The Pronto Glyph

A story by Keith Croes

Art Devine motioned the man into the room and he stood blinking bleary-eyed in the fluorescent lights. The stranger was an unshaven, lanky bag of loose joints and long bones wearing wire-rimmed glasses smudged to the brink of opacity and a hangover like an anvil around his neck.

Wade and Rose Astor looked at one another the way they did when anything out of the ordinary happened. They were too closely bound for independent reactions, one waiting for the other so that it often appeared that they had no reactions at all. Two brilliant, orderly little mice, Wade the hairy little father mouse, Rose the smooth little mother mouse, with three children and a combined government income well into six figures. Fingers poised at their keyboards, they returned their attention simultaneously to the man in the doorway.

Lounging back, hands locked behind his head, Frank Williams grimaced in sympathy. He was an alcoholic and the only person alive who knew it, a former Marine who hadn't had a drop since officer candidate school. His wife of 35 years had known, but she had taken it to the grave a year before. Frank's decades of self-discipline had somehow forged within him an iron will without evaporating an ounce of his generous nature, and he found himself drawn to the man, liking him, enjoying the way the glasses clung to the long nose, threatening a plunge to ruination on the green-speckled linoleum.

The fourth person seated in the room, Ned Fuller, chewed on a pencil and barely heard Art's brief introduction. A Russian sub had just entered Swedish territorial waters and Ned was smiling at the snippet of translated cipher on the screen in front of him: BEAR IN THE BALTIC. As the newest member of the team, he still experienced the jolt, the rush that came from being the first American to contemplate the machinations of friend and foe on the planet Earth. Though not as talented as the other three in linguistics or mathematics, his typical contribution lay in discerning meaning and context, in figuring out the puzzle from its pieces. And when his eyes focused finally on the disheveled figure next to Art in the doorway, he felt the cold breath of annihilation.

"Dr. Holbert is from the astrophysics department of MIT," Art was saying. Ned's scalp prickled with a disquieting intuition: compared to what this haggard figure had to offer, the Swedes faced a cake walk.

"Last night we became certain," Holbert said, "I mean, as certain as you can be about these things. Certain enough to break out the champagne." He smiled weakly, wavered and grasped the door jamb, his cheeks swelling like an alarmed blowfish, then going as hollow as craters. "Jesus, I'm sorry about this. It was--well, you can imagine the party. But the plane had been chartered--" He pushed himself upright and tried to brighten. "Anyway, we figured you folks might want to work on it, too. It repeats at the three hundredth variant. That's all we know. We think it's a message."

Art guided him back through the doorway and after a minute returned alone. "No public announcement will be made on this, folks," the chubby supervisor said. "It's more complex than anyone ever envisioned and the experts think it's a message. Eyes only. But you do it on your own time, okay?"

And so it was with little fanfare on a cloudy Thursday before payday that Wade and Rose and Frank and Ned came into possession of the first detected signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence.

The Astors shared their access codes for the ET series, as they dubbed it, often calling up the same display in order to bring a tandem approach to the problem. On these occasions the tapping of keyboards in the quiet room would be punctuated by utterances of agreement or disagreement or surprise as the two sought a foothold in the conundrum from another world. Though they sat several feet apart, what transpired on their respective screens was a sublime union of intricate thought processes. In the armamentarium of the Astors, it was the heavy artillery.

But the world was full of guile and stealth. Art hadn't accorded the MIT signal the status of a full-scale project, so the pursuit remained a hobby, a free-time activity. The national defense, as Art was wont to remind them, was still the top priority.

The Astors found the situation especially irritating. They could have no idea how much time Frank was spending on the signal. Condescending to his face and often witheringly cruel behind his back, Wade and Rose considered the aging civil servant an overpaid, undereducated, double-dipping ex-jarhead who hadn't cracked an important code since Vietnam. But the old fart might luck into something. So the MIT signal was receiving a good deal of attention from the Astors.

