Brave New Girls: Tales of Girls and Gadgets

by Kate Moretti

  “What’s up?”

  “Uhhhhhh…”

  The semi-coherent drone was coming from Lindsay, the grad student on the other end of the call, who had a habit of becoming dumbstruck when flustered.

  “Okay, message received, Lindsay. Thanks for checking in.”

  “Wait!”

  “I’m on pins and needles.”

  Judy flipped back through the final she was grading, looking desperately for any excuse to award a few more points to the poor kid who had taken it. Internally sighing, she inked an F followed by “59” at the top of the paper. Looked like she’d be seeing young—she flipped back to the first page to check—Henry Caber again next semester.

  “There’s a phone call for you, Professor,” Lindsay finally spat out.

  “Cool, is it Hollywood? Are they finally turning my article on thermal equilibrium into a buddy-cop movie? Tell them I want it to be called Planck’s Law.”

  “Did you just make that up?”

  “No, I practiced it in the shower all morning. Come on, Lindsay. Spit it out, or I’ll make you come grade papers like TAs are supposed to do.”

  She smiled, imagining the nasty knock that suggestion had given her grad assistant.

  “Oh, well, look Professor K., I know you said no crank calls, and this lady says she’s from the other side of the galaxy, but she won’t get off the line.”

  Judy dragged her hand down her face. At least it wasn’t as bad as the time she had gotten a nastygram from some campus religious group calling her a Satanist for teaching about Maxwell’s Demon.

  “Have you tried disconnecting the line, Linds? What you do is, you press the red button—”

  “I know you’re joshing me, Professor, but I seriously can’t hang up on this lady. Every time I do, the line doesn’t go dead like it’s supposed to. She’s still there, saying she has an appointment to keep with you and spouting off these numbers—”

  “Numbers? What numbers?” Judy snatched at her morning coffee, which had gone cold, of course, now that it was nearly sunset. She always littered her coffee with enough Splenda and artificial creamer that it tasted like saccharine milk, even cold. The mug said Jamaica—a place she had never been—and as she planted a fortieth or fiftieth lipstick kiss on its rim, she swore she would get around to washing it before the weekend, a promise she invariably never kept.

  Lindsay was reciting numerals.

  “Two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen—”

  The mug tumbled to the floor, shattering and delivering a sickly sweet payload almost entirely over her rug. “Lindsay… put the crank through.”

  Lancaster, Pennsylvania

  1955

  The radio had been ticking for upward of ten minutes. Judy glanced at her Mickey Mouse wristwatch. Yup. Just about ten minutes.

  Tick-tick. Then a pause. Tick-tick-tick. Another pause.

  She rubbed her temples with the thumb and pinky of her left hand. With her right, she keyed the handset.

  “Broken station, this is W3KH. No one can hear what you’re saying.”

  She waited. There was silence for a time. Then the ticking began again. She moaned loudly and buried her head in her arms on her desk. She fiddled with the ham radio, trying a dozen different frequencies. Everything she tried produced that same annoying noise.

  She stopped on one of the channels frequented by an imaginary friend of hers, a trucker with a regular route he claimed, though who knew if that was true.

  “W3BA, this is W3KH. How do you read me?”

  No response. No one seemed to be out there tonight. No one except the weirdo with the broken clock or whatever.

  “Broken station,” Judy said, keying her handset without lifting her head and not really caring if it muffled her voice, “why don’t you just shut up?”

  This time, there was no pause. In fact, the clacking seemed to speed up, but the intervals between ticking were just as regular as before. Judy pulled out the battered Boy Scout manual she had stolen from one of her brothers and flipped to the page on Morse code.

  She knew Morse code well enough to get by; she rarely had to look up more than one or two less-usual letters. But Morse code almost always combined dots and dashes. Whoever was wildly taking up every radio frequency on this warm August night seemed to be using dots exclusively. She had to be sure.

  She pulled out a stub of a pencil and began to record what she was hearing on the back of an old Field and Stream. The pounding had reached an endless crescendo, and she waited for the inevitable pause. When it finally came, the operator seemed to have calmed down again.

  Two clacks.

  “Dot dot. I.” She double checked in the manual. Yup, “I.” She made a note.

  Dot dot dot.

  S.

  “Is.” Okay, that was something. The beginning of a question, maybe. She hoped it wouldn’t turn out to be “Is your refrigerator running?” or something equally asinine.

  Dot dot dot dot dot.

  Five. I-S-five. What the heck was I-S-five?

  Dot dot dot dot dot dot dot.

  “Seven dashes?”

  Nothing. There was nothing for that! She tossed the pencil stub across the room. It bounced off the open window, leaving a tiny mark on the screen. She double-checked the manual, but no, there was no entry for seven dashes. She took her head in her hands.

  “I-S-five. Is five? Is five seven? No, five isn’t seven. Except seven isn’t seven dashes. It’s…”

  She glanced at the manual to be absolutely sure. Right there in black and white, seven was annotated as dash dash dot dot dot. So the weird transmission wasn’t Morse code. Maybe it was just numbers.

