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Transmission
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Kevin checked how he looked in the mirror before heading out. It wasn’t vanity; he wanted to make sure that there was no possible way anyone could recognize him. He had his hoodie pulled up over his head, dark glasses on to break up some of the lines of his face. It wasn’t great, but if he hunched in enough then he could almost convince himself that people wouldn’t be able to tell that it was him.
“It will have to do,” he said to himself.
His mother had left the house a few minutes before, out talking to more lawyers, or maybe trying to find another job, not that anyone wanted to hire the mother of the boy who’d lied. The doors were locked against the continued presence of the reporters out front, and would probably stay that way even after she got back.
“She’ll be mad if she finds out I did this,” Kevin said, but that was part of why he was wearing the disguise. He’d been sitting in the house too long, with no school because of his illness, no chance of going out because of both the reporters and his mother’s fear of what might happen. He was going crazy there, and he suspected that was only making things harder for his mother. He needed to get outside at least for a while.
His phone was full of messages from people he didn’t know. Some were questions, more were insults. One or two held threats, or promises that they would pay Kevin if only he would tell them his story.
Kevin wasn’t sure that he wanted to be careful then. He felt as though he might explode if he stayed hiding out for much longer. He looked out the back, trying to judge if he could get out of there the same way Luna had gotten in. A few weeks ago, he wouldn’t have had to worry about it.
Now, he thought about the tremors that came and went in his body, the moments of losing time and the dizzy spells. He fetched a stepladder from where his mother kept it in the garage, setting it up against the fence and using that to climb over, to a small path that ran between yards.
Kevin kept his head down as he went along, making sure that no one saw his face. Even though the part of town where he lived wasn’t a bad one, it was just a few blocks to a more industrial area, where factories stuck up like fenced-in boxes, and occasional rusted out machinery pointed to the businesses that hadn’t done so well.
“Come on,” Luna said, after they hopped the fence, setting off at a walk that took them through some of the abandoned buildings, past graffiti that looked as though it had been painted with someone’s eyes shut.
They came out closer to the center of town. Kevin kept his hood up, sure that even here, away from his house, people would spot him.
“We could go to the mall,” Luna suggested.
Kevin shook his head. “Too many people.”
“The square then,” Luna suggested.
Kevin nodded. There might be almost as many people there in the middle of town, but they would be moving on more, less likely to notice a kid keeping his head down. In the mall, security would probably think he was there to steal something, but out in the open, he and Luna could walk where they wanted without it being a problem.
They headed into the heart of town, for a small square where they and their friends had hung out since they were kids. There was a smaller block of park there, with trees at each corner, and a statue in the middle that had probably once been a monument to someone very important, but had now been worn by the wind and rain until it could have been anyone. By the time they got there, Kevin was so exhausted that he started looking around for a bench to sit down on.
“Kevin,” Luna said, “what’s wrong?”
“I’m just tired,” Kevin said.
Luna frowned, obviously not believing it. “Well, we could always go to Frankie’s.”
The diner had been one of their favorite places for a long time. Maybe if he hadn’t been so exhausted, Kevin might have been worried by that, but as it was, he could do with somewhere to recover a little from the effort of the walk. He nodded.
“I thought you managed to go trekking through the jungle,” Luna said.
“I think things are getting worse,” Kevin said, as they made their way toward the diner. “It’s like I have to concentrate to make my body do things.”
Even that wasn’t putting it right, but he wasn’t sure there were words for it. That was one of the hardest parts about having such a rare illness: it meant there weren’t really the words to describe everything that was happening.
“You should go to the hospital,” Luna said, and she sounded as if she wanted to call for an ambulance right away.
Kevin shook his head. “There’s no point. We know what’s happening to me. It’s not as though they can do much to help.”
“That can’t be true,” Luna said. For a moment, Kevin heard her voice catch and he thought that maybe she might cry. “I know… I know they can’t cure you, but they can help with the symptoms and things, right? They can slow things down? They were doing it in the NASA place.”
“Because they had some of the cleverest scientists in the world,” Kevin pointed out. “I don’t think they’re going to want to help now. And… if I go to the hospital now, I think it would cost too much. I don’t think Mom could really afford my treatment even before all this. Now, with the lawyers and stuff…”
Kevin didn’t know how much a court case cost. A lot, he guessed. His treatment cost a lot too. Was that twice a lot, then? A lot squared? When he had no idea of the amounts involved, his imagination couldn’t even begin to supply the amounts.
