“Yes,” she answers.
“Is it conveying a Morse Code message?” he asks.
“Analyzing. R-C-U-R, possibly, but inconclusive. It’s stopped,” she responds.
“RCUR, that doesn’t make any sense. How about the signal in the news? The one in the area of Voyager One. Did that come from another planet?” he asks her.
“I don’t know,” she responds.
“I think it did,” he says. “What else could it be?
He gets up, goes back into his apartment, picks up the commemorative coin and takes a really good look at it. With all that has happened, he’s learned not to dismiss possibilities, regardless how remote they may appear. He now wonders if the coin was a signal or a message from the past, and if there’s possibly more to unearth beneath the stone right now.
“Can you play my messages?” he asks Phaedra.
“You have four new messages,” she answers. There’s a beep.
“Cedric, Its Dr. Ridpath. We missed you today at your preliminary review and the panel is growing uneasy. I can’t make decisions for the panel Cedric, but I have some sway with them. Please give me a call as soon as you get this so we can work this out,” the first messages is heard saying, followed by a pause, and another soft beep.
“Cedric where the hell are you? I so cannot believe you missed your prelim! Give me a call,” Pender urges in the voice message. There’s another pause and a beep.
“Cedric, Dr. Ridpath again. I’ve had the FCC in here asking me if we’ve been making any unlicensed transmissions. They’ve traced them back to one of our transmitters. You wouldn’t know anything about that would you?”
“Cedric, I’ll be back Saturday night and rested if you want to play golf on Sunday morning,” Lennox can be heard saying.
Cedric sits in silence for a few minutes, thinking about the coin.
“DOT-5,” he tells Phaedra. A deep voice comes over his sound system.
“We’re now gonna be sending tourists to Mars, or at least into its orbit. Could we be taking the space tourism thing a little too far? What are your thoughts on this? Give us a call at KDOT 5 Slide 34T and let us know. We’ll be discussing this and other topics over the next few hours as the mercury continues to rise in a wave of heat with no relief in sight.
“And say, what’s up with that transmission NASA’s buzzing about? I guess SETI is now in the mix. What do you think? Are we alone? I know I am. I’m pretty sure I’m on the wrong planet. It’s now 10:38,” Flint Nikor, KDOT’s most popular DJ announces.
The humid air carries a fresh summer bouquet. The night is calm.
“You have an incoming call from Lennox,” Phaedra announces.
“I’ll take it,” Cedric tells her; “hello Lennox, what’s up?”
“Did you get my message?” Lennox asks; “I’ll be back by this time tomorrow if you want to play golf on Sunday.”
“Why not?” Cedric answers; “sounds good! So how’s the trip going?”
“Meaningless,” Lennox responds; “completely devoid of meaning.” They laugh.
“You’re a perfect fit for the job,” Cedric tells him.
“Have you taken another look underneath the rock yet?” Lennox asks.
“Not yet no,” Cedric answers.
“Even after finding the coin, you’re not curious if there’s something more to the story?” Lennox asks; “I mean this could be huge.”
“Sure, I’m curious,” Cedric answers; “that’s not it.”
“Then what is?” Lennox asks.
“I’m reluctant to look for the same reasons I didn’t want to look the first time. I don’t want the story to end. My fear of not finding anything outweighs my curiosity,” he tells Lennox. “The coin has extended my hope, but the closer I get to looking beneath that stone again, the more I can see how unlikely anything else will be there. Why end the dream?”
“Have it your way,” Lennox replies; “but something may lay beneath that stone right now and time is ticking.”
“I know,” Cedric says; “I know and you are right. I’ve gotta quit screwing around. I have to go to school tomorrow afternoon to iron a few things out. I’ll stop by the park and check the stone on my way.”
“I’ll see you Sunday,” Lennox says, “back on earth.”
“Alright, later Lennox,” Cedric responds and they both hang up.
Cedric steps back onto his balcony. The stars are out, at least the few you can still see through the city’s light pollution. Due south, Antares sits barely above the horizon, and just twenty-five thousand light years behind it, sits the galactic core.
The moon is full, appearing bigger than usual. Cedric takes it in for a moment, then goes back inside. He lies on the sofa and pulls a light blanket over himself.
“Lights out please,” he tells Phaedra. The lights dim and the room is silent.
“Waves please,” Cedric then requests of her. The sound of ocean waves fill the room’s background.
Exhausted Cedric clears his mind by thinking of Nikki, and a time when the two of them were sitting on the beach in Lincoln City, Oregon. They were just watching waves crash onto the shore, one by one, powered by the moon. It’s now a place in Cedric’s mind, where he can drift to when he wants to relax or to sleep. Tonight, however, he isn’t simply trying to relax. Instead, he’s trying to invite Nikki into his dreams by creating an ambiance that stimulates memories of her. He’s doing this with the hope of increasing his chances of having her appear in his dream. He’s beckoning her.
After a few minutes he finds himself breathing in deep, rhythmic unison with the waves. A minute later, he’s out cold, sound asleep.
