Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [58]
‘Are you there yet?’ Alison’s voice said over the speaker phone. Alison was twenty-nine and had shoulder-length auburn hair, enormous sky-blue eyes and a beaming smile that made her face glow. Pete loved it. Alison wasn’t conventionally beautiful, but she could stop traffic with that smile. At the moment, she was working out of the paper’s D.C. office.
‘I’m almost there,’ Pete Cameron replied.
He was on his way to an observatory out in the middle of the New Mexico desert. Some technician at the SETI Institute there had called the paper earlier that day claiming to have detected some chatter over an old spy satellite network. Cameron had been sent to investigate.
It was nothing new. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, or SETI, picked up stuff all the time. Their radio satellite array was very powerful and extraordinarily sensitive. It wasn’t uncommon for a SETI technician, in his search for extra-terrestrial transmissions, to ‘cross beams’ with a stray spy satellite and pick up a few garbled words from a restricted military transmission.
Those pick-ups were disparagingly labelled ‘SETI sightings’ by the reporters at The Washington Post. Usually they amounted to nothing – just incomprehensible one-word transmissions – but the theory was that, maybe, one day, one of those garbled messages would provide the starting point for a story. The kind of story that ended in the word Pulitzer.
Alison said, ‘Well, call me as soon as you’re done at the Institute.’ She put on a mock-sexy voice, ‘I have a thing for SETI sightings.’
Cameron smiled. ‘Very provocative. Do you do house calls?’
‘You never know your luck in the big city.’
‘You know,’ Cameron said, ‘in some states, that could qualify as sexual harassment.’
‘Honey, being married to you is sexual harassment,’ Alison said.
Cameron laughed. ‘I’ll call you when I’m done,’ he said before hanging up.
An hour later, Cameron’s Toyota pulled into the dusty parking lot of the SETI Institute. There were three other cars parked in the lot.
A squat two-storey office building stood adjacent to the parking lot, nestled in the shadow of a three-hundred-foot-tall radio telescope. Cameron counted twenty-seven other, identical, satellite dishes stretching away from him into the desert.
Inside, Cameron was met by a geeky little man wearing a white lab coat and a plastic pocket protector. He said his name was Emmett Somerville and that it was he who had picked up the signal.
Somerville led Cameron down some stairs to a wide underground room. Cameron followed him silently as they negotiated their way through a maze of electronic radio equipment. Two massive Cray XMP supercomputers took up an entire wall of the enormous subterranean room.
Somerville spoke as he walked, ‘I picked it up at around two-thirty this morning. It was in English, so I knew it couldn’t be alien.’
‘Good thinking,’ Cameron said, dead-pan.
‘But the accent was definitely American, and considering the content, I called the Pentagon right away.’ He turned to look at Cameron as he walked. ‘We have a direct number.’
He said it with nerdy pride: the government thinks we’re so important that they gave us a direct line. Cameron figured that the number Somerville had was probably the number for the Pentagon’s PR desk, a number that SETI could have found by looking up the Department of Defense in the phone book. Cameron had it on his speed-dial.
‘Anyway,’ Somerville said, ‘when they said that it wasn’t one of their transmissions, I figured it was okay to give you guys at the paper a call.’
‘We appreciate it,’ Cameron said.
The two men arrived at a corner console. It consisted of two screens mounted above a keyboard. Next to the screens was a broadcast quality reel-to-reel recording machine.
‘Wanna hear it?’ Somerville asked, his finger poised above the ‘PLAY’ button on the reel-to-reel machine.
‘Shoot.’
Emmett