Rick Parnell opened his mouth, closed it, then started again. "If an alien spaceship came into the solar system, believe me, you'd know about it. Something like that would be a bigger event than the Second Coming."

Victor gazed thoughtfully at the hologram of the big dish. This was the second time he'd been told the arrival of aliens would be momentous. The prospect was beginning to worry him badly. "In what way?"

"Spectacular. OK, look. There's two ways of travelling between the stars. In a small ship going very fast, say about thirty or fifty per cent lightspeed. Or a big multi-generation ship, something the size of New London, travelling at one or two per cent lightspeed. Either way, it takes a colossal amount of energy to move them. If anything like that started decelerating into the solar system, the plasma from the reaction drive would scream like a nova across the radio bands. We'd spot it half a light-year out. It would stop radio astronomy stone dead across half of the sky."

"What if they didn't use a reaction drive? What if they have some faster than light drive like the science fiction shows on the channels?"

"Christ, you're really serious, aren't you?"

"Yes."

Rick Panel put his elbows on the desk, and rested his chin on his clasped hands. "Nick Beswick is the one you really should be asking about this, because it all fits in with quantum theory, but… FTL means producing wormholes through space-time large enough for a ship to pass through. Now wormholes are theoretically possible, but we haven't got a clue how to open one."

"An advanced technology might be able to achieve it."

"Granted, an extremely fanciful technology could stress space to a degree that tears it open. However, even if you have that level of technology you still couldn't enter the solar system without being detected. If the terminus of a wormhole on this scale erupted near Earth, its gravitational distortion would be of epic proportions. To my knowledge there are three hundred and twenty functional gravity-wave detectors on this planet, fifteen of which are in orbit; astrophysicists use them to check out general relativity. They would have spotted it."

"What about an FTL system that used something other than wormholes?"

Rick Parnell frowned sadly. "You know, my problem is usually convincing people that aliens do exist. Now you come in, and I have to persuade you what you're saying doesn't make any sense. This universe is no different for aliens than it is to us, it obeys the same physical parameters ten million light-years away as it does right in this office. That includes relativity."

"I was just trying to establish if there's a third method of aliens arriving in the solar system."

"If there is, we can't conceive it. Which would make them roughly the equivalent of angels."

"Fair enough. So just go back to my original question, we don't know the method they used to get here, and we didn't see them arrive. How do we locate them now?"

"These hypothetical aliens, are they on Earth?"

"No. We don't believe they could get past the strategic defence sensors."

"Good point. But you're giving me a tall order here, you know? The solar system is a big place, and that's just staying in the plane of the ecliptic. They could easily be in a high inclination orbit. If you take Pluto's orbital radius as the boundary, and extend your search to cover a spherical volume, that's a quarter of a million cubic AUs to sift through. An electromagnetic sweep is the only practical method, assuming they're emitting in that spectrum. There's a good chance of picking up random noise leakage from their on-board systems, certainly with the power levels a starship will need to employ."

"Do you have that sort of equipment?"

Rick Parnell gave a low laugh. "We've got six ten-million-channel receivers operating at the moment, although we only own them in partnership with various national science councils and space agencies. But they're all assigned to specific sections of the sky. It's the old nightmare, you listen to your section for eighteen months of deathly silence, then the day you move on to the next, there's a genesis pulse."

"What's a genesis pulse?"

"Special message, a shout that says "Here we are!" to the universe at large. You use a dish like the Arecibo to beam a strong signal at a star cluster with a high quota of Sol-like stars. Put in plenty of data about local life and culture, star co-ordinates—you do that by triangulating with known quasars. We send out a couple every year. Give it a millennium, we might even get an answer."

"So there's no way you can run a search for me, then?"

Rick Panel swivelled his chair, and tapped the hologram of the giant dish. "This is Steropes, we've spent twenty per cent of our budget and three years refining the design. You persuade our lovely lady boss to part with two billion pounds New Sterling and in five years I'll have it up and running for you. If you've lost a hydrogen atom inside the solar system, this beauty will be able to find it for you."

Victor held back on the urge to shout. "I meant, starting today."

"God, no. No way, sorry."

"Shit."

Rick Parnell clenched his hands tight, as if he was praying. "OK, I've been straight with you. Now, what have you got? What made you come in here and ask me this?"

"We are in possession of certain evidence which suggests that first contact has already been initiated."

Rick Parnell's lips moved around the words, repeating them silently. "Oh, God. What evidence?" he croaked.

"An artefact."

"What fucking artefact?"

"A biological one."

Rick Parnell lent right over the desk, fired by excitement and trepidation. "High order?"

"Pardon me?"

"I mean, more advanced than the microbes?" His hands spun for emphasis, urging Victor on like a football coach.

Victor felt a real tingle of alarm. Greg had once explained to him how his intuition manifested itself, a cold that wasn't physical. This was something similar. "Slow down. Which microbes are we talking about?"

Rick Parnell let out a groan and flopped back into his chair. "After the turn of the century the Japanese NASDA agency sent an unmanned probe called Matoyaii out to Jupiter. It was designed to measure the near-Jupiter environment, from the ionosphere out to it's plasma torus. That's a pretty active area, saturated with radiation, the planetary radio emissions; and then there's the magnetosphere, the flux-tube, small moons, the ring bands. Fascinating to see how they all interact. Thing was, when mission control manoeuvred the Matoyaii in close to a ring particle the on-board spectroscope started to register some pretty odd hydrocarbon patterns. Nothing conclusive, nothing final, you understand. Intensive analysis wasn't possible, the sensors weren't designed for microscopic examination. And the hydrocarbon deposits were minute. Specks really, like dust motes. If they were microbes, they could've been captured by the gravity field, and settled on the ring particles."

"They were alive?" Victor asked.

"More than likely. The theory's been around since the middle of the twentieth century. High-order organic forms couldn't survive interstellar transit, they couldn't contain enough energy, not for the time-scales and distances involved. But something like a microbe or a germ, they might just make it. Go into a kind of suspended animation between stars, they're small enough to withstand freezing. The microbes were even put forward as an hypothesis for flu epidemics, literally a plague from space."

"So there is life on other planets," Victor said, half to himself.

"Now you question it!" Rick Parnell exclaimed in exasperation.

"What we found might have been a joke, an elaborate bioware construct. But not any more, not with you telling me this."