Lights in the Deep (12 page)

The Bullfrog Radio Astronomy Project would be off-limits to unauthorized personnel until further notice.

Crap. Even I was reluctant to see all those extra faces go away. What was good for Bullfrog was good for K-Powell, and with the faddish tourism surrounding the dish officially ended, we on the outside were left to ponder what sort of wealthy insanity was being perpetrated behind the fences and the signs at Andy’s place.

Along with construction of the dish itself, Andy had put up a few auxiliary buildings on his new property, including a cement and glass residential with attached garages for his boats. He started spending more and more time at his new home and less time on the water. There was still no official word as to what the dish was being used for or why, and the fences and signs were understandably intimidating. Some teenagers who once drove up from Arizona to see the dish actually jumped the fences one night, bent on a sophomoric adventure. By morning they and their car were gone, and nobody ever knew exactly what happened to them.

A few of the desert cranks predictably talked UFO jargon and circulated crude flyers about black helicopters. One guy even tried to get on the K-Powell staff, offering to volunteer his life away if only I’d let him use some airtime to push his paranoid ideas.
The public has a right to know, man!

But I wasn’t having any of that. I’ve let a lot of interesting characters volunteer for board time over the years, but I stop short of supermarket checkout shit. Andy might have been rich and weird, but he had become a
local
, and that accorded him respect in my mind. Certainly I’d been called a weirdo plenty of times when I’d first shown up and poured all I had into the construction and launching of the station.

I had my dreams. Andy had his. I figured I owed it to him to stay out of his business.

It was many months before Andy showed up at my door.

• • •

“Mister Kelly,” said one of the men who sat with me in the back of the van. I could smell the stench of my own sweat and fear as they watched me, heads unmoving.

“This is very serious,” said the other woman, who now that I could get a look at her in the van’s dome light, was a near twin of the one who’d surprised me on my steps.

“
What
are you?” I said.

“That’s not as important as
who
we are, Mister Kelly.”

The woman who had identified herself as Spingath had replaced her sunglasses, but once you’ve seen something you can’t very easily
un-see
it. Where a normal person would have eyes, Spingath had had…things. Clusters. I don’t know what to call them. They’d been bizarre and grotesque and I’d known the second she showed them to me that I’d be seeing them in my nightmares for the rest of my life.

None of the four had produced a gun or a badge, but I’d gotten the strongest sense that not doing what they told me to was going to be a Bad Thing.

So now I sat in their van, a best-of Van Morrison spinning back in the K-Powell trailer.

Had I pushed the disc repeat button? I couldn’t remember.

“NSA?” I said, swallowing hard. “DHS?”

“None of the above. We’ve got some dealings with NASA, but we can’t really talk about that. Mister Kelly, what we really want to know is, how involved are you with Mister Chang?”

“This is obviously about the dish?”

“Yes. Mister Chang is operating in violation of several Articles. We need to know how much you’re involved with him.”

I didn’t have the foggiest what they were talking about, but I still had the sense that not doing what they asked would be poor judgment on my part, so I told them what had happened.

• • •

When Chang came clomping up the wooden steps to the trailer’s main entrance, I feared that perhaps my transmitter was causing minicebo some grief. I’m no astronomer, but ever since its completion I’d suspected that a dish like that would be able to detect even the slightest cosmic flatulence from enormously far away. That meant even at a puny 800 watts, my nearby FM transmitter had to be screaming-loud in Andy’s electronic ear.

Andy surprised me when he said the station was not causing him any trouble, but instead he wanted to purchase the services of K-Powell. I sighed with relief and took this to mean he wanted to exchange dollars for publicity. I gave him the obligatory rundown on how community stations differed from commercial stations.

Clad in floppy boater’s shoes, olive-drab shorts, a Giants ballcap, and a crisp, white short-sleeved shirt, Andy listened attentively with his head bent forward.