“Okay,” Luna said, “but we should at least get inside. Come on, Frankie’s isn’t far.”
They went into the diner, which wasn’t busy at that time of day. There were a few kids Kevin half recognized, a couple of older guys in one corner, and the owner, a fifty-something man who seemed to spend most of his time wiping down the counter with a cloth. It was a deliberately old-fashioned kind of place, and it should have meant that Kevin’s friends didn’t like it, but it also had great ice cream.
“I’ll go get ice cream,” Luna said, pointing to a corner booth. “You sit down.”
She made that into an order, and Kevin did it. He needed to sit down anyway, and if it meant that Luna was buying the ice cream, that was even better. There was a TV on in the corner of the diner, and for a moment or two, Kevin thought that was okay. Then the news came on, and the pictures of the scenes around his house continued.
Kevin did his best to ignore it, but it wasn’t easy. That the channel was still there at all was kind of surprising; maybe someone still believed, or maybe they just hadn’t gotten around to looking at something else yet. Either way, he sat there, hunched in on himself. It was hard to imagine that just a few weeks ago, he and Luna had come here regularly; that everything had been normal. Now, he was sitting here, and as far as Kevin could tell he was pretty much just waiting to die.
That was a thought he didn’t want, but it crept in when he wasn’t looking, sitting down in his mind and refusing to budge, no matter how he pushed at it. He was going to die. He’d been able to ignore that while there had still been all the stuff with the aliens, the messages, and the trip to the rainforest. Now, there was nothing to do but sit there and think about it.
“Well,” Luna said, coming back with two glasses filled to the brim with ice cream, “you look miserable. Better cheer up, or you’re not getting ice cream.”
Only Luna would make fun of him when he was like this. Only Luna would know that it was exactly what Kevin needed.
“You’re just looking for an excuse to have both,” Kevin said.
Luna smiled. “Maybe. You’re still stuck thinking about what you could have done differently?”
Kevin nodded. “I don’t know why. I guess… I just keep hoping it will make sense.”
“Hope is good,” Luna said. “I think it’s good you’re still listening. You shouldn’t give up, even if people don’t believe you.”
Kevin nodded. He needed this. He needed something to hold onto, otherwise—
“Hey, wait, you’re Kevin McKenzie, aren’t you? The boy who made up all that alien stuff? You used to go to our school.”
Kevin looked over to find that some of the kids were looking his way. He was about to tell them that he didn’t want trouble, but Luna was already on her feet, moving toward them.
“Kevin didn’t make anything up!”
“Of course he made it up,” one boy said. “Who would be stupid enough to believe in aliens?”
“You and everyone else, apparently,” Luna snapped.
“Are you calling me stupid?”
Kevin got up, joining her. “We don’t want any trouble.”
“So why did you do it then?” a girl at the back demanded. “My parents were so worried about aliens coming that they were talking about selling our house and moving out into the countryside.”
More people were staring at them now, and people had their phones out. Kevin knew he couldn’t be seen here like this. His mom would go crazy. Besides, he’d seen what large groups of people could be like.
“We’ll just go,” Kevin said, holding up his hands. “We don’t want to cause a problem.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” the boy who’d spoken first said. “Not until you admit what you did.”
He stood there with his arms folded, looking like he meant it. That was a problem, because the longer they stayed there, the more people would be watching. Luna seemed to be thinking the same thing, and, being Luna, she took a more direct approach to the problem:
She walked up to the boy in the doorway and pushed him, hard.
“Run, Kevin!”
She was already running, and it took Kevin a moment to realize he should be doing the same, but only a moment. As tired as he had been, he was recovered enough now to run past the boy, following Luna as she ran out into the middle of the town. He ran as fast as he could, ignoring the way his breath came in short bursts, trying to keep up as they retraced their steps, heading back through the factories and past the rusting metal. Kevin ran until he felt that his heart might explode in his chest, his lungs burning.
When it was obvious that no one was following, he and Luna came to a halt, and to his surprise, Kevin found himself laughing.
