The Lost Probe

A story by Keith Croes

The craft appeared above the sun and looked out at the nine circling planets.

"Find an orbit!" The captain's order rasped through his mouth slit like wind across the broken reeds of an overused bassoon. His three eyes bulged at the monitor. "Ckrylos, bang it!"

The navigator grinned, sandpaper skin curling back to reveal several rows of sharp saw-teeth. "A little close, aren't we," he commented. A hammer-hand swung down hard against a mushroom-shaped knob on the control panel and the he loosed a simultaneous shout: "Bang!"

The five crew members' bony heads snapped back in their padded seats.

"Hull temperature!" the captain bellowed.

"Twenty-five thousand and falling," answered the systems engineer.

"Take it just beyond that first planet, Ckrylos. Think you can handle that?"

The ship settled in and the crew waited for Ckrylos to unsnap his safety harness before releasing themselves. The captain punched an intercom. "Dr. Eylye, let's get those probes launched."

The sound of fumbling and breathing came back. The crew laughed barnyard noises. "Yes. Twenty minutes. They'll all be gone."

"Good. Then get up here." The captain turned and snorted at the group.

"Captain Bol?" It was Gotkon, the systems engineer.

"Speak."

"Variety of transmissions from the third planet. Intelligent life probable."

The captain smacked himself in the side and scratched.

Tired and distracted after a long day, Ralph Lambert walked through the front door of his Georgetown home and his left leg rocketed straight ahead, buckling his right knee down into a squishy bowl of strawberry jam and cottage cheese. A marble shot across the living room and ricocheted with a hollow thonk off the dog's head.

"Daddy!" Squealing, his five-year-old daughter attacked.

"Oh, Ralph." From the kitchen, his wife, Diane, held her arms toward him as if to say that she would have caught him if only he had fallen closer to her.

"Hillary..." He tried to pry out of his daughter's sticky headlock with one hand while holding his briefcase in the other and gave up, drawing her close and standing. The bowl let go of his knee with a sucking sound and clattered to the parquet floor of the foyer. "You little goober," he said, nuzzling a loud kiss into her neck. "What's for dinner?"

Diane answered from the kitchen. "We already ate. You just fell in Hillary's dessert." She appeared with a fistful of paper towels and, laughing, helped him wipe up the sticky pinkish chunks of cottage cheese. Hillary began chasing marbles, urging them into a brown leather pouch. The dog watched suspiciously from beneath the coffee table.

Upstairs, he changed and listened to the sound of Hillary's bath being drawn, a sound that did for him what a martini does for some men. Wearing jeans and a green polo shirt, he descended the stairs and squatted next to the coffee table. "Whatsamatta, Bingo?" He stroked the beagle's ears. Bingo's brown eyes rolled upward, but his head remained resting on his forepaws. He looked doubtful.

Halfway through dinner--chicken and dumplings, his favorite--Diane joined him with a cup of tea.

"How was your day?" she asked.

"The country's safe."

It was Diane's turn to look doubtful. "Hillary called a man 'daddy' at the store today--some...old guy, dirty, scruffy...yuk." She shuddered.

Ralph shook his head.

''You should spend more time with her."

"I know." He cut a section of moist dumpling with the side of his fork. "We'll do something tonight," he said.

"Tonight?" She fished out the teabag and strangled it on a spoon.

"Yeah. Before she goes to bed. It will only take a minute."

"What are you going to do?"

"Cook marbles." He smiled the smile she had fallen in love with, then shrugged. "Hey, it's something."

After her bath Hillary spent several agonizing minutes deciding which five marbles she wouldn't need any more, then stood on a chair that had been pulled up next to the range. She wore yellow flannel pajamas with a little white poodle emblem stitched on the chest.

"Oh, no," Diane said behind them. "Tell her not to do this by herself."

"You heard your mother. Never do this by yourself. Never do this without me or mom. Okay?"

The girl nodded solemnly, then turned and looked at her mother in amazement. "Daddy's cooking! I didn't know you could cook, Dad."

