Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

Hello from God.

Outside, the trees bent under a stiff wind, and the ocean was choppy. Rain coming. Oblivious to the weather, a groper ambled amiably along the treeline, its oilskin hide glistening. It probed the branches with long, flexible arms for a yellow fruit that had also tested okay for Martin’s consumption.

He’d awakened with a wisp of recollection from his childhood, something not quite remembered, brought back by a dream:

He was a boy, alone in the house in Atlanta. And frightened by the shadows and dark places outside the living room. He’d put on the HV, and looked through the dining room at the gloomy doorway to the kitchen, with its exits opening out back and into the basement. He’d sat awhile, trying to pretend it was not there. Then, he had turned off the unit, taken a book, and crawled behind the sofa. To be safe from whatever might come through that door.

Had it really happened? As he reached back, details took shape. It had happened more than once.

He rotated the orbiter’s antennas randomly, and set the scanner to range over a wide band of frequencies. There was something constructive he could do: intercept an alien signal, a navigational beacon in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, maybe, or a weather report from the Pleiades. Do that, and they’d build a shrine on this spot.

He sat through most of the afternoon, listening to the cosmic racket, wondering whether he would recognize an alien signal if he heard one. Eventually tiring of the game, Martin returned control to the on-board computer, which obediently tracked back across the sky and locked onto its primary target. The signal changed.

It was a blip, a rhythmic murmur gone so quickly that he wasn’t sure it had been there at all. He reversed the scanner, and was listening to a jumble of signals, nothing he could make out, but different in quality from the stellar transmissions he’d heard previously. He used the filters to isolate the strongest signal, and then boosted it. It became a piano, and a voice:

“ …A lipstick’s traces,

“ An airline ticket to romantic places,

“ And still my heart has wings;

“ These foolish things remind me of you…. ”

Martin frowned, smiled, shook his head.

Rescue ship nearby? That brought a momentary surge of elation, but he knew it could not be. He got up anyhow and went outside to see if anything was moving against the stars. The piano sounded very far away.

“ …A telephone that rings, but who’s to answer?

“ Oh, how the ghost of you clings!…. ”

The singer finished to a burst of applause, and the melody shifted smoothly.

“ Thanks, folks, and goodnight from all of us here at the Music Hall until next Sunday, when we’ll be coming your way again with more of America’s favorite tunes. ”

More applause, music up in volume, and then a fadeaway to another voice:

“ This is CBS, the Columbia Broadcasting System. News is next, with Waldo Anderson. ”

Old Earth: he was picking up carrier waves that had left Earth more than two centuries ago!

Anderson arrived in a clatter of electronic gimmickry, introduced his lead story, which concerned an armed robbery, and gave way immediately to a woman with a passion for antacid tablets. Then Anderson returned, speaking in a rich, cultured voice:

“ The Willie Starr case went to the jury today. Starr is one of two men accused in a triple slaying last March at a Brooklyn liquor store. His alleged partner, Joey Horton, has already…. ”

Martin sighed, and turned it off. He had found his alien civilization.

The sun broke through and the day warmed. Languidly, Martin stripped and gave himself to the sea. The water had turned cold. He swam out beyond the breakers with sure, swift strokes, turned and surveyed his world, rising and falling with the waves.

It was like one of those early summers off St. Simons, minus the white frame houses and the beachfront restaurants. And the women.

Anyone.

He sat on the beach, wrapped in a robe, with his reader propped against his knees, lost in a planetary, a novel set during the early days of extraterrestrial settlement. The author, Reginald Packard, had grown wealthy cranking out these historical romances. Martin did not normally read such things. But he had become engrossed in the book over breakfast. Now, however, as the sun began its long slide toward the mountains, he found that his eyes kept wandering from the rows of neat print to the shadowy places among the trees.

Something was there.

He pulled the robe tight around him. A long wave unrolled and ran up the beach. He could not get his eyes off the edge of the forest.

Nothing moved.

The Dome was three hundred yards away. A long run in the sand. How easily he could be cut off!

His heart pounded.

The wind blew and the trees writhed.

Greenway . He understood the woman, hysterical in her capsule beyond Centaurus, while a space-born thing with sharp teeth and feral eyes prowled the outside, slavering at her through the viewscreen, gnawing at the airlock.

His heartbeat picked up. And suddenly, without thinking about it, he was on his feet, churning through the loose sand. He did not look back, but kept his eyes fixed on the Dome. He fell and, in slow motion, rolled over and came back to his feet in a single fluid move.

When he got back inside, he bolted the door, set the shields in place, drew the blinds, and collapsed. His cheek was bleeding.

That night he tried to distract himself by working out a search pattern for the datapak. If, by a remote chance, he found what they’d all been looking for, they’d have to come get him…. Martin’s eyes narrowed at the thought that had surfaced, that he’d refused to consider. That someone might decide a rescue was too expensive. They knew, or would know, he was the only survivor. One person laid against the cost of a multi-year mission. But the Service had a tradition to maintain. He had nothing to fear.

At dawn, he started the search. While the display blipped and beeped, he sat by the window, peering through the drawn shades.

Deciding that chatter would at least be company, he switched back to the terrestrial radio station and listened to two domestic serials, “Our Gal Sunday” and “Life Can Be Beautiful.” His tension lessened. The shows had a small-town charm, and the characters seemed generally virtuous and vulnerable, if not bright. Sunday’s voice had a peculiar vitality, a quality of moonlight and laughter. He tried to picture the actress, and decided he would have liked to know her.

And there was more news:

“ …Governor Dewey at a press conference this morning stated that police are closing in on Buchalter, and that his arrest is imminent. Known in gangland as Lepke the Leopard, Buchalter jumped bail two years ago. Onetime boss of New York’s protection racket, he is believed—. ”

He experimented with other terrestrial frequencies. Most were in foreign languages. But there were others. He listened to “Ma Perkins” and a quiz show. And he discovered “Terry and the Pirates” and “Jack Armstrong.”

There were supplies to be got in from the capsule, a job he’d been putting off. And he’d dropped his reader when he ran from the beach. He looked out the windows and saw nothing. He turned up the radio, unlocked the door, and forced himself to walk. He went first to recover the reader. Then he hurried to the capsule. He loaded his arms with packets of dehydrated foods, sealed the vehicle, and started home. Nothing watched him from the hills. Nothing charged out of the trees. When he’d gotten back to the Momsen, he was proud of himself. He bolted the door, though—no point being foolish—and put everything away. Then he sat down and turned the radio back on.