Radiomen (11 page)

Jack asked me if I wanted another beer and I said no because I had to leave, soon, to get to work. But he said he thought he’d have one, so he left the room again and returned a few minutes later. When he sat down again, I pointed at the brown folder, which was still sitting on the floor.

“So what’s in the folder?” I asked.

He smiled. “If I tell you, I have to kill you.”

“Nice,” I said sourly.

He laughed, and then tipped back the bottle of beer. After taking a long swallow, he put down the beer, lifted the folder from the floor, and tapped it with his finger. “What’s in there,” he said, “is the real secret of the Wild Blue Yonder.”

“I can’t wait.”

Jack ignored my sarcasm. He tapped the folder again and said, “I’d heard so much about the ghost signals, first from Avi and then from one particular Awareness defector who actually knew Howard Gilmartin, that I decided to see what I could find out about them. Avi tried before me using the Freedom of Information Act. But the material he got didn’t really shed any light on what the ghost signals were. All Avi received were redacted reports and transcripts of conversations in which all sorts of people were speculating about what the signals could be. There was one interesting thing though: during World War II, there were a couple of reports of these kind of signals being registered at radar installations—which does track with Gilmartin’s experience on the ship—and then nothing until Sputnik was launched. After that, they turned up fairly steadily, always associated with satellite telemetry, until they completely stopped.”

“When was that?” I asked.

“In 1972.” Jack gave me a curious look. “Why? Are you thinking there might be some connection to Avi?”

“How could there be? That was a year after Avi died.”

Jack shrugged. “Well, it seemed like anyone wanting to delve any deeper into the ghost signals was going to hit a brick wall—except for the fact that just a couple of years ago, the government expanded the Freedom of Information Act to include sources that had been off-limits before. So I made a request. I asked for information about the ghost signals that had been heard from the time of World War II up until 1972. And this is what I got.”

Jack pulled a thick sheaf of papers from the file and handed them to me. I paged through them but quickly realized that I’d never be able to extract any real meaning from them. Most of the pages were covered with equations of some kind and electrical diagrams. There were a number of memos from various government agencies, including the air force, as well as pages of correspondence, but most of these had whole sections blacked out.

“What does all this mean?” I asked, handing the material back.

Jack took the pages from me but instead of slipping them back into the folder, he held onto them, as if he weren’t yet ready to tuck them away. “It means,” he said, “that I think whatever he, or they, were doing . . .”

I interrupted him right there. “They?” I said. “Who’s
they
?”

“The radioman,” Jack said. “Or maybe radio
men
. The ghost signals are not originating from just one ground source on Earth—they jump around a lot, but there are clearly multiple sources. Maybe your friend is alone here, maybe not.”

“Please stop calling him my friend.”

Jack shrugged. “Well, even if we assume he’s the only one here—at least now—he must have started out trying to somehow use radars to broadcast the signals, but they didn’t work very well. Once the Soviet Union and the United States started putting satellites into orbit, they worked a lot better—until, for some reason, they didn’t anymore.”

“Use them for what?”

“I can only give you my best guess about the answer to that question, so here it is: the satellite telemetry signals are broadcasting to stations on Earth so their movements can be tracked and coordinated. Nobody wants their satellite to bump into anybody else’s, to put things very simply. So everybody on Earth is listening for signals coming in to us. Even the various groups like SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which is listening for possible alien hailing signals—you know,
Hello Earthlings, here we are
—is expecting to hear signals coming toward us, from far away. But the ghost signals are—were—completely different. Whoever was sending them started using satellites, the Soviets’ and ours, as a sort of hi-tech trampoline; they were bouncing their signals off our hardware. And as I told you already, they’re pinging them outward. The signals originate on Earth and are going out into space.”

This sounded very much like Avi’s explanation about how the same TV signals that brought me my Saturday morning cartoons could travel out into space, journeying on through the solar system for unimaginably vast distances—so much so, that I had a hard time taking Jack seriously. Objectively, I understood that he was describing something decidedly strange and seemingly inexplicable—what were the aliens broadcasting, and why?—but it was hard for me to shake the image of a stream of electronic pulses, formed into the cartoon shapes of dancing mice and wise-cracking bunnies, slowly drifting past the nearest planets on their way to the asteroid belt and beyond.

