Liars' Prize 1 : To Knock Upon Their Door

By Justyne Kairos

You are fourteen years old and you find something that the world's experts thank you for pointing it out, and then say goodbye. Neither of them quite believes what the other is saying, so they both take a closer look, and the lies begin. When the two come to the same conclusion, mutual blackmail leads to the inevitable question. Is the prize worth the price, when the cost is an avalanche of terror, blood, tears, and a lifetime of being called a liar? This is what happens when the answer is YES!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lyres Publishing
• Release date: Aug 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9780995659704

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Liars' Prize 1 : To Knock Upon Their Door

Liars' Prize 1 : To Knock Upon Their Door

by

Justyne Kairos

Copyright © 2017 by Justyne Kairos

ISBN 978-0-9956597-0-4

First Printed 2017

Published by Lyres Publishing,

www.lyrespublishing.co.uk

England

All rights are reserved and held by Lyres Publishing. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

Zero Hour

Heliconia Farm, nr. Cromwell, South Island, New Zealand

‛Breakfast’.

The shouted command penetrated Frank's closed bedroom door and reached his ears, but promptly got diverted into the temporary memory built into all 14 year teenagers. He was working.

Their home-built telescope had been downloading sky images into its controlling laptop all night, while he slept. As soon as he had woken up, Frank had started up his own computer, in his bedroom, to download the images from the laptop. The computer, which used to be his dad's, sat on his bedroom's desk. The desk had a history of not-very-careful owners, and the last, his dad, had added to its scars, so now Frank could use it for whatever he wanted without mum getting upset.

Still in his underpants, Frank began checking the night's images. After all, there could be new comet out there, or maybe a nova, or even a supernova. Breakfast could wait. As each image was selected, the software would have compared it with the computer's astronomical database and looked for pin-sharp differences in the light. Differences in one star's brightness would get the image file marked for special attention.

Frank always did a blink test on the telescope's images. His computer would call up the database's image for that part of sky and then rotate it, squeeze it, and distort it, and until it exactly matched their telescope's image. Then it displayed them alternately, switching them several times a second, so that anything different would look as though it were blinking. He could check ten images a minute, but the smell of fried eggs and bacon was making its insidious way under the door.

Most of the images were ruined by clouds. That was the penalty for living in New Zealand. The Maori's had called it the land of The Long White Cloud for good reason. On the other hand, there were a lot fewer telescopes in the southern half of the planet, so if he did find something, he had a much better chance of being the first to see it. If he checked the images as soon as possible.

Last night's telescope observations had produced only sixty one totally clear images that he could add to his own database. There was nothing special in any of them, not one blinking star or even a new satellite. A pretty typical and unexciting cloudy night’s viewing, but the next night could be different.

‛Your breakfast is getting cold.’ The aroma was weakening his resolve, and this time the words got through.

‛Okay, I'm coming’ he yelled back. He quickly moved the mouse to end the program. Too quickly. Somehow he had managed to knock his alarm clock onto the floor. He reached down to get it, and then looked up at the screen as he grabbed it. Something was blinking in the last image. Not a spot. Not a cloud. A line, but it was so faint that you could hardly see it, except from that one angle, while he was bent down into a human question mark.

He sat back in his chair and looked again. Along the line, almost a tenth of the pixels were blinking, but incredibly faintly. It was only because he had set the gain as so high, so that the smallest difference would be magnified, that he could see them at all. The stars had become lurid beacons. On a farm, miles from the nearest town, in the middle of New Zealand's South Island, the sky was so dark and free from light pollution that almost every photon of light had to come from somewhere up high but the line was so dim that it could be his imagination. His dad would probably tell him to ignore it. He pushed his chair back, stood up, slid the keyboard aside, and pulled the display forwards until it was resting on the desk's edge. He squatted down and found a position from where he could see the line clearly once more. It was still there. He slowly moved around the display, like the hand on an old-style clock, but looking across the image, looking for more lines. He found another 'maybe', but nothing like the first one. He kept moving until he found it again. Still squatting, looking, he blindly reached out and found the computer's mouse, and summoned the software's meteor course plotting entry table. He manoeuvred the mouse's crosswire cursor over one end of the line, and clicked. Its angular coordinates appeared alongside, entered into the top of a two-line display table. Still squatting awkwardly, he moved the cursor's crosswire to the other end of the line, and clicked again. The second line of the table was filled in, together with a choice of options of where to save the table. Frank chose the meteorite report page, and everything was filled in for him. The question was, did he want to report it as a meteorite... or something else? Dad would know, but Frank was fed up with being told that what he thought was a meteorite, wasn't, so he saved the report page in a file, while he thought about that. Should he ask dad?

