Joe Haldeman - The Coming

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THE COMING

Joe Haldeman

[02 jun 2002—scanned and proofed for #bookz]

This book is for two guys who live a thousand miles apart and have never met: Ricky and Rusty.

Both, by coincidence, were marines in the Pacific in World War II.

Ricky is Ottone Riccio, poet and prophet and rascal. Every teacher needs a teacher like him.

Rusty is James Hevelin, who is never called James except by the government. He is the friend every

man needs and not many find.

In some world everyone has a Ricky on his left and a Rusty on his right, and it's a good world.

The author gratefully acknowledges the influence of James Gunn's beautiful novel, The

Listeners, on this book.

October first

Professor Bell

Reporters.

Normally her desk was no neater than it had to be, a comfortable random pile of notes, journals,

and books. So long as she knew where everything was, who cared? But she had just spent fifteen

minutes nervously straightening things up, desk and worktable. It was not quite six in the morning.

There would be reporters.

She looked at the coffee machine in the anteroom. The smell was a magnet. No, not now. Her heart

was already racing. Doctor said two cups a day.

She pushed a button on the desk. "Previous," she said, and the diagram on the wallscreen was

replaced by a double page of equations and numbers. "Previous," she said again, and got a double page

of numbers and words. "Left." The screen reconfigured and gave her a single magnified page of words.

She stared at it and shook her head.

It was an old and old-fashioned office, dating from before the turn of the century. It had an antique

blackboard that she enjoyed using, the only one left in the physics building, and one whole wall, floor to

ceiling, had built-in shelves for books printed on paper. Some of that space had been converted into a

large display screen, but she did have rows of paper volumes bound in leather, cloth, and cardboard. The

head of the department can be eccentric.

"Music," she said; "random Vivaldi, then random Baroque." An oboe began a familiar figure.

"Louder, ten percent."

She sat down for a minute, listening, and then got up and slid a large book from the shelf, one she'd

bought on impulse Monday. She leafed through the yellowing pages carefully. It was a book of news

photographs from the old Life magazine, documenting a war that her great-great-grandfather had fought

in. Grainy patriotic pictures and ads with meaningless prices. Lucky Strike Green Has Gone to War.

What on Earth did that mean? Lucky Strike was evidently a tobacco cigarette; maybe green tobacco had

some weapons application back then.

At the sound of the elevator, she closed the book and returned it. Her husband came into the outer

office. "Coffee any good?"

"Just made it, half-real." He poured a cup. White stubble on his chin, rumpled workclothes. He got

up almost as early as she did, but didn't bother to shave and dress till noon.

"I didn't quite understand your message." He sat down on the chair normally reserved for nervous

graduate students. "Or quite believe what I heard." She always expected to get the house when she

called home. Norman was a cellist and composer, and spent the first hour of his workday warming up,

meditating over scales and intervals, and ignored the phone. But the house had told him it sounded

important, and so he picked up the message. He'd called back immediately and said he was coming over.

He looked around the neat office. "You have someone in?"

She laughed. "I've been tidying. Waiting for a longer parallax verification."

"Parallax, yeah, Relax. Sit down, you make me nervous." He gestured at the wallscreen. "This is it?"

She nodded. It was a neat column of words: WE'RE COMING, repeated sixty times.

"Well ... by itself, it doesn't exactly make one—"

"Norman. The signal came from a tenth of a light-year away. In English."

"Oh." He sipped his coffee. "We don't have anyone that far out?"

"Of course not."

"Creatures from outer space."

"Something from outer space." The phone rang and she picked up the wand. "Bell." She leaned

forward, elbow on desk, staring blankly at the column of words. "Anytime is okay. Is he the science

reporter?" She rolled her eyes. "Please. Can't we wait for a science reporter?" She exhaled slowly. "I

understand. You have the address? Right. Bye."

Norman smiled. "Science reporters aren't up at six?"

"They're sending their 'night man.' He's probably used to murders and things."

"They couldn't wait?"

"No, it's out on the nets. I called the Marsden Bureau in Washington as soon as I was sure what it

was."

"Oh, you're sure what it is?"

"No, no." She stood up and sat back down. "Just how far away, how fast. You know what the blue

shift is?"

"An article of clothing?"

She gave him an exasperated look.

"I guess it's like the red shift, but blue."