"Okay, now watch." Ralph lifted the frying pan off the burner and poured the hot marbles into a saucepan of cold water, then reached in and retrieved them. "Look." He held them in his palm. Water dripped from his knuckles back into the saucepan. "See all the little cracks inside." He and Hillary peered into the fractured globes. "That's science," he said finally.

"Now you're gonna buy me some more?"

"Yep. We'll buy you some more."

''That one's not broken."

"Which one?"

''The one that hit Bingo."

It was crystal clear with a ruby-red cylinder inside. Hillary stuck out her hand and jumped when the gray box above the kitchen door began a penetrating electronic chirping.

"Shit."

"Ralph!"

"Last time I answered that I didn't see you for a month." He put the marble in Hillary's hand, switched off the burner and tossed the other four marbles in the trash on his way out of the kitchen. The secure phone was in his library. He closed the door behind him.

"Ralph, we've got something hot here."

"Yeah?"

"Radio. Long wave. The Air Force has had sub chasers up all day."

"Where am I going now, Pete?"

"What's the matter with you?"

"I just got back from the Middle East. My daughter is calling strangers 'daddy.'"

"Well, this one's local, mid-Atlantic, anyway. But you may be tied up for awhile at the office. I could call Swanson."

Ralph groaned. "He hasn't broken a code since Vietnam."

"Well then, bring a razor."

"Get back!" The captain's huge paw clutched Ckrylos's shoulder and spun him away. "Get back, all of you. There's no reason for you to be here. Gotkon! Wohgi! You don't even know what you're looking at. Stations everyone! For all we know, we may have a fight on our hands." Gotkon moved too slowly and the captain kicked him in the rear and edged in beside Dr. Eylye, who stood in front of the receiver that had been specially installed for the trip.

Eylye was old and bent and would have been dead long ago if not for his brains. The smart ones were allowed to go naturally. The thought never failed to irk Bol.

"So?" he hissed.

"The eighth and ninth will land within hours. The rest respond normally."

"And?"

Eylye pointed one eye at the captain and left two on the screen. "I'll need the ship's computer to analyze the readings. We may as well wait for all of them to land."

''Do the third planet now."

"It will not save a significant amount of time to begin now."

"We have no time. Gotkon! Can we interpret their transmissions?"

"The computer is working on it."

"Are we being scanned?"

"No. These are very low-power transmissions--intraplanetary."

Bol addressed Eylye in quieter tones. "Can the computer handle the probes and these transmissions at the same time?"

"Yes." Eylye shuffled uneasily. "I'm curious, captain."

"That can be dangerous." Bol scratched his left arm impatiently.

"At my age, who cares? Obviously, you have not ruled out this star system. What if we find one of the other eight planets to be habitable?"

"We take it."

"And what if the third planet is habitable?"

"We take it. We analyze the threat and we take it." Bol shouted at everyone in the cabin. "We are not going back until we find a habitable planet! Unless we or another of our ships find a habitable planet, there is no reason to go back. Does everyone understand that!"

The crew was silent.

"I cannot agree to either of the actions you describe," Eylye said. "In view of the fact that this system has a planet with intelligent life..."

Bol grabbed the light fabric of the doctor's overshirt and pulled him close, his mouth slit inches away from the old one's bushy nasal antennae. "Those aren't actions, doctor, they are orders. Begin with the third planet--now. If we can live there, it is ours."

He shoved the doctor away and lumbered over to Wohgi, the gunner. "Is everything normal?"

Wohgi nodded.

"Speak!"

"Yes, sir! We are fully armed and operational."

Pete poked his head inside the door. "Do you guys want some more coffee?" he asked. The response was mixed. A minute later, wearing his white lab coat, he entered the room carrying two white foam cups of coffee. He put one down next to Ralph and the other next to Sam. "Sure you don't want any, Rita?" The woman stared at a computer printout.

Washington, D.C., was waking up under a heavy cloud cover, dry but dim and full of hurried headlights. The brightest spot in the city must be this room, Pete thought, a room the size of a warehouse with white soundproof paneling, full-spectrum fluorescent lighting in the suspended ceiling and row after row of Cray computers.

