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by Mike A. Lancaster

  He had no idea who Ani had just called, but figured that she had some pretty good resources of her own. Maybe it would be an ideal test to see if her friend could deliver for her… .

  Abernathy’s voice came through loud and clear.

  “Joe. We’re already running traces on Ms. Bell. I’ll let you know when we’ve got something.”

  “I think we have it under control,” Joe said, ignoring Ani’s puzzled look. From her perspective he was suddenly talking to himself. “Ani here has lines of inquiry open, maybe we should see how they pan out …?”

  “I think that I should be the judge of that. And, while I see little harm in another brain working on gathering intelligence, I’d still like the opportunity to continue through official channels, if it’s all right with you.”

  It took a second or so for Joe to figure out that letting Ani’s friend do his research for him was actually a little bit of a blow to Abernathy’s pride. Maybe that explained his immediate reaction to Ani herself—putting her straight out in the field with no training. This was Abernathy’s version of if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

  “Look,” Joe said. “The way I see it, it’s a race. Your government resources against Ani’s phone-a-friend.”

  “I’m running the search myself,” Abernathy said and his voice betrayed how much he would take it as a personal affront if he was beaten to the information by an amateur. “I’ll get right back to you.”

  “You’re not talking to yourself, are you?” Ani asked. “Wired for sound, that’s what Abernathy said earlier. You’re talking to him now, aren’t you?

  Joe nodded.

  “So does your boss listen in on everything you say and do?”

  “It’s still new to me. A very recent upgrade.”

  “How do you switch it on and off?”

  “I don’t. Abernathy does.”

  Ani shook her head. “It shouldn’t be too hard to work out a way of shutting it off and on from your end.”

  “We’re looking into that,” Abernathy said.

  “Apparently that’s coming in the next version,” Joe told Ani.

  She smiled.

  So did Joe.

  The Pabody/Reich telescope array was hidden away in countryside outside Shrewsbury; three radio telescopes that looked alien and strange as they rose above the land, curved science fiction dishes with scaffolds focused into a pyramid shape, mounted upon metal towers.

  An iron fence with a matching gate blocked their way to the site, but there was a buzzer and speaker by the gate and Joe got out of the car, pressed the buzzer, introduced himself to the person on the other end, and the gates swung open.

  “Looks like Abernathy called ahead,” Joe said when he was back behind the wheel. “Wanna go do some investigating?”

  “Am I Daphne or Velma?” Ani asked.

  “Huh?”

  “From Scooby-Doo. Do I stand around looking gorgeous, like Daphne, or do I ask pertinent questions like Velma?”

  “Play it by ear,” Joe said, then pretended to be offended. “Does that make me Fred or Shaggy?”

  Ani looked him up and down.

  “Scooby,” she said, and they both laughed.

  Joe followed a single-lane road to a high-tech building at the end. It seemed to have been spun by a silkworm that was now working in steel and glass. Or maybe Joe’s imagination was running wild.

  They got out of the car and made their way to the entrance. Another buzzer, but this time the door was opened by a human. Joe noticed a black half globe above the door, which he recognized as a high-end CCTV camera.

  A small, middle-aged man stood there with a puzzled expression on his face. He had an overabundance of hair in his eyebrows that seemed to be sympathizing with the lack of hair on the top of his head and standing in solidarity with the bubbly froth of gray hair that started about level with his ears.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” the man said, offering his hand. “I’m Donald Klein. Professor Donald Klein.”

  “Joe Dyson. And this is Ani Lee.”

  “I was told to offer you full assistance, although I was expecting someone …”

  “Older?” Joe asked.

  Klein nodded. “I was told to expect government agents… .”

  “That’s us. They start training us young these days.” Pheromones underscored his statement, and it seemed to appease Klein.

  “I’m sure I have no idea what this is all about.” Klein gestured for Joe and Ani to follow him into the building. “We’re just an observatory, you know. Now twice in a week we get visitors …”

  “Twice?” Joe felt a prickling sensation down his spine. “Who else has been here?”

