I can repair the antennas, Theo told himself. I know what to do and how to go about it. The maintenance robots can do most of the outside work, all I’ve got to do is program them and feed them the right materials. Tomorrow I’ll go through the logistics files and find what I need.
But the next morning he found that the monomolecular spray that made up the antennas was not listed in the logistics files. Theo spent the next two days searching through the stores in the ship’s storage bays. No antenna spray.
Spit in my hat, he groused to himself, I’m gonna have to make it up from scratch.
By dinner time of the second day he was thoroughly angry.
“How could Dad let us sail out here without the proper materials to repair the antennas?” he grumbled into his bowl of soup.
“Are you sure—” Angie began.
“I’m sure!” Theo snapped. “The stuff isn’t there. Never was. He let us cruise through the Belt without the material we need to repair the antennas. Our main antennas, for crying out loud!”
Pauline kept her face from showing any emotion. “You’ll have to produce the antenna spray from the materials we have on board, then, Theo. That’s what your father would do, I suppose.”
He glared at her. “No. Dad would just wave a magic wand and the antennas would fix themselves.”
“Theo.”
“Or more likely the antennas wouldn’t dare get damaged long’s Dad’s in charge.”
His mother drew in a long breath. Then she said, “Theo, the antennas did get damaged while your father was on board. Now it’s up to you to repair them.”
He stared down into his unfinished soup. “Yeah. It’s up to me.”
COLUMBUS, OHIO.
COSETI HEADQUARTERS
Even after more than three quarters of a century, the headquarters of the Columbus Optical Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence was hardly imposing. It consisted of a lovingly preserved but unpretentious wooden frame house, a much newer brick two-story building for offices and workshops, and the Kingsley Observatory, which housed beneath its metal dome a sturdy two-meter Schmidt reflector telescope.
The homes adjacent to COSETI headquarters had long been demolished after being inundated time and again by the Scioto River, which had overflowed much of Columbus in the greenhouse floods. Now the headquarters grounds were surrounded by a low earthen levee, almost like the long mysterious mounds that the original Native Americans had built in the region a thousand years earlier.
Jillian Hatcher was bubbling with excitement. She bent over the desk of the observatory’s director, a small, slim blonde woman filled with the energy and exhilaration of discovery.
“It’s real!” she shouted, tapping the computer screen on her boss’s desk. “I found it! I found it!”
She practically danced around the small, cluttered office. Dwight Franklin smiled at her. Although he contained his excitement as best as he could, he too felt a thrill shuddering along his spine. “After all these years,” he murmured.
Franklin had a square, chunky build. His thinning hair was combed straight back from his high forehead. Sitting behind his desk in his shirtsleeves and suspenders, he looked more like a clerk or an accountant than a world-renowned astronomer.
“The pulses are regular!” Jillian said, dancing back to his desk. “It’s a message! A message from an extraterrestrial civilization!”
“Looks intriguing, I’ve got to admit,” said Franklin. “Where in the sky—”
“The region of Sagittarius!” she crowed. “The heart of the Milky Way!”
“And it’s fixed in its position? It’s not a satellite or a spacecraft?”
Jillian’s beaming face faded a little. “I haven’t tracked it yet.”
Franklin got up from his creaking desk chair. “Let’s see if we can get a firm fix on it.”
She sank into silence and followed him out into the chill November night. Clouds were building up along the western horizon but most of the sky was clear as crystal. Orion and the Bull sparkled above them. Jillian picked out the Pleiades cluster and bright Aldebaran.
The observatory was freezing cold with the dome open but they walked past the silent framework of the Schmidt telescope and into the tiny control room. It was heated, and Jillian was grateful for that.
Half an hour later her excitement had evaporated like a shallow pan of water over a hot fire.
Franklin looked up from the computer screen, a fatherly look of sympathy on his face.
“It’s a spacecraft, I’m afraid.”
“Are you sure?” Jillian asked, desperate. “Positive?”
He gestured toward the display. “See for yourself. It’s out in the Asteroid Belt, and it’s definitely moving.”
“It’s not a star.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Not a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence.”
“No.”
Jillian felt like crying. But then a new thought popped into her head. “So why is a spacecraft out in the Belt sending pulsed laser messages toward Earth? What’s he trying to say?”
ORE SHIP
THE WORKSHOP
The workshop smelled of machine oil and dust. The overhead lamps bathed the big chamber in glareless, shadowless light. Theo sat at a long workbench in one corner where shelves of chemical compounds were stacked high on both sides of him. He was bent over an ordinary optical microscope, feeling frustrated and cranky, when his sister came through the open hatch that led back to the family’s living quarters.
He didn’t hear her enter, nor the soft footfalls of her slippered feet as she approached his workbench. He was studying the jiggling Brownian motion of the metallic chips that he had mixed into a sample of liquid plastic. Although the instructions in the maintenance videos had been quite specific, Theo found that the supplies his father had stored were far short of what he needed to repair the ship’s antennas. He was trying to make do with what was available in the storage bays. And it wasn’t going well.
“Thee?” Angie called timidly.
Her voice startled him. He jerked up straight on the stool he was sitting on.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Angie said.
“I’m not scared,” he snapped. “You just surprised me, that’s all.”
“You didn’t come in for lunch,” his sister said. “And now it’s almost dinner time.”
“Okay. Okay. Tell Mom I’ll be there.” But he turned back to the microscope.
“How’s it going?” Angie asked.
“Lousy.”
“Really?”
He looked up at her. “Really. Lousy. I don’t have the electrolyte I need. And the polymer filler is so old and goddamn gooey I don’t think it’ll be workable.”
“Theo, I really—”
“Go tell Mom about the language.”
“It’s not that.” Angie took a breath, then went on, “Is it really going to take eight years for us to get back to Ceres?”
He heard the stress in her voice. “Unless I can figure out a way to shorten it.”
