Terraplane by Jack Womack Page B

the signal
ceilingways-"
    "Alice," I said, praying for response. "Alice, QL789851ATM.
Emergency prime. Respond. Contact essential, Alice. Come in."
The screen's color remained ice green; no response came from she
who heard all. "Spot me, Alice. Alice-"
    "When Sashenka passed over," she said, "we retained contact till
moment transfer concluded. Nothing thereafter. Cybernetic messages seem not to pass between worlds."
    "Worlds?"
    "Forgive misstatement," she murmured. "There is no way to
communicate with your computers or with mine from where we
are.
    Her latest elaborations puzzled, but before I could consider we
dropped below the final layers of strata; across the form of the void
winked a thousand fireflies, lights of home and hearth. Leaning
down between the seats to viz more clearly, ducking to keep my
head from striking the sharp-curved roof, I tried and failed to spot
larger gleams.
    "Luther," said Jake, "location coordinates suggest Delaware
Water Gap below us." A river down there evidenced, its surface
agleam with night light.
    "Where's 1-80? If that's the Gap it should shoot right through
there. "

    "The wires're fuzzed, Luther. Give ear," he said, flipping earphone vol into open mode; decibel-rich static breakup
brainracked me. "Overmuch sunspot activity, mayhap? A like
sound-"
    "This month's clear for that," I said. "Try FM. New York or
Philly might show. Someplace might show" As he switched bands
the racket settled into electrical crackle and whoosh; no other
evidenced as he ran the channels. "Try AM, then. There must be
something to hear. Altitude's safe?"
    "Three thousand. Nothing's radared." Static mugged us again
while he swept and reswept the AM band. Midway along the
spectrum, amidst flutter and hiss, sounds of controlled design
flickered like aural lightning.
    "Oktobriana, where're the toners? Defuzz it." She digitalized,
hitting switch after switch; Jake centered in and locked on for those
few seconds prime transmission reached. Even at full-clear
remaining static obliterated all but vague musical passages, the
sound of stray notes wandering from their chords. Dissonant signals blasted repeatedly, rocking the hold we held on the signal.
Then, without warning, human voice rang forth.
    "-that concludes the musical portion of our program," said the
voice, "and now a word from our sponsor." For a moment it
seemed lost again, and then:
    "Beeeeeee-"
    Foghorn?
    "Ohhhhhhh! Lifebuoy-" Then, drowned in static's riptide.
The fragment heard unsettled my mind, in undefinable but not
unfamiliar ways. At a highlevel strategy meet in Argentina, ten
years past, I met a VLF technician; she spent long days tallying
unending ribbons of location numbers sent from her nation's deeprunning subs. Before, she'd worked at Jodrell Banks; for some years
at New Mexico's big dishes in the desert's reserved acreage. She
anecdoted me nightlong with tales of unexpected sounds gathered
by those listening to the air's constant call: stories of whistles
received with Aldebaran's signals; fast-read numbers bursting over
dead wavelengths, the ones not even used by intelligenceries;
Indian war whoops transmitted from the far side of the moon during the old Apollo flights. For brief seconds on still winter
nights, she said, if the clouds were right, the dishes sometimes
caught audio waves of decades-old radio programs, returning if but
for once to their origin before bouncing again back to the space
between stars. The sensation I felt as she told me those tales was the
sensation I now knew again.

    "Where was fuel when we took off?" Oktobriana suddenly
asked, shattering my reverie.
    "Full," said Jake, gliding the knob across the band to retry
pickup. "Why?"-
    "Blinking red light shows auxiliary tank now in service."
    "Auxiliary?" he repeated. "We couldn't-"
    "Twenty-five minutes remaining flight time," she said. "Cut
speed."
    "Is Newark reachable?" I asked.
    "Just," said Jake. "If it's there. We've