For three months, until Wade made the first perceptual leap, Ned feigned apathy toward the endeavor. He had meticulously filed all the data from the scientists--the numerical sequence, the audio, the frequencies, the time intervals--the same data that had been provided to all of them. But he couldn't call it up, couldn't bring himself to type out the access codes that he had assigned to it. And he sensed it there, at the tips of his fingers, a rearrangement of magnetic particles twirling on a hard drive in one of the many Crays in the next room, nothing more threatening than invisible tracks on ferrous oxide, yet malignant somehow. It lurked a few keystrokes away. And what he felt was not apathy, but dread.

"You're not working on the ET series?" Rose asked one day while the four were settling in after lunch. The bespectacled Holbert had made his besotted bestowal only several weeks before.

Ned shook his head. "Nah."

Frank was leaning back in his chair with his chin cupped in his hand, peering under droopy eyelids.

"Why not?" Rose and Wade said in unison. "Too much for you?" Wade ventured alone.

"Too much. That's right, Wade."

"Even Frank is giving it the old college try. State college, anyway. Isn't that right, Frank?"

"Why not?" Frank asked. The question was directed at Ned.

The three watched the husky young man shuffle papers around the desktop. "It's not a message. Can't be. I mean, not in the usual sense. Nothing we could ever hope to understand. If it's words, it's words we couldn't possibly translate." He shrugged. "No words, no meaning." He sat down and stared at a printout without making the slightest effort to comprehend it, knowing only that he had been looking at it before lunch. "Besides, I don't know where you guys find the spare time."

Holbert had provided them with a compression audio of the original long-wave radio signal and the MIT astrophysicists' clever numerical interpretation of the signal. The compression was simply a proportional shortening of the long wave into audible sound. The numbers, delivered on floppy disk in a locked courier pouch, consisted of a repeating series of 300 integers representing the fluctuating amplitude of the signal. Those same 300 changes in amplitude, echoed over and over and over, had begun who knows when and would stop whenever on a beam that had been reaching down the black throat of space for four billion years.

Amid considerable uproar ten years later, Reginald Holbert and his colleague, James Stoltz, would accept the Nobel Prize in physics. But three months later, three months after Holbert's vomiting flight from Boston, Wade Astor would make the most deadly observation of his career.

A simple algebraic relationship existed between every 25th integer, allowing the numerical series to be depicted as six pairs of coordinates. If one imagined a circle consisting of 300 degrees, each pair represented the two points on the opposite ends of a chord of the circle and thus transcribed a line.

The discovery may have passed by the others unnoticed had Wade not whispered, "Rose, get this!" one morning when Frank and Ned were not particularly busy. Rose was working on something else and her fingers rapidly tapped her screen clear and brought up Wade's display.

Frank stood. "Mind if we take a look?" he said, then strolled over and leaned on the back of Wade's chair. Technically, Wade had no authority to deny Frank. They all had identical clearances and, at least in theory, absolute access to each other's data. For some reason Ned rose and joined Frank at his vantage point over Wade's shoulder.

"Uh," said Wade, "it's a graphic of the MIT stuff. We're looking at 12 coordinates that are produced by this analysis. I was just about to connect them."

"Go ahead," said Frank.

Lines of various slopes and lengths appeared across the screen.

The instant he saw them, Ned made the second perceptual leap. "Run them together," he said. Wade paused.

"Tighten them up."

Wade's delicate fingers tapped the keys and the lines drew together. "Yessss!" Wade hissed. "Yes, Fuller!"

The resulting figure resembled a Sino-Tibetan glyph, a Chinese character. "It's not Chinese, is it?" said Ned.

"No." Everyone seemed to grunt it out at the same time.

"It can't be," Ned said. "It can't be anything." His voice had become shrill. "It can't be any fucking thing, people!" His eyes flew up to the doorway where Holbert had wambled in not so many weeks before, then squeezed shut.

