A for Andromeda

One Arrival

Light was soaking out of the sky when they drove up to Bouldershaw Fell. Judy sat beside Professor Reinhart in the back of the staff car as it slid up the road from Bouldershaw town to the open moor; she peered hopefully out of the windows, but they were nearly at the crest of the hill before they could see the radio-telescope.

Suddenly it stood in front of them: three huge pillars curving together at the top to form a triangular arch, dark and stark against the ebbing sky. Hollowed out of the ground between the uprights lay a concrete bowl the size of a sports arena, and above, suspended from the top of the arch, a smaller metal bowl looked downwards and pointed a long antenna at the ground. The size of the whole thing did not strike the eye at first; it simply looked out of proportion to the landscape. Only when the car had drawn up and parked beneath it did Judy begin to realise how big it was. It was quite unlike anything else she had seen—as completely and intensely itself as a piece of sculpture.

Yet, for all its strangeness, there was nothing particularly sinister about the tall, looming structure to warn them of the extraordinary and disastrous future that was to emerge from it.

Out of the car, they stood for a moment with the soft, sweet air filling their heads and lungs, and gazed up at the three huge pylons, at the metal reflector that glistened high above them, and at the pale sky beyond. Around them a few low buildings and smaller arrays of aerials were scattered about on the empty moor-top, enclosed by a wire-link fence. There was no sound but the wind in the pylons and the curlews calling, and they could almost feel the great concrete-and-metal ear beside them straining to listen to the stars.

Then the Professor led the way to the main building—a low stone-faced affair with a half-finished entrance and a newly-laid approach. Men were putting in gateposts and direction notices and painting them: it all looked very new and sharp against the soft, dark hilltop.

“There’s all sorts of subsidiary gubbins,” said the Professor, with a small delicate wave of his hand. “This houses the main control room.”

He was a man in his sixties, small, neat and cosy, like a family doctor.

“It’s quite a baby,” said Judy.

“Baby? It’s the biggest baby I’ve ever given birth to. A ten years’ labour.”

He twinkled at her and his small black shoes pattered up the steps into the control building.

The entrance hall had an unfinished but at the same time familiar look: inevitable pegboard ceiling, inevitable composition floor, plain colour-washed brick walls and fluorescent lighting. There was a wall telephone and a drinking fountain; there were two small doors in the side walls, and there were double doors facing the entrance; and that was about all. A faint hissing noise came from behind the double doors. When the Professor opened them the hissing became louder. It sounded like atmospherics from a radio.

As they went through the double doors a man in a cleaner’s brown coat came out. His eye met Judy’s for a moment, but when she parted her lips he looked away.

“Good-evening, Harries,” said the Professor.

The room they entered was the control room, the centre of the observatory. At the far end an observation window gave a view of the gigantic sculpture outside, and facing the window was a massive metal desk, like an organ console, fitted with panels of buttons, lights and switches. Several young men were working at the desk, referring from time to time to the two computers which stood in tall metal cases on each side of it. One side wall was covered with enlargements of optical-telescope photographs of stars, and the other was two-thirds glass partition behind which more young men could be seen working at equipment in an inner room.

“The opening ceremony will be in here,” said Reinhart.

“Where does the Minister break the champagne bottle, or cut the ribbon, or whatever he does?”

“At the desk. He presses a button on the control desk to start it.”

“It isn’t working yet?”

“Not yet. We’re running acceptance tests.”

Judy stood by the doorway taking it in. She was the sort of good-looking young woman who is more often called handsome than pretty, with a fresh complexion, an alert, intelligent face and a very positive, slightly ungainly, way of standing. She might have been a nurse, or an officer in the Services, or simply the product of a good hockey-playing school. She had rather large hands and deep blue eyes. Under one arm she held a bundle of papers and pamphlets which she pulled out and looked at, as if they might explain what she saw.

“It’s the biggest radio-telescope, well—anywhere.” The Professor smiled happily round the room. “It’s not as big as an interferometer, of course, but you can steer it. You can shift your focus by the small reflector up top, and by that means you can track a source across the sky.”

“I gathered from these,” Judy tapped her papers, “that there are other radio-telescopes operating in the same way.”

“There are. There were in nineteen-sixty, when we started this—and that’s several years ago. But they haven’t our sensitivity.”

“Because this is bigger?”

