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  Renate rode in the back holding a monitoring device, one she had designed and made herself in the tech shop.

  Alpha Vehicle looked like a gargantuan silver beach ball rolling over the desert-gray wastes of the Moon.

  Renate said, ‘‘Dr. Conrad, I’m reading blips of atypical subatomic activity in and around Alpha Vehicle.’’

  Five seconds later, the sky above Alpha Vehicle shifted, whirled, and a vortex—as insubstantial, fleeting, and miragelike as retina burn—appeared. Then disappeared. At first he thought he was seeing things because the green and smoky smudge had come and gone quickly. But when he glanced at Lesha and saw her looking at the same spot, he knew he wasn’t mistaken.

  ‘‘Renate, you got that?’’

  ‘‘It’s recorded.’’

  As Alpha Vehicle rolled across the Moon, several such green smudges appeared in the sky over the next half hour.

  ‘‘Is there any relationship between Alpha Vehicle’s sudden movement and this subatomic activity we’re seeing?’’ he asked. ‘‘And what about the green vortexes? They didn’t appear until Alpha Vehicle started moving. The only other one was when it first arrived.’’

  ‘‘Let me make some further observations,’’ said Renate.

  They followed Alpha Vehicle for twenty-five kilometers. That’s when its speed decreased. Its bulk was such that it reminded Cam of an ocean liner. It veered toward a crater a kilometer away. The crater’s rim was a hundred meters high. Any suspicion of random behavior on the part of Alpha Vehicle could now be dismissed—it rolled unwaveringly toward this crater. The dichromatic vista—gray moon, black sky—was demarcated sharply by the rise of the crater’s rim. As Cam got closer, the area became strewn with ejecta, and he had to turn the rover to avoid some larger rocks.

  In ten minutes they reached the crater.

  Alpha Vehicle rolled up the slope, maintaining a two-meter height above the lunar surface, etching a small concave trail in the dust, an effect of its gravitational ‘‘push.’’ It balanced on the rim’s peak, then rolled down the other side, the impression that of a small setting sun, only this sun was silver, and reflected everything around it with mirrorlike brilliance. It disappeared from view inside the crater. That the alien construct should now be out of sight distressed Cam. Why was it doing this? And why had it chosen this particular crater? And why did he seem to be having this fit of separation anxiety?

  ‘‘We’ll park at the crater’s base and climb.’’

  The rovers swung to a stop. Cam glanced at the tracks they’d left behind. They looked lonely—the first human impressions made in this area. He saw Earth, blue and white, hovering above the gray-brown horizon, and found it inspiring.

  Everyone got off the rovers.

  Renate pointed her monitoring device toward the sky. ‘‘Interesting.’’

  ‘‘What?’’ said Cam.

  ‘‘I’m detecting a subgravitational surge.’’

  ‘‘Over and above the usual push?’’

  ‘‘Yes. It’s right off the scale in terms of negative g-force.’’

  ‘‘Anything else?’’

  ‘‘Each subgravitational surge seems to be encoded with . . .’’ She glanced up at him, looking surprised. ‘‘Binary language.’’

  Cam bounced over and investigated Renate’s screen. Through the rigid format of digital and pixilated imagery, Renate’s software had interpreted the binary energy coming from the subgravitational surge as a series of dots and dashes, nothing else, and these dots and dashes spilled over the screen with intense rapidity, so fast that they were nearly a blur. The hypothesis of binary language seemed to be a sound one.

  ‘‘Communications?’’ he postulated.

  ‘‘Possibly. Maybe remote commands from NGC-4945?’’

  Over the next five minutes, the team climbed the crater’s rim. At first the slope was gentle, but as they neared the apex, it got steeper. Loose soil slid from under Cam’s feet. Lesha fell and he helped her up. She glanced at him as he took her arm. She clutched his hand. The squeeze was a brief one, but enough to be revealing again of what they had spoken of last night. The attraction had long been brewing, but until this past day, never acknowledged.

  A minute later, they reached the top.

