"That's not clear. If they were attacking us, why announce that they were on their way? Why not just sneak up?"

"On the other hand," Marya said, "if their intent is benevolent, why don't they say more than 'ready or not, here we come'?" One finger.

"Well, they have three months to go. This first signal might just have been to get our attention."

"They certainly have done that. Thank you so much, Dr. Bell, for taking time here at the University of Florida to explain this interesting new development to our audience at home; this is Marya Washington reporting live from Gainesville, Florida; we now return you to your local stations." She smiled into the large camera until it clicked twice. Then she leaned back in the chair and yawned hugely.

"Caramba. I guess astronomers always discover things at unG.o.dly hours."

"Used to be. It's around the clock now."

"I suppose. Well ... thanks, Aurora-can I call you Aurora?"

"Rory."

"Thanks for your patience. I wish we'd had more time, but we're competing with some big hard news." She laughed. "As if a police station being blown up was anything compared to this."

"Oh, my. Was anyone hurt?"

"Eleven dead they know of. It was leveled."

"Funny I didn't hear the explosion."

"Oh, no, no. It was up in Detroit. It may not have been directed at the police, either. They were holding some Mafia guy who was going to sing to the grand jury on Monday ... You didn't know about any of this, did you?"

"No, I-I'm afraid I don't pay much attention to the news."

"Me neither, for a reporter. Since I specialize in science stories. My big newsmagazine is Nature."

Rory picked up a beige crystal. "Astrophysical Review Letters. All the latest gossip." She tapped it on the table, thinking. "So what about this special? What will you want me to do?"

Marya interpreted the gesture as impatience. "Oh, don't worry. No rehearsal or lines or anything. I'll just be interviewing you the way I did today, but in more depth. Bother you as little as possible."

"But I really do want to be involved. SETI is pretty far from my specialty, but I seem to be thrust into it. Besides, it was a pa.s.sion with me thirty years ago, when I was an undergraduate."

"Was that about the time they found the first source?""Five or six years before that, actually. By the time they heard from Signal Alpha, I was pretty much committed to the physics of nonthermal sources, academically-not much time for little green men."

"Who didn't materialize anyhow." Marya took a leatherbound bookfile from her purse, flipped through the pages, and pulled out a blue crystal with seti-l printed in small block letters across the top.

"You have the Leon survey book?"

"No. Heard of it." She took the crystal and slipped it into the reader on the desk. It hummed a query note, copyright, and Rory told it "general fund." It copied the crystal and ejected it. Rory looked at it.

"This has the raw data?"

"All three stars. The reductions, too."

"Well, we might want to redo them. It's been a few years, early forties?"

Marya squinted at the back of the crystal. "Twenty forty-three."

"Don't know how much has happened in eleven years." She asked the desk for the department roster, and it appeared on two screens. "You'll be talking to Leon, I guess-he's where, Cal Tech?"

"Berkeley. I called his office and left a message asking for an appointment. But who do you have doing SETI here in Gainesville?"

"No one specializing ... but Parker's pretty sharp. He does our radio astronomy courses, intro and advanced, and he's kept up on SETI. Keeps the undergrads excited." She wrote his name and number down on a slip of paper. "Excited as I was ... and will be again, looks like. Mysteries."

"It should be a good show. Network gave me two days to come up with forty-five minutes, though, so I have to move." She put the crystal back, and hesitated. "Um ... can you sort of a.s.sign me someone?

Someone less senior than Parker, some grad a.s.sistant I could call at any unG.o.dly hour for information?"

"No, I can't get you a grad a.s.sistant," she said, and studied Marya's reaction. "You're stuck with me, I'm afraid. I wouldn't let anybody else share in the fun. Parker can give us both an update, but I'm your pet astronomer for the project. Finders keepers."

The elevator bonged. "Well, hablar del diablo. Here comes Parker." A tall man, unshaven and bleary-eyed but wearing a coat and tie with his kilt, shambled down the hall toward them. He had small rimless gla.s.ses and a goatee.

