Kevin and his mother followed Dr. Levin from SETI's facility to a car that seemed far too small to belong to someone in her position.
"It's very environmentally friendly," she said, in a tone that suggested she had faced that question a lot. "Come on, it will be easier if I drive you both over. They're quite strict about security."
"Who is?" Kevin's mother asked.
"NASA."
Kevin's breath caught at that. They were going to talk to NASA? When it came to aliens, that was even better than SETI.
The drive across Mountain View was only a short one, a few minutes at most. Even so, it was long enough for Kevin to stare out the windows at the high-tech companies spread around the area, obviously drawn there by NASA and Berkeley, the presence of so many clever people in one place pulling them in.
"We're really going to NASA?" Kevin said. He couldn't quite believe it, which made no sense, given all the things he'd had to believe in the last few days.
The NASA campus was everything that the SETI building hadn't been. It was large, spread across several buildings and set in a space that managed to have views of both the surrounding hills and the bay. There was a visitors center that was essentially a tent built on a scale that seemed hard to believe, bright white and painted with the NASA logo. They drove past that, though, to a space that was closed off to the public, behind a chain-link fence and a barrier where Dr. Levin had to show ID to get them in.
"I'm expected," she said.
"And who are they, ma'am?" the guard asked.
"This is Kevin McKenzie and his mother," Dr. Levin said. "They're with me."
"They're not on the-"
"They're with me," Dr. Levin said again, and for the first time, Kevin had a sense of the kind of toughness involved in her position. The guard hesitated for a moment, then produced a couple of visitors' passes, which Dr. Levin handed over to them. Kevin hung his around his neck, and it felt like a trophy, a talisman. With this, he could go where he needed. With this, people actually believed him.
"We'll need to go into the research areas," Dr. Levin said. "Please be careful not to touch anything, because some of the experiments are delicate."
She led the way inside a building that appeared to be composed mostly of delicate curves of steel and glass. This was the kind of place Kevin had been expecting when they came down to Mountain View. This was what a place that looked out into space should be. There were laboratories to either side, with the kind of advanced equipment in them that suggested they could test almost anything space threw their way. There were lasers and computers, benches and devices that looked designed for chemistry. There were workshops full of welding equipment and parts that might have been for cars, but that Kevin wanted to believe were for vehicles for use on other planets.
Dr. Levin asked around as they went, apparently trying to find out where everyone was who was connected with the news about Pioneer 11's message. Whenever they passed someone, she stopped them, and it seemed to Kevin that she knew everyone there. SETI might be separate from all of this, the way she said it was, but it was obvious that Dr. Levin spent a lot of time here.
"Hey, Marvin, where is everybody?" she asked a bearded man in a checked shirt.
"They're mostly gathered in the center for supercomputer research," he said. "Something like this, they want to see what the pits will come up with."
"The pits?" Kevin asked.
Dr. Levin smiled. "You'll see."
"Who are they?" the bearded man asked.
"What would you say if I told you that Kevin here can see aliens?" Dr. Levin asked.
Marvin laughed. "You can try to play up to the crazy alien hunter reputation all you want, Elise. You're as skeptical as the rest of us."
"Maybe not about this," Dr. Levin said. She looked back at Kevin and his mother. "This way."
She led the way to another part of the building, and now Kevin had the sense of extra security, with ID scanners and cameras at almost every turn. More than that, it was probably the cleanest place he had ever been. Much cleaner than, for example, his bedroom. It seemed that not a speck of dust was allowed to intrude on it without permission, let alone the piles of old clothes that filled his space until his mom told him to tidy it.
The labs were mostly empty at the moment, and empty in ways that suggested they'd been left in a hurry because something more exciting was happening. It was easy to see where they had gone. People crowded in the corridors as the three of them got closer to their destination, exchanging gossip that Kevin only caught fragments of.
"There's a signal, an actual signal."
"After all this time."
"It's not just telemetry data, or even scans. There's something…else."
"We're here," Dr. Levin said, as they arrived at a room where the door had been left open, obviously to allow for the crowd of people trying to cram inside. "Let us through, please. We need to talk to Sam."
