KEN GAZED UP at the black autumn sky. He smiled at stars behaving properly in their constellations, then at a light that lined from the east. A satellite or space station? A door opened behind him. Yellow light flooded the garden, blotting out the heavens. He turned to glare just as his wife’s voice hit him.
“What are you doing out here?”
“Keep your hair on, Angie, I’m trying to get a signal on this new phone your brother gave me.”
“Your parents are fighting, and if my mother folds her arms any tighter she’ll crush her ribs. Derek keeps putting the TV on, and I need you to open another red–for my nerves.”
Ken glanced back up to the sky one last time before rejoining his thirtieth birthday party. His parents were tug-of-warring over a long packet wrapped in shiny red paper. As soon as his mother saw him, her scowl transformed to a toothy smile.
“Kenneth, come and get your present.”
He hesitated. Clearly, there was a problem judging by his father’s tormented face. He assumed they hadn’t divorced years ago for the sake of their children but Ken wished they had. There they were competing to be the one to give him his present of socks, slippers, a tie–whatever. They’d never given him the present he’d really wanted: peace, genuine smiles for each other. Oh well, he’d never change their lifestyle pattern now. He strolled over with his hand out when his jacket pocket jangled into the phone version of The Stripper, making his brother laugh. Ken shot an evil-eye at him, but he laughed all the more.
Ken waved the phone at his parents to indicate he was taking it into the peace of the garden. He was glad for the interruption though puzzled as no one had his new number–except his brother. He examined the phone looking for a famous brand. The name Nookia shone in metallic green on the black plastic. Typical of his brother to acquire a knock-off.
The display didn’t help. It shone its electric blue light with the words “Incoming call from Gobowen.”
“Call from a girlfriend already?” said Angie from the doorway.
“It says Gobowen. Who or what’s that? Sounds familiar.”
“A hospital in Shropshire.”
“Mental?”
“It should be to want you, but it’s orthopaedic. Probably someone’s name.” She took it from him and held it to her ear for a few seconds. “Maybe they do have a psychiatric unit. Sounds like gibberish.”
Ken took it back for a listen. “Ku four-five-six. Toggle seven-eight-nine. Frequency twelve-point-one Giga-Hertz.” Then hiss. He laughed. “It might as well be gibberish. It’s some radio frequency testing routine. It’s not my girlfriend, love, you know I’m more careful than that.” He hoped she knew he was joking. Having an affair would be as safe as playing football on a busy motorway. Angie pecked him on the cheek before rejoining the melee. Anyway, he did love her, her perfume, her cooking, and he refused to think outside that box.
A shout from the party and a turned-up stereo shook him out of his reverie. He examined the phone again and pressed call-back. Gobowen showed again as the ID for the other end. Hissing, then a Deep South US accent: “Hey, Alice, I told you not to call me while I’m up here.” More hissing followed by a flourish of castanet clicks. He imagined a flamenco dancer in a red swirling dress, stockings–stop it. Back to the call.
“Hello, who’s that?” said Ken.
“Hank Gobowen, now buddy, who the hell are you?”
“Hang on, not the Hank Gobowen, astronaut, raconteur, voted number-one guest on TV talk shows?”
“You’re not a booking agent?”
“No, I’m a wrong number. Are you at Houston–ah, no, you’ll be in a TV studio.”
“Hah. No, I’m on comms watch on Demetrius. You know? The spacebus up in orbit since last Tuesday. Anyway, buddy, I can’t keep chatting. My pay-as-you-go is running up a bill. Goodbye, whoever you are.”
“I’m Ken Stones… hello? Damn he’s gone.” His one chance of fame and he blew it. He imagined all those talk shows Hank’s going to brag on that he used his cellphone to chat to a Brit back on the planet but he didn’t know the idiot’s name.
He dared himself to call-back again, but resisted.
Angie stood hands on hips in the doorway. “This is your birthday, come inside and enjoy it.”
“Really, have our relatives gone?”