"Pete?"

Pete jumped.

"Sorry," Ralph said. He sat at a tiny desk looking lost. "This is not like anything we've seen before. No coded signal ever broadcast has looked like this. We need to know as much about the source as we can. We need some clues here. We don't even know what it is."

Pete nodded. "The boss will be meeting with the Joint Chiefs in--" He looked at his watch. "--20 minutes to decide who will get jurisdiction. My bet would be the Army. The Air Force has already ruled out subs. Whatever. They may go with a joint service strike force. But the first item on the agenda has got to be triangulation and identification of the transmitter. The Air Force couldn't take it that far, but they think it's on land and they think it's damn close. And it's a powerful son of a bitch. That's all I can tell you."

"We need a break."

"Okay." Pete looked at his watch again. "The boss will be checking in here in two hours to see how you and your team are doing, Ralph. Do whatever you want, but be awake when he gets here. Okay? Are we on line with Huntsville?"

Ralph nodded.

"We've got to humor them. But there's no doubt in anybody's mind that the best code crackers in the country are in this room. Sweet dreams."

Pete left and Ralph drifted the short distance down the hallway to his office, where he set a radio alarm for 10:30 a.m. and fell on a well-worn overstuffed couch. He woke to Elton John singing "Rocket Man"--Mars ain't the kind of place to raise a kid. In fact, it's cold as hell.

The signal was repetitious--a 20-second burst of information every 45 seconds or so--and when the boss left after informing them that a joint service strike force would be mobilized, Ralph assigned Rita and Sam to work on the information within each burst. He spent the balance of the morning and into the early afternoon graphing the variability between the bursts from when the signal was first picked up the previous morning. By 2 p.m. he had a real-time hard-copy tracing scrolling out of one of the printers.

Rita and Sam were huddled together at Sam's desk and Ralph stood behind them with a copy of the printout under his arm. "Let's compare notes," he said. "What've you got?"

They stared at him, as empty as a new blackboard.

"Nothing?"

Rita spoke, frustration squeezing her voice into higher pitches. "It's...it's probably numeric."

"It's probably numeric," Sam echoed quickly.

"But it could be anything, Ralph." She exhaled and turned away.

"Well," said Ralph, "looky here." The paper unfolded across the desk. "The transmission started at 8:56 yesterday morning--" His finger followed the path. "--and was static until about noon, then it was all over the place, sometimes settling down. And then, at about 8 p.m., completely different for 15 minutes, then back to baseline until 9:30 this morning. A few more blips until 11:30--and look, entirely different and holding. A whole new baseline."

The three turned at the sound of the door opening. It was Pete's head. "How's it going?" Three shrugs. "General Robertson is holding out on the strike force. Insists that it should be an Army operation. We're at a full stop."

"No triangulation?" Ralph asked.

"Not yet. And the national defense may be leaking off into the stratosphere. I found out just a few minutes ago that we don't even know how to jam this frequency. I'll be back. Dinner's at five."

The head disappeared and the phone on Ralph's desk rang. He answered it.

"Mr. Lambert, it's your wife." It was the receptionist, whose female voice was familiar. But Ralph had no idea who or where she was located.

"Thanks. Hello?"

"Hi. How long are you going to be, honey?"

''Hard to say."

"I just got back from taking Hillary to the hospital, but she's okay. Nothing serious."

"What happened?"

"She swallowed a marble."

"Oh, Christ."

"The doctor says it will pass. Took some x-rays, you know."

"When did this happen?"

"Oh, about 11:30. We just got back."

"And she's okay?"

"She's fine. Here..."

Hillary got on the line. "Hi, Daddy."

"Hi, you goober. You ate a marble for lunch?"

"Yeah. The one that hit Bingo."

"What?"

"The doctor's breath stunk."

"Yuk. You be a good girl now. At least it wasn't a basketball. Let me talk to Mom."

Diane came on. "Okay, honey."

