Transmission

It was more than that, though. Every time he sat there translating, listening through his headphones to the latest burst of information, Kevin felt as though all of this might mean something. It was a reminder that he wasn’t just a thirteen-year-old boy dying of a disease practically no one had heard of. He was doing something no one else in the history of the world had done. If all of this was for something, then that was a good thing.

“I have to keep going,” Kevin said. “We need to get all of it.”

For the most part, what Kevin managed to pull out were facts, and each one seemed to excite the scientists around him more. Some of it, like the presence of seven planets around the star, or the interlocking gravitational orbits of their moons, were things that they’d been able to work out from their observations using the telescopes available on Earth. Other parts, such as the presence of so much life, had them scratching their heads.

“We think the planets are all tidally locked,” one said. “Is there evidence of day shifting into night? If not, one side of the planets should be burning, while the other freezes.”

Kevin couldn’t tell him at first, until another message explained that yes, the planets spun, in ways that seemed to excite the scientists even more.

“We’ll have to rewrite what we know about all of this. What about the radiation exposure from being so close to the star?”

Again and again, they asked questions Kevin didn’t know the answers to. They didn’t seem to get that he didn’t have any control over what the aliens had sent in their bursts of messages. They sent what they sent, Kevin translated it, and the scientists had to scramble to try to make some kind of sense of it.

Strangely, Dr. Levin was the one person who didn’t seem to mind that.

“It’s just astonishing that they’ve chosen to communicate in this way,” she said. “They’re sending so much information about themselves, trying to preserve some understanding of who they are.”

“Who they were,” Kevin corrected her. That was one thing that the messages had been clear about. The people sending them were long gone. That was both incredibly sad and also kind of cool, knowing that he was pretty much the last link to a dead civilization.

One strange thing was how simple and factual it all was. Kevin had been kind of expecting to learn more about the culture or the languages of the beings that inhabited the planet, yet he still hadn’t seen enough of them to understand what they really were. Which of the creatures on the planet’s surface were they? Were they the chitin-shelled creatures that crawled there, or the long-necked things like scaled giraffes? Kevin’s imagination kept him expecting something humanlike and familiar, but so far he hadn’t heard any reference to it.

Kevin just wished that he could share more of those words with the world. When he couldn’t stand it any longer, he sought out Dr. Levin, because he suspected she would be his biggest ally. He found her in the canteen with Phil.

“I’m worried that I’m saying all of this, and it’s just going to be locked away in secret somewhere,” he said.

“Professor Brewster is just being careful,” Dr. Levin said. To Kevin, she sounded as though she was trying to convince herself.

“What if he’s so careful no one ever learns about the aliens?” Kevin asked. It was a real worry. He could imagine the tall scientist doing it all too easily. “What if my mother only agrees because she doesn’t want people laughing at me?”

“I’m sure that won’t happen,” Dr. Levin said. Again, she didn’t sound sure.

“What aren’t you telling me?” Kevin asked. He wasn’t sure if Dr. Levin would answer that or not.

“David… Professor Brewster… has to answer to people inside the government,” Dr. Levin said. “Some of his funding is from the military. Something like this… they might want to keep it secret.”

Kevin could tell she wasn’t happy about that. “So he might never tell people?”

“They’d probably be worried about people panicking,” Dr. Levin said. Again, Kevin got the feeling that she didn’t agree.

“You must want to tell people,” Kevin said. “Your whole organization wants to find aliens.”

Dr. Levin smiled tightly. “I can’t,” she said. “If I do, it will make things harder for SETI. Professor Brewster wouldn’t let it go, and some of his bosses… well, they’d see it as a betrayal.”

“Even though people have a right to know?” Kevin said.

“They’d say that people only have a right to know what they’re told,” Dr. Levin said.

Kevin shook his head. “This isn’t right. Professor Brewster shouldn’t do this.”

“I’ll try talking to him. In the meantime, Phil, why don’t you take Kevin for a walk around the facility? I’m sure it must be pretty boring spending all your time either here or in your room.”