But it was something. Two weeks later he saw it enter Wade and Rose.

Despite directives limiting handwritten notes to official stationery, Wade took to doodling the glyph on telephone message pads and software instructional manuals, and Ned had seen him draw the symbol on a napkin in the cafeteria. Though their paper waste was shredded at the end of each working day, the breach made Ned nervous enough to mention it. A week after they had first conjured up the glyph, Ned managed to get Wade alone.

"What's with the napkin, Wade?" he asked.

Wade took a second to work up a mien of defiance but gave up. What replaced it, telegraphed grudgingly through the heavy beard, was puzzled and lost. "I don't know." The balding head shook in bewilderment. Ned watched the chest hairs curling above the top button of a polo shirt. "I usually play it by the numbers." At that Wade smiled sadly. "I drew it on a Redskins ticket this weekend. They almost wouldn't let me into the game--said the ticket had been doctored. Can you imagine that?" Then his face went as blank as a gutted animal.

Ned heard the audio for the first time a week later. Frank started it up before connecting his earphone to the monitor and it screeched out, startling them all. Embarrassed by the disturbance, Frank fumbled with the earphone, finally driving home the small shaft of the plug and throwing the room into a shuddering silence. To Ned the noise had sounded like a flock of hungry birds.

And Wade and Rose had been looking at the glyph after lunch that day. Wade had whispered Rose over to his terminal at the same moment that Ned was chasing a pencil that had ricocheted off his foot. Squatting a few feet in front of Wade's desk, he turned and watched. Their faces, directed toward a slip of paper on the desk, seemed suddenly huge and vibrant, the faces of living colossi, and Ned felt a hot, voyeuristic flush. Wade's dark, hairy face and Rose's smooth, freckled face leaning toward one another, close enough to kiss, intimate, and Ned looking on as though through a telescope, appreciating every subtle, private nuance, every intermingling breath.

Wade saw something and was changed. His eyes leaped from the paper in front of him to Rose's right cheek. "Do you see it?" he whispered.

And then it entered Rose. It was the light of understanding in her eyes. "Yes," she said.

There was no mistaking it.

Art called them into his office the next morning, his flabby face pallid in the fluorescent lights. Ned and Frank sat on a frayed, burnt-orange couch.

"There's been a terrible accident," he said. "Wade and Rose are dead." He took a sip from a coffee cup enscribed with a blue Air Force insignia.

Frank and Ned stared at him.

"You won't see it in the papers, but I want to tell you what happened." He began coughing, choking. It lasted for a minute or two. He reached in a desk drawer, took out a paper tissue and wiped his mouth. "There's a lesson here somewhere." Emphasizing the words with rhythmic thumps of his hammy hand, he said: "You gotta...figure...out...how to...handle...the pressure."

Ned shifted uncomfortably.

"They were killed by a neighbor, a retired Army general. His security system went off about 3 a.m. They were coming up his stairs and he took them down with a 9-mm standard-issue pistol. They were carrying knives. They were coming after him."

Still holding the cup, Art stretched his thick forearms flat out across a green desk blotter. His eyes went out of focus.

"The police got there pretty damn quick and I wasn't far behind. The general--" He shook his head. "Hell, he's seen it all. But he'd never seen anything like the Astors. He was shook." A slow, careful sip.

"Anyway, I got the police to lay off the house until our people could arrive." Another slow sip. "They killed the kids. I couldn't begin to tell you how bad it was. I just couldn't begin to tell you." He stared for a long time. "You have the right to know this," he said finally. "And I wanted you to get it from me."

Frank and Ned exchanged glances and Art came out with a loud sigh.

"There's something else," he said. "The Russians have picked up the space signals. Naturally, we want answers, pronto. So I'm upgrading the MIT thing to priority one. It's now the Pronto Project. Get moving on it." He stood and motioned them toward the door. "There'll be some psychologists in to talk to you about the Astors...if you want to. Only nothing about the job, okay?"

