8 Strawberry Bank Rd.

Suite 20

Nashua, New Hampshire

     Ron nodded slowly, not sure if he had escaped the ‘guillotine’ or not. He had expected to be summarily dis-missed at the least and possibly put in prison. But, it seemed to him, that the whole episode was going to be swept under the rug; that a public issue was to be avoided. Why?, he wondered. His relief at not losing his job and avoiding dire punishment was somehow muted by the awareness that the issues he had been involved in and accused of were going to be hushed, as it had never happened. But it had happened, he mused. This whole thing is real. What are they hiding?

Chapter 1

Present Day

     “So, what’d you do all weekend?” asked Fred as he stared at the green lines of data on the computer screen. He reached up to make some adjustments on the radio telescope he was monitoring.

     "Worked on my dissertation. Came in here last night to do some star gazing,” replied Jenny, her back to him as she watched the image on the computer screen, the image as seen through the optical telescope.

     "You missed your big chance.” “How’s that?”

     “You coulda spent the evening with me,” said Fred, keeping his eyes on the screen.

     “What? An evening of baseball and beer and popcorn?” “Well, not all evening.”

     “In your dreams.”

     “Jeezis, look at this,” exclaimed Fred Myers. The green trace bobbed up and down out of the noise hash on the bottom of the computer screen. Fred continued to make remote adjustments to the radio telescope positioning. “Lemme see if I can strengthen this signal.”

     Jenny Grant swiveled her chair away from the controls of the optical telescope to peer over Fred’s shoulder. They had detected strange signals before with the radio telescope; but with this particularly large signal, it was almost certain to be a satellite or even a terrestrial transmitter. The occasional strong signal detracted from their focus on examining the radio emissions of stars.

     “Sure is a solid signal.” She looked at the control settings and scowled. “Gotta be a freaking satellite -- signal that strong.”

     “How ‘bout you swing the optical to my coordinates. I have the position data on the slave RAM.”

     Jenny turned back to her control panel. “Okay. I’ll take a look.”

     Her remote adjustments re-pointed the 14-inch Mead RCX 400 telescope to match the radio telescope orientation. The optical telescope was housed in the spherically roofed shelter just outside the control shack. The radio telescope was at the other end of the Science Building roof in a simple wooden shelter sufficient to provide protection from the elements.

     In a few minutes Jenny had the telescope aligned to Fred’s coordinates. The large computer screen showed a quarter of the Moon.

     “Gotta be a satellite. I just can’t see it. I took it from the Moon down to Earth, but I don’t see anything.” She ran through the adjustments again.

     Fred turned to look at the image on her screen. “Maybe it’s on the Moon, some kind of probe or some-thing.”

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