Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

“I know there are procedures to follow after a discovery of this magnitude,” Elizabeth said, “so why aren’t you following them?”

“Wait a minute before you jump to protocol,” he said and then nodded to Ruth.

Ruth narrowed her eyes and turned the old radio around so she could see the dials. The rear panel had been folded down and revealed glass tubes with glowing points of light inside them, and the air was filled with ions of electricity and the oniony smell of the cheeseburgers. Ruth pulled a long wire from the back of the radio and stretched it to a metal fire sprinkler that had the placard warning DO NOT HANG FROM SPRINKLER. She opened the alligator clip on the wire’s end and connected it to the fire sprinkler, the wire drooping back to the radio, salsa still playing strong. Ruth sat and punched a button with her finger, and a different static came on. She tuned through intermingling voices and electronic noise.

“Listen to what this radio is picking up now,” Van Raye said in a stage whisper, and she slowed her tuning, let it stop on music and then human voices — Japanese, then Spanish, more music and a preacher proclaiming, “ This is a time when you don’t want to be messing with Abraham’s seed . .”

Charles said, “Hear all of what is being broadcasted tonight. Think also of all the electronic sounds playing together at once in all the atmosphere, the cacophony.” He waved his hands in the air. “Remember that, okay? That’s our planet’s Big Murmur.”

Ruth kept tuning. She stopped on a humming vibration. Inside the noise was a cadenced electronic twap-twap-twap and a sound like an airplane propeller increasing pitch. Ruth sat back and crossed her arms behind her head.

“ That’s it? ” Dubourg said.

“That’s the planet?” Elizabeth said.

“Yes,” Van Raye said.

Elizabeth turned her head to listen.

“We can hear it over a radio?” Ursula said. “That’s impossible.”

“Shortwave,” Van Raye said. “The space station is receiving the signal and amplifying it and then rebroadcasting it to Earth where receivers at different relay stations rebroadcast it over the planet via shortwave. Atmospheric skip does its magic.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s hidden in the white noise of the shortwave lengths. The rebroadcast is of no scientific value, has only the telemetry of the space station’s broadcast. We aren’t listening directly to the planet. It’s like looking at an art book photograph of Van Gogh’s Irises instead of the real painting. I wanted everyone to hear it. Everything will change after I make this public, but before then, I need a place to stay so I can compose and send a message and we have an antenna here that can do it.”

“ You’re sending a message?” Ursula said.

“The message wouldn’t have to be a large amount of data. Ruth has checked and confirmed that the star, the planet, will track through the beamwidth of that dish on the roof. I’ll send one little tiny message blurb.”

“My God, the ego,” Ursula said.

“You’re not supposed to be doing this, are you?” Dubourg said.

“It’s not morally wrong,” Charles said.

“I think it is,” Dubourg said.

“I think I deserve to send my own message. It won’t matter in the grand scheme of things.”

“They,” Ruth said, “whoever is on the other end of this noise, they probably won’t even pay attention to it.”

“But, so, why shouldn’t I do it?” he said.

“This will be the longest ego trip in history,” Ruth said. “Even after you’re long dead, your ego trip will be carrying on in outer space.”

Ruth began explaining how she used the space station’s computer to prove that this was not a random pattern of noise. She added, “It’s just going to make for a better chapter in the book.”

“That’s not totally why I’m doing it,” he said.

I used my cane to stand and think: Charles is going to send his own message because it makes a better story for a book. He, Van Raye, would be the rogue who sent his own brief message to the planet before he would tell the world what he’d done. Would he even tell the world what the message was or would it be a better story to leave it a mystery? I stood beneath the fire sprinkler and stared at the alligator clip biting the metal pipe. I took it off and the airplane sound stopped, leaving only the hum of white background noise. “Sorry,” I said to everyone. I replaced the alligator clip and the noise came back on the radio. The radio was connected to the pipe, and the hotel plumbing was an antenna seining the atmosphere of those broadcasts Ruth had dialed through, broadcasts as ethereal as snowflakes. The noise flowed by and if you missed it, you missed it, like time flowing by. I also understood that Charles needed the hotel.

I said to him, “You’re going to write about this, aren’t you?”

“I don’t understand the significance of that question,” he said.

“Of course you’re going to write about this,” I said. “You’ll have to name the hotel, right? Will you talk about the antenna on the roof, or that Dubourg punched you?”

“Certainly the important facts will have to be recorded for history.”

“It’s called the Grand Aerodrome Hotel, by the way,” I said. “You can get the antenna to work, right?”

“We’ll need some equipment,” he said.

“How much will this cost?” Elizabeth said.

Ruth said, “The dish is the right size but it’s a fixed-azimuth mount. We’ll have to wait for the star to drift into the field of view. If we finish rigging and the programming, and if — a big if —we can find the software for the gain amplifier, we would have one chance in March.”

“ March? ” Elizabeth said. “We’re not going to be here. This hotel will be closed by then.”

“Elizabeth, this is of great importance,” Charles said.

She looked at him in the water. “Yes, I know. But we always mind costs.”

“But we don’t have the software,” Ruth repeated.

Van Raye said, “We’ll get the software. Somehow. Help me, darling. No problem is insurmountable. Don’t you know someone who could get the software?”

“Yeah, and they’re all dead,” Ruth said.

“Wait,” Dubourg said. “You were on Infinity ? You were the one who left the station?”

“Who?” Ursula said.

Dubourg said, “There was one astronaut who come back to Earth. .”

“I told you she was the station’s chief of biomedical problems,” Van Raye said.

“And I stole a gain amplifier,” Ruth said, “but we can’t get the software for it.”

“You stole something?” Dubourg said.

I noticed Ruth’s bare feet crossed beneath the table, the bottoms as black as if she’d walked from California.

Charles said, “I’m not sure ‘stole’ is an accurate word.”

Ruth said, “It’s a little magic box that can make low energy into ultra-high energy.” She put her hands behind her head and leaned back. “But we need the software a friend of mine wrote or the magic box is just a box. The software is just a spell to cast on the magic box.”

Elizabeth slapped her hands on the chair arms and pushed herself to a standing position. “You don’t have to over oversimplify. We understand what software is.”

Elizabeth twisted her hair on top of her head, tucked it in, and inserted a hotel ballpoint to hold it in place, then she undid the sash and took off her robe, revealing her full figure in a black tank swimsuit with a gold accent braid. My mother’s skin, even at the age of fifty-eight, was beautiful. All those times in our lives when she chased shadows — shadows of telephone poles while waiting on the bus, finding shade anywhere we went, the sun her enemy — kept her skin incredible. She took her time stepping into the pool, her rings tinging on the metal railing as she descended by Dubourg in his existential hunch on the steps.