“Of course,” Jack continued, “as most researchers eventually concluded, the real likelihood was that these signals were some sort of artifact of regular, Earth-linked communications systems. Our planet, along with the layers of the atmosphere around us, is blanketed with electronic chatter that’s growing exponentially every minute of every day. Millions of people using billions of devices—from incredibly complex military systems to homemade, hand-cranked radios—are sending and receiving broadcasts of all kinds, all the time. It’s impossible to even begin to estimate the volume of all these transmissions or pin down the kind of anomalies that so much atmospheric noise might cause.”

“So that’s the big reveal?” I asked. “That’s what you find out in the Wild Blue Yonder? There’s a lot of unexplained atmospheric noise around us?”

“No,” Jack said. “Not exactly.” Still holding onto the sheaf of papers, he said, “Everything I just told you adds up to the conclusions that most reasonable people would probably come to after reading all this Freedom of Information material. But that’s not what a top-level Aware learns when he is taken into a locked room and allowed to read Howard’s last story, one that has never been published. In that story, the alien reveals to Howard that the ghost signals are really homing beacons and that he is part of an advance contingent sent here to assess whether the time is right to help humans recover their memory of who their real ancestors were. The homing beacons will help guide other members of the alien race—the descendants of our original alien ancestors—through the vastness of the universe, back to ours.”

“Why do they need the help? Because they lost their interstellar map?”

“You think you’re being funny, but actually, you’re sort of right. Wherever they come from—this universe, or some other—apparently, it’s not so easy to get from
there
to
here
. In the distant past, they used to be able to find their way here by homing in on the life force of the humans who still retained a memory of them. But now—well, now, the only guides they have are the Awares, but there aren’t enough of them. Hence—homing beacons.”

There was something so deliberate about the way he told this story that made me wonder if he might believe any of it, and so I asked him that. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d reacted scornfully, but he didn’t. Not exactly.

“Look,” he said, “I believe that the Blue Awareness is a cult and like any cult, I tend to think they’re a little nutty. Maybe a great deal more organized—even respectable, and certainly a lot larger than most—but nutty, all the same. But then you come along and you, who have absolutely no interest in anything about them, seem to confirm at least one part of their creation story. I think that’s interesting.”

“I don’t.”

“Really? Then why are you asking me all these questions?” I wanted to reply with some snappy answer, but I wasn’t fast enough. Jack quickly started in again. He said, “Some of
my
questions would be answered if I could just understand what was happening on the fire escape. Or at least, what you think was happening. Was your radioman adjusting the signal of a homing beacon? Was he doing something else entirely? And whatever he was doing—what was the reason? Are you really sure you don’t know? Because when you called, I was hoping that if I told you all this and then we talked some more, if you did know something, or remembered some detail . . .”

I rose to my feet and gave Jack Shepherd what I intended to be a poisonous look. I was suddenly beginning to feel the same way I had in Ravenette’s loft: like I was being manipulated to serve someone else’s agenda. I was getting sick of it; I felt like I had been suckered into playing head games that I didn’t understand and absolutely did not like. Until I had called into Jack’s damn radio program, worrying about aliens—real, imagined, or otherwise—was not high on my list of fun things to do and as of this moment, it was going right back down to the bottom of the heap.

“There is nothing. I’ve told you that. Nothing to remember, no details to add. So maybe now the best thing to do would be to just stop bothering me about all this. Okay, Jack? Just leave me alone. You, that crazy Ravenette and all the aliens from here to . . . Vulcan!”

Well, Vulcan might not have been the wittiest thing to come up with, but it did seem to resonate with Jack—though not in exactly the way I would have wanted—because he lifted his right hand, separated his fingers and gave me the Vulcan high sign.

