Several of them spilled out onto the bridge. Pete. Rick Stockard, the Canadian. Hal Packwood, who was on his first long flight and who drove everybody else crazy talking endlessly about the wonder of it all. Miriam Kapp, who was running the chrono experiments. And two or three more. Everybody was breathing hard.

“Where’d it come from?” The question came from every side. “Did we really hear something?”

“Are we still picking it up?”

“For God’s sake, Mike,” said Tora Cavalla, an astrophysicist with a substantial appetite for sex, “are we scanning for the source? You realize somebody might be out there?”

“We are,” said Langley. He didn’t care for Tora very much. Her behavior disrupted the ship, and she seemed to think everyone around her was an idiot. It was an attitude that might have passed unnoticed at, say, CalTech. But in the intimate environment of a superluminal, where people had to live together for months at a time, she created claustrophobia and jealousy. “Of course we’re looking. But don’t expect much. We’ve no idea where the