The Rock by Robert Doherty Read Free Book Online Page B

miles to the southwest of this station. The interfering radio waves were coming out of the rock."
    "What do you mean, out of the rock?" Batson leaned forward. "You mean someone inside is transmitting?"
    Lamb looked at Batson with a blank expression. "We don't know. Ayers Rock is the largest homogeneous rock in the world-there are caves along the face, but the rock itself has always been thought to be solid. It is 1,131 feet high, a mile and a half wide, and two miles across. Using sonar and magnetic resonance imaging equipment, we have narrowed down the source of the emitter to be center of the mass, approximately six hundred feet in from the top."
    Batson ran a slightly shaking hand through his hair. "No sign of a mine entrance or tunneling?"
    "None. As far as we can determine from sonar readings, there is a chamber of presently indeterminate size in the center of the rock with no tunnels leading to it. We assume that is where the transmission originated."
    Hawkins spoke for the first time. "What's it transmitting?"
    Lamb pointed at the Air Force officer. "Major Spurlock was on duty when the radio waves were first received. I’ll let him explain what happened and what he discovered."
    Spurlock took a quick drink from a glass of water and then stood. "We picked up the transmission here only because of our proximity to the transmitter. It was picked up by other stations and satellites because the transmission was an up link to a meteor bounce. There were five directional down links.
    "The transmission itself was digital--exactly the same mode used by some of our deep-space probes. Specifically, the same mode that Voyager uses. Despite that, at first I could not make any sense of it and thought it was just garbage. But then I ran it through the computer and saw that there was a repeating pattern. I isolated the core message from the repeats and discovered that the reason I couldn't decipher it initially was that the beginning of the message was musical."
    He reached over and threw a switch on a tape recorder. The sound of classical music filled the air. He turned it off. "The music goes on for ninety minutes-a wide variety ranging from classical to rock and roll. At the end of the ninety minutes of music comes greetings in various languages. This part also threw me off until I had the computer analyze it. There are twenty-four languages represented."
    Spurlock took another drink of water. "At that point it occurred to me that this message was very similar to something I knew about. I checked the data log for the Voyager space probe and found out that the ninety minutes of music and the greetings were the exact same as those appearing on a record built into the probe itself."
    "Wait a second." Hawkins held up a hand. "You're saying that something in Ayers Rock is transmitting the same message that was placed on board Voyager?"
    Lamb fielded the question. "Yes. On the off chance Voyager might run into another interstellar traveler on its journey among the stars, the designers had placed on board a plaque with engravings depicting humans and the location of the sun. Also, there was a long-playing record that contained spoken greetings in various languages, a selection of various sounds found on earth, and ninety minutes of music. In the grooves of the record there are also common mathematical and scientific codes."
    "You said there were five down link sites? Where was the message sent to?" Hawkins asked.
    In reply Lamb pressed a button on the remote and a black-and-white outline map of the world appeared with five red dots superimposed. "The message was sent from Ayers Rock via very high-power meteor burst to five locations--one in each continent outside of Australia and excluding Antarctica."
    Hawkins studied the overlay. There was a red dot in the southwest United States. One in Europe--someplace in Germany. One in the middle of Russia. One in Argentina. And one in the southeast part of Africa. That last dot--Hawkins leaned