  The crater had to be two kilometers across. Alpha Vehicle had positioned itself exactly in the center; this in itself was a sign of intelligence—the thing had a sense of geometrical fitness. The sun shone from a forty-five-degree angle off to the left, a glaring white ball illuminating the Moon’s surface with caustic brilliance. For several seconds, the team stood there watching Alpha Vehicle.

  Then Mark pointed. ‘‘Look.’’

  A new phenomenon became apparent to Cam a few seconds later. Using his visor magnification, he observed an odd puckering on Alpha Vehicle’s surface, a dimpling at the thing’s north pole. A thin filament grew from this flattened section. The weblike streak caught and amplified the sun’s light. The filament rose to a height equal to Alpha Vehicle. A second filament rose next to the first one. For several seconds, the two filaments balanced there, reminding him of rabbit-ear antennae. But then they braided together; and as they twined, they fused into a single thicker filament. Then another filament shot out of Alpha Vehicle, and this third one was equal in thickness to the first two combined. After a moment, it melded with the others, creating an even thicker structure.

  This operation repeated itself for the next few minutes. The combined filaments at last squared off at the corners to form a solid oblong, one that was equal in volume to Alpha Vehicle and, according to Renate’s readouts, equal to its mass as well. Yet Alpha Vehicle showed no diminution of its own mass and volume. The whole process reminded Cam of a great mitosis. He glanced around at his team. Blaine and Mark stared in wonder. Lewis and Lesha set up cameras. Renate was down on her knees rigging up equipment.

  He turned to Alpha Vehicle just in time to see the oblong launch itself. One second it was there, the next it was gone, a silver streak traveling so fast, arcing over the far horizon of the Moon, he could hardly see it.

  ‘‘Did everybody catch that?’’

  Affirmatives came from Lesha and Mark, then everybody else. The strange, momentary, and elusive launch had the effect of rendering everyone mute for the next several seconds. A rush of adrenaline quivered through his body. The thing was actually doing something now? What? That it could throw thirty-story structures around with such lightning velocity made him think of Pittman’s query, whether it could mutate into a weapon. For the act was aggressive in nature, and he wondered what the colonel’s possible reactions might be to this worrisome development. Where had the new oblong gone? Was it headed for Earth? And how could Alpha Vehicle produce an object of mass and volume equal to itself without depleting its own mass and volume?

  Before he could even begin to answer these questions, he saw rising out of Alpha Vehicle another weblike filament. A second quickly joined it, and the two twined together.

  The process started again.

  By the end of ten minutes, another thirty-story oblong flew off into the darkness, so quickly that it was gone over the Moon’s horizon in the blink of an eye.

  No sooner was it gone than another filament appeared.

  So began a long afternoon.

  The destination of the oblongs became apparent only after careful study of Greenhow satellite photographs of the Moon.

  Cam and Lesha sat in front of the screen in Gettysburg Tower. He clicked to a higher magnification, stopping when it was the equivalent of two kilometers above the lunar surface, and saw the first of them, clean lines, flat surfaces, right angles startling and unmistakable against the chaotic airless terrain, an alien-created tower rising from the gray pitted regolith like a high-rise apartment. It reminded him of a huge domino. Only, bizarrely, it cast no shadow.

  He clicked the magnification to one hundred meters. He looked for activity but saw none. He saved the image, then asked Greenhow software to find like or simi
lar structures.

  The camera zoomed out, and he and Lesha saw the curve of the Moon. Then the Moon rotated, and the camera zoomed in. Soon they were looking at another tower.

  The camera repeated this a number of times.

  It took them close to an hour before all current towers were accounted for, seventy-five so far, spaced equidistance from each other around the Moon’s equator.

  ‘‘Let’s switch back to Alpha Vehicle,’’ he said.

  He keyed in the parameters, the camera zoomed back, then closed in.

  Soon he discerned the principal module showing a slower pace of activity—only two towers had been built in the last three hours, hardly comparable to the frenetic pace of the first five hours. He was baffled. He couldn’t begin to guess what Alpha Vehicle was up to.

  He sat back and breathed a sigh of frustration. Lesha turned to him. She put her hand on his arm. He placed his hand over hers.