Ned heard more about the Astors later that day from John, one of the security guards in the front lobby. John had a friend who had a friend who had entered the house with Art. Down the long walk of the Annandale home. Slowly through the open front door. Every light in the place on, every room ablaze in light, and the blood sparkling sticky red, spattered spin art on walls of robin's-egg blue and sunshine yellow. The torsos of the three children, found in separate bedrooms upstairs, had been relieved of their organs like garbage bags split open by dogs. Six little arms had been arranged in a pattern on the braided living room rug. Three little heads had stared up from the kitchen sink.

He pushed aside the memory of the day before, the Astors' shared moment of understanding, because he had to. If life was to proceed, if his steps were to take him from his apartment to his car to the office each morning and home again each afternoon, he had no choice. But in the weeks ahead he worked tentatively on Pronto, his efforts coming to resemble high school science projects. And he ignored the glyph.

A month after the Astors died their positions were filled by two men who apparently had cracked a priority-three Syrian code for a lower-level team. On their first day in the office Art stood in the doorway.

"We're not looking for numbers here," he huffed. Frank leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. The two new men, whose names Ned thought were Al and Joe, glanced up attentively. "We're not looking for similarities to hydrogen atom electron perturbations. We re not looking for star maps or chemical equations or base 12 mathematical progressions with only six exceptions. We're looking for a message." He peered directly at Ned. "The Russians are looking for a message, the experts think it's a message and so we're looking for a message."

Ned shook his head. "We're wasting our time."

"May I see you in my office?"

"No." Ned pointed at the new men and two mouths fell open slightly. "This is a signal from an alien intelligence. We have no common denominators here. None. Zilch."

Art slammed the door and left the four of them alone.

Ned stared at his computer screen. "If it's a message, we'll never know what it is," he said. "Never."

Frank called in sick the next day. It took Ned a second to recognize the voice at the other end of the phone when he called again just before quitting time.

"Can you get down here?"

"Where are you?"

"The Star Bar."

Ned paused. "Yeah, I know it. Give me 20 minutes."

Frank was wearing the same clothes he had worn the day before, a short-sleeved plaid cotton shirt and green work pants. Sliding into the booth across from him, Ned thought of his father and of his father's closet full of green permanent-press pants from Sears.

"What's up, Frank?"

A scalp full of age spots behind fine, graying hair hovered in front of him.

"Frank?"

Frank's open hand slapped down on a cocktail napkin, slid across the table and twisted around. It came up in an open-fingered gesture of helplessness. Ned looked at the napkin, sensing what he would find there. The symbol was sketched in pencil.

"So?"

The blotchy scalp bobbed. "It's a message."

"Right." Ned picked up a swizzle stick and twiddled it between his thumb and forefinger. "I don't buy it."

The head came struggling up and Ned caught his breath. The eyes were empty, icy in a tortured face. The lips moved like worms. "It's a concept."

"It's six fucking lines."

"I've almost got it now." The mad face turned pensive, then retreated until the head could dip below the level of the tabletop. Frank was retching quietly between his legs.

Ned squeezed the napkin into a ball, placed it in an ashtray and drew a cigarette lighter out of his pants pocket. By the time Frank straightened up the paper was burning, squirming, writhing.

"You draw that anywhere else?"

Frank shook his head and wiped his mouth on his hand. Ned poked the husk with the swizzle stick, watching it flake and crumble.

"--but I remember it."

Ned reached out and held the man around the neck. "My advice is to forget it."

Frank giggled, grunted "Right," and Ned released him.

"Waitress." Ned waved at a woman who turned out to be a skinny redhead. "What are you drinking?" he asked Frank.

"Scotch."

"Scotch, please. Both of us."

''It's starting to make sense."

"It's nothing."

''It's a message."

"Shit, Frank." Ned watched the waitress, who suddenly seemed to be moving in slow motion, and a surge of impatience overtook him. "Hurry it up, okay?"

