When the sheriff showed up he brought along Mark Talos, who had worked with the phone system in Centrus, and was pretty fluent in Standard.
“They don’t pick up everything from Earth all the time,” he said. “That would be insane and probably impossible. But there’s one frequency they do monitor and record all the time. It’s basically an ongoing archive. Important messages come and go by way of the collapsar drone, but this one is basically `Here’s what happened on Earth eighty-eight years ago today.’ ”
He stepped up to the console and studied it. “Ah, Monitor 1.” He flipped a switch and there was a rapid, high-pitched flow of the language they call Standard.
“So the one under it is Monitor 2?”
“Not exactly. More like `1A’.” He turned off the first one and clicked on 1A. Nothing. “I’d guess that it talks to the collapsar drone, and maybe to people who go back and forth. That might be done at the spaceport, though.”
“Can we send a message to Earth?” Marygay asked.
“Sure. But you’ll be…we’ll all be pretty old by the time it gets there.” He waved at the chair. “Just sit down and push the red button in front, the one that says HIN/HAN. Then press it again when you’re done.”
“Let me write down the message first.” She took my hand. “We’ll all take a look at it and make sure it has everything.”
“They’re probably getting pretty curious,” Mark said. “Oh, yeah?” I said. “Where are they, then?” I looked at the sheriff. “Are humans that unimportant in the scheme of things? That we could suddenly disappear, and they don’t even bother to send a ship to check?”
“Well, they’d still be getting radio from–”
“Eighty-eight years ago, but bullshit! Don’t they think that twenty-four years without an urgent message, via collapsar jump, might be cause for concern? We send several a year.”
“I can’t speak for them–”
“I thought you were a group fucking mind!”
“William…” Marygay said.
The sheriff’s mouth was set in a familiar line. “We don’t know that they haven’t responded. If they came and found what we have found, they wouldn’t necessarily stay. Why would they stay? We weren’t due back for another forty thousand years.”
“That’s true, sorry.” It still bothered me. “But they wouldn’t come all the way here, take a look around, and go back without leaving a sign.”
“We don’t know they haven’t left a sign,” Marygay said. “It would probably be out at the spaceport.”
“Or maybe here.”
“If so, it’s not obvious,” Mark said. He stepped to the next station. “Want to try Tsogot?”
“Yeah, let’s do it while the sheriff’s here. He knows more Tauran than we do.”
He clicked a few switches and shook his head. Turned a dial up and the room filled with a roar of white noise. “That’s all they’re sending,” he said.
“A dead line?” I asked, suspecting the answer. “Nothing wrong with the circuit,” he said slowly. “Just an open mike at the other end.”
“So the same thing happened there,” the sheriff said, and corrected himself. “May have happened.”
“Is it continuously recorded?” I asked.
“Yeah. If it stops 3.1 years after the big day, then it’s compelling evidence. I can check that out.” He turned off the white noise and fiddled with some dials. He slid a Tauran keyboard out of the way and a human one took its place.
“Think I can make it go fast-forward here.” A small screen gave him date and time, about eight years ago, and he turned the sound back up. Tauran chatter got faster and faster, more high-pitched, and then suddenly stopped. “Yep. Same time, about.”
“There and here and where else?” I said. “Maybe Earth didn’t send anybody here because there’s nobody there.”
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Chapter twenty-four
The next week was too busy with practical matters to allow much time or energy for mystery. We were keeping the same leadership until things settled down, so I was pretty occupied with the business of turning this corner of a ghost town into a functional town.
People wanted to roll up their sleeves and get the farms started, but our immediate needs were power, water, and sanitation. Another vehicle or two wouldn’t hurt, either, but nothing turned up in the first search.