The crux of the matter was that I couldn’t actually do any paid publicity for him, save for in the form of a bland “friendship” thank-you if he were to
donate
some dough. I was about to show him one of the custom-screened K-Powell t-shirts I’d bartered from buddies in Bullfrog—Andy’s gift for becoming a listening contributor—when he waved me off.

“That’s not it,” Andy said with a sheepish grin. “What I really want is your airtime.”

“You want to do a show?” I said.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“You don’t have to pay me for that,” I replied with a grin. “Just become a volunteer like everybody else. Got a good music collection?”

“Enough discs to fill this trailer.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Yes. And there’s more to it than just me becoming a volunteer. I want to tie K-Powell in with the Bullfrog Radio Astronomy Project. Your station will play a vital part in my SETI program.”

SETI? I frowned.
Oh great.

“I hate to say this, Andy. As much as I’d love to have you get involved as a music programmer, I’m not interested in any talk shows about space aliens. I get too many of those kinds of offers as it is, ever since you built the dish.”

Personally I have nothing against the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. But I’d put in thirty years bouncing around the professional broadcast business and had had a hard enough time finding intelligent life on
Earth
, much less finding it out among the stars. I think it’s safe to say I’m with Clarke in that I don’t believe there are any advanced aliens within listening distance of humanity, otherwise they’d have been here already and exterminated us on account of the noise.

I started to explain myself further.

Andy waved me off once again.

“I have no intention of using K-Powell as a crazy man’s pulpit. Sure I’d like to get on the air. But not in the way you are assuming. Instead, how would you like to get on
my
air? I’d be willing to compensate you accordingly. Seems K-Powell could use the funding.”

Andy’s head nodded in the direction of the master mixer behind me: the station’s elderly control board was a rebuilt 70s-era workhorse, the windows for its VU meters badly cracked and the needles waving crazily over a landscape of switches, knobs, duct tape, permanent marker, and torn and faded file-folder labels. I had purchased the vintage beast on the cheap from another public station after they’d upgraded to a digital mixer with sliders.

I got the impression Andy regarded my board with a degree of pity. I might have been offended if I myself did not also regard the board with a mixture of nostalgia and loathing. Keeping it functional had become an increasingly frustrating exercise. The company that built it no longer existed, making spare parts scarce, and it had become permanently infested with nagging malfunctions that introduced a nightmare of hums and buzzes into the output.

Still, I didn’t yet understand what the hell he was talking about, so I looked Andy in the eyes and said, “Explain.”

“I want to run a digital relay between your place and mine, something with enough bandwidth to maintain a clean stereo signal all the way to the dish control house. I’ve spent enough time behind my own microphones at home to realize that I can’t do this all by myself.”

“And what exactly is it that you’re trying to do? SETI involves nothing save for a hell of a lot of listening.”

“The Bullfrog Radio Astronomy Project is not a normal SETI effort my friend. Other people across the globe with bigger and better brains than mine are already involved in traditional SETI. Maybe at first I wanted to use the dish in this fashion, but before long I realized that the biggest problem is that everyone is standing around waiting for somebody
else
to speak. I mean, is it any wonder that we haven’t heard from
them
yet? What if at the same time we’re spending all day long listening for them, they’re spending all day long listening for
us?
”

The studio had started to turn uncomfortably hot. I invited Andy inside and closed the trailer door behind him. My in-window A/C was chugging painfully as it battled the waves of hot air rapidly filling the double-wide.

Still standing with his hands in his shorts, Andy elaborated further. He actually wanted to use his dish to beam a steady 24-hour broadcast into the sky, with enough juice behind it to send the signal halfway across the galaxy.
We want to let the aliens know that we are here!

Much of the technical stuff Andy threw at me must have been cribbed from information the U of U faculty had provided to him. He spoke not so much as an authority on the matter, but rather like a salesman trying to pitch an idea using someone else’s data. He was animated, and persuasive. I started to understand how he had managed to make his fortune while still in his thirties. He oozed tycoon. And he apparently was not distracted by the fact that it would take years for his dish-powered broadcasts to reach even the nearest stars.

