by John Shirley
“Wait, you’re telling me . . . you can predict what Pioneer is going to say next?”
“In a nutshell, yeah. If I’m right, Pioneer’s response to this message will be to add 4, 18, 19, 23 to the fourth set of numbers.”
“But you won’t tell me why,” said Costigyan, frustration creeping into his voice. “Will you at least tell me what you think the numbers are—generally speaking?”
“Well, sir, I think they’re dimensions. But not geometrical shapes, exactly.”
“Dimensions.” There was another pause, then the scientist asked, “Are you a mathematician, Mr. Kinsella—Bill?”
“No sir. I’m a writer. Of fiction. Not science fiction, though, in case you were wondering.”
“He’s a writer?” repeated Peter Grace. “A fiction writer is driving your game plan?”
“He’s getting results,” argued Gita. “Which is more than our well-considered responses are doing.”
“Let me guess—he writes science fiction, right?”
“He says not,” said Kurt. “Besides, as Gita said, he’s getting results. You can’t argue with that. I think we’re pushing the envelope of coincidence. So here’s our test case—he’s given me a new sequence and told me what response he expects. We might as well send it and see what happens.”
Grace muttered something under his breath about looking silly, then said, “I’ll tell you what you’re going to get. She’s going to repeat what you send, just like she did this last time.”
“But she added it to a different sequence of numbers.”
“Of course she did, Kurt. She’s locked into that program of thirty data sets. She ran what’s now her normal sequence and tacked exactly what you sent to the end of it. No mystery, there.”
Kurt shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. But we’ve got nothing to lose, right?”
“Hell, no,” said Grace. “Just our professional dignity.”
They sent the data. They waited. Within ten minutes of Pioneer’s answer, Kurt Costigyan called Chilliwack, B.C.
“Well, Bill,” he said, “she gave the answer you were expecting. I think we need to talk face to face. Are you willing to meet with me?”
“In Puerto Rico?”
Kurt chuckled. “I was thinking of someplace in between. There’s an observatory in Santa Cruz, California . . . ”
“William Patrick Kinsella,” the man said, holding out his hand.
Kurt Costigyan took it, thinking that he surely must have meant to say “Mark Twain.” Tall, lanky, and spare, he had a wavy fringe of collar-length hair that was going from gray to white. Mustache and beard to match. Hazel eyes sparkled behind wire-rim glasses. There, the resemblance to the Twain archetype ended; he wore a cowboy hat and a blue chambray shirt. Kurt guessed him to be in his seventies.
“Dr. Kurt Costigyan,” Kurt said. “This is my colleague, Dr. Peter Grace, from NASA.”
“Kinsella,” repeated Grace, shaking the older man’s hand. “Didn’t you write that movie—”
“I wrote a book that got made into a movie,” Kinsella said, warily, Kurt thought.
“A fantasy movie,” said Grace, passing him a look.
“Fantasy,” said the writer, “is in the mind of the reader. You’re talking across millions of miles of space to a glorified Tinkertoy. How fantastic is that?”
Grace raised his eyebrows but didn’t offer a comeback.
“Can you send messages to Pioneer from here?” Kinsella gestured around the observatory’s main lab.
“No, but we can have Arecibo send them.”
“And what messages will we be sending?” asked Grace, his voice patronizing.
In answer, Kinsella pulled a steno pad out from under his arm, flipped it open and handed to him. On the exposed page was a table. Looking over Grace’s shoulder, Kurt saw the sequences of numbers he’d come to know so well, each sequence in a neat row that ended with a date and a name.
“What . . . what are these?” Grace asked brushing the names with a fingertip.
Kinsella cleared his throat and gave Kurt an almost apologetic glance. “They’re . . . um . . . ballparks.”
Kurt could feel Grace’s eyes on him. “Ballparks?”
Kinsella scratched around in his longish white hair. “Your numbers there are the internal dimensions of a baseball diamond, in meters. The first number is the distance from home plate to the mound—18.9 meters, or 60 feet, 6 inches. The second, third, fourth and fifth numbers are the distance between the bases—27.44 meters or 90 feet. Those numbers are constant for every major league ballpark ever built. The last three numbers are outfield dimensions, which are different in every park.”