  “Two, three, five, seven… oh wait!”

  She rifled around her desk for another pencil, but not finding one, she reluctantly stood, crossed the room, and retrieved the one she had tossed. The point was ruined. She pulled out her fishing knife and carefully whittled the tip back into a perfect cone.

  “Two-three-five-seven. What would that be in the alphabet?”

  She counted it out on her fingers.

  “B-C-E-G. B ceg. B.C. egg? Is that right? Maybe there’s more.”

  The clacking was reaching a fevered pitch again. When it stopped, she felt a little thrill go through her as she recognized a pattern. There went the two-three-five-seven code again. So it wasn’t just gibberish. It was repeating, over and over.

  This time, she marked down the numbers as they came until the transmission cycled back around to two again. She looked down at what she had written.

  2-3-5-7-11-13-17-19-23-29.

  “Twenty-nine?”

  Well, crud, there goes the alphabet-code theory. She leaned back in her chair and put her feet up on the bed. She pinched her eyes shut and rubbed her temples with her knuckles, as though willing her brain to begin working harder.

  It’s not random. It’s not Morse code. It’s not alphanumeric code. Maybe it’s a more complex code. Or wait…

  She sat up suddenly. “Maybe it’s not a code at all. Maybe the numbers are important.”

  She stared down at the numbers. What did they all have in common? They were all odd. No, wait, two isn’t odd. Did they all have a common denominator or something? No, wait…

  They didn’t have any denominators at all.

  “Prime numbers,” she realized breathlessly. “The first ten prime numbers. Is it like a math test?”

  She got down on the floor and crawled under her bed. She had tossed her knapsack under the bed on Friday afternoon with every intention of finishing up her homework before… er… well, it was Sunday evening already, and she hadn’t really gotten to it. Oh, well. This mystery would have to take precedence.

  She forgot to even crawl out from under the bed as sh
e rifled through her knapsack, finally producing her math textbook.

  “Here we go,” she said, finding the proper page. “Prime numbers. What’s the next one?”

  She slid out from under the bed, ignoring the dust bunnies that had attached themselves to her clothes like leeches. She picked up the handset to her radio and keyed the mike. She clicked the button, carefully counting in her head up to thirty-one.

  “What a pain in the neck,” she said. “You guys get all the easy ones, and I have to do thirty-one, thirty-seven, forty-one…”

  She fell silent. The clicking on the other end of the radio had stopped, reaching the end of the pattern. She didn’t want to wait through another cycle to respond, so she began clicking furiously. By the time she had clicked the button thirty-seven times, her hand was starting to cramp.

  How about it, do I pass elementary school math?

  She waited. Suddenly the line picked up in a flurry of activity. She almost forgot to count, but smiled when the strange operator stopped at 41 clicks.

  Yup, I got your number. In fact, your number is…forty-three.

  She didn’t know how long this back and forth was going to go on, and she began to curse herself as she clicked out forty-three more button taps and waited. Hoping they would be satisfied that she had jumped through all of their hoops like a trained monkey, she keyed the mike and spoke.

  “How’s that? Good enough for you guys?”

  “Yes.”

  Judy whirled around so fast, she fell out of her chair. The voice seemed to have come from her own desk. Now, with her butt on the floor and eyes wide, she saw who—or rather what—had spoken.

  The creature couldn’t have been taller than three feet. It was built like a human but had two sets of arms, a total of six limbs. The thing’s skin was bright green, like a fresh stalk of celery. Its face was broad and frog-like, and its eyes were bulbous, yellow, and pupil-less. It had big floppy ears like a dog’s. And perhaps most disconcerting of all, it was wearing very ordinary clothes, not unlike a mechanic’s. Around its neck hung a pair of red goggles proportionate to its head and eyes, and it wore a pair of dun coveralls.

  “What… what are you?”

  The thing opened its mouth and began to click its tongue, just as Judy’s mother did when she was bored or irritated. The creature was repeating numbers again, just as it had over the radio, though Judy quickly noted that it wasn’t the same prime-number progression. This time, it sounded truly random, or at least Judy hadn’t picked up the pattern yet.

  “Didn’t you just…? I thought you said yes.”

  “Yes,” the thing croaked, although the word did not match the movement of its mouth, as though she were watching a dubbed foreign film.

  Judy slowly pushed herself up, wincing in pain. Apparently, she had given her tailbone a good rattle. “Well, let’s just stick to English, then, shall we?”

  The thing tapped its foot impatiently and gestured to the filleting knife she had left on her desk. Judy leapt to her feet, ignoring the white-hot jolt of pain that movement sent up her spine, and snatched up the knife before the little greenie could grab it.

  She stood, feeling a little foolish and more than a little wobbly. Her hand shook as she tried to keep the blade between her and the creature.

  “Hands off the knife!”

  “Hanzovdani?” the creature, or rather its disembodied voice, repeated.

  Judy took a step back. “Knife,” she repeated.

  “Knife,” the thing said, much closer to correct now.

  It gestured wildly at the pencil stub, clicking in what Judy guessed was its native language.

