The Signal Read online

  The Signal

  The Multiverse Chronicles

  Nick Cook

  I will always owe a huge debt of thanks to the Lair of Lost Authors for encouraging me to write this.

  ‘Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.’

  Carl Sagan

  Copyright 2018 © Nicholas P Cook

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  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Published worldwide by Voice from the Clouds Ltd.

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  www.voicefromtheclouds.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Outside, our massive Lovell radio telescope was picked out by spotlights against the night sky. Just past 2 a.m., it was currently aimed low towards an unseen target near the eastern horizon: a distant black hole that I knew we were capturing data from for an astrophysics team back at Manchester University.

  With my arms loaded up, I pushed the door open with my bum and entered the 1950s-retro-styled control room of Jodrell Bank.

  On the control panels, the readout displays showed a series of sine-wave peaks and troughs rolling into our systems courtesy of Lovell’s giant metal bowl.

  Steve turned his attention from his laptop. It looked as if he was watching the original War of the Worlds movie, probably to kill the tedium of his graveyard shift.

  With a broad smile I swung round to reveal the ridiculously monstrous pizza box between my arms. ‘Ta-da!’

  Steve took in the ‘Mario’s’ logo on the box and shook his head. ‘Now that’s one serious bribe, Lauren Stelleck. Who spilt the beans about my all-time favourite pizza restaurant?’

  ‘Hey, I have friends in high places,’ I replied.

  ‘In other words, you’ve been talking to Graham again, haven’t you?’

  I grinned. ‘Absolutely. Anyway, that’s not the real bribe.’ I placed the box down on a table as I unhitched my rucksack from my back. ‘If it’s bribes you’re after, then check this out.’ I withdrew a parcel wrapped with star constellation paper that I’d grabbed from the gift shop in our visitor centre.

  I dipped my head and raised my arms up towards Steve with the parcel. ‘This is your gift, oh wonderful one with a heart of gold.’

  He hitched an eyebrow at me as he started to unwrap the present. A few rips later he was holding a Millennium Falcon Star Wars T-shirt in his hands. ‘OK, due kudos, Lauren; this is very cool.’

  ‘I know it is, although I did get into something of a bidding war on eBay for it. It’s an original collector’s item but it was worth the price. Graham said you’d love it.’

  Steve placed a hand over his heart. ‘I am, and always will be, an eternal Star Wars geek, so yes absolutely. But you really shouldn’t have.’

  ‘Oh, but I so should, because I do have ulterior motives.’

  Steve snorted. ‘Of course you do.’

  A soft chime came from the console and he glanced across at it.

  ‘All good?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, the system has just finished capturing the first data run for NGC 1277, which should keep the team at Manchester happy for a while. Next, I need to recalibrate the sensors for a second run, but we can squeeze in your project now if you like?’

  I tipped my head to one side. ‘How did you know?’

  He gestured towards the pizza and his new T-shirt.

  I laughed. ‘Busted. But you’re sure it’s OK? Because I know how tight telescope time is at the moment with everyone’s projects stacked up back to back.’

  ‘Our schedule may be fit to bursting, but for you, Lauren, anything. However, I will have to swear you to secrecy. We don’t want the Manchester team coming after me with their proverbial pitchforks.’

  I smiled at Steve, enjoying the image of the angry mob of astronomy academics pursuing me across the Cheshire countryside. ‘It will be our little secret. Anyway, where’s Phil? I thought he was meant to be working with you tonight?’ I asked.

  ‘My partner in crime cried off earlier when he phoned in with an Oscar-worthy hacking cough performance to convince me of his dreadful state of health.’

  ‘Not like him, especially when it’s movie night.’

  Steve just shrugged. ‘Probably his poker night that no one here is meant to know about.’

  ‘I guess that’s his idea of a good time.’ I tapped the top of one of the computer speakers. ‘So do you mind if I have a listen in to what you’ve captured already?’

  ‘Knock yourself out.’

  ‘Great.’ I reached across and turned the volume up on my speakers as I sat down.

  At once rising and falling crackling sounds filled the control room. I leant back in my chair and gazed off into empty air as a trance-like state took hold of me.

  I breathed in the slightly musty air of the control room. Even though I wasn’t looking at him, I could sense Steve watching me with the slight wide-eyed look he always had when he knew that I was tuning in to my synaesthesia, something that he and everyone else always found endlessly fascinating.

  I ignored him and focused my attention on the light patterns dancing to the beat of static that were now superimposed over my view of the control room. These patterns of light were always there for me to a greater or lesser extent, but certain audio sources, such as the one I was listening to now, turned those sounds into my very own personal disco light show.

  I remember the first time I realised my gift as if it was yesterday. I’d been five years old, visiting the Science Museum in London with Aunt Peggy, when we’d discovered the exhibit about the life cycle of stars. I’d stood, hypnotised, as I listened to the clicks and whirs of a pulsar that had triggered a symphony of vision in my eyes.