"Right. It tells how fast something is coming toward us, rather than away." She pointed at the column

of words, stabbing. "This thing came in a burst of gamma rays. Its source is coming at us with almost the

speed of light."

"Sounds dangerous."

"It's slowing down. If it weren't, I couldn't say anything about the blue shift—I mean, they could just

be broadcasting in high-energy gamma rays."

He frowned. "I don't understand."

"It's complicated." She waved the complications away. "Anyhow, I can tell how fast it's slowing

down. From that ... what it boils down to is that this thing popped into existence going the speed of light,

exactly one-tenth of a light-year away, and it's decelerating at such a rate that it will reach Earth in exactly

three months. New Year's Day."

"No coincidence."

"Of course not. They're giving us a creepy message. Those two words, combined with the blue shift

and position, say, "We know a lot about you, and we are vastly superior technologically. Ready or not,

here we come.' "

He rubbed the stubble on his throat. "Jesus." They both looked up when the elevator door chimed.

"The night man cometh."

Daniel Jordan

Dan didn't like the way the old elevator squeaked and shuddered. They were supposed to be

fail-safe, but he'd covered a story over in Jax a few years before, where one—newer than this had

dropped twenty floors. Broken necks and fractured skulls and only one survivor, her muffled screaming

terrible as the Rescue Squad rappelled down to cut open the roof. He pushed on the squealing door to

speed it up, then held the door for the cameras to roll out behind him.

He checked his watch: 6:17. The Kampus Kops wouldn't start ticketing until seven. Maybe the

press card on his windshield would protect him. The station only paid for two tickets a week, and he'd

already had them.

Dr. Bell, 436. He turned to the right and the cameras followed. The small one stopped every couple

of meters to take atmosphere: bulletin boards, an empty classroom, the sign that said department of

astronomy and astrophysics. Dr. Bell was waiting for him in a doorway, a small stocky woman with short

black hair streaked with white; a kindly face with an expression difficult to read. Dan introduced himself

and they went into the office.

The guy sitting by the desk looked like the janitor, but Dan had a good memory for faces and made

the name connection. He held out his hand. "Norman Bell, of course. I went to your concert in the park

last spring."

The man shook his hand and looked amused. "You cover music as well as astronomical anomalies?"

"No, sir." Something about the man compelled honesty. "Actually, I'm tone-deaf. It was a date."

He laughed. "She must have been worth pursuing." He stood up. "Well. I'll get out of your way."

"Please stay, Norman." She looked at Dan. "Is that all right?"

He shrugged. "As long as you don't stand or sit together. Confuses the cameras' tiny brains." They

would scurry around getting two-shots, long shots, intercuts, reaction shots. Half the footage would be of

a scruffy-looking man in gray workclothes, temporarily irrelevant. "I think it would shoot best with you at

your desk, Professor. I'll sit over here." He indicated the chair that Norman had just vacated.

"I'll go lurk by the coffee machine. Want some?"

"No thanks. Just came from Burgerman."

"That's how you got here so fast," Dr. Bell said. "I hope it didn't interrupt your breakfast."

"Oh, no," he lied, "just hanging out with the city cops. Trade gossip." He looked at the big camera

and whistled, then spoke slowly: "Establishing shot. Bee Gee two-seventy from behind subject to my

left." The camera drifted behind Bell and then wheeled out in an arc. "That's for editing back in the studio.

I just repeat the questions there and they can paste my face in from any angle. So the cameras don't have

to worry about me now."

The camera completed its circuit and said "okay" in a monotone. "Begin at the beginning," Dan said.

"How much do you know?"

"Almost nothing. You got some weird signal from outer space and the night desk thought it was

important."

"It is." She leaned back. "I got to the office a little after four. The screen was blinking for attention."

"Can you recreate that?"

"Sure." She pushed a button on her desk. "Find today, 0405."

The screen began to blink red, saying ANOMALY RECORDED GRB-1 0355 EST.

Dan whistled and pointed at the screen. The large camera rolled up to it and seemed to concentrate.

"Daniel," it said in a soft woman's voice, "please come adjust my raster synchronization."

Dan shook his head. "That's automatic in the new models." He got up and peered through the

camera and fiddled with a pair of knobs until the picture of the wallscreen settled down.

