Of the three, the morning shots were always the worst. Foletta would administer the dose himself, monitoring his patient as he cooed softly in Mick’s ear, taunting him. Once the drug took effect, he’d place Mick in a wheelchair and push him around from pod to pod on his morning rounds, sending a warning to the other residents that dissidence of any kind would not be tolerated.

The nightly exercises after the third shot of the day were a worthwhile struggle. By increasing his metabolism, Mick found he was able to burn off the effects of the drug faster, gradually giving him a toehold on sanity. By the fourth morning, he had regained enough of his mental equilibrium to focus on a plan.

From that moment forward he had acted the part of a mindless bag of bones. The seventh-floor orderlies would arrive each morning to find him lying on the floor of his cell in a deep stupor, totally incoherent. This angered the attendants, who were now forced to feed their incapacitated patient, and, to their utter disgust, even change his soiled clothing. After a week of this routine, Foletta was forced to cut Mick’s dosage from three times a day to just an afternoon and an evening injection.

Over the last few weeks, Foletta’s schedule had become inundated with other matters. He stopped checking in on Mick, trusting his care to the orderlies.

For the first time in his eleven years of captivity, the security surrounding Michael Gabriel had become lax.

NASA: Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland

NASA Director Brian Dodds stares in disbelief at the immense computer printout scrolled out across his desk. “Explain it to me again, Swicky.”

Dodds’s assistant, Gary Swickle, points a thick index finger to the checkerboard pattern, consisting of thirteen square boxes across, running continuously over thousands of sheets of paper. “The radio signal is made up of thirteen different harmonics, represented here by these thirteen columns. Each harmonic can be played out over any one of twenty distinct, consecutive frequencies. This allows for a possible combination of 260 different sound bytes, or commands.”

“But you say there’s no repeating pattern?”

“Only at the very beginning.” Swickle locates the first page of the printout. “When the signal first appears, the harmonics are kept very simple, several notes played out over just one frequency, yet repeated over and over again. Now look here. At the seventeen-minute mark, everything changes, all thirteen harmonics and twenty frequencies suddenly coming into play at once. From that point on, the signal never repeats itself. The remaining 185 minutes use all 260 combinations of sound bytes, indicating a highly structured communiqué.”

“You’re absolutely certain that no primer exists within the first seventeen minutes? No mathematical equations? Nothing that indicates translation instructions of any kind?”

“Nothing.”

“Damn.” Dodds rubs his blood shot eyes.

“What are you thinking, boss?”