But
why did the satellite – or whatever it was – have the ability to broadcast in
the ultrasonic in the first place? “In space,”
went the apocryphal aphorism, “no one can hear you scream.”
He
set the chamber to 55o nm and 38,412 Hz or 38 kHz, slowing the recording rate
of the overhead camera and fired again.
Staggering
backwards, Paolo Marcillon crumpled to the floor.
When
he woke up again, the clock said he’d been out for nearly an hour. His ears
rang as if he’d been standing near an active launch pad on Earth without sound
cancelling headgear. The headache this time was worse. He took another dose of
analgesic then looked into the airlock.
Nothing
had changed. Humans typically used smooth titanium or aluminum shells, either
boxy or misshapen but this was pebbled in some way – not abraded by
micrometeoroids like cheap sats were after a couple years in orbit. It wasn’t
even spherical – though that might be explained by him running over it with the
‘bug. Even so, it didn’t look like it had been crushed, either. It looked to
him as if it had been made this way.
There
was nothing that made it look like it could have landed, though one end was
slightly wider than that other and there were four tapered bumps that had been
placed equilaterally around it. It had also had markings under a strong green
light – at 550 nanometers. They’d been incomprehensible but clearly intelligently
shaped. “Alien” tried to shove itself into his head and he resisted. Everyone
on Mars was aware that one of their missions had been to find life, or even
evidence of life on the Red Planet. But they’d been here over a hundred years,
and despite the best efforts of wild-eyed alienologists, there was nothing
verifiable, no unambiguous “dinosaur” fossils – or even “trilobite” fossils.
Even hotly debated claims over “algae fossils” ebbed and flowed as if they had
a mind of their own.
It
had become a matter of ne0-religious belief to alienologists on par with the
early 21st Century belief that Humans alone – even seven billion of
them – could destroy the environment of a living world and alter its climate on
any significant scale. He shook his head, the hubris was astonishing. Believing
in any metaphysical higher being was easier.
He
saved the recording of both the markings and the satellite’s response to the
ultrasound, then muted the recording and watched it in slow motion. Across the
bottom of the screen, the frequency climbed by tenths of a wavelength.
At
exactly 38.412 kHz the surface of the satellite spiked. He paused, reversed
then magnified ten times. One of the pebble bumps grew into a spike when the
key frequency was reached. He froze the image and magnified again, noticing
that the spikes were not identical. He reversed the magnification, but the
differences disappeared. He was no audio visual expert, so he said to the ship’s
computer, “What would this image look like if I was doing a medical ultrasound?”
The
image vanished for a few moments and when it reappeared, he couldn’t understand
what he saw at first. Scowling, he ordered the image to rotate slowly. Still
nothing. Then he asked it to reverse the magnification again until the entire
satellite was visible. Even then, he couldn’t identify anything until the image
grew to include the entire airlock.
That was
when he gasped as the image of a Human-scaled being shaped like a dolphin – in the
same way a Human was shaped like a chimpanzee – floated in the air. It turned
to face the camera and it was at that point that he’d passed out.
“The
hell?” he muttered. He stared for a long time before he finally said, “Looks
like the alienologists were right.”
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