Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

The basis of any conversation is a shared interest. Things may be a bit slow getting started if you don't know what that interest is...

In the movies, you were slumped at your computer console, fast asleep, surrounded by empty Pepsi cans and candy wrappers, when the system pinged. You woke on a tide of adrenaline, flinging candy wrappers and crumpled cans to the lab floor and, after a moment of disorientation, realized WHAT THAT SOUND MEANT.

In reality, Dr. Santiago Rodriguez was standing in the middle of the lab stuffing his face with nachos when the Signal Detection System spoke—figuratively speaking. What the interface actually did was fire an alarm that played the five-note sequence from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, at Dr. Mukerjee’s whimsy.

When he’d first come to Project Quetzalcoatl, Santiago had jumped out of his skin every time the system pinged. Now, three years and many false alarms later, he didn’t even twitch. Now, he stood chewing like a contented cow, contemplating a response to the summons. Most likely it meant another bogey or that Kev and Roz would have to run diagnostics, which would mean pulling the Spectrum Analyzer and Signal Detection Subsystem offline for a day or two.

He was strolling over to the SDS console when Gita Mukerjee poked her head in the door. “Snag a tire, Sandy?” she asked, but her eyes were hopeful.

Santiago laughed, set aside the nachos, and dusted his hands off on his jeans. “Heck, no, Gita. I got me a live one this time.” He dropped into his chair and swiveled to the display.

“Any of those nachos left?”

“Uh, yeah... Kitchen.” His mind was already occupied with the data. He got a raw read on the left, a waterfall plot of the data on the right. He was still studying the waterfall plot of the side band when Gita returned from the kitchen with a small plate of nachos.

“What have we got?” she asked.

“Not sure. Come look at this.” He felt a peculiar wriggling in his stomach. Nachos were no longer of any interest. He was seeing pulses in the microwave window—pulses that were clearly patterned. They played in series, paused, then picked up again. There was very little drift. But the carrier wave was in the 1500 MHz range and looked familiar. In fact, Santiago could put his hands on any number of archived log entries that had recorded the same signal.

It didn’t look like a glitch. Those were generally more capricious. And the few hackers who’d tried to get bogeys into the system had been unable to get past the first Follow-Up Detection Device or couldn’t resist tapping out “ET phone home” in Morse code or something equally precious.

Santiago looked up at Gita. “What do you think, Dr. Mukerjee?”

“Well, Dr. Rodriguez, I think we need to call a powwow. This looks like a job for the FUDDs.”

oOo

The small conference room was dim and hushed. The handful of scientists sat, expectant, their eyes on the screen at the front of the room where Santiago Rodriguez stood next to the podium that held his laptop.

“The data signal is in the 2GHz range,” Santiago told the gathering. “It’s regular and it repeats in cycles. It seems to be coming from the direction of the constellation Taurus.” He hesitated, allowing himself a bit of wonder at the words he would say next. “At a distance of 100 AU.”

He watched the others’ faces as they digested the information; saw that Gita Mukerjee, seated at the edge of the group, was doing the same.

Their Program Director, Dr. Kurt Costigyan, studied the screen intently, eyes roving over and over the figures there.

“That’s outside the heliosphere,” said one of the Techs, a lanky redhead named Kevin.

Santiago tapped the touch pad on the laptop and the projection on the screen beside him changed to a graphic representation of the signal’s source. He tapped a second time and a waterfall plot from the spectrum analysis opened on the right side of the screen.

“Oh, wow,” said Kevin.

“Here’s the carrier signal...” Santiago switched the display again to show a second waterfall plot.

“I’ll be damned.” Kurt Costigyan sat back in the plastic conference chair. He was a big man; the chair squeaked loudly in protest. “That’s Pioneer 10.”

Santiago didn’t realize he’d leaned so heavily against the podium until it scraped away from him across the floor. He straightened. “That’s what we thought, but...” He glanced over at Gita Mukerjee. “We don’t see how. She’s so far out.”

“And she’s so dead,” said Kevin. “Those old power cells couldn’t possibly send from that distance. Even if she was turned in the right direction.”

“Couldn’t possibly?” asked Gita, gesturing at the screen.

“Okay, shouldn’t be able to.”

Kurt looked up at Santiago. “I didn’t know you were scheduled to ping Pioneer.”

“We weren’t.”

“Then why-?“

Santiago licked his lips. “We didn’t ping her—if this really is her—she pinged us.”

“With this...pattern?”

Santiago nodded, then clicked up another screen. This one came with a shower of noise that sounded like a Flamenco dance played at warp-speed. The graphical display showed the pulses as dashes and dots of white on black. The sequence was composed of multiple series of long and short pulses divided by mere seconds of silence.

“Oh, please tell me that’s not Morse code,” said Kurt.

“Not Morse code,” Santiago assured him. “If you listen real carefully, you might be able to catch the pattern, but I’m glad we’re not relying on our ears to decipher this. The spectrum analyzer pulled it apart pretty efficiently, and came up with this.” A key press brought up a window atop the display of dashes and dots. This one showed a series of eight numbers:

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 103.6, 121.9, 99.1

Kurt’s eyes flickered between the exposed portion of the graphic and the numbers. “Okay, so it’s 18 long pulses and 9 short?”

“’Long’ being purely arbitrary,” said Gita. “Those pulses can’t be more than...”

“A quarter-second,” said Santiago. “Then there’s a half-second pause before the next set starts: 27 long; 44 short, and so on. Then, there’s a three second pause after the last repeat of 27.44. Then there’s about a nine second pause after the last number and the whole sequence starts up again with 18.9. It repeats twice per minute, roughly. It’s sending steadily—hasn’t stopped since we picked it up.”

“Without variation?”

“Without variation.”

“God Almighty,” said Roz Klein. A software technician, she sat beside Kevin, elbows on her knees, eyes glued to the screen.

“Probably not,” said Kevin.

Roz reached out and punched his arm without taking her eyes from the screen.

“Ow! Look, that’s a complex signal. Do you think it could possibly be latent? Some piece of programming that’s just started regurgitating old messages?”

Gita Mukerjee smiled. “You mean Pioneer is dreaming?”

Kevin chuckled. “You’re not going to get all mystical are you, Dr. Mukerjee?”

Gita ignored him. “I’d say our next step would be to set this contact up for follow up and check Pioneer’s logs to see if a similar pattern occurred during a previous transmission.”

Kurt nodded. “What FUDDs do you want to use?”

“Lick and Parkes,” said Gita. “Jodrell Bank is the middle of an equipment upgrade.”

“Consider it done.” Santiago shut off his laptop, sending the screen into darkness. The roomful of scientists gave up and audible sigh.

“In the meantime,” said Kurt, “let’s design and prep a return signal.” He paused, took a deep breath. “And call NASA.”

oOo

“Been awhile.” Santiago’s Aussie counterpart at Parkes Observatory sounded preternaturally perky. “ET not biting much these days?”

“ET’s not biting at all,” said Santiago.

“Then what’s up?”

“We think we’ve gotten a message from an old friend; we need you to verify. We’ve got a carrier wave in the 1500 MHz range and pulses that fall inside the microwave window. Distance approximately 100AU in the direction of Taurus.”

“Pioneer? You’re kidding.”

Santiago chuckled. “Well, if I am, you’ll be the first to know.”

He called Lick Observatory in Santa Cruz, California next, receiving a similar reception. As he downloaded the contact information, he was amused to find that his palms were sweating. And why not? Pioneer 10 was supposed to be dead, her batteries and fuel cells long exhausted, her antenna eternally locked in whatever direction she happened to have tumbled.

She might have been struck by something that coincidentally aimed her in the right direction, but no amount of coincidence could energize her defunct fuel cells or grant them the power to transmit a coherent sequence of numbers back to Earth.

And they were still transmitting, he discovered upon returning to the lab. He was surprised, too, not by the fact that the sequence of numbers was still repeating, but that Gita had held the huge main radio array trained on that target all afternoon.

“Dr. Mukerjee, this is highly irregular,” he teased. “You’re neglecting a goodly portion of the heavens.”