“Idiot. I’m pissed off playing at referee. Do your bit.”
“Angie, you’ll never believe who I’ve just been talking to on this phone.”
“It could be the man on the moon for all I care.”
“Close. Real close. No, why have all the lights gone out–and the smoke alarm going berserk? Derek! Ah, birthday cake with thirty damn candles.”
NEXT MORNING the bedside clock alarm penetrated Ken’s thumping head. His arm lashed out to sweep the bedside table but missed the vibrating clock, which joyfully travelled out of his reach, toppled over the edge and turned itself off, buried in the waste-bin. Only then could he hear Angie crashing around in the kitchen and the television belting out breakfast news.
The door kicked open as Angie staggered in with a full laundry basket. One of his green boxers fell out.
“Sundays you make breakfast. Why are you still in bed?”
“I’m at a difficult age.”
“You’ve always been at a difficult age, what’s different now you are thirty?” She laughed and launched herself onto the bed. Rising to her change in mood, Ken grabbed, but missed as she twisted. He froze mid-play as a word from the TV news shocked him. “…spacebus…”
He rolled from under Angie and ran into the kitchen, his face a blue sheen as he stared at the screen.
“…Houston admits they have lost all radio communication with… ”
“Don’t think you can come back to bed.”
“Shhssshhh!”
“…even instrumental telemetry is spasmodic although… ”
“Birthday or not.”
“…seems normal.”
“Hell, Angie. I was talking to them last night, and now they’ve lost radio contact.”
“Trust you to mess things up. With who? I’m not sure I want you to have a mobile phone. You might start that affair up again with Teresa.”
“I didn’t have an affair. Not with her. Joke. Anyway, this is important. Where’s my mobile? I put it on the table last night.”
He looked at Angie who looked at the floor.
“Come on, Angie.”
“I said I don’t want you to have it.”
“Good grief, woman, you haven’t binned it!”
A fruitless search in the tipper-lid bin made him step back from the sour yoghurts and fermenting fruit. He looked at his wife, scrutinising her face for clues. Despite her womanly skills, Ken spotted her eyes flick to the fridge, in which he found his mobile phone pretending to be a pack of Silver Maid butter. After he dried the condensation, he dashed outside, found Gobowen and hit Call.
After the hissing and assorted clicks: “Kgorrrha uochxa grrr-eouwa.”
“Sorry, Hank, were you eating your tea? Hello?”
“Arrchx cooroo snigurghghz.”
“I’ll try again later, Hank, bye for now.” Ken looked at his phone for a few moments as he thought about the news broadcast and the garbled speech from Hank. Was it messed up because of some signal breakdown on the Shuttle such as the reason Houston might be incommunicado through their more conventional radio? Maybe the signal became scrambled for security reasons. Ken had a twitching stomach muscle telling him that neither was true and that something more sinister was going on.
“Ken, get in here, it’s raining,” shouted Angie.
Ken looked up for confirmation and was rewarded with a raindrop into his right eye.
“I knew that phone would be a bad idea,” said Angie. “You’ll be phoning that weird woman. What’s her name?”
“Angie?”
“Funny–not. What is her name, Hannah?”
“No, Hank is the astronaut I’ve talked to—”
“You’ll need a hanky if you’re lying. And you’ll get RSI from too much texting.”
“Texting? Now, that is a good idea. Text messages can often sneak through problem signal areas when voice mail can’t.”
He followed Angie back into the kitchen, scraped the terracotta-tiled floor with his chair as he sat at the laminated oak table and found the text option.
“Hi Hank. Hope ths gts 2 U. Hustn sez U have a coms prob. Can this hlp?” He pressed the Send button and watched the animated graphics whiz it off to space.
He sat at the table, elbows either side of his mobile phone, resting his face in his hands. Ten minutes later. “Come on, Hank.” Another thirty minutes and he lifted his face to allow blood circulation.
Angie threw him her exasperated face. “Are you coming to mMother’s for dinner?”
