Friday afternoon, deciding to bull his way through the hideously embarrassing prospect of seeing her again by going straight at the topic he'd cover with her on Monday.
At 3:57 A.M. on Sunday, August 3, 2019, James Connor Quinn pulled off his headset and sat back in his chair, sweating and sucking air, sure now, but hardly able to believe what he alone in all his world knew.
'Jesus Christ,' Jimmy breathed, meeting the future by turning to the ancient past. 'Holy Mother of God.'
He rubbed his eyes and combed his fingers through his tangled, scribbly hair and sat, staring blankly, for a few moments longer. Then he called Anne.
11
ARECIBO, PUERTO RICO:
AUGUST 3, 2019
'You're joking,' Anne whispered. 'Sweet pea, if you have called me at four o'clock in the goddamned morning and this isn't for real—'
'I'm serious.'
'Have you told anyone else yet?'
'No. You're the first. My mother will kill me, but you're who I wanted to tell.' Anne, standing naked in the dark, smiled and sent a mental apology to Mrs. Quinn. She heard Jimmy's urgent voice again. 'Wake George up and get him on the VR net. I'm going to call Emilio and Sofia, too.'
Anne didn't say anything, but Jimmy understood her silence.
'It was the song that did it. I couldn't stop thinking about it and when I looked at the signal, it just reminded me of music. I figured if it was music, I'd recognize it and then I could figure out where it was coming from. So I washed it through a digital sound program. Anne, it's like nothing I've ever heard before.'
'Jimmy, are you certain it's not just some kind of music you're not familiar with—South Ossetian or Norwegian or something? I mean, it's a big world.'
'Anne, I just spent three hours verifying and checking and trying to disprove and it is really, truly, absolutely not local. It's not a bounce, it's not a pirate station, it's not drug ships, it's not military. It is ET and I got a confirm from Goldstone's files, but nobody there has looked at it yet. It's music, Anne, and it's ET and you know what else?'
'Jesus, Jimmy, don't tease! What?'
'They're neighbors. We're picking up an amazingly loud party near Alpha Centauri. They're only about four light years from here. That's practically next door.'
'Holy shit. Wow. Jimmy, shouldn't you tell somebody official?'
'Not yet. Right this minute, it's mine. I want my friends to know first. So for crying out loud, wake George the hell up and get on the net.'
'No, listen. If this is real, then virtual reality isn't good enough. I want real reality. Tell Emilio to come here to the house. We'll swing by to pick up Sofia and then go on up to the dish. We'll be on the road in, say, twenty-five minutes. We should be there by—' She found she couldn't add. Her mind just went blank. God. Music. Four light years away.
'About six o'clock,' Jimmy supplied. 'Okay, I'll be there. And Anne?'
'Yeah, I know, bring food. We'll hit Senor Donut's on the way.'
'No. Well, that, too. But—thanks. That's what I wanted to say. For last night.'
'Hey, if news like this is the thanks I get for giving you a hug, you are entirely welcome, darling boy. We'll see you in a couple of hours. And Jimmy? Congratulations. This is fantastic.'
It was a clear chilly morning, the light still pale, when the Edwardses and their passengers pulled in. Jimmy's little Ford was the only car in the dish parking lot besides the guard's. 'Private tour, Mr. Edwards?' he asked as they signed in.
'No, there's something Jimmy Quinn wanted to show us and we figured it was better to come by when the place isn't busy,' George said. Anne, smiling innocently, handed the guard a couple of donuts on the way by.
Awake all night, Jimmy was bleary-eyed but too strung up on his nerves to notice he was tired. As they squeezed into his little cubicle, he grabbed the donut Anne held out to him and ate it in two bites, setting up the playback while he chewed.
It was vocal, mainly. There was a percussive underlayment and possibly wind instruments as well, but it was hard to tell about that—there was still a lot of noise, although Jimmy had already filtered some out. And it was unquestionably alien. The timbre of the voices, the harmonics were simply different, in some way that Jimmy couldn't describe in words. 'I can display sound signatures that would show the differences between their voices and ours graphically,' he told them, 'the way you can see that a violin sounds different from a trumpet. I don't know how to say it.'
'I know it's not scientific, but you can just tell,' Anne agreed, shrugging. 'It's like you could tell Aretha Franklin's voice from anyone else's, from a single note. It's just
At first, they simply listened to the fragment of music over and over, each time groaning as the signal fell off to static just as the music began to build to something wonderful. Then, after the third hearing, Anne said, 'Okay. What can we tell about them? They sing in groups, and there is a lead singer. So they have a social organization. Can we assume they breathe air because their music can be heard like this?'
'We can assume they have some kind of atmosphere that propagates sound waves,' George said, 'but not necessarily anything we could breathe.'
'So they've got something like lungs and mouths and they can control expelled air, or whatever it is they breathe,' Anne listed.
'And they can hear, or there'd be no point to singing, right?' said Jimmy.
'The language doesn't sound tonal to me,' Emilio said, 'but it's difficult to tell when people are singing. There is a sentence structure. There are consonants and vowels and something in the throat, like glottal stops.' It didn't occur to him to wonder if they had throats. 'Jimmy, may I hear it again, please?'
Jimmy replayed it. Sitting at the edge of the group, almost in the hallway just beyond Jimmy's little space, Sofia watched Sandoz, seeing in action the process she had abstracted while working for the Jesuits in Cleveland. He was already beginning to mouth a little of it, picking up phrases sung by the chorus, trying out phonemes. Without a word, she handed him her notebook and stylus. 'I could learn this, I think,' he said to no one in particular, distracted, half-convinced already. He began making notes. 'Jimmy, may I?' Jimmy rolled his chair out of the way and let Emilio take the console.
'Jim, have you changed the frequency much?' George asked. 'Is this what it really sounds like, or is it more like insects chirping or whales singing in real time?'
'No, as near as I can figure, this is what it sounds like. Of course, it would depend on the density of their atmosphere,' Jimmy told him. He thought for a while. 'Well. They've got radio. That implies vacuum tubes at least, right?'
'No,' George disagreed. 'Vacuum tubes were actually kind of a fluke. You could just as easily go straight to solid state. But they would have to understand electricity.' There was a short pause, everyone chewing on the ideas, the only sound that of the music as Emilio slowed it down and repeated sections, correcting his notes. 'And chemistry, for sure,' George continued. 'They'd have to know something about metals and nonmetals, conductors. Microphones need carbon or some kind of variable resistor. Batteries—zinc and lead.'
'A theory of wave propagation,' Jimmy said. 'Radio implies a lot.'
'Mass communications,' Anne suggested. 'And a segment of the population with the leisure to sit around thinking up wave theories. So: probably a stratified society with economic divisions.'
'Metallurgy,' Jimmy said. 'You wouldn't start with radio, right? You'd work metal for other stuff first. Jewelry, weapons, metal tools.'
'All possible,' George said. He laughed and shook his head, still stunned. 'Well, chalk one up for the Principle of Mediocrity, boys and girls.' Sofia raised her brows in question, so George explained. 'That's the idea that Earth is