Gita glanced up from the notepad she was scribbling on and said, “Yeah, well, this is the only portion of the heavens that’s interested in conversing at the moment.”

Santiago crossed the room and slid into a chair at the console next to her, noticing that the pad was covered with tight clumps of numbers. “Composing a reply?”

“No, actually, I was trying to make something out of these numbers.” She grinned ruefully, tucking a strand of ebony hair behind one ear. “For all the good it’s doing. There’s clearly a pattern, I just don’t get it.”

Santiago looked at the top row of figures. “Divisible by anything constant?”

“This figure that repeats is divisible by 13.72. Ring any bells?”

Santiago smiled. “No.”

Gita dropped her pen onto the pad. “I like your idea better. What should we send?”

“Uh, well...I’d say we should probably send one of her old command sequences. See if we can’t get her to wiggle her ears at us.”

“Makes sense. Or we could send a one to ten count, then count down from ten to one.”

He stared at her for a moment. “Why would we send that? It wouldn’t mean anything to Pioneer.”

She dropped her eyes to the note pad. “I suppose not.”

“But you’re just a cock-eyed optimist.”

She didn’t answer, but picked up her pen, once more, tapped at the sequence of numbers she’d written across the top of the page. “Spatial coordinates? A location?”

“It’s not longitude and latitude. At least not by any system I know.”

She shook her head. “I guess we should just send a command sequence. Let’s ask her to ping us.”

They did just that, and roughly twenty-seven hours later, there was a pause in her broadcast. But then, instead of giving the programmed response to the command sequence, she simply began sending her original sequence of numbers again. Shortly thereafter, both follow-up detection locations called to verify the ‘hit,’ and confirmed location and range. The contact could only be Pioneer 10.

Kurt Costigyan sat in silence for a moment after Santiago delivered the news, then grinned and said, “Cool. I’m going to call a press conference. Contact NASA and let them know it’s official—the prodigal has phoned home.”

oOo

NASA was delighted; the press, full of questions, mostly unanswerable: Why was Pioneer signaling now, after such a long silence? What had prompted it? What did the signals mean? Why didn’t she respond to their command sequences?

That at least, Kurt thought, was fairly easy to explain. “Chances are,” he told the flock of science reporters, “the receiver is damaged.”

“Does that mean you won’t try contacting her any more?”

“Not at all. We’ll certainly keep trying. It’s also possible that her signal processor is malfunctioning. The sequence we sent may not raise her, but another one might.”

While bits of their press conference played in living rooms across the US and Canada, Team Quetzalcoatl pondered their next message to Pioneer 10. It was Kurt Costigyan who came up with the winning entry.

“Why don’t we echo the sequence she’s sending back at her?”

“Doesn’t it make more sense to send a standard message?” Santiago argued.

The project liaison, Dr. Peter Grace, who had arrived that morning from NASA, was quick to agree. “It makes a lot more sense. Sending a message she won’t even recognize is just a waste of project time and money.”

“We’ve already sent a standard command sequence and were roundly ignored,” said Kurt. “I’d like to try something different.”

“Why not compromise?” suggested Gita. She sat so far forward in her chair, Santiago was afraid she was going to fall out of it. “Send a standard sequence followed by the echo. Or vice versa.”

“Look,” said Grace, “Pioneer is still a NASA spacecraft. You guys drew the job of monitoring her, but I think in this department, NASA should call the shots. Send a command to run a diagnostic and report status.”

oOo

“It’s our processor time, dammit! If we want to send a recipe for Masoor Dal we should be able to send it.”

Kurt let out a crack of laughter. “Good Lord, Gita! Save some energy for the House Budget Committee.”

“Yeah,” said Kev, eavesdropping from where he huddled in a tangle of wires behind one of the equipment racks, replacing a bad cable. “Besides, if you sent Masoor Dal to ET, you’d start an interstellar war. They’d think it was a biological weapon.”

“Just because you can’t handle Indian food-“ Gita began, but Kevin popped out from under the console waving the faulty cable.

"You're ready to rock, boss," he told Santiago.

Santiago glanced at Kurt. “What are we sending?”

Kurt shrugged. “Standard command sequence requesting a diagnostic and status. If that doesn’t work, we’ll take it from there.”

“Meaning we’ll send the echo?” asked Gita.

“Meaning we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

They sent the request for status exactly as stipulated. During the wait for Pioneer’s response, they fielded several emails from their loyal Quetzalcoatl devotees offering all manner of explanations for the message Pioneer had sent. The most interesting ones encouraged them to work the numbers out as dimensions. But while it was true the repeated figure could form a square 27.44 inches, feet, meters or whatever on a side, the other figures seemed to bear no relation to each other.

The window of probability exhausted itself on a Sunday afternoon. Pioneer stopped transmitting for a period of five minutes, suggesting that she had received the command sequence and was processing it. Then she began transmitting again—the same eight numbers in the same order.

At that point, Drs. Rodriguez and Mukerjee, finding themselves alone with a titanic radio telescope and 75 gigaflops of computational horsepower, decided to queue a message of their own to Pioneer 10 so that if, by some chance it were approved, they’d be ready to send it.

Santiago was keying in the message when their Program Director strolled into the lab. Gita jumped guiltily and straightened from where she had been peering over her colleague’s shoulder.

“My, but you two look like a couple of cats caught sizing up the canary,” observed Kurt. “What’s up?”

The two exchanged glances, then Santiago said, “We just wanted to be ready in case Dr. Grace let us send another sequence.”

“Dr. Grace will not be back until Tuesday. He had a pressing matter to attend to at Kennedy Space Center.”

Gita’s face fell. “You mean we have to wait until Tuesday to try again? Kurt, that’s a waste of time! We should send now.”

Kurt’s eyebrows rose in an exaggerated arc. “Who said we had to wait? As I recall, the transmission schedule is the Program Director’s purview. I assume you’ve queued the echo?”

Santiago nodded.

“Well, then why don’t you just ask the Program Director if you can send it?”

Drs. Rodriguez and Mukerjee exchanged glances, and Dr. Rodriguez asked. “Dr. Costigyan, is it your opinion that we should echo the Pioneer’s last message?”

“Make it so.”

Santiago hit ‘send,’ confirmed, then sat back in his chair. “Well, there it goes. Now we wait.”

oOo

“You did what?” Dr. Grace was incredulous.

Kurt looked up at him from behind his desk. “I said: we sent the echo.”

“It’s a waste of time, Kurt.”

“I happen to disagree. We’re still scanning other areas. The only time it took was Sandy’s time queuing the sequence.”

“Sandy?”

“Dr. Rodriguez. Of course, Dr. Mukerjee was in attendance, so I suppose you’d want to argue that she wasted her time, too.”

Grace shrugged and dropped into the chair across the desk. “It’s your staff, doctor. If you don’t mind them pursuing wild geese-“

“Excuse me—Dr. Costigyan?” Roz Klein stood in the door of his office, her face flushed. “Pioneer is responding.”

oOo

The lab was as quiet and tense as a hospital waiting room. Quetzalcoatl staffers—techs, engineers, software experts, and the science crew—had come out of the woodwork to attend, everyone of them trying to peer over Santiago Rodriguez’s shoulder at his screen.

“What do we have?” Kurt asked, pushing through a cluster of techs.

Santiago glanced up and Gita vacated her chair to allow Kurt to take her place.

“She paused, as usual. This time for exactly three minutes, fifteen seconds. Then she resent the original sequence. We thought, ‘Okay, that’s it, she’s just...” He glanced at Gita. “...just dreaming.”

“Dreaming?” repeated Dr. Grace.

Gita flushed. “Spinning off old data. Reliving old broadcasts.”

“But then the sequence changed,” said Santiago.

“Show me.” Kurt rolled his chair closer.

“The pattern is the same,” Santiago told him as he shifted the display to show the decoded output of the Multi-Channel Spectrum Analyzer. “And the first part of the sequence is the same: 18.9 and 27.44 repeated four times. Then it changes: 103.6, 134.1, 99.1. One digit off from the first sequence. Now, the third sequence-“

“The third sequence?” repeated Kurt.