“And the dates?” Grace asked.
“Opening days.”
Grace’s mouth, which had been open, snapped shut. “Come sit down, won’t you, Mr. Kinsella?”
The old guy smiled. “Call me ‘Bill.’ ”
“Why would Pioneer 10 be talking to us in baseball?” asked Gita, the bemusement in her voice clear even through the speakerphone. “Was there some sort of database on board that might be spilling first contact information? I mean, maybe one of the scientists on the project was a baseball buff or something.”
“A database?” Kurt repeated. “Gita, Pioneer was launched in 1972.”
“But there’s got to be some reason she’s spitting ballpark dimensions at us.” There was a moment of puzzled silence, then she said, “Okay. So we’ve got an aging spacecraft that wants to talk baseball. What do we do about it?”
Kurt looked at Bill Kinsella. “I’d like to try sending all thirty sets of dimensions and dates. Cut to the chase.”
Peter Grace looked dubious. “What do you expect to happen?”
“I don’t know. Bill, you have any ideas?”
“She might start on player stats next,” said Kinsella, then shrugged. “Maybe she’ll start giving us box scores. Beats me.”
They scanned the handwritten list of dimensions and dates and emailed it to Arecibo where Santiago and Gita fed it to the transmitter.
“Now what?” Kinsella asked.
“Now we wait,” said Grace.
Kinsella shook his head. “You scientists do a lot of waiting, don’t you?”
Pioneer’s response, when it came was anti-climactic. She simply stopped sending. The absence of any signal stretched into minutes, then hours. When three days had passed without her commentary, Peter Grace went back to NASA and Bill Kinsella, after taking in two Giants games, prepared to fly back to B.C.
He was, in fact, standing in the main concourse at SFO with Kurt Costigyan when a bleary sounding but excited Dr. Rodriguez called from Puerto Rico.
“She’s sending again.”
“What is she sending?” Kurt clutched his cell phone as if it might fly out of his hand, and met Bill Kinsella’s eyes.
“It’s not so much what as where from. I’ve checked this through the FUDDs at three separate observatories. Pioneer—if this is Pioneer—is transmitting from inside the solar system.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Tell me about it. Can you get back to Lick, ASAP?”
“With bells on. I’ll call when I’m there.” He hung up, pocketed the phone and blinked at Kinsella. “Well, Bill, I’ve got to go back to Lick.“
“Our girl get talkative again, did she?”
“Yes, she’s sending again. And she’s apparently headed back toward Earth.”
“I didn’t think that could happen.”
“It can’t. You can still catch your plane—”
“You kidding? I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
The two men picked up their bags and began to wend their way toward the Ground Transport area.
“By the way, what’s she sending?”
Kurt laughed. “I forgot to ask.”
She was sending new coordinates—longitude and latitude, Santiago thought. And by the time Kurt Costigyan and the “psychic writer” had checked back in at Lick Observatory, h
e had been able to generate a map. It displayed on Kurt Costigyan’s borrowed computer monitor in Lick’s main lab as a U.S.-shaped outline populated with about two-dozen points of light.
“I’ve got to say,” Santiago told them as they sat down to study the map, “when we put this together and saw what it looked like, it made us a bit . . . uh, nervous out here. Those coordinates correspond to major American cities.”
“No need to be nervous,” said Bill, raising salt and pepper eyebrows. “I don’t think.”
“Then they’re not cities?” Gita sounded relieved.
“Oh, I’m pretty sure they’re cities,” said Kinsella. “Can I ask what order you got the coordinates in?”
“Is that significant?” Santiago asked.
“Could be. Let me guess—the first four were Boston, Detroit, Chicago, and New York.”
“Uh . . . yeah. Oh, wait. You’re thinking they should line up with the—the list of dimensions. But they don’t. There aren’t thirty of them.”
“Some cities have more than one professional ballpark,” said Kinsella patiently.
