He expected surprise and anger. He saw resignation. It suddenly came to him that George might leave Anne and that she might be willing to let him go. The possibility made him go cold. Beyond their broad and useful professional qualifications, Anne and George Edwards were possessed of a fair degree of wisdom and a joint total of more than 120 years of alert experience of the world, combined with physical toughness and emotional stability. It had never occurred to him that one of them might stay behind.

Since proposing the mission, Emilio had been taken aback by the pace of things. What had begun in laughter, almost as a joke, was snowballing, changing lives. Already, time and money were being spent in quantities that staggered him. And if the speed of events scared him, the precision with which the pieces were falling into place was even more unnerving. He went sleepless, unable to decide which was harder to live with: the idea that he had started all this, or the possibility that God had. The only way he could reassure himself during these midnight debates was to believe that wiser heads than his were making the decisions. If he could not put his faith directly in God, who remained unknowable, he could place it in the structure of the Society and in his superiors—in D. W. Yarbrough and in Father General da Silva.

Now he felt himself rocked again by doubt. What if the whole thing was a mistake and it cost the Edwardses' marriage? And as quickly as that passed his mind, he caught another glimpse of the serenity that sometimes came to him lately. Anne and George, he felt sure, were meant to be a part of the mission, if the mission was meant to be. And when he spoke again, Anne heard only calm and reason.

"The Society would never permit a suicide mission, Anne. If the voyage could not be undertaken now with a reasonable chance of success, we would simply wait until it seems sensible to make the attempt. Already, the plans call for provisions sufficient for ten years, just in case the subjective travel time does not contract as much as the physicists predict. The specifications call for an asteroid more than sufficiently large to provide fuel for a return trip, plus a one hundred percent safety margin," he told her. "Who knows? The atmosphere may be unbreathable or it may be impossible to land. In such cases, we would gather as much information as possible and return home."

"Who's we? Is it definite now? Are you going?"

"There has been no decision about the crew as yet. But the Father General is, in fact, a religious man," Emilio said ironically, "who seems to believe that God is involved with this discovery." He saw that set her off again and laughed. "In any case, it would be logical to assign someone like me to the mission. If it is possible to make contact with the Singers, a linguist will presumably be useful." He wanted to tell her how much it meant to him to think that she would be part of this, but Emilio suspected he'd taken the subject as far as he could. He pushed his chair from the table and stood, picking up their plates and taking them to the kitchen. Out of sight, he called to her, "Anne. May I ask a favor?"

"What?" she asked suspiciously.

"I have an old friend coming in to visit. May I offer him your hospitality?"

"Dammit, Emilio! Aren't there any restaurants in Puerto Rico? Between you and George, I end up feeding every stray cat on this island."

He came out of the kitchen and leaned against the doorjamb, arms across his chest, grinning, not fooled for a moment.

"All right, who's coming?" she demanded ungraciously, refusing to be charmed.

"Dalton Wesley Yarbrough, New Orleans Provincial of the Society of Jesus, from Waco, Texas, Vatican City of the Southern Baptists," he announced with ceremony, standing at attention, a butler introducing the next guest to enter a ballroom.

She put her head in her hands, defeated. "Barbecue. Hush puppies. Collard greens, red beans and watermelon. With Carta Blanca. I can't seem to help myself," she said in tones of wonderment. "I have this compulsion to cook for strangers."

"Well, ma'am," said Emilio Sandoz with a Texas twang, "they don't come a whole hell of a lot stranger'n D. W. Yarbrough."

She laughed, reached behind her to the bookcase, and pitched a hardcover novel at him. He caught it with one hand and flipped it back at her. They spoke no more about the mission, but a truce had been reached.

"Dr. Quinn, Elaine Stefansky says the ET transmission is a hoax. Do you have a comment on that?"

Jimmy was no longer startled to find reporters waiting outside his apartment at eight in the morning and no longer amused that they routinely promoted him to doctor. He pushed past the crowd and made his way to the Ford, Murmuring "No comment," Jimmy got into the car, the crowd closing around the vehicle, shouting questions, aiming AV pickups at him. Jimmy let the window down. "Look, I don't want to run over anybody's foot here. Could you back off a little? I have to get to work."

"Why haven't there been any other transmissions?" someone called out.

"Is it that they're not sending or we're not listening?" asked another.

"Oh, we're listening," Jimmy assured them. With the entire scientific community and a goodly portion of the world's population looking over his shoulder, Jimmy Quinn had coordinated a concentrated effort by radio astronomers to listen for additional transmissions. There weren't any. "We're even sending, but it will take nearly nine years, minimum, before we find out if they notice us yelling and waving our arms," he said, starting to raise the window. "Listen, I gotta go. Really."

"Dr. Quinn, have you heard the Mongolian Humi singers? Stefansky says their music may have been altered and planted in the SETI file. Is that true?" "What about the Sufis, Dr. Quinn?"

Skeptics had begun to flood the nets with alternate explanations for the music, experimenting with obscure folk traditions, running the music backward or playing with the frequency, to show how alien human music could sound, especially when modified electronically.

"Well, sure, all that stuff sounds strange." Jimmy still found it hard to be rude enough to drive away abruptly, but he was learning. "But none of it sounds like what we picked up. And I'm not a doctor, okay?" Apologizing, he eased the car out of the crowd and drove to the Arecibo dish, where another mob was waiting.

The media eventually went on to other things. Radio telescopes around the world returned one by one to projects that had been under way before August 3rd. But in Rome, coded transmissions continued to move along the clear-cut Jesuit chain of command, from Father General to Provincial to Rector to individual priest given an assignment. There were practical decisions to be made, many scientific teams to organize.

Tomas da Silva, thirty-first General of the Society of Jesus, remained convinced of the authenticity of the signal. The theological rationale for this mission had been worked out decades before there was any evidence of other sentient species in the universe: mere considerations of scale suggested that human beings were not the sole purpose of creation. So. Now there was proof. God had other children. And when it was time for Tomas da Silva to make a decision about acting on this knowledge, he quoted the bald and artless words of Emilio Sandoz, to whom he had spoken on the evening of the discovery. "There is simply no alternative. We have to know them."

His private secretary, Peter Lynam, questioned this on August 30, 2019, but Father General da Silva smiled and dismissed the troubling slenderness of the reed that supported all their deliberate and complex plans to contact the Singers. "Have you noticed, Peter, that all the music that sounds most similar to the extraterrestrial music is sacred in nature?" the Father General asked. He was a man of great spirituality and almost no business sense. "Sufic, Tantric, Humi. I find that very intriguing."