  ‘‘What do we do?’’ she asked.

  ‘‘Observe. And visit each and every one of these towers, if we can.’’

  ‘‘That’s a major undertaking.’’

  ‘‘We would have to retool two rovers into robotic carriers. Just the oxygen requirements alone would use up the space of one rover. Then there’s the food and water requirements. It’s too bad all the vehicles in the SMCP are wrecked. One of these towers is all the way on the other side of the Moon.’’

  ‘‘Would I be coming with you?’’

  Something in the way she said it.

  He turned to her.

  And knew it had to happen. The potentiality of the thing had been building all day.

  Their lips met.

  They kissed—softly, gently, for fifteen seconds, and were still kissing when Renate came into the room.

  Cam and Lesha disengaged. Renate glanced at Lesha. Then at Cam. Not that she was embarrassed, but there were a few awkward moments.

  ‘‘I’ve got some new findings,’’ said Renate.

  Cam, breaking the tension, swung his chair around from the screen and pulled it up to his desk. ‘‘Great.’’

  She gave him a circumspect nod and advanced into the room. The tall, austere Dr. Tennant took a waferscreen from under her arm, opened it, and placed it on the table. The screen lit up with a diagrammatic representation of the transit points through which Alpha Vehicle had traveled to get to Earth, as outlined by Dr. Nolan Pratt, Cam’s astronomer friend in Hawaii. But now superimposed directly behind these transit points was a map of the dark green vortexes they had discovered warping the sky above Alpha Vehicle earlier in the day. She leaned over and pointed.

  ‘‘I’ve used your own Stradivari software to figure some of this out, as it’s good at extrapolating and defining hyperdimensional phenomena. As you can see by this diagram, I’ve charted Dr. Pratt’s transit points. If you set the diagram in motion, it will take you all the way, theoretically, to NGC4945. But that’s not what I’m here to show you. These dark green disturbances behind the transit points have been my focus. I’m now calling them relay points. I’ve been able to determine, using your software, as well as elements of the Next Generation Space Telescope, that these relay points consist primarily of so-called boundary particles, and these particles are in close contact with the more regular quark constituents Alpha Vehicle is generating. Within this space of interaction, we see the formation of gluon chains, and we further observe that these chains behave like the strings in string theory. As a communications specialist I’ve done much experimentation in trying to transmit messages through different forms of space in the hope of accelerating messages beyond light speed. The friction between these boundary particles and the more standard quarks have allowed these gluons the ability to form strings. And the strings in turn then create this hyperdimensionality that you’ve written about in your various papers. Through what you’ve described as temporal radius and sequential drop, the subgravitational surges, or packets as I’m now calling them, can travel much faster than light. As these packets are encoded with binary language, I think our communications theory can stand.’’

  ‘‘So in other words, they’ve created a secondary instantaneous pipeline back to their own galaxy, only for communications?’’

  ‘‘The evidence certainly suggests it.’’

  ‘‘And the Builders are using it regularly to communicate with NGC4945?’’

  ‘‘The Builders?’’

  ‘‘Just a name I’ve given them, since building towers seems to be their primary activity.’’

  She nodded. ‘‘It’s in place, and in regular use, you’re right. With Dr. Pratt’s transit points, the . . . the Builders have created an intergalactic highway. With the relay points, they’ve created a telegraph line. It seems the two systems are needed, each designed for its separate and different tasks, and the properties of each vary accordingly.’’

  He was stupendously impressed. And awed. The Builders were sending messages twelve million light-years to NGC4945, and doing it instantaneously.

  Renate continued. ‘‘As for breaking the actual code in the packets and figuring out what it means, I’ve had no luck.’’

  He raised his eyebrows and rubbed the top of his desk in a preoccupied way. ‘‘Have you quantified the number of subgravitational packets they’ve sent so far?’’

  She nodded. ‘‘I’ve counted thirty-one.’’

  ‘‘And is there any way we can utilize these relay points to send our own message?’’

  Her eyes narrowed, and her lips pursed. ‘‘I hadn’t thought of that.’’

