The Most Boring Signal in the World

"This is the worst job," Maya said. "We watch a pen draw a line."

The pen drew a line. It scratched across a long roll of paper that crawled out of the machine one slow inch at a time. Outside the shed, the radio dish pointed at a patch of nothing in particular.

"Mr. Okafor said something interesting might come through," Soren said.

"Mr. Okafor said that four hours ago."

Mr. Okafor was asleep in the lawn chair by the door with a thermos of coffee balanced on his knee. He had built the dish himself out of an old satellite antenna and a lot of patience. He had warned them that radio astronomy was mostly waiting, and then he had proven it.

The pen scratched. The paper crawled.

Then the pen jumped.

It was a small jump, a quick spike up and down, and then the line went flat again. Soren leaned in.

"Did you see that?"

"I saw it."

They watched. The paper crawled. The pen jumped again. The same little spike, sharp as a tooth.

"Twice," Maya said.

"How far apart?"

Maya put her thumb on the first spike and her finger on the second. Then she held that same gap up to the empty paper ahead, like she was measuring nothing.

"About there," she said. "It'll do it again about there."

The pen jumped. Right where her finger was.

Soren stopped breathing for a second. He pulled the notebook out of his back pocket and wrote down the time, and the gap, and three spikes in a row.

"Maya. Do it again."

She measured the gap, set her finger ahead on the blank paper. They both stared at the spot.

The pen jumped. Her finger was on it.

"That's not possible," Soren said quietly.

"It just happened four times."

"That's why it's not possible." He tapped the notebook. "Stars don't do that. Stars hum and crackle and wander. They don't keep time. Nothing out there keeps time like a clock."

Maya was already counting under her breath, matching the rhythm. "Tick," she whispered, and a half second later the pen jumped. "Tick." Jump. "Tick." Jump.

She could feel it now, the way you feel a song you can clap along to. The thing in the sky had a beat, and she had found the beat, and the beat did not miss.

"Soren. What keeps perfect time?"

He looked up from the notebook. "A clock."

"What builds clocks?"

Neither of them said the word. The shed was very quiet except for the scratch of the pen and the small wind in the dish wires outside.

Maya sat down slowly on the dusty floor. "Somebody's sending it," she said. "Something. Out there. It's too neat to be an accident. Accidents are messy. This is on purpose."

Soren wanted to argue. That was his job in their friendship, the careful one, the one who needed the next step before he believed the last one. But the spikes kept coming, evenly, patiently, and he could not find a single natural thing that ticked like that. The more regular it was, the more it felt like a message. The neatness itself was the strange part.

"Wake him up," Soren said.

"No." Maya didn't move. "He'll say it's interference. A car. A satellite. He'll have a boring reason."

"He might be right."

"Then let's beat him to it." She looked at the dish through the open shed door. "If it's somebody sending it, the signal stays put. It comes from one spot. A radio tower, a phone, whatever. It stays where the sender is."

Soren followed that. "And the dish is pointed at the sky."

"And the sky moves." Maya was on her feet again. "The Earth turns. The stars drift over us all night. So if our ticking thing is a star, it should slide across the dish and disappear. The beat should fade out as the spot moves off the dish."

"And if it's somebody on the ground," Soren said, writing fast now, "it stays. It doesn't fade. It just keeps ticking forever because it's not in the sky at all."

"So we wait." Maya grinned, which was a terrible thing to do to a person who had just declared waiting the worst job in the world. "We watch the pen draw a line."

They watched.

The pen ticked. Maya kept the beat in her chest. Soren kept his eyes on the clock and the paper and the gap, which never changed, not by a hair, not once. Twenty minutes. The coffee thermos slid an inch on Mr. Okafor's knee and stopped.

Then the spikes got smaller.

Not slower. That was the thing Soren noticed, and he grabbed Maya's sleeve so she would notice it too. The ticking kept perfect time, exactly as perfect as before, but each jump was a little shorter than the one before. The rhythm did not break. The strength faded.

"It's drifting off the dish," Soren said. "It's still ticking. It's just leaving."

"It's in the sky," Maya breathed. "It's really up there."

The spikes shrank. Tick, smaller. Tick, smaller. The pen drew a line that remembered to jump even as the jumps faded into the flat. The Earth was turning underneath them and carrying the shed away from whatever it was, and whatever it was kept knocking, politely, on time, growing fainter, not because it was slowing but because they were leaving it behind.

"It's not a person," Soren said. He had needed every step to get here and now he was here. "Nobody could keep time that exact. Not a tower. Not a satellite. It's a real thing. A whole real thing in space that spins fast enough to tick like that, and we can't even see it, and it's been ticking the whole time before we pointed at it and it'll keep ticking after we point away."

Maya put her thumb and finger to the paper one last time, measuring the gap that had not moved all night.

"How fast would something have to spin," she said, "to knock on us this fast."

Neither of them knew. The not-knowing sat between them like a held breath.

The pen reached the edge of the faintest spike, jumped once more, almost nothing, a whisper of a tooth.

In the lawn chair, Mr. Okafor's thermos finally slid off his knee and hit the floor, and he woke up asking what he'd missed.