Ice Station

Before that, he had made a name for himself doing features for the respected investigative-reporting journal Mother Jones.

Cameron had fitted in well at Mother Jones. The journal has one all-encompassing goal: to expose misleading government reports. Cover-ups. And to a large extent, it had been successful in achieving this goal. Pete Cameron loved it, thrived on it. In his last year at Mother Jones, he had won an award for an article he had written on the loss of five nuclear warheads from a crashed B-2 stealth bomber. The bomber had crashed into the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast of Brazil and the U.S. Government had issued a press release saying that all five warheads had been recovered, safely and intact. Cameron had investigated the story, had queried the methods used to find the missing nukes.

The truth soon emerged. The rescue mission had not been about the recovery of the warheads at all. It had been about recovering all evidence of the bomber. The nuclear warheads had been a secondary priority, and they had never been found.

It was that article and the award ftiat followed it that had brought Cameron to the attention of the Washington Post. They offered him a job, and he took it with both hands.

Cameron was thirty years old and tall, really tall?six-feet-five. He had messy sandy-brown hair and wireframe glasses. His car looked like a bomb had hit it?empty Coke cans were strewn about the floor, intermingled with crumpled cheeseburger wrappers; pads and pens and scraps of paper stuck out from every compartment. A pad of Post-its rested in the ashtray. Those that had been used were stuck to the dashboard.

Cameron drove through the desert.

His cellular rang. It was his wife, Alison.

Pete and Alison Cameron were something of celebrities among the Washington press community, the famous?or infamous?husband-and-wife team of the Washington Post. When Pete Cameron had arrived at the Post from Mother Jones three years ago, he had been assigned to work with a young reporter named Alison Greenberg. The chemistry between them had ignited immediately. It was electric. In one week, they were in bed together. In twelve months, they were married.

'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,' he 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 extraterrestrial transmissions, to 'cross beams' with a stray spr satellite and pick up a few garbled words from a restricted military transmission.

Those pickups were disparagingly labeled '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-story 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, he 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, deadpan.

'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 OK 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 Somerville hit the switch. The reels began to rotate.

At first Cameron heard nothing, then static. He looked expectantly at Emmett the Geek.

'It's coming,' Somerville said.

There was a wash of some more static and then, suddenly, voices.

'?copy, one-three-four-six-two-five? '

'?contact lost due to ionospheric disturbance?'

'-?forward team?'

'?Scarecrow? '

'?minus sixty-six point five? '

'?solar flare disrupting radio?'

'?one-fifteen, twenty minutes, twelve seconds east?'

'?how,' static, 'get there so?'

'?secondary team en route?'

Pete Cameron slowly shut his eyes. It was another bum steer. Just more indecipherable military gobbledygook.

The transmission ended and he turned and saw that Somerville was watching him eagerly. Clearly, the SETI technician wanted something to come of his discovery. He was a nobody. Worse, a nobody out in the middle of nowhere. A guy who probably just wanted to see his name in the Washington Post in anything other than an obituary. Cameron felt sorry for him. He sighed.

'Could you play it again for me,' he said, reluctantly pulling out his notepad.

Somerville practically leaped for the REWIND button.

The tape played again and Cameron dutifully took notes.