Skywave

by K Patrick Donoghue

  But to Ajay, Saturn didn’t stack up. Perhaps he felt this way because of how little he could see of Saturn through the telescope. Yes, its rings were visible, but the rest of the planet was a yellowish blob, nothing more. When NASA published breathtaking images of Saturn taken by the Cassini probe, Ajay’s father had called him to challenge his perception of the planet’s dull appearance. While Ajay had agreed the pictures were spectacular, they did little to change his impression of the planet. Jupiter swirled and bubbled with color and activity. Saturn looked lifeless and still.

  And then there were Jupiter’s moons to consider. Through their telescope, Ajay had come to appreciate the grandeur of the planet’s four largest moons. Of Jupiter’s sixty-seven moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto were all visible through their viewfinder, bracketing the gas giant. Ajay often imagined how amazing it would be to stand on a planet’s surface and look up to the sky and see dozens of moons overhead. While he realized Jupiter’s thick cloud cover negated any such possibility, the view of its four orbiting behemoths excited his imagination.

  By comparison, Ajay could spot only one of Saturn’s moons, Titan, on most occasions. And Titan was often hard to detect, given its distance from its ringed parent. Another strike against his father’s favorite planet in Ajay’s mind.

  And so, over time, Ajay had become obsessed with Jupiter. He read anything and everything published about the planet. When any new images were posted by NASA, they were added at once to his laptop screen saver and his phone’s lock screen. Even his cubicle walls at the office were plastered with postcard-sized photos of the planet and its moons.

  Those pictures, much like the one he stared at now, fueled dreams of traveling in space and visiting distant planets. They were dreams he yearned to fulfill, but ones he feared would never happen. He traced the contrail again with his finger and uttered a deep sigh.

  As Ajay continued to brood, he felt a tap on his shoulder. “Hey there, where’s the crown?”

  He looked up from the collage to see a bronze-skinned blonde in a long-sleeve white T-shirt and black boardshorts. Atop her head was an orange visor.

  “Huh?” he said.

  “Your Elroy crown,” Kiera said with a smile. “Did it blow away in the breeze or did you leave it in Phoenix?”

  “Oh, no. You’ve seen my videos?” Ajay winced and covered his eyes.

  “Oh, yeah. Watched ’em all,” Kiera said, hands anchored on her hips.

  “How embarrassing,” Ajay said. What possessed Sarah to tell her about his podcast channel?

  “Hope you didn’t send any to NASA,” Kiera said.

  “Um, no,” Ajay said, stepping down from the bar stool to greet Kiera. He bowed and extended his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Walsh. Thank you for agreeing to see me.”

  “Ooh, how formal of you.” Kiera took hold of Ajay’s hand and curtsied. “I fully expected you’d say something like, ‘Yo, yo! Wat up, gurly gurl!’”

  Ajay laughed at her imitation of his 3lr0y persona. “Very good. But you need to thump your chest when you do it. Like this.”

  He repeated the slang greeting while rapidly pounding his chest with his fist. Kiera mimicked the gesture while Ajay applauded. “That’s it. That’s it!”

  As Kiera took a bow, Ajay studied her appearance. She looked nothing like what he expected. When Sarah had first told him about Kiera, she’d said her former roommate was a PhD from Embry Riddle University who’d worked at JPL and now held a position at Augustus Amato’s A3rospace Industries. The combination had caused Ajay to form an immediate mental image of a gangly, pale brunette with thick glasses. This perception had been partially dispelled after he conducted an Internet search on Kiera. He found several pictures from her JPL days that showed her to indeed be a pale brunette, but she wore no glasses and was quite chubby.

  But the woman standing in front of him now bore little resemblance to the JPL photos. Beyond the tan and dyed hair, Kiera had trimmed down. Ajay wouldn’t go as far as to call her slender, but she was far more toned and shapely than she’d been in the earlier pictures. She was also shorter than he expected. Ajay, at five-foot-eight, was a good six inches taller than Kiera.

  She completed her bow and asked, “Should I call you Elroy or Ajay?”