Santiago nodded. “The third sequence starts out just like the other two—an identical sequence of five numbers. But this time the last three numbers are: 108.2, 121.9, 107.6.”

“Completely different,” observed Grace.

“But the seventh number is the same as in the first sequence,” said Kurt. “That could be significant.”

Grace shrugged. “And it could be mere chance.”

“But look at the first set of five numbers,” said Santiago. “It’s the same for each set. That’s hardly random.”

Grace shrugged again. “Why should it be? Pioneer may not possess any intelligence of her own, but she was created by an intelligence. She’s spitting out available data—data we’ve given her—she’s just not doing it in a form we understand.”

“Whoa! There’s a fourth sequence!” Santiago Rodriguez’s voice, quiet as it was, cut through the discussion taking place over his head. The silence was immediate and thick.

“First five figures, the same...then 96.9, 124.4, 95.7.”

Kurt leaned in to look at the series of numbers now lining up across the screen. “Okay, now the end of the sequence is completely different. The only thing obviously common is that the seventh figure is always larger than the others.”

“You think we’ll see that same pattern in the next sequence?” asked Grace.

“If there is a next sequence,” said Santiago.

There was. It began as they all began, but the last three digits were 96, 122.5, 96. Not one of them matched a previously sent number. New sequences of numbers continued to come in—thirty unique sequences in all. Then there was a pause and they began to repeat, beginning with the initial sequence, and replaying in exactly the same order as they were originally received. Occasionally, there was a repeated digit, but there seemed to be no pattern. When it became clear that no new sequences were going to appear, Kurt called an analysis session.

While machine intelligences compared numbers, biological intelligences mulled patterns in their own way. They considered spatial coordinates, global coordinates, geometric figures.

“The second, third, and fourth numbers form a square,” said Santiago, doodling on the white board in the conference room. He used a scale of one-half inch per unit, so the figure would fit on the board. “And the last three numbers could be the sides of a triangle.”

“What about the first figure?” asked Gita. “What do you make of that? A line?”

Santiago drew a line 30.3 inches in length. “Yeah. Maybe...maybe that’s it—a line between two points, then a figure with three points, then a four sided figure.”

“Except,” said Grace, “that they didn’t arrive in that order. They came one, four, three.”

“Maybe 18.9 is the diameter of a circle,” suggested Gita. “Or the circumference. They could be showing us that they understand geometric constructs.”

“They?” repeated Grace.

Gita flushed. “Did I really say that?” She shook her head. “Too many episodes of X-Files. Sorry.”

“Hey,” Kurt said, “it’s why we’re here—right, Dr. Grace? But why would the triangle—and only the triangle—vary in size?”

The question was met with silence.

They resorted to computer assistance at that point, generating two different sizes of circles, a square, and a series of thirty triangles—thirty lopsided, irregular triangles. They put the circles inside the squares, and the squares inside the triangles, oriented them in numerous ways. Nothing rang a bell, for either human or machine. In the end they sat back, mentally exhausted, and stared at the pages taped to the walls of the conference room—circles, squares, and/or triangles on every one.

“All right,” said Kurt. “It’s geometry. But why the subtle differences? Why such regularity in the first set of numbers and such irregularity in the second? And why the oddball matches? They’ve got to be significant.”

“Do they?” asked Santiago. “If this is Pioneer spinning dreams or having the machine equivalent of a near death experience, then maybe the variations are merely extrapolations on a program they created for a First Contact scenario.”

Gita shook her head. “They didn’t program a geometry set like that into Pioneer. Roz and I went over every one of the First Contact protocols. There’s nothing like this anywhere in her routines. Besides, Pioneer can’t extrapolate. She’s a machine. An old machine. A dying machine.”

“Look,” said Kurt, rubbing his forehead, “let’s assume for a moment that Pioneer is merely expiring much later than expected and that for whatever reason she went off on her own, scrambled a bunch of old messages and sent them home. Let’s assume that she refused to respond to familiar command sequences because they no longer seemed familiar. That she responded to an echo of her own unprovoked transmission because it did seem familiar. And let’s further assume that receiving that echo caused her to randomly change the second set of numbers in what is now her default data set. Let’s also assume that these numbers are dimensions for geometric shapes. What should our response be?”

“Why respond at all?” asked Gita. “That’s what our friend from NASA would say. If this is Pioneer, the only significance is that she seems to have resurrected herself.”

“Like Quetzalcoatl?” murmured Santiago.

Gita’s dark brows arced gracefully. “Exactly. Score one for old rocket scientists. But if that’s the case, there is no intrinsic significance to her message, above the incredible fact that she was able to send it at all. Any return messages we send should be targeted to keeping her online as long as possible, maybe getting her to return to an old routine, send some real data.”

“I hear a definite ‘but,’” said Kurt.

“But...if this isn’t Pioneer, then this message is more significant than we can possibly imagine and our response should be targeted to letting whoever programmed that message know we got it and understand what we got.”

“They already know we got it,” said Santiago. “If there is a ‘they.’ And we don’t understand it completely.”

Gita ground the heel of her hand into her forehead. “But isn’t that enough? Can’t we send some geometry of our own?”

“Let’s work on it,” Kurt said. “Tomorrow, when I don’t feel so much like a zombie. Let’s sleep on it. Maybe one of us will have an epiphany.”

oOo

If there were no epiphanies to be had in Puerto Rico that night, there was at least a piece of one in British Columbia. It came during the ten o’clock news in a living room in the town of Chilliwack.

The man had half risen from the sofa, mentally already in bed when the story about messages from space caught his attention and the numbers being scrolled out across the screen, his curiosity.

He sat back down.

Four orderly rows of figures later, he reached for a steno pad, flipped to a page devoid of Scrabble scores and wrote the numbers down. In the end, his pad contained thirty rows of 8 figures each.

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 103.6, 121.9, 99.1

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 103.6, 134.1, 99.1

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 108.2, 121.9, 107.6

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 96.9, 124.4, 95.7

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 96, 122.5, 96

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 102.2, 111.3, 96.9

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 100.6, 120.4, 100.6

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 103, 125, 103

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 99.1, 121.9, 99.1

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 100.6, 123.7, 100.6

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 100.6, 122.5, 100.6

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 99.7, 123.4, 100.6

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 100.6, 121.9, 100.6

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 100.6, 123.1, 100.6

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 102.1, 121.9, 102.1

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 100.6, 124.4, 100.6

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 100.6, 124.9, 100.6

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 99.1, 123.1, 99.1

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 104.9, 124.4, 99.7

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 100, 121.9, 100

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 105.8, 121.9, 105.8

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 101.5, 121.9, 96.9

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 102.2, 123.1, 105.2

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 101.8, 121.9, 99.1

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 99.1, 123.4, 99.1

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 205.8, 135.6, 106.7

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 102.1, 122.2, 100.6

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 100.6, 124.1, 101.8

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 96, 123.1, 98.1

18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 100.9, 123.4, 99.4

The pattern seemed familiar. Damn familiar. But elusively so.

“Bill? You coming to bed?” Barbara had apparently finished her crossword puzzle.

“In a minute, babe.”

“You’re not writing are you? You know you’re more likely to write crap than cream at this hour of the night.”

She was right, of course. “I’m not writing. I’m watching the news.”

“All right then.” Barbara subsided.

Bill leaned his head toward the TV to catch what the SETI guy was saying about geometrical figures. They thought the old Pioneer 10 spacecraft was speaking to them in geometry. When asked why this was happening, a pretty East Indian woman—a Dr. Mukerjee—said that they thought her deteriorating condition had caused the old space craft to start running some mangled first contact programming.

She smiled (it was a dynamite smile) and said, “I like to think she’s dreaming.”

Bill sat back on the sofa. Now that was one for the books—a dreaming spacecraft. He waited for them to show the geometrical shapes they thought lived in the neat rows and columns of numbers. They didn’t.

Miffed, he hunkered down to do the math himself.

“Bill? Are you sure you’re not writing?”

