“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.