When the aging Pioneer spacecraft, long silent, suddenly starts sending strange sequences of numbers, the scientists charged with tracking her must decipher what she's trying to say. They get help from an unlikely source - baseball fantasy writer WP Kinsella.
This story was published in the February 2002 issue of Anlaog Science Fiction magazine.
In the movies, you were slumped at your computer console, fast asleep, surrounded by empty Pepsi™ cans and candy wrappers, when the system pinged. You woke on a tide of adrenaline, flinging candy wrappers and crumpled cans to the lab floor and, after a moment of disorientation, realized WHAT THAT SOUND MEANT. In reality, Dr. Santiago Rodriguez was standing in the middle of the lab stuffing his face with nachos when the Signal Detection System spoke--figuratively speaking. What the interface actually did was fire an alarm that played the five-note sequence from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, at Dr. Mukerjee’s whimsy. When he’d first come to Project Quetzalcoatl, Santiago had jumped out of his skin every time the system pinged. Now, three years and many false alarms later, he didn’t even twitch. Now, he stood chewing like a contented cow, contemplating a response to the summons.
Pieces of Eight, Part III is a collection of eight novellas to complement the eight in Pieces of Eight, Pieces of Eight, Part II and Pieces of Eight, Part IV.
