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a table behind Jimmy’s terminal, took her hands and went down on one knee, not in an attitude of prayer but with an odd playfulness. "But, Anne! This is an extraordinary moment, is it not? Entertain, for this extraordinary moment, the notion that we are all here in this room, at this moment, for some reason. No, let me finish! George is wrong. Life on Earth is unlikely," he insisted. "Our own existence, as a species and as individuals, is improbable. The fact that we know one another appears to be a result of chance. And yet, here we are. And now we have evidence that another sentient species exists nearby and that they sing. They sing, Anne." She felt his hands squeeze hers. "We have to find out about them. There is simply no alternative. We have to know them. You said it yourself, Anne! Think of the theology."

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,