“Not entirely. Also because we’ve better receiving equipment. That should give us a higher signal-to-noise ratio. It’s all housed in there.”

He pointed a small, delicate finger to the room behind the glass panel.

“You see, all you pick up from most astronomical sources—radio stars for instance—is a very faint electrical signal, and it’s mixed up with all kinds of noise, from the atmosphere, from interstellar gas, from heaven knows what—well, heaven indeed.”

He spoke in a precise, matter-of-fact tenor voice; he might have been a doctor discussing a cold. The sense of achievement, of imagination, was all hidden.

“You can hear sources other people can’t?” asked Judy.

“Hope to. That’s the idea. But don’t ask me how. There’s a team evolved it.” He looked modestly down at his little feet. “Doctors Fleming and Bridger.”

“Bridger?” Judy looked up sharply.

“Fleming’s the real brains. John Fleming.” He called politely across the room. “John!”

One of the young men detached himself from the group at the control desk and wandered towards them.

He said, “Hi!” to the Professor and ignored Judy.

“If you have a moment, John. Dr. Fleming. Miss Adamson.”

The young man glanced at Judy, then called across to the control desk.

“Turn that flaming noise down!”

“What is it?” Judy asked.

The atmospherics reduced themselves to a faint hissing.

The young man shrugged.

“Interstellar hiss, mainly. The universe is full of electrically charged matter. What we pick up is an electrical emission from these charges, which we get as noise.”

“The background music of the universe,” Reinhart added.

“You can keep that, Prof.,” said the young man, with a sort of friendly contempt. “Keep it for Jacko’s press handouts.”

“Jacko’s not coming back.”

Fleming looked faintly surprised, and Judy frowned as if she had mislaid some piece of information.

“Who?” she asked the Professor.

“Jackson, your predecessor.” He turned to Fleming. “Miss Adamson’s our new press officer.”

Fleming regarded her without relish. “Well, they come and go, don’t they? Inheriting Jacko’s spheres?”

“What are they?”

“Dear young lady, you’ll soon find out.”

“I’m showing her the layout for Thursday,” the Professor said. “The official opening. She’ll be looking after the press.”

Fleming had a dark, thoughtful face which was less surly than preoccupied; but he seemed tired and bitter. He grumbled away in a thick Midland accent.

“Oh yes—the Official Opening! All the coloured lights will be working. The stars will sing ‘Rule Britannia’ in heavenly chorus, and I’ll be round at the pub.”

“You’ll be here, John, I hope.” The Professor sounded slightly irritated. “Meanwhile, perhaps you’d show Miss Adamson round.”

“Not if you’re busy,” said Judy in a small, hostile voice.

Fleming looked at her with interest for the first time.

“How much do you know about it?”

“Very little yet.” She tapped her papers. “I’m relying on these.”

Fleming turned wearily to the room and spread an arm wide.

“This, ladies and gentlemen, is the largest and newest radio-telescope in the world—not to say the most expensive. It has a resolution of fifteen to twenty times greater than any existing equipment and is, of course, a miracle of British science. Not to say engineering. The pick-up elements”—he pointed out of the window—“are steerable so as to be capable of tracking the course of a celestial body across the heavens. Now you can tell them everything, can’t you?”

“Thank you,” said Judy icily. She looked at the Professor, but he seemed only a little embarrassed.

“I’m sorry we worried you, John,” he said.

“Don’t mention it. It’s a pleasure. Any time.”

The Professor turned his kindly general-practitioner’s attention to Judy.

“I’ll show you myself.”

“You do want it operating by Thursday, don’t you?” said Fleming. “For His Ministership.”

“Yes, John. It’ll be all right?”

“It’ll look all right. The brass won’t know if it’s working. Nor the news touts.”

“I should like it to be working.”

“Yeh.”

Fleming turned away and walked back to the control desk.

Judy waited for an explosion, or at least some sign of affront, from the Professor, but he only nodded his head as if over a diagnosis.

“You can’t push a boy like John. You may wait months for an idea. Years. It’s worth it if it’s a good one, and it generally is with him.” He looked wistfully at Fleming’s receding back: sloppy, casual, with untidy hair and clothes. “We depend on the young, you know. He’s done all the low-temperature design, he and Bridger. The receivers are based on low-temperature equipment and that’s not my subject. There’s a hand-out on it somewhere.” He nodded vaguely at her bundle of papers. “We’ve run him a bit ragged, I’m afraid.”