  ‘‘Because I think the most important thing we can do right now is try to talk to them. I was on the link to Pittman earlier. He wants us to try and find out what these Moon towers mean.’’ He took a deep breath and sat up straighter. ‘‘They’re a bit troubling.’’

  Renate nodded. ‘‘It might take some work.’’

  ‘‘Then I want you to make it a priority. Let’s send a message to them. Nothing complicated. We don’t want to overwhelm them with cultural overlay. The initial thrust should be at establishing a common language. Let’s find out if we even think the same way.’’

  ‘‘What would you suggest?’’

  ‘‘As we hypothesize that they understand complex mathematics, I think our first message should consist solely of the first hundred prime numbers. Everything I’ve seen so far tells me that they’re vastly different from us. Since such is the case, to communicate to them in anything else but numbers might scare them away, or worse, elicit an aggressive response. Numbers are pure. Numbers can’t be misinterpreted. To send them the prime numbers, one of the fundamental sequences, will illustrate our own higher intelligence. We have to convince them that we’re more than just bipedal fauna of no particular consequence before we can actually get them to talk to us in any meaningful or understandable way.’’

  7

  Through a live feed, Pittman, Blunt, Goldvogel, and Fye watched Conrad’s team investigate one of the so-called Moon towers, this one twenty-five kilometers from Alpha Vehicle. On the screen, the Moon tower rose, geometrically precise, dwarfing the moonwalkers, who took its measurements.

  Conrad’s voice came over the link. ‘‘This tower, like the others, is seventy-five by twenty-two by ten meters. It’s emitting electromagnetic energy. Temperature fluctuates from minus-one hundred and sixty Celsius to plus-seventy Celsius. Our team has yet to account for this wild fluctuation in temperature.’’

  Pittman turned to Fye. ‘‘Oren, what about the media?’’

  Fye sighed in his all-is-lost way. ‘‘It’s been their top story in all formats since we broke it yesterday. It’s the Builders, and the Moon towers, and Alpha Vehicle.’’

  ‘‘General, the White House?’’

  Blunt’s eyes narrowed. ‘‘If we think a preemptive strike is necessary, the president’s willing to go for it.’’ He motioned at the screen. ‘‘Though he would like some intelligence about the possibility of retaliation.’’

  Pittman
said, ‘‘I’m leaning toward a preemptive strike myself. Inform the president I think that the building of the Moon towers represents an extremely ominous development.’’

  And, as if these were trigger words, there came a great flash from the monitor at the end of the room, so bright it whited out the screen for several seconds. Audio became a scramble of confused, panicked voices. Pittman heard Dr. Conrad’s voice asking for visuals, demanding visuals, ordering all assets to remain in place. Pittman was impressed. Cameron Conrad was turning out to be a soldier.

  The burnout on the screen dimmed and the image resolved. The camera lurched dizzily upward. At the edges of the screen Pittman saw the demarcation between the gray landscape and the black sky. The landscape quickly sank from view as the camera rose farther. In a moment, all Pittman saw was a bright blue light rising into the sky, getting smaller and smaller as it got farther away. Now the towers were launching things? Whoever operated the camera had the good sense to filter the lens—resolution sharpened.

  The launched object was a bird’s nest of curving thunderbolts whirling in a continuous eddy of fluctuating light. As the object moved farther away, Pittman got a better view of its underside, and saw that it was donut-shaped. A shimmering film of turquoise plasma coated the object.

  ‘‘Let’s get Greenhow online. I want Peaceshield scrambled, as well as all available suborbital aircraft.’’

  It was like a drug. It invaded his body. Combat. Engagement. The scorpion at last getting to sting.

  He watched the thing grow fainter, smaller, until finally it was nothing more than a speck.

  Goldvogel and Fye got on their special phones and contacted appropriate commands.

  Pittman sat there over the subsequent minutes and watched new information come in. First came the Greenhow feeds. The screen divided itself into several different windows, and in each of these he saw similar launches from several other Moon-tower sites, sudden flashes from the lunar surface, ninety-two launches in all, one each from the final number of Moon towers.