He returned to his seat and the small camera climbed up onto Bell's desk and stared at her. She

looked at it warily. "Am I supposed to talk to it?"

"No, just talk to me. What does the message mean?"

"GRB-1 is a gamma-ray burst detector. The 'one' is optimism; we never got money to launch the

second, which would've been a backup.

"Anyhow, some sources send out bursts of gamma rays, sometimes for hours, sometimes minutes,

usually just seconds. This satellite detects and analyzes the radiation. It has a small telescope, essentially a

fast wide-angle lens, that covers the whole sky every two seconds. If it detects a gamma-ray burst, the

bigger telescope can be on it in about a second."

"Does it have any practical applications?"

"One never knows, but I doubt it. Except that if the Sun ever did that, it would fry everyone on the

daytime side of the planet. It would be nice to have a few hours' warning."

"Do you have a picture of the satellite?"

"Sure." She pushed the button. "Find GRB hyphen one comma artist's conception." A dramatic holo

of the satellite appeared, silhouetted against the sun peeking crimson from behind the curve of the Earth.

Dan pointed at it and the big camera, which had been tight on Bell, turned around and got a shot of the

wallscreen.

"That's pretty but falsado," she said. "GRB-1 's up in geosynchronous orbit; the Earth's just a big ball

that gets in the way."

"So what's this anomaly? I mean, what does the word mean?"

"It means something unexpected, a mystery. In this case, we recorded the gamma ray burst, but

when the computer tried to find out what source it was, there was no object there, in previous records. I

mean down to twenty-fifth magnitude, which is about as faint as they get.

"That was the first anomaly, which was interesting. The second was startling. Whenever we get a

burst that's more than a few seconds long, we send out a request to the Japanese gamma-ray

observatory on the Moon, for backup data. Their detector's more powerful. It found the burst but said

that our position was a tiny hair off. We checked and no, our position was accurate. What it was, was

parallax."

She anticipated the question. "You hold your finger up at arm's length, and look at it first with your

right eye; then with your left." She demonstrated, blinking. "The finger appears to change position with

respect to things farther away. That's parallax.

"Stars, let alone galaxies, are too far away for there to be a measurable parallax between the Moon

and GRB-1, the right eye and the left. This thing was only about a tenth of a light-year away. It's not a

star."

"So what is it?"

"That's the third anomaly, the fantastic one. I went to analyze the spectrum of ... I went to analyze

the signal. It was a long steady beep for sixty seconds, and then a jumble for sixty seconds, and then

another steady beep, and then an identical jumble." She paused. "Do you know what that means?"

"You tell me," he said quietly.

"It means the signal isn't natural. The sixty-second minute is not an interval that occurs in nature."

"Yet it was coming from somewhere farther than humans have ever been?"

"That's right. And it's obviously a signal. I put it through a decryptation, what we call a Drake

program. It's simple frequency modulation, like FM radio. This is the message." She pushed the button

and said, "Previous previous."

Dan pointed at the screen and the camera obeyed. "They're coming?"

"Yes, initially at almost the speed of light. At the rate they're slowing down—fifty gees'

deceleration!—they'll be here in exactly three months. That's New Year's Day."

He was silent for a moment. "Suppose it's a hoax. Could it be a fake, a joke?"

"Well, somebody could get to my computer, verdad, and set me up for a practical joke. But they

couldn't get to the Moon. I mean, I just told them where to look, and there it was."

"So something's out there." Dan laughed nervously. "An invasion from outer space."

"We'd better hope it's not an invasion. You extrapolate back from the first signal, and when that

thing first appeared it was going point-nine-nine-nine ... fifteen or sixteen nines ... of the speed of light."

She leaned toward the little camera and spoke carefully. "If you took all of the energy that all of the world

produces in one year, and put it all into a space drive ... we couldn't make a golf ball go that fast. If it's an

invasion, we've had it. Perdido."

"Dios," Dan said under his breath. "Use your phone?" He reached past her and picked up the wand;

checked his watch while he was punching. "Charlene, listen up. Dan. You have to cut me a

fifteen-second teaser on the seven o'clock. Then a three-minute lead at eight, and a five-minute lead at

nine. And get ... listen, it's my ass, not yours. And get Harry and Rebecca down here right now for

depth and color, for nine."