  “Men in black,” Klein said, scratching his bald head. “Well, men in suits, anyway. Two of them. Odd fellows. Had some very official-looking IDs. Asked strange questions.”

  “About?”

  “That was the thing. Awfully vague questions, actually. Didn’t seem to know much about radio astronomy at all. Didn’t seem to have a clear reason for being here. I just figured it was a security check, or some such nonsense.”

  They’d walked down a corridor as they spoke and Joe had spotted another three cameras on the ceiling. Klein stopped and they stood outside a door. He opened it and ushered them inside. A simple office, star charts and hi-res photos of nebulae and galaxies and planets. A grown-up version of a child’s room, with computers and charts instead of toys and posters. Joe took a seat in front of the desk and Ani took another. Klein settled down behind it and leaned forward, steepling his index fingers and then resting his chin on the apex.

  Joe looked around the office and spotted the camera in here, too. “I see that you have a great security system,” he said. “CCTV cameras, motion sensors.”

  “Part of the burden of getting insurance for a building stocked with state-of-the-art equipment,” Klein replied.

  Joe waited a moment then asked, “Do you have footage of your two previous visitors?”

  “We must. It’ll be in the security office, stored on hard drives. May I ask why you’re interested in seeing them?”

  “Just wondering why they came, is all. I hate coincidences.”

  Klein made a sound that implied he hated coincidences, too.

  “Did you leave these men alone at any point?” Joe asked.

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Did either of them ask to use the toilet?”

  Klein narrowed his eyes, which had the unfortunate effect of lowering his eyebrows over them, making them looked thatched. “One of the men did visit the facilities. But he was only gone for a moment.”

  Joe nodded. “You’d be surprised what a well-trained operative can do in a moment. We’ll need to see the recordings in a while. First we have a few questions.”

  Klein looked at him impassively.

  Joe turned to Ani. “This is Ms. Lee. She wants to know about a former colleague of yours.”

  Klein lifted one of those eyebrows and it looked like a caterpillar jumping. It was as if he were seeing her for the very first time.

  “I’d like to hear about Imogen Bell,” Ani said. Joe didn’t hear even the slightest fluctuation of nervousness in her tone. Indeed, she sounded supremely confident.

  She’s good, he thought.

  “Ah, of course.” Klein sighed. “Why doesn’t anyone ever want to hear about the rich wonder of the heavens? The composition of the colossal expanse that surrounds us? The life cycles of stars and the sublime power of the event horizon of a black hole? But, no. Let’s just keep bringing up that.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ani said lightly. “I don’t mean to come in here from London, barking annoying questions at you that you’ve answered a thousand times before. It would just be really helpful to us.”

  The sudden look of vulnerability she affected had Joe mentally applauding her technique. Equally good was the subtle reminder of how far they’d traveled to talk to Klein.

  As a package, it certainly flustered the
professor.

  “No … look, I’m sorry,” Klein backtracked. “Look, of course I’ll answer your questions. It’s just that the topic of Imogen Bell is still a bit of a … sore point here.”

  Ani nodded her encouragement and left a silence for Klein to fill. She was raw and untrained, Joe thought, but she had a natural, easy way of guiding people. With a pheromone factory and some detection software, Joe guessed she’d be a force to be reckoned with.

  “A promising astronomer, Imogen was a keen and, I thought, gifted addition to our team here. Her postdoctorate research subjects were SETI-related. When she wasn’t searching through space looking for alien life, she was at the whiteboard trying to find a new equation to replace Drake’s.”

  Joe had no idea what the professor was talking about, and was surprised when Ani started nodding agreement.

  “It certainly needs replacing,” she said, “though, of course, Drake’s equation was never intended to be a method for estimating the number of alien civilizations in our galaxy. It was just supposed to provoke debate about the kinds of questions we need to be asking if we want to find those civilizations. That UFOlogists have used it as a proof of the existence of extraterrestrial life seems a little dishonest.”