He flipped the steno pad shut, slid the pencil back into the spiral binding, clicked off the TV, and went to bed.

oOo

Peter Grace rubbed the back of his neck absently. “Okay, next time you guys come up with a hare-brained idea I’ll just chalk it up to thinking ‘outside the box’ and go with it.”

Kurt grinned. “Hey, that hare-brained idea got us 240 data points.”

“Don’t rub it in.” Grace shook his head. “You’re an unorthodox son of a bitch, Kurt, but I guess that’s why you’re out here, in the first place.”

“And not at NASA with the real scientists?”

“Didn’t say that; didn’t mean to imply it.” He pushed his glasses back up his nose. “So, what’s our next move?”

Kurt laughed. “What makes you think we’ve got one?”

oOo

The steno pad lay on the coffee table in the living room. Bill picked it up on the way to the kitchen, where he pecked his wife on the cheek, poured himself a cup of fresh, hot coffee and sat at the kitchen table to think about geometric figures. By the time Barbara put a plate full of scrambled eggs in front of him and sat down caddy corner, he was doodling lines, circles, squares, and triangles. He studied what he’d done as he shuttled eggs to his mouth.

“What’s that?” Barbara asked.

His mouth full, he rotated the pad so she could see what he was doodling.

She frowned, shrugged, shook her head. “I still don’t know what it is.”

“Well, neither do I, exactly,” Bill said. “These rows of numbers are being sent to Earth by the old Pioneer 10 spacecraft. Problem is, the scientists weren’t expecting her to send anything and they can’t figure out why she’s sending this all of a sudden. They don’t know what it is, either.”

Barbara smiled, puckering the little crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes and firing up her dimples. They were turning to creases now, but he still loved them. “And you think an old writer can figure out what a bunch of NASA brainiacs can’t?”

Bill shook his fork at her, flipping eggs across the table. “Don’t disparage old writers. There is a compendium of knowledge about a great many things in this noodle. Scientists on the other hand, tend to specialize. I just need to figure out which of my many veins of generalized knowledge this pertains to.”

He reached for the pad, glancing as he did at the page full of circle-square-triangles. They were tip-tilted now, standing on end.

He set down his fork. “Son of a bitch.”

“What?” Barbara asked, but he didn’t hear her.

He snagged the pad back and stared at it, caddy-wumpus, then turned to a clean sheet. “We got a ruler, babe?”

“Uh-huh.” She got up, pulled it out of the junk drawer beneath the telephone, and flipped it to him. He caught it without looking up.

After watching him for a moment, Barbara cleared her dishes and left him to his doodles.

oOo

“This number appears eight times in the sixth place and nine times in the eighth place—that’s seventeen times altogether.”

Santiago brought his laser pointer to the number 100.6 in the chart projected onto the screen in the conference room. Kurt Costigyan and Gita Mukerjee followed the red beam in the semi-darkness.

“It never occurs in the seventh place,” continued Santiago. “This figure—121.9—occurs nine times in the seventh place, but never occurs in the sixth or eighth. All in all, there seems to be no actual pattern, although in fourteen cases, the number from place six is repeated in place eight. In seven instances, the repeated number is 100.6.”

Kurt rubbed his hands over his face in a gesture of weariness. “I don’t even know what to suggest we send next.”

“So far,” said Gita, “the geometric figures seem to be nested. Circle in square in triangle. What if we add a larger circle that contains all the previous figures?”

“Bring it full circle?” punned Kurt wryly.

“Har-har-har,” said Gita.

“Okay.” Santiago scrolled through the thirty rows of data. “Which data set do you want to work with?”

“The first one,” Gita suggested. “I’m thinking we calculate the circle so that it’s diameter is a multiple of the first circle’s diameter. If this is some kind of progressive loop, then we should see another square that is built on a multiple of the first one in some way.”

“Sounds like a plan,” said Santiago. “Let me just rack ‘em up. What multiple of 18.9 would you like, ma’am?”

“Oh, how about seven? That ought to clear the points of the triangle.”

Kurt Costigyan had just gotten up to stretch when the phone rang. He picked it up, expecting it to be his wife demanding to know when he intended to come home. It was their admin, Rosa, sounding a bit flustered.

“Doctor, there’s a man calling long distance from British Columbia. He wants to talk to...um...one of our experts about the messages from Pioneer.”

“Does he say why, in particular?”

“He saw the story on the news the other night and he says he thinks he knows what the message is about.”

“Oh? And what does he think it’s about?”

“He won’t say. He wants to talk to an expert.”

“I guess that would be one of us. Okay, put him on,” Kurt said, reasoning that if he talked to the guy and made him think they took him seriously, he’d be much more likely to go away and stay gone.

“Hello?” The voice sounded dubious, as though the guy suspected he’d been put on hold indefinitely.

“Hello, this is Dr. Costigyan. I’m Director of the Project Quetzalcoatl Signal Detection Group. You...you have some information relating to Pioneer 10?”

There was a moment of profound silence, then the caller said, “Look, I know you figure me for a crackpot, and in some ways you’d be right, but I really do have an idea about this message.”

It was Kurt’s turn for thoughtful silence. “All right. What do you think it’s about?”

“If I told you flat out, you’d be sure I was a crackpot. Let me ask you this: what’s it doing now?”

“It’s...still sending the same sets of data.”

“Thirty of ‘em?”

“Yes.”

“And no more?”

“No more.”

“In the same order every single time?”

Now Kurt was intrigued. Order. “Yes, as a matter of fact.   Is that significant?”

“Could be. Have you sent anything back yet—since it started sending the thirty sets, I mean?”

“Not yet. We were just now preparing a response.”

“What were you planning to send?”

“A number that would describe the diameter of a circle that will encompass the entire set of geometric figures.”

“Wrong. That’s not it.”

“No?”

“No. What you need to do is this: take the first set of numbers. The ones you got first, I mean.” He repeated them for good measure. “But either at the beginning of the sequence or at the end, add this: 4, 20, 19, 12.”

“May I ask why?”

“Just testing a theory. What’ve you got to lose, right? The ship’s on her way out—hell, you thought she was gone already, didn’t you? If I’m wrong, you lose a little chatting time. If I’m right...”

“If you’re right—what?”

The caller laughed. “Hell, I don’t know. Damn! I really don’t know.”

“May I ask who this is?”

“My name’s Bill. Bill Kinsella.”

“Well, thank you, Mr. Kinsella. If we can’t raise a response with our current approach, maybe we’ll try yours.”

“When?” Kinsella insisted.

“Well, we’ll try our response tonight. And then it will take about twenty-seven hours to see if there’s a response.”

“Twenty-seven hours?”

“She’s 100 astronomical units out from Earth, Mr. Kinsella. That’s a long-“

“I know how far it is. I read.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to-“

“That’s all right. But if you do try my...my idea, you let me know what happens. I left my number with your secretary. If I don’t hear in a week, I’ll call back.”

Of course you will, Kurt thought wryly, and rang off.

oOo

“4-20-19-12? Isn’t that one of those low cost call gimmick numbers?” Gita leaned back in her chair and put her feet up on the conference table.

“Did he say why he thought that would work?” asked Santiago.

“Nope. He was pretty tight-lipped.”

“You’re not really thinking of sending that, are you?”

Kurt shook his head. “We want to keep Pioneer chatting with us. I think our best chance of that is to follow the geometric progression as Gita suggested.”

oOo

It made perfect sense to do that, Kurt thought twenty-seven hours later when they received Pioneer’s response. As usual, she paused to receive the data and process it, before sending a return message. This time the pause was longer, as if their response puzzled her, then she continued sending her thirty sets of data as if they’d sent nothing at all. She seemed only to take a very deep breath before taking it, once again, from the top.

Like a teacher dealing with a particularly slow student, Kurt thought, staring across the lab where a screen saver wove multi-colored twists.

“Apparently, that wasn’t what Pioneer was expecting,” said Gita.

“Expecting?” Peter Grace took a sip of his coffee, made a face and added more sugar. “Dr. Mukerjee, Pioneer wasn’t expecting anything. She’s just firing back broken bits of data.”