He sighed, and took her off on a conducted tour of the building. He showed her the wall photographs of the night sky, telling her the names and identity of the great radio stars, the main sources of the sounds we hear from the universe. “This,” he explained, pointing to the photographs, “is not a star at all, but two whole galaxies colliding; and this, a star exploding.”

“And this?”

“The Great Nebula in Andromeda. M.31 we call it, just to confuse it with the motorway.”

“It’s in the Andromeda constellation?”

“No. It’s way, way out beyond that. It’s a whole galaxy in itself. Nothing’s simple, is it?”

She looked at the white spiral of stars and agreed.

“You get a signal from it?”

“A hiss. Like you heard.”

Near the wall was a large perspex sphere with a small dark ball at its centre and other white ones set around it like the electrons in a physicist’s model of the atom.

“Jacko’s spheres!” The Professor twinkled. “Or Jacko’s folly, they call it. It’s a display of things in orbit near the earth. All these white units represent satellites, ballistic missiles and so on. Ironmongery. That’s the earth, in the middle.”

The Professor waved it daintily aside.

“A gimmick, I think you’d call it. Jacko thought it would interest our government visitors. We have to keep tabs, of course, on what’s happening near the earth, but it’s a waste of a machine like this. Still, the military ask us to, and we don’t get the sort of money we need unless we can tap the defence budget.” He sounded as though he was being naughty and enjoyed it. He made one of his small, manicured gestures to take in the room and the huge thing outside. “Twenty-five millions or more, this has cost.”

“So there’s a military interest?”

“Yes. But it’s my establishment—or rather, the Ministry of Science’s. Not your Ministry’s.”

“I’m on your staff now.”

“Not at my request.” His manner stiffened, as it had not done when Fleming was rude to him; Fleming, after all, was one of his own.

“Does anyone else know why I’m here?” Judy asked him.

“I’ve told no-one.”

He steered her away from the subject and into the other room, where he went carefully over the receiving apparatus and the communications equipment.

“We’re simply a link in a chain of observatories all round the world, though not the weakest link.” He looked around with a kind of pure pleasure at the switchboards and wires and racks of equipment. “I didn’t feel an old man when we started to put all this together, but I do now. You have an idea and you think: ‘That’s what we must do’, and it just seems the next step. Quite a small step, possibly. Then you start: design, research, committees, building, politics. An hour of your life here, a month there. Let’s hope it’ll work. Ah, here’s Whelan! He understands all about this part of it.”

Judy was introduced to a pasty-faced young man with an Australian voice who held on to her hand as though it was something he had lost.

“Haven’t we met before somewhere?”

“I don’t think so.” She stared at him candidly with large blue eyes, but he would not be put off.

“I’m sure of it.”

She wavered and looked around for help. Harries, the cleaner, was standing across the room, and when she looked at him he shook his head very slightly. She turned back to Whelan.

“I’m afraid I don’t remember.”

“Maybe at Woomera....”

The Professor piloted her back into the main control-room.

“What was his name?”

“Whelan.”

She made a note on her pad. The party at the control desk had split up, leaving only one young man who was sitting in the duty engineer’s seat checking the panels. The Professor led her across to him.

“Hallo, Harvey.”

The young man looked up and half rose from his seat.

“Good-evening, Professor Reinhart.” At least he was polite.

Judy looked out of the window to the great piece of gadgetry beyond and the empty moorland and the sky, now growing dark purple.

“You know the principle of the thing?” Harvey asked her. “Any radio emission from the sky strikes the bowl and is reflected to the aerial, and received and recorded on the equipment in there.” He pointed through the glass partition.

Judy did not look for fear of seeing Whelan, but Harvey—keen, dogged and toneless—was soon directing her attention to something else. “This bank of computers works out the azimuth and elevation of whatever source you want to focus on to it and keeps it following. There’s a servo link arrangement....”

Eventually Judy managed to escape to the hall and have a moment alone with Harries.

“Get Whelan moved,” she said.