He listened. "Just tell Julie to be down in Room Six in fifteen minutes. I'm gonna show him two

crystals that'll blow him into the next county. The next century. We're gonna scoop the whole fucking

world."

He nodded at the phone. "The Second Coming, bambina. The Second Coming." He hung up the

wand and pulled a data crystal out of the small camera, and then stood and extracted a similar crystal

from the large one.

"Thanks, Professor, you were great. Gotta run. Couple science types be here in a half hour." He

started for the door.

"Your cameras?"

"They'll use 'em." He sprinted down the hall, crashed through an emergency exit, and ran down the

stairs.

Norman Bell

Norman winced at the ugly clanging the emergency door precipitated. A pure tone would do the

job. His wife called maintenance and the noise stopped.

He stood up and stretched. "Guess you're stuck here. Bring you back something to eat?"

"Where you going?"

"Greek place, Nick's."

"Hmm. One of those spinach things. Spinach and cheese. No hurry."

"Spanakopita." He bent over slowly to pick up his bicycle helmet. "Don't forget to watch yourself on

the news."

She was looking at a screen full of numbers and letters. "I wonder what channel."

Norman tapped the number on the side of the large camera. "Seven would be a good bet."

Downstairs, he unlocked the ancient bike and pedaled squeak-click-squeak though campus, taking

the long way downtown to avoid traffic. There weren't too many cars at this hour, but drivers were

erratic. The ATC didn't kick in until seven.

He checked his watch and pedaled a little faster. He would have to cross University Avenue, and it

was best to be off the main roads well before "the bitching hour." Some drivers would go a little crazy,

their last few minutes of manual control, trying to make an extra block or two before the ATC system

engaged and turned them into law-abiding citizens—or at least turned their cars into law-abiding

machinery. Until then, an orange light meant "grit your teeth and step on it."

He got across University without incident, and kept up the rapid pace for the few blocks remaining,

just to get some exercise. He was a little winded by the time he locked up outside the Athens, Nick's,

and was glad Nick had the airco on inside. It was going to be a bad one today, close to eighty already,

with the sun barely over the trees. He could remember when it was never this hot in October in

Gainesville.

He selected a honey-soaked pastry and asked for strong Greek coffee and ice water, then put three

bucks in the newspaper machine and selected World, Local, and Comics.

He read the comics first, as always, to fortify himself. The world news was predictably bleak.

England and Germany and France snapping at each other, the Eastern Republics choosing up sides.

Catalonia declaring itself neutral today—the day after its sister Spain aligned with Germany, squeezing

France. Europe has to do this every century or so, he supposed.

The coffee and roll came and he asked for a glass of ouzo. Not his normal breakfast drink, but this

was no normal morning.

"Nick," he said when the man brought the liquor, "Would you mind turning on the seven o'clock

news? Channel Seven; Rory's going to be on."

"Your wife? Sure." He shouted something in Greek and the cube behind the bar turned itself on.

Still five minutes to go. The local station was filling time with its trademark "Girls of Gatorland" nude

montage. He watched a pretty young thing display her skills on the parallel bars, and then went back to

the paper.

Water riots in Phoenix again. Inner-city Detroit under martial law, the national guard called in after a

police station was leveled by a predawn kamikaze truckload of explosives. A man in Los Angeles legally

married his dog. In Milwaukee, twins reunited after sixty years immediately start fighting.

The local section had an unlovely, but possibly useful, photoessay that showed the types of facial

mutilations that various local gangs used to tell one another apart. They were more like social clubs

nowadays, however fearsome the members looked. Ten years ago there was a lot of blood spilled. Now

they just have those strange tournaments, killing each other in virtual-reality hookups, with dozens playing

on each side. Why couldn't Europe do that?

The Coming 11

Too American, he supposed, though the Koreans had actually started it.

He folded up the paper as the news program started. The lead story was Detroit, of course. There

was dramatic footage of a water-dumping helicopter that was fired upon and had to drop its load a block

away from the fire and retreat. The crowd shots around the ruins of the police station showed little grief;

one group of boys was cheering, until they saw that the camera was on them, and scattered.

Rory's discovery hadn't made the lead, but it got more time than Detroit. It wasn't often they had a

story that was both interplanetary and local.