Luna laughed too. “That was fun.”
“My mom is going to kill me,” Kevin pointed out, but right then, even that didn’t sound so bad. The truth was that he felt better than he had for days now. It felt like so long since he’d done something as simple as getting into trouble with Luna, running away before it could turn into anything worse.
“Your mom will be fine with it,” Luna said.
“I’m not so sure about that,” Kevin replied, because she would be angry that he’d gone out like that, angry that he’d risked everything by going where people might see him. “When I get home, I’m going to have to…”
He trailed off as a feeling started to rise through him. A feeling he knew far too well, because it had been there before the facility, before NASA, before all of it.
“What is it?” Luna said. “What are you going to have to do?”
Kevin shook his head. “Luna, I think…”
“What?” she said.
“I think there’s another message coming through.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Kevin stood among the factories, listening to the transmission as it started to come. He struggled to latch onto the message. That was hard at first; harder than it had been, and harder than Kevin suspected it should be.
He started to worry. What if whatever it was in his brain that connected with the transmissions had changed, shifting with the slow progress of his illness? What if there had only been a brief window when his brain was receptive to it all, and now it was starting to pass beyond it? He tried to concentrate, focusing on the sounds and willing them to make sense.
An image burned in his brain, numbers shining there in neat rows of coordinates. Kevin wouldn’t have recognized them as that, but he’d seen strings of them before, when he’d known to shift the telescope the first time to pick up the stream of the message.
“Kevin?” Luna said. “Are you all right?”
Kevin didn’t know how to answer that. The strange part was that he felt better than he’d felt in days, maybe some interaction between his illness and the message making the symptoms feel better for the moment.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think… I think the aliens want us to look for signals in a new place.”
It was what they’d wanted the last time he’d had a signal through straight to his brain like this, the power of it almost impossible to hold. It had been the beginning of all of this.
“So who do we tell?” Luna asked.
Kevin must have stared at her too long in the wake of that, because she spread her hands.
“What? We have to tell someone,” she said.
Kevin knew she was probably right. If there was a fresh message, people would want to know. The problem was that he wasn’t sure how they would react. He’d seen all the reporters who were still outside of his house. He’d seen the pain that it had caused his mother. Wouldn’t it be better to just keep quiet and protect her?
“I’m not sure if anyone will believe me,” he said. “They think that I’m a fake. If I tell people, then they’ll assume that I’m just trying to get attention.”
People wouldn’t listen to him now, whatever he said. If he came forward with another string of numbers, wouldn’t they assume that he was just trying to start it all again?
“We could tell your mom,” Luna said. “She’d believe you, and she’d know what to do.”
Kevin shook his head. “I’m not sure she would now, not after all the trouble this has caused. Even if she did, I don’t know if anyone would listen to her, either.”
“Who then?” Luna asked. “We have to tell someone. A reporter, maybe?”
That would at least get the news out into the open, but again, it didn’t feel like the right idea. If he went to the reporters, trying to explain, wouldn’t they just make fun of it? He needed to be able to prove it. There was only one place he could do that, only one place where they might be able to realign a telescope to pick up whatever new signal awaited.
“We need to contact someone at the NASA facility,” Kevin said.
Even as he said it, he could guess how difficult that might be. He took out his phone, trying to think of the best way to do it. It wasn’t as though he had direct numbers for any of the people who might be able to help.
He decided to start with Dr. Levin, because at least the SETI director had seemed more sympathetic than Professor Brewster. He found a number for SETI online and called it, listening to it ring and finally getting through to reception.
“Hello,” the receptionist said. “SETI Institute. How can I help you?”
“I need to speak to Dr. Levin about an urgent matter,” Kevin said, trying to sound as grown up as he could. Maybe if he could make it sound as though he was a colleague or something, they might let him speak to her.
“Who is this?” the receptionist asked.
“Well… um…” Kevin looked over at Luna, who shrugged. “This is Kevin McKenzie. But I have to speak to her right away. There’s been another message, and there’s a second set of coordinates, and…”
He heard the click as the receptionist hung up.
“They wouldn’t even let me explain,” Kevin said. That hurt, that after so much they would hang up without even letting him say anything.
