But the signal Darren had detected was optical. Anyone with a decent backyard telescope had been able to pick it out, once he’d made known the celestial coordinates. And in all the places on Earth from which Groombridge 1618 could be seen at night, people were doing just that. Sales of telescopes were at an all-time high, exceeding even the boom during Halley’s last visit. Darren Hamasaki became a media celebrity, interviewed by TV programs from around the world. Of course, all the usual SETI pundits—Seth Shostak and Paul Shuch in the U.S., Robert Garrison in Canada, and Jun Jugaku in Japan—were also constantly being asked for comment. But when the mayor of Las Vegas decided to do something about the alien signal, it was indeed Darren that he called.
Darren had taken to letting his answering machine screen his calls; the phone rang incessantly now. He was leaning back in a leather chair, fingers interlaced behind his head, listening absently to the words coming from the machine’s tinny speaker: “Shoot, I’d hoped to catch you in. Mr. Hamasaki, my name is Rodney Rivers, and I’m the mayor of Las Vegas, Nevada. I’ve got an idea that—”
Intrigued, Darren picked up the phone’s handset. “Hello?”
“Mr. Hamasaki, is that you?”
“Speaking.”
“Well, looks like I hit the jackpot. Mr. Hamasaki, I’m the mayor of Las Vegas, and I’d like to have you come down here and join us for a little project we got in mind.”
“What’s that?”
“You ever been to Vegas, son?”
“No.”
“Seen pictures?”
“Of course.”
“We’re one brightly lit city at night, Mr. Hamasaki. So bright, the shuttle astronauts say they can easily see us from orbit. And, well, this is our off-season, you know—the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Don’t get enough tourist traffic, and it’s the tourists that drive our economy, sure enough. So me and some of the boys here, we had an idea.”
“Yes?”
“We’re goin’ to flash the lights of Las Vegas—every dang light in the blessed city—on and off in unison. Send a reply to them there aliens you found.”
Darren was momentarily stunned. “Really? Is that—I mean, can you do that? Are you allowed to?”
“This is the U.S. of A, son—freedom of speech and all that. Of course we’re allowed to.”
“What are you going to say?”
“That’s why I’m callin’ you, Mr. Hamasaki. We want you to help us work out what the reply should be. Any chance I could entice you down here with a free trip to Vegas? We’ll put you up at—”
“At the Hilton. Isn’t that the one with Star Trek: The Experience?”
The mayor laughed. “If that’s what you’d like. How soon could you get down here?”
Mayor Rivers was certainly savvy. Over one hundred thousand extra tourists came to Las Vegas to be part of the great signaling event; it was the best early-December business the city had ever had.
Darren Hamasaki’s first inclination had been to send a simple message in response. The aliens—whoever they might be—had signaled one flash, four flashes, nine flashes, and sixteen flashes, over and over again; those were the squares of one, two, three, and four. Darren thought the logical reply might be the cubes of the first four integers: one, eight, twenty-seven, and sixty-four. Not only would it make clear that the people of Earth understood the original message—which simply parroting it back wouldn’t necessarily have conveyed—but it would also indicate that they were ready for something more complex.
But Las Vegas was a city of spectacles; being that prosaic wouldn’t do. Darren spent a week devising a more content-rich message, using the form Frank Drake had worked out for Earth’s first attempt at communicating with aliens, back in 1974: an image made of a string of on/off bits, the length of the string being the product of two prime numbers—in this case 59 and 29.
Arranging the bits as a grid of 59 rows each 29 columns wide produced a crude picture. Darren coded in a simple diagram of a human being, and, because ever since he’d read Lilly in college, he’d believed dolphins were intelligent, a simple diagram of a bottle-nosed dolphin, too. He then put binary numbers underneath, expressing the total populations of the two species, and a crude diagram of the western hemisphere of the Earth, showing that the humans lived on the land and the dolphins in the ocean.
Media from all over the world came to cover the event. Mayor Rivers and Darren were invited to the master control room of the Clark County Power Authority. The entire power grid could be controlled from a single computer there. And, at precisely 10:00 p.m., the mayor pushed the key to start the program running. It began—and would end—with one solid minute of darkness, then a solid minute of light, and then another of darkness, to frame the message. Then the glowing marquee at Caesars Palace winked at the night sky, the floodlights at Luxor strobed against the blackness, the neon tubes at the MGM Grand flickered off and on. All along the Las Vegas strip, and in all the surrounding streets, the lights blinked the 1,711 bits of Darren’s reply.
Out front of Bally’s, surrounded by a huge crowd, a giant grid of lights—specially powered by gas generators—filled in with the pixels of the message, one after the other, line by line, from upper left to lower right, painting it as it was transmitted. The crowd cheered when the human figure was finished, thousands of people raising their right arms in the same salute of greeting portrayed in the message.
After the message had been completed, the mayor took to the podium and addressed the assembled mass, thanking them for their orderly conduct. Then His Honor invited Darren to say a few words.
Darren felt the need to put it all in perspective. “Of course, Groombridge 1618 is almost sixteen light-years from Earth,” he said into the mike, his voice reverberating off the canyon of hotels surrounding him. “That means it will take sixteen years for our signal to reach the aliens there, and another sixteen before any reply they might send could be received.” This being Las Vegas, there were already betting pools about what date the aliens might reply on, and what the content of their next message might be.
Darren refrained from remarking about how exceedingly unlikely it would be that the aliens would be able to detect one blinking city against the glare of Earth’s sun behind it; if humanity ever really wanted to seriously respond, it would likely need to build a massive laser to do so.
“Still,” said Darren, summing up, “we’ve had a lot of fun tonight, and we’ve certainly made history: humanity’s first response to an alien signal. Let’s hope that if a reply does come, thirty-odd years from now, we’ll have made new friends.”
The head of the power authority had the final words for the evening; the crowd was already dispersing by this point—heading back to the casinos, or the hotels, or the late Lance Burton show during which his assistants were topless, or any of the hundreds of other diversions Las Vegas offered at night.
Darren felt a twinge of sadness. He’d enjoyed his fifteen minutes of fame—but now, of course, the story would slip from public consciousness, and he’d go back to his quiet life in rural Ontario.
Or so he’d thought.
Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed had spent the entire night in Fist-Held-Sideways’s quarters but had left by the time ship’s morning had rolled around. He was one of ten males aboard the Ineluctable, and she, one of ten females. As on the homeworld, though, females were loners, while males—who in ancient times had watched over the clutches of six eggs laid then abandoned by each female—lived communally. The Ineluctable’s habitat was shaped like a giant wheel, with ten spokes, each one leading to a different female’s lair; the males lived together in the hub.