"Why didn't you call me when it happened?" he asked.

She laughed, and Ralph was relieved that it was not an unhappy laugh. "Would you have been able to come?"

"I see what you mean."

"Can you call tonight?"

"I'll call. Watch her stools."

"I will. 'Bye."

"'Bye." He hung up. He was never there for the little things, the everyday tragedies and victories, he thought. Hell, he was never there for the big things. "My daughter is calling derelicts daddy," he said. Rita and Sam looked up.

"What?" Sam asked.

"Oh, uh, nothing." On the memo pad next to the phone he had scribbled 11:30.

Bol leaned over Gotkon and slammed the knob on the superspace communicator. "This is Verda gunship 102. You have our coordinates," he complained. "If we had anything more to tell you, don't you think we'd get back to you? Now, what do you want?"

"Bol, this is General Fohg. If you shut your slit for a moment, I'll tell you."

Gotkon laughed and got a shot in the side of the head. "Reading you, general," Bol hissed.

"The scientists have changed their minds again, Bol. If these mutant fleas maintain their current rate of reproduction, we only have six months, not a year. Repeat, we only have six months."

"I understand."

"Get your probes down, get your readings and get in and out of these star systems as fast as possible. We'll take any planet that's livable. If you meet resistance, don't hold back. Our ships are ready and a good chunk of the population is ready to follow you at a moment's notice. We're going crazy here." Bol heard a frantic rustling. "These things are everywhere, Bol. We can't take much more of it. Don't let us down."

"I understand." Bol smacked the knob and leaned on it for a moment. "Gotkon, put that audio transmission back on."

"Yes, sir." The weird noise filled the cabin: ...first guest tonight on the Larry King Show is author Clarence Wiley, whose book describes his bizarre abduction by aliens. No, no. He's shaking his head at me. They may or may not have been aliens. But they were three-and-a-half feet tall, were they not? Three-and-a-half foot beings who may or may not have been aliens. We'll be taking your calls here in the nation's capital....

"That's enough!" Bol roared, covering his ear holes. "Everyone below. Go on. Everyone. Take a break. Doctor, I'd like to speak to you a second."

Eylye let the crew pass around him and then moved forward. Bol sank into Gotkon's seat and gestured toward Wohgi's. "Here." Eylye sat stiffly. "What's the story, doctor?"

Eylye counted down on the six fingers of his right hand. "One is no good, two is no good, and five, six, seven, eight and nine are no good. Four is probably no good--I'll know in a minute. Three is strange."

"Strange?"

"I need more time."

"Doctor, you're the only one who knows what these probes are saying. Could you be protecting the third planet?"

"I have a family just as you do."

"If you are misleading me in any way, I'll take you back to where we popped into this system and drop you in its sun." Bol reached out and poked the scientist's chest with each word: "What...do...the...readings...say?"

Two of Eylye's eyes blinked. "At first it looked good. Now, I don't know." The doctor poked the captain back: "I...need...more.. .time."

When Pete stuck his head into the computer room the next morning, Ralph's arm locked around it and pulled him inside. ''We've got something."

"Whoa, I don't have my coat," Pete said. Rita and Sam applauded.

"It's telemetry," Ralph sputtered. "Numeric--all numbers. Base 12."

"And who figured that out?"

"Rita did," said Ralph.

"Ralph did," said Rita.

"Cray did," said Sam.

The three of them were loony from lack of sleep.

"Rita figured it might be telemetry, I figured it might be another base and Sam figured out how to ask the Crays," Ralph said.

"So what is it telemetering?" Pete asked.

Ralph paused. "We have no idea. Just numbers. They could mean anything. You'd have to know what the original questions were, what the thing was designed to measure--blood pressure, heart beat, velocity of flatulence release. Could be anything."

"Oh. Well, good job. But, uh, keep working on it, okay? We've got to know what it means. Anyway, we'll soon know where it's coming from. Triangulation begins--" He looked at his watch. "--two hours ago. Joint-service triangulation, to boot. We should know in an hour."

