s weight on his right shoulder. “Ker-gue-len, Ker-gue-len, Ker-gue-len!”
Everyone joined in by the third repetition, with no better reason that “why not?”.
Emma recorded for a few more seconds then lowered her phone. She had already decided that she would cut the three or four minutes of footage down to sixty seconds and send it to Trey back in Birchwood. This would be the exclusive she had promised Trey a week earlier as thanks for bringing Dan the digital translator and keeping quiet about the letter, even before his extensive help with the big screen set-up and announcements at the drive-in.
Within minutes the footage would air the world over: Dan McCarthy, source of the leak, leaping around and being triumphantly carried by an international team of scientists who had dedicated their lives to finding an ounce of the kind of proof that had just been lifted out of the ocean by the proverbial ton.
Emma focused on the video on her phone’s screen, cutting it down to the best parts.
“You should be celebrating with them,” Timo said. He watched on like a proud father, eternally grateful that the sphere had been discovered while Dan was touring his observatory. “You did it. It’s over.”
“Dan did it,” Emma said, clicking “confirm” to send the trimmed footage to Trey. She put her phone in her pocket and looked back up at the still jubilant group. Behind her smile, another thought circled, though she chose not to say it:
Over? It hasn’t even started…
D minus 11
10 Downing Street
London, England
By the time people around the world saw the footage of Dan McCarthy celebrating with SETI researchers in Italy — complete with Trey’s small but unsubtle “Blue Dish Network” watermark — they had already heard from several national leaders.
Reports of the sphere’s discovery trickled through official channels in Argentina within seconds of the sphere emerging from the sea, with more details revealed once it was safely on deck and on its way to a secure docking point.
The sphere had a hairline seam, the officials said, with no sign of a hinge mechanism. Their “knee-high” size estimate fitted the description in Hans Kloster’s letter. Quite remarkably, the sphere was wrapped in well-worn netting, suggesting that it had been “caught” previously and thrown back into the sea by the crew of a fishing vessel understandably unaware of its worth.
After Argentina’s, the first national government to respond was Norway’s. This was less random than it seemed on the face of it given that Norway administered both Bouvet Island and Queen Maud Land, the Antarctic region claimed by Germany as New Swabia in the late 1930s where the very first sphere was discovered.
A brief Norwegian statement congratulated Argentina on the find and offered as much or as little technical assistance as the Argentine government wanted. Norway offered to send a team to help analyse the sphere’s material composition, scan it to determine the internal contents, and look for a way to open it without causing damage.
Argentina had yet to respond.
The identity of the next national leader to speak out came as no surprise to anyone who had been paying attention to the politics of the IDA leak.
William Godfrey, though sufficiently experienced and battled-hardened to know that there was no room for loyalty in politics, invited John Cole to stand by his side outside Number Ten; Cole had, after all, been the only member of Godfrey’s cab
inet to firmly take his side in the argument over whether to broach the topic of the leak in the first place. His presence at the Prime Minister’s side now provided a measure of congruence, Godfrey thought; a reminder to the world that they and they alone had been on the side of the truth from the very beginning.
Cole had recently angered leaders in Oslo and Buenos Aires by reopening an ancient debate over the British claim to Bouvet Island and mentioning the Falklands, so Godfrey took care not to step on any toes. He had been deliberately quiet since declassifying the UK’s own “UFO files” eight days earlier, preferring to let events play out and watch President Slater splash around in an effort to stay afloat.
A necessary statement in the wake of the tragic mass suicide at Hemshaw had broken Godfrey’s streak of silence, but this happier moment — the discovery of the Kerguelen sphere — was the one Godfrey had been waiting for since the thought first crossed his mind that Dan McCarthy’s leak might actually be real.
There was no pettiness in William Godfrey’s words and no humour in his tone as he addressed the media. This moment in history called for a statesman, and he was ready to play the part.
He praised Argentina’s handling of the situation, saying that he had opted not to comment on the brief American intrusion into the restricted zone since the Argentine government didn’t seem to want to turn it into a major issue. Now, however, his gloves were off.
“Slater, Walker and the rest of them are clinging to a world that no longer exists,” he said. “The world they have lived in for so long — one where the rules don’t apply to them — is gone. The sphere which we saw rising from the ocean just an hour ago is absolute proof that they have been lying to us for decades.”
As he knew he was supposed to, John Cole nodded along with Godfrey’s words.
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