The Sound of Light

The Sound of Light

Part 1 – 

DO you remember the movie Contact? I owe a lot to Carl for writing that story. It’s all because of the leading star (pun intended), Ellie, that I became a radio astronomer. 

The movie came out around the time I was a teenager, and I had better things to do than watch a sci-fi drama. It looked like it was going to be a slow and boring love story with a little outer space sprinkled in. But my girlfriend at the time was obsessed with Matthew McConaughey, so she dragged me to the theater to see it on the big screen.

I’m so glad she did though. It changed my life!

Like I said, I was a teenager. And like most teenagers, I had no idea what job I wanted to do when I graduated. But as soon as that movie ended, I knew what I was going to be. 

As I walked her home after our evening movie date, I told Theresa my big plans to study astronomy. She just chuckled warmly and reminded me that I said the same thing after we watched Karate Kid together as children. 

Yes, we’ve known each other that long… and yes, I did end up studying karate, thank you very much. But so did she; and she turned out to be way better at it than me... mostly because she stuck with it, while I quit after the first few lessons. I jokingly called her “Danielle San” one time… and only one time. When I made the wisecrack, she hadn’t quite learned the discipline involved in the art yet. I thought it was clever, but she smarted me good for it!

Theresa and I had been neighbors since elementary school, and our parents took turns babysitting each other’s kids every now and then. Whenever we ended up at my house, I chose the movies we would watch—the good ones.

So, as we moseyed along the old fashioned, lamp lit, cobblestone street leading into our cul-de-sac, reminiscing the nostalgia of those good old days, Theresa went on to recall how I wanted to be an archaeologist after seeing Indiana Jones for the first time, then a paleontologist when Jurassic Park came out a few years before the conversation we were having right then. 

“I’m serious this time Theresa,” I persuaded, “This isn’t one of those childish fantasies. I’m determined this time. I am going to be a radio astronomer!” 

“Okay, okay,” she relented. “It certainly would be a fitting occupation for you, considering your name.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, confused. “I was named after a Roman god… or a Greek one… one of those anyway.”

“Most of the heavenly bodies were named after myths and lore in some form or another. Perseus is also the name of a group of stars. It’s actually one of my favorites,” she turned her head and smirked at my reaction. “Not because it’s your name, but because of how the constellation looks… to me anyway. Come on. I’ll show you.”

She cradled my arm tightly in hers and pulled me through the row of trees that lined the sidewalk and we strolled into the empty field to our right. Each step took us farther from the streetlights and further into the darkness. During the day, the park was always bustling with activity: ultimate Frisbee, soccer, volleyball, picnickers—oh man, the smell of grilling hotdogs and burgers made my mouth water every day in summer; but our neighborhood was relatively quiet and peaceful, so no one really went there after dark to cause trouble or do things that other people might do in the dark. Which got me thinking…

“Why haven’t we ever come here at night before?” I asked. And, although the darkness hid my mischievous grin, I knew she caught my drift. I also knew that I would never get that lucky because Theresa was a Christian and was ‘saving herself’ for marriage. But that made her all the more appealing to me; and I was willing to respect her wishes because I was planning to be ‘the one’. 

“Get your mind out of the gutter!” she exclaimed in mock disgust, then pointed directly overhead. “You see that kind of hook right there? And the trapezoid-looking body? And the arch coming out of the back?”

The way she described it was so apt that I immediately found was she was pointing at. “I do see it! Wow! That’s me?” I jested.

“That’s Perseus,” she confirmed, ignoring my vanity. “It’s supposed to look like the hero who lopped off the head of Medusa, but to me it looks more like a winged horse, flying in that direction,” she motioned with her hand, “In my opinion, it actually looks more like Pegasus than that square there,” she nonchalantly pointed a little lower down in the sky. “Do you see what I’m talking about?”

I verified that I did, in fact, see what she was implying. And from that point on, I was unable to picture anything else. Pegasus was now just a big square and Perseus would forever be cemented in my brain as a flying horse galloping toward the east.

She continued her impromptu lesson on the constellations, but I was transfixed. The last thing I heard of the conversation was her almost whispering in a soft, awed voice, “God sure is amazing to have created all this for us.” 

Part 2 – 

YOU know what the craziest thing is? That was the last thing I ever heard her say. She literally died the next day in a freak car accident, and her words have haunted me to this day, “God sure is amazing…” Yeah right. If He was so amazing, why did He let her die? Out of all the people in the world, why’d He have to take her? I refuse to believe in a God like that. Even if He were to come down from Heaven and speak directly to me, I still wouldn’t believe.

But I digress. You wanted to know how I ended up here at this tedious job working at the ‘Square Kilometer Array’ listening for little green men. Well, that’s how it happened. I was just one of the fortunate few who were chosen to man this monster of a radio telescope.

“That’s… quite a story,” my intern for the evening, Suugii remarked, finally breaking the silence—both from the lull in my monologue and the telescope speakers, “I’m sorry to hear that. Sounds like she was a really nice girl.”