“What was it you said about us thinking outside the box?” Kurt asked mildly.

“Oh, all right. But be honest, Kurt—isn’t it just as likely that Pioneer changing her message earlier was just coincidence?”

“No.”

“True believer.”

“Jade. Maybe you should get out of space science and into something that requires less imagination—accounting maybe.”

“I hate to interrupt this mutual admiration society,” said Gita, “but what’s our next move? Are we going to send that guy’s message?”

Grace frowned through the steam that lingered above his coffee cup. “What guy? What message?”

“A gentleman from Chilliwack, B.C. saw a news broadcast of our last press conference and called to say he knew what we should send next.”

“Oh really. And that would be?”

“4, 20, 19, 12,” Kurt said.

“Why?”

“Didn’t give a reason why. Just testing a theory, he said.”

Grace’s brow puckered again. “Is that a date?”

“A date?” Santiago returned blankly.

“I don’t know,” said Kurt. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I suppose it could be. He asked about the order the numbers came in. Wanted to know if the sequences were always in the same order. Maybe this date—if it is a date—has something to do with the order the data is delivered in. Though I can’t imagine what.”

“Hm. And maybe it’s the date his mommy and daddy were abducted by aliens.”

Santiago looked over at Kurt from the Signal Detection console. “You did tell him you’d use his sequence if ours failed. And I’m fresh out of ideas. We might as well send it while we’re trying to come up with something else.”

Grace snorted. “You’re kidding. You’re not going to authorize-“

Kurt smiled, tapped his forehead, and said, “Outside the box, Peter.”

“Do you have any reason to think this might work?”

“None. But Sandy’s right—we might as well send something.”

They sent: 18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 103.6, 121.9, 99.1, 4, 20, 19, 12.

Just over twenty-seven hours later, Pioneer’s return message began with the characteristic pause. Then she started into a sequence: 18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 108.2, 121.9, 107.6, she said. The second sequence. And she added: 4, 20, 19, 12.

“Whoa,” said Santiago, taking in the complete sequence. He glanced up over his shoulder at Kurt Costigyan, colors from the MCSA display patterning the side of his face. “Now what do we do?”

“Now, we give Mr. Kinsella a call back.”

oOo

"Well, this is a surprise. I didn't expect to hear from you. I kind of figured I'd have to nag." Bill Kinsella raised eyebrows at his wife and mouthed, "It's them" across the kitchen table.

"No, Mr. Kinsella," said the caller, "we tried your sequence of numbers right after...well, right after our sequence failed to get Pioneer's attention."

When the man from SETI—Dr. Kurt Costigyan, he called himself—hesitated, Bill prompted, "Well, don't keep me in suspense, Kurt. Did it work?"

After a moment more of hesitation, Costigyan said, "Pioneer returned a second set of numbers, and added the same sequence you gave us to the end of it."

"Damn. Which set was it?"

"The second set."

Bill looked at the list of names and numbers he'd scribbled in his steno pad. "Damn," he said again.

The scientist cleared his throat. "Does that number mean something to you, Mr. Kinsella?"

"Yes sir, it does."

"May I ask what it means? Some of us thought it might be a date."

"It is a date. At least, to me, it’s a date. I don't know what it is to your little robot friend."

"If you were to... What would you send next?"

“Well, the logical thing would be to send the third sequence again and add 4, 23, 19, 14 to the end of it."

There was a pause before Costigyan asked, "May I ask why that would be logical?"

Bill sighed. This man was going to think he was a lunatic. "Trust me: that date goes with the third sequence of numbers."

"Mr. Kinsella-"

"I know I'm being cantankerous and mysterious, but if I tell you what I'm thinking, you'll hang up on me."

"I won't, I promise, Mr. Kinsella. I won't hang up."

"Call me 'Bill.'"

"I promise I won't hang up, Bill."

"Look, try this—send this batch of numbers, and if it comes back with...well, with the next logical sequence, I'll tell you what I think it's all about."

"Wait, you're telling me...you can predict what Pioneer is going to say next?"

"In a nutshell, yeah. If I'm right, Pioneer's response to this message will be to add 4, 18, 19, 23 to the fourth set of numbers."

"But you won't tell me why," said Costigyan, frustration creeping into his voice. "Will you at least tell me what you think the numbers are—generally speaking?"

"Well, sir, I think they're dimensions. But not geometrical shapes, exactly."

"Dimensions." There was another pause, then the scientist asked, "Are you a mathematician, Mr. Kinsella—Bill?"

"No sir. I'm a writer. Of fiction. Not science fiction, though, in case you were wondering."

oOo

"He's a writer?" repeated Peter Grace. "A fiction writer is driving your game plan?"

"He's getting results," argued Gita. "Which is more than our well-considered responses are doing."

"Let me guess—he writes science fiction, right?"

"He says not," said Kurt. "Besides, as Gita said, he's getting results. You can't argue with that. I think we're pushing the envelope of coincidence. So here's our test case—he's given me a new sequence and told me what response he expects. We might as well send it and see what happens."

Grace muttered something under his breath about looking silly, then said, “I’ll tell you what you’re going to get. She’s going to repeat what you send, just like she did this last time.”

“But she added it to a different sequence of numbers.”

“Of course she did, Kurt. She’s locked into that program of thirty data sets. She ran what’s now her normal sequence and tacked exactly what you sent to the end of it. No mystery, there.”

Kurt shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. But we’ve got nothing to lose, right?”

“Hell, no,” said Grace. “Just our professional dignity.”

They sent the data. They waited. Within ten minutes of Pioneer's answer, Kurt Costigyan called Chilliwack, B.C.

"Well, Bill," he said, "she gave the answer you were expecting. I think we need to talk face to face. Are you willing to meet with me?"

"In Puerto Rico?"

Kurt chuckled. "I was thinking of someplace in between. There’s an observatory in Santa Cruz, California..."

oOo

"William Patrick Kinsella," the man said, holding out his hand.

Kurt Costigyan took it, thinking that he surely must have meant to say 'Mark Twain.' Tall, lanky, and spare, he had a wavy fringe of collar length hair that was going from gray to white. Mustache and beard to match. Hazel eyes sparkled behind wire-rim glasses. There, the resemblance to the Twain archetype ended; he wore a cowboy hat and a blue chambray shirt. Kurt guessed him to be in his seventies.

"Dr. Kurt Costigyan," Kurt said. "This is my colleague, Dr. Peter Grace, from NASA."

"Kinsella," repeated Grace, shaking the older man's hand. "Didn't you write that movie-"

"I wrote a book that got made into a movie," Kinsella said, warily, Kurt thought.

"A fantasy movie," said Grace, passing him a look.

"Fantasy," said the writer, "is in the mind of the reader. You’re talking across millions of miles of space to a glorified tinker toy. How fantastic is that?”

Grace raised his eyebrows but didn’t offer a comeback.

“Can you send messages to Pioneer from here?" Kinsella gestured around the observatory's main lab.

"No, but we can have Arecibo send them."

"And what messages will we be sending?" asked Grace, his voice patronizing.

In answer, Kinsella pulled a steno pad out from under his arm, flipped it open and handed to him. On the exposed page was a table. Looking over Grace's shoulder, Kurt saw the sequences of numbers he'd come to know so well, each sequence in a neat row that ended with a date and a name.

"What...what are these?" Grace asked brushing the names with a fingertip.

Kinsella cleared his throat and gave Kurt an almost apologetic glance. "They're...um...ballparks."

Kurt could feel Grace's eyes on him. "Ballparks?"

Kinsella scratched around in his longish white hair. "Your numbers there are the internal dimensions of a baseball diamond, in meters. The first number is the distance from home plate to the mound—18.9 meters, or 60 feet, 6 inches. The second, third, fourth and fifth numbers are the distance between the bases—27.44 meters or 90 feet. Those numbers are constant for every major league ballpark ever built. The last three numbers are outfield dimensions, which are different in every park.”

“And the dates?” Grace asked.

“Opening days.”

