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 1. LIGHTS IN THE SKYNo-one saw it coming. For a few brief moments, the early evening sky lit up bright as midday. On the bluffs overlooking San Francisco Bay, the only sound came from a gaggle of children laughing and playing in the tall grasses on the Marin Headlands. Far below, the deep Pacific sparkled in the late summer light. Suddenly, the children fell silent—a dark shadow loomed across the headland, and then, in an instant, everything blazed white. No longer running, they looked up, astonished. Out of nowhere, a brilliant ball of fire streaked through the sky then abruptly dipped and vanished into the ocean. The waves rose up to engulf it, and the air cracked with a thunder that shook the heavens. A shower of lights ripped through the upper atmosphere, and disappeared over the horizon. It was the greatest fireworks display they had ever seen—except this was not the fourth of July. Some fifty miles south, in a dim auditorium at Stanford University, Professor Dara Martin lectured to an audience of colleagues and attentive students. A beam of light slanted down from the back of the room to a screen behind him, projecting Hubble images from deep space. “Compliments of NASA, I bring the vast cosmos to your very own eyes.” Sporting a couple of day’s stubble, the professor scratched his chin absent-mindedly with his hand-held remote, and then clicked to a dramatic animation, complete with sound effects, depicting the birth of the universe. “Fourteen billion years ago, it all started with a Big Bang. Today, all we hear is a faint echo.” He clicked to a new image. “For centuries, scientists have been listening to the skies and have heard nothing but the constant rhythms of the stars spinning through space. Yes, the distant galaxies talk to us, but they speak only of chaotic fires, explosive hells of dead matter. Random noise, meaningless cosmic chatter.” Next image. “Now I’m here to tell you that the famous echo from the birth of time may not be just random snow on your TV. I’ve discovered an anomaly. The Big Bang echo seems to contain some kind of pattern.” He enunciated this last sentence slowly, emphasizing the final word and, peering out through the dim light, eyed his audience carefully, watching for reactions. A murmur of disbelief rippled through the auditorium, as the air thickened with anticipation. He continued . . . “We live in an unimaginably vast universe, with countless billions of galaxies, stars, and planets. There must be—there is—intelligent life out there. And perhaps it is already communicating with us.” A smart-ass student blurted out: “Are you telling us you’ve found a hidden message in the Big Bang—put there by some lonely E.T.?” The murmuring turned to snickering. The professor walked slowly and deliberately over to the wiseass, sat on the armrest of his chair, and whispered, loud enough for his neighbors to hear . . . “Lonely? And when was the last time you had a good big bang, eh?” The student’s face turned an open-a-hole-and-bury-me-ten-feet-deep crimson, as the class roared with laughter. The professor patted him on the shoulder and gave him a friendly wink. “A good scientist always keeps an open mind.” NASA scientist Dara Martin, a no-nonsense astrophysicist, was married to his job—searching the heavens for signs of extraterrestrial life. A single-minded workaholic, his career distracted him from the pain of a recent divorce. At home later that evening, following a hectic few days lecturing and puzzling over some highly unusual data, he relaxed in front of the TV. He flipped through the channels, almost in a daze. “Typical Saturday fluff,” he muttered to himself, and began shuffling through an assortment of photos and technical papers littering the floor. Then, a news flash caught his attention: “Children see mysterious lights in the sky.” He turned up the volume and leaned forward as a reporter shoved his microphone in front of a hippy-looking Earth Mother. “Yeah, I saw it too . . . a divine spectacle. Nothing’s an accident, y’know. Everything is part of a greater plan. You just need to know how to look—not with your eyes . . .” The reporter pulled the microphone away, but the Earth Mother snatched it back, and intoned like an oracle, waving her index finger at the TV camera. “We are not alone, you know. They’re everywhere. But scientists have overlooked the most important clue, right under their noses. Our culture is hypnotized by logic. We no longer pay attention to the wisdom of dreams. But our children are not so blind. Those kids saw something. Perhaps below the waves ancient messages lie waiting for us . . .” Martin jumped into his SUV and headed north on 280, hell-bent for the Golden Gate Bridge, and across to the Marin Headlands. He struggled to fix his earpiece, as he talked excitedly on his cell phone to his NASA colleague and boss Graham Bechtel. “Graham, you know for months I’ve been monitoring a strange point of light—possibly the most remote object ever discovered.” He swerved to avoid a rubber traffic cone bouncing over from another lane, clipped by an oncoming tourist bus. “Yet the light from the quasar is far too bright for such a distant object. Really puzzling. It seems to be extremely far away, and yet very close at the same time.” He exited off the bridge. “I’ve also detected bursts of radio waves arriving in unusual patterns. Quite peculiar. I’m going back to the lab later to check the data one more time.” He paused, as he listened to Bechtel on the other end. “I’m now in Marin, on my way to the headlands to check out whatever it was those kids saw. Did you catch it on the news . . .?” He paused again, then: “Hey, I know it sounds weird . . . but I wonder if there’s some connection between the strange lights they saw and the anomalous data I’ve been getting. What if those radio waves are caused by undetected meteors, or whatever those unidentified objects are?” Another pause. “What if they are signals?” He slipped his phone into the dashboard holster and flipped on the speaker as the car spiraled up the coast road to the headlands. “Dara, old chap, I’m beginning to get a little concerned. You seem to be noticing weird coincidences everywhere lately.” Bechtel’s British accent crackled through the static, his supercilious tone irritated Martin. Not wishing to make an issue with his boss, he let the remark slide. “Got to go, Graham. I’ve arrived. Call you later.” He pulled into a parking lot in an abandoned military lookout. A small crowd had gathered on the cliffs near where the children had witnessed the mysterious flying object. He approached the reporters and onlookers circled around the Earth Mother, who was still intoning, as she clutched two kids close to her. Bright camera lights beamed onto the trio, as a couple of helicopters hovered a few hundred yards out over the water. Spotlights from the choppers sliced through the dusk speckling the surface in ovals of white light. He stood aside and listened. “Greater forces are at work in the cosmos than the powers of reason and the senses can detect,” the Earth Mother addressed the crowd. “Streaming through us at every moment, they carry messages for the soul. If we had the ears to listen, the eyes to see, and the wisdom to understand, we might know . . .” Martin muttered to himself, “Crazy New-Agers . . .” then walked to the cliff edge and stared out at the ocean. The air was still and hushed as the setting sun cast a carpet of red and gold on the quieted waves. Bechtel’s parting comment still irritated him. What if his boss was right, though? What about all those strange “coincidences” peppering his life recently? First, the mysterious quasar, so remote it should hardly be detectable yet was unaccountably bright; followed by even stranger radio signals from somewhere in space; then there was that curious email, and disturbing dream . . . His cell phone rang. Bechtel. “Huh? . . . They sure don’t waste any time, do they? . . . Yes, of course, I’ll get my report to the NASA brass before the eclipse. That’s three weeks away. But why the rush? I’d like more time to see if there’s any connection between the mystery balls of fire and the anomalous radio data. . . . Yes, Graham, I know it’s a long shot. Just call it scientific instinct or something. Humor me . . . I’ll get a draft to you next week.” Before heading back to Palo Alto, he introduced himself to the Earth Mother and left his NASA card. “Please call me as soon as you can. Now is not a good time to talk. I need to get back to check on something. It may be related to what the kids saw. I’d like to talk to them before the details begin to fade. I think it could be important.” |
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