Flood Rising (Jenna Flood #1)

After landing, they headed out from Socorro on US Route 60. Noah was at the wheel of their rented Jeep Cherokee, maintaining a steady seventy-five miles per hour. Cort sat in the front passenger seat. Soter and Jenna were in the back. She could see distant mountain ranges on the horizon, but the foreground was flat and desolate. Florida was flat, but at least there were palm trees to break up the monotony. Here, there was nothing except the occasional herd of cattle, and—distant but growing ever larger—an irregular line of satellite dishes.

As they approached, Jenna began to appreciate just how extraordinary the Very Large Array was. Unlike the Arecibo Observatory, which made use of a single enormous dish, more or less fixed in place, the Very Large Array’s twenty-seven individual dishes—each more than eighty feet in diameter and arranged in a Y-shaped pattern with legs that extended more than thirteen miles in each direction—worked in unison to create a single antenna that could be extended to a maximum twenty-two miles across. A tourist brochure she had picked up in Socorro described how the 230-ton dishes could be moved as needed using a special transport vehicle running on railroad tracks that extended to the Y’s full limit.

As the full scope of the observatory came into view, Cort looked back at Jenna. “Why does it have to be here? Couldn’t this signal be sent from any radio telescope?”

Soter answered before Jenna could admit her ignorance. “We can only speculate about the reason, but my hypothesis is that the intelligence behind the message was very familiar with our capabilities and our potential. In 1977, when the Wow! Signal and the transmission I later received were sent, the VLA was the best radio telescope on Earth. The author of the transmission could expect that it would still be functioning thirty-seven years later. The same cannot be said for the Big Ear telescope, which received the Wow! Signal. It was dismantled in 1998 to make room for a golf course.”

“A golf course?” Noah echoed, glancing in the rear view mirror. “You’re kidding, right?”

Soter grimaced. “I wish I were. One would expect a better fate for the place that marks the first contact by an alien intelligence.”

Cort gave a sarcastic chuckle. “Maybe someday they’ll build a war memorial there.”

Nobody had a response to that.





57



5:31 p.m.



The VLA dishes grew larger until they stretched across half the horizon like a picket line. A rough map on the tourist pamphlet revealed that the highway passed through the upper leg of the array. Just before they reached it, Noah turned off the main route and headed toward the cluster of administrative buildings near the junction of the three legs. He drove past the visitors center—the parking lot was empty—and continued to the control building, a two story concrete and stone structure.

Jenna was struck by the profound differences between the VLA facility and the Arecibo Observatory. The landscape was open and featureless, unlike the lushly forested limestone hills in Puerto Rico. The buildings reminded her more of the structures she’d glimpsed at the abandoned Aerojet facility in the Everglades—big, open and scattered across the landscape. The enormous dishes sprouted from the plain like surreal white mushrooms in a Lewis Carrroll story. Strangest of all was the profound quiet.

“Sure doesn’t look like anything is about to happen,” Cort remarked, taking out his cell phone and glancing at the display. “Less than half an hour to go. I’m guessing you don’t just walk into a place like this and say ‘I’d like to place a collect call to the Andromeda galaxy.’”

Soter shook his head. “Scientists have to schedule their research months, even years in advance. And this facility is primarily a receiving station.”

“You mean it can’t be used to call out?”

“It can. There’s no fundamental difference between a transmitter and a receiver in terms of hardware. A transmitter like the one at Arecibo, is built to sustain a high-power transmission over long periods. A transmission sent from here wouldn’t be very powerful at all, but the focusing ability of the array would compensate for that. However, making the changes would require some technical knowledge.”

“Do any of your clones have that knowledge?”

This wasn’t the first time the subject had been brought up, but Soter’s answer was the same. “To the best of my knowledge, no.”

“Well, we’re here. I guess we should go and make sure nobody snuck in the back door.”

As they headed in through the main entrance, Jenna hung back, allowing the three men to take the lead. The urge to make this journey, that she had first experienced in Puerto Rico, had not relented, but she felt no sense of familiarity or attunement with this place. No new implanted memories had been awakened in her. She couldn’t tell whether the door to those memories had been shut or there was simply nothing there in the first place.