first apogee: transmission

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Bearing nothing but his leather jacket and an affinity for the Kissing Lot, Lawrence had been the one to open the door for Connie Anne that night. The quantum mechanics extraordinaire had been hurling pebbles at the side of Louise's house for several minutes on end, and the biting cold was beginning to seep into her jacket. Had she traveled all the way across the bridge to Near Southeast to tell the Ring bearer about anything other than the contents of the plain box sitting on the pile of grey snow beside her, she would've left for Dolores's house to work on the Project already. But there in the knee-high garden weeds she remained simply because what else is there to do when you find proof of an imminent doom that isn't brought on by the Reds than tell your oldest friend?

Connie'd noticed Kate sitting in the Chevrolet in the driveway as she hesitantly crept around the front of Louise's house. She knocked on the main door once, twice, three times and waited for someone to stumble upon her. Assuming Kate and Lawrence were off to another one of their biweekly dates, Connie Anne's windswept hair, askew glasses, and rumpled button-up were probably the last thing Lawrence expected to find shivering behind the screen door. Similarly, contempt was one of the few expressions the young writer anticipated from him. She blinked.

"What in God's good name are you doing here?" he nearly spat the second he lay eyes on her. "You'd better run before my mama realizes you're here, or she'll call your parents and ask for permission to beat you herself."

Connie Anne was hardly fazed by his words as she peered over his broad shoulders into the house. Absentmindedly, she hiked the cardboard box in her hands higher on her torso. "Is Louise here? I need to speak with her."

Lawrence glanced up at Kate and the Chevrolet before glancing down at his broken Watch. "'Bout what?" he demanded.

"The contents of this box. It's a science experiment we've been working on. We coulda used you as our calculator if you hadn't—" Then, as abrupt as ever, Connie straightened and said, "Wait a second. Are you parents inside the house right now? What'd you say about your mama?"

Lawrence impatiently watched as Kate leaned over and began to honk the Chevrolet's horn loud enough to wake the entire neighborhood. Bedroom windows of houses around the block brightened as nosy neighbors peered out at the spectacle, and a dog on the porch a few houses over howled in irritation. It wasn't until Louise hollered something from upstairs that he finally let out a resigned sigh, decidedly brushing past Connie Anne. "Nevermind it. I gotta go. But if you tell Mama I let you in the house, it's a whippin' for the both of us."

As soon as Lawrence took off towards Kate, a Louise-shaped figure appeared at the head of the stairs and beckoned Connie up without delay. "Good grief! You've got a death wish coming here in the middle of the night!"

"It's hardly nine in the evening, Louise. And I'm not the only one with a death wish here what with this box!" Straightening her father's spectacles so that they sat firmly on the bridge of her nose, Connie Anne took the stairs three at a time to the second level of Louise's house. She was immediately ushered into Louise's room in which she sat on Louise's bed and watched as Louise's door shut carefully behind the two. Louise's eyes fell upon Connie as she stationed Louise's box on Louise's covers in Louise's room in Louise's unfamiliar house.

Connie Anne cleared her throat, wiping her hands on her pants. She'd traveled here to chat and chatter alongside Louise many times before, but to be on the opposite side of the window was a different concept entirely. Her posters in the far corner of the room made her feel less anxious, less like everything here was Louise's and more like she belonged, but the thought of either of her friend's parents coming into the room to find her with two black straps running along her shoulders underneath her sweater were enough to make her chest constrict with nerves. Had Louise just stuck her head outside to gaze up at the stars as she always did, she wouldn't be anywhere near her mama or papa and could wear whatever she liked.

If she were being entirely honest (a rare occurrence—if not nonexistent), Connie Anne could hardly understand what was immoral about her wearing suspenders. They held her pants up just as well as they did her father's, and if she couldn't don his spectacles every day, she didn't see why she could take his suspenders with her, too. Connie had already taken off several inches of her hair (and several years of her mother's life), refused to wear any single piece of clothing that didn't have two holes for each of her disproportional extremities, and written science fiction behind her parents' back. But somehow, braces were too far. Although she'd admit that it was a relatively recent trend in her idiosyncratic approach to fashion, she was surprised anyone had expected anything else of her.

