Sometimes it was better to just stop counting, he thought — especially when it’s a counting down instead of a counting up. They’d both made it to eighty-seven, and to sixty years together. But they surely wouldn’t be around for a seventieth anniversary; that just wasn’t in the cards. In fact…

In fact, he was surprised they’d lived this long, but maybe they’d been holding on, striving to reach the diamond milestone.

All his life, he’d read about people who died just days after their eightieth, ninetieth, or hundredth birthdays. They’d clung to life, literally by the force of their wills, until the big day had been reached, and then they’d just let go.

Don had turned eighty-seven three months ago, and Sarah had done so five months before that. That hadn’t been what they’d been holding on for. But a sixtieth wedding anniversary! How rare that was!

He would have liked to put his arm around Sarah’s shoulders as they sat side by side on the couch, but it pained him to rotate his own shoulder that much, and—

And then it hit him. Maybe she hadn’t been hanging on for their anniversary. Maybe what had really kept her going all this time was waiting to see what reply the Dracons would send. He wished contact had been made with a star thirty or forty light-years away, instead of just nineteen. He wanted her to keep holding on. He didn’t know what he’d do if she let go, and—

And he’d read that news story, too, dozens of times over the years: the husband who dies only days after his wife; the wife who finally seems to give up and let go shortly after hubby passes away.

Don knew a day like today called for some comment, but when he opened his mouth, what came out were just two words, that, he guessed, summarized it all:

"Sixty years."

She nodded. "A long time."

He was quiet for a while, then: "Thank you."

She turned her head to look at him. "For what?"

"For—" He lifted his eyebrows and raised his shoulders a bit as he sought an answer. And then, finally, he said, very softly, "Everything."

Next to them, on the little table beside the couch, the counter on the answering machine tallied up another call. "I wonder what the aliens’ reply says," Don said. "I hope it’s not just one of those damn autoresponders. ‘I’m sorry, but I’ll be away from the planet for the next million years.’ " Sarah laughed, and Don went on. " ‘If you need immediate assistance, please contact my assistant Zagdorf at…’ "

"You are a supremely silly man," she said, patting the back of his hand.

Though they only had voice phones, Sarah and Don did have a modern answering machine. "Forty-eight calls were received since you last reviewed your messages," the device’s smooth male voice said the next morning as they sat at the dining-room table. "Of those, thirty-nine left messages. All thirty-nine were for Sarah. Thirty-one were from the media. Rather than presenting them in order of receipt, I suggest you let me prioritize them for you, sorting by audience size. Starting with the TV networks, CNN—"

"What about the calls that weren’t from the media?" Sarah asked.

"The first was from your hairdresser. The second is from the SETI Institute. The third is from the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. The fourth—"

"Play the one from U of T."

A squeaky female voice came on. "Good morning, Professor Halifax. This is Lenore again — you know, Lenore Darby. Sorry to be phoning so early, but I thought someone should give you a call. Everyone’s been working on interpreting the message as it comes in — here, over in Mountain View, at the Allen, everywhere — and, well, you’re not going to believe this, Professor Halifax, but we think the message is" — the voice lowered a bit, as if its owner was embarrassed to go on — "encrypted. Not just encoded for transmission, but actually encrypted — you know, scrambled so that it can’t be read without a decryption key."

Sarah looked at Don, her face astonished. Lenore went on. "I know sending us an encrypted message doesn’t make any sense, but that seems to be what the Dracons have done. The beginning of the message is all math stuff, laid out in that symbol set they used before, and the computer gunks say the math describes a decryption algorithm. And then the rest of the message is total gibberish, presumably because it has indeed been encrypted. Get it? They’ve told us how the message is encrypted, and given us the algorithm to unlock it, but they haven’t given us the decryption key to feed into that algorithm to do the actual unlocking. It’s the craziest thing, and—"

"Pause," said Sarah. "How long does she go on?"

"Another two minutes, sixteen seconds," said the machine, and then it added, "She’s quite chatty."

Sarah shook her head and looked at Don. "Encrypted!" she declared. "That doesn’t make any sense. Why in God’s name would aliens send us a message we can’t read?"

Sarah fondly remembered Seinfeld, although, sadly, it hadn’t aged well. Still, one of Jerry’s bits of stand-up seemed as true today as it had been half a century ago. When it came to TV, most men were hunters, switching from channel to channel, always on the prowl for something better, while women were nesters, content to settle in with a single program. But today, Sarah found herself scanning constantly; the puzzle of the encrypted message from Sigma Draconis was all over the TV and the web. She caught coverage of oddsmakers paying off winners who’d correctly guessed the day on which a reply would be received, fundamentalists decrying the new signal as a temptation from Satan, and crackpots claiming to have already decrypted the secret transmission.

Of course, she was delighted that there had been a reply, but as she continued to flip channels on the giant monitor above the mantel, she reflected that she was also disappointed that in all the years since they’d detected the first message, no other alien radio source had been found. As Sarah had once said in an interview very much like the ones she was looking at today, it was certainly true that we weren’t alone — but we were still pretty lonely.

Her surfing was interrupted each time someone came up to the front door and rang the bell; an image of whoever it was automatically appeared on the monitor. Mostly it seemed to be reporters; there were still a few journalists who did more than send email, make phone calls, and surf the web.

Those neighbors who had lived here on Betty Ann Drive four decades ago knew Sarah’s claim to fame, but most of the houses had changed hands several times since then. She wondered what her newer neighbors made of the succession of news vans that had pulled into her driveway. Ah, well; at least it wasn’t something to be embarrassed about, like the cop cars that kept showing up at the Kuchma place across the road, and, so far, Sarah had simply ignored all the people who had rung her doorbell, but—

My God.

But she couldn’t ignore this.

The face that had suddenly appeared on the monitor was not human.

"Don!" she called, her voice dry. "Don, come here!"

He had gone into the kitchen to make coffee — decaf, of course; it was all Dr. Bonhoff would let either of them have these days. He shuffled into the living room, wearing a teal cardigan over an untucked red shirt. "What?"

She gestured at the monitor. "My… goodness," he said softly. "How’d it get here?"

She pointed at the screen. Partially visible behind the strange head was their driveway, which Carl had shoveled before leaving yesterday. An expensive-looking green car was sitting on it. "In that, I guess."

The doorbell rang once more. She doubted the being pushing the button was actually getting impatient. Rather, she suspected, some dispassionate timer told it to try again.