Transmission

Kevin saw his mother turn to them angrily, and he tried to pull her back, but it was too late to do anything about it.

“Leave my boy alone!” she shouted. “He hasn’t done anything wrong here. He’s ill!”

They pushed their way into the house, shutting the door behind them. Kevin saw his mother bolting it the way she might have if she thought that people were going to try to break in. She went through the house, drawing the curtains, blocking out the flashes of the photographers along with the light.

Kevin went over to the TV, turning it on. The news was running, with pictures of their house from the outside, and a short clip of his mother that made her look like a madwoman as she pushed reporters back.

“Leave my boy alone. He hasn’t done anything wrong here. He’s ill!”

The words An admission of the hoax? played across the bottom of the screen, in a question that managed to accuse without accusing. They made it sound as if Kevin’s mother were trying to excuse him doing something wrong, rather than standing up for him as she had been.

She had been, hadn’t she?

“You should turn that off,” his mother said. She stepped past Kevin, doing exactly that, sending the screen into darkness. “It won’t do any good watching them saying all this about you.”

“Mom,” Kevin said, “what they’re saying… They’re making it sound like you don’t really believe me. Like you think I’m making things up because I’m ill.”

His mother didn’t answer for a moment or two.

“You do think that,” Kevin said. He couldn’t believe it. He’d thought that his mother, of all people, would believe him at this point.

“I don’t know what to think, Kevin,” his mother said. She sounded so tired then. “I know that you believe all this.”

“We found the signal,” Kevin insisted. “You defended me to Professor Brewster.”

“You’re my son,” his mother said. “I won’t let them say bad things about you, no matter what happens. Whether it’s true or not… I don’t know. I was convinced, but everything with the rock…”

Kevin felt sick inside. He felt as though things were back to where they had been when his mother had first taken him to SETI, doing it only because she thought it was something Kevin needed to do. He didn’t want her to do things because she was his mother and she felt she had to. He wanted her to believe him.

“They’ll go away eventually,” his mother said. “They’ll forget about all of this. We can get on with our lives without them, without aliens, without any of it.”

She sounded as though she was trying to reassure Kevin, but Kevin wasn’t sure that it was all that reassuring.

He might have said just that, but his mother’s phone rang then.

“Hello,” she said. “Who is… No, I don’t have anything to say to you or any other reporter.”

She’d barely hung up before there was another call, and another. Each time, she hung up after only a few seconds of conversation. When the phone rang again, Kevin thought that his mother might throw her phone across the room. She paused as she held it up though, looking at the screen with a worried expression.

“What is it, Mom?” Kevin asked.

“It’s work,” his mother said, and something about the way she said that told Kevin just how scared she was. She took the call, gesturing for Kevin to be quiet. “Hello, Mr. Banks. Yes, it is pretty bad. Yes, I know I’ve been off, but my son… yes, I know. No, I understand that, but… You can’t do that. I know it’s bad publicity, but you can’t…” She fell silent, listening for several seconds. “No, I understand.”

She finished the call, and this time she did throw her phone, sitting down on the edge of the sofa, her head in her hands.

“Mom?” Kevin said, reaching out for her. “What happened?”

“That was my work,” she said, without looking up. “They… they fired me. They said that they don’t want the negative publicity that might come from employing someone linked to all this.”

“Can they do that?” Kevin asked. It didn’t sound like the kind of thing people should be allowed to do, especially when they’d done nothing wrong.

“They say they can,” his mother said, “and if I fight it, well, I’m pretty sure that they’d make it so expensive I couldn’t do anything, and maybe a judge would agree that I’m causing their business problems by being there anyway.”

It didn’t sound fair to Kevin. It didn’t sound right. Worse, it didn’t sound as though there was anything they could do about it.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. “If I’d just kept all this to myself…”

“It isn’t your fault,” his mother said.

Kevin knew that wasn’t true, though. Thanks to the TV, he knew his mother didn’t even think that. He’d gone to NASA talking about aliens, and now his mom was getting fired, while no one even believed him about what he’d heard.

“It will be okay,” his mother said. She didn’t sound as though she believed it. “We’ll find a way to make all of this right.”