“We need to keep trying,” Luna insisted. “Here, let me. We’ll try NASA. They’ve got the telescopes, after all.”
She rang, and pressed some buttons. It seemed that she did a better job of sounding older too, because when she spoke, it sounded to Kevin more like her mother than it did his friend.
“Hello, I was wondering if you could put me through to Professor Brewster? It’s quite urgent, yes. It’s Professor Sophie Langford of the University of Wisconsin. Yes, I’ll hold.”
Kevin hadn’t known that Luna was quite that good at making things up on the spot. She thrust her phone at him, and Kevin took it, just in time for Professor Brewster’s voice to come onto the other end of the line.
“Hello?” Professor Brewster said. “Professor… Langford, was it?”
Kevin took a breath. “Professor Brewster, it’s me, Kevin. Don’t hang up, it’s urgent.”
“What are you doing calling this number?” Professor Brewster demanded. “And getting through to me under false pretenses? Don’t you think you’re in enough trouble already, young man?”
“Listen to me,” Kevin said. “I wouldn’t be calling if it weren’t important. There are things you need to know.”
“I know quite enough about your situation,” Professor Brewster said.
“That’s not it,” Kevin insisted. “There has been another message! A new set of coordinates. The aliens said—”
“That’s enough,” Professor Brewster said. “We all put enough time and effort into chasing this charade, without trying to revive it. I’m going to hang up now, Kevin. If you contact this facility again, I will be passing the details of it along to the police.”
He hung up, just as firmly as the receptionist had.
Kevin stood there, trying to work out what to do next. He didn’t have any other phone numbers to try, unless he was going to attempt to call a journalist or the White House or something, and in both those cases, he suspected that he would get pretty much the same response that he’d just had. He could go home and try to talk to the journalists there, or he could wait for his mother, but both of those options risked him being ignored, and—
“So,” Luna said, interrupting his thought process, “how are we getting to SETI?”
“What?” Kevin said.
“It’s the best option we have,” Luna said. “If we go to them, they’ll see that you’re serious, and they’ll be able to persuade NASA to move their telescopes. Dr. Levin always seemed far nicer than that Professor Brewster anyway.”
When she put it like that, she managed to make it sound so utterly logical that there was no arguing with it. Luna had a way of doing that kind of thing that was kind of terrifying, in its way. Even so, Kevin thought that he should at least try.
“My mom will kill me if I do something like that,” he pointed out.
“Your mom loves you too much for that,” Luna said. “Anyway, she’s going to ground you forever for sneaking out as it is. You might as well save the world while you’re in trouble already.”
“You don’t have to get into trouble though,” Kevin pointed out. “Your parents will be mad if you just go off to San Francisco.”
“You think I’m letting you do this alone?” Luna demanded. “You think I’m letting you get all the credit for finding the aliens again? You think I’m letting you have all the fun?”
“I’m not sure that it will be exactly fun,” Kevin said.
Luna was already shaking her head. “You got to go to the jungle without me, but you’re not leaving me behind for this part, Kevin.”
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
They bought bus tickets to San Francisco from a clerk who eyed them suspiciously. Kevin wasn’t sure if it was because the man recognized him from the news, or because he thought they were probably runaways, or both. They still managed to buy tickets though, and snagged two seats toward the back of a bus that rattled along half full in the direction of the city. They huddled in them, and Kevin found himself grateful that Luna was there. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to do this without her.
The bus journey seemed to take forever, and Kevin spent most of that time trying to work out what he might be able to say that would be able to convince them that he was telling the truth. He couldn’t just ask them to trust him, not after last time.
“Of course you can,” Luna said when he said as much to her. “You ask them to check the location of the signal. They might not be able to work out what it means, but they’ll still hear it.”
She made it sound easy, but the truth was that it probably was their best option. So, when the bus got into the station, Kevin set off with Luna, finding a taxi that would take them in the right direction, trying to ignore the way his body was starting to shake.
“You going for the excitement there?” the cab driver asked. “You missed most of it. They stopped talking about aliens a couple of days ago.”
“Maybe they’ll start again,” Luna said. “You never know.”