Pepe Parker He leaned against the doorjamb, a little out of breath. "Rory ... what the h.e.l.l?"

"A reasonable question. Pepe Parker, this is Marya Washington."

He peered at the attractive black woman. "I know you. You're on television."

"Not at the moment," she said. "Newsnet asked me to put together a special on this message."

"And I took the liberty of volunteering you."

"Oh, muchas gracias. I had so much time on my hands."

"If you'd rather not-" Washington said.

He raised one hand. "Kidding. Look, I don't have half the story: Lisa Marie had the news on and recognized your voice; she punched 'record' and woke me up. Or tried to. I was up at the dome till past three,"

"What on earth for?"

"Don't ask. Don't get me started. Be nice if somebody besides me could make the G.o.dd.a.m.ned bolometer work. So you got some LGMs?"

Washington looked at Bell. " 'Little Green Men.' I don't know what else it could be. Open to suggestions."

"Could it be a long-delayed hack? That occurred to me on the way over. Some eighty-year-oldprobe with a practical joke encoded."

"Nice try. You haven't seen the spectrum, though. Eighty years ago there wasn't that much energy on the whole planet."

"And it's actually English?" She nodded slowly. "Holy Chihuahua. What's it doing now?"

"Carrier wave. It's a 21-cm. signal blue-shifted to 12.3 cm."

"Yeah, okay. How fast is that?"

"Call it 0.99c. Decelerating."

"Oh, yeah-Lisa Marie said you said it would just take three months? To slow down and get here?

Fifty G.o.dd.a.m.ned gees?" Rory nodded.

"What if it didn't slow down?" Washington asked. "What if it hit us going that fast?"

"Terminado," Pepe said. "If it's any size."

"Let me see." Rory turned to address the wall. "How much kinetic energy is there in an object ma.s.sing one metric tonne, going 0.99c?"

"Four-point-four-three X 1021 joules," it answered immediately. "Over a million megatons."

"Crack this planet like an egg," Pepe said. He was amused by Washington's avid expression. "I think she's got a lead for her story," he said to Rory.

"I'm not the one you have to worry about," Washington said. "By noon you're going to have stringers from every tabloid in the country down here. If I were you I'd have some secretary send them all to the Public Information Office."

"Do we have one?" Pepe asked.

"Yeah, some kid runs it," Washington said. "I talked to him, Pierce, Price, something." She took a Rolodex card out of her breast pocket and asked it, "Name and office number, Chief, University of Florida Public Information Office." It gave her "Donate Pricci, 14-308."

Rory wrote it down. "Good idea," she said. "G.o.d knows when we'll get any science done around here. You straight newspeople are going to be bad enough."

"We try," Washington said. "But wait until you meet the science editor from Dayshot. He's also the astrology columnist."

"Maybe we better put the secretary down by the elevator," Pepe said. "The front door. Maybe with a couple of fullbacks."

Washington checked her watch. "I better get down to the station. See what local talent can cover; how many people I'll have to bring in. Try to bring in."

She squeezed past Norman, coming through the door. He put the white box with the spinach pie in the cooler under the coffee machine. "Buenos, Pepe. Program looked good, hon."

Rory looked momentarily confused. "Oh, the early one. We just did another."

"I don't know about that million megatons," Pepe said. "That'll be on every front page in the world tomorrow morning."

"What million megatons?" Norman said.

Rory gestured at the wall. "I asked it how much kinetic energy the thing had."

"If it were to hit us without slowing down," Pepe said.

"Save Germany and France some trouble." He tossed the folded-up newspaper sections onto the table by the coffee machine. "Comics and world."

"From the sublime to the ridiculous," Pepe said.

The phone chimed and Rory picked it up. "Buenos ... why, Mr. Mayor. Such an honor."Mayor Southeby "Mr. Mayor, right." Cameron Southeby lived across the street from Rory and Norman; they'd been neighbors for nine years. "So what can I do to help you? What can you do to help me?" Rory told him that the situation wasn't clear yet; there might be a lot of reporters-if she could figure out some way to send them over, she would.