  Joe watched the shock settle across Klein’s face. He wondered if his own was betraying surprise, too.

  Ani turned to Joe and winked.

  She wasn’t just good.

  She was ace.

  Ani was relieved that her short-term memory storage hadn’t let her down.

  She’d read about the Drake Equation on Wikipedia the night before because of a paper that Imogen Bell had put up on the net a few years ago. The essay had been dry and dull and Ani had only skimmed it, but it had a link to the Wiki entry on the equation, and she’d read that. The information had stuck with her.

  Lucky, really.

  Or maybe Gretchen’s mental magic was rubbing off on her.

  Whatever the explanation, it was worth it for the look on the professor’s face.

  Shocked disbelief. And a little bit of respect. More than he’d given her before, anyway.

  “Yes,” he said after a long pause. “Imogen thought it was time that humanity stopped looking at the question of What will we do if we meet intelligent extraterrestrials? and started focusing on What will we do when we meet them? For her there was no doubt. Intelligent life was out there, we just needed to find it. Her attitude started to strike me as increasingly unscientific, her ideas based entirely on faith. But a project like SETI needs single-minded individuals to put in the hours, so I kind of let it go. Especially when you see some of the types a project with ET at its center brings out of the woodwork. I’m sure you can guess.

  “Anyway, Imogen certainly worked hard, that much can’t be denied. I’d started to value her as a part of the team, but then the whole signal fiasco happened and it all went downhill really very fast.”

  “Ah, the signal from space.” Ani made direct eye contact with the professor, which seemed to unnerve him a little, so she held it. “How do you explain—or account for—Dr. Bell’s overreaction regarding the message she claimed to have received?”

  Klein threw up his hands in something that looked close to surrender.

  “Strain of work. The pressure to justify project budgets. Or a genuine mistake. I only have a take-your-pick kind of answer.”

  Ani noticed Joe narrowing his eyes in response to something Klein had said or done that she’d missed.

  Which, to be honest, made her feel a little bit annoyed.

  She thought she’d been doing so well.

  She reviewed Klein’s list of reasons again and, in the few seconds it took, she noticed that he was starting to sweat. It looked like dew on an egg.

  What are you suddenly nervous about, Professor Klein? she thought, then glanced over at Joe. The look they exchanged told her he wanted her to press Klein further.

  With pleasure. Either he’s hiding something, or he’s scared. I want to know which.

  “This ‘message’ that Dr. Bell supposedly intercepted, what form did it take?”

  “Form?” Klein’s eyes slipped left and right and Ani was sure that it was because he didn’t want to meet her gaze any more. “What do you mean, ‘form’?”

  “I assume it was recorded? And it exists as some kind of digital file?” she pressed.

  “There was a file …”

  “Was?” Ani arched an eyebrow.

  “It was a radio-telescope artifact, nothing more. A binary glitch …”

  “But Imogen Bell thought it was something more?”

  “She wanted to see more,” Klein snapped. “It’s called confirmation bias: people choose to pay attention to the information that supports their beliefs, and to discard that which contradicts them.”

  “So she detected a radio-telescopic glitch, but heard an alien message?” Ani asked.

  “Exactly.” Klein seemed pleased with himself. He even met her eye again.

  Ani’s memory flashed to another detail from Wikipedia and she thought it was worth a try. “Didn’t the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico have a similar incident a few years back?”

  Caterpillars knitted themselves together on a crinkled brow. “It’s exceedingly likely—” Klein began, but Ani stopped him before he could complete the lie that she now knew for certain he was trying to pass off as truth.

  “Likely?” Ani said, making her voice sound one respectful notch below actual mocking. “I find it hard to believe that you are unaware of a near-identical situation occurring at SETI’s headquarters. One that, unless I am very much mistaken, was every bit as dramatic.”

