THIS SPACE FOR RENT

First published in Kitty Letter during the production of Cat's Don't Dance"

THIS SPACE FOR RENT

            Dr. Guy Manly leaned forward from his desk towards the eyepiece of the massive 36 inch reflector telescope. He was working on a tip. A mysterious phone call from a woman with a voice that oozed blue eyes, full lips, and long legs told Dr. Manly of a strange occurrence that she wanted him to check out. Her voice was warm enough to melt any man, and Manly was butter.

            The first he noticed of anything out of the ordinary was a little wobble in a star in the telescope at the McDonnell Observatory in Texas. “Moe, Larry, Cheese!” was all the Dr. Manly could say as he punched a key on his computer to check what his eyes saw. In astronomy, seeing isn’t believing. It never is. The instruments tell you if you saw what you saw. And then there’s independent corroboration to verify the findings. It’s a modern, technological form of “Did you see what I just saw?”

            There it was. Or, so it seemed. A fluctuation seemed to have occurred in the star’s brightness and size. And then it was normal. Out near the Andromeda Galaxy is a star which Dr. Manly was investigating.  A star in his viewfinder. . .  Nu Andromedae. . .  wobbled. There it was again. He pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. It shows all the signs of something passing in front of it. Something big! A previously unknown binary? No. It couldn’t be. It’s too well known and doesn’t make any sense to suddenly have a twin orbiting it. It must be something else. Who was that woman? Manly would have to wait to find out.

At the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, a phone rang. “SETI, . . .  Dr. Lee speaking. . . . Mmm. . . hunh. . . uh-huh. . . Okay, we’ll check it. And, uh. . . thanks, Dr. Manly.” Lee hung up. He picked up his glasses he used for reading, wiped them and put them on.

            He rolled his chair over to his keyboard and began a finger tap-dance on the keys. The massive satellite dish responded and turned slowly until it was aligned with the Nu Andromedae. At first nothing. Then a the noise graph fluctuated wildly. Then, just as quickly, it faded to normal. The star sort of wobbled.

            Lee didn’t “hear” anything all day after that. He checked the audio recording of the noise and it sounded like a digital version of pots and pans falling from the kitchen counter. But it was. . . organized chaos. As though there was some order to it., an underlying sense of. . . intelligence, Lee thought.

            On a hunch, Lee tried the keyboard again. The big dish moved. Nothing. He punched again. The dish moved a second time. Nothing. Moved again. Nothing. Again. Something! That noise again. The same, but not the same. A little different. Different pots and pans? He went to the phone and called Manly.

            “Manly here.”

            “Guy, I have something interesting here.” said Lee. “I got a noise. But, I can’t make heads or tails of it except that it seems. . . digital.”

            “Digital?”

            “Yeah, there’s a funny sense of order to it, but I can’t make sense of it. But, ah. . . I tried moving the dish around the star and, well. . . I got it again, southeast of the center of the star.. I went in three wider circles and kept finding it. It’s moving Dr. Manly.”

           

            On the World Wide Web, Sheila Weintraub, an amateur astronomer, X-Files fan, and firm believer in extra-terrestrial life, gathered up the activity from the McDonnell Observatory and SETI. Sheila may be an amateur, but she was no dummy. She knew the routine. If something was going on, scientists have to confirm and coordinate to verify. All she had to do was wait and pick up the information like she was standing on a corner and overhearing a conversation. Gotta love the internet. That night, Sheila and several dozen other bystanders on that same corner would be tracking the noise as best they could from the coordinates of Dr. Lee’s.

            They weren’t sure of what they were tracking. Sheila saw another wobble in a star in the Constellation of Lacerta, the Lizard, and by morning, another wobble in Cygnus, the Swan. Sheila, and nearly all of the eavesdroppers now had a speed and direction of. . . something. Something big, and something they couldn’t see unless it passed in front of a star.

            Sheila called up Dr. Manly. She confirmed with him her own new findings, that he and Dr. Lee and other astronomers around the globe were mutually corroborating: something large and unseen was passing through our galaxy at a speed that boggled the imagination. And if Dr. Lee was right. It was intelligent. Sheila didn’t listen to Guy’s protestations that she not jump to any conclusions.

            Within days, it made the papers. And when it seemed just incredible enough, it hit TV. CNN did a half hour on the object. All four major networks devoted their weekly news-magazines to it. Several hosts hinted that the object was heading for earth. Only “60 Minutes” had any appeal to reason and that was on Andy Rooney’s segment. Since the show was slipping in the ratings, very few people saw it.

            The whole world began a nightly vigil––––watching and looking with telescopes, radarscopes, binoculars and just gazing up at the night sky. Something was up there. And everyone wanted to see it.

            Large groups of people began appearing on mountain tops with even larger signs saying “Welcome to Earth!!” From Washington, extreme liberals began expressing the need to welcome the visitors and that we have bi-lingual trans-stellar education for the visitors. They took to wearing their old E.T. buttons. The right wing extremists complained that we should never have slowed the spending on defense and that Star Wars should be revived. They continued wearing their ID4 buttons.

            When Dr. Lee was showing the varying noise graphs to a US Navy code-breaker, a man that deciphers military secret codes, they got a clue. Emil Dickens, Captain, US Navy found a word. After seventeen scrambles of the noise he had located a word.

            “Hello, Manly, this is Dr. Lee.”

            “Yes?”

            “Emil’s got it!”

            “Shalzbot!” exclaimed Guy.

            “Uh. . . Dr. Manly have you been watching TV at all lately?” asked Lee.

            “Well, frankly no.” said Guy. Being an incredibly busy and popular scientist I’ve no time for TV. Why?”

            “I think we’ve been duped Doctor.” Lee said, leaving the empty static of the phone line pregnant to the point of bursting.

            “What are you saying, Lee. Spill it!” shot back Guy.

            “Well, it seems that this thing is moving pretty fast. A long trip. . . . if the speed we’ve calculated is on the money. But, something else if we’re wrong. And we are.”

            “But how can you be so sure?” Dr. Manly shifted the phone to his other ear. Sweat beaded up on his forehead.

            “Well,” answered Lee, “it seems, that we’ve been so led on by speculation and wanting to believe, we missed an obvious fact. This thing is not out in space at all, but right here in our own atmosphere. Manly, where did you get this “tip” that started this whole thing?”

            “I don’t see why that’s important., Freddy! It was uh. . . very reliable, I’m sure of it.” That voice had been haunted Manly’s dreams. Who was she?

            “Not after what Emil told me. That noise, it’s a message.”

            “For God’s sake! What’s the message?” screamed Manly. “We could get the Nobel Prize!!”

            “Enjoy Coca-Cola®,” said Lee. “It’s a damn ad.”

            Dr. Guy Manly let the phone fall to it’s cradle. It was over. The hope, the glory, gone. He’d learned his lesson.The door creaked open behind him. He wheeled around and faced a pair of legs with a blonde on top. She was smiling and holding a bottle of Coca-Cola®. Guy asked, “And you/re? . . .“

            “Sue,” she said.

            “I see.” he shot back.

            “I see you saw what I said you should see!”

            “That was you, Sue?”

            “Sure! . . . You sap!” she said, and strolled over to where he sat.

           

            Looks like it wasn’t going to be a total waste. Manly stood up and knocked his can of Pepsi® into the trash.

-dougg williams