"Do that. We eat 'em alive." He swiveled around and looked out the gla.s.s wall over the city, two hundred feet below. "City of Trees" was becoming an embarra.s.sment. "City of High-Rise Parking Lots"

wouldn't help real-estate values, though. "Seriously ... keep me in mind, Rory. You know our university liaison, June Clearwater?" She didn't, but read him off the Public Information name that Washington had given her.

Pricci the p.r.i.c.k, Southeby thought, remembering his grandstanding over a little a.s.sembly permit. "I'll get them in touch with each other," he said. It was his day for Italians. He fingered the card that said WJC 9:30-w.i.l.l.y Joe Capra, one of his favorite people. He touched the envelope in his side pocket.

Rory told him not to get his hopes up about this having any far-reaching effect on the city. It might turn out to be a seven-day wonder; it still could be some subtly arranged hoax.

"But you said on cube that you were sure it wasn't a hoax." Southeby's vision of his town becoming the focus of the world's attention evaporated, replaced by a nightmare of worldwide derision.

Rory told him to pick up his shorts; all she meant was that just because she was sure there was no hoax didn't mean there couldn't be someone smarter than her behind it, second-guessing her suspicions.

The straightforward explanation was still the most probable, but ...

"Oh ... okay. Well, you must have a million things to do. I'll let you go. Mariana."

Norman Bell Norman watched his wife's expressions with amus.e.m.e.nt as she finally extricated herself from their blowhard neighbor. "He's trying to find a money angle?"

"Good old Cam."

"I'm going through the market on the way home. What you want for dinner?"

"Whatever. Something I can reheat. No telling how late I'll be."

"Keep it in mind." He picked up his helmet.

"Don't forget your sunblock."

"You kidding?" Actually, he had forgotten, but he kept a tube in his bike bag. "Give me a call when you start home. I'll hot it up."

"You do that." Her husband spoke in accents of cool New England, but he used southern expressions he'd picked up from her cornball uncle, whom she loathed.

It was a ten-minute pedal down shady back roads to the Farmers' Market in the middle of town.

Halfway there, he started sweating in spite of the shade, and stopped to put on the sunblock.

They'd been doing this for about ten years, using the s.p.a.ce between the federal building and City Hall as an open-air market two days a week. It was a "free" s.p.a.ce, as Norman knew, with a catch: you had to put down a five-hundred-dollar deposit, which would be refunded at closing time, or more likely a week later. That kept marginal farmers at home.

He locked his bike and walked past the seafood display, expensive fish, shrimp, squid, and eels attractive on beds of shaved ice. Save it for last. The place was pretty crowded, as he knew it would be at this hour, city workers killing time before going to the office at nine. The crowd was bright and young and chatty-lots of new students, this time of year. He liked to drift through, eavesdropping.

He had two cloth bags, and as he wandered from one end of the market to the other-from fish to coffees-he checked out prices and planned what he was going to buy where, on his way back. Rorythought the market business was a silly affectation, the city manufacturing nostalgia for a simpler time that had never existed in the first place, and although Norman couldn't disagree, it was still a high point of his week. Prices were cheaper in the supermarket, but the produce was suspiciously uniform there, and the crowds were just crowds.

"Dr. Bell!" Lots of warm brown skin and a little tight white cloth: Luanne somebody, a student from three or four years ago.

"I saw the news this morning-isn't that just ... total?"

"It's something," Norman admitted. "So where have you been? Haven't seen you around."

"Oh, I went to Texas for a master course, keyboard. No work there, surprise. So what do you make of it?"

"I don't know any more than you do; just what was on cube. Aurora does think it's real." He studied her. She was radiating s.e.xual signals, but they communicated display rather than availability, just as he remembered from before. He wondered how much of it was deliberate, like the carefully bedraggled hair and the makeup so subtle it was almost invisible, and how much was just in her nature. She liked being looked at; glowed in his attention. Any man's attention.

"When I left a few minutes ago, she was talking to the mayor. Fishing for an angle to bring fame and fortune to Gainesville. Or to Cameron Southeby."