enter a ballroom.
She put her head in her hands, defeated. 'Barbecue. Hush puppies. Collard greens, red beans and watermelon. With Carta Blanca. I can't seem to help myself,' she said in tones of wonderment. 'I have this compulsion to cook for strangers.'
'Well, ma'am,' said Emilio Sandoz with a Texas twang, 'they don't come a whole hell of a lot stranger'n D. W. Yarbrough.'
She laughed, reached behind her to the bookcase, and pitched a hardcover novel at him. He caught it with one hand and flipped it back at her. They spoke no more about the mission, but a truce had been reached.
'Dr. Quinn, Elaine Stefansky says the ET transmission is a hoax. Do you have a comment on that?'
Jimmy was no longer startled to find reporters waiting outside his apartment at eight in the morning and no longer amused that they routinely promoted him to doctor. He pushed past the crowd and made his way to the Ford, Murmuring 'No comment,' Jimmy got into the car, the crowd closing around the vehicle, shouting questions, aiming AV pickups at him. Jimmy let the window down. 'Look, I don't want to run over anybody's foot here. Could you back off a little? I have to get to work.'
'Why haven't there been any other transmissions?' someone called out.
'Is it that they're not sending or we're not listening?' asked another.
'Oh, we're listening,' Jimmy assured them. With the entire scientific community and a goodly portion of the world's population looking over his shoulder, Jimmy Quinn had coordinated a concentrated effort by radio astronomers to listen for additional transmissions. There weren't any. 'We're even sending, but it will take nearly nine years, minimum, before we find out if they notice us yelling and waving our arms,' he said, starting to raise the window. 'Listen, I gotta go. Really.'
'Dr. Quinn, have you heard the Mongolian Humi singers? Stefansky says their music may have been altered and planted in the SETI file. Is that true?' 'What about the Sufis, Dr. Quinn?'
Skeptics had begun to flood the nets with alternate explanations for the music, experimenting with obscure folk traditions, running the music backward or playing with the frequency, to show how alien human music could sound, especially when modified electronically.
'Well, sure, all that stuff sounds strange.' Jimmy still found it hard to be rude enough to drive away abruptly, but he was learning. 'But none of it sounds like what we picked up. And I'm not a doctor, okay?' Apologizing, he eased the car out of the crowd and drove to the Arecibo dish, where another mob was waiting.
The media eventually went on to other things. Radio telescopes around the world returned one by one to projects that had been under way before August 3rd. But in Rome, coded transmissions continued to move along the clear-cut Jesuit chain of command, from Father General to Provincial to Rector to individual priest given an assignment. There were practical decisions to be made, many scientific teams to organize.
Tomas da Silva, thirty-first General of the Society of Jesus, remained convinced of the authenticity of the signal. The theological rationale for this mission had been worked out decades before there was any evidence of other sentient species in the universe: mere considerations of scale suggested that human beings were not the sole purpose of creation. So. Now there was proof. God had other children. And when it was time for Tomas da Silva to make a decision about acting on this knowledge, he quoted the bald and artless words of Emilio Sandoz, to whom he had spoken on the evening of the discovery. 'There is simply no alternative. We have to know them.'
His private secretary, Peter Lynam, questioned this on August 30, 2019, but Father General da Silva smiled and dismissed the troubling slenderness of the reed that supported all their deliberate and complex plans to contact the Singers. 'Have you noticed, Peter, that all the music that sounds most similar to the extraterrestrial music is sacred in nature?' the Father General asked. He was a man of great spirituality and almost no business sense. 'Sufic, Tantric, Humi. I find that very intriguing.'
Peter Lynam did not argue but it was clear that he thought the Father General was chasing wild geese. Lynam was, in fact, losing his nerve about the whole expensive business.
Seeing his secretary's barely concealed misgivings, Tomas da Silva laughed and, raising a didactic finger, declared,
Yes, well, Lynam mused silently, perfect humility might require that one be 'a fool for Christ,' but that does not rule out the possibility of being a plain fool.
Four hours later, to Peter Lynam's astonished chagrin and Tomas da Silva's pure delight, a second transmission was detected.
Despite the recent decline in interest, there were several radio telescopes set to receive the signal when it came. The word «hoax» was permanently retired from discussion of the songs. And around the world, those few who knew the extent of the plans for a Jesuit mission to the source of the music were greatly relieved, and began to be very excited indeed.
In the end, it was not George or Emilio who convinced Anne Edwards to sign on to the plan. It was a bus accident.
A trucker going east on the coast road swerved briefly onto the shoulder to avoid a chunk of rock in the road but then overcooked his return to the pavement. For a few moments, the truck went into the oncoming lane and sheared the side off a westbound bus that had just rounded the curve. The truck driver was killed. Among the bus passengers, there were twelve DOA, fifty-three others more or less badly hurt, and quite a few hysterical. By the time Anne took the call and got to the hospital, its lobby was filled with distraught relatives, and lawyers.
She helped first with triage and then moved to a trauma theater, part of the team trying to save a woman in her sixties with extensive head injuries. Anne had talked to the husband in the lobby. They were tourists from Michigan. 'I gave her the window seat, so she could see. I was sitting right next to her.' He kept putting his hand to the side of his face, where his wife's head had been hurt. 'This trip was my idea. She wanted to go to Phoenix to see the grandkids. No, I said, let's do something different. We always go to Phoenix.'
Pressed, Anne had murmured something about doing their best for his wife and moved on to the next task.
At dawn, the crisis was over and the patients who had passed through Emergency were distributed to their waiting relatives, to the wards, to the ICU, to the morgue. By chance, Anne glanced into an open door on her way out of the hospital and saw the man from Michigan seated at the foot of his wife's bed, his face striped and stippled with glowing readouts from the machinery surrounding them. Anne wanted to say something comforting, but the punch-drunk reaction to hours on her feet was beginning and the only thing that came to mind was, 'Next time, go to Phoenix,' which was clearly inappropriate. Then, oddly, the final scene of
When she got home, George was awake and dressed and offered her coffee, but she decided to clean up and catch a few hours of sleep. Standing in the shower, soaping herself, she glanced down at her own nakedness and a vision of the woman with the head trauma came back to her. The woman had been in good shape; her body might go on for decades, but she'd never know the grandkids were all grown up. One minute, she was in the State of Puerto Rico and the next minute, she was in the State of Persistent Vegetables. Jesus, Anne thought, shuddering.
She rinsed off and stepped out of the shower. Towel wrapped around her wet hair and terry robe wrapped around her durable dancer's body, she padded into the dining room and sat across the table from George. 'Okay,' she said. 'I'm in.'
It took him a few moments to realize what she was agreeing to.
'What the hell,' Anne said, seeing that he understood. 'It's gotta be better than not quite dying in a bus wreck on vacation.'
On September 13, Jean-Claude Jaubert received a message asking for an AV appointment to discuss a buyout of the remaining time on Sofia Mendes's contract. The individual making the request gave no name and, seeing no referral, Jaubert denied video access but agreed to open an electronic meeting, which he would encrypt and route through several networks. Jaubert was not a criminal but his was a business subject to jealousies, hard feelings, tedious disputes; one could not be too careful.