"One more thing, Pete," Ralph said. "That's the fastest transmission I've ever seen. We don't have anything that goes that fast. More than a hundred billion digits in 20 seconds. We had every computer in here doing cartwheels. And another thing, Pete. We'll never figure out what it means. No way. Not from this end, not with crypto. I intend to be home in bed within two hours."

"Ralph, look here." Rita had the real-time printout draped over her forearm.

"You better get out of here, Pete. You aren't wearing a coat." Ralph turned Pete around, shoved him toward the door and joined Rita.

"The second baseline has changed." She pointed.

"Yeah." He took a red pencil from his pocket and marked the edge of the paper. "It looks like it may be back to the first baseline where it was, what, about 24 hours ago. What the hell day is it, anyway?"

Ralph went to the stack of paper on his desk and worked his way back through the graph. "Rip the copy and bring it over here, will you Rita?" The phone rang, startling him. "Hello?"

"Mr. Lambert, it's Diane."

"Thank you. Hi, sweetheart."

"Just wanted to let you share the big moment. Or big movement, as the case may be."

"She passed it?"

"Uh-huh."

"Any pain?"

"And gnashing of teeth."

"Hold on, honey. Yeah, Rita, that second baseline came at 11:30 yesterday morning and ended at.--" With the phone receiver tucked into his neck, he checked his watch. "--8:32 this morning."

"That's funny," said Diane.

"What's funny?"

"That's when Hillary swallowed the marble and passed the marble."

"Yeah?"

"Uh-huh. Exactly."

"Exactly?"

"About 11:30 yesterday morning. And this morning at exactly 8:32. I looked at the living room clock--the one you keep synchronized with the atomic clock in Denver?"

"Right, honey. Uh, I gotta go."

Rita and Sam stood in front of his desk, watching him. "Oh, uh, you guys might as well get out of here. There is absolutely nothing more we can do. I'm just going to go over a few things. And, uh--" He smiled. "--you done good, kids."

For the next hour he sat at the tiny desk and compared the real-time graph to his memory of the past two days. Static readings the first morning, then movement--movement--then a sharp peak about 8 o'clock that evening, when he and Hillary cooked the marbles, then back to baseline until the next morning, then a new baseline at 11:30 when Hillary swallowed the marble--the marble that hit Bingo. Bingo. He looked at the 11:30 he had jotted on the memo pad. It was almost 10 a.m. when Pete stuck his head through the door.

"Ralph, there's something important I have to tell you."

"Yeah, I know."

"You know?"

"No. What?"

"The triangulation....this is unbelievable, but..."

"The transmission is coming from my house." Ralph shook his head. "I don't know what it is, Pete. But listen to me. If I'm not the first person through the door, I'll tell the Washington Post every secret I know and then I'll start making them up. So tell your friends we're on our way. Okay?"

Pete's head nodded.

Ralph dialed his home phone number and got no answer. On his way out of the computer room he took a last look at the real-time printout. There was a new baseline. "What the...?" He fled out the building and into Pete's car and they followed a military police escort to the suburbs.

It was a cloudy day, not quite as dark as two days ago, and everything seemed to Ralph to be artificial, simulated. The quiet neighborhood with its snap-in houses and carpet lawns. The green uniforms of the soldiers at the barricade. The square-jawed, clean-shaven face of General Robertson looming through the open window at Pete. "Joint service," he said to Pete. "The Air Force and Navy do the triangulation, my people take the objective. Is this Lambert?"

Ralph waved.

"You have some friends, Lambert, or we'd be inside by now. You also have some explaining to do." He backed away from the car and motioned at someone, then stepped up to the window again. "Colonel Knauer will be going with you." A studious type slid into the rear seat. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and carried an olive-drab box with dull-black knobs. A walkie-talkie drooped from his belt. "Call me when you find it," the general said. Knauer nodded. They drove the half block to Ralph's house.

The Volvo was gone and the house was empty except for Bingo, who waited in the foyer, his tail wagging and his nails clicking on the parquet. A rumble rose in his throat when he caught a whiff of Colonel Knauer. Ralph knelt beside him. "It's okay, boy." He patted the dog's side and held him.