An I'm putting your breakfast in the fridge, mother's warning drifted in from the kitchen.

Frank decided. His dad had shown him how report a new object in space, so he could do it on his own, but he had to be quick and do it before somebody else did. Only the first person got the recognition, but it would be best not to tell dad just yet, because it could still be his imagination. It was only bits of a line, and maybe not even a line. It could be, what did they call it, an artefact of the software? A mistake in the software was what they meant.

There was one last check that could be done – a search of the latest database information. If it was new, then it might not be in his computer's information file, so he had to update his database with the latest information. Frank got the download in progress, but the farm's internet link was awfully slow. It wouldn't finish downloading for minutes, which meant that he could have breakfast while he was waiting.

‛What are you doing in there?’ his mother yelled demand penetrated the door. ‛It′s getting cold.’

He rushed out of his room and made his way to their kitchen. His mother took one look at her tawny-haired son, displaying his bony ribs and legs.

‛Not dressed like You're not, not in my kitchen’ his mother rebuked him. ‛Put some clothes on, if you want to eat.’

Frank didn't see anything wrong with wearing yesterday's socks and underpants, but she was the supreme ruler in her kitchen, so he had to go back and start over again.

His mother looked annoyance at his father. His father was relaxed and unconcerned, leaning back in the kitchen chair, enjoying his second cup of breakfast coffee. His hair was beginning to thin, she noticed, but it was still as brown and curly as ever. On the outside, her husband was as average as a person could be. Average height, average build, average almost everything. It was the man inside that she had discovered, that had made her ignore her mother's protestations, and marry him. He had been out working since dawn, making the most of the daylight hours, though he didn't consider it to be working. He just liked being out there at that time of day, and if he could do a few chores at the same time, then that was all to the good. He had never planned on being a farmer, but that was life for you. Now he had come back, to enjoy his wife's breakfast and his son's brief company before school.

His wife of sixteen years was still pretty, and now there was a strength in her that made her so much more, but she did tend to get on Frank's case. Their son was growing up fast and wanted to make his own way in the world, which meant that Frank's relationships with his mother, and himself, were being stretched to the point of invisibility. That was as it should be, but mothers tended to deny the inevitable outcome, so he said nothing to Frank, and smiled at his wife. Besides, she looked so good, annoyed or not, standing there in her flower-patterned apron. Her hair was black and glossy and vigorous. Her skin was as smooth and perfect as the day she was born, with the golden tan of the Maori. She was all he ever wanted, but she wasn't perfect where Frank was concerned. Teenage boys and their mothers were civil disobedience demonstrations in slow motion. She tried to nail him down to obeying a rule, and somehow the circumstances changed to make the rule irrelevant, and what annoyed her even more was that Frank didn't seem to notice that it was happening. He just.. continued.

His wife continued to look at her husband. She wasn't giving up.

‛Since when does he put off breakfast?’ she accused her husband. ‛I think that he was up to something on that computer you gave him.’

‛So?’ her husband casually responded. ‛All teenagers are up to something. I do regular checks on it for porn, what else do you want.’ He didn't tell her all that he had found, because all teenage boys are interested in naked women. Relationships came later, as they grew into adulthood.

‛So check it again. Please?’

‛No. If I go looking he'll know. You go and check his clean clothes, or something, while he is eating. If the computer is on, but the screen is blank, then move the mouse. If it stays blank, press the space bar like I showed you, the one at the bottom of the keyboard, that doesn't have markings on it. Then come and tell me what appears on the screen. Whatever you see, do not tell Frank, or we will never hear the end of it’.

‛Humph.’

Frank came rushing back, in worn beige shorts and a green polo shirt. He scrambled onto a kitchen chair, and began devouring the muesli, soaked in milk. His mother quietly withdrew. At the rate Frank was eating, she had about three minutes before he would be expecting his main course.

She opened the door to Frank's room and carefully stepped over his favourite blue top. She dearly wanted to tidy it up, but that could wait and Frank would notice if she touched it. The computer screen was displaying rows of letters and numbers being replaced by more rows of letters and numbers. At least it wasn't porn, so it had to be something to do with that damned telescope. Touching Frank's computer was a no-no, so she had to be satisfied with a quick look on his desk and around the room. The computer screen on the desk was surrounded by a stack of internet books and the e-book reader that his dad had bought him. His mobile phone and tablet were plugged into their chargers. The rest of the room was a disaster area of strewn bedclothes, books, magazines and positively stank of teenage boy. Why, oh why, could he not open a window just a little bit. In other words, his bedroom was in its normal state.