Frank's eyes darted wildly and he tapped his head with his middle finger. "It's here. You think booze is going to make me forget it?"

"Why are you here?" Ned searched the man's face for a trace of sanity and found a sad looking-away, a tiny admission of the impossibility of it all. "You're not sure what it is, are you?" he said.

Frank shook his head. "I've been working on it a lot--" He trembled and convulsed--once, twice. "Now it's working on me."

The back of Ned's neck crawled. "It's the Astors, Frank. You're not thinking straight."

Frank spat it out between clenched teeth in a way that reminded Ned of frostbite: "There's a needle in my brain! "

Ned reached out again and drew him close, pressing his mouth to his ear. "Talk to me," he pleaded. "How can there be meaning without words?"

Frank pulled back and fell with a chonk against the hard wood of the seat. "It's a concept==whole and true on its own. It's forming itself somehow. Changing directly into what it is. Words are just intermediaries anyway. This thing skips the middleman. I think it might be beautiful." He shuddered.

The waitress returned with the drinks and they waited until she left. "Al and Joe will find it--" Frank said finally. "--the glyph. It's only a matter of time." He laughed an unnerving whinny.

Ned slumped down as if he meant to disappear under the table. "The glyph is nothing--a mathematical accident."

Frank shook his head. "It's a message. It's also an invasion."

Ned stared at the blackened chaff in the ashtray.

''Help me."

He watched as Frank brought the new drink quiveringly to his lips.

Ned closed the door to Art's office behind him and headed for the computer room, relieved that he still had his job. It was crucial that he still have his job.

Assholes don't get this far. Restore my faith in the system, Ned. Tell me you're not an asshole.

He entered the computer room and smiled at the security guard, a thin, intense man named Dave who wore a thin, black mustache that reminded Ned of Zorro.

''Hi there."

"Hi. What can I do for you?"

Frank calls here on an unsecured line and arranges to meet you in a bar on a day he's supposed to be off sick and you're surprised that you were followed. Well, I'm surprised that you're surprised.

"Oh, just bored, I guess." Ned shoved his fists into the pockets of his tan chinos. "I was wondering--" He motioned with his head toward the next room. "--where is all our stuff stored?"

Uncertainty chased panic across Dave's face. He glanced momentarily at the rows of Crays. "I--I don't know. Maybe Paul could help. Paul!"

A man in a white lab coat began a jangling, flapping walk in their direction.

The two of you put away a case of scotch or so, go to your place and pour each other into bed, then you show up asking me to pull Frank's clearance without offering a shred of explanation. After that stunt you pulled the other day, you're already on my shitlist. Am I leaving anything out?

"Can I help you?"

"Yes, Ned Fuller." Ned stuck out his hand.

"Paul Hockenberry."

"Yes. Funny how you see someone a million times and don't know their name. You know?"

Paul shook hands and nursed a distracted, suspicious smile. "Yeah," he said, "I've seen you around." His glance fell on Ned's badge.

Ned let go of the hand. "I was just wondering how many computers it takes to store all the stuff we work on."

Frank didn't get here by being an asshole, either. I'm concerned about all of you, especially after what happened with the Astors. But Frank is a fucking rock around here and has been for 15 years. You picked a bad day to yank my chain, Fuller.

Paul snorted. "That all? Everything you've done is on that machine." He pointed.

"Wow. Just that one disk?" Ned noticed the locking hub through the glass door.

"Yeah. Well, everything for the last year. We have to change it in a few months."

"Geeze."

As far as I'm concerned, you're both incriminated. I should pull both your clearances. Unless you want to tell me what this is all about--"

"Of course, that doesn't count the floppies you guys use. It's all guys now, isn't it?" Paul had an obscene, inquisitive look.

"Yeah, it's all guys," Ned said.

I've got to go to Quantico today. You say Frank will be in tomorrow? Good. He deserves a hearing. And I want the whole fucking story, is that clear? From both of you. Go on. Get back to work.