Except for Louise, of course. Louise never expected anything of Connie Anne unless Patricia Morris was involved. But Connie Anne supposed that was because whatever Patricia Morris meant to her felt just as suffocating as her own need to dress and read the way she wanted.

"What'd you come here for at nine in the evening, then?" the pajama-sporting girl demanded as quietly as she could. "Go on, before my parents realize that a) I got company and b) that company is you!"

Connie blinked, pushing her thoughts aside. "Louise," she started, "where did you find this box last week? When we were, you know....?"

"When we were what? Experimenting? Is that what this is all about?" Indignation wrapped itself around her voice like a thick blanket.

"Yes, that's what this is all about! Some of the stuff in here.... Do you even know how much trouble this could get you in?" she replied in return.

Louise bit her lip, her contrite eyes cast to the floor. "I told you I wasn't sure where it'd come from. A dusty storage room, maybe. I don't think I was in Anacostia."

"Me neither. The contents of this box certainly ain't anything you'd find here. Let's put it like that." Connie removed the top of the mystery object to reveal nothing more than stacks upon stacks of typed pages.

"Well! You gotta be kidding me!" Louise reached forward to touch the papers in a display of exasperation, but Connie Anne pulled away so fearfully that she froze.

"No! It's not just papers! Have you no respect for words?" Connie lowered her voice to nothing but a whisper as she added, "Illegal words, mind you. Words that we could find ourselves in trouble for reading."

Louise was slowly beginning to understand. "You mean...you mean like trouble with the cops?" Panic flooded her eyes, and her hands flew to the Ring on her finger to twist it. Once, twice, three times. Pause. Once, twice, three times. Again. "All I did was take a box! I'll bring it back if we have to! What's so special 'bout those papers?"

"Louise, they talk about aliens."

"Aliens?" The same indignant disbelief from before filled Louise to the very core. Connie never understood that—never understood how or why Louise felt emotions so strongly. Every crease in her brow expressed a newer and even more remarkable sentiment than the last. She radiated anxiety whenever she turned the Ring, and her smile electrified everything and anything it was directed at.

Emotions were fickle things: Louise amplified them while Connie ignored them. 

Perhaps that's why they were such good friends.

"Connie?"

Connie Anne blinked. She'd left Louise's house for a moment to traverse the freight cars of her train of thought. "Your house is awfully quiet, and I keep getting the greatest ideas for new experiments." It was a thoughtless partial truth, and Louise paid no heed.

"What about this one here? The aliens?"

Something must have clicked in Connie Anne's mind then, because she simply opened her mouth and never closed it. "Yes! Goodness! I'd almost forgotten about the box until I was cleaning out my room and went through it. I thought it'd be full of old bill calculations or something of that sort, but then when I realized someone had typed them, I knew it had to be something more important. And many of the papers are from the Vanguard program!"

"Vanguard as in the satellite that finally went up last spring?" Louise tried to interject. But she was silenced with an irritated, "Waaaait. Let me finish."

"I decided to read a few of them just because I thought you'd always had them sitting in your closet. I was sure I was just going through a secret science fiction story you didn't want me to read, so I went along critiquing it of course. But the farther I got, the more I realized that there wasn't any way you could possibly write so believingly and persistently without coming to me about it, and then I realized there were facts listed here that you couldn't possibly know unless you were an there at the damned Naval Research Laboratory at the time of Vanguard I's liftoff.

"I kept reading past the beginning, and I found these descriptions of unexpected radio transmissions from space. And the farther you go, the more evidence there is pointing to extraterrestrial communication! I had to study some space dynamics and classic mechanics before I came over to make sure I would explain this right and Honor's books weren't nearly sufficient enough for my research, but I'll try my best to put it into words."

"Space dynamics and what—?"

