Area 51: The Reply-2 Read Free Page A

an empty hangar at Nellis. Armed guards surrounded the hangar, hard-looking men in black jumpsuits. Their presence had further enhanced the significance and power of this mysterious organization.
    Shortly after the guardian computer had sent out its message from Easter Island, she'd been contacted by STAAR and given a classified briefing by the same man and detailed new instructions. She didn't really believe that she would have to use those new instructions, as she hadn't the old ones from the NSA, until eight minutes before eight P.M. on this evening.
    She was in the process of doing a loop scan, the dishes slowly rotating to get a clear radio picture of a section of sky, when the master warning light bolted to the beam running across the front of the

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    control room snapped on and a high-pitched tone screeched.
    At those two simultaneous occurrences, Brillon dropped his Coke, the can bouncing on the carpeted floor, dark fluid pouring out unnoticed as he stared at the flashing warning light. Comp-ton was more practical. She immediately hit the record button on the console in front of her, which turned on every piece of monitoring machinery in the control center. Then she focused her attention on the large screen to her left, which had a series of electronic grid lines laid over the section of star map the radio scopes were currently aimed at.
    "Off center, move quadrants. Left four, up two," she ordered.
    Brillon shook his head, trying to get back in reality, and Compton had to repeat the order until he sat down at another console and began realigning the radio telescopes to be more on line with the incoming message.
    Compton spun her chair to the left and looked at another screen. A jumbled mass of letters and numbers filled the entire display. "We've got data coming in," she said in a surprisingly calm voice. "Real data," she added, meaning it was not random radio waves generated by astral phenomena.
    "Sweet Jesus," Brillon muttered, realizing what this meant. Contact. Not first contact as they had always dreamed—that had occurred with the discovery of the Airlia artifacts—but this was first live contact, beside which even those earlier discoveries paled.
    Compton checked another display. "Damn, it's

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    a strong signal. Very strong." She glanced over at her partner. "Are you dead on yet?"
    "I've centered up as best I can," Brillon reported, "but it's a very tight transmission beam and I can't seem to center."
    "How do you make a radio transmission on a beam?" Compton asked. "They're not directional."
    Brillon didn't have time to answer the hypothetical question as he continued to work. Compton quickly turned to another computer and accessed the secure Department of Defense Satellite Internet Link. She typed in the two addresses that she had long ago memorized but never used. As soon as she got a line and a prompt, she typed.
    >NSA AND STAAR THIS IS DSCC-10. WE'VE GOT A TRANSMISSION AT 235 DEGREES AND AN
    ARC OF PLUS 60 FROM ZERO.
    Compton cursed to herself as she read the message. She quickly typed in more information.
    >NSA AND STAAR THIS IS DSCC-10. TRANSMISSION IS NOT RANDOM.
    Compton sat back in the chair and waited while replies came back.
            RECORDING MESSAGE?
    Compton shook her head in irritation at the STAAR questions.

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    >THIS IS DSCC-10.
    WE ARE WORKING SOURCE AND DESTINATION. WE ARE RECORDING ALL DATA. TRANSMISSION IS VERY POWERFUL. READS 10 BY ON SCALE. HOWEVER THE BEAM IS DIRECTIONAL.
    "Do you have a lock yet?" she asked Brillon.
    "I've got a source lock!" Brillon yelled. "I'm sending it to your computer.
    Nothing yet on destination except it's west and south of here. This system wasn't designed to pinpoint a destination here on Earth for a transmission."
    Compton accessed another program on her computer and put that box next to the one that was her dialogue with STAAR and the NSA. She