  “Ajay, please,” he said, pulling out a bar stool for her. Once seated, Kiera leaned over to brush clumps of sand from her feet. Ajay remounted his own stool and pushed a menu across the table toward Kiera. “I know you are pressed for time. You want to go ahead and order lunch right away?”

  Kiera halted her sand removal process to glance at the orange sport watch on her wrist. “Um…sure. I don’t need a menu, though. I know what I want.”

  “Same here,” Ajay said. He signaled a waitress, who sidled up to the table just as Kiera removed her visor. The waitress smiled. “Kiera! Haven’t seen you in ages.”

  “Hey, Millie,” Kiera said, sharing a hug with the waitress. “How’re you?”

  “Can’t complain,” Millie said. “Weather’s been good. How long are you in town?”

  “A few more days,” Kiera said. “Then it’s back to the Bahamas for another three weeks in the bunker.”

  “Oh, poor you,” Millie teased, nudging Kiera’s shoulder. “You paddleboarding today?”

  “Yeah, I was out for an hour this morning. Gonna go back out when I finish here,” Kiera said. While she maintained her gaze at Millie, she cocked her head in Ajay’s direction. “This is Ajay Joshi. He’s a friend of Sarah’s.”

  “Cool. Nice to meet you,” Millie said. “You guys want something from the bar?”

  Ajay looked at Kiera. She said, “Water’s good for me.”

  “Same,” Ajay said. “We’d like to order lunch, though.”

  “Sounds good,” Millie said. “I’ll be right back with the waters and then take your order.”

  They chitchatted while awaiting the return of the waitress. In that conversation, Ajay asked about her paddleboard hobby.

  “I suck at it,” she said, “but it’s still fun to me.”

  When the drinks were delivered, they ordered lunch and returned to their conversation. Ajay pointed in the direction of Cape Canaveral. “Ever see a Shuttle go up from the beach here?”

  “A few,” she said.

  “Must have been crazy,” he said.

  “Yeah. But it was nothing like watching one go up from the viewing stands at Kennedy,” Kiera said, swirling her ice water with a straw.

  “I’ll bet,” Ajay said as he raised a hand. “Count me jealous.”

  “It’s too bad the program was canceled. I miss ’em. They were sorta my Super Bowl,” Kiera said. “The rockets that go up now just aren’t the same.”

  Ajay nodded and sipped his water. He noticed Kiera check her watch again and decided it was time to move beyond small talk. “So, what did you think of my podcasts?”

  “Honestly,” she said, “you come across as a kook.”

  The blunt assessment stunned Ajay. Sarah had said Kiera didn’t mince words, but given her earlier gentle ribbing about his crown and lingo, he hadn’t expected her to be so curt.

  “I’m not sure why you decided to go the clown route,” Kiera said, “but if you want anyone to take you seriously, you need to delete everything on your channel and start over again.”

  Ajay felt heat rise on his face and neck. He crossed his arms and said, “Don’t hold back. Tell me what you really think.”

  “Look, I don’t mean to be a bitch, but you can’t believe those videos are helping your cause,” she said. “Why do you make them?”

  “You sound like my father.”

  “Holy crap! Your father’s seen them? I sure hope he didn’t share ’em with your mother.”

  “All right. Enough. You’ve made your point,” Ajay said. “Did you listen to any of the Jupiter recordings I posted?”

  She nodded.

  “And?” he asked.

  “And what?”

  “Do you agree with
me?”

  “If you mean, do I think there are little green men on Callisto beaming messages to Earth…hell, no,” she said.

  Geez, what a bitch!

  “If you mean, are there unusual sounds on the recordings, then, yes,” Kiera said.

  “But you think they’re interference,” Ajay said, his tone sarcastic.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to, I could hear it in your voice. How familiar are you with Radio JOVE?”

  “A little. I checked their website after listening to your recordings.”

  “And how much do you know about radio waves in general?” Ajay asked.

  “Quite a bit, actually,” Kiera said.

  “Okay, then tell me what you make of the clicks?”

  “I don’t know what to make of them. They might be interference, they might not,” she said. “But it’s a big frickin’ leap to call them proof of aliens.”

  The urge to summon the waitress for the check and leave surged through Ajay. She was just like the rest of them, he thought. Only nastier.

