She had no reply. She could only look at him, and then at the others, one by one. Sofia, who was knowledgeable and brilliant and who seemed to think there was no insurmountable economic or technical difficulty in launching a mission. Jimmy, who was already working out the astronomical problems. George, whom she loved and trusted and believed in, and who thought they should be part of this. Emilio. Who spoke of God.

"Anne, at least, shall we not try?" Emilio pleaded. He looked about seventeen years old to her, a teenager trying to convince his mom that he'd be fine driving across the country on a motorcycle. But he was not seventeen, and she was not his mother. He was a priest, pushing middle age, and he was alive with something she could hardly imagine.

"Let me propose the idea to my superiors," he said, his voice reasonable. He stood but kept her hands in his. "There are a hundred, a thousand ways the idea can prove itself impossible. I am willing to let God decide. We could call it fate, if that makes you feel more rational."

Still, she did not reply but he could see her eyes change. Not capitulation but a sort of worried, reluctant assent was forming. A willingness to suspend judgment, perhaps.

"Someone will go, sometime," he assured her. "They are too close not to go. The music is too beautiful."

There was a part of Anne Edwards that was thrilled about the discovery, that gloried in being this close to history in the making. And deeper, in a place she rarely inspected, there was a part of her that wanted to believe as Emilio seemed to believe, that God was in the universe, making sense of things.

Once, long ago, she'd allowed herself to think seriously about what human beings would do, confronted directly with a sign of God's presence in their lives. The Bible, that repository of Western wisdom, was instructive either as myth or as history, she'd decided. God was at Sinai and within weeks, people were dancing in front of a golden calf. God walked in Jerusalem and days later, folks nailed Him up and then went back to work. Faced with the Divine, people took refuge in the banal, as though answering a cosmic multiple-choice question: If you saw a burning bush, would you (a) call 911, (b) get the hot dogs, or (c) recognize God? A vanishingly small number of people would recognize God, Anne had decided years before, and most of them had simply missed a dose of Thorazine.

She took her cold hands out of Emilio's warm ones and crossed her arms over her chest. "I need coffee," she muttered and left the cubicle.

12

EARTH:

AUGUST 3–4, 2019

At 9:13 A.M., Sunday, August 3, 2019, the guard at the Arecibo Radio Telescope signed out Jimmy Quinn's visitors. Leaving his desk for a few minutes to stretch a little, the guard strolled to the front door and returned the waves of George and his passengers. Masao Yanoguchi arrived at Arecibo half an hour later. As he signed in, the guard remarked, "You must have passed George on the way up." Yanoguchi nodded pleasantly but headed directly for Jimmy Quinn's cubicle.

By 10:00, as George Edwards was pulling out of the parking lot of Sofia Mendes's apartment building in Puerto Rico, Dr. Hideo Kikuchi was called in from his early-morning golf game, just outside Barstow, California, to take a call from Masao Yanoguchi. Within forty-five minutes, the staff of the Goldstone Station was assembled and the Arecibo discovery was confirmed. Several individuals at Goldstone considered seppuku. The shift boss, who should have noticed the discovery before Jimmy, resigned immediately, and while he did not actually kill himself, his hangover the next morning was very nearly lethal.

By 10:20, that Sunday morning, Sofia Mendes had brewed a pot of Turkish coffee, closed the cheap, ugly curtains over the window of her one-room efficiency apartment to block out distractions, and sat down to code the AI system that would automate request scheduling for the Arecibo Radio Telescope. She put Dr. Sandoz's speculations out of mind. Arbeit macht frei, she thought grimly. Work could buy her freedom, sooner or later. So she worked, to make it sooner.

Emilio Sandoz, back in La Perla by 11:03, called D. W. Yarbrough in New Orleans and spoke to him for some time. Then he sprinted to the chapel-cum-community center, where he threw on the simple vestments he used and celebrated Mass for his small congregation at 11:35. The homily was on the nature of faith. Anne Edwards was absent.

At 5:53 P.M., Rome time, a video transmission from D. W. Yarbrough, New Orleans Provincial, interrupted the late-afternoon nap of Tomas da Silva, thirty-first General of the Society of Jesus. The Father General did not return to his room, nor did he appear for his evening meal. Brother Salvator Rivera cleared up the untouched dishes at nine P.M., muttering darkly about the waste of food.

The Japanese ambassador to the United States left Washington on a chartered plane at 11:45 A.M. local time and arrived in San Juan three and a half hours later. While he was in flight, news of the discovery flashed from system to system around the astronomical world. Virtually all radio astronomers dropped whatever they were doing and aimed telescopes at Alpha Centauri, although there were a few who were working on the origin of the universe and did not care greatly about planets, inhabited or otherwise.

Waiting for the world press to converge on Arecibo, an archivist for ISAS posed the Arecibo staff with various dignitaries as they assembled at the dish to grace history with their presences. Jimmy Quinn, more than a little overwhelmed by what was happening, was nevertheless able to appreciate the humor of once more finding himself standing in the exact center of the back row. The tallest kid in every class since preschool, he had a large collection of group pictures in which, in every single solitary one, he was standing in the exact center of the back row. After the pictures were taken, Jimmy asked permission to call his mother. Better late than never.

The news conference was carried live, worldwide, at 21:30 G.M.T. In Boston, Massachusetts, Mrs. Eileen Quinn, recently divorced, watched it alone. She wept and laughed and hugged herself and wished someone had told Jimmy to get his hair cut or at least to comb it. And that shirt! she thought, dismayed as always by Jimmy's taste in clothes. When the conference was over, she called everyone she knew, except Kevin Quinn, the bastard.

By 5:56 P.M., before the news conference in Arecibo had ended, two enterprising fifteen-year-old boys had broken into Jimmy Quinn's home system by way of his public web address and pirated the code needed to reproduce the music electronically. The Arecibo system was secure but it had never occurred to Jimmy, an honest man, to put a serious lock on his own. It would be weeks before he realized that his inability to imagine theft had led to the vast enrichment of an illegal offshore media company that bought the code from the kids.

It was 8:30 on Monday morning in Tokyo when the conference ended. Legitimate bids to reproduce and market the ET music began to flood in to ISAS almost immediately. The Director of the Institute for Space and Astronautical Science deferred to the Secretary General of the United Nations, pointing out that there was a long-standing agreement that any transmission received by the SETI program was the possession of all humankind.

Anne Edwards, hearing this on the radio as she and George fixed supper, was disgusted. "We paid for the damned program. We put all of the real money into it. The whole idea of SETI was American. If anybody makes any money off this, it should be the U.S., not the U.N., and certainly not Japan!"