“Live long and prosper,” he said with a grin. He was trying to make amends by being amusing, but I was having none of it.

“Fuck you,” I said. And then I got up and walked out.

Once I was on the street, for the first few moments, I was so hyped up that I couldn’t even remember where I was. Grim buildings leaning down toward me, a broken chain-link fence, the dull clang of a buoy rocking in the salty current of the nearby river; my head finally cleared and my breathing calmed down. Of course. I was in Brooklyn, a million miles away—or so it felt—from where I had to be in an hour and a half: back at the airport, back at my station behind the bar. It was just a job, just the normal thing I did night after night, but right now, it felt like a lifeline. Enough with shadows and mysteries. Maybe, for a brief while, I had been intrigued by the idea that somewhere, somehow, there was something else besides the regular routine of my daily life waiting to be revealed to me. But now, I didn’t know who I was angrier at, myself or Jack—or maybe even Avi—for making it seem possible that there was. It was clear to me that there wasn’t. Was not. Period. End of story.

And that was what I kept telling myself as I tried to find my way back to the train.

~VI~

T
wo trains later plus a ride on the AirTrain monorail to the airport, I finally got to work. I was late, which made the afternoon bartender mad at me since he had to work an additional half hour for which he was going to have to fight to get paid, so the evening started out a little on the tense side. Plus, it must have been take-the-last-flights-out-for–big-business-meetings-in-Europe night, because the bar was packed with guys who didn’t have enough miles or points or clout or whatever to get into the first-class lounges, so were getting drunk at The Endless Weekend before flying off to London or Zurich or wherever else it is that thirty-something-year-olds go to help the masters of the universe keep the rest of us broke and begging for crusts of bread, so to speak. This is the kind of crowd that requires lots of service but leaves small tips, so I was not in the best frame of mind while the Knicks pounded up and down the floor of the Garden on three of the TVs in the bar, a pair of British soccer teams hammered each other on a screen in the corner and a rebroadcast of a Jets game was showing on the big flat screen right above my head. It was noisy, it was frantic, I cut my finger slicing limes (and in violation of all the health and safety rules, just ran it under cold water, did not apply antiseptic or a Band-Aid, and went back to work) and by the end of the night I was worn out and ready to kill the first person who gave me a reason to. Luckily, no one did; the manager showed up on time, checked out the register, and helped me lock up. Then, feeling even more exhausted than I usually was after eight hours on my feet, I stalked out of the bar and headed for the bus.

As I waited, I saw that Orion was getting lower in the sky, a sign that, despite the chilly weather, spring was bound to come and send the great hunter and his star dogs to roam the night on the other side of the globe. Other than that, my mind was a blank, or maybe I was deliberately trying to keep it in that state. I didn’t have the energy to think about anything, not a thing.

I thought I would doze on the bus, but couldn’t. I felt too tired to sleep, too weary to really relax. So instead, I watched the traffic passing by—cars on the highway, planes in the sky; they filled the night with lights. I just absorbed the images and the sounds, and let myself be carried home.

When I finally pushed open the front door of my building, I noticed a small pile of mail with my name on it lying in a corner of the outer lobby. That was our exasperated postman’s solution to the problem of me picking up my mail with even less regularity than he delivered it; once the tiny box couldn’t hold any more of the junk it was usually stuffed with, the postman just dumped the rest on the floor. I would have liked to kick the PennySavers and credit card offers out the front door, but then I’d probably get grief from the super for making a mess, so I picked up the pile on the floor, emptied my mailbox as well, and carried everything upstairs.

After I changed into a tee shirt and sweatpants and poured my usual glass of wine, I started going through the mail. I had been avoiding my mailbox like the plague since I’d gotten that communiqué from Ravenette and tonight the weirdness continued: in with the unwanted magazines, newsletters and other junk was an expensive-looking ivory-colored envelope with my name and address typed on the front. I don’t generally get
anything
addressed to me, personally, on fancy stationery, so once I realized that the return address appeared to be from a law firm I knew, instinctively, this couldn’t be good news.