"Here" turned out to be a large room, filled with blinking lights below and surrounded by walkways that made it seem a bit like a theater where the actors were all computers. Kevin recognized them as computers even though they were nothing like the small, barely working laptop his mother had bought for him to do schoolwork on. These were devices the size of coffee tables, cars, rooms, all matte black and glittering with lights. The people standing or sitting close to them had on suits like the ones forensics people wore on TV shows.
"Impressed?" Dr. Levin asked.
Kevin could only nod. He didn't have the words for a place like this. It was…incredible.
"What is this place?" his mother asked, and Kevin didn't know if it was a good or bad thing that even his mother didn't understand it.
"It's where NASA does its supercomputer research," Dr. Levin explained. "Work on AI, quantum computing, more advanced superconductors. It's also the equipment they use to work on…complex issues. Come on, we need to talk to Sam."
She led the way through the crowd and Kevin followed, trying to be quick enough to move into the gaps she created before they closed again. He hurried along in her wake until they came to a tall, slightly stooped man standing by one of the computers. Unlike the others, he wasn't wearing a clean suit. His long, bony fingers seemed to be tying themselves in knots as he typed.
"Professor Brewster," Dr. Levin said.
"Dr. Levin, I'm glad you could…wait, you've brought visitors. This really isn't the moment for sightseeing, Elise."
If Dr. Levin was annoyed by that, she didn't show it. "David, this is Kevin McKenzie, and his mother. They're not here to sightsee. I think Kevin might prove helpful with this. We need to see Sam."
Professor Brewster waved a hand at the machine in front of them. It was even taller than he was, with pipes running up the side that were so cold they gave off steam into the air. It was only when Kevin saw the sign on the side, "Signals Analysis Machine," that he realized Sam wasn't a person's name, but an acronym.
"You want to let a child play with a multimillion-dollar piece of engineering?" Professor Brewster asked. "I mean, he's what? Ten?"
"I'm thirteen," Kevin said. The difference might not be much to someone Professor Brewster's age, but to him, it was a fourth of his life. It was more life than he had remaining. Put like that, three years was a huge amount.
"Well, I'm forty-three, I have a doctorate from Princeton, a building full of often frankly impossible geniuses who should be doing their jobs"-he looked around the room pointedly, but no one moved-"and now, apparently a thirteen-year-old who wants to play with my supercomputer just as it is about to get to work on a signal from a probe we thought long dead."
He seemed like a man who didn't like stress much. Kevin guessed that was probably a disadvantage in his job.
"Kevin's here because of the signal," Dr. Levin said. "He…well, he predicted that it would occur."
"Impossible," Professor Brewster said. "Elise, you know I have always respected your efforts to keep SETI research in the realm of serious science, but this seems to run in completely the opposite direction. It's obviously a trick."
Dr. Levin sighed. "I know what I saw, David. He told me that there would be something happening with Pioneer 11, and then we got the signal. Will you at least play it for us?"
"Oh, very well," Professor Brewster said. He gestured to one of the scientists working around the supercomputer. "Play it so that we can get on with our work."
The scientist nodded and tapped a control interface a few times. Data flashed up on a screen in string after string of numbers, but Kevin was more interested in the audio signal that came with it. It was a strange mechanical chattering that sounded nothing like language, more like the kind of interference that might come from a computer going wrong.
Even so, he understood it. He just didn't know how.
"You need to adjust one of your radio telescopes," Kevin said, the knowledge just sitting in his mind. There were numbers too. Two sets of them, one marginally different from the other. "I think…the first seems wrong somehow, and the second is what it should be."
"What?" Professor Brewster and Dr. Levin asked almost simultaneously, although with very different expressions. Dr. Levin looked amazed. Professor Brewster mostly looked irritated.
"It's what it means," Kevin said. He shrugged. "I mean, I guess. I don't know how I know it."
"You don't know it," Professor Brewster insisted. "If there's any meaning in there at all, which frankly isn't likely, it will take SAM hours to decode it, if it's possible at all.
"I just told you what it means," Kevin insisted. "I can…it just makes sense to me."
"You should listen to him, David," Dr. Levin said. "At least search for the numbers, see if they mean anything. Can you write them down, Kevin?"