There was an interesting deja vu feeling to watching it, seeing which parts of the interview were

chosen, and how they were modified. They didn't actually monkey with Rory's responses, but some of

the questions were changed. Predictably, there was nothing about parallax or the noncoincidence of the

human minute being part of the signal; nothing about what the distance and speed implied. That would

come in a later broadcast. This seven o'clock one just established their scoop.

Nick had brought the ouzo and stood by Norman, watching the broadcast. "Your wife gonna be

famous?" he said. "She gonna still talk to you?"

"Oh, she'll talk to me." Norman sipped the ouzo and looked away from the screen, which was

featuring a graphic feminine hygiene commercial.

"Guys from outer space," Nick mused. " 'Bout time they admitted they was out there."

"Really."

"Sure—been in the papers since I was a kid. Damn air force shot one down a hundred years ago.

They got the dead aliens in a freezer."

"Nick. You don't believe that."

"It was in the paper," he said. "Hell, it was on the cube." He raised both eyebrows high and bent to

polish a table that was already spotless.

"This could be pretty big," Norman said. "Rory didn't think there was any way it could be a hoax.

Otherwise, she wouldn't have called the news."

"Well, you don't never know, do you?"

"I guess in about a week we'll find out. You wouldn't care to make a gentleman's bet?"

Nick stared at his reflection in the plastic tabletop and scowled comically. "Where you from, Mr.

Bell?"

"Boston."

"Well, I never make bets with people from Boston."

"I was actually born in Washington, D.C."

"You kiddin'? That's even worse."

The news picked up with outer space again. They'd had time to contact the Moon. A confused

Japanese astronomer, the one who had verified Rory's signal, was on live, providing more questions than

answers: What do you mean, message? Speed of light? Who is this Aurora Bell? Rory hadn't identified

herself personally, of course, she was just some code name like UF/GRB-1.

When the announcer explained to the scientist that Professor Bell had decoded the signal as "We're

coming," repeated sixty times, his eyes narrowed. "Is this some sort of a college prank?" Then someone

off-camera handed him a piece of paper. He stared at it for several seconds and then looked up. "We ...

um ... we apparently have verified the Florida analysis. "We're coming'?"

"So what does it mean, Dr. Namura?"

The delay was longer than the usual Earth-Moon time lag. He shook his head. "I suppose it means

they're coming. Whoever 'they' might be." He spread his hands in a gesture more Gallic than Oriental. "I

really don't have the faintest idea. Of course we can't rule out the possibility of a hoax. Not to accuse

your Mr. Bell." He glanced off-camera and back. "Mrs. Bell, Dr. Bell. Excuse us. We really do have to

discuss this." He walked away, the camera starting to track the back of his head, and then cutting to the

moonscape in the holo window behind where he'd been standing.

"Tell you what, Mr. Bell. I say it's a hoax. If I'm right, you owe me a hundred bucks. If I'm wrong ...

you and me gotta trade jobs for a day."

"What, you can play the cello?"

"Maybe. Never tried."

Norman laughed. "It's tempting, but I'll pass. Never was much of a pastry chef." He pointed. "Oh,

yeah. Rory wanted a slice of spanakopita."

"Sure thing. Fresh this morning."

A small dark man came in and let the door slam behind him. He was in formal evening wear and

looked as if he'd been up all night. "¿Que pasa, Professor?"

"Not much," Norman said. The man had called him Professor ever since he found out his wife

outranked him. "Invasion from outer space."

"Yeah, right. Lay ya odds."

"Better talk to Nick about that. Thanks." Norman took the spinach pie, paid, and left.

Willy Joe

"What the hell he's talkin' about?" Him and Nick probably been in the back room, coupla fuckin'

mariposas, everybody knows about Greeks, and the musicians, hell, do anything. Take turns down the ol'

dirt track. Otherwise why's he always here in the morning? Half the time, anyhow.

"They got some weird radio thing at the observatory. Had his old lady on the news."

"It's always somethin', ain't it?"

"Siempre." Nick brought out a small cup of strong coffee, a sausage pastry, and a glass of retsina

wine. He set them down in front of Willy Joe with a neatly folded five-hundred-dollar bill under the

saucer. "So how's business?"

Willy Joe palmed the bill and took a sip of coffee. "Always good, first of the month. Runnin' me

ragged, though."

"Pobrecito," Nick muttered as he walked back to the pastry counter.

"So what's that mean?" he snapped. "What the fuck you mean by that?"