Grace's mouth, which had been open, snapped shut. "Come sit down, won't you, Mr. Kinsella?"

The old guy smiled. "Call me 'Bill.'"

oOo

“Why would Pioneer 10 be talking to us in baseball?” asked Gita, the bemusement in her voice clear even through the speakerphone. “Was there some sort of database on board that might be spilling first contact information? I mean, maybe one of the scientists on the project was a baseball buff or something.”

“A database?” Kurt repeated. “Gita, Pioneer was launched in 1972.”

“But there’s got to be some reason she’s spitting ballpark dimensions at us.” There was a moment of puzzled silence, then she said, “Okay. So we’ve got an aging spacecraft that wants to talk baseball. What do we do about it?”

Kurt looked at Bill Kinsella. “I’d like to try sending all thirty sets of dimensions and dates. Cut to the chase.”

Peter Grace looked dubious. “What do you expect to happen?”

“I don’t know. Bill, you have any ideas?”

“She might start on player stats next,” said Kinsella, then shrugged. “Maybe she’ll start giving us box scores. Beats me.”

They scanned the handwritten list of dimensions and dates and emailed it to Arecibo where Santiago and Gita fed it to the transmitter.

“Now what?” Kinsella asked.

“Now we wait,” said Grace.

Kinsella shook his head. “You scientists do a lot of waiting, don’t you?”

oOo

Pioneer’s response, when it came was anti-climactic. She simply stopped sending. The absence of any signal stretched into minutes, then hours. When three days had passed without her commentary, Peter Grace went back to NASA and Bill Kinsella, after taking in two Giants games, prepared to fly back to B.C.

He was, in fact, standing in the main concourse at SFO with Kurt Costigyan when a bleary sounding but excited Dr. Rodriguez called from Puerto Rico.

“She’s sending again.”

“What is she sending?” Kurt clutched his cell phone as if it might fly out of his hand, and met Bill Kinsella’s eyes.

“It’s not so much what as where from. I’ve checked this through the FUDDs at three separate observatories. Pioneer—if this is Pioneer—is transmitting from inside the solar system.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Tell me about it. Can you get back to Lick, ASAP?”

“With bells on. I’ll call when I’m there.” He hung up, pocketed the phone and blinked at Kinsella. “Well, Bill, I’ve got to go back to Lick.“

“Our girl get talkative again, did she?”

“Yes, she’s sending again. And she’s apparently headed back toward Earth.”

“I didn’t think that could happen.”

“It can’t. You can still catch your plane-”

“You kidding? I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

The two men picked up their bags and began to wend their way toward the Ground Transport area.

“By the way, what’s she sending?”

Kurt laughed. “I forgot to ask.”

oOo

She was sending new coordinates—longitude and latitude, Santiago thought. And by the time Kurt Costigyan and the ‘psychic writer’ had checked back in at Lick Observatory, he had been able to generate a map. It displayed on Kurt Costigyan’s borrowed computer monitor in Lick’s main lab as a U.S.-shaped outline populated with about two dozen points of light.

“I’ve got to say,” Santiago told them as they sat down to study the map, “when we put this together and saw what it looked like, it made us a bit...uh, nervous out here. Those coordinates correspond to major American cities.”

“No need to be nervous,” said Bill, raising salt and pepper eyebrows. “I don’t think.”

“Then they’re not cities?” Gita sounded relieved.

“Oh, I’m pretty sure they’re cities,” said Kinsella. “Can I ask what order you got the coordinates in?”

“Is that significant?” Santiago asked.

“Could be. Let me guess—the first four were Boston, Detroit, Chicago, and New York.”

“Uh...yeah. Oh, wait. You’re thinking they should line up with the-the list of dimensions. But they don’t. There aren’t thirty of them.”

“Some cities have more than one professional ballpark,” said Kinsella patiently.

Kurt closed his eyes. “Okay, okay. Let’s think things through. Pioneer 10 suddenly, and without provocation, starts sending us the dimensions of major league baseball parks.”

“Except that the list isn’t up to date,” said Kinsella. “Some of these parks have been replaced.”

“Yeah, but how would Pioneer know that?” asked Santiago.

Into the pregnant silence that followed, Kurt Costigyan said, “Sandy, Pioneer 10 doesn’t know anything. And she doesn’t—she couldn’t—have any information her programmers didn’t have back in 1972. Unless...”

“Unless,” repeated Gita, “someone’s been able to hack that archaic code and-and what—send her the dimensions of baseball parks?”

“Pre-2000 baseball parks,” said Kinsella.

Kurt cleared his throat, making way for words that sounded unreal even in his head. “Let’s assume someone could hack her code. How could they reach her outside the solar system, when an array as powerful as Arecibo’s couldn’t raise her? And how could any hacker, no matter what his or her technology, turn her around and bring her back to Earth?” He paused to let it sink in. “The answer is, they couldn’t.”

“Maybe they’re only making it seem as if she’s coming back to Earth,” said Santiago. “Maybe they’ve hacked our system and the diagnostics just didn’t pick it up.”

“Then they would have had to hack all the Follow-Up Detection Systems we used too. That’s four separate installations all together.” Kurt closed his eyes and sat back in his chair.

“We’re talking ET’s, now, aren’t we?” said Kinsella.

Kurt turned to stare at him; the Arecibo side of the connection was silent.

Kinsella’s eyes blinked behind their oval lenses. “Well, good Lord, Kurt. When you eliminate all the other possibilities what are you left with? Isn’t this what you SETI guys have been working for all these years?”

“He’s right, Kurt,” said Gita and laughed, nervously. “This could be it.”

“It,” repeated Kurt.

“But why?” asked Santiago. “Why would—well, aliens—talk baseball?”

“Maybe because we do,” said Kinsella softly.

“But we don’t,” said Santiago. “We speak mathematics-“

“Baseball is mathematics. And it’s geometry, and music, and poetry, and art. Art made of time and space and motion. Sunlight and grass and earth. Maybe they even play baseball back where they come from. Or maybe they’ve been picking up broadcasts from Earth and the beauty and perfection of it just...enchanted them so much they had to come here to see.”

Gita said, “You wrote that baseball was too perfect to have been created by human beings—that God must’ve had a hand in it.”

Bill blinked at the speakerphone, wishing the lady scientist were there so he could see her smile. “You’ve read my stories.”

“All right,” said Kurt. “Let’s assume that an extraterrestrial intelligence is using Pioneer to talk to us. What are they trying to say?”

“If you send it, we will come?” suggested Kinsella wryly.

Gita stifled another giggle. “I think Mr. Kinsella’s right. I think maybe they’ve just adopted a language they think we’ll understand.”

“Or maybe they think baseball diamonds have some sort of religious or political significance,” said Santiago.

“Don’t they?” asked Kinsella.

“Let’s have that discussion later,” interrupted Kurt and Gita said: “Maybe they think they’re grounded spacecraft. Some of them look like spacecraft.”

“Whoa!” Santiago’s voice rose half an octave. “Kurt, she’s sending again. A whole different set of numbers. Oh, man, she’s- Wow. Double-check this with the Signal Detector at Lick, would you? Gita, get on line with, um, with Parkes, okay? This is wild. Kurt, this signal’s coming from inside the orbit of Jupiter.”

Kurt swung around, catching the eye of one of the tensely hovering observatory staff. “Can you check that telemetry?”

The woman nodded, wide-eyed, moved to a terminal, and brought up Lick Observatory’s Signal Processor. “Have him send coordinates.”

“I heard that,” Santiago said. His fingers, tapping across his keyboard, sounded like the clatter of dice in a cup.

Roll the bones, Kurt thought.

“Okay, listen,” said Santiago. “I’m going to send you the first sequence of numbers. See what Mr. Kinsella makes of them. They don’t mean a damn thing to me.”

The numbers rolled down the screen, pulling scientist and writer close enough to bathe their faces in its light.

1/2.40

2/.302

3/.311

4/.250

5/.330

6/.279

7/.289

8/.350

9/.306

“There’s a full second pause between the first number in each group—the ascending numbers—and the rest. That’s what I’ve indicated with the slash. There’s a three second pause between each set. I notice the first number seems...out of keeping with the others.”