"Do your thing, Knauer. The house is yours."

Pete sat in the living room and Knauer fiddled with the box, then carried it through the dining room and into the kitchen. "Looks like the dog got into the trash," he said. It was the first time he had spoken and his odd, squeaky voice in the familiar surroundings made Ralph smile. Ralph glanced at Pete, whose eyes widened. Bingo rumbled. "It's okay, boy." Ralph pulled the dog by its collar into the living room and up onto the couch, where he sat beside him.

Several cars pulled into the driveway and stopped, the sound clear and sharp through the open front door. Ralph heard his wife's voice and Hillary's scolding. "We're gonna tell my daddy, mister." Diane appeared in the doorway with a bag of groceries in one arm and holding Hillary's hand with the other. "This General Robertson is getting no Christmas card from us this year," she huffed, then headed for the kitchen.

The general stepped warily into the foyer followed by several other officers. His eyes sought Ralph. "She ran the barricade. Went right up over your neighbor's lawn."

A heart-stopping scream came from the kitchen and the general snatched the .45 from his holster.

"It's okay," Ralph said. "The dog got into the trash. Does it every now and then when we leave him alone. Isn't that right, Bingo?" He scratched Bingo's ears.

There was another little scream from Hillary. "Ralph, who is this man and why is he pointing that thing at us?"

"That's Colonel Knauer, honey."

Holding the box in front of him, connected to it by the tenuous tangle of an earphone wire, Knauer walked slowly into the living room. The other men watched, fascinated, hardly breathing as Knauer crossed the room and homed in on Bingo. "Here's your transmitter!" he squeaked. Bingo's tongue dangled out the side of his mouth and he looked from the men to Ralph, from the men to Ralph.

"Honey, what did you do with the marble?" Ralph yelled.

Diane appeared at the entrance to the dining room. Hillary ran in and leaped on Ralph's lap. "I threw it in the trash. Was I supposed to frame it?"

"Hi, baby." Ralph kissed Hillary's forehead. "What else was in the trash?"

"There used to be some old hamburger, but it looks like Bingo got it all."

"Looks like he got more than that," Ralph said. "General, if we don't get this dog back in one piece, you'll have to answer to her." He turned Hillary around to face the man, then nodded at Bingo. "You'll find a marble in there. It's not from around here."

The captain fumed back and forth at the front of the cabin, whapping miscellaneous reinforcement posts while Eylye stared blankly at the screen in the rear. "Tell me again, Eylye." The other crew members were at their stations trying to look occupied. "Tell me again."

"It's gone. We've lost contact with the probe on the third planet. But we have what we need. If you settle down before you hit some critical control instrumentation, I'll explain it to you."

The captain plopped in his seat and spun around to face the rear.

"Whatever life inhabits that planet, we could not live there. It is...volatile. Unpredictable movements, extremes in temperature and atmosphere--there are even extended periods when the environment becomes highly acidic. At one point there was a significant x-ray bombardment. Plenty of organic activity, yes, and there seems to be nice things like oxygen and nitrogen--the atmosphere at times appears ideal. But this, my good captain, is no place to raise a family. Granted, I have never seen readings quite like these before from any planet of any kind, but my conclusion must be that our people could not survive in such a place. End of report."

"We should go and see for ourselves," Bol mumbled.

"And waste more time? That's why we are using the probes in the first place."

The seat spun again toward the front. "Go below, Eylye. Strap yourself in." The captain sat quietly for a moment with his three eyes closed, thinking of the warm sand of his favorite beach, the lolling waves and the blue sky, his children sparkling in their slimy young excretions, wriggling and burrowing their way down to become pupae. "Ckrylos, speak!"

"Yes, sir!"

"Are we ready for the next star system?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Will this ship become a blackened cinder when we rematerialize?"

"No, sir!"

Bol scratched at something on his neck. "Then bang it."

"Bang!"

THE END

MORE STORIES BY KEITH CROES

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