"Just an expression."

"Yeah, I know what it means. You watch your fuckin' mouth." Willy Joe shifted, slumping back in

the chair. The new belt holster was uncomfortable in the small of his back. He didn't have to carry a gun

on these collection rounds, anyhow. Who'd fuck with him? Not to mention Bobby the Bad and Solo out

in the car.

Got this fuckin' town by the nose, now the new mayor's in. Bought an' paid for before the

Commission election back in '40. The bitch last year was hard to handle. She found out what it was to

push on Willy Joe, though. Might as well piss in the sea, bitch. Nothin's gonna change.

He unfolded his list and checked off the Athens. It was the last twenty-four-hour joint; the others

wouldn't be open for a while. He took the phone wand out of his pocket and said, "Car."

"Solo here."

"Look, we're ahead. You guys go do what you want till quarter to nine. Make it nine, outside

Mario's." He put his thumb on the hang-up button while he drained the retsina. "Sanchez."

"Buenos."

"Willy Joe. Where you at?"

"Second and North Main, like you said."

"Okay; you try and keep up with Solo. Black and red Westing-house limo pullin' out from the

Athens."

"No problema if he stays in town." Sanchez was on a bicycle. With the ATC going in the morning,

you could keep up with traffic on foot without overexerting yourself.

The limo moved smoothly in a diagonal from the curb, between two cars and into the left lane.

Headed for the ghetto, interesting. Bobby the Bad was okay but a little dumb. Solo was new; friend of a

friend in Tampa. He acted a little too tough. Willy Joe would love to get something on him. Someday he

might need a little lesson in who's boss.

"Nick." He held up the empty wineglass. "Another retsina. You got the sports page?"

"Get you one." He brought the bottle over and then put a buck in the paper machine.

Willy Joe snatched the sports section. "See if I got any money left." He took a leatherbound

notebook from an inside pocket and checked his bets against the columns of results: Thoroughbreds at

Hialeah, dogs at Tampa, jai alai in town. He knew from last night's news that he'd lost his biggest wager:

convicted murderer Sally Anne Busby chose the wrong door and was electrocuted. The bitch. He'd

played a hunch and put a thousand on lethal injection.

Won a dog trifecta, though. All told, he was down $378. So he'd bet double that today. He spent

twenty minutes drawing up a list distributing the $756 among safe bets and long shots, and then called his

bookie.

The cube had some black broad talking to the professor's wife. "Did you ever expect this sort of

thing to happen?" she asked. "Is there any precedent?"

"Nick, you wanna put somethin' else on the cube? Enough about the fuckin' president."

Marya Washington

"Nothing I'd call a precedent," Professor Bell said. "As you certainly know, there have been

ambiguous SETI results—"

"Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence," Marya supplied for her audience.

"Yes ... that may come from other intelligent species, or they may be radio signals generated by

some natural process we don't completely understand."

"Like intelligence," Marya said.

"Quite so." She smiled broadly at the younger woman. "But in more than twenty years of analysis,

we haven't gotten any clear semantic content from the three suspect sources. This one is as plain as a slap

in the face."

"And as aggressive?" She held up two fingers in front of her chest, out of sight of the camera.

"That's not clear. If they were attacking us, why announce that they were on their way? Why not just

sneak up?"

"On the other hand," Marya said, "if their intent is benevolent, why don't they say more than 'ready

or not, here we come'?" One finger.

"Well, they have three months to go. This first signal might just have been to get our attention."

"They certainly have done that. Thank you so much, Dr. Bell, for taking time here at the University

of Florida to explain this interesting new development to our audience at home; this is Marya Washington

reporting live from Gainesville, Florida; we now return you to your local stations." She smiled into the

large camera until it clicked twice. Then she leaned back in the chair and yawned hugely.

"Caramba. I guess astronomers always discover things at ungodly hours."

"Used to be. It's around the clock now."

"I suppose. Well ... thanks, Aurora—can I call you Aurora?"

"Rory."

"Thanks for your patience. I wish we'd had more time, but we're competing with some big hard

news." She laughed. "As if a police station being blown up was anything compared to this."

"Oh, my. Was anyone hurt?"

"Eleven dead they know of. It was leveled."

"Funny I didn't hear the explosion."