 Sugawari was usually the chatterbox of the bunch. I think she was fluent in about ten different languages, and could converse with anyone in our close-knit group, in their own native tongue. But tonight, she let me do the talking. And, since it was just the two of us left in the building, I poured my heart out. It was the first time I’d done that in I don’t know how long. It was somewhat therapeutic to get it all off my chest. And, I have to admit, for as much talking as Suugii normally does, I was rather impressed with her attentive listening skills. Guess it comes with the territory.

As far as radio astronomy interns go, Sugawari was top of the line. I barely had to teach her anything. She effortlessly slid into the position and hardly needed any oversight. But since tonight seemed to be slow and uneventful, I gave her the option to leave early. She jumped at the opportunity, and was out the door before I could even look up from changing frequencies on the modulator.

Now that I was alone with my thoughts of bygone days—or more accurately, nights—I adjusted the coordinates so the array would point toward my namesake. As I waited for the excessively long period of time it takes for a kilometer’s-worth of telescopic antennae to turn, I went outside to enjoy the crisp, evening air.

The humming of the servos spinning on their axes filled the otherwise peaceful expanse around me. I gazed up, instantly spotting the winged horse leaping across the southwestern sky, and my mind drifted to what could have been, what might have been, if things were different.

God sure is amazing to have created all this for us. The soft words replayed in my mind.

“Please,” I harrumphed, and stormed back inside, expecting my footsteps on the tile floor to be the only sound I would hear. But they weren’t.

There was a low, oscillating tone reverberating from the speakers. It gradually rose in pitch, then fell abruptly, then slowly rose again in a slightly different tone. The sequence repeated three times before it completely faded out and the room went deathly silent.

I dashed over to the phone and dialed Suugii’s number. Hopefully, she hadn’t gotten too far yet… and still had cell service. This was big! I needed someone else here to verify these findings.

Part 3 – 

“BELIEVE me, I’m just as stunned as you are. What do you think it could be? A pulsar?” Sugawari admitted as we played back the sequence for the umpteenth time.

“Not a pulsar. The pitch is too low, and the duration is too drawn out... maybe radio waves?” I responded skeptically.

“It’s coming from too far away to be anything sent from Earth. Could it be CBR?” she asked. But before I could reply, she corrected herself, “No… Cosmic Background Radiation would sound more like static, wouldn’t it? At least from the images I’ve seen, that’s what it looks like it would sound like… if that makes any sense.” 

“Perhaps they’re radio waves coming from another planet? An alien world? Could you imagine? We’d be the first people to hear a message from another intelligent species,” I wondered aloud.

We brainstormed for the next few minutes, and I began taking notes on the facts of the matter:

1) Low pitch

2) Long duration

3) Triple sequence of varying tones

4) Too far to have come from Earth

“Doppler effect!” Suugii cried out, startling me into streaking my pencil across the paper. “It’s far away right? Well, the farther away it is the more the bandwidth would be stretched. So the tones would be longer and lower than they normally should be.”

“Good thinking. You might be on to something there! Let’s speed up the playback and see if that does anything,” I said excitedly, mind racing as I prepared myself for what we might hear next.

Hhhooo Eeee Hhhiiiiiaaayyyaaaavvv

The enigmatic tones exuded from the speakers, bounced off the walls, and echoed back to our ears. It was such an eerie sound that I was reluctant to play it again, but knew I had to.

Hhhooo Eeee Hhhiiiiiaaayyyaaaavvv

“Maybe that’s ‘Hello’ in some alien language?! You know a bunch of languages, don’t you Suugii? Does that sound familiar to you?” I joked.

After a long pause, she made a statement that completely caught me off guard. “Actually… it does sound like a language I’ve heard. But it sounds like it’s back-masked.”

“Say what now?”

“Back-masked, like it’s being played in reverse.”

“I know what back-masking is. A couple songs I’ve heard when I was a kid did that. There were random bits in the song that, if you played them backwards, would have some sort of subliminal message hidden in them.”

“Well, perhaps that’s what this is. Maybe the aliens are transmitting subliminal messages to us while we sleep?” Sugawari said, somewhat tongue in cheek.

I set up the playback so the output would be in reverse and pressed enter.

Vvvaaaayyyiiiiiaaahh eeee ooohhh

“Can you clean up the distortion a bit more?” she asked.

I did so, and replayed the audio.

Vaya He Oh

“Via… he… oh?” I attempted to repeat what I just heard, totally baffled.

“That can’t be right,” Suugii commented. “Play it again… please.”

Vaya He Oh

Sugawari just sat there, dumbstruck. “Again!”

Vaya He Oh

“What is it? Do you know what it says?” I enquired, almost impatiently now.

“I know what language this is,” she said somberly.

I couldn’t contain myself anymore. “Well? What language is it? Can you translate it?” 

“It really is the strangest thing. The language is… ancient Hebrew!”

“Okay?! And…?”

“It says…, ‘Let there be light!’”