“Why not just pre-record some stuff and then endlessly loop it?” I said, shuffling through my rack of worn 8-track carts. I pulled a recently played tape from Cart Machine #1 and wrote its title in the government-mandated program log before cueing up a public service announcement and a promo for the next break.

“I had that idea early on,” Andy said, now sitting across from me at the guest’s mic seat. “But what if somebody does pick us up? I don’t know about you but if I tuned in to a channel and they repeated the same stuff every five minutes, day after day, week after week, month after month, I’d get bored fast and tune out.”

Good point. But if Andy wanted a varied broadcast, and he wanted my signal, why not just copy it off the air and then feed it into his own transmitter? The signal was free to be had by anyone with an FM antenna.

Chang made a face. “K-Powell sounds clean and clear on a car stereo, perhaps. But I’m going to be hurling you into the universe as far as I can make you go, and I’d be extending my coherent range by light-years if I can start off with the cleanest possible sound. Plus, that would seem like bad manners to copy your signal without asking.”

“Thank you for the courtesy,” I said honestly, suddenly feeling vindicated in my earlier decision to not let the cranks have at Andy while using my airwaves. “Really, thanks, from one radioman to another. But Andy, why me? I’m proud of K-Powell but I’d hardly call it the best available option. Why not just hire a team of folks to build your own live broadcasts? If you’re gonna do this you may as well assemble an appropriate cast. You could have armies of rockers, speakers, maestros, singers, all lining up to do their thing for you. Hell, you could have President Obama! This is historic, sort of like those gold LPs they flew out on the Voyagers in the seventies. You don’t even need to bring the artists out here to Powell. Set it up somewhere on the west coast and satellite feed it. You obviously have the money. It would make a unique publicity stunt, the kind of stuff that turns Hollywood heads.”

“That’s exactly what I
don’t
want,” Andy said, suddenly frustrated. He stood up from his chair and began to pace the small space between the cart carousel and the CD shelves.

“It’s been bad enough with all the trashy press going on and on about the dish being built. If I go public with what I want to do now I’d be a laughing stock. No way. I need someone I can trust, who can keep this relatively under his hat. That someone ought to be close by and ready to deliver a unique product every day of the year. That’s why I want you. K-Powell may be small-time radio, but that’s exactly what will make this work. If I took your suggestion and built my own tailor-made broadcasts, I’d lose all the authenticity of the thing. It would wind up being too…too…“

“Corporate?”

“Exactly,” Andy said, snapping his fingers.

Including myself, there was a small and ever-evolving list of local volunteer radio enthusiasts who populated the weekly broadcast schedule. Like its sister community stations in Moab and Salt Lake, K-Powell’s program grid was a crazy pastiche of musical and spoken word weirdness that borrowed heavily from the collections and eccentricities of the staff. On any given day you were never sure what you’d get, which was as it should be. It wouldn’t be community radio otherwise.

Andy smiled. He was hooking me, and he could tell he’d piqued my interest. Maybe he was filthy rich and I was a radio pauper, but in some ways we thought more alike than I’d ever suspected. Andy could have paid for any kind of professional broadcast he wanted, and instead he was choosing
us.

There were still certain problems, though. Where Andy feared Hollywood, I feared would-be volunteer nutcases. And the FCC. If I’d been forced to turn down the occasional weirdo in the past, I’d almost certainly be beating them off with a baseball bat if news spread that I had a pipeline into the Milky Way. My cozy little incognito radio existence would be shattered by a pilgrimage of UFO freaks. I might wind up on the front pages of the very supermarket tabloids I despised. Assuming the government didn’t pull my license first.

Dear God.

“If we do this, you better make damned sure it’s low profile,” I said, turning very serious. “Does the Federal Communications Commission even know about this?”

“I secured broadcast clearance from the government at the same time I got the land rights to build the dish.”

“Yeah, but did they know you’d be piggybacking
my
signal?”