She had left her suitcase at the hotel in the town and driven on up the hill with very little idea of what to expect. She had visited a good many service establishments and served as security officer in a number of them, from Fylingdales to Christmas Island. Whelan, she knew, had met her on a rocket range in Australia. She had worked with Harries on a tour of duty at Malvern. She did not think of herself as a spy, and the idea of informing on her own colleagues struck her as an unpleasant business; but the Home Office had asked for her, or at least for someone, to be transferred from the Ministry of Defence security section to the Ministry of Science, and an assignment was an assignment. Before, the people she worked with had always known what she was, and she had thought of her duty as protecting them. This time they themselves were suspect and she was to be palmed off on them as a public relations stooge who could nose around and ask questions without putting them on their guard. Reinhart knew, and disliked it. She disliked it herself. But a job was a job and this—she was told—was important.

She could act the part without difficulty: she looked so honest, so forthright, so much a team member. She had only to sit back and listen and learn. It was the people she met who discomforted her; they had their own world and their own values. Who was she to judge them or be party to their judging? When Harries nodded and sauntered away to do what was needed, she despised both him and herself.

The Professor left soon afterwards and handed her over to John Fleming.

“Perhaps you’d drop her at the Lion when you go back to Bouldershaw. She’s staying there.”

They went out on to the steps to see the old man off.

“He is rather sweet,” said Judy.

Fleming grunted. “Tough as old nails.”

He took a hip-flask from his pocket and drank out of it. Then he handed it to her. When she refused he took another swig himself, and she watched him standing in the light of the porch, his head thrown back, his Adam’s apple working up and down as he gulped. There was something desperately keyed-up about him; perhaps, as Reinhart had said, they had run him ragged. But there was something else besides—a feeling of a dynamo permanently charging inside him.

“Play bowls?” He seemed to have forgotten his earlier indifference to her. Perhaps the drink. “There’s an alley down at Bouldershaw. Come and join our rustic sports.”

She hesitated.

“Oh come along now! I’m not going to leave you at the mercy of these mad astronomers.”

“Aren’t you an astronomer?”

“Do you mind! Cryogenics, computers, that’s really my stuff. Not this airy-fairy nonsense.”

They walked across to the small concrete apron where his car was parked. A red beacon light shone on top of the telescope, and in the dark sky behind it stars began to show. Some could be seen through the tall arches of the pylons, as though they had already been netted by man. When they reached the car, Fleming looked back and up.

“I’ve an idea,” he said, and his voice was quieter, quite gentle and no longer aggressive. “I’ve an idea we’ve got to the breakaway stage in the physical sciences.”

He started to unclip the tonneau cover from his car, a small open sports, while she moved round to the other side.

“Let me help you.”

He hardly seemed to notice.

“Some moment, somewhere along the perimeter of our knowledge, we’re going to go—wham!—clean through. Right out into new territory. And it might be here, on this stuff.” He bundled the tonneau cover in behind the seat. “’Philosophy is written in that vast book which stands forever open before our eyes, I mean the universe.’ Who wrote that?”

“Churchill?”

“Churchill!” He laughed. “Galileo! ‘It is written in mathematical language.’ That’s what Galileo said. Any good for a press hand-out?”

She looked at him, uncertain how to take it. He opened the door for her.

“Let’s go.”

The road dropped down to Lancashire on one side and into Yorkshire on the other. On the Yorkshire side it ran down a long valley, where every few miles a tall old brick mill stood over the river, until they came to the town of Bouldershaw. Fleming drove too fast, and grumbled.

“They get on my wick... Flogging Ministers’ Opening!... The old Prof. sweating on the Honours List; the Ministry bunch all needling and nagging. All it is, really, is a piece of lab equipment. Because it’s big and costs the earth, it becomes public property. I don’t blame the old man. He’s caught up in it. He’s stuck his neck out and he’s got to show results.”

“Well, won’t it?”

“I dunno.”

“I thought it was your equipment.”

“Mine and Dennis Bridger’s.”

“Where is Dr. Bridger?”

“Down at the alley. Waiting for us with a lane booked, I hope. And a flask.”

“You’ve got one flask.”

“What good’s one? They’re dry, these places.”

As they swung down the dark winding road, he started telling her about Bridger and himself. Both had been students at Birmingham University, and research fellows at the Cavendish. Fleming was a theorist, Bridger a practical man, a development mathematician and engineer. Bridger was a career scientist; he was set to make the most he could out of his particular line. Fleming was a pure research man who did not give a damn about anything except the facts. But they both despised the academic system into which they grew up, and they stuck together. Reinhart had winkled them out, several years ago, to work on his new telescope. As he was, perhaps, the most distinguished and respected astro-physicist in the western world, and a born leader of teams and picker of talents, they had gone along with him without hesitation, and he had backed and encouraged and generally fathered them throughout the long and tortuous business of development.