Frank was scraping the bowl clean when she returned, bearing a hint of impatience. His father relaxed. That meant that Frank's computer was probably still connected to the telescope, or something along those lines, an interest that was totally incomprehensible to his wife. He had a physics degree himself, and had long ago given up trying to explain his enthusiasm to his wife. It was one of the reasons that his telescope had been mothballed before he had finished building it. That was even before Frank had been born, a long time ago, but the parts of telescopes do not decay with time. If anything, the stresses in the mirror's glass can ease with time, and boys will go exploring. The telescope parts, carefully sealed and protected, were bound to be discovered. His wife fought for her share of her son's attention, and made her husband promise not to spend hours with the telescope. At first she won, because her husband said that he would only offer guidance to his son, a half-hour here and there. He chose not to say that he was guiding their son how finish building the telescope. It was their secret, and it bound father and son together.

Building the telescope required time and money, but they had a plan, and his father had given him the final, and most expensive, part as a fourteenth birthday present. Frank's enthusiastic announcement of what it meant did not go down well with his mother. Her son was now lost to her. He would forever be his father's son, never hers. Why couldn't she have had a girl, she silently mourned?

The telescope was originally his father's, untouched for nearly two decades. Frank had discovered it, carefully sealed up in plastic, in one of the farm's barns. Persistent badgering had persuaded his father to buy a new CCD camera and use an obsolete laptop to control it. His father had not expected the enthusiasm to last, but he was flattered that his son seemed to like the same things that he did, so he paid for all the extras that Frank wanted, finance permitting, but not his time. He was a farmer now, and he no longer had the time that any sort of astronomy demanded – especially if it was only to take pretty pictures, so Frank had put it all together himself, a bit at a time, and the system worked. He wrote it up for a school project. It had been the first time that he came top of the class. Then he sent it to the New Zealand amateur astronomers' web site. They had accepted it and published it as a download. That so many people thought so much of what he had done had built up Frank’s confidence, and his father was going to do nothing to damage that.

‛See anything up there?’ his father asked, so very casually.

‛Maybe,’ Frank delayed, intent on dismembering a sausage.

‛What sort of maybe?’ His father persisted.

‛An LSB sort of maybe. It could be one of those high-flying military aircraft, or a bird, or an orbiting spanner, or a midge, or maybe a software error. I'm downloading a database update. Then I'll see.’

‛How long before you know?’ his father asked.

‛Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.’ Frank replied with careless assurance.

‛Time enough for you to slow down and eat your breakfast properly,’ his mother declared, ignoring his already emptying plate. How her son managed to pack away that much food, that fast, was a mystery.

‛Fifteen minutes you said, didn't you?’ she questioned.

‛Yes,’ Frank admitted.

‛Then you have plenty of time. Slow down or you will choke.'

‛What makes you think that it's a spanner?’ his father asked him, leaning back in his creaking kitchen chair.

‛It could be anything, but the orbital track would be about right.’

His mother looked at her husband for a translation as Frank attacked his food.

‛The telescope tracks the stars, so their image is fixed. Planets, and other things, orbiting the sun in the solar system, mostly move very slowly. They don't show up as lines. Meteorites travel faster than anything we can put up there. They travel so fast that they leave a long track, across the whole image, in less a second. A spanner is a solid lump of metal, travelling a lot slower, and it takes while to burn up. If it was a piece of metal foil then it would have burnt up so fast that nobody would have seen it, so it's probably pretty solid, I'd say. If it's not in his updated data base, then it's new and it's important that everybody should know about it. It could do a lot of damage, if it came down in the wrong place.’

His mother leaned back, appeased, and then remembered something.

‛An LSB?’ she queried.

‛It stands for Lowest Significant Bit,’ her husband responded. ‛Digital jargon. It means that it was so faint that it was only just visible to the telescope. So faint that Frank isn't sure what it is, or even if it is there at all.’ Which Frank's father was damn sure was not the case. They had downloaded the latest database a week ago, and two months before that. Whatever it was, Frank was hooked by it, and his father didn't bring up a stupid son, to go hunting ghosts.

‛If it is a spanner, could it come down and hit somebody?’ she worried.

