SHE RAN ON FIRST SHIFT, WHICH MEANT THAT THIS WAS MIDAFTERNOON for her: traditionally a time when she began to feel a little drowsy even when Markus had not just been helping her relax. She felt that going fully to sleep would be a bad idea, partly because she had work to do and partly because it would lead to more gossip than was happening already. She could hear Markus chitchatting with Dubois Harris on the other side of the curtain. She knew that he was stalling for her, giving her some time to pull herself together; she was duly appreciative, and she made the most of it, gliding in the liminal zone between dozing and waking until her radio began to beep. She knew immediately that this was not Rufus; she could tell as much by the “fist” of the transmission. It was faint and it was clearly not the work of an experienced ham.
Her eyes opened as a thought came to her: maybe this was the source known as the Space Troll. That term had originated with Rufus, who had first mentioned it several days ago: Have you heard from the Space Troll yet? It was his name for a transmitter that he had begun picking up recently, and it matched what Dinah was hearing now.
She ejected herself from the bag, turned up the volume on the receiver, and listened while pulling on a T-shirt and some drawstring pants. The signal sounded as if it was coming in from a home-brew transmitter. The owner had a sketchy understanding of the practices and etiquette of the CW (Morse code–using) radio world. His dots and dashes were perfectly formed, and came rapidly, as much as proving that he was using a computer keyboard and an app that automatically converted keystrokes into Morse. He was sending out a lot of QRKs and QRNs, which were queries about the strength of his own signal and the degree to which it was being interfered with. So, he seemed a little insecure about the quality of his equipment.
According to Rufus, as soon as you started transmitting back to the Space Troll he would shoot back a spate of QRSes, meaning “please transmit more slowly,” further proof that he was a novice using a computer keyboard to form the groups, but not very good at deciphering what came back. He transmitted on one frequency only, which was the one that Rufus had, until a year ago, generally used to contact Dinah. This had become known to the Internet in the wake of a human interest story about the MacQuarie family, and so for a few weeks it had been damned near unusable as every CW ham on the planet had tried to use it to contact Dinah. Then word had gotten around that the MacQuaries père et fille weren’t using it anymore and it had gone pretty silent, except for a few people who apparently hadn’t gotten the memo, such as the Space Troll. Anyway, Rufus had gone back to monitoring that frequency again and Dinah was now doing likewise. She had not personally heard any transmissions from the Space Troll. This was not remarkable. Her antenna was nothing compared to the one that Rufus had installed above his mine, and her receiver was something out of a fifth-grade science project. Except when Izzy was passing over his meridian, she and Rufus would naturally “hear” different stations.
According to Rufus, having a conversation with the Space Troll required patience or a sense of humor. The fact that novice hams were screwing around on the radio, which would have driven Rufus into a spasm of righteous fury a few years ago, now just seemed like a sign of the times. Of course people were getting interested in amateur radio; the Internet was expected to go down as soon as the Hard Rain started. And of course many of them were novices.
When they finally did begin an intelligible conversation, Rufus would send QTH, which meant “where are you?” and would get back QET. This was an unofficial Q code, a sort of corny joke meaning “not on planet Earth.”
And that was why Rufus called this guy the Space Troll. Because, among other oddities, he didn’t have a call sign, or at least didn’t use one. The signal she was hearing now was QRA QET, repeated every few seconds; it meant, basically, “Hello, this is E.T., is anyone listening?”