  Steve leant forward. ‘What are you seeing, Lauren? Can you describe it?’

  Describing my own version of reality was always something of a challenge – the equivalent of trying to explain to someone who was blind what sight was like.

  ‘Imagine the most incredible firework display made from overlapping shapes and points of light, all dancing over each other and ranging from reds to blues, then you’d be getting reasonably close,’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘I’ll never be able to get my head around the fact that you can see sounds in this way.’

  ‘And I will never get my head around the fact that most other people can’t. It’s part of who I am as much as my sense of smell and my hearing.’

  Steve slowly nodded. ‘So when did you first realise you weren’t like the other pesky kids? That you were “special”?’ He added air quotes to that final word.

  I gave him an eye-roll. ‘For your information, Steve, I was about six when I finally figured out that other people couldn’t see the world in the same way that I could. My parents freaked out at first but relaxed when a specialist told them that I had synaesthesia.’

  Steve offered me his bucket of popcorn. ‘Still, it must be strange to be in your shoes, right?’

  I grabbed a handful of the proffered snack. ‘Not really. You have to remember that this has always been my normal. I also have some pretty famous company to hang out with. Both David Hockney and Kandinsky were well known to be synaesthetes. I actually feel sorry for the rest of you who don’t get to see the world like I do.’

  ‘We po
or mortals, hey?’

  ‘Something like that. However…’ I opened the pizza box and acted out wafting the scent towards him. ‘Breathe deeply, Steve – pepperoni and anchovy, your favourite.’

  He shook his head. ‘You so know how to push my buttons, Lauren. OK, so what’s your target for tonight’s deliberation?’

  I beamed at him and pulled out my phone from my rucksack, which of course was already in flight mode. From the moment anyone stepped on to the Jodrell Bank site there were numerous signs displayed reminding them to keep their phones switched off, or as in my case in flight mode. The problem was that our radio telescopes were so sensitive, designed as they were to pick up the radio signal equivalent of a candle flame on the moon, that a single stray mobile phone signal to a cellular mast could totally screw with our data during a capture session.

  I scrolled down the list of targets on my phone and selected the one I’d marked in bold text. ‘Ah, here she is.’ I handed my phone to him.

  Steve’s eyebrows crept up his forehead. ‘My old friend J1925+1720, a possible supernova remnant, otherwise a fairly run-of-the-mill pulsar.’

  ‘Hey, your unremarkable is my visual symphony.’

  ‘If you say so. So why did you choose this particular target?’

  I coughed. ‘I used my free-form selection technique.’

  ‘In other words, you ran your finger down a list with your eyes closed?’

  I laughed. ‘Busted again.’ It might have been a random approach but that was part of the fun of this – I never knew what it would throw up with my synaesthesia.

  Steve smiled and began typing at the keyboard.

  I watched him search through the database with a growing sense of anticipation as he pulled up the coordinates for my pulsar.

  He highlighted it and hit return. ‘Your pulsar is locked and loaded.’ He gestured towards the big button in the middle of the control console for the Lovell dish and nodded to me.

  I stared at him. ‘Seriously, you trust me to operate Lovell?’

  ‘I think you’ve more than proved yourself as my go-to person, Lauren, and anyway, we’re only talking about pushing a button.’

  My heart actually fluttered because what that button did was the stuff of my dreams. Before Steve could change his mind, I leant forward and slammed my hand down hard on the control. At once an answering warble came from the console and, with a faint whine of motors, outside 15,000 tons of steel started to rotate towards my pulsar.

  ‘You so never forget your first time,’ Steve said with a grin.

  I gave him the look.

  He coughed and returned his attention to the display.

  This was all part of our regular flirtation that never actually led anywhere. Though I really wasn’t into Steve the way he obviously was into me. Plus I had a certain amount of experience that had taught me not to combine pleasure with work, like one of those dodgy blue cocktails that looked great at the bar but always left you with a brain-melting hangover.

  Lovell’s giant metal dish slowly rotated on its track as it pivoted towards its new target and my excitement grew to epic proportions.

  An alarm shrieked out, accompanied by at least ten red warning lights. Lovell slowed to a complete stop and it felt as if someone had just cancelled Christmas and shot Rudolf for good measure.

  ‘Damn and blast,’ Steve muttered.

  I raised my hands up from the console where I’d been resting them. ‘That definitely was not me.’

  ‘Relax, I know it wasn’t, Lauren. According to the readings we’ve just had another power spike. I bet it’s that right axial motor unit glitching out again. Of course the tech team was meant to have serviced that particular motor last week.’

  ‘Timing, hey?’

  ‘I know, but you can relax because everything should be OK once I’ve reset the breakers. However, that means a trip up to the engine room to sort this out. Fancy tagging along?’

  ‘You mean I get to push the big button and climb to the summit all on the same night?’

  ‘Why not? If we’re going to initiate you we may as well go all in.’