‛If it's in the right orbit, and big enough, but it's pretty unlikely,' her husband assured her. ‛That image was recorded hours ago, and once you hit the atmosphere the friction slows it really quickly, and then only way to go is down, unless you have rocket power, and he would have seen that. If a spanner was up there, then it has probably either burnt up or landed before we got out of bed, but you never know. Its better safe than sorry, so if NASA don't have a record of it, then they need to be told, just in case.’ He knew that the odds were about equal, that if it was that faint, it wasn’t a real event, but he wasn't about to rain on his son's parade.

‛So you're going to email NASA, as if they haven’t heard of this thing,’ she asked, a little incredulous.

‛Not me,’ her husband replied, ‛That's Frank's job, because if it is not on the NEO, that's the Near Earth Object database, then NASA probably do not know about it. Frank could be the first to have seen it.’

She looked back at her husband with an expression that meant he had better be sure, but he just smiled.

‛Can I have a refill of my coffee, since I might be here a while longer?’ he asked. Her expression did not change, but she poured out her husband's coffee, and then attended to Frank's empty plate.

‛Clean your teeth now,’ she commanded as Frank scrambled from the table. He rushed for the bathroom. Mum would check his teeth before he left for school, but as long as she could not see any breakfast in them and there was a smell of mint, that would do.

Five seconds in the bathroom and he was back in his bedroom. The update had finished early and it was ready to go. He entered the data request, and waited.

NO KNOWN OBJECT WITH THAT VECTOR AT THE SPECIFIED COORDINATES was the immediate and uncaring answer. So now what?

His father joined him, to sit on the edge of the bed, wearing his working clothes and socks. His wife did not allow his farm boots in the house.

‛So,’ he said, ‛you reckon it's a spanner?’

‛Or something,’ his son continued.

‛You’re not sure?’ his father queried.

‛Well, no, not really,’ Frank admitted.

‛Why not,’ his father asked patiently, thinking that getting a straight answer out of his son was beginning to be like extracting a tooth.

‛Well, its brightness doesn't vary in the right way,’ Frank puzzled.

His father continued to look at him, but this time saying nothing, just waiting.

Frank continued. ‛It sort of, twinkles. Some bits are dimmer than they should be, and some are brighter. And it is very faint. That's why the software missed it. Lean over this way and I'll show you.’

His father patiently leaned over and looked at the screen as it blinked between images. He could see that the line was there, after Frank had pointed it out, but it was so hard to distinguish that it could be your imagination.

‛It's hard to see,’ he agreed, not wanting to dash his son's hopes. ‛Maybe you can do a check to see how real it is,’ he suggested.

‛The software can't even see it, so how can I check?’ Frank asked his father and himself.

‛I think there is a way,’ his father answered, ‛but it will take the computer a while to work it out. What you have got do to is to calculate the chance, the probability, of that sort of line going through every bit of the image. Then, if your line is real, then it will have the highest probability of all, but that is a lot of calculations, and it will take too long to arrange today.’

‛I hope there is some software that can do that,’ Frank asked, not really understanding. ‛I am only fourteen,’ he pleaded.

‛I think that it's already in there,’ his father answered. ‛You just have to put it together. You have a spreadsheet, don't you, with a statistics package?’ His father knew it was there, because Frank's computer used to be his computer. ‛All you have to do is to copy the brightness of each pixel of the image into a spreadsheet cell, and then use the statistics package.’

‛Dad, can you help me do it?’ Frank asked, feeling helpless.

‛I could,’ his father answered, ‛if I had the time, but I don't.’ He could make the time, but first he wanted his son to try his best.

‛Tell you what,’ he continued, ‛you do what you can, and then I'll help you with the bits you can't do.’

Frank was familiar with the sort of help that his father offered. It meant that he had to do all the work while his father looked on. At least, Frank consoled himself, it must be possible else his father would not have proposed it.

Frank looked nervous, as he turned to his father. ‛I want to send the email now. Can I?’

His father took a breath and gave his decision.

‛You found it. If you think it's real, then you should send the email, but remember that they won't thank you if it isn't.’

Frank had already made his decision.

‛I think that it probably is real, but if it isn't, then I'm just a fourteen year old boy with a vivid imagination,’ Frank consciously quoted his teachers, ‛and they'll forgive me.’ He held up both his hands, interlaced his thumbs and crossed all his fingers.

‛Then do it,’ his father commanded, ‛but please be careful what you claim,’ he advised Frank. ‛I'll watch you write it out, and then I have to go. You can send it yourself.’

