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think it implies?"
    "Shhhhh!"
    Raoul Lamont stared at his Communications Chief for nearly a minute in silence. "Jerry . . . we're still more than two hundred light-years from Earth.
    What are the chances we could be picking up old radio waves that originated there? Television, for example?"
    "Slim. The frequencies don't fit. And that sure didn't sound like any human language or code I ever heard. I'll have the computer search its auxiliary files to make sure." Greendeer's broad, OldNorthAm Native features were still impassive, but his voice betrayed an undercurrent of excitement.
    "Any other possible sources? Natural ones?"
    "Maybe ... if we've stumbled across something totally unknown."
    "Couldn't it be a pulsar?"
    Jerry shrugged. "Pulsars--neutron stars--are the strongest radio signals we should be receiving out here--but they all have well-documented frequencies. They're so regular that people used to speculate about setting clocks by them. And they've got a broad distribution of frequencies." He pushed his hair behind his ears. "This thing here falls roughly into the 200 to 400 megahertz range. That's narrow. Then it drops off abruptly on either side. Pulsars and quasars don't do that."
    "So what are you saying? What do you think it is?"
    The Communications Officer drummed his fingers thoughtfully. "I'm guessing we'll discover that this signal didn't originate on Earth, that it's not from one of our ships, and that it didn't come from any known natural source."
    Greendeer paused, running his fingers through his long hair again, then fished a scrap of cloth out of his jumpsuit pocket and tied it back. Mahree saw that Jerry's hands trembled, belying his studied calmness.
    "And?" Raoul prompted.
    "And, since we're sixteen parsecs from nowhere, that leaves 19
    only two other possibilities. One, that it's some kind of previously unknown stellar phenomenon--which I doubt, because nothing natural has such a narrow frequency--or, two, that it was generated by an artificial, nonhuman transmitter."
    For the first time Paul Monteleon, Desiree's Chief Engineer, spoke. "Jerry ...
    you do know what you're saying, don't you?" His soft, tentative voice was in keeping with his gangly, spare body, his graying brown beard and wispy hair. "We've never discovered any evidence of sentient life-forms other than ourselves out here."
    The communications tech shrugged. "There's a first time for everything, Paul. I'll want to check it out further, of course, but I think we may have hit the jackpot this time."
    Silence enclosed the control cabin like a giant, invisible fist. Nobody moved.
    Mahree's heart was pounding so hard that she could hear the blood throbbing in her ears. A strange mixture of fear and joy filled her, and she realized she was shaking, too.
    Rob put a steadying hand on her shoulder. She glanced up, seeing that he was flushed with exhilaration. "I can't believe we're this lucky--talk about challenges--this is great!"
    "An alien transmission," Mahree whispered, putting the idea into words, trying it on for size. Her mouth was dry and her lips felt stiff. "Oh, my God."
    20

CHAPTER 2
The Phantom Frequency
    Dear Diary:
    I'm so excited! Jerry and Joan have searched every auxiliary file on board, and the -strange signal we received still hasn't matched up! Whatever it is, it is not from Earth.
    Joan refuses to believe that we've actually stumbled onto a transmission from an alien race, and keeps maintaining that it must be electromagnetic radiation from some kind of weird solar flare or black hole or something.
    She's being unreasonable, which is unlike her. Usually she's pragmatic to a fault. I have no idea why she finds the idea of a world occupied by people who aren't Terran so unsettling, but it's obvious that she does.
    The reaction among the crew seems about seventy percent positive, thirty percent negative on hoping that we can pin down the signal as definitely artificial. Simon Viorst, for example, turned pale when he heard--I