"Hold on with the questions! Goodness gracious! The successful Vanguard I (not kaputnik--remember that from last year?) was launched into Earth's orbit a while ago, but it kinda...leaned away from its normal path. Just before NASA took over all operations, it came completely out of orbit moving faster than it was supposed to. And after it came away from our planet, it started detecting another large object with a mass nearly identical to the moon's nearby. That's when the messages started—"

"Messages?"

"Aliens!" Connie Anne turned to Louise, finally acknowledging queries. Her eyes shone with the type of mischievous curiosity that usually led to talk of experiments. "Alien transmissions, all recorded clearly! They speak through what the engineers at the Laboratory call disturbances. From what I could gather, disturbances were usually made up of high-frequency radio waves that were directed at the satellite for periods no longer than a few hours. There's a telescope on Vanguard I, and although they aren't any pictures, a single page somewhere here describes the ship with its estimated dimensions and features."

"What does all of this mean?" Louise's playful eyes told Connie she understood the words sprouting from her friend's lips but not the truth and logic behind them.

"Humans have met aliens, Louise. Real life aliens. And you went and stole the proof." Connie paused to breathe for a moment before quietly adding, "As of right now, you cannot use the Ring until we figure out how to return this."

Immediately humorless, Louise demanded, "What? Hell no! Christmas is right—did you ever think that—I haven't even," she sputtered, shaking her hands in irritation. "H-how do you know any of this is true? How do you know someone else, an big shot engineer maybe, didn't sit down in front of his typewriter and start a story he never expected anyone to read?"

"I don't know," Connie admitted. "But how do you know it's not the truth, either? What evidence rests behind your case?"

There were a multitude of things Louise could've answered with, but she was at a complete loss for words. She stuttered through the beginning of a sentence twice before letting out a sign that eerily resembled the same one Lawrence had given before allowing Connie to enter the house. "How long?"

"A week perhaps. It should be safe to use qua—Jump Time by Christmas."

"Five days, Connie." Louise's hands fell to her sides, and her hard gaze bore into Connie Anne's irises. "I won't use the Ring for five days, and that's it. Don't look at me like that! You'll be conducting experiments, won't you? You won't need longer than five days."

The quantum mechanics extraordinaire opened her mouth to protest, but the panels of the floor outside Louise's door creaked ominously at that very moment. Before she knew it, Connie and the box were being ushered off and under the bed. Ignoring her hushed pleas to hide in the closet instead, Louise offered nothing more than a shove when her thighs got stuck under one of the wooden planks of the bed frame. Quickly and fearfully, Connie pushed aside dusty socks and a single pair of ripped nylons to make room for herself before—the door opened.

"Louise, what are you wearing to Church tomorrow?" Louise's mama asked. Connie held her breath.

"The purple dress, Mama," Louise answered, her voice shaky. "Do you need to wash it?"

"Not unless you'd like to wear an unwashed dress into the House of the Lord." Boards creaked, and her mother's feet tread over to the closet before yanking the door open with the flourish of a church-going woman. Hangars scraped and banged as she moved the dresses from one side to the other. "Are you talkin' to someone? Because I coulda sworn I heard—"

"Mama!" Louise chuckled nervously, awkwardly. "You know I mumble to myself when I do my algebra homework!"

Her mother's sharp glare was audible in the tense silence that filled the room. "Don't you interrupt your mama, now. Like you lost your senses. Here it is, the purple one." The conversation came to a brief halt, and Connie chewed on the inside of her bottom lip. Louise quickly kicked something under the bed—the cover of the box that trembled in Connie Anne's hands.

"Alright, Mama. I'm going to go back to my homework. Will Lawrence be home soon?"

The woman scoffed. "That boy better be home soon. And you oughtta be gettin' to bed. Best be up early tomorrow. I'll bring the dress back in the morning. Goodnight."

"Goodnight!" The door closed, and the room sighed in relief. "Five days," Louise seemed to whisper to herself. But Connie's ears caught it, just as Louise knew she would, and she understood. She fixed the spectacles on her face, setting her mouth into a determined line.

Connie Anne Williams had five days to prove the existence of aliens. And by God, she was going to do it.

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