“I’ll give it a miss this week, love. I don’t want to miss this call. It could be more important than you can possibly imagine. Even more than when your sister rings to tell you about a sale at Debenhams.”
“Why can’t you bring it with you? I thought that was the point of mobile phones.”
“I need it plugged in, dear. It’s a bit low on charge. You go and give them my best wishes.”
“Yeah, right. While you arrange a rendezvous with Hannah. She is an ex, isn’t she?”
“Yes, but no. Stay here if you are so sus.”
The phone sprang into a wolf-whistle, simultaneously vibrating itself into a spin on the polished tabletop. Angie went for it but Ken grabbed it first.
“Hp”
“What?” said Ken, then looked at Angie, wondering if she was more text abbrev-savvy than she made out.
“She wants to meet you at the Hypermarket coffee shop,” she said, with a face that clearly read not joking.
“Sweetheart, that’s where you and I meet. If I tried to arrange an assignation with another woman it would hardly be where we might bump into you.”
“Where else then, that could be Hp?”
“I don’t know. Hendon Park?”
“There. You admit to having an affair.”
“What? No I don’t. You tricked me. Good God woman, there’s a shuttle crew in trouble up there and they’ve sent me a message. I ask for help and all you do is accuse me of philandering.”
“Help,” she said, waving her hands in the air to accompany an obvious remark.
“Of course. You’re a genius. A suspicious one. I’ll send another text asking for clarification.”
“You don’t think I meant it, did you?”
“Hank. How can I hlp?” He punched the send button. “Meant what?”
“If you think I believe you are in contact with an astronaut you’re more crazy than I thought. It’s me that needs help to be rescued from you.” She slammed the door on her way out.
The phone wolf-whistled again and was in Ken’s hand before it finished.
“Call NASA abort pic”
Ken tried to call using voice. “Hank, are you there?”
He was rewarded with a cacophony of hisses and clicks before he heard: “--gent. Must not return. Aarrgh eeeuugh!” A ten second pause followed while hot perspiration stung Ken’s eyes yet a cold shiver travelled up and down his back as if his long-dead grandfather had materialised through the tabletop. His phone sounded again with the strange gutteral voice he heard yesterday. “Kgorrrha uochxa grrr-eouwa. Kgorrrha uochxa grrr-eouwa.”
He tried to recall what Hank had said before his agonising cry–call NASA pic. Obviously he was being asked to let Houston in on his mobile phone experience. The pic must mean picture, but which, and where? He looked through the recent internet news pictures of the spacebus flight until all radio and telemetry abruptly ended yesterday. Hank’s smiling clean-shaven face drew Ken’s attention. A typical all-American guy looked through the screen at him, no indication of any problem. Then in yesterday morning’s shuttle picture Ken spotted a mobile phone in Hank’s hand. The screen glowed. Of course! It was a picture phone. He snatched his new phone off the table and eagerly pressed buttons. It was a dodgy gift from his low-life brother. No instruction book and no helpful sibling words. Ken didn’t believe it would come to life when he first tried it, and hadn’t got round to exploring its multiple functions such as video and picture phone.
There; he found the right combination of buttons and hit receive. The screen fluoresced through pastel rainbow colours until the signal became stronger. A face stared at him. The most beautiful person he’d ever seen. He couldn’t tell if it was a perfect woman or a young man. Ken laughed. This must be a joke. Maybe Hank had saved this image on his phone pre-mission because none of the crew looked anything as beautiful as this. But the image changed. Only subtly, such that the person looked away and turned a few degrees. It was enough to tell Ken that he was looking at someone on the ship. He put the phone up to his ear and said, “Hello, who are you?”
“Kgorrrha uochxa grrr-eouwa.”
“Sorry miss, or sir, that comes through scrambled. Are you using some encryption coding?”
“Kgorrrha uochxa grrr-eouwa.”