Frank turned back to the computer, selected the text program and started to type, very carefully. It was very important that each word was correct. He was almost finished when his father abruptly stood up.

‛You appear to know what you're doing, so I'm going now. I have boots to put on and a farm to run.’ He left Frank's bedroom and shut the door behind him before Frank could say anything.

His father didn't have to leave so quickly, but it was important that Frank took the final step of finishing and sending the email on his own. He went into the utility room, and sat down to put his boots on.

‛Well?’ his wife demanded, a little impatiently, from the lounge.

His father shrugged. ‛It looks genuine and NEO don't have a record of anything in that position. he is sending the email now.’ He reached for his working top.

‛And if he's wrong?’ his wife worried.

‛Then he's done what every fourteen year old does, and should do. Tell his elders and betters that he knows better than them, and accept the risk of being wrong.’

‛Except that we are his elders and betters.’ His wife pointed out. Just then Frank came rushing in.

‛I've sent it,’ he proclaimed.

‛And now you hurry up and get ready for school,’ his mother responded. She turned towards her husband, but he was already making good his escape through the door to the utility room and the farm outside. Men, she thought, and then returned to the task of getting her son ready for school.

Fromon Conference Room meeting 1

(Translation from committee records)

The branchman waited until the last committee member had slid onto his branch.

‛This is a mess,’ he summarised, ‛and we have to rescue the surviving crew, but first we need to know how it happened, so that we can better plan our response. Base captain?’ he enquired, looking down the table, but then continued without waiting for a response.

‛For those who are not familiar with the position of base captain, he duplicates the position and knowledge of the space vessel captain and continually monitors the data sent back from the craft for the duration of trip. He also leads a base crew who duplicate the space crew. Captain?’ he ended.

‛There was a collision in transit. It is always a risk of course, and we take precautions, but as we all know, the risk is unavoidable. The forward shield suffered a major impact with a large object of high density. A nickel/iron body is the most likely. The shield did its job, but the forces that it passed on the vessel were very high. There was a generalized structural failure of the vehicle. Not enough to destroy it, but enough to damage almost everything to some extent. Think of it as a ground vehicle that has rolled over at speed. It has been bent out of shape and the passengers are injured, maybe dying. If the crew are healthy and mobile, they may be able to recover enough to repair a few things and extend life support duration.’

‛Extend it?’ the branchman interrupted. ‛how long do you think they have?’

‛There is no way of knowing. The impact forces damaged the two main quantum safes. Their contents are no longer quantum-linked to the base safes, so signal communication via modulation of their quantum states is no longer possible. There is an emergency quantum safe which we are now using, but the communication rate is very slow. One very low resolution video image takes a day to transmit. The vessel's internal information system seems to be working well enough for our purposes. It was a distributed system, employing twenty three locations spread throughout the vessel. Enough of it was undamaged for it to do what we instruct, and information that it returned looks reasonable, except that specific requests for crew life support data has gone unanswered. However, analysis of the data indicates that there are survivors.’

‛Surely crew communication and video images are crucial to our planning?’

‛No. Crew life support data and the monitoring any potential hazards comes first, and then we will try for a video, if everything else still works.’

‛Ok,’ the branchman accepted. ‛What is the vessel and crew's current status?’

‛No propulsion systems are responding to status requests, but the vessel did arrive as per the standard procedure for that solar system and has aligned itself with respect to the target planet as per normal. The impact did slow it down somewhat, as you would expect, and there was a deviation from its planned course, but it did arrive and successfully link up with the monitor vessel. There are indications of increasing radiation in the vicinity of the engine. The rate of increase is very slow and the radiation should not become significant for a while. We should be able to get there in time to avoid any hazard to the crew. Its cause is unknown.’

‛Environmental monitoring analysis shows that crew members are present in what you would call the socializing area, and life support appears to be functioning in this area. There is, however, one more hazard that the crew may have to face. The security of the experimental animals may have been compromised, and that consequently some may have escaped from their confinement. We are now making confirmation of that our highest priority.’

‛Oh, damn,’ the branchman swore. ‛How soon will we know?’

‛If I may interrupt, branchman,’ the psychologist broke in. ‛We should not make this a priority. Knowing that they are at risk to this danger will not help us save them any quicker. Reaching the vehicle as quickly as possible should be our priority. We can always include the appropriate equipment in the rescue vessels, and personally speaking, I would not want to see, or hear, the animals get at the crew. I know that the public will want to know, and will somehow obtain copies of any audio, or video that we can get. We should make this impossible by not requesting the relevant data, and we should always refer to individuals as a 'crew member', not by their name. If this rescue does not go well, then personalisation will make it all the harder.’

