فصل 14

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Listeners

A hundred million kilometers beyond Mars. Deep Space Recorder 79 continued with its observations of radio noise and distant stars. Anything that it saw or heard was recorded in its memory and sent back to Earth every twenty-four hours. There, machines waited to examine the information, and then add it to the thousands of kilometers of tape stored in the World Space Centers in Washington, Moscow and Canberra.

And now Deep Space Recorder 79 had noted something strange - a faint but unmistakable movement across the Solar System, quite unlike anything it had noticed in the past. Automatically, it recorded the direction, the time and the strength.

Orbiter Ml5, circling Mars twice a day, and even Explorer 5, heading out into the cold emptiness beyond Pluto, also noted a peculiar burst of energy. They reported it automatically to the memory stores on Earth.

The computers were not programmed to notice the connection between the three sets of signals from machines millions of kilometers apart. But as soon as he looked at his morning report, the Chief Controller at Goddard knew that something strange had passed through the Solar System during the last twenty-four hours.

He had only part of its path, but when the computers had done their work, it was as clear as a line of footprints across snow. A pattern of energy had jumped from the face of the Moon and was heading out towards the stars.