Ken looked again at the image. From the previous smiling lovely came a twist in its mouth. That shiver in his back travelled to his neck again, only this time his hairs stood up. He dropped the phone just as the image changed again. The phone rotated upside down on the table as if daring him to pick it up. He hesitated but had to snatch it and steeling himself, turned it. The smile had transformed into an ugly snarl, but the eyes worried him more. The iris had narrowed to pinpricks. Then nothing. The signal had not only gone but the phone became warmer, then too hot for Ken to hold onto. He dropped it again as smoke wisped away from the speaker and microphone orifices. Damn. He knew he was losing evidence of what he now realized Hank was trying to tell him.
The shuttle had been invaded and taken over by an alien, maybe several. His face heated. His worry hormones surged through his veins. His phone simmered in meltdown on the table. It would burn the wood laminate and Angie would blame him. Using the kitchen tongs he gingerly placed it in the sink, but he didn’t want to pour water in case there was a chance of its recovery. His own logic circuit spurred him to reach for the landline phone but he stopped. How did he phone Houston mission control from a kitchen in Hendon, UK? It wouldn’t be in the phone book and search engines took him twenty minutes to accumulate dozens of possible but unlikely current numbers for the command centre. So he called an old school friend who had sucked up through the ranks to become a police inspector.
“What can I do for you, Ken? Driving too slowly on a motorway, again?”
“Please, Ed, this is important. You know that NASA has lost contact with the shuttle Demetrius?”
“Don’t tell me it’s your fault?”
“Ed, I have been able to talk to the shuttle on my mobile phone.”
“Of course you have, Ken.”
“I don’t know how the signal reached my phone but it did. They are in big trouble, Ed. Hank Gobowen asked me to contact NASA, but I don’t know how.”
“Ken, assuming you haven’t been drinking, where did you get this phone from?”
“Why is that relevant, Ed? Aren’t you listening to me?”
“Your brother wasn’t it?”
“Ed, you are not going to believe what I have to tell them.”
“Since it was your brother who gave you the phone, I would believe it.”
“Damn it, Ed. I am really worried sick over this. Please be serious.”
“Go on then. As long as it isn’t about little green men.”
Ken froze. What could he say that didn’t make him seem a blithering idiot? Seconds went by.
“I take it your message is to be about aliens, then?”
“Ed, suppose you were the only one to know something that meant the spacebus mustn’t return to Earth.”
“It is returning, there’s a failsafe autoreturn routine that will kick in tomorrow morning.”
“My God. They have to stop it. Ed. I really did talk to Hank on the shuttle and then someone, something else. I need to tell them. I have to warn the government.”
“As in a threat? National security and all that?”
“At last, Ed, you’ve got it.”
“Stay there, Ken. I’ll get things in motion. Expect visitors in an hour or so. Bye. Take care.”
His fear subsided by a smidgen from sharing his information with a police inspector. Ken put the kettle on. Angie returned, banging the door open, dropping bags of shopping.
“What’s wrong with you? Your face is purple. Have you been at those funny ciggies again?”
“No, it’s Hank, you know, on the phone.”
“You mean Hannah. Wouldn’t she play with your ball?”
“He changed into a woman. Rather he didn’t but the image did. It was horrible, Angie.”
“I told you Hank was a woman. You can’t fool me. Idiot. There’s more shopping in the car, go fetch it.”
He went out towards the car and stopped. Armed men in black balaclavas lay on his lawn.
IT WASN’T RIGHT that he should be held in a police cell. Grey walls, a concrete floor and a damaged black rubber-foam bench. Some anti-terrorist charge had been implemented to hold him while a phalange of different accents asked him over and again what he’d experienced. As time crept by and the disbelief continued, he knew it was too late. He had a chance to save the world and he blew it.
“Come on, Sir, out we go,” said the sergeant, to take Ken for a photo and fingerprint session. As they passed the custody officer’s table, among the small collection of his pocket contents, he spotted his mobile phone. Damaged but still working. The incoming call light was flashing.