Ed looked at the newspaperman for long enough to make him feel sheepish, his expression inscrutable behind his glasses. Then, he slapped the top of the console with his palm. “Why the hell didn’t I think of that?” He exclaimed.
“Let’s hope he isn’t right,” Rosemary remarked. “Being vindicated in his paranoia would only make him more intolerable.”
Ed popped his pipe back in his mouth and shrugged, speaking around its stem. “He might have a point, but it’s a moot one. Any culture advanced enough to build something like that isn’t going to have any trouble seeing us coming.”
“I don’t suppose this ship has guns or something if we need them?” Lamont asked.
“Last time I checked, this isn’t a comic book,” Ed quipped.
“But we haven’t heard anything back from our signals?”
“That’s the thing,” Abigail answered, biting her lip. “We don’t think so, but we can’t be completely sure. That structure is flooding the EM spectrum with looped signals on every conceivable wavelength. So any wavelength we select to send our peace message is already occupied by one of theirs. The only thing we can do is listen to the transmission channel and see if the signal we receive on that channel changes to something new. So far, that doesn’t seem to be the case.”
“Maybe you should try another method,” Lamont suggested.
“Like what?” Abigail asked.
Lamont shrugged. “Flash some lights at it or something.”
Ed looked at the newspaperman for long enough to make him feel sheepish, his expression inscrutable behind his glasses. Then, he slapped the top of the console with his palm. “Why the hell didn’t I think of that?” He exclaimed.
“It’s worth a try,” Santana agreed. She stood to her feet, straightening her skirt and turning to Raj at the navigation console. “Mr. Singh, can you use the spotlights to flash a repeating pattern toward the tower? Shall we say, an exponential sequence?” She glanced up at Phobos, who nodded approvingly.
“Up to 32, then repeat,” Abigail suggested.
Raj nodded, his eyes flickering over his control panel a few times before his hands flew into action. He lifted a panel that had many tiny white buttons beneath it and pressed a few of them. Then he closed the panel and depressed a larger button to its right, so that its red telltale illuminated against the blue glow that filled the deck. Finally, he flipped a toggle up on the board facing him. He flicked it down, then up and down twice in quick succession. Lamont watched as the green indicator next to the toggle switch flickered with Raj’s quick movements, counting its flashes. The navigator’s lips twitched as he counted silently to himself. One, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two. Raj sat back, a bead of perspiration rolling down his temple and disappearing into his black sideburn. He pressed a smaller button next to the one beside the panel, and the light beside the toggle switch began to repeat the sequence on its own. Looking up toward the observation deck, Lamont could see intermittent flashes of white faintly illuminating the underside of Westward’s hull toward the front.
“Well done,” Smiled Abigail, patting Raj’s shoulder.
All eyes turned forward, fixed on the purple-white point of light that stood against the surface of the weird, dark moon. A minute passed. Lamont squinted. Were his eyes tricking him? The point of light seemed to start flickering, twinkling like a star in the night sky.
Ed looked down at the monitor in the center of the console and licked his lips. “The tower is continuing the sequence,” he concluded. “Sixty-four. One hundred twenty-eight.” He looked up at Amila Santana and nodded confidently. “It knows we’re here.”
Very exciting