“They look like batting averages,” said Kinsella. “Except for the first one, which looks like a pitcher’s ERA. That’d be my guess.”

“I think you’ve had more than enough guesses, Mr. Kinsella.”

Kurt turned to see Peter Grace standing in the middle of the lab, looking windblown and harried.

“I think,” Grace continued, smoothing his hair, “that it’s time you gave science back to the scientists.”

oOo

“What were you thinking?” Grace asked when he’d closed the door on the borrowed conference room. “Letting a civilian take control of the situation? That’s nuts.”

“It was working.”

“Oh, come on. For all you know, this could be a monumental hoax.”

“Hoax? Perpetrated by whom, Peter? A Canadian fiction writer? You can’t hoax a FUDD. Parkes and Lick both confirm—Pioneer 10’s signal is now coming from local space.”

“Right. Meaning that your friend may have precipitated an attack on us by...“

“By what? A bunch of geeks with a fleet of daisy-chained Pentiums? You can’t have this both ways. Either it’s incredibly sophisticated hoaxers, or it’s...it’s what we’ve been waiting for, working for, praying for all these years. First contact with an alien race.” Kurt had to force himself to breathe.

“Who are interested in old baseball diamonds.”

Kurt shook his head. “Life’s strange, isn’t it?”

“It’s time to stop playing games and call in the people who know how to handle this sort of thing.”

“And who would that be? The CIA? The FBI? Interpol? The Marines? The cast of the latest Star Trek series stands a better chance of handling this right than any of them. At least they’ve dealt with this situation in theory.”

Grace’s face reddened. “Regardless, I...I’ve taken the precaution of alerting the State Department.”

“And told them what?”

“That an unidentified spacecraft is heading for Earth with unknown intentions and that it has expressed some interest in a number of major American cities.”

“It expressed interest in major league ballparks.”

Grace snorted. “If I’d told them that they’d have laughed me off the line. Look, Kurt, you and I both know that Pioneer 10 can’t possibly be hurtling toward Earth under her own power, nor is there any natural phenomenon that could account for it. Whatever the interest is, we are soon going to face an unknown...intelligence.”

“All right. So the military is involved. What’s next? What do we do?”

“We keep Pioneer—whatever it is—talking. Now, I think we have to lock this project down. No press conferences, no more media coverage, no one talks to anyone outside of this lab. In fact, no one leaves this lab. We don’t want to cause a panic.”

Panic. That was something Kurt hadn’t considered. He had gone from curiosity to intellectual challenge to giddy anticipation without considering the reaction of the non-geek majority of human beings.

“No one leaves,” he agreed.

oOo

Left to his own devices, Bill continued his conversation with the scientists in Puerto Rico, mulling over the sequences of data, trying to figure out what they meant.

“So,” Santiago asked, “how do you figure it’s batting averages and a—what did you call it—an ERA?”

“Earned Run Average,” said Bill. “An ERA is the number of runs a pitcher allows per 9 innings. So this pitcher allows 2.40 runs every 9 innings.”

“Okay, but why are you so sure that’s what this is?”

“Context, first of all. In baseball, each position has a number. Pitcher is one, catcher is two, first baseman is three, and so on all the way out to right field, which is position number nine.”

“Oh, okay. I think I-“

Gita’s voice cut across him with “Oh, wow.”

“What?” Bill asked. “What?”

“She’s changed again. She’s sending...”

“Damn!” Santiago’s expletive coincided with the sudden appearance on the computer screen at Bill’s elbow of a perfect outline of the United States. Within the map’s glowing tracery, a pattern of bright dots lit up the dark interior.

Bill shuffled through the papers littering the desktop, finally coming up with a printout of the map Santiago had created earlier from the transmitted coordinates. A glance confirmed the match. This was the same map, only brighter, clearer.

He looked back at the computer screen. The dots had begun to flash. One by one, they winked off, then on again: Boston, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Milwaukee...

Hair stood up on the back of Bill’s neck. “You flashing those lights, son?”

“No sir. She—it, whatever it is, it’s got direct control of the receiver. It’s in the driver’s seat, now.”

“Is Kurt there?” Santiago asked, his voice tight and anxious.

“Nope. Still closeted with that NASA guy. Look Sandy—may I call you Sandy? Kurt isn’t here and Pioneer needs an answer. And I think I got one. Will you send it?”

“If Dr. Costigyan okays it-“

“It’s a repeat of an earlier message, so he’s already approved it.”

“A repeat?” said Gita.

“Yeah.”

“Kurt’s not available; I’m his second; I’ll approve it,” she said.

There was a moment of silence, then Santiago said, “Okay, Bill. What am I sending?”

oOo

“He what?” Peter Grace sat heavily in the swivel chair, rolling backwards several feet before coming to a stop against a workbench.

“He had us repeat a sequence,” said Santiago, “from an earlier transmission. Then he excused himself and took off.”

“Why?”

“Why’d he take off?”

“Why repeat the sequence?”

“Oh. Because of the map.”

“The map?”

“They...she...Pioneer sent a map of her own. Should still be on screen over there.”

“They sent this?” asked Kurt, leaning over Grace to see the screen better. “It’s not our construct?”

“What you see is what we got. They’re apparently quick studies tech-wise. They drove this right through our MCSA.”

“Oh, God,” murmured Grace.

“Anyway, Bill had me send the sequence and-“

“Whoa, that was quick,” said Gita.

“Oh, God,” said Grace a second time. He pressed a finger to the map where a lone spot of brilliance now blinked steadily. All the others had dimmed.

“Which sequence did you send?” Kurt asked.

“The third sequence.”

“The signal, Sandy. Where’s the signal coming from now?”

“Approaching Saturn’s orbital plane. At that rate-“

“Sometime tomorrow,” Kurt finished.

oOo

The National Guard arrived first, elite units sealing off streets and rerouting traffic. It was an above-average spring day for Chicago, less blustery than usual. Clouds chased each other across a cerulean sky—they’d have no trouble seeing whatever was descending upon them—be it the remains of Pioneer 10 or an alien ship.

An alien ship. Kurt tried on the thought for size—wasn’t sure how it fit, after all. He was almost ready to believe this was an elaborate hoax. Something they’d simply not anticipated when they built all their security protocols and firewalls. Something loosed on them by a particularly clever hacker who’d been able to hijack their Signal Detection System and completely flummox two FUDDs...and the NASA tracking computers, and the sophisticated radar arrays of any number of nations whose every attention was on the object—much larger than the hapless Pioneer—currently on an obviously controlled descent to Earth.

Kurt shook himself. No, he wasn’t ready to believe that, after all. Occam’s Razor cut this particular pie such that the big half went to ET. And yet, he irrationally half-hoped it was a hoax. He had to wonder why, after all these years of daydreaming, anticipating, even praying for contact with THEM.

He looked up now into the cloud-draped expanse of heaven and prayed none of the fighter jets assigned to fly escort for anything that entered Earth’s atmosphere contained trigger-happy pilots.

He thought it was a bird soaring high overhead when he first saw it, but a second later, he decided it was a helicopter. Then realized it was neither. He straightened from the hood of the Army Jeep he’d been leaning against, catching peripheral movement as the soldiers around him stirred. Peter Grace, who’d been sitting in the Jeep monitoring radio traffic, slid out of the cab and stared skyward with everyone else.

It descended swiftly, wavering not at all, bracketed by fighter jets. A deep thrumming filled the air, audible even beneath the scouring roar of jet engines. The fighters had to pull up when the alien vessel—the ALIEN VESSEL—continued to descend toward the corner of Addison and Wheatland.

Kurt devoured it with his eyes, his heart galloping wildly beneath his Kevlar™ vest. It wasn’t saucer-shaped, or cigar-shaped, or ice-cream-cone-shaped, or bristling with instrumentation. It was a perfect sphere of light-sucking black and had no distinguishing marks on the exterior except for... Kurt squinted at the image that sat at about the equator on the side the ship presented to him. It looked like a face. But before he could catch more than a glimpse, the huge black ball had dropped into Wrigley Field like a pop fly into a fielder’s outstretched glove.