  “I do think they’re interesting, though,” she said. “Especially the three-minute intervals and the consistent click pattern. How’d you happen to notice them?”

  “Huh?” Ajay asked, surprised by the shift in her critique.

  “The clicks. You have to listen to the recordings very closely to pick them up. What made you notice them?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been listening to Radio JOVE for a while. I bought one of their antenna kits so I could listen to the storms live. Record them myself. I guess I just got so used to them, the clicks stood out to me,” Ajay said. He didn’t dare tell her the real story of how he discovered the clicks, as it would only evoke a fresh round of criticism. The truth was he liked to listen to his Radio JOVE’s long-burst recordings when he got ready for bed, as their soothing, ocean wave–like pattern helped him fall asleep. But every now and then, the recordings would include the annoying clicks, disrupting his ability to drift off.

  “Well, you’ve got a very keen ear. I think I would have missed the clicks without a spectrum analyzer,” Kiera said with a smile. “How did you piece together the connection with Callisto?”

  “I thought something was wrong with my antenna,” Ajay said, noting the earnest quality of Kiera’s question, “so I downloaded some recordings from Radio JOVE’s database for the same dates as the ones I made. And I found the clicks in their recordings, too. That led me to go through the entire Radio JOVE inventory of recordings to see if the clicks showed up in the past.”

  His recitation was interrupted by the arrival of their lunches: lionfish tacos for her, conch fritters for him. As Kiera squeezed lime juice over her tacos, she said, “You were talking about the clicks.”

  Ajay took a bite of the fried shellfish and lowered his fork. After a quick chew, he said, “Yes, so I found the clicks in some of the recordings, but not all. I created a spreadsheet with all the dates where the clicks occurred.”

  With one eye on Ajay, Kiera hovered over her plate and took a bite of a taco. Ajay watched a third of the taco’s fillings spill onto her plate. As she wiped a trail of lime juice from her chin, she uttered a muffled, “And?”

  “And I found a pattern. The clicks occurred in recordings approximately seventeen days apart, or multiples of seventeen when there were gaps,” he said. By way of explanation, he qualified his comment. “Recordings aren’t made every day. Jupiter’s only in position to pick up radio signals on certain days each month, so there are blocks of time when recordings aren’t available.

  “Anyhow, it seemed interesting to me, so I kept on digging, trying to understand why the clicks appeared at such regular intervals. I looked at a bunch of different factors. I downloaded sunspot activity charts, near-earth asteroid lists, anything I could think of that might produce radio interference.”

  Kiera scooped up the dropped fillings and loaded them back into her half-eaten taco. “That’s a pretty tall order for an amateur astronomer. Why did you focus on extraterrestrial sources instead of looking at sources of interference on Earth? I know you don’t want to hear it, but skywaves are the most likely cause.”

  “Yeah, I know. Believe me, I’ve gotten that pushback from the people at Radio JOVE, NASA and everyone else I’ve tried to show my findings.”

  “Well,” Kiera said with a delicate lilt, “maybe they’re right.”

  “Maybe,” Ajay said. “But I don’t think so. I considered skywaves, other sources of Earth interference, but none of them sound like the clicks, and none of them occur at set intervals.”

  “Fair enough, but that doesn’t mean they come from Callisto,” she said, pushing her plate away.

  “Bear with me,” he said. “One of the things I looked at was orbital patterns. Was there any body between Earth and Jupiter that might cause periodic interference? It’s what made me consider near-Earth objects data initially.”

  “Makes sense, theoretically, but it’s hard to imagine a small asteroid causing a Jupiter radio signal to bounce around,” Kiera said.

  “Agreed, and I couldn’t find a correlation anyway, so I trashed the idea. But then I started to wonder if they might be caused by one of Jupiter’s own moons. And lo and behold, I found one of its moons, Callisto, orbits Jupiter every seventeen days. Well, sixteen point seven days, to be exact,” Ajay said.

  “Okay,” Kiera said, resting her elbows on the table. “So, I assume you mapped Callisto’s orbit and found it passed between Jupiter and Earth on the days you heard the clicks.”

  A smile, wide and toothy, spread across Ajay’s face. “Exactly!”