  “Pencil,” Judy hazarded.

  “Pan-sill.”

  “Pencil.”

  “Pencil.”

  “Is this how you learn other languages?”

  The thing held up one of its four arms and extended a single digit. Judy laughed, because that finger meant something nasty here, but she knew the thing was trying to reassure her. It clicked once.

  “One.”

  “One,” it aped.

  “Oh, I see, one word at a time? Oh, crud, I’m saying long sentences again. Hang on.”

  She went around the room, pointing out various objects: knick-knacks on her shelves, posters on her wall, her pillow, anything that came to hand. The thing repeated along with her each word she spoke and continued to click in its own seemingly math-based language in the interim. She noticed that as they progressed, some of the clicks were replaced with words.

  “Oh, here, this might make things go faster,” Judy said with a chuckle. She climbed under the bed to fetch her grammar text and handed it to the creature. The creature did not reach out and take it.

  “Book?” it asked, using one of the words it had just learned.

  “Yes.” Judy opened the book and placed it before the thing, which scampered back onto her desk to get a good look. “But take a look at what kind of book.”

  She flipped through a few pages, and the thing stared, clicking along in its native tongue.

  “Here, flip, just like this.”

  Judy showed again how to flip the pages, but the green thing still steadfastly refused to participate. As it clicked along in its own tongue, Judy made out two English words weirdly sandwiched in the middle: “book” and “grammar.” Suddenly, the thing stopped speaking and fixed her with its eyes.

  “Book… words,” it said.

  “Yes,” Judy agreed, “books have words.”

  “No. Book… in… words?”

  “Book in words?”

  “Book… with… words?”

  “Book with words… oh, wait! Do you mean a dictionary? Hang on. My dad has one in his study.”

  Judy rushed to her door and froze. She glanced around nervously. It was only about eight or eight thirty. Her parents routinely went to bed early, and her brothers didn’t care what she did.

  Everyone knew she stayed up late to play with the ham radio, and only occasionally, when it was getting to be two or three a.m., did her father come and tell her to knock it off and go to bed. But now, she was making more noise than usual, and this Martian had teleported into her room somehow. All of a sudden, she felt a terrifying fear of being caught.

  She flicked off her light and glanced at the creature, which gave no response to the loss of illumination. She turned the knob slowly, making as little noise as possible, then slipped through the tiniest crack she could possibly make of the doorway and pulled it closed behind her. She pattered down to her dad’s study and heaved a sigh of relief when she found it empty.

  There, on his bookshelf, stood the great red leveler of the Scrabble field. She slipped the dictionary out of its spot of honor and hurried back to her room with it clenched in both arms, pressed to her chest. The creature’s ears perked up at her return. She handed the dictionary triumphantly toward the greenie, but it refused to grasp the book, much as it had the grammar text.

  “Flip,” the thing said, gesturing.

  “Oh, you want me to flip? You can do it yourself. It’s easy.”

  “No. Flip.”

  Sighing, Judy flipped to the first page. Aardvark to abattoir.

  “Flip,” the thing said almost immediately.

  “There’s no way you read that that fast.”

  “Flip!” it insisted.

  “All right.”

  She turned to the next page. Again, it immediately demanded that she flip the page.

  “Flip, flip,” the thing croaked, until Judy was just speeding through the pages.

  “I don’t see how you could possibly be getting anything out of this.”

  “I am.”

  That was more knowledge of grammar than it had shown up until now. She decided to press the issue.
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  “You are?”

  “Yes. Keep going.”

  They sped through the entire dictionary at lightning speed. When she was finished, Judy stared at her odd visitor. She closed the book and waited expectantly.

  “Thank you,” it croaked at last.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Judy Kraybill,” she said, managing not to stutter.

  The thing seemed to think for a moment. “Hello, Judy Kraybill.”

  “Judy is fine.”

  “I see.”

  “What should I call you?”

  “Dela.”

  “Are you a male or—?”

  “Female.”

  Judy took a deep breath. There were so many questions she wanted to ask, and all of them seemed to be jostling for priority on the tip of her tongue.

  “I see you are confused. Is this your first extraterrestrial encounter?”

  “It’s more than just mine. It’s my whole planet’s!”

  It was hard to read the emotions of the little goblin, but Judy suspected that when she turned a lighter shade of green, it indicated she was upset.

  “That is… regrettable. Are you capable of keeping this encounter clandestine?”

  Judy blinked. “You mean don’t tell anybody?”

  “Yes.”

  She reached out with her pinky bent into a crook.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t understand the significance of this gesture.”

  “Pinky swear. The sacredest oath on my planet. Just take my finger with yours.”

  Judy continued to be weirded out by how the tiny creature seemed to share none of the basic body language of humanity. Her nose flared, and Judy wondered whether it was the alien equivalent of a smile or some kind of looking down on her.

  “Very well, I will. But don’t be alarmed when we touch.”

  In fact, Judy was quite alarmed by that statement. But when Dela reached out with one of her digits and met Judy’s embrace, she felt… nothing. Not slimy, not scratchy, not even normal. She felt just nothing.