CHAPTER SIX           Story Table of Contents          Finding Martin Game

Dr. Julie Takamine, the local veterinarian, was having a tough week.

She'd been trying to hire a new receptionist for several days now, but none of the applicants had seemed right for the job.  As a result, the waiting room at her office was in a state of utter chaos, and many of her regular customers were starting to complain.

More importantly, she was worried about Martin.  Julie and Martin had been "running into each other" at the zoo every Saturday afternoon, but this week he didn't show up.  It wasn't exactly what you would call a date, but Julie always looked forward to their time together as something quite special.  She'd begun to suspect that Martin was starting to see their relationship in romantic terms, which suited Julie completely.  It was about time!

But Martin had been acting strangely lately.  He'd been upset when his boss, Mr. Pendergast, canceled the project that Martin had been working on.  And then Martin had asked Julie for a special favor.  Against her father's wishes and against her own better judgment, she'd complied with Martin's request.

Now, Julie was beginning to wonder if this had been a mistake.

Years ago, when both she and Martin were children, their fathers had worked together on a scientific research project.  Viktor Kessler and Jorucho Takamine had been colleagues, spending all of their spare time in the laboratory that Mr. Kessler had built off of the courtyard in back of his house.

Martin's father kept his research notes on audio cassettes. Ever since the tragic laboratory explosion that killed Mr. Kessler, Julie's father had kept the plastic box of audio cassettes enshrined in the teahouse of the Japanese garden behind his store.

The tapes had been given a place of honor and respect.  Right next to the cassettes her father stored the latest prototype of the Kessler-Takamine propulsion drive.  Jorucho Takamine filed the patent application for his drive mechanism last October, on the 25th anniversary of the lab accident.  He always said that his inspiration for the mechanism would never have come to him had it not been for the vision of Viktor Kessler.

And then, out of the blue, Martin asked to listen to his father's tapes.

Julie understood the reason why her father refused, but she couldn't bring herself to say no to Martin.

Thinking that it might help Martin to snap out of the odd depression he'd sunk into lately, Julie had told Martin the location of the cassettes and the secret of how to get into the teahouse.

She'd never dreamed that listening to the tapes might make Martin feel worse than he had before.  What had she done?

And so, Julie found herself walking through the beautiful Japanese garden that had always before filled her with a sense of peace and serenity.  But as she slipped her shoes off on the stone ledge and stepped into the teahouse, she felt only remorse and trepidation.

Julie started to listen to Viktor Kessler's audio cassettes.

The cassettes were numbered and dated, so Julie decided to concentrate on listening to the tapes from the final year of the project.

The tapes documented the transmissions that the two men had sent into outer space, attempts to communicate with intelligent extraterrestrial life forms.

In July they sent a transmission targeting a star system that was 25.7 light years away.  Since the message would be traveling through space at the speed of light, it would take 25.7 years for the signal to reach its destination.

The content of the message was meant to provide a sampling of sensory impressions extracted from Viktor Kessler's brain as he viewed a textbook on mathematics, listened to recordings of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Beethoven's fifth symphony, smelled an assortment of flowers, and tasted several different food items.  The fabric samples that were intended for tactile impressions were not going to be used that day because of some technical difficulties involving Viktor's cat Paganini, who had urinated on the samples that morning.

On the next tape Martin's father talked about the astonishing development that occurred immediately after sending that transmission.  A reply message was received!

Mr. Kessler and Julie's father were stunned by the ramifications of the reply message.  It appeared to be alien in origin, from the same region in space that they had been transmitting to.  But the reply transmission arrived instantaneously!  This should be completely impossible since their own message would not arrive at its destination until 25.7 years later.  Even if the aliens were somehow capable of sending instantaneous messages across light years of space, how could they possibly respond to a message that they hadn't even received yet?

The content of the alien reply appeared to be mostly mathematical, with the information transmitted directly into the brains of the two men.  Each seemed to have received only a part of the message.  But between the two of them they had enough information to suspect that the aliens had supplied them with instructions for how to enhance their transmitter for the purpose of sending signals faster than the speed of light.

However, they learned that the process of faster-than-light signaling involved a folding of space-time made possible by the magnetronic transformation of organic materials.  They needed to use materials that produce unusually strong taste sensations, either sweet, sour, salty, or bitter.

The last tape, from October, discusses the researchers' decision to try to use broccoli in a bitterness transformation.  Both men apparently possessed the genetic characteristic that causes broccoli to taste bitter to them.

The two partners had been having a disagreement over how much broccoli to use.  Julie's father wanted to start the testing with a medium-sized piece of broccoli, and Mr. Kessler wanted to use a large piece of broccoli.  However, the first broccoli transmission test had been temporarily put on hold because the cat Paganini had eaten almost all of the broccoli.  Both partners agreed that the small broccoli sprig left by Paganini was clearly insufficient for testing purposes.

Julie sighed as she put the blue-labeled cassettes back in their plastic box.  Except for some technical details including the exact coordinates of the original transmission, Julie had learned nothing new.

Julie had been twelve years old that year.  Her father had been using Julie to help translate for him ever since her mother died when she was eight.  No doubt this had forced her to grow up faster than the other children that she went to school with, but Julie never minded helping her father.

She'd always thought of herself as her father's "good little girl".

Until now.

It wasn't until Julie was driving back to her office that she realized what she hadn't seen in the teahouse.  

There had been an empty space next to the cassettes.  The Kessler-Takamine propulsion drive prototype was missing!

Chapter Seven (coming soon)          Story Table of Contents          Finding Martin Game