The driver took them as far as the entrance to SETI. There weren’t the people camped out here that there were with the NASA facility, and Kevin was happy about that. It meant that he could simply walk in without people spotting him, or grabbing him, or—
“You?” the receptionist said almost as soon as he stepped through the door. “Didn’t you get the message when I hung up on you? You’ve caused so much trouble here already. Get out before I call security.”
Before, it had been Kevin’s mother who had gotten into a shouting match with the receptionist. Now Luna started forward, obviously spoiling for an argument.
“It’s okay,” Dr. Levin said, stepping out into the lobby. “I’ve got this. Kevin, what are you doing here?”
“He’s trying to get through to you,” Luna said, the irritation easy to hear in her voice. “But apparently people who have already betrayed him aren’t willing to listen.”
“Hello, Luna,” Dr. Levin said. “Do your parents know the two of you are here? You really shouldn’t be here.”
“There has been another message,” Kevin said, guessing that they didn’t have a lot of time. He didn’t feel as though he had a lot of time right then. Maybe it was the effort of coming all that way, but Kevin could feel the pressure in his head building, along with a dizziness that made the world swim. He pushed it back. This was important.
“Kevin,” Dr. Levin said, “we all know by now that the messages aren’t real. Even if you think they are, you need to stop this.”
“How did I know about Pioneer 11?” Kevin demanded. He’d had a whole bus ride in which to think about what he was going to say, and how he could convince Dr. Levin. “How did I know where the first signal would be? You saw me do that with your own eyes, Dr. Levin.”
The scientist started to shake her head. “That doesn’t matter.”
“It does,” Kevin insisted. “If you don’t believe the evidence in front of you, then what’s science for?” He paused. “If you can explain it away, just tell me. Tell me how I’m doing it, and I’ll turn around and go, but I think that you can’t, and you can’t, because this is real, and there’s another message.”
He would have said more then, but he couldn’t hold back the sudden pressure in his head.
Suddenly, he collapsed.
*
Blackness claimed Kevin. For once, there were no visions, no messages, and no signs of anything.
Just emptiness
He woke to harsh light, blinking, trying to figure out where he was.
Luna and Dr. Levin were looking down at him.
“Kevin, are you all right?” Luna asked.
“We should get you some medical attention,” Dr. Levin said.
“No,” Kevin managed to say, and for a moment, even he wasn’t sure which question he was answering. “No more doctors. Don’t call my mom. We have to listen to the signal.”
He realized he had collapsed. He was lying on the floor, in the spot he had been standing just moments before.
He heard Dr. Levin sigh. He wasn’t sure what he would do if she threw him out. Put the information on the Internet, maybe? Send it directly to some other observatory in the hope that they would do something with the information? Probably, he would be in too much trouble with his mother for that by then. He just had to stand there and hope.
He saw her eyeing him with more compassion than she had before; he suspected his collapse had shifted something within her.
“Okay,” Dr. Levin said, “okay, I’ll admit, I’ve been thinking about everything from when you first came here. Unless you somehow managed to take control of all of NASA’s systems… No, it just doesn’t work. But that means…”
“It means you believe me,” Kevin said.
Dr. Levin nodded. “Yes, I believe you. I don’t want to, but I can’t see any other way. What’s this message of yours?”
“Coordinates,” Kevin said. “Like the last time we had to change the telescope’s alignment, only different. They want us to focus on a different place.”
“For messages coming from a different patch of sky?” Dr. Levin asked. Kevin heard her sigh. “You know that no one will move a telescope just on my word, right? Not after…”
“After everything I did?” Kevin guessed.
Dr. Levin nodded.
“There must be someone,” Luna insisted, beside them. “Professor Brewster doesn’t have to know. Or we could find a way to hack in.”
It was surprising, sometimes, just how little respect for rules Luna could have. To Kevin’s surprise, Dr. Levin seemed to be taking her suggestion seriously.
“Hacking NASA is hard,” she said. “To do that, we’d need someone who…”
Then her eyes brightened with realization.
“Of course,” she said to herself. “Phil.”
Kevin nodded at the mention of the scientist’s name. “Do you think… do you think he would help?”
“He might,” Dr. Levin said. “He’s our best shot, at least.”
She and Luna helped Kevin to stand. It took an effort, but he was going to see this through.
“I can’t believe that I’m doing this again,” she said, “but I guess… I guess we need to take a trip to NASA.”
