Dr Capri stood up and stretched, dispersing tiredness and sleepiness. He realized that if they had received a signal, even though it was wrong, then the technique was working and now they just needed to adjust it. He wanted to suggest that Yulia go downstairs for half an hour for some tea and then take care of the technical issues afterwards.

“Yulia,” he turned to her, but met her concerned look. “What’s wrong?” with a sharp change in tone, the doctor asked.

“It’s a cosmic signal and strong electromagnetic radiation,” Yulia looked into the space in front of her, “I’m a hundred percent sure of it. But the signal is too distinct. There’s sound and everything else,” she turned to the computer again and started typing something.

“Wait a minute, Yulia,” Dr Capri said, hoping she was just tired, “how can we tell what kind of signal we’re picking up?”

“Now I’m going to try to get that signal and convert it to audio. Damn it!” she yelled.

“What?” the doctor tensed up.

“The program is looking for the signal over and over again, trying to point the telescope there. It’s recording in half-second bursts. I could…” she hesitated, biting her lower lip, “tell the program that the telescope is pointed at the object. Please, disconnect the telescope wire from the control box,” she tossed to the doctor.

Dr Capri, justifying the meaning of his name, which can be translated as ‘mighty man’, immediately ripped one of the wire from the box. Yulia began typing the coordinates into the command line. She copied the data from another window and let the program know that the telescope was already manually pointed to the correct coordinates. The error message stopped appearing on the display. Everything looked calm. Yulia began to receive a steady and clear signal. All devices showed bursts of energy. The electromagnetic spectra were off the charts. She tried to extract the audio signal from the pile of data the system was showing and picking up.

“It seems to be working. The signal is strong, it’s at 8450 MHz. It’s the frequency used to transmit data from spacecraft to Earth. But if the signal is from…” Yulia shook her head to get the interfering thought out of her head. “The telescope can’t aim at the object because the object is on Earth.”

“Can we locate the source of the signal?” Dr Capri asked.

“Yes,” she pointed to the display. “Okay, let’s put this as the zero point. Here,” Yulia pointed at the numbers.

Dr Capri wrote down the coordinates ‘27°41'53.0"N 88°08'15.4"E’ with a pencil on a sheet in his notebook and went to the computer at the other end of the room. He quickly entered the data into the search query and saw the name of one of the largest mountains in the world, Kanchenjunga.

“Yulia, I checked the coordinates,” the doctor began to speak loudly from his desk, “it is the northeastern border of Nepal, the Kanchenjunga mountain.”

Yulia was sitting at the table, her left ear placed over the small speaker of her laptop, she held her right hand outstretched upward, letting the doctor know to stop shouting. Dr Capri ran up to Yulia and lowered his head closer to the laptop, too. They tried to breathe quietly, but the sound was almost inaudible. Yulia tried to turn up the volume. It was the maximum, but apart from the hissing, only isolated almost elusive sounds came through.

Dr Capri ran to the second computer and unplugged the small speakers from it. Ten seconds later, Yulia hooked them up to the laptop and turned the volume to maximum.

The noise increased. Then the sound became some kind of gurgling and finally the room was filled with some rustling and thumping.

“Is that thunder?” Yulia whispered.

The sound began to change again. It was the sound of water. Dr Capri checked the speaker wire, hoping the hissing and rustling would disappear. But then they heard birds singing. Dr Capri sat down in the chair next to Yulia and listened to the sound of birds trilling first, then the growling of wild animals, and then the screams of chimpanzees coming from the speakers.

Yulia and Dr Capri’s faces frowned. The tension was going away and was replaced by frustration and even some embarrassment. Yulia lowered her eyes to the floor and thought to herself, “I caught the educational channel on several million worth of equipment.”

Sounds kept pouring out of the speakers: a phone call, a steamer horn, the sound of a train and some kind of tractor.

Yulia was afraid to raise her eyes to Dr Capri because she couldn’t explain why two days of tuning space gear had resulted in them simply catching a television or radio signal from some station.

At that moment, the cry of a newborn baby was heard. Dr Capri touched Yulia’s hand.

“It’s very strange sounds,” he said, as the crunch of snow beneath feet sounded in the background.

Classical music began to play. Something snapped in Yulia and Tulu-Manchi’s chest. Yulia’s breath hitched and she tried to catch her breath, but Dr Capri beat her to it.

“A golden record?!” he said to the accompaniment of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Debby was very tired, waiting for her flight from New York to Paris. She arrived early, afraid she would be late. She was worried about leaving in the middle of the school year, about flying halfway around the world, about money and gifts, about her pupils. All at once about a lot of things. To fly spontaneously to Sango in Tokyo like that was not like Deborah Glandfield. Of course, it was fine for Sango to arrange a wedding so unexpectedly, but Debby didn’t like surprises.

Debby wasn’t a nerd, but she certainly wasn’t the kind of person who could decide to fly to the other side of the world in a week. She was a teacher, after all. Honestly, Debby was very fond of Sango and wanted to see her. She didn’t think about the fact that she’d spent half her savings on this trip. And that right now she just wanted to go to a normal bed and rest. She has the one closest friend she has, and she only lives on the other side of the world.

A flight to Paris was announced. Debby wandered tiredly toward the gate. In Paris, she would catch a connecting flight to Tokyo. She was only glad that there she could spend the day in the beautiful city she knew so much about, but had never been to. She loved French movies, music, and culture, though she had never met a native French person in her entire life.

“Plaid?” the stewardess offered, looking into Debby’s tired eyes with her tired eyes.

“Yes, thank you.”

She covered her head and fell asleep as the plane rolled in for takeoff.

It hadn’t been an easy flight. But Debby woke up rested and happy. She ate a bar of white chocolate she bought at the airport and asked her seatmate when the plane would be landing.

“Oh, yeah. About fifteen minutes ago they said we’d be arriving,” her companion said with obvious inspiration.

“Great,” Debby said at the same time as she flashed the signal to buckle her seat belts.

“Hmm. I’ve got a whole day ahead of me…the Louvre and a real French café. I think I’ve had enough of that. Let’s save the Eiffel Tower for the next visit,” anticipating the adventure, Debby thought.

Stepping off the plane at Charles de Gaulle airport, she dropped off her luggage in the luggage room and went straight to the RER-train going to the city center. Debby listened to French trills all around her the entire ride from the airport to the Châtelet le Alle station. There she found Café Grizzly and ate a variety of sweets until she felt dizzy. Afterwards, she walked to the Louvre. She looked at the tourists walking in the same direction and felt joy and unity with them. There were many people around: couples and families, companies and singles, all striving for the goal. Some of them were going there, driven by the irresistible fascination of the Mona Lisa, some wanted to feel the spirit of antiquity or walk through time, from the era of Ramses II to the modern glass and metal pyramids. Debby, on the other hand, didn’t want to look at anything in specific, but rather wanted to get a grip on the principle. It always amazed her that history, which is so uninteresting to most people as a science, is simultaneously so attractive in the world’s museums. People stand in lines and walk for hours at a time in various Louvre halls to immerse themselves in the past. Debby wanted all the kids she teaches history to be as interested in it as visitors of the Louvre. For her, history and art merged. Art drowned in history, and history manifested itself in art.