Chapter Forty-one
Signals from space
Four months and twenty-three days after Bakman’s sentencing hearing and imprisonment, a strange thing happens. One night amateur radio operators and radio astrometry employees around the planet pickup up a strange very old style signal repeated every ten seconds. It is in ancient Morse code, dots and dashes. The message is short, only three letters: D, V, Z. Ten seconds of silence and then the three same letters are repeated and ten more seconds of silence. This message is repeated over-and-over again for ten hours and then it suddenly stops. The excitement is not over the message or its content. Everyone in the world is buzzing over where it came from—deep in space.
The signal appears to a few experts to be moving away and a few knowledgeable ones believe the letters stand for Bakman’s three mechanicals: Dee, Vee, and Zee. Two week afterward all experts decide and agree that it has to be from their lost space ship—New Horizons.
Next month, exactly thirty days later to the second, the signals start again even deeper in space. This time a dozen Information Screens fill with information about where it was last month and where it is this month. Screens of a real night sky show a red line from the first signal to this one.
The third month, the signals are deeper still in space, and any Information Service Screen that does not mention the signals repeatedly loses viewers and market share. By the fourth month, Informationalists began to include New Horizon Programs with Bakman disks information and things from the Bakman Report. All of them and their audience begin to ask, “Where is the ship going?”
Experts plot a course toward the Centaurus Constellation and by the fifth month most agree that it is headed straight for Alpha Centauri. Now, each program includes all known information about what appears from earth as a single star, but they explain is really three stars. Cen A-B-C become common program information every month after that.
During the sixth month with New Horizons deeper still in space headed for Cen A-B-C, they began playing different segments of the disks, more things from the Bakman Report, interviews with Bakman, registration pictures of the three deactivated mechanicals aboard, and things from the trial. Each program keeps viewers if they try to explain “why” and “where.”
After the sixth month, no Information Screen can keep viewers without having at least a ten hour report or two or even three full length programs about Bakman, the three mechanicals, construction of New Horizons, and its flight path. By now most experts and listeners all agree it is headed for Alpha Centauri, the closest cluster of stars in our galaxy, only 4.4 light years away, and in great detail give its present location. On each of these programs once the target has been agreed on and explained, the talking heads give wildly different estimates of how long it will take to reach Cen-A. Through all this, Informationalists talk about where it was last month, where it is now, and estimate where it will be next month. Each talking head or expert traces its monthly path through space adding information about why it was there, known facts about Alpha Centauri, its mission, and even piecing together with computer magic Bakman’s words into statements he never made.
More than a few do even play the actual last Morse code sounds from the spaceship. Some even use the line of spots connected by red lines on their star map to try to predict where it will be next month and how long it will take. These programs continue month after month until a simple capital “A” or "A" on a screen, painted on the wall of a building, or in a hallway, or texted, or made in the air with an index finger is enough to communicate the thought of New Horizon’s journey.
The Centauri Conspiracy Page 43