Transmission

Already, people were crowding around him. His mother was there, wrapping her arms around him as if she might protect him from anything that came. Dr. Levin and Professor Brewster were there, both looking worried. To Kevin’s relief, Luna was back up on her feet. She hadn’t been stabbed. Kevin ran to her, hugging her.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“That depends,” she said. “How many of you are there supposed to be?”

Kevin shook his head. “Don’t joke, I was worried about you.”

“You were worried about me? I wasn’t the one with a knife to my throat.”

Through it all, of course, the cameras kept rolling. They weren’t going to stop in the middle of something this dramatic.

Professor Brewster was there, looking as though he was afraid Kevin might break. Or maybe it was just that he was staring at the dead man behind Kevin, the one that he didn’t dare turn to face.

“What’s happening?” he demanded. “Why are we not getting Kevin out of here?”

“He says there’s another message coming,” Ted explained.

Kevin didn’t know how to explain it any clearer than that.

“Well, hold it back until we get you to safety,” Professor Brewster said, but surely he had to know that it didn’t work like that by now.

Kevin gritted his teeth. “I can’t control when the message arrives. I just receive it and translate it.”

“Why… why is it a problem if you get the message here?” Luna asked. She sounded shaky, which was understandable given everything the two of them had just been through. Even so, she was the one asking the right questions, not the professor.

“Because it will be the coordinates for the escape capsules,” Kevin said. “I’m sure of it. What else could it be?”

“You remembered the numbers for the system before,” Luna pointed out. “You could remember this.”

“What if it’s a long list?” Kevin countered. “What if I miss something?”

Luna pointed to the cameras, and Kevin realized she had a point. All he had to do was speak, and everything he said would be recorded by so many cameras he couldn’t count them all. It would be around the world in an instant.

He went over to them, and even as he did it, the signal hit him.

The strings of numbers seemed to last forever. No wonder the beings sending them had given Kevin a warning that they would be coming. They’d wanted to give him a chance to prepare to record them in some way, so that the information wouldn’t be lost. Each time Kevin finished repeating a string of numbers, a new string of digits and symbols began, barely giving him enough time to take a breath. He was translating it as it came, shaking with the effort of doing it, or perhaps just with the aftereffects of everything he’d been through in the past few minutes.

He recited the numbers and letters in a long, almost endless string, but the truth was that, for the first time since Luna had helped him to work out the connection to the Trappist system, he didn’t know exactly what any of it meant.

Finally, the stream of numbers came to a stop, and Kevin stood there, trying to catch his breath.

“Is that everything?” Luna asked. “Kevin, are you all right?”

Kevin managed to nod, although even that was an effort right then. He wasn’t sure which part he was nodding for.

Dr. Levin was there then, putting an arm around each of them.

“Okay,” Dr. Levin said, “let’s get you both back inside. After everything that has happened, my guess is that a lot of people will want to talk to both of you, but I want to get you both checked out first and make sure that you’re all right. I don’t like how close you both came to being hurt back there.”

As they turned to go, Kevin could hear the shouts from the gathered crowd as they started to come out of whatever stunned silence they’d been caught up in.

“Kevin, when are the aliens coming for us?” one man yelled.

“Kevin, what does life mean?”

“When are you going to admit this is a hoax?”

“Are you hurt?”

There were so many different questions being shouted at once that for a moment or two, Kevin wanted to just walk away and leave them to it. He didn’t, though. He felt as though he had to say something, and this time it didn’t have anything to do with the pressures of alien signals.

 “I know a lot of you are looking to me for answers, but the truth is that I don’t have many,” Kevin said. “I’m just a kid. I don’t have any special understanding. I don’t even know why I’m the one who receives the messages that the aliens are sending.”

“What happened today?” a reporter asked. “Why all these numbers? What is it about?”

Kevin inclined his head, trying to work out how much he was allowed to say. Then he realized that was probably the wrong way of thinking about it. Misunderstanding this had caused this. Someone had tried to kill him today, because they didn’t understand the information he had. Because, given the space to do it, they jumped to the wrong conclusion.

“Someone tried to kill me today,” he said, “because they think the information I’m receiving is dangerous enough to be worth killing for.”

“Is it?” someone called out.