"Oh, no, no. It was up in Detroit. It may not have been directed at the police, either. They were

holding some Mafia guy who was going to sing to the grand jury on Monday ... You didn't know about

any of this, did you?"

"No, I—I'm afraid I don't pay much attention to the news."

"Me neither, for a reporter. Since I specialize in science stories. My big newsmagazine is Nature."

Rory picked up a beige crystal. "Astrophysical Review Letters. All the latest gossip." She tapped

it on the table, thinking. "So what about this special? What will you want me to do?"

Marya interpreted the gesture as impatience. "Oh, don't worry. No rehearsal or lines or anything. I'll

just be interviewing you the way I did today, but in more depth. Bother you as little as possible."

"But I really do want to be involved. SETI is pretty far from my specialty, but I seem to be thrust

into it. Besides, it was a passion with me thirty years ago, when I was an undergraduate."

"Was that about the time they found the first source?"

"Five or six years before that, actually. By the time they heard from Signal Alpha, I was pretty much

committed to the physics of nonthermal sources, academically—not much time for little green men."

"Who didn't materialize anyhow." Marya took a leatherbound bookfile from her purse, flipped

through the pages, and pulled out a blue crystal with seti-l printed in small block letters across the top.

"You have the Leon survey book?"

"No. Heard of it." She took the crystal and slipped it into the reader on the desk. It hummed a query

note, copyright, and Rory told it "general fund." It copied the crystal and ejected it. Rory looked at it.

"This has the raw data?"

"All three stars. The reductions, too."

"Well, we might want to redo them. It's been a few years, early forties?"

Marya squinted at the back of the crystal. "Twenty forty-three."

"Don't know how much has happened in eleven years." She asked the desk for the department

roster, and it appeared on two screens. "You'll be talking to Leon, I guess—he's where, Cal Tech?"

"Berkeley. I called his office and left a message asking for an appointment. But who do you have

doing SETI here in Gainesville?"

"No one specializing ... but Parker's pretty sharp. He does our radio astronomy courses, intro and

advanced, and he's kept up on SETI. Keeps the undergrads excited." She wrote his name and number

down on a slip of paper. "Excited as I was ... and will be again, looks like. Mysteries."

"It should be a good show. Network gave me two days to come up with forty-five minutes, though,

so I have to move." She put the crystal back, and hesitated. "Um ... can you sort of assign me someone?

Someone less senior than Parker, some grad assistant I could call at any ungodly hour for information?"

"No, I can't get you a grad assistant," she said, and studied Marya's reaction. "You're stuck with me,

I'm afraid. I wouldn't let anybody else share in the fun. Parker can give us both an update, but I'm your

pet astronomer for the project. Finders keepers."

The elevator bonged. "Well, hablar del diablo. Here comes Parker." A tall man, unshaven and

bleary-eyed but wearing a coat and tie with his kilt, shambled down the hall toward them. He had small

rimless glasses and a goatee.

Pepe Parker

He leaned against the doorjamb, a little out of breath. "Rory ... what the hell?"

"A reasonable question. Pepe Parker, this is Marya Washington."

He peered at the attractive black woman. "I know you. You're on television."

"Not at the moment," she said. "Newsnet asked me to put together a special on this message."

"And I took the liberty of volunteering you."

"Oh, muchas gracias. I had so much time on my hands."

"If you'd rather not—" Washington said.

He raised one hand. "Kidding. Look, I don't have half the story: Lisa Marie had the news on and

recognized your voice; she punched 'record' and woke me up. Or tried to. I was up at the dome till past

three,"

"What on earth for?"

"Don't ask. Don't get me started. Be nice if somebody besides me could make the goddamned

bolometer work. So you got some LGMs?"

Washington looked at Bell. " 'Little Green Men.' I don't know what else it could be. Open to

suggestions."

"Could it be a long-delayed hack? That occurred to me on the way over. Some eighty-year-old

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THECOMINGJoeHaldeman[02jun2002—scannedandproofedfor#bookz]Thisbookisfortwoguyswholiveathousandmilesapartandhavenevermet:RickyandRusty.Both,bycoincidence,weremarinesinthePacificinWorldWarII.RickyisOttoneRiccio,poetandprophetandrascal.Everyteacherneedsateacherlikehim.RustyisJamesHevelin,whoisnevercall...

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Joe Haldeman - The Coming

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