‛So it is your recommendation that we deliberately do not video the crew, do not ask the crew how they are feeling because we would become too 'connected' to them? To spare our feelings?’ The branchman ended.

‛As a medical doctor,’ the psychologist informed them, ‛I have been present at the scene of vehicle accidents where nothing can be done except to hold their claw and wait. I do not recommend it. And billions could be hearing it, watching it. You will be saving them much anguish.’

The base captain interrupted. ‛In our profession it is an unwritten rule that if death is imminent, then the communications equipment is destroyed, to save others from hearing the sounds of their dying, their death.’

‛The survivors may not even be capable of doing that,’ the psychologist pointed out. ‛Until we know more about the situation, we should keep communications impersonal, clinical if you will. It is the best way, in this situation.’

‛I cannot say that I like the idea,’ the branchman said, ‛but you are the psychological expert in stress situations, so I will accept your recommendations. For the moment. Captain, you heard the lady. Use the communications facilities to establish the vessel's status. That comes first. When that is known and the rescue plan is being progressed, we will discuss this again.’ He sighed and began a new subject

‛Logistically, what vessels are available for the rescue? We have to assume that the engines may be damaged and hazardous…’

Zero Plus 9 hours

Near Earth Object claims review office

Frank's email had arrived, but now it waited in the queue of almost a thousand others. NASA had contracted the work out to students, because amateur astronomers' pretty pictures were not top of their priorities. There was a waiting array of five Berkeley post-graduate astronomy students, paid to spend their evenings reviewing the incoming claims. Their remit was establish the email's individual worthiness and then submit it to the appropriate authority to verify or not, according to an established procedure.

The student's desks were arrayed in two columns, but each was orientated at an angle, so that their supervisor, George Benton, could keep an eye on them and their screens. Well, that's what he told his supervisor. Candice was the best looking of the five, he had always thought, a slender blonde working to help pay for her intended PhD. This evening she was wearing a cream top and jeans. He had never seen her in high heels, which he thought was a pity.

Candice had already worked the terminal for two hours and was beginning to wish that she didn't need the money, but it helped that the job kept her out of the food halls, and so not be tempted by chocolate chip ice-cream. Frank's email arrived at her terminal and she read it carefully. No spelling mistakes, no outrageous claims, just an image and a reasoned argument as to why anyone should pay attention to this particular claim. The curious thing about it was that it did not say what the object was, but what it wasn't and couldn't be. That was unusual, but a brief look at the image convinced her that the astronomer had a point. Oh, well, she sighed. She selected the images and exported them it to the statistics program, temporarily closed Frank's email, and then got back to the next email in the queue while the image was being processed.

Five and a half email reviews later she got the message that it was done. God bless supercomputers she thought. She typed a brief message replying to her current email, that the amateur astronomer's image was almost certainly that of a piece of space junk whose fiery demise that particular part of the sky had been predicted, and to thank the astronomer for his observation record. One more piece of potentially lethal orbiting junk the less. She sent a separate email to NASA, attaching the details. The astronomer would get a thank-you note from NASA that he could show to his friends, colleagues, whoever. She clicked on the statistics message icon and looked at the summoned window. It wasn't what she expected.

She checked it again and thought about it. There was a high probability that the ‛line’ existed. Compared to all the other potential 'lines' on the image, it was clearly much more likely to be a genuine line of something, with odds of several thousands to one better than the nearest competitor. It was also about a thousand to one on that it was real light source, not an artefact of electronic noise or software error, but there were no known astronomical bodies that could have left that track at that position. That left a local atmospheric source – a bug flying in front of the telescope, the headlight of a distant car reflected off a high cloud, etc., etc., but they didn't quite fit either. She called up the astronomer's record. His previous, and only, claim was two months ago. He said that it was a piece of insulation entering the atmosphere and burning up, and he was right on the mark. Okay, then. His name was Frank Naismith and he was, oh shit, fourteen years old. It was time for a rethink.