Kurt found himself being swept along in a group that included Peter Grace, a four-star General named Garner, a tactical expert named Quinn, and a couple of sharpshooters. Walkways, staircases, and corridors unfolded in a blur as they made their way into the park through an access that brought them out behind the home dugout.

They came up short along the railing, staring at the alien vessel. It hovered above center field, a ramp extending down to the grass. A man stood at the bottom of the ramp, looking up. He wore an unfamiliar baseball uniform with a royal blue cap. A collar length mane of white hair stuck out from underneath.

“Who-“ General Garner began.

“Kinsella,” Grace growled. “We need to get him out of there, the damned idiot.”

“No, wait.” Kurt put up a hand. “It may be all right. I...think he may speak their language.”

Peter Grace gasped, pointed. “The ship!”

Around them, the sharpshooters tensed. A figure had appeared at the top of the ramp, and now proceeded down it, out into the sun. It was shorter than Kinsella, but had two arms, two bandy legs, and a slightly too large head with a pointed face. It was followed by a small squad of similarly built beings, all of which differed slightly in size and shape. Like most of the people currently in the confines of the ballpark, they were wearing uniforms—baseball uniforms.

Even as Kurt took that in, Kinsella reached out to shake hands with the alien leader and waved expansively at the field. They seemed, incredibly, to be exchanging words. Then the alien repeated Kinsella’s gesture and, without hesitation, the crew of the alien ship trotted across the outfield to the visitor’s dugout. From the home dugout, just below where Kurt stood, exploded a squad of human players, racing to take positions on the diamond.

“What the hell is going on here?” asked General Garner, his voice barely above a whisper. “Are they—are they going to play?”

“It certainly looks that way.” Kurt found himself tipping toward giddiness again. He could just see the headlines: Aliens Visitors On Field of Dreams! Or ET Goes the Distance to Play Ball!

“We got a small problem.”

Kurt looked down over the railing. Bill Kinsella stood just this side of the on-deck circle, grinning up at him. The blue cap sported a gray, heart-shaped alien face, the top of its head stitched like a baseball. Across the front of his uniform the words Las Vegas were embroidered in blue and silver.

“What uniform is that?”

“Huh? Oh—Las Vegas Area 51’s—Dodger Triple-A affiliate. They were out here for an interleague against the Iowa Cubs. I tried to get the Major League Cubs, but they were down in Florida against the Marlins. (Stupid name for a ball club, if you ask me.) But this-“ He flicked the bill of the ET-bedecked cap with a fingertip. “This was a real serendip, finding the Area 51’s right next door.”

“But how did you-?” Peter Grace gestured at the field, from which he seemed unable to take his eyes.

“I’ve got friends in baseball,” Kinsella said. “I made some calls from the taxi.” He shrugged.

General Garner spoke now, his eyes on the alien players. “These...people...came all the way from...wherever they came from-“

“Oh, um, out Taurus way, manager said.”

“Out Taurus way?” repeated Grace. “He said that? In English?”

“Well, he started out in Japanese, I think, then switched to Spanish. I don’t speak Japanese, and my Spanish is pretty shaky, so he went to English when he saw I wasn’t getting him. Spoke it pretty well, too. Hardly any accent. A little trouble with the letter ‘p,’ maybe. Seemed as if his Japanese and Spanish were pretty good too, though not speaking any, I couldn’t say. Anyway, I’m pretty sure he said their star was out Taurus way. They’ve had their eye on us for while, he said. Or maybe ‘ear' is a better choice of words. They’ve been listening in to space chatter, TV and radio broadcasts—that sort of thing—trying to figure out how to communicate with us.”

Grace moved his head slowly from side to side like a man trying to shake off a decrepit gnat. “Did he explain why they chose baseball?”

Kinsella tugged at the bill of his cap. “Not as such. They’ve been picking up our baseball games, of course—trying to figure out our rules, he said. But when I asked how they came to be playing baseball in the first place, he just blinked at me and repeated the question. Didn’t figure we were going to get anywhere after that, so I suggested we play ball.”

Kurt looked up at the sharp sound of a ball smacking a catcher’s glove. An odd tingle of memory took him. A memory of sultry summer afternoons that passed in a timeless haze of cheers and chants, popcorn, peanuts, and hot dogs, all punctuated with the cries of hawkers and the crack of the bat meeting a little lump of horsehide.

Kurt dragged his eyes away from the gray-skinned batter who had taken his place in the on-deck circle to take his practice swings. “You had a problem, you said.”

“Well, seems they didn’t bring any umps with ‘em and ours didn’t believe me when I told them where we were going and why. So, we were hoping maybe among the troops here, there might be some folks who’d be willing and able to umpire the game.”

“I’ve umped at my daughter’s little league games,” Kurt said. “Usually behind the plate.”

Bill Kinsella’s grin deepened. “Great! I’ll bet we can scramble some gear up from the clubhouse.”

“Actually, all I need is a mask. This helmet and Kevlar™ ought to do fine for gear.” Giddiness washed over him again.

Kinsella was looking up at Garner now. “General, care to spare a couple of your soldiers?”

The General finally managed to look away from the spectacle on the field. “You’re serious?”

“Well, we’ve got home field advantage, which means we play by home field rules. Rules say: in order for this game to be official, we need umpires.”

“You want U.S. Army troops to umpire an alien ballgame?”

“Well, not troops—we only need four—and an official scorekeeper, of course. The rest can watch.”

“Watch?” He swung his eyes to Grace. “Dr. Grace, you’re the space program expert. Your opinion of these proceedings?”

Grace seemed dazed. “These...people don’t seem dangerous, General. But the situation is...well, it’s unprecedented, and probably does bear watching.”

The General’s brows rose.

“What would you do?” Grace asked. “Capture them? Ignore them? This is First Contact, General Garner. That means it’s never happened before. There are no rules of engagement. There are no precedents. I guess we’ll have to set those as we go along.”

“Well,” said Garner, eyes going back to the sunny diamond. “They seem to pose no immediate threat. Under the circumstances, I suppose participating in a ritual of the visitors’ choice might be appropriate.” He swung around to the tactical officer beside him. “You ever do any umping, Tommy?”

Kurt didn’t wait to hear the answer. He was already over the railing and into the dugout. Bill Kinsella met him there, handed him a catcher’s mask, and walked him to the plate. He nodded to the Area 51’s catcher, who flashed a brilliantly white smile from the depths of his mask then turned to receive the last of the pitcher’s warm-up throws.

A little painted alien face stared up at Kurt from the back of the catcher’s helmet. He glanced up at Kinsella, already on his way back to the home dugout. “What do the visitors have on their caps?”

Bill touched his own headgear above the bill. “Same as ours. Alien faces.”

The visiting leadoff hitter had stepped into the left-hand batters box. Kurt looked at the logo on his helmet. The face was human.

Kurt couldn’t be sure, but he thought it might be the same face that was etched into the anodized aluminum plate that had been aboard Pioneer 10. Along with the two human figures, the plaque had carried an etching of the solar system and various mathematical figures that had apparently successfully conveyed the pertinent information about base-ten arithmetic. He made a mental note to recommend a few modifications to the plaque before they sent up their next deep space probe.

The alien ship had withdrawn from the field of play now, moving to hover over the park at a respectful distance, and looking for all the world like game day blimp. Kurt wondered if the aliens had the technology to transmit the game all the way home. An interleague game, indeed.

He looked out over the brilliant diamond, seeing the home team in their positions, the other umpires taking the field, and a crowd of spectators—mostly in khakis and camouflage—filling the stands. He felt the spring sun warm on his shoulders, smelled the perfume of grass and earth, and perhaps popcorn, though that might have been his imagination.

He did not imagine that unique, expectant hush that had preceded the first pitch of every baseball game since the beginning. He filled his lungs with air and officially opened the first encounter between humanity and beings from another world.

“Play ball!”

THE END

Copyright © 2006 Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

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