Moonliner 5:04
A man screaming vulgarities somewhere far away wakes Cedric, and apparently that same damn dog that’s been howling in the night as well. The stars are fading in the wee hours of the dawn’s twilight. There’s a hint of ocean in the air coming in on pre-dawn, summer breeze. You can hear it move through the trees, and then you can’t.
After a few seconds of silence, the morning’s first bird starts to chirp, too loudly. Cedric stares at the ceiling, knowing he won’t get back to sleep now, not in the summer when the sun comes up this early. Besides, he slept well throughout the night. His self-hypnosis must’ve put him right to sleep.
The hypnosis failed, however, to induce a dream, or at least not a memorable one. Cedric knows that time is healing his deep wounds; his appetite has returned; he sleeps through the night without any lucid dreaming. Time, however, is also erasing Nikki, which haunts him. Without her, there doesn’t seem to be any essence to his life, or life itself for that matter. He now sees the human race as nothing but an ant farm caught in some fruitless, insipid lifecycle, tucked nicely away on a blue planet that’s hurtling through space at destructive speeds. We’re insignificant specs on a spec of a spec. Our measly thousands of years of human history pale in comparison to the billions the planet has endured, and we’d be lucky to survive thousands more of the billions to come.
Then he sees the moon still in the sky to the west, just above the horizon. The air around it is getting lighter, reducing it to a whiter, less distinct object. The earth is rolling into the light and the moon will soon roll out of sight, if the morning sky doesn’t obscure it first.
With his work on his mind, Cedric gets up, turns on his orbiting graphs and begins shuffling them around again, looking as frustrated and confused as ever. He knows he has to get something together to take to the department, and soon. They’ll only excuse so much.
After shifting graphs around for almost three hours, he reduces them to his blue-beam device and drops it into his pocket, then just stares out his balcony door in a moment of tranquility.
“What time is it?” he asks Phaedra.
“It’s eight fifty-seven,” she replies.
“I gotta get going,” he tells her, now realizing he needs to use the school’s photon acceleration tubes to complete his outline. It’s a Saturday but he knows the lab should be open.
As the train glides into Park Station, Cedric grapples with the idea of getting off to take another look under the stone. It would be, he reasons, the optimum point in the day to do so, knowing well the layout of the station and how much easier it is to access the park should he get off an inbound train.
It’s time anyway, he thinks, to indulge the fantasy. It’s time to discover the reality beneath the stone. His hopes of the stone covering a connection to the past have faded over time, despite finding the coin. Time does that to a pessimistic mind. For Cedric, this has simply become something that he has to check off his to do list before getting on with his life. It’s a final step toward healing.
He gets off the train mid platform, alone in the Saturday morning lull, takes the long escalator up and exits into the park. He stops at the edge of the trail that takes him to Lost Lagoon. He’s hit again with déjà vu, hard, for the first time in a while. This time it even changes his visual perspective of the park. The air is tinted yellow. It’s dream-like. He has stood here before, in the same spot looking at the same green trees swaying in the wind.
Time slows. Everything around him is in slow motion. He watches cyclists rolling along the park’s stone seawall, still spellbound by déjà vu. This time he sees a world rolling beneath the cycles, instead of cycles across the ground.
The world slows and the cycles speed up, snapping Cedric back into his day. He smiles, happy that his déjà vu is back. Could it mean something? Why does it come in waves? He really doesn’t know. He only knows that it’s real whatever it is, very real.
At the tip of Lost Lagoon, he again spots the very bench on which he sat with Nikki not even three weeks ago. It’s their bench and it’s unoccupied. Realizing that this dream may all be over in a few minutes with the flip of a stone, Cedric takes a moment from the day and a seat on the beloved bench. He thinks of Nikki. This was all, after all, her idea.
For such a nice morning, oddly, there aren’t many people around. The scene is serene. The wind seems to sway the distant trees, but really can’t be felt. The temperature is already bordering on hot.
High above a spacecraft enters the atmosphere with a sudden red glow, then morphs into a long, white streak across the clear blue sky. Seconds later it is heard roaring across the sky at a very high elevation.
Cedric gets up and walks to the tip of the lake and down the trail he now knows so well, to the large stump. Behind the stump sits the stone, right where he’d left it, seemingly untouched. A smile comes across his face as he takes a really long look at it, now feeling its potential again. Something feels right about this whether anything is under that rock or not.
He kneels beside it and brushes dirt off the top of it with his hand.
“Well I’m back,” he says to the stone, then laughs. His smile suddenly drops off his face. The moment has arrived.
Cedric gets his fingers under the stone for leverage and gently lifts it from its form fitted impression in the soil. Looking down, he notices a distinct indentation where the coin had been discovered days earlier. He sets the stone aside and begins running his fingers through the soil where the coin had laid. It’s tight and well compacted. He picks up a thick stick and uses it to dig a bit deeper.
Within seconds the stick hits something hard beneath the soil’s surface. A shot of adrenalin goes straight down his spine. Almost afraid to even look, he digs further around the object, which is now revealing itself. It’s a box, a black PVC box of some kind, square in shape. Cedric digs deeper, faster. He then manages to get the stick under it and pry it upward, out of the ground. It’s not very large.