Forget that he was fourteen. Was the equipment ok? It was a Newtonian telescope design, with a monster 18 inch mirror that had been re-polished and silvered six months ago. It had new ccd detectors, motors, etc. fitted. 12 inches was the standard size, and rarely was it a Newtonian. This was old style, because its superior light gathering ability simply wasn't needed in these days of ccds. It sounded as though he had got hold of an old mirror and he, or somebody, had added some modern gizmos. He must seen unusual things before now, but he hadn't claimed anything then. The address was Heliconia farm, near Cromwell, in New Zealand's South Island, so there was unlikely to be any nearby bright lights, not that there was much light pollution in New Zealand. They had really dark skies down there. It was probably his father's telescope that the kid was using, so the father would have checked, so the odds were good that this was a genuine sighting, but it was still possible that it wasn't. She debated whether or not to pursue it, but she decided that a fourteen year old needed encouragement, remembering her own family's attitude. First, had anybody else reported it? She checked today's reviewed emails for any reference for that patch of sky – nothing. That was not surprising, given that there were so few telescopes in the Southern hemisphere and the image was of a very small patch of sky. So what else? Who else might be looking in that general direction, at that time? A quick check of all the big telescopes showed that, at that particular time, most of them were either looking in the wrong direction or clouded over, except for one, in Australia, the 3.9 metre at Siding Spring Mountain, being used by planet hunters. However, they didn't much care about anything unless a star wobbled a bit, the gravitational effect of an orbiting planet, or if its brightness was that little bit different because a planet passed in front. It was worth a phone call though, since she knew one of the PhDs over there, and she had no objection to a few minutes, totally justifiable, conversation with him. The room was a bit noisy, so she plugged in her headset and dialled through.

‛Hi, Wayne, it's Candice here, how's it going down there?’ she asked. ‛We haven't spoken since graduation.’

‛Busy,’ came the reply. ‛Is this social or work, because they just dumped a problem on me from last night's results? Why the phone call?’

Candice decided that caution seemed to be a good idea, just in case. ‛Oh, I was going through all these emails from the amateurs in Australia and New Zealand, and I thought of you. Found any new planets recently?’

‛Some,’ he admitted, ‛but last night something got screwed up, and we got some totally weird results, so I got delegated to identify the fault and fix it.’

Candice's world shrank to the sound of Wayne's voice.

‛What sort of fault?’ she enquired, with deliberately casual clarity.

‛Oh, three small stars appeared to move by about a hundred per cent of their image diameter. That's not possible, of course, so I have to hunt the cause down. There is no chance that your amateurs would have seen anything – too faint.’

‛No,’ Candice replied, ‛but they might have seen an atmospheric disturbance which could have affected your image, if that was the cause. Send me the time and coordinates and I'll do a trawl.’

‛It would be a waste of your time. Are you sure?’ Wayne thought that her tone had changed somehow, but even if she did not fancy him, then maybe at least she could identify an atmospheric cause for him. It was one less possibility for him to investigate.

‛I'm sure’ Candice replied firmly.

‛Ok, I'm copying the coordinates and the time across to an email. I'm sending it… now. Okay, I've got to get back to work. It's been good talking to you. Don't forget to let me know what you find out. ‛Bye.’

It was nowhere near as good as it was listening to you, Candice thought, studying the email. If the source was close to Earth, then there would be a big angular difference in the coordinates, because the two telescopes were over a thousand miles apart, but the difference was small. Very small. Mental arithmetic told her that if it there was a common cause, it that meant the source was at least a million miles out. Emitting light. Interesting. Maybe, wow. Calm down, she told herself. It's probably an object that was falling into the Sun from out of the solar system's distantly orbiting Kuiper Belt, or perhaps the even more distant OOrt cloud. Her thoughts were rudely interrupted by her friend, Louise, working beside her in the array of desks.

‛Who is he?’ she asked, leaning forwards.

‛What? Oh, no it's nothing like that,’ Candice replied, twisting around to look at Louise.

‛Oh, yeah? Take a look in a mirror and then try again,’ Louise told her.

Candice took a deep breath and tried once more to calm down. If she told her the truth then… it was time to lie through her teeth. She wasn't going to share this with anyone. ‛A surprise phone call,’ she claimed. ‛You don't know him. I used to know him from before university from high school.’

‛I thought you called him?’ Louise persisted.

Damn her, thought Candice. Louise was a good friend, but sometimes Candice felt like nailing her tongue to the wall.

‛He texted me his phone number,’ Candice insisted, ‛and you’re not getting it. I wouldn't wish him on anybody.’

Louise sat back, unbelieving and making a note to pursue Candice again, once she had settled down.

