The morning greeted me with a sky the color of old tin, the fog finally dispersing in uneven patches to reveal a reluctant sun. I took it as a sign to begin my search in earnest. The absence of the signal overnight had gnawed at me, not unlike a tune half-remembered but impossible to hum correctly.
I descended into the equipment room — a cramped, low-ceilinged space that smells perpetually of solder and machine oil — and pulled out the portable dish unit. It is not a particularly elegant contraption: a collapsible parabolic reflector about a meter in diameter, bolted onto a swiveling tripod of my own design. The real marvel is the receiver, a narrowband digital unit I cobbled together from parts scavenged from surplus auctions. It can isolate a frequency to the thousandth of a megahertz and record signals with a clarity that puts some commercial units to shame.
I carried the dish up the exterior spiral staircase to the observation platform. From here, the view is remarkable — a sheer drop to the foaming ocean on one side, the ragged green sprawl of the headlands on the other. It also offers an unobstructed sweep of the sky, which is critical for directional measurements.
Before I powered on the receiver, I performed a ritual I have always considered essential in field work: I stood still for a full minute, listening. No wind, no gulls, just the deep, rhythmic pulse of the sea below. A good scientist, I believe, must first let the world speak before attempting to interrogate it.
Then I switched on the dish.
The static hiss filled my headphones — familiar, comforting. I tuned carefully, sweeping across the bands like a man running his fingers along a bookshelf in the dark, hoping to recognize the spine of a long-lost volume. At 1.643 gigahertz, I paused.
Nothing.
I allowed myself a sigh, adjusted the gain, and began a slow rotation of the dish. East. South-east. South. Then, at south-south-west —
— there it was.
Faint, almost buried in the background hiss, but there. The five-long, three-short, five-long sequence. The signal had returned.
I froze for a moment, afraid that moving too quickly might frighten it away. Then I began taking readings, carefully noting azimuth and elevation. The portable dish lacks the precise resolution of my main array, but it has the advantage of mobility. I could, in theory, take measurements from multiple locations and triangulate the source.
By mid-morning, I had the first coordinate. I packed the dish into the back of my motorcar — an aging, slate-grey runabout with more dents than I care to count — and drove inland to a clearing near Hollow Marsh. There, I took the second reading.
It was during this measurement that something peculiar happened.
As the signal pulsed through the headphones, a low vibration began in the ground beneath my boots. It was subtle at first, almost like the distant passage of a heavy truck. But it built steadily over thirty seconds before fading again. The signal, however, did not change — it carried on with mechanical indifference.
I made a note in the journal: Vibration coinciding with signal detection, location #2. Possible seismic correlation?
The third measurement took me to the cliffs north of Eddington, where the wind is fierce enough to peel the hat off one's head if not secured. There, the signal was strongest of all, almost as if it were being aimed directly at that stretch of coastline.
Back at the lab by late afternoon, I plotted the readings on my chart. The lines intersected in a region of open ocean approximately 220 kilometers off the coast — far beyond any shipping lane, and too deep for known undersea cables.
Mrs. Brogan, having caught sight of my work, peered over my shoulder with thinly disguised curiosity.
"So, it's coming from the water?" she asked.
"Or from above it," I replied. "Or perhaps even below it, if one is prepared to be unreasonably imaginative."
She gave me a look that suggested she suspected I was being deliberately cryptic, and returned to the kitchen.
I remained at the chart table long after sunset, tracing the coordinates again and again. The more I studied them, the more I became convinced that the signal was not drifting as one might expect from an orbiting source. It was fixed — anchored to a point in space, or to a point in the ocean.
That night, as I prepared for bed, I could not shake the image of something vast and silent waiting beneath those waters, sending its coded heartbeat into the sky.
---
Tomorrow I will begin preparations for an expedition.
If the signal refuses to come to me, then I must go to it.
And I have the uneasy suspicion that whatever is waiting will not appreciate being found.