"Well--" Ned nodded at Paul, then Dave. "Thanks, guys. See ya later."

He worked on an Israeli code for the balance of the morning, then went to the cafeteria for lunch. The sun angled bright swatches through the windows. The salad dressing was orange and tangy.

I want out of this, Ned. There's got to be some way out of this. It's starting to make sense--like a branding iron.

He had a glass of chocolate milk and listened to the clinking of silverware. Knives and forks. Quiet talk. Everything normal. Normal. Everything entirely normal. Except for Frank trussed in clothes line on his living room couch.

Better use a gag, too. I might yell. Someone might come. There's got to be a way out of this, Ned.

A paper napkin next to the empty carton of chocolate milk. White as ice in a patch of sun. The pen came out of his pocket. He drew a line and gorge rose in his throat.

Get it all, Ned. Get it all and get rid of it.

Walking back from the cafeteria, standing before the security door to his wing. His card in the slot. A click and the door giving way slowly against his shoulder. A noise like birds picking at carcasses. The smell of blood. For no reason he wondered what day it was and couldn't remember.

The door nudged something. He pushed and a head rolled a few feet down the hallway. Ned recognized the thin, black mustache. The rest of the security guard's body was behind the door, the pistol still in its holster. Ned dropped to his hands and knees and fumbled at the snap. The door closed behind him.

The air turned torrid, suffocating. He gasped and clawed at the front of his shirt. Still on his hands and knees, holding the gun in his right fist with his knuckles against the floor, he gazed past the head and down the hall. The furious chirping came from the open door of his office.

"Frank!"

He crawled forward, past the head with the narrow Zorro mustache, past the closed door of Art's office, and reached the open doorway. His vision seemed sharpened, able to pick up the rapid strobing of the fluorescent lights, and another odd notion came over him: the Astors had one another and their kids; all Frank had was his job.

Moving slowly, the raucous noise growing in intensity, he peered around the edge of the door jamb, then clutched it and brought himself unsteadily to his feet. The heads of Al and Joe--is that their fucking names? and which is which?--were propped up on their computer monitors. Their bodies were armless, one draped stomach down across an overturned chair, the other tossed up against the far wall. Ned felt a tacky warmth and looked at the blood dripping from his left palm down his wrist.

"Frank!"

His foot lashed out and one of the monitors shot backward, a head thudding off the desk and the noise dying abruptly. He breathed deeply in the silence for a moment, his index finger rubbing the safety of the pistol, clicking it off, then on, then off again. Then he stepped around his desk and grabbed the gym bag he had brought in that morning. He often went to a fitness club after work. John would usually wave him by: "Yeah, Ned, I really wanna see your jock strap."

He'd planned this for later that day--after hours. They were each allowed 20 floppies that they kept in plastic file boxes. The boxes went into the gym bag and he rifled through the desks, searching for the symbol, found it on a telephone message pad in Frank's desk, threw the pad in the gym bag. Then Wade's desk, the software manuals, the telephone message pads, other loose papers from all the desks.

Farther down the hallway, just ahead of the springy swinging doors to the computer room, he found Paul lying along the wall with his hands pressed over his stomach, squishy against a huge red blotch covering the front of his white lab coat.

"Paul, I've got to get that disk."

The eyes rolled in a dead man's face that flickered in the vibrating light. The voice rasped. "It was Frank."

"Yeah, I know. And the reason he did it is on that disk. You've got to unlock the hub. Where's the key?"

Paul appeared to fall asleep. Ned shook his shoulder.

"Where's the key? We've got to stop him."

Paul roused, opened one side of his lab coat and grasped a heavy, cluttered key chain in his bloody hand. Then he died. Just let it go. Ned ripped it from his belt loop and dove through the swinging doors.