Candice returned her attention to the screen. It could still be a coincidence, but it deserved more investigation, though not from here. She forwarded a copy of Frank's email and images to her personal email account, and then composed an official reply. If it was an important discovery, then she wanted all the glory, but all emails were recorded, so she couldn't lie, and she had to reply, and reply officially, now.

‛No other site has reported an object at this position.’ she entered on her email response. Absolutely true, she thought.

‛One other site has described a visual distortion at a similar position and time, which is believed to have been caused by atmospheric conditions.’ she continued. Also true, Candice thought. Sort of.

‛I suggest that you continue to monitor the location,’ she ended the email.

Fat chance of him finding anything, Candice thought, even with an 18 inch telescope, but you never know. She sent the email off with almost a flourish, before returning to her queue of email claims, though not before her supervisor had noticed her change in attitude. George Benton, as her appointed administrator, monitored her actions and emails. This he was allowed to do, in order to verify that she was doing the work that she was being paid for. He had taught students for too many years, not to notice when their attitude changed.

Nothing unusual, he thought, except for that call to Australia, and wondered who she had phoned. He made his own phone call, to Debbie, in communications security. ‛This is George Benton here, on extension 7580. I believe that one of the students may be making personal phone calls, from computer terminal M245. Can you confirm that the destination is work related, please?

Debbie was familiar with George Benton, and thought that he was an interfering busybody, but he had the authority and she retained her politeness. She called up the terminal's records and answered him.

‛There was one phone call, to the Siding Spring Mountain Observatory in Australia. It lasted three minutes. There have been no other long distance phone calls to that site from your location, your section, for the last .. three days. Is that all you require?’

‛Yes, thank you,’ George accepted. He went back to studying the email that had induced Candice's reply. It was different, he allowed, from most of them. It was probably nothing, but he went through his collection of business cards, and then picked up the phone and dialled the Siding Spring observatory.

‛Hello, could you please put me through to Jane Marangi.’ He waited. ‛Hi Jane, how are things? It's George Benton here. Do you remember me from the Wellington conference? I was wondering how things were over there, with you, remembering all your complaints.’ Not that he had slightest recollection of her, but everybody had their problems and he had found that if he volunteered to listen to all their troubles, then he usually heard something useful by the end of it. Ten weary minutes later he put the phone down. All for ten seconds of information about a computer glitch causing a strange error at the same time, and a similar location, to that claimed in the email. Interesting, he thought. Very interesting.

He spent the rest of the evening researching the situation. The answer was either that it was an elaborate fabrication by a student, or a very strange set of coincidences, or, possibly, a terrifying truth. He phoned his department head at his home, where he had been perfectly happy watching television with his family.

George's boss did not like George very much. He thought that George was an underachieving obsolescence who used an excess of acronyms to disguise his mediocrity. The boss transferred the phone call from the lounge to his home office, because there was no need to disturb his family's evening. However, the data George had emailed to him with was convincing, if incredible.

‛Ok, ok,’ he reluctantly agreed. ‛It could be a micro black hole. That is a possible source for these observations, I admit. If, and only if, the data is correct. If the public get hold of this, there will be a panic, so I'll do it on the QT. Not a word of this gets out or both our hides will be pinned to the wall. If it is a student prank, then I'll nail their hide to the wall.’

George put the phone down, feeling pleased but nervous.

His department head sat with both hands smoothing his remaining hair back over his head. It was now his problem, as to who he told. If he asked an astronomer, or a physicist, to analyse the data, to seek confirmation of George's opinion, then the possibility would be public knowledge within days, if not hours. True or not, the panic would be global. The astronomical enquiries had to stop here, with him. It was a security matter, he decided. A colleague, who knew people in the NSA, just got nominated to have a nice day.

He decided that he really did hate George Benton, and then made the phone call, at about the same time that Frank got home from school.

Zero plus 12 hours

Heliconia farm – first response

Frank jumped out of the car as soon as it stopped. He ran into the house, shouting for his father, without any answer. The car, having deposited its passenger, continued onwards, with its next school escapee.

‛You know he won't be back until later, so stop rushing about,’ his mother called, somewhat despairingly. Frank was totally his father's son, not hers. She found Frank in his bedroom, waiting for his computer to complete its start-up.

‛I want to see if there is a reply to my email,’ Frank broadcast. She waited with him, watching him. The computer initialized, he selected his email account and connected to the server. There was a reply waiting for him. He read it carefully, and then sank back into his chair.

‛They don't think it's real,’ Frank mourned.

His mother carefully read the message, and then offered what comfort she could.

‛They don't say it isn't