The Coming (2 page)

"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."

He nodded at the phone. "The Second Coming, bambina. The Second Coming." He hung up the wand and pulled a data crystal out of the small camera, and then stood and extracted a similar crystal from the large one.

"Thanks, Professor, you were great. Gotta run. Couple science types be here in a half hour." He started for the door.

"Your cameras?"

"They'll use 'em." He sprinted down the hall, crashed through an emergency exit, and ran down the stairs.

Norman winced at the ugly clanging the emergency door precipitated. A pure tone would do the job. His wife called maintenance and the noise stopped.

He stood up and stretched. "Guess you're stuck here. Bring you back something to eat?"

"Where you going?"

"Greek place, Nick's."

"Hmm. One of those spinach things. Spinach and cheese. No hurry."

"Spanakopita." He bent over slowly to pick up his bicycle helmet. "Don't forget to watch yourself on the news."

She was looking at a screen full of numbers and letters. "I wonder what channel."

Norman tapped the number on the side of the large camera. "Seven would be a good bet."

Downstairs, he unlocked the ancient bike and pedaled
squeak-click-squeak
though campus, taking the long way downtown to avoid traffic. There weren't too many cars at this hour, but drivers were erratic. The ATC didn't kick in until seven.

He checked his watch and pedaled a little faster. He would have to cross University Avenue, and it was best to be off the main roads well before "the bitching hour." Some drivers would go a little crazy, their last few minutes of manual control, trying to make an extra block or two before the ATC system engaged and turned them into law-abiding citizens—or at least turned their cars into law-abiding machinery. Until then, an orange light meant "grit your teeth and step on it."

He got across University without incident, and kept up the rapid pace for the few blocks remaining, just to get some exercise. He was a little winded by the time he locked up outside the Athens, Nick's, and was glad Nick had the airco on inside. It was going to be a bad one today, close to eighty already, with the sun barely over the trees. He could remember when it was never this hot in October in Gainesville.

He selected a honey-soaked pastry and asked for strong Greek coffee and ice water, then put three bucks in the newspaper machine and selected World, Local, and Comics.

He read the comics first, as always, to fortify himself. The world news was predictably bleak. England and Germany and France snapping at each other, the Eastern Republics choosing up sides. Catalonia declaring itself neutral today—the day after its sister Spain aligned with Germany, squeezing France. Europe has to do this every century or so, he supposed.

The coffee and roll came and he asked for a glass of ouzo. Not his normal breakfast drink, but this was no normal morning.

"Nick," he said when the man brought the liquor, "Would you mind turning on the seven o'clock news? Channel Seven; Rory's going to be on."

"Your wife? Sure." He shouted something in Greek and the cube behind the bar turned itself on.

Still five minutes to go. The local station was filling time with its trademark "Girls of Gatorland" nude montage. He watched a pretty young thing display her skills on the parallel bars, and then went back to the paper.

Water riots in Phoenix again. Inner-city Detroit under martial law, the national guard called in after a police station was leveled by a predawn kamikaze truckload of explosives. A man in Los Angeles legally married his dog. In Milwaukee, twins reunited after sixty years immediately start fighting.

The local section had an unlovely, but possibly useful, photo-essay that showed the types of facial mutilations that various local gangs used to tell one another apart. They were more like social clubs nowadays, however fearsome the members looked. Ten years ago there was a lot of blood spilled. Now they just have those strange tournaments, killing each other in virtual-reality hookups, with dozens playing on each side. Why couldn't Europe do that? Too American, he supposed, though the Koreans had actually started it.

He folded up the paper as the news program started. The lead story was Detroit, of course. There was dramatic footage of a water-dumping helicopter that was fired upon and had to drop its load a block away from the fire and retreat. The crowd shots around the ruins of the police station showed little grief; one group of boys was cheering, until they saw that the camera was on them, and scattered.

Rory's discovery hadn't made the lead, but it got more time than Detroit. It wasn't often they had a story that was both interplanetary and local.

There was an interesting déjà vu feeling to watching it, seeing which parts of the interview were chosen, and how they were modified. They didn't actually monkey with Rory's responses, but some of the questions were changed. Predictably, there was nothing about parallax or the noncoincidence of the human minute being part of the signal; nothing about what the distance and speed implied. That would come in a later broadcast. This seven o'clock one just established their scoop.

Nick had brought the ouzo and stood by Norman, watching the broadcast. "Your wife gonna be famous?" he said. "She gonna still talk to you?"

"Oh, she'll talk to me." Norman sipped the ouzo and looked away from the screen, which was featuring a graphic feminine hygiene commercial.

"Guys from outer space," Nick mused. "'Bout time they admitted they was out there."

"Really."

"Sure—been in the papers since I was a kid. Damn air force shot one down a hundred years ago. They got the dead aliens in a freezer."

"Nick. You don't believe that."

"It was in the paper," he said. "Hell, it was on the
cube."
He raised both eyebrows high and bent to polish a table that was already spotless.

"This could be pretty big," Norman said. "Rory didn't think there was any way it could be a hoax. Otherwise, she wouldn't have called the news."

"Well, you don't never know, do you?"

"I guess in about a week we'll find out. You wouldn't care to make a gentleman's bet?"

Nick stared at his reflection in the plastic tabletop and scowled comically. "Where you from, Mr. Bell?"

"Boston."

"Well, I never make bets with people from Boston."

"I was actually born in Washington, D.C."

"You kiddin'? That's even worse."

The news picked up with outer space again. They'd had time to contact the Moon. A confused Japanese astronomer, the one who had verified Rory's signal, was on live, providing more questions than answers: What do you mean, message? Speed of light? Who is this Aurora Bell? Rory hadn't identified herself personally, of course, she was just some code name like UF/GRB-1.