She held out a piece of paper and a pen, and Kevin noted them as clearly as he could. He held it out to Professor Brewster, who took it with bad grace.
"We have better things to do than this, Elise," he said. "Right, that's enough. Out. We have work to do here."
He shooed them away, and Dr. Levin didn't seem inclined to argue. Instead, she took Kevin and his mother out into the corridors of the research facility again.
"Come on," she said. "David might be too busy to actually use that gigantic brain of his, but there are plenty of people here who owe me favors."
"What kind of favors?" Kevin's mother asked.
Dr. Levin looked back at Kevin. "The kind where we find out exactly how Kevin is managing to receive and decode signals from outer space."
***
"You need to hold still, Kevin," said an overweight researcher wearing a Hawaiian shirt under his lab coat. He just went by "Phil" even though the nameplate on his door declared that he had at least as many PhDs as anyone else. He seemed to be a friend of Dr. Levin's, although that might have had something to do with the foot-long sandwich she picked up from the canteen before going to visit him. "It won't produce a clear image if you move."
Kevin did his best, lying still in the cramped interior of an MRI machine. It made him feel like a torpedo about to be launched into the ocean, and the confined space was only made worse by a regular dull thudding, which sounded as though someone was hammering on the outside of it while he lay there. His experiences in the hospital told him that was probably normal, and not a sign that the whole thing was about to collapse. Even so, it was hard to hold still for as long as it took for the thing to scan him.
"Almost there," Phil called. "Just hold your breath for a moment. And relax."
Kevin wished he could relax. The last couple of hours had been busy ones. There had been scientists, and labs, and tests. Lots of tests. There were cognitive tests and imaging scans, things like X-rays and word association tests while Kevin found various kinds of devices pointed at him, designed to pump different kinds of signals toward his body.
Eventually, even Phil seemed to be getting tired of shooting rays at Kevin.
"Okay, you can come out."
He helped Kevin from the machine, then led the way over to where Dr. Levin and Kevin's mother were waiting. The researcher shook his head as he pointed to the screen, and a series of black-and-white images that Kevin guessed must be of the inside of his brain. If so, brains looked weirder than he'd thought.
"I'm sorry, Elise, but there's no sign of anything different about him that wouldn't be explained by his illness," he said.
"Keep looking," Dr. Levin said.
"How, exactly?" he asked. "I'm telling you, I've used almost every test it's possible to do on a human being-fMRI, CAT scan, psych battery, you name it. I've fired so many different frequencies at Kevin here that it's a wonder he isn't picking up the local radio. Short of subjecting him to radioactive isotopes or actually dissecting him-"
"No," Kevin's mother said, firmly. Kevin didn't like that idea either.
Phil shook his head. "There's just nothing else there to find."
Kevin could hear the man's disappointment. Unlike Professor Brewster, he obviously liked the idea of someone being able to hear alien signals. That disappointment mirrored his own. He'd been sure that these people, with all their brains and their laboratories, would be able to find out what was happening, but it looked-
A man burst into the room, and it took Kevin a moment to recognize the gangly frame of Professor Brewster. He looked, if anything, even more agitated than he had when he'd been throwing them out of the supercomputer pit. He was holding a tablet, gripping it so tightly that Kevin suspected he might crack it.
"David, if this is about the use of resources…" Dr. Levin began.
The tall scientist looked over at her as if trying to work out what she was talking about, then shook his head. "Not that. I just want to know how you did it. How did you know?"
"Know what?" Kevin asked.
"Don't play dumb," the scientist said. He held out the tablet for them to look at. "One of our people ran those numbers you gave us through our systems. It turns out that they were the current settings for one of our radio telescopes, just as you said. No one who wasn't working at the observatory could know that. So how did you know?"
"Know what?" Kevin asked.
"Know what would happen when we changed it!"
Professor Brewster pressed something on his tablet.
"This is a feed from it."
He thrust the pad at Kevin, holding it out like an accusation. A buzzing, clicking signal came from it, which sounded as though it might just be static, or a mechanical problem, or crickets stuck somewhere in the workings of the machine.
To Kevin, though, the words were clear.
We are coming. Be prepared to accept us.
