Transmission

“I just told you what it means,” Kevin insisted. “I can… it just makes sense to me.”

“You should listen to him, David,” Dr. Levin said. “At least search for the numbers, see if they mean anything. Can you write them down, Kevin?”

 She held out a piece of paper and a pen, and Kevin noted them as clearly as he could. He held it out to Professor Brewster, who took it with bad grace.

“We have better things to do than this, Elise,” he said. “Right, that’s enough. Out. We have work to do here.”

He shooed them away, and Dr. Levin didn’t seem inclined to argue. Instead, she took Kevin and his mother out into the corridors of the research facility again.

“Come on,” she said. “David might be too busy to actually use that gigantic brain of his, but there are plenty of people here who owe me favors.”

“What kind of favors?” Kevin’s mother asked.

Dr. Levin looked back at Kevin. “The kind where we find out exactly how Kevin is managing to receive and decode signals from outer space.”

***

“You need to hold still, Kevin,” said an overweight researcher wearing a Hawaiian shirt under his lab coat. He just went by “Phil” even though the nameplate on his door declared that he had at least as many PhDs as anyone else. He seemed to be a friend of Dr. Levin’s, although that might have had something to do with the foot-long sandwich she picked up from the canteen before going to visit him. “It won’t produce a clear image if you move.”

Kevin did his best, lying still in the cramped interior of an MRI machine. It made him feel like a torpedo about to be launched into the ocean, and the confined space was only made worse by a regular dull thudding, which sounded as though someone was hammering on the outside of it while he lay there. His experiences in the hospital told him that was probably normal, and not a sign that the whole thing was about to collapse. Even so, it was hard to hold still for as long as it took for the thing to scan him.

“Almost there,” Phil called. “Just hold your breath for a moment. And relax.”

Kevin wished he could relax. The last couple of hours had been busy ones. There had been scientists, and labs, and tests. Lots of tests. There were cognitive tests and imaging scans, things like X-rays and word association tests while Kevin found various kinds of devices pointed at him, designed to pump different kinds of signals toward his body.

Eventually, even Phil seemed to be getting tired of shooting rays at Kevin.

“Okay, you can come out.”

He helped Kevin from the machine, then led the way over to where Dr. Levin and Kevin’s mother were waiting. The researcher shook his head as he pointed to the screen, and a series of black-and-white images that Kevin guessed must be of the inside of his brain. If so, brains looked weirder than he’d thought.

“I’m sorry, Elise, but there’s no sign of anything different about him that wouldn’t be explained by his illness,” he said.

“Keep looking,” Dr. Levin said.

“How, exactly?” he asked. “I’m telling you, I’ve used almost every test it’s possible to do on a human being—fMRI, CAT scan, psych battery, you name it. I’ve fired so many different frequencies at Kevin here that it’s a wonder he isn’t picking up the local radio. Short of subjecting him to radioactive isotopes or actually dissecting him—”

“No,” Kevin’s mother said, firmly. Kevin didn’t like that idea either.

Phil shook his head. “There’s just nothing else there to find.”

Kevin could hear the man’s disappointment. Unlike Professor Brewster, he obviously liked the idea of someone being able to hear alien signals. That disappointment mirrored his own. He’d been sure that these people, with all their brains and their laboratories, would be able to find out what was happening, but it looked—

A man burst into the room, and it took Kevin a moment to recognize the gangly frame of Professor Brewster. He looked, if anything, even more agitated than he had when he’d been throwing them out of the supercomputer pit. He was holding a tablet, gripping it so tightly that Kevin suspected he might crack it.

“David, if this is about the use of resources…” Dr. Levin began.

The tall scientist looked over at her as if trying to work out what she was talking about, then shook his head. “Not that. I just want to know how you did it. How did you know?”

“Know what?” Kevin asked.

“Don’t play dumb,” the scientist said. He held out the tablet for them to look at. “One of our people ran those numbers you gave us through our systems. It turns out that they were the current settings for one of our radio telescopes, just as you said. No one who wasn’t working at the observatory could know that. So how did you know?”

“Know what?” Kevin asked.

“Know what would happen when we changed it!”

Professor Brewster pressed something on his tablet.

“This is a feed from it.”