The man shook his hand and looked amused. “You cover music as well as astronomical anomalies?”
“No, sir.” Something about the man compelled honesty. “Actually, I’m tone-deaf. It was a date.”
He laughed. “She must have been worth pursuing.” He stood up. “Well. I’ll get out of your way.”
“Please stay, Norman.” She looked at Dan. “Is that all right?”
He shrugged. “As long as you don’t stand or sit together. Confuses the cameras’ tiny brains.” They would scurry around getting two-shots, long shots, intercuts, reaction shots. Half the footage would be of a scruffy-looking man in gray workclothes, temporarily irrelevant. “I think it would shoot best with you at your desk, Professor. I’ll sit over here.” He indicated the chair that Norman had just vacated.
“I’ll go lurk by the coffee machine. Want some?”
“No thanks. Just came from Burgerman.”
“That’s how you got here so fast,” Dr. Bell said. “I hope it didn’t interrupt your breakfast.”
“Oh, no,” he lied, “just hanging out with the city cops. Trade gossip.” He looked at the big camera and whistled, then spoke slowly: “Establishing shot. Bee Gee two-seventy from behind subject to my left.” The camera drifted behind Bell and then wheeled out in an arc. “That’s for editing back in the studio. I just repeat the questions there and they can paste my face in from any angle. So the cameras don’t have to worry about me now.”
The camera completed its circuit and said “okay” in a monotone. “Begin at the beginning,” Dan said.
“How much do you know?”
“Almost nothing. You got some weird signal from outer space and the night desk thought it was important.”
“It is.” She leaned back. “I got to the office a little after four. The screen was blinking for attention.”
“Can you recreate that?”
“Sure.” She pushed a button on her desk. “Find today, 0405.”
The screen began to blink red, saying ANOMALY RECORDED GRB-1 0355 EST.
Dan whistled and pointed at the screen. The large camera rolled up to it and seemed to concentrate. “Daniel,” it said in a soft woman’s voice, “please come adjust my raster synchronization.”
Dan shook his head. “That’s automatic in the new models.” He got up and peered through the camera and fiddled with a pair of knobs until the picture of the wallscreen settled down.
He returned to his seat and the small camera climbed up onto Bell’s desk and stared at her. She looked at it warily. “Am I supposed to talk to it?”
“No, just talk to me. What does the message mean?”
“GRB-1 is a gamma-ray burst detector. The ‘one’ is optimism; we never got money to launch the second, which would’ve been a backup.
“Anyhow, some sources send out bursts of gamma rays, sometimes for hours, sometimes minutes, usually just seconds. This satellite detects and analyzes the radiation. It has a small telescope, essentially a fast wide-angle lens, that covers the whole sky every two seconds. If it detects a gamma-ray burst, the bigger telescope can be on it in about a second.”
“Does it have any practical applications?”
“One never knows, but I doubt it. Except that if the Sun ever did that, it would fry everyone on the daytime side of the planet. It would be nice to have a few hours’ warning.”
“Do you have a picture of the satellite?”
“Sure.” She pushed the button. “Find GRB hyphen one comma artist’s conception.” A dramatic holo of the satellite appeared, silhouetted against the sun peeking crimson from behind the curve of the Earth. Dan pointed at it and the big camera, which had been tight on Bell, turned around and got a shot of the wallscreen.
“That’s pretty but falsado,” she said. “GRB-1’s up in geosynchronous orbit; the Earth’s just a big ball that gets in the way.”
“So what’s this anomaly? I mean, what does the word mean?”
“It means something unexpected, a mystery. In this case, we recorded the gamma ray burst, but when the computer tried to find out what source it was, there was no object there, in previous records. I mean down to twenty-fifth magnitude, which is about as faint as they get.
“That was the first anomaly, which was interesting. The second was startling. Whenever we get a burst that’s more than a few seconds long, we send out a request to the Japanese gamma-ray observatory on the Moon, for backup data. Their detector’s more powerful. It found the burst but said that our position was a tiny hair off. We checked and no, our position was accurate. What it was, was parallax.”
She anticipated the question. “You hold your finger up at arm’s length, and look at it first with your right eye; then with your left.” She demonstrated, blinking. “The finger appears to change position with respect to things farther away. That’s parallax.
“Stars, let alone galaxies, are too far away for there to be a measurable parallax between the Moon and GRB-1, the right eye and the left. This thing was only about a tenth of a light-year away. It’s not a star.”
“So what is it?”
“That’s the third anomaly, the fantastic one. I went to analyze the spectrum of… I went to analyze the signal. It was a long steady beep for sixty seconds, and then a jumble for sixty seconds, and then another steady beep, and then an identical jumble.” She paused. “Do you know what that means?”
“You tell me,” he said quietly.
“It means the signal isn’t natural. The sixty-second minute is not an interval that occurs in nature.”
“Yet it was coming from somewhere farther than humans have ever been?”
“That’s right. And it’s obviously a signal. I put it through a decryptation, what we call a Drake program. It’s simple frequency modulation, like FM radio. This is the message.” She pushed the button and said, “Previous previous.”
Dan pointed at the screen and the camera obeyed. “They’re coming?”
“Yes, initially at almost the speed of light. At the rate they’re slowing down—fifty gees’ deceleration!—they’ll be here in exactly three months. That’s New Year’s Day.”
He was silent for a moment. “Suppose it’s a hoax. Could it be a fake, a joke?”
“Well, somebody could get to my computer, verdad, and set me up for a practical joke. But they couldn’t get to the Moon. I mean, I just told them where to look, and there it was.”
“So something’s out there.” Dan laughed nervously. “An invasion from outer space.”
“We’d better hope it’s not an invasion. You extrapolate back from the first signal, and when that thing first appeared it was going point-nine-nine-nine… fifteen or sixteen nines… of the speed of light.” She leaned toward the little camera and spoke carefully. “If you took all of the energy that all of the world produces in one year, and put it all into a space drive… we couldn’t make a golf ball go that fast. If it’s an invasion, we’ve had it. Perdido.”
“Dios,” Dan said under his breath. “Use your phone?” He reached past her and picked up the wand; checked his watch while he was punching. “Charlene, listen up. Dan. You have to cut me a fifteen-second teaser on the seven o’clock. Then a three-minute lead at eight, and a five-minute lead at nine. And get… listen, it’s my ass, not yours. And get Harry and Rebecca down here right now for depth and color, for nine.”
He listened. “Just tell Julie to be down in Room Six in fifteen minutes. I’m gonna show him two crystals that’ll blow him into the next county. The next century. We’re gonna scoop the whole fucking world.”