It was easy to see, when Fleming talked, the mutual trust that tied him to the older man, behind his surliness. Bridger, on the other hand, was bored and restless. He had done his part. And they had, as Fleming said without modesty or conceit, given the old boy the most fabulous piece of equipment on earth.

He did not ask about Judy, and she kept quiet. He waited in the bar of the Lion while she went to her room. By the time they reached the bowling alley he was pretty much the worse for wear.

The bowling alley was a converted cinema which stood out in a wash of neon and floodlighting against the dark old mill-town. Its clientele seemed to have come from somewhere other than the cobbled streets. They were mostly young. They wore jeans and soda-jerks’ jackets, crew-cuts, and blouses with slogans on them. It was difficult to imagine them at home in the old terraced houses, the grimy Yorkshire valleys. Their native voices were drowned under a flood of music and the rumble and clatter of bowls and skittles on the wooden planking of the lanes. There were half-a-dozen lanes with ten pins at one end of each and, at the other, a rack of bowls, a scoring table, a bench and a quartet of players. When a bowl pitched down and scored a strike, an automatic gate picked up the skittles again and returned the bowl to the rack at the players’ end. Except in the concentrated, athletic moment of bowling, the players seemed uninterested in the game, lounging around and talking and drinking Coca Cola out of bottles. It was more transatlantic than the cinema had been: as though the American way of life had burst out through the screen and possessed the auditorium. But that, Fleming remarked, was just bloody typical of the way things are generally.

They found Bridger, a narrow, pointed man about Fleming’s age, bowling on a lane with a curvy girl in a vermilion blouse and tight, bright yellow drainpipes. Her bosom and hair were swept up as high as they would go, her face was made up like a ballet dancer’s, and she moved like something in a Hollywood chorus; but when she opened her mouth all Yorkshire came out of it. She bowled with a good deal of muscular skill, and came back and leant on Bridger, sucking a finger.

“Ee, I got a bit o’ skin off.”

“This is Grace.” Bridger seemed slightly ashamed of her. He was prematurely lined and nervous, mousily dressed in dull sports clothes like a post office assistant on Saturday morning. He shook hands tentatively with Judy, and when she said “I’ve heard of you,” he gave her a quick, anxious look.

“Miss Adamson,” said Fleming, pouring some whisky into Bridger’s Coke, “Miss Adamson is our new eager-beaver—lady-beaver—P.R.O.”

“What’s your other name, love?” inquired the girl.

“Judy.”

“You haven’t got a bit of sticking-plaster?”

“Oh, ask at the desk!” said Bridger impatiently.

“One of your team?” Judy asked Fleming.

“Local talent. Dennis’s. I’ve no time.”

“Pity,” she said. But he appeared not to hear. Taking another swig from the flask, he addressed himself unsteadily to the bowling. Bridger turned confidentially to her.

“What have you heard about me?”

“Only that you’d been working with Dr. Fleming.”

“It isn’t my cup.” He looked aggrieved; the point of his nose twitched like a rabbit’s. “I could get five times my salary in industry.”

“Is that what you want?”

“As soon as that lot on the hill’s working, I’m away.” He glanced across at Fleming, conspiratorially, then back at her. “Old John will stay, looking for the millennium. And before he’s found anything, he’ll be old. Old and respected. And poor.”

“And possibly happy.”

“John’ll never be happy. He thinks too much.”

“Who drinks too much?” Fleming lurched back to them and marked up his score.

“You do.”

“All right—I drink too much. Brother, you’ve got to have something to hold on to.”

“What’s wrong with the railings?” asked Bridger, twitching his nose.

“Look—” Fleming slumped down on to the bench beside them. “You’re going to walk along those railings, and then you’ll take another pace and they won’t be there. We were talking about Galileo—why? Because he was the Renaissance. He and Copernicus and Leonardo da Vinci. That was when they said ‘Wham!’ and knocked down all the railings and had to stand on their own feet in the middle of a great big open universe.”

He heaved himself up and took another of the heavy bowls from the rack. His voice rose above the din of the music and bowling.

