The Ghosts of Heaven by Marcus Sedgwick
II
Edward Althing slept for eighteen hours, and when he woke it was late into the following day. He wondered why no one had woken him, and he wondered where everyone was.
He showered, had the shave he’d wanted, and dressed quickly, pulling on jeans and a t-shirt, then swapping them for the trousers from his suit and a light blue shirt. He had no idea how to dress, and yet here he was, supposed to be the saviour for the project, after the last mathematician, a prodigy from Athens, had fallen ill in the previous winter.
It had been news to Edward that ISIS, the Institute for the Search for Intelligence in Space, even existed still, but after accepting the offer, he’d decided it might be wise to read up about it. In the fifties they had struggled by, using just one 20 metre dish to scan the skies. It had been, the ISIS website said, like looking for a needle in ten thousand haystacks. But now they had the new array, and work was progressing a hundred times faster.
Edward wandered down several corridors, seeing no one until he found the giant who’d driven him from the airport fixing some broken bulbs in a stairwell that led to the higher floors of the dome.
‘Lensmann?’ Edward asked, and the giant jabbed a finger up the stairs.
‘Thanks,’ said Edward, and set off. ‘Nice talking to you again.’
As Edward made the top of the stairs, he found himself in a wide hallway, with windows all along one side. He was at the back of the round building, and for the first time he had a view over the valley beyond the hill. The sun was setting over what Edward took to be a vast lake, shining red-gold in the lowering sun. But something was not right, and as he looked again, he saw that the lake was not one of water at all, but one of polished metal. What he was looking at was the telescope field; an array of radio telescopes, all linked to form a virtual superdish, equivalent to a single dish almost 15,000 square metres in size.
He heard a footstep and turned to see Tyler approaching him.
‘Five hundred dishes, each 6 metres across,’ she said. ‘The most advanced system ever built, on Earth anyway, and rather beautiful, don’t you think?’
Edward said nothing, but stared at the array. For the first time he understood that these people were serious in their goal. They intended to find signs of intelligence somewhere else in the universe.
‘What we have achieved here,’ Tyler said, ‘is nothing short of a miracle. We have turned the Earth into a giant observatory, floating through our solar system. At any given moment, our array is pointing at a new section of the universe, and we can turn our attention to the signals from that sector. As the years go by we will cover every fraction of the sky.’
‘And have you found anything yet?’
Edward regretted the blunt question almost as soon as it was out of his mouth, but Tyler didn’t seem to mind.
‘A little. Perhaps. One or two patterns that we cannot easily explain away. We have been a little slowed down by the illness that occurred to Dr Anathapopolous. But now you’re here, we can hope for some better luck.’
Edward was again conscious of the responsibility he had taken on, of the hopes they’d placed in him.
‘I’m sorry I’m late. I don’t know what happened. I slept…’
‘For as long as you needed to,’ Tyler smiled, ‘And don’t worry, your timing is perfect. We work at night, it’s the best time to take readings unimpeded by heat radiation. There’s no light pollution up here, but what we’re reading are radio waves, and we get less interference at night. Here we are; the reading room.’
She led the way off the corridor into a room which, from the concave shaped ceiling, Edward took to be at the very top of the dome. Inscribed across the ceiling was a modern interpretation of some ancient Egyptian imagery.
Tyler saw what Edward was looking at.
‘Isis,’ she said, ‘Queen of the Heavens, the Bright Star in the Sky. I guess it seemed appropriate when they built this place.’
‘How long did the project run for?’ Edward asked. ‘I mean, first time round?’
‘About 8 years,’ Tyler said, turning to a bank of computers nearby.
‘And why did it shut down? Lack of funding?’
Tyler didn’t turn round as she answered, so quietly Edward could only just hear.
‘No, they had some problems.’
Edward’s attention was taken as Lensmann glanced up at him, beckoned him over. He walked over to where the project’s lead astronomer sat in front of banks of computers, screens ranged along several desks, and several star charts displayed on a plasma screen along one wall.
‘That yellow square is where we’re looking tonight,’ Lensmann said, waving proudly at a centimetre wide insect that crawled across the vastness of the black universe of the star chart.
‘And now it’s time to begin.’