  I looked up through the window at Lovell and my stomach clenched slightly. As always it looked ridiculously high to climb.

  ‘Fantastic,’ I replied, trying to inject a note of extra-bright I’m-really-not-scared-to-death enthusiasm into my voice.

  ‘We’ll take the lift up most of the way.’ He cast a glance towards the Mario’s box. ‘The only problem is that the pizza will be as cold as the cardboard it came in by the time we get back down here.’

  I grabbed a slice and offered it to Steve. ‘Who says you can’t eat on the job?’

  ‘Good point.’ He took the slice and sunk his teeth in. A look of utter bliss filled his face. ‘So good.’

  I smiled at him. ‘If I say so myself, I do know what makes you tick.’

  He tossed me a head torch from his drawer and took one for himself. ‘OK, temptress, let’s get this show back on the road.’

  The moment we stepped outside, the chill of the autumn-night air washed over my skin. But in reality I was only dimly aware of the temperature because my whole attention was focused on the beautiful monument to scientific endeavour standing before us.

  Many might see the Lovell as an impressive piece of structural engineering that had taken five years to build back in the fifties. But for someone like me who could literally see sound, Lovell was like a love poem from humanity to the cosmos. Not that I would ever admit these thoughts to Steve or anyone else who worked here for fear of being branded a hopeless romantic. No, hard scientific thinking was what got you ahead in your job at a place like Jodrell Bank.

  We cut across the public area under the flood of spotlights, chewing on our slices of pizza, and headed through the gate. As we walked beneath the giant metal bowl, easily the size of a football pitch, the usual sense of awe took hold. Lovell’s charm would never fade for me.

  Steve headed towards the nearest of two massive support legs and approached the door set into it. He pressed a button and then cast me a frown as he finished his pizza slice. ‘That’s strange. It looks like the power’s been tripped to the lift system as well.’

  ‘Why strange?’

  ‘Because the lift system is on a separate circuit to the main ones for the whole reason that no one wants to use the alternative method to get up there when a maintenance check is needed.’

  ‘Please tell that doesn’t mean what I think it does?’

  He nodded and gestured towards the series of ladders that snaked their way up the side of the leg we were standing beside. ‘You really don’t have to do this. It’s a big enough rush of blood to the head walking out on to the gantry from the lift for the first time without throwing in a ten-minute climb as well.’

  ‘A fear of heights is something you should face up to rather than let rule your life.’

  ‘In that case…’ He started up the ladder ahead of me.

  With a mental equivalent of a breath I put my hand on the first rung and the cold of the metal bit into my palms. As I began the climb I had no idea that what would happen next was going to change the rest of my life for ever.

  Chapter Two

  The first ten metres of the ascent of Lovell were by far the worst and, despite the cold turning my hands to blocks of ice, I grew sweaty as I clung to the ladder.

  Vertigo sucked.

  Yet once we passed the second flight of ladders, already at the height of a house, the bitterness tainting the back of my mouth started to vanish. I was so high now that the effect of a fall was something of a moot point.

  Rung by rung, metre by metre, I gradually became calmer as the night landscape began to reveal itself around us. Over the top of the trees the few distant lights of houses were dotted across the countryside. Further out, Macclesfield, our nearest city neighbour glowed orange on the horizon.

  Above me, Steve started to hum ‘Stairway to Heaven’ as his head-torch beam danced over Lovell’s metal latt
icework.

  ‘Good tune choice,’ I called up to him.

  ‘It’s something of a tradition for me. I find it helps keep me distracted.’

  ‘From?’

  ‘From my vomit-inducing fear of heights.’

  ‘And there was me thinking it was only me. You’ve never said anything about it before.’

  ‘Of course not, Lauren. Can you imagine the amount of piss-taking I’d be letting myself in for with the others?’

  ‘Way too easily. So that will be another of our little secrets then.’

  ‘And that right there is one of the reasons that I hired you – you are discretion personified.’

  ‘Not on account of my academic brilliance and my perky disposition then?’

  ‘Those things too.’

  With Steve continuing to hum ‘Stairway to Heaven’ to himself we reached the gantry at last.

  He shut his eyes for a moment as he gripped the rail and stepped out on to the gangway.

  Through an act of pure willpower I managed to keep my legs from wobbling as I followed him along the walkway towards the door to the engine room, making sure to keep my eyes dead ahead.

  Steve took out a key to unlock the door.

  I’d no idea why they needed a lock up here. If a thief managed to make it all the way up here, then in my humble opinion they more than deserved their haul of copper wiring or whatever loot they were after.

  We headed into the motor room. Inside, Steve’s head-torch beam played across a bank of eight levers all in a lowered position. ‘This is looking much more serious than I first thought.’

  ‘Why, what’s the problem?’

  ‘Every single circuit breaker in here has been tripped. And that’s never happened before in the history of Lovell, which is saying something, considering the number of electrical failures that we’ve had over the years, not to mention a few direct lightning strikes.’