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“Not any more. This is your number one priority now, Dr. Soter.”

To his complete surprise, Soter was not the least bit bothered by the prospect.

43

November 28, 1977
8:05 a.m. (local time)

“We have made contact!” Jerry Zavada shouted, waving a newspaper as he swept into the room where Soter had set up his office.

Soter felt his pulse quicken. He had resigned himself to the failure of this latest attempt to interpret the Wow! Signal, but now it seemed that Zavada, the computer engineer, had discovered some new insight.

In the newspaper? That didn’t make any sense.

“Here!” Zavada laid the tabloid on the desk and tapped a headline. It read: “Message From the Stars.”

Soter had seem similar headlines when news of the Wow! Signal had gotten out, but this seemed to be referring to something that had happened just two days earlier. He began reading aloud.

“Residents of Southampton received a shock Saturday evening when their local news broadcast was interrupted by a mysterious transmission, purporting to be a message from an intergalactic visitor. Over the next few minutes, viewers heard the ‘voice of Asteron’—” He stopped abruptly.

“The voice of Asteron? Seriously, Jerry?”

Zavada chuckled. “Just trying to lighten the mood.”

Soter threw the paper down in disgust. The tabloid lay atop the thick printout he had been reviewing. The story of a hoaxster hijacking a television broadcast to spout hippie propaganda, and the data from their survey had one thing in common: neither contained an actual message from an extraterrestrial intelligence.

He had known, from the moment he had accepted this crazy assignment, it would probably amount to nothing. The odds against the Wow! Signal actually being a transmission from an alien life form were…well, astronomical. And the likelihood that there was an actual message contained in the data was an order of magnitude less probable. Yet, as he and the team had worked the angles, the emerging patterns had made a believer out of him. It really did seem as if someone had placed an intergalactic, long-distance call to the planet Earth. He was sure of it, just as he was sure that the Wow! Signal also contained the key to answering that call.

He still recalled the day he had met the small team of geniuses and experts, all of whom were, like him, more interested in solving the mystery of the signal than actually proving the existence of extraterrestrial life. “We are working under the assumption that whomever sent this message knows what our capabilities are. So what are the data telling us?”

The working hypothesis that emerged from that meeting was that the message was two-fold. The number values—6, 14, 26, 30, 19, 5—were determined to be celestial coordinates: 6 hours 14 minutes 26 seconds, with a declination 30 degrees 19 minutes 5seconds, which corresponded to a point in space somewhere between the constellations of Gemini and Auriga. The fact that the sum of the values was exactly one hundred might mean that a second signal would be transmitted one hundred days from the first. To test this theory, they would train a radio telescope on that region of the sky on or about November 23, and wait.

There were many problems with the hypothesis, not the least of which was that fact that the original signal had come from the opposite side of the sky. The team’s astronomer, Bill Earl, had offered a plausible explanation. “What if we’re mistaken in assuming that the Wow! Signal originated in the Chi Sagittarii group? What if it originated from a source much closer, but along that same vector? Say, from a spacecraft? It would be a simple thing for that spacecraft to move to another location in the sky for a second broadcast.”

Not everyone in the team supported the hypothesis. Xenobiologist Chris Anstead expounded the belief that the six values might represent the atomic numbers of elements — carbon, silicon, iron, zinc, potassium and boron — which perhaps might form the basis of the extraterrestrial organic molecule. Zavada, the computer expert, found the Hundred Day concept too simplistic and too convenient. “You asked us to find the message hidden in the signal,” he had complained. “This isn’t a hidden message. You’re trying to shoe-horn it to fit your pet theory. Just like those people who try to calculate the end of the world from Bible prophecies.”

It was a fair criticism, but as Soter had pointed out, it would be easier to test the hypothesis and eliminate it, than to dismiss it out of hand, and then wonder after the hundred day limit had expired whether they had missed an important opportunity.

Zavada, it seemed, had been proven right.

They had traveled to the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, aimed the enormous radio telescope receiver at the target coordinates, and started listening. Unlike the Big Ear telescope, which had received the Wow! Signal only because it happened to be pointing the right direction for exactly seventy-two seconds, the Arecibo array could be set to track a specific location for as long as it was in the sky — several hours at a time. Earl had arranged to begin the survey on the night of November 22 and to continue gathering data until the early morning hours of November 24.

The vigil had yielded nothing remarkable. They had reams of data, but no radiation spike like the Wow! Signal. Instead, there were pages and pages that looked like part of the Wow! printout outside the circle — lots of blank space and a scattering of ones.

Zavada settled into a chair on the other side of the desk, appraising Soter for several silent seconds. “Did you know that Thomas Edison tested thousands of different materials for the filaments to make a light bulb? When asked about his failures, he said: ‘I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.’”

“In other words, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

“Not exactly. You don’t keep trying the same thing over and over again.”

“We won’t be trying this again. We’ve already tied up the observatory too long. They’re about to call the cops on us.” That wasn’t quite true. Soter’s mysterious benefactors at ONE would have authorized him to use the Arecibo Observatory as long as he deemed necessary, and the astronomers lined up to do work of their own would have had no recourse. But Soter couldn’t justify staying on site any longer, not without something more concrete to go on. “I’m afraid it’s back to the drawing board.”

Zavada shrugged. “Hey, have you heard about this movie that’s out now? Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

Soter shook his head. He didn’t have time for movies.

“Might be worth taking a look at. It’s about aliens visiting Earth. They communicate with this weird musical signal.” Zavada did his best to mimic the theme.

“Music?” Soter sat up. That was an angle they had not explored. Could it be that the six values represented musical notes?

“If I were going to send a message, though,” Zavada continued, as if Soter’s apparent interest was an invitation, “I would use computer language. Just like we did with the Arecibo Message.”

The Arecibo Message was the reverse of the Wow! Signal. It was a blast of information sent from Earth in 1974—from the very facility where Soter’s team now probed the heavens — into deep space. The message, which had lasted just three minutes, was designed to establish a communication baseline — the numbers one through ten, the atomic number of several elements, the basic nucleotide structure of DNA, and so forth — all rendered into binary code, broadcast at 2,380 MHz — much stronger than the Wow! Signal — and modulated at 10 Hz.

Some people had speculated that the Wow! Signal might be an answer to the Arecibo Message, but this was extremely unlikely. The Arecibo Message had been sent to a different part of space, and had gone out only three years earlier, not nearly enough time to be received by a civilization around a distant star, and answered.