“When was that?” I asked.
“In 1972.” Jack gave me a curious look. “Why? Are you thinking there might be some connection to Avi?”
“How could there be? That was a year after Avi died.”
Jack shrugged. “Well, it seemed like anyone wanting to delve any deeper into the ghost signals was going to hit a brick wall—except for the fact that just a couple of years ago, the government expanded the Freedom of Information Act to include sources that had been off-limits before. So I made a request. I asked for information about the ghost signals that had been heard from the time of World War II up until 1972. And this is what I got.”
Jack pulled a thick sheaf of papers from the file and handed them to me. I paged through them but quickly realized that I’d never be able to extract any real meaning from them. Most of the pages were covered with equations of some kind and electrical diagrams. There were a number of memos from various government agencies, including the air force, as well as pages of correspondence, but most of these had whole sections blacked out.
“What does all this mean?” I asked, handing the material back.
Jack took the pages from me but instead of slipping them back into the folder, he held onto them, as if he weren’t yet ready to tuck them away. “It means,” he said, “that I think whatever he, or they, were doing . . .”
I interrupted him right there. “They?” I said. “Who’s they?”
“The radioman,” Jack said. “Or maybe radiomen. The ghost signals are not originating from just one ground source on Earth—they jump around a lot, but there are clearly multiple sources. Maybe your friend is alone here, maybe not.”
“Please stop calling him my friend.”
Jack shrugged. “Well, even if we assume he’s the only one here—at least now—he must have started out trying to somehow use radars to broadcast the signals, but they didn’t work very well. Once the Soviet Union and the United States started putting satellites into orbit, they worked a lot better—until, for some reason, they didn’t anymore.”
“Use them for what?”
“I can only give you my best guess about the answer to that question, so here it is: the satellite telemetry signals are broadcasting to stations on Earth so their movements can be tracked and coordinated. Nobody wants their satellite to bump into anybody else’s, to put things very simply. So everybody on Earth is listening for signals coming in to us. Even the various groups like SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which is listening for possible alien hailing signals—you know, Hello Earthlings, here we are—is expecting to hear signals coming toward us, from far away. But the ghost signals are—were—completely different. Whoever was sending them started using satellites, the Soviets’ and ours, as a sort of hi-tech trampoline; they were bouncing their signals off our hardware. And as I told you already, they’re pinging them outward. The signals originate on Earth and are going out into space.”
This sounded very much like Avi’s explanation about how the same TV signals that brought me my Saturday morning cartoons could travel out into space, journeying on through the solar system for unimaginably vast distances—so much so, that I had a hard time taking Jack seriously. Objectively, I understood that he was describing something decidedly strange and seemingly inexplicable—what were the aliens broadcasting, and why?—but it was hard for me to shake the image of a stream of electronic pulses, formed into the cartoon shapes of dancing mice and wise-cracking bunnies, slowly drifting past the nearest planets on their way to the asteroid belt and beyond.
“Of course,” Jack continued, “as most researchers eventually concluded, the real likelihood was that these signals were some sort of artifact of regular, Earth-linked communications systems. Our planet, along with the layers of the atmosphere around us, is blanketed with electronic chatter that’s growing exponentially every minute of every day. Millions of people using billions of devices—from incredibly complex military systems to homemade, hand-cranked radios—are sending and receiving broadcasts of all kinds, all the time. It’s impossible to even begin to estimate the volume of all these transmissions or pin down the kind of anomalies that so much atmospheric noise might cause.”
“So that’s the big reveal?” I asked. “That’s what you find out in the Wild Blue Yonder? There’s a lot of unexplained atmospheric noise around us?”
“No,” Jack said. “Not exactly.” Still holding onto the sheaf of papers, he said, “Everything I just told you adds up to the conclusions that most reasonable people would probably come to after reading all this Freedom of Information material. But that’s not what a top-level Aware learns when he is taken into a locked room and allowed to read Howard’s last story, one that has never been published. In that story, the alien reveals to Howard that the ghost signals are really homing beacons and that he is part of an advance contingent sent here to assess whether the time is right to help humans recover their memory of who their real ancestors were. The homing beacons will help guide other members of the alien race—the descendants of our original alien ancestors—through the vastness of the universe, back to ours.”
“Why do they need the help? Because they lost their interstellar map?”
“You think you’re being funny, but actually, you’re sort of right. Wherever they come from—this universe, or some other—apparently, it’s not so easy to get from there to here. In the distant past, they used to be able to find their way here by homing in on the life force of the humans who still retained a memory of them. But now—well, now, the only guides they have are the Awares, but there aren’t enough of them. Hence—homing beacons.”
There was something so deliberate about the way he told this story that made me wonder if he might believe any of it, and so I asked him that. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d reacted scornfully, but he didn’t. Not exactly.
“Look,” he said, “I believe that the Blue Awareness is a cult and like any cult, I tend to think they’re a little nutty. Maybe a great deal more organized—even respectable, and certainly a lot larger than most—but nutty, all the same. But then you come along and you, who have absolutely no interest in anything about them, seem to confirm at least one part of their creation story. I think that’s interesting.”
“I don’t.”
“Really? Then why are you asking me all these questions?” I wanted to reply with some snappy answer, but I wasn’t fast enough. Jack quickly started in again. He said, “Some of my questions would be answered if I could just understand what was happening on the fire escape. Or at least, what you think was happening. Was your radioman adjusting the signal of a homing beacon? Was he doing something else entirely? And whatever he was doing—what was the reason? Are you really sure you don’t know? Because when you called, I was hoping that if I told you all this and then we talked some more, if you did know something, or remembered some detail . . .”
I rose to my feet and gave Jack Shepherd what I intended to be a poisonous look. I was suddenly beginning to feel the same way I had in Ravenette’s loft: like I was being manipulated to serve someone else’s agenda. I was getting sick of it; I felt like I had been suckered into playing head games that I didn’t understand and absolutely did not like. Until I had called into Jack’s damn radio program, worrying about aliens—real, imagined, or otherwise—was not high on my list of fun things to do and as of this moment, it was going right back down to the bottom of the heap.