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of their feat—but they also could hear another, faint pinging on a different frequency. At least, the ones who were playing around with what amounts to homegrown radio astronomy, like your uncle. You do know he was doing that, right?”
    I remembered the hollow, pyramid-shaped antenna, the hiss of celestial radiation. “I guess so,” I admitted.
    “Well, when these amateur astronomers monitored the Watering Hole, that’s where they’d hear this ghost signal, which is what they started calling it. Whenever a satellite was pinging on its advertised frequency, there would almost always be what Avi liked to call ‘whispering at the Watering Hole’ as well.”
    “What’s the Watering Hole?”
    “Remember Star Trek ? Maybe a better term would be a hailing frequency. Literally, it’s the frequency band on the radio dial between eighteen and twenty-one centimeters, which are the wavelengths of hydrogen and the hydroxyl radical—wait, don’t tell me: that’s more than you want to know, right? So let me put it this way: both of those are essential elements of water, and water, most scientists think, is not only necessary for life on Earth but for any kind of extraterrestrial life as well—if it exists. So for radio astronomers, that’s always a critical frequency to monitor for any signals that extraterrestrials might be beaming our way to let us know they’re out there. The idea is that those frequencies would be known to any living beings, so it’s a starting point where everyone could gather and say hello.”
    “I don’t understand,” I said. “If people expected to hear an alien signal in that frequency range and suddenly, they did, wouldn’t everyone have gone crazy? I mean, contact, right?”
    “Right—except the signals were going the wrong way. They weren’t coming from space, they were outbound, from Earth going into space. Unfortunately, nobody could ever pinpoint where, exactly, they were being broadcast from or figure out what their real connection was to orbiting satellites. Eventually, they became just one more weird, unexplained phenomenon. Some people thought they weren’t anything more than a sophisticated hoax. In any event, no one has heard any ghost signals for years now. But they were still being picked up by satellite trackers when your uncle was alive, and he was always fascinated by them. He never let it go. Mostly, because of what had happened to you.”
    “You mean because I told him about my dream?”
    “That’s your story and you’re sticking to it, right?”
    I let Jack’s sarcasm just roll on by, along with his remark. “So you had Avi on your show to talk about these ghost signals?”
    “He was obsessed with them. I assumed that’s why he never moved, never changed jobs—he wasn’t really interested in anything else but pursuing the truth about those signals. You can still hear them on the Internet—did you know that? You can hear Sputnik’s original telemetry signal and a recording of its ghost, along with most of the satellites that were launched afterward, as well, both by the Soviets and the United States.” Suddenly, Jack took the conversation in another direction. “So tell me,” he said, “what’s out there? On the fire escape.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You know, the fire escape. Ravenette told you that the figure she saw was pointing to the fire escape. What’s out there?”
    “Nothing,” I replied.
    “Okay. I guess I have to frame the question exactly right to get you to answer me. So here goes: Who is out there?”
    “Just me,” I told Jack Shepherd. “Me.”
    Of course, I was lying again.

~III~
    W ho is out there?
    Well, I thought, as I clicked off the phone and concluded my conversation with Jack after managing to tell him nothing more than I’d already said, maybe I wasn’t totally lying when I said, Just me, because the honesty of my answer depended on whether or not what happened to me on the fire escape was or was not a dream.