“People have put up new fences, further out. But this is another Renaissance! One day, when nobody’s noticing, when everybody’s talking about politics and football, and money—” he loomed over Bridger, “then suddenly every fence we know is going to get knocked down—wham!—like that!”

He made a great sweep with the bowl and knocked the bottles of Coke off the scoring table.

“Oi! Careful, you great clot!” Bridger leapt to his feet and started picking up the bottles and mopping at the spilt drink with his handkerchief. “I’m sorry, Miss Adamson.”

Fleming threw back his head and laughed.

“Judy—her name is Judy.”

Bridger, down on his knees, rubbed away at the stain on Judy’s skirt.

“I’m afraid it’s gone on you.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Judy was not looking at him. She was gazing up at Fleming, puzzled and entranced. Then the Tannoy went. “Doctor Fleming—telephone call, please.”

Fleming came back after a minute, shaking his head to clear it. He pulled Bridger up from the bench.

“Come on, Dennis boy. We’re wanted.”

Harvey was alone in the control-room, sitting at the desk adjusting the receiver tune. The window in front of him was dark as a black-board, and the room was quiet except for a constant low crackle of sound from the loudspeaker. From outside—nothing, until the noise of Fleming’s car.

Fleming and Bridger came pushing in through the swing doors and stood, blinking, in the light. Fleming focused blearily on Harvey. “What is it?”

“Listen.” Harvey held up a hand, and they stood listening.

In among the crackle and whistles and hiss from the speaker came a faint single note, broken but always continuing.

“Morse code,” said Bridger.

“It’s not in groups.”

They listened again.

“Short and long,” said Bridger. “That’s what it is.”

“Where’s it coming from?” Fleming asked.

“Somewhere in Andromeda. We were sweeping through—”

“How long’s it been going on?”

“About an hour. We’re over the peak now.”

“Can you move the reflector?”

“I expect so.”

“We’re not supposed to,” said Bridger. “We’re not supposed to start tracking tests yet.”

Fleming ignored him.

“Is the servo equipment manned?” he asked.

“Yes, Dr. Fleming.”

“Well, try to track it.”

“No, listen John.” Bridger put an ineffectual hand on Fleming’s sleeve.

“It may be a sputnik or something,” said Harvey.

“Is there anything new up?” Fleming disengaged himself from Bridger.

“Not that we know of.”

“Someone could have put something fresh into orbit—” Bridger started, but Fleming cut him off.

“Dennis—” He tried to think clearly. “Go and get this on to a recorder, will you? There’s a good chap. Get it on a printer too.”

“Hadn’t we better check?”

“Check after.”

Fleming walked carefully out into the hall, bent his face over the drinking fountain and sluiced it with water. When he returned, fresh and shining and remarkably sober, he found Bridger already setting up in the equipment room and Harvey phoning the duty engineer. There was a dip in the lights as the electric motors started. The metal reflector high up outside swung silently and invisibly, its movement compensating for the motion of the earth. The sound from the speaker grew a little louder.

“That the best you can get?”

“It’s not a very strong signal.”

“Hm.” Fleming opened a drawer in the control desk and fished out a catalogue. “Have its galactic co-ordinates shifted at all?”

“Hard to say. I wasn’t tracking. But they couldn’t have shifted very much.”

“So it’s not in orbit?”

“I’d say not.” Harvey bent anxiously over the faders on his desk. “Could it be some ham bouncing morse code off the moon?”

“Doesn’t really sound like morse code, and the moon isn’t up.”

“Or off Mars, or Venus. I hope I haven’t brought you out on a wild goose chase.”

“Andromeda, you said?”

Harvey nodded.

Fleming turned the pages of the catalogue, reading and listening. He became quiet and gentle again as he had been earlier with Judy at the car. He looked like a studious small boy.

“You’re holding it?”

“Yes, Dr. Fleming.”

Fleming walked across to the desk and flicked on the intercom.

“Getting it, Dennis?”

“Yes.” Bridger’s voice came tinnily back. “But it doesn’t make sense.”

“It may by morning. I’m going to try to get some idea of the distance.”

Fleming flicked back the key and crossed, book in hand, to the astronomical charts on the back wall.

They worked for a while with the sounds from space the only noise in the room, Fleming checking the source and Harvey holding it with the great silent telescope outside.

“What do you think?” Harvey asked at last.

“I think it’s coming from a long way out.”

After that they simply worked and listened, and the signal went on and on and on, endlessly.