I knew that I was taking a chance by being so confrontational, but I didn’t think I had anything to lose. I needed answers and so far, I hadn’t gotten them by being nice. At least, relatively so.

To my relief, the tactic quickly seemed to work. “Wait,” Ravenette said, holding up her hand as a sort of stop signal. I didn’t think she was even aware that she was doing this; the gesture seemed forced, mechanical. “He says to remember that it was you who contacted him.”

“I called into a radio show,” I replied. “I was half drunk.”

Ravenette—or the radioman she was speaking for—paid no attention to me. “He is very angry,” she said, pronouncing each word with grim deliberateness, as if there was any possibility that this particular communiqué hadn’t gotten through to me yet. And then, after a pause, she spoke again, this time sounding puzzled. And she was speaking for herself. She said, “Laurie? He sounds . . . desperate, too.”

“Desperate? And he thinks I can help him?”

“Yes, you,” she said, snapping back into the strange state in which she seemed to be only partly in control of herself. “He repeats that he needs the Haverkit. 3689D. 3689D,” she said suddenly, seeming, now, to be slipping more deeply into the grip of her alien counterpart. I finally sat back down as she closed her eyes once more and cocked her head to the side in the same way that Digitaria often did. “These numbers must be important. 3689D. 3689D. He keeps saying them over and over again.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

She held up her hand again; this time, she wanted me to stop speaking because there was more she had to tell me. “He’s showing me a vast network of . . . energy waves? Maybe radio waves? I’m not sure what it is. But there are stations all across the galaxies. Many galaxies? Millions? Here and . . . there. This universe and others. Theirs, he says. And others.” She shook her head. “I’m not sure of the words, exactly. But he has a job to do; he has to remain at his post. It’s just a small part of the grid but still . . . still . . . his part of the network isn’t functioning. He can’t broadcast without the Haverkit. He can’t send out the signal. He hasn’t sent a signal in years. Our years. So much time has been wasted! Why did Avi remove 3689D? Why why why why why?” The strange screeching sound had once again inserted itself into Ravenette’s voice. It was very difficult to listen to and it was becoming more and more insistent. “Give it back,” the alien voice said over and over again. “3689D. 3689D.”

“Ravenette,” I said, trying to summon her back from the trancelike state she had fallen into. When she didn’t respond, I spoke louder, and then louder still, calling out her name. Finally, I reached out and shook her. She blinked, and seemed to focus on me.

“What is he talking about?” I asked her. “What kind of signal is he supposed to be sending out? Do you understand what he means?”

She nodded. “They’re sending out a message.”

I had a moment where all the monster movies of my childhood flickered across my memory and I thought of huge robots stomping out of flying saucers, alien insects invading the Earth. Faceless, soulless beings with ray guns lurking in the gas clouds just beyond the edges of our solar system, waiting for the signal that it was time to start the attack.

“What kind of message?” I made myself ask.

“It’s hard to believe.”

“Just tell me. What are they broadcasting?”

“Prayers,” she said incredulously. “Encoded in a signal that’s sent out into . . . the infinite. He says they send it through the Watering Hole, whatever that means. Laurie, Laurie. They’re sending out prayers.”

“Prayers?” I couldn’t quite believe what she was saying. “Prayers? You mean like . . . to God?”

Ravenette seemed to be listening to whatever she was being told.

“Yes. To God.”

“Why? I don’t understand.”

Slowly, she shook her head. “He can’t answer that. He doesn’t know.”

“Because he’s just the radioman,” I said, mostly to myself. But someone else had heard me.

“Yes,” Ravenette responded. “That’s all. He’s just doing his job. He’s been doing it for . . . for . . .” She stopped speaking and then finally, started again. “There is no word to describe for how long.” Her eyes opened wide, as if she were trying to see out from somewhere deep inside herself, and then closed again. A moment later, in the alien-inflected voice that I found so disturbing, she began droning “3689D, 3689D,” until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

I grabbed her arm and shook her again. “Ravenette,” I said. “Ravenette.”

The response I got was that vicious hiss, even louder and more ferocious sounding than before. It stopped abruptly and Ravenette seemed to recoil, as if she had been shoved backward. After a moment, her body posture changed, her features seemed to change, to become less rigid, and she expelled a long breath. “He’s gone,” she said. “He won’t talk to you anymore. It’s like . . . like he slammed a door. And he won’t open it again.”

“What door?”

“The door between us.”

“What does that mean?”

The only image I could create out of what Ravenette had said was literal—like the door to Avi’s room being slammed shut. Or at least, the version of Avi’s room where the radioman seemed to be waiting. Waiting for someone to give him back whatever it was that could be identified by the numbers 3689D.

Ravenette didn’t answer. Instead, she suddenly sprang to her feet. Now, she was the one who was agitated. She started wandering around the room, moving in and out of the circle of light. “Is this who they are?” she said. “Is this who we are supposed to strive to become? Howard Gilmartin promised that when we met them again, they’d be higher beings than us, better than us, and instead, they turn out to be these . . . these creatures?” She continued to pace, and as she did, she continued to voice her apparently deepening despair. “They don’t care about us. They’re completely indifferent to our existence.”

“They?”

“There are others,” she said vaguely. “They’re not with him. I mean, they’re not here. Not exactly. I told you that.” Her voice trailed off. She seemed unable to find a way to add any further description.

“But the room you described to me. It still exists. At least, the building it’s in still exists. Is he there?”

“I don’t know,” Ravenette said. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. And what difference does it make? Nothing he said makes any sense. What is all this . . . this idiocy about prayers?”

Like a wheel turning, I could almost see her trying to think her way back through everything that had just happened in order to return to where she had started, which was in a place that definitely had nothing to do with prayers. From what I knew about the theology of the Blue Awareness—if it could even be called a theology—the concept of a universal creator would have been an anathema. After all, the goal of becoming “Aware” was to expand your consciousness in a way that would eventually allow you to evolve to the same exalted level of mind as the alien beings who were our true ancestors. Why would you pray to them when your aim was to become them?

Suddenly, she stopped her pacing and whipped around to face me. “This is all your fault,” she said. “I don’t know how you tricked Raymond into thinking that you could be trusted, because you’re sick. You’re damaged, deranged. I told you when we first met: this . . . this gray thing is a creation of your own perverted mind. It’s an engram, a manifestation of the pain and anger inside you that keeps you chained down to a miserably low level of consciousness. That’s what I made contact with—not a living entity but some kind of projection of your own neuroses. Someone needs to lock you up for about a year with a Blue Box and a trained Aware to help you rid yourself of this insanity. You’re the one who wants there to be some great big fat God off in the ether somewhere, waiting to receive prayers he might or might not answer a billion years from now. My guess is probably not, because there is no such thing. There is no God, Laurie, there is only mind. Only consciousness. The way to the infinite is through becoming Aware, rising through the levels of consciousness to the higher planes. Once we achieve that, we will deserve to join the beings who left us here. To join with them, to understand their minds and therefore, the true nature of the universe.”