Transmission

“I’m sure it will be fine,” Ted said. Kevin heard the doors to the plane shutting as the last people climbed aboard. “Besides, it’s too late to turn back now. Nine hours from now, and we’ll be in Bogota.”

Nine hours. How did you spend nine hours cooped up in a confined space with a bunch of scientists? It seemed to Kevin that practically everyone there was having to find the answer to that question. Some played games on phones, or read, or watched movies. Kevin’s mother mostly slept. Kevin alternated looking out of the window with trying to get some rest and occasionally putting on the headphones with the signal stream, just in case there was anything to hear. There wasn’t.

“I don’t even know if these will work so far from the research institute,” Kevin said, after the third time he’d done it.

“I asked the scientists that before we left,” Ted said. “They’ve set it up so the base signal is relayed over the Internet. Anywhere you have a connection, you can access the signal.”

Kevin supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised by that. Of course they would want to make sure that he could hear it, whatever happened. They wouldn’t want to risk missing an important message. Even so, the idea of being able to listen in from anywhere in the world seemed impressive.

Kevin spent some of the time looking down at the places they passed over. He’d never even been out of state before, yet here he was flying over deserts and thick rainforests, cities and patches of ocean. He thought about the people down there. Did they know about the escape capsule? What did they think about the possibility of actually finding alien life?

He got part of an answer when they landed in Bogota. He immediately saw a dozen similar groups, all carrying equipment that looked suspiciously similar to the gear they’d brought with them.

“Looks as though we weren’t the only ones who worked out where those coordinates led,” Ted said as he looked over the collection of them. He seemed fairly relaxed about it, but Professor Brewster was anything but calm.

“This is simply unacceptable

,” the scientist said. “The Swiss are here, and that looks like a group from the private tech sector, and those are the Canadians. After all the effort we’ve put into uncovering this information, I can’t believe that they’re planning to snatch the capsule from under us.”

Kevin wanted to say that they didn’t know for sure that was what the other groups were there for, but he couldn’t think of another reason they might be there. He wasn’t sure how he felt about their presence.

On the one hand, he wanted to believe that the aliens’ message was intended for the whole of humanity, and that it should be shared. He was happy that he’d had to shout the coordinates to the news cameras or risk losing them for that reason. At the same time, Professor Brewster was kind of right: Kevin was the one who had been able to translate the alien signal, not the others, and he wanted to at least see the escape capsule now that he had.

“We’ll just have to be the first to it,” Professor Brewster said, although Kevin suspected that it was going to be easier said than done. He couldn’t see how they were going to get through the airport any quicker than the others, or get to the jungle quicker, or even search quicker.

They tried, though. Kevin would have laughed at the sight of a dozen sets of scientists conducting a strange kind of race through the Bogota airport, except that he had to keep up with them all, trying to find gaps in the press of people and making sure that he didn’t lose sight of his mother at the same time.

“This way!” Professor Brewster called, leading the way toward what looked like a rental car desk. “Hello, we need to rent… let’s see, probably a dozen off-road vehicles and a small truck.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman at the desk said. “As I told the last gentleman to ask for that, it is simply not something that we keep here at the airport. Most people… well, they do not need this for their vacation, you see?”

“This is not a vacation,” Professor Brewster declared. “This is a scientific expedition of the utmost importance!”

“Even so.”

Dr. Levin stepped in. “Come on, David, you know we’ll need to rest first, and then we can work on the actual expedition after that.”

“And meanwhile the Canadians will be getting ahead of us!” he complained. “How did they even get here so fast?”

There didn’t seem to be an answer to that, but Kevin found himself swept up as they made their way from the airport to the spot where the American embassy stood waiting, looking like a large gray block in the middle of Bogota.

The ambassador was waiting for them within. He shook Professor Brewster’s hand, and then shook Kevin’s, much to his surprise.