Kurt closed his eyes. “Okay, okay. Let’s think things through. Pioneer 10 suddenly, and without provocation, starts sending us the dimensions of major league baseball parks.”
“Except that the list isn’t up to date,” said Kinsella. “Some of these parks have been replaced.”
“Yeah, but how would Pioneer know that?” asked Santiago.
Into the pregnant silence that followed, Kurt Costigyan said, “Sandy, Pioneer 10 doesn’t know anything. And she doesn’t—she couldn’t—have any information her programmers didn’t have back in 1972. Unless . . . ”
“Unless,” repeated Gita, “someone’s been able to hack that archaic code and-and what—send her the dimensions of baseball parks?”
“Pre-2000 baseball parks,” said Kinsella.
Kurt cleared his throat, making way for words that sounded unreal even in his head. “Let’s assume someone could hack her code. How could they reach her outside the solar system, when an array as powerful as Arecibo’s couldn’t raise her? And how could any hacker, no matter what his or her technology, turn her around and bring her back to Earth?” He paused to let it sink in. “The answer is, they couldn’t.”
“Maybe they’re only making it seem as if she’s coming back to Earth,” said Santiago. “Maybe they’ve hacked our system and the diagnostics just didn’t pick it up.”
“Then they would have had to hack all the Follow-Up Detection Systems we used too. That’s four separate installations all together.” Kurt closed his eyes and sat back in his chair.
“We’re talking ETs, now, aren’t we?” said Kinsella.
Kurt turned to stare at him; the Arecibo side of the connection was silent.
Kinsella’s eyes blinked behind their oval lenses. “Well, good Lord, Kurt. When you eliminate all the other possibilities what are you left with? Isn’t this what you SETI guys have been working for all these years?”
“He’s right, Kurt,” said Gita and laughed, nervously. “This could be it.”
“It,” repeated Kurt.
“But why?” asked Santiago. “Why would—well, aliens—talk baseball?”
“Maybe because we do,” said Kinsella softly.
“But we don’t,” said Santiago. “We speak mathematics—”
“Baseball is mathematics. And it’s geometry, and music, and poetry, and art. Art made of time and space and motion. Sunlight and grass and earth. Maybe they even play baseball back where they come from. Or maybe they’ve been picking up broadcasts from Earth and the beauty and perfection of it just . . . enchanted them so much they had to come here to see.”
Gita said, “You wrote that baseball was too perfect to have been created by human beings—that God must’ve had a hand in it.”
Bill blinked at the speakerphone, wishing the lady scientist were there so he could see her smile. “You’ve read my stories.”
“All right,” said Kurt. “Let’s assume that an extraterrestrial intelligence is using Pioneer to talk to us. What are they trying to say?”
“If you send it, we will come?” suggested Kinsella wryly.
Gita stifled another giggle. “I think Mr. Kinsella’s right. I think maybe they’ve just adopted a language they think we’ll understand.”
“Or maybe they think baseball diamonds have some sort of religious or political significance,” said Santiago.
“Don’t they?” asked Kinsella.
“Let’s have that discussion later,” interrupted Kurt and Gita said: “Maybe they think they’re grounded spacecraft. Some of them look like spacecraft.”
“Whoa!” Santiago’s voice rose half an octave. “Kurt, she’s sending again. A whole different set of numbers. Oh, man, she’s—Wow. Double-check this with the Signal Detector at Lick, would you? Gita, get on line with, um, with Parkes, okay? This is wild. Kurt, this signal’s coming from inside the orbit of Jupiter.”
Kurt swung around, catching the eye of one of the tensely hovering observatory staff. “Can you check that telemetry?”
The woman nodded, wide-eyed, moved to a terminal, and brought up Lick Observatory’s Signal Processor. “Have him send coordinates.”
“I heard that,” Santiago said. His fingers, tapping across his keyboard, sounded like the clatter of dice in a cup.
Roll the bones, Kurt thought.
“Okay, listen,” said Santiago. “I’m going to send you the first sequence of numbers. See what Mr. Kinsella makes of them. They don’t mean a damn thing to me.”
