They were listening to the music of the spheres, Colin would tell her. They were listening to sounds from beyond Orion and the Mutara Nebula, which – yes – was from Star Trek II but Colin liked his little jokes, and Sylvie entertained them well enough, so Mutara Nebula it was.

She’d not got the gag about hearing Bill Shatner shouting “Khan!!!!!!” even from this distance, even without the radio telescope, but Colin was working on her. They had plenty of late nights still to pull before the project was complete.

“I don’t get it,” Sylvie said, coming back with the chicken soup from the vending machine. It was pot luck what you got, but Colin always went with the chicken soup, anyway. Last time, there’d been croutons and a garnish of cocoa powder. What Sylvie handed him now looked just about as palatable.

“I said, I don’t get it.” Sylvie performed what Colin eventually realised was the universally recognised symbol for headphone removal. He supposed XTC’s Best Of had been just a tad loud, but Sgt. Rock needed to be pumped up, even on the twelfth or thirteenth repeat.

“The same one, over and over,” Sylvie said with a look at the headphones on the console.

Colin turned down the volume. It surely didn’t matter. Their job, yes, was to listen, and that’s what your man on the street would expect they were doing, but there was really precious little of it. Tonight’s tasks, for example, primarily involved entering the coordinates for the telescope and then waiting for it to move, painfully slowly, to its new position in the sky. It would be another hour before data started spooling from the dot matrix printer in the corner of the Portakabin. And another hour or two before it turned out anything worth studying.

“It’s a Best Of,” said Sylvie. She helped herself to the cassette sleeve and started reading out track titles. “Science Friction,” she said. “Sounds like a good one. For the Star Wars nerd in you.”

“Star Trek.”

“Whatever. Or how about this one? Life Begins at the Hop. Sounds fun. Why don’t you give that one a spin? You know, for a change.”

“Records spin,” Colin told her. Those were definitely not croutons in his soup. He poked at one with the end of his Biro. He was pretty sure he heard it squeak.

“And what are those spindle things in your Walkman doing, then? If not spinning.”

Colin reached out to press stop. Sgt. Rock was no longer going to be of any help to him. “They’re sprockets,” he said. “Or pulleys.”

Croutons did not squeak, he thought to himself. The under-employed scientist in him was, of course, intrigued. The Biro was deployed once more. Sylvie handed him a spoon.

“The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead,” she said.

Colin prodded at the not-a-crouton. “Hmmmm?”

“What about that one?”

Colin ran a hand through his hair. He was still rocking the 1978 look, he knew. In 1993. Sylvie was a mine of such useful observations.

“Is that an insult?”

Sylvie scooted her office chair across the lino, shoving the cassette sleeve under his nose. A crimson nail tap-tap-tapped at the title. Colin could smell the Dior fragrance she wore, every single night, as if this was anything like the appropriate venue for it. “You don’t even know what’s on there, Col. Why buy the Best Of if you’re not going to listen to all the tracks?”

“Where else are you going to find the best tracks but the Best Of?” The crouton shot out from under the spoon and rolled away across the floor. “I really think that machine needs fixing,” he said. “I’ll call Jeff in the morning. Probably a blocked nozzle.”

“You never listen to any of the actual albums?” Sylvie asked. Colin slid his chair back slightly and caught sight of the sunset through the dusty slats of the blinds. The dish looked almost magnificent as it moved so very slowly against the wash of orange.

“Well, you know,” Colin said, when Sylvie prompted him with a pithy near repeat of her question, “album tracks. They’re always – an effort, aren’t they? I mean, aren’t they?”

Sylvie shook her head. “You’re one of those who boos when the band plays a track from the new album instead of one of the old favourites, aren’t you?”

Colin shook his head. He’d been distracted enough. He got up to fetch his errant crouton.

“I don’t know,” he said, bending self-consciously in his too-tight flares. “It’s too much of an…effort, isn’t it? Sometimes. Forcing yourself to listen to something new. I mean, isn’t it?”

Sylvie watched as he walked back to his desk, plopped the crouton on a tissue, prepared to investigate it further.

“I sometimes wonder why you came into this line of work,” she said. A hand reached towards the volume control on the panel and, yeah, Colin thought, it was possible to listen to what the dish was receiving right now, but what would be the point until it was in its final position. It would only be noise. Confusing. Almost meaningless.

Sylvie handed him back the cassette case. “At least try Are You Receiving Me,” she said. “At least once. How can you resist?”

Colin could tell her about the Walkman’s dodgy rewind. He could explain that it bothered him, spooling back and forth to find the start of a track he didn’t even know. But then he’d have to listen to her explaining the wonders of track skipping on CD.

“Ah, forget it,” Sylvie said, kicking up her feet onto the counter and exploring the surface of her possibly-soup. “You listen to what you like to listen to. Don’t we all?”

And that ought to have been that.

Until Colin thought about his chances of getting Sylvie to laugh at his Shatner gag, and he reached out for the dial that would allow in the sounds from the dish scanning as yet unswept tracts of sky.