With some resistance, he gets the lid of the box to pop open. There’s a rubber ring sealing the rim. Inside Cedric finds a plate made of brushed metal. It’s thin, just a few millimeters thick at best, and laser-engraved on one side in a small font. He stays on his knees, now shaking too hard to get up. With each passing moment, reality sets in. What does he hold in his hand?
He takes his sunglasses out of his pocket and puts them on. He then holds the plate in front of them and rotates it.
“Can you scan this?” he asks Phaedra, with somewhat shaky hands.
Within seconds he has a 3D holographic image of the plate rotating in front of his eyes.
“Can you enlarge and project the message?” he asks. A large, flat, laser-generated image appears in front of Cedric’s eyes. He reads it.
Cedric takes the plate back to his bench, where he sits throughout the rest of the morning and some of the afternoon examining it, the box, and rereading the message over and over again. He doesn’t see the sun as it cuts across the blue sky, or hear the birds. He’s too deep in thought. He sits with his sunglasses on, watching images of the plate and its message orbit him. He doesn’t say anything, but just sits there staring in a state of shock.
A late afternoon gust of wind catches his attention. It’s the first thing he’s noticed outside of his sunglasses all afternoon. Exhausted from hours on end of heavy brainstorming, Cedric makes his way back home, dispensing with his plan to get the photon tubes from school. He now has more important things on his mind.
Moonliner 5:05
Lennox looks out the window of his shuttle as it burns across the darkening sky. He has already re-entered the earth’s atmosphere and is minutes from touching down. Tonight, unlike any other, his shuttle is descending over the city just as fireworks from the annual Festival of Light light-up the entire valley. His flight has to circle tonight to avoid them, giving passengers the most optimal seat in the city.
“Ladies and gentleman this is the captain,” a voice is heard coming over the intercom. “Passengers on the left side of the craft can see fireworks from the Festival of Light. We’ve had to take a small diversion to fly around them but we’ll be on the ground in seventeen minutes. Enjoy the show.”
Meanwhile, Cedric sits on his balcony, holding both the coin and the plate. Distant booms can be heard from the fireworks. He smiles, as if they were planned to celebrate his discovery. This all still seems like a dream to him. He occasionally has doubts, which trigger more forensic examinations of the events. They only lead him again down the same logical path, and to the same logical conclusion; the best explanation for the engravings remains that the coin and the plate are what they claim to be, both messages from the past.
He laughs. Then he laughs even louder, to the point of tears forming in his eyes. If only Nikki could be here sharing this moment. He grasps the objects tightly and stares off into the distance as fireworks light up the horizon. A million thoughts race through his mind.
A few stars appear as the night gets even darker. The moon is up and almost full, just starting to wane a little. It’s a magical summer night. Some neighbor is playing that DP song again, somewhere. It’s still really warm out.
Cedric steps back into his apartment where Phaedra can hear him.
“Can you take a message for Lennox?” he asks her.
“Yes, go ahead with your message,” she responds.
“Let’s meet at the clubhouse at ten tomorrow morning. You’re gonna wanna hear what I’ve unearthed,” he says. “End message. Send,” he adds.
“Message sent,” she tells him.
Just as Lennox’s spacecraft banks a turn and perfectly aligns with its designated runway on final approach, his blue-beam alerts him of an incoming message from Cedric. Lennox takes a close look at the message and smiles, nodding his head in agreement. He sits back and stares out his window as his craft glides across the landscape, then softly touches down on the tarmac.
Moonliner 5:06
It’s mid-morning and Lennox is taking some practice swings just outside the clubhouse with
his seven iron. The day couldn’t be more picture perfect and Lennox is glad to be back on the planet.
Cedric approaches with a golf bag slung over his shoulder, walking pretty swiftly. He takes a seat on a bench by the clubhouse and kicks into a conversation with Lennox.
“So how was your trip?” Cedric asks.
“Pleasant actually. It seemed to go by pretty fast,” Lennox answers. “So what was beneath the rock,” he asks Cedric, not wanting to beat around the bush.
Cedric takes his sunglasses off and hands them to Lennox.
“Take a look for yourself. I scanned it.”
Lennox sits down on the bench beside Cedric, takes the sunglasses and rolls his eyes, not looking too thrilled to wear them. He puts them on nevertheless. Once on, he immediately sees the orbiting images of the scanned metal plate, rotating as they orbit. He reads the plate’s inscription. After a few minutes, he takes the sunglasses off and stares blankly down the first fairway.
“Is this some kind of trick?” Lennox asks Cedric.
“If it is, then it isn’t coming from me,” Cedric responds. “Frankly, I don’t think it is,” he adds.
“What if it’s just someone here and now, receiving your messages and setting you up?” Lennox asks.
“I don’t think so,” Cedric answers. “Doesn’t that metal seem aged to you?” he asks Lennox; “and the duration between messages is exactly the same in 2014 as it is between the two Moondock transmissions.”
Moonliner: No Stone Unturned Page 18