Explore "The Wailing Asteroid" by Murray Leinster on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The signals from space began a little after midnight, local time, on a / Friday. They were first picked up in the South Pacific, just westward / of the International Date Line. A satellite-watching station on an / island named Kalua was the first to receive them, though nobody heard / the first four or five minutes. But it is certain that the very first / message was picked up and recorded by the monitor instruments.
The satellite-tracking unit on Kalua was practically a duplicate of / all its fellows. There was the station itself with a vertical antenna / outside pointing at the stars. There were various lateral antennae / held two feet above ground by concrete posts. In the instrument room / in the building a light burned over a desk, three or four monitor / lights glowed dimly to indicate that the self-recording instruments / were properly operating, and there was a multiple-channel tape recorder / built into the wall. Its twin tape reels turned sedately, winding a / brown plastic ribbon from one to the other at a moderate pace.