  “So, you basically found radio wave evidence that confirms Callisto transits Jupiter,” Kiera said. “Not exactly Nobel Prize material.”

  The dismissive comment hit Ajay harder than a slap to the face. “I believe it’s more than that. A lot more.”

  “Like what?” Kiera said, crossing her arms on the table.

  “I don’t think the clicks are just the result of Callisto passing in front of Jupiter. I think the clicks originate from Callisto,” he said.

  She stared at him and frowned. “Now, what would make you think that?”

  “Well, let’s start with our discussion a few minutes ago about near-Earth asteroids, how they’re too small to interfere with Jupiter radio signals. Even though Callisto’s a whole lot bigger than the largest near-Earth asteroid, it’s still only three percent of the size of Jupiter. It’s hard to imagine something so small causing perceptible interference. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “Okay, then there’s another aspect of Callisto’s orbit to consider. It’s tidally locked. It shows the same face to Jupiter at all times, just like Earth’s moon.”

  “Big deal. That makes no difference,” Kiera said.

  “As a source of interference, I agree. It wouldn’t,” Ajay said. “As a source of transmission, it makes all the difference.”

  Kiera rolled her eyes. Ajay continued to make his case. “The clicks don’t just happen once each recording. They repeat, at approximately three-minute intervals for the length of each full recording. If a click just marked Callisto passing in front of Jupiter, it wouldn’t repeat, would it?”

  “I don’t know. There could be an echo. Jupiter’s got a very active magnetic field, high radiation. Something small passing in front might cause radio signals to bounce back and forth between the two bodies, sort of like a paddle ball,” Kiera said.

  Ajay shook his head from side to side. “I’ve slowed down the recordings. Ran them through a spectrum analyzer. The clicks have identical patterns and a very distinct wavelength compared to Jupiter’s long-burst waves.”

  “Oh, come on. You’re grasping at straws. You want to believe there are aliens there, so you’re twisting the data to make it fit your theory.”

  “Not true!” he said. “The waves start out at a low volume, grow louder over the course of a recording and then fade
away near the end. To me, it means the clicks are not only coming from Callisto. It means they are coming from a fixed position. There’s no other explanation that makes sense.”

  Kiera walked along the beach, her feet making deep impressions on the wet sand. In her hand, she fidgeted with the Space Shuttle–shaped flash drive Ajay had handed to her when they departed Bahama Bettie’s.

  She had been reluctant to accept the flash drive, not wanting to give Ajay the false impression she found his arguments convincing. However, there were kernels in his observations that intrigued Kiera, especially considering her own radio wave research.

  By the time she returned to the spot on the beach where her paddleboarding club was camped out, Kiera was anxious to head to her apartment and pop the storage device into her laptop. But she was corralled by fellow club member Lauren, who prodded Kiera to grab her board and join her on the water. Kiera was allowed a moment’s respite to stow the flash drive in her beach bag before Lauren dragged her by the hand to the stack of boards behind their circle of beach umbrellas. A few of the guys hopped up to join them, and off into the surf they went.

  For the better part of thirty minutes, Kiera’s mind was locked on Ajay’s curious clicks. In that time, she decided against reviewing Ajay’s data right away. Instead, she devised two plans for analyzing the anomalous sounds. For the first avenue of investigation, Kiera would identify the most likely variables that could account for the clicks, and then she’d attempt to validate or disqualify each variable as a possible source. This would be somewhat repetitive to what Ajay attempted, but given that she planned to perform the analysis without the benefit of reviewing his data, it would provide her with an independent read.

  The second approach would focus on Ajay’s conclusion. She’d start with the premise that the clicks were radio signals broadcasting from Callisto. From there, she would identify the set of conditions that would need to exist for the signals to find their way onto the Radio JOVE recordings and then assess the feasibility of such conditions.

  But before she did any of that, she wanted to listen to a bigger sample of Radio JOVE recordings. She feared Ajay had been too selective, picking out only recordings that fit his theory. So, the first order of business after returning to the apartment would be to download a sizeable block of long-burst wave recordings from the Radio JOVE website. She would also review the upcoming broadcast schedule in conjunction with Callisto’s orbit to determine the next available opportunity to listen to a live broadcast.