At Last; They’re Here!

The Mullard control building was sedate, almost hypnotic. No noise could be heard except for the constant murmur of static radio signals. The cosmic hums seemed to sooth the technicians during their tedious hours of tuning, recording and analysis. Matt was alone. Sir Vernon chose to spend his time trying to figure out how he was going to justify all this. Trying to be anonymous, Matt strolled through the room without apparent purpose. The technicians were used to this and paid him little notice. Quite frankly, Matt was embarrassed and was searching for a way to introduce the search for navigation signals. He had become rather friendly over the past two weeks with one of the older workers, Ben Comewright. Ben was not only excited about the project, as was everyone on board, but had engaged Matt in many personal conversations concerning their families, their likes and dislikes and related trivialities. Matt chose to broach the subject with Ben. He walked over to Ben’s worktable and sat down in a vacant, straight-backed, metal chair. He hoped he did not look like some Dickens character ready to finagle a friend with a wild scheme, because he felt like he was. “How’s it going Ben?” Matt tried hard to sound casual without a quivering voice. Ben looked up from a pile of computer print-outs, “Oh not bad Matt; we’re still plugging away. Haven’t seen a thing of interest though.” His accent was roguish, almost cockney, revealing his middle class, blue-collar background. Nevertheless, he was a wizard with radio fine-tuning. Matt took a deep breath and leaned toward Ben as though taking him into a secret confidence. “Ben, I want to try some new frequencies. Sir Vernon is giving me a few more days of recordings.” Ben looked quizzical. “Some new frequencies? Going to look for other elements?” He stroked his pointed jaw and tried in vain to straighten out his broad but rounded shoulders. His posture was in a perpetual bend as though designed for working at radio controls. His question would have been misleading to an innocent bystander since they never were looking for the element of hydrogen. They had been searching for a signal broadcasted at the wavelength of hydrogen. Matt did not correct him. He knew what Ben meant. He said in a matter of fact tone, “Yes, some new numbers. I’d like to see if we could find what may be navigation signals.” His embarrassment was betrayed by a crimson flush across his face. There was no need to have worried. Ben did not look at all dubious. Quite the contrary, with a very sanguine smile through his reddish complexion he said loud enough for others nearby to take notice, “Hey, right. That’s a bloody good idea. I kind of thought this broadcast stuff was for the pigs; navigation signals is a popper!” He did not know how contradictory his statement was. The astronomical world would consider finding navigation signals at guessed-at frequencies to be magnitudes less probable than a signal at the hydrogen atom frequency. Nevertheless, Ben’s reaction relieved Matt’s embarrassment. Matt stood up and addressed all present, most of who had gathered around him in reaction to Ben’s outburst. Relieved of trepidation, he thrust out his jaw in a self-assurance jester and unabashedly said, “As I was just saying to Ben, Sir Vernon has authorized us to spend a few more days looking at lower frequencies; what may be navigation signals.” He did not elaborate on how he would specify the actual frequencieshowever, the term “pulled out of my ass” passed before his eyes. He hoped no one in the room was a mind reader. About half way through the second day’s 14 hour viewing period, at a wavelength of 28.9 millimeters and tuned to a frequency of 10.4 Gigahertz, the computer shocked everyone in the facility with its melodic, muffled bell-like electronic alarm. (Matt will always claim he does not know how or why he chose those numbers) What this meant to all present, including Matt, who had near cardiac arrest at the sound, was that the computer detected a distinctive pattern of repeatable signals. In radio astronomy, signals that are repeatable are treated as potential artificial sourcesi.e., from intelligent beings. There are many other possible sources for a repeatable signal, but at this time, at this place, no one was considering them. They would wait for the radio map generation and then do the arduous analysis to reject or confirm. SETI has gone through this procedure hundreds of times, and to date all had been rejected as intelligent sources. * Four days later, after subjecting the recorded signals to every test possible within Mullard’s capabilities, and after collecting the same signal continuously since the first intercept every 12.48 minutes, the Mullard team could not reject it as an intelligent source. On the contrary, as the signal kept arriving, the team was able to eliminate it as a pulsar, quasar, maser or any other potential radio source produced by the nearby Milky Way galaxy and often mistaken for artificial sources. The evidence was mounting, even overwhelming, that it was an artificial intelligent signal! Sir Vernon was amazed, one might say even astonished. He was first and foremost a scientist, a very conservative and rational scientist. On the other hand, having an Anglican background, spirituality, while not ardent, was also a part of his character. It was this side of Sir Vernon that caused him to wonder about Matt’s role in this developing marvel. Did Matt posses some unexplained psychic sense, or was he perhaps anointed in some way to guide what was surely to be a major human experience of unbounded proportions? His rational objectivity kept telling him that there are still many other explanations for the signals. He would await unfolding events for the answer.