One key, two keys--let's get systematic here--one key, two keys, halfway around the ring the lock turned. The disk went in the gym bag. Ned spun and sprinted out through the swinging doors and down the hallway and Frank stepped out of Art's office in front of him not more than ten feet from the security door. He was carrying an arm, dragging its ragged stump across the green-speckled linoleum. In his other hand he held a serrated carving knife like the one Ned kept in a wooden rack in his kitchen. Cord dangled from both wrists.

"Frank!"

The eyes were the cold, unblinking pits he had glimpsed in the bar. The thing stepped forward--there was nothing of Frank or of humanity about it--keeping its right foot stretched out strangely behind it. Ned glanced down at the security guard's head.

"Frank, tell me what the fuck is happening to you."

The right foot launched forward and Ned dodged the rocketing ball--a head spinning black and white--heard it thwack against the far wall, and he pulled the trigger once, then again and again and again.

There's got to be a way out of this, Ned.

He stopped and washed in a men's room on the way to the lobby. John waved him by.

The cabin clung to a low knoll in a copse of poplars and birches just above the flood plain of Pine Creek, which flowed through the belly of the Allegheny mountains in central Pennsylvania. Ned had left the flue open and a quirky night wind drove fingers of fine black ash out of the fireplace and across the hardwood floor. Every light in the place was on.

He sat near the bottom of the bare wooden stairway and listened to the wind, how it whispered through the rooms, moist and full of the outside. It was all starting to make sense.

The disks had gone in a poisonous, sparking fire along with half a dozen pens and pencils and every scrap of paper he could find. But for two days the lines had formed in his mind, one after another as the hours passed. He saw them scribed into his gray matter, branded there in stark relief, each one bringing its own sweet agony until the glyph was finished.

He tried at first to think of other things. How good the fishing was in the creek nearby, trout plucked from the deep, murky current beneath overhanging roots and flashing in the morning sun. But then it would follow: his sharp blade easing through their fleshy throats, entrails spilling to the rocks and mud. The meaning came at him like the injection of a drug--directly into his bloodstream.

He was a perversion. Life in this realm--the way the laws had come to be realized--was a perversion. So far away from the original intent. So lost and alone. So obscene in contrast and so deadly to those who were coming. He must die. And the distinction between himself and others disappeared as the sun melts morning fog. To kill others was to kill himself.

The night breeze laden with creek smells, the smells of his youth, swirled up the chute that had formed in his mind. When the time was right--very soon now--they would come through. To start over? It was not his to ponder even if he could. It was his to make ready.

The flashlight beams probed up the dirt road through the birches and poplars and he heard Art Devine's voice over the wind calling his name, swirling up the tunnel. Yet it was his own voice and he would cut it off, slice through the vibrating tissues of the throat, sever the gross culmination of a misguided evolution, undo the hopeless monster. The knife in his fist thunked into the wooden step between his feet. Again and again.

The Nobel acceptance speech delivered by Reginald Holbert, PhD, in Geneva, Switzerland, January 23, 2012:

The foundation of the scientific method is verification: repeat the experiment. But this is not to be with the signal from galaxy EU-220. It cannot be. Like the deadliest virus, a virus that would inevitably destroy its discoverers, the signal must be left veritably undiscovered, sequestered, unexplored. That this contradicts the very essence of the scientific spirit is evidenced by the protests this award has evoked from many prestigious institutions around the world. That the best of our field understands its necessity is why I am privileged to stand at this podium today. Events--let us call them what they were: death, violent and incomprehensible--have conspired to keep the signal from us. It is my hope that vigilance--constant and universal--will keep us from the signal. Thank you.

The estate of Wade and Rose Astor included certain papers and memorabilia that had been transferred to Wade's father, who in turn left it to a second son. Among the effects, waiting for Wade's brother within a crowded safe-deposit box at the main branch of the Mid-Atlantic Bank, was the stub of a Redskins ticket. The stub bore a simple diagram drawn in pencil.

THE END

MORE STORIES BY KEITH CROES

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