The numbers rolled down the screen, pulling scientist and writer close enough to bathe their faces in its light.
1/2.40
2/.302
3/.311
4/.250
5/.330
6/.279
7/.289
8/.350
9/.306
“There’s a full second pause between the first number in each group—the ascending numbers—and the rest. That’s what I’ve indicated with the slash. There’s a three second pause between each set. I notice the first number seems . . . out of keeping with the others.”
“They look like batting averages,” said Kinsella. “Except for the first one, which looks like a pitcher’s ERA. That’d be my guess.”
“I think you’ve had more than enough guesses, Mr. Kinsella.”
Kurt turned to see Peter Grace standing in the middle of the lab, looking windblown and harried.
“I think,” Grace continued, smoothing his hair, “that it’s time you gave science back to the scientists.”
“What were you thinking?” Grace asked when he’d closed the door on the borrowed conference room. “Letting a civilian take control of the situation? That’s nuts.”
“It was working.”
“Oh, come on. For all you know, this could be a monumental hoax.”
“Hoax? Perpetrated by whom, Peter? A Canadian fiction writer? You can’t hoax a FUDD. Parkes and Lick both confirm—Pioneer 10’s signal is now coming from local space.”
“Right. Meaning that your friend may have precipitated an attack on us by . . . ”
“By what? A bunch of geeks with a fleet of daisy-chained Pentiums? You can’t have this both ways. Either it’s incredibly sophisticated hoaxers, or it’s . . . it’s what we’ve been waiting for, working for, praying for all these years. First contact with an alien race.” Kurt had to force himself to breathe.
“Who are interested in old baseball diamonds.”
Kurt shook his head. “Life’s strange, isn’t it?”
“It’s time to stop playing games and call in the people who know how to handle this sort of thing.”
“And who would that be? The CIA? The FBI? Interpol? The Marines? The cast of the latest Star Trek movie stands a better chance of handling this right than any of them. At least they’ve dealt with this situation in theory.”
Grace’s face reddened. “Regardless, I . . . I’ve taken the precaut
ion of alerting the State Department.”
“And told them what?”
“That an unidentified spacecraft is heading for Earth with unknown intentions and that it has expressed some interest in a number of major American cities.”
“It expressed interest in major league ballparks.”
Grace snorted. “If I’d told them that they’d have laughed me off the line. Look, Kurt, you and I both know that Pioneer 10 can’t possibly be hurtling toward Earth under her own power, nor is there any natural phenomenon that could account for it. Whatever the interest is, we are soon going to face an unknown . . . intelligence.”
“All right. So the military is involved. What’s next? What do we do?”
“We keep Pioneer—whatever it is—talking. Now, I think we have to lock this project down. No press conferences, no more media coverage, no one talks to anyone outside of this lab. In fact, no one leaves this lab. We don’t want to cause a panic.”
Panic. That was something Kurt hadn’t considered. He had gone from curiosity to intellectual challenge to giddy anticipation without considering the reaction of the non-geek majority of human beings.
“No one leaves,” he agreed.
Left to his own devices, Bill continued his conversation with the scientists in Puerto Rico, mulling over the sequences of data, trying to figure out what they meant.
“So,” Santiago asked, “how do you figure it’s batting averages and a—what did you call it—an ERA?”
“Earned Run Average,” said Bill. “An ERA is the number of runs a pitcher allows per nine innings. So this pitcher allows 2.40 runs every nine innings.”
“Okay, but why are you so sure that’s what this is?”
“Context, first of all. In baseball, each position has a number. Pitcher is one, catcher is two, first baseman is three, and so on all the way out to right field, which is position number nine.”
“Oh, okay. I think I—”
Gita’s voice cut across him with “Oh, wow.”
“What?” Bill asked. “What?”
“She’s changed again. She’s sending . . . ”
“Damn!” Santiago’s expletive coincided with the sudden appearance on the computer screen at Bill’s elbow of a perfect outline of the United States. Within the map’s glowing tracery, a pattern of bright dots lit up the dark interior.