I looked up to ask: “What about my atmosphere suit and supplies?”
“Everything is already on the Transport. The extra air tanks and supplies for a week are loaded into external-access compartments. We’ll control the Transport from here until they take over to guide you into a pressurized bay. They’ve prepared an environmental chamber for you with our specs, so you should be fine.”
Conflicting emotions came over me as I thought about the coming days, but before I could say anything, I saw Lazz reach for a wall-com.
“He can’t go yet, Liza. I’m not finished training him.”
“They seem to think he’s ready, so he’s going to have to deal with it.”
“I’m telling you,” Lazz protested. “He’s not ready. He’s starting to get the hang of the eyes, but he needs more time. What’s the harm if I come along? There’s a spare suit, and they’re adjustable. And there are more than enough supplies.”
“No.” Liza was firm. “The Travelers said he has to come by himself.”
“Actually,” I corrected her. “They only said that no government representatives were to be along. If they want parity, Lazz really ought to come since he’s right: I’m still not fully trained and I need his help. I can explain his presence without too much trouble.”
I wasn’t being quite truthful about needing Lazz because it was getting easier and easier to use the electronic eyes now that I had found the right mental buttons. But I owed Lazz for all his help and I knew he was dying to go. The whole time he had been training me, he had been pumping me for information on the Travelers, wistfully admitting he wished he had been the one to make contact. But through a series of coincidences, I had been the lucky one.
I had been working as an advanced A.I. programming instructor at M.I.T., and I had always been an amateur astronomer and a SETI buff, and in studying newly released deep-space probe data from the Farside monitoring station on the Moon, I had come across some intriguing signals that had seemed to correlate with similar ones from the Arecibo SETI site. Along with other ranges, I had originally been working with data in the 1.42 and 1.65 gigahertz range from Arecibo since the hydrogen and hydroxyl ranges seemed like good potential sign posts for any alien transmissions, and I had found the hint of a pattern. But I had been unable to do anything with it until I had seen the Farside Station data where I had found anomalies at around 15 GHz that seemed to echo the lower frequency ones. They higher frequency signals had not been picked up by Arecibo since the atmosphere interfered with anything over 10 GHz. But unfortunately the data from Farside had been so watered down and disjointed that they were hard to piece together and coordinate with those from Arecibo.
If it had been mid-semester, everything might have ended there since it was a very weak correlation, but it was summer and I had time on my hands. Too much time in fact, with Ellen gone. Figuring out the meaning of the teasing signals had become a mental challenge to help me keep my mind off the usual summer trips we had always taken. But ironically, in my efforts to hide from memories of Ellen, I had been forced to turn to those same memories to solve the puzzle.
Ellen had been a linguistics professor at Harvard, and in order to keep up with her, I had made a hobby of language puzzles. From that perspective, the anomalies I had noted had started looking more and more like an encrypted message. Deciphering them had gradually grown from a hobby to a near obsession, and I had finally put in for a leave of absence and applied for a SETI research grant to study the data further.
With a little help from friends in the right places, I had obtained both the leave and a modest grant to spend time on Hawking to study the raw data coming in from Farside and deep space probes. It was in analyzing those data and combining them in real-time with the Arecibo signals, that I had finally found the complete Traveler message and eventually decoded it. It had become apparent that the signal had been divided up in three parts. My guess had been that all three parts were meant to be coordinated as a test of our problem-solving skills and to see if we were a space-faring race, since part of the signal had only been detectible to space-based observatories.
My luck in piecing it together must have been frustrating for Lazz. As a SETI buff himself, it would have been equally possible for him to find and decode the signal, had he only been looking in the right frequency ranges. But now I was the one heading for a historic meeting, even if I did want to share it with him.
The speaker linking us with the control-room had been silent. Liza knew very well how Lazz felt, and she probably agreed with me, personally. But I knew her well enough to know that ultimately she would have to make her decision as station commander, not as Lazz’s wife.
“I’m sorry, Lazz, but I can’t spare you,” she finally answered. “Mitch, you’ll just have to make the best of it. Aside from the fact that I would probably be hauled up in front of the U.N. General Assembly and publicly lynched for breaking the guidelines they set, I need Lazz here. What if the main processor goes down again? We won’t get the new unit up from the surface until Friday, and I can’t lose two of my best computer jocks.”
Lazz tried again. “Come on, Liza! Janice knows the system well enough… hell, she’s already been running things solo while I’ve been training Mitch. The new program they developed doubled the throughput.”
“No.” The line went dead.
“Shit!” Lazz turned to me, eerily outlined in a sensory halo as our beams intersected.
I had avoided looking at him too much before because the crossed signals gave me a bit of a headache, but I faced him now and held out my hand.
“Well, Lazz. I guess it’s goodbye, for now.”
“That’s what you think!” An extra burst of reflected signal from his teeth lit up as he smiled. “I don’t care what my dear wife says, I’m not letting you go over there alone and fuck up our reputation—”
“You mean ‘hog all the glory’.”
“Touché.” The teeth flashed again and he chuckled. For a moment he was quiet, and then he started nodding. “Well, when all else fails… persuasion, usually works. I haven’t used this one since I proposed to her, but I think it’s time to pull out the heavy guns again.”
The tone of his voice was enough to start me thinking about running for cover.
I saw him pull out his Braille-pad and his fingers flashed over the tiny seven-button keyboard, the speech feedback set too fast for me to follow. Then he stabbed the ‘send’ chord firmly with a threatening little chuckle. I knew his pocket computer was linked with the station mainframe and I looked around nervously.
Then I discovered the awful thing he had unleashed.
It began innocently enough. From all around us, the gentle music of Chinese temple chimes stroked our ears, but then a deep roar began to unfold itself, spreading with visceral power. It was the beginning of his belch-collection. I had never heard it, though I had heard of it, of course. It was legendary on the space station and I knew Liza despised it, but I was discovering that its amplified and omnipotent presence was beyond my wildest imaginings. What beer had spawned such awesome scope? What combination of spiced foods and beverages? And this was only the first in the collection!
Beginning with an almost sub-audible vibration, it climbed into the audible threshold quickly and then added harmonic frequencies that chilled me. Amazingly enough, the gentle bells remained clear and distinct throughout. But that first blast lasted for hours, it seemed. As it finally faded away, leaving only the innocent chimes, I stared up at the ceiling speaker and shook my head in admiration. Digital recording at its best.