  “Well, of course there have been other mistakes… .”

  “Genuine mistakes that didn’t end with the person reporting their observation having their reputation dragged through the media mud.” She was surprised with the level of outrage she was actually feeling. But something here wasn’t right. And Professor Klein knew more than he was telling them, she was sure. “So why the level of hysterical overreaction?”

  Klein puffed himself up and his features settled into a look of cunning that was both unexpected and odd. “I’m not sure I appreciate the way this conversation is going,” he said slyly, watchfully. “I cannot be held responsible for the way the media treated Imogen which, while shameful, was hardly within my power to control… .”

  “If you’re uncomfortable with the line of questioning then I apologize,” Ani said, “but the media would surely only respond to the information they were given. It seems to me that you hung her out to dry, let her take full responsibility for this supposed glitch… .”

  “It’s a fact,” Klein retorted. “Unless you’re implying that there actually was an alien transmission and that I’m covering it up while using Imogen Bell as a smoke screen.”

  He tutted and settled back in his chair, as if he thought that he had demonstrated the ridiculousness of the idea.

  Ani simply changed her tactics.

  “I honestly hadn’t thought of that,” she lied. “What an odd conclusion to draw from a few random questions.”

  This seemed to wrong-foot Klein and he stared down at the surface of his desk as if seeking answers amid the papers and computer equipment in front of him.

  Joe stood up and pointed to the door. “Perhaps you could show me the security tapes of your other visitors now.”

  “Of course.” Klein seemed pleased to escape Ani’s questioning. “Follow me.”

  He stood up and Ani did, too, but Joe shook his head.

  “Could you stay here and try to contact HQ?” he asked her in a voice that suggested he was telling her off, excluding her for making the professor uncomfortable. “See if they have any messages for us. You could ask if they want copies of the footage, for identification purposes.”

  Ani understood the instruction and the tone instantly. She nodded humble agreement and Joe turned to the professor and offered him an apologetic look. The relief on Klein’s face w
as plain for them both to see.

  She took out her phone and looked ready to make a call.

  Klein led Joe out into the corridor and closed the door behind them.

  Ani put the phone away and got to work.

  Klein led the way to a small room that seemed pretty much an afterthought at the end of a long corridor. A person would have been excused for thinking it was a janitor’s closet. The professor opened it with a keycard and ushered Joe inside. It was a tiny security station, three monitors showing eight camera viewpoints each—twenty-four cameras? Seems excessive—a couple of computers, and a bank of hard drives that would make up the digital vaults where the footage would be stored. What it was missing, Joe thought, was a security guard, or anyone to watch the monitors. There wasn’t even a chair in the room.

  “You sure do have a lot of cameras here,” Joe said, trying to make it sound like he was impressed when really he was more than a little suspicious.

  “We have a lot of very expensive equipment here,” Klein said proudly. Joe was surprised that he felt the need to revisit his earlier comment. He wondered whether it was just absentmindedness on Klein’s part, or an imagined need to bolster up the existing statement. “Now let me see …”

  He pulled an iPad mini out of his jacket pocket and tapped and swiped his way to an app and page that he needed.

  “11:55 a.m,” he muttered. “Three days ago …”

  Klein leaned over one of the computers, pointed and clicked his way to a file, adjusted some parameters in a pop-up box, clicked again, and then stood back and pointed to the monitors.

  All the screens were now showing recorded CCTV footage of the site from three days before. Each screen was time-stamped 11:54. Most of the screens were just showing scenery; only three had people on them: Professor Klein himself, sitting in his office, staring blankly at the wall; a young technician in a white coat monitoring a vast bank of computers in a sort of central hub; and another older man leafing through a bunch of printouts. It seemed a small number of personnel for such a large building, but Joe had to admit he really didn’t know anything about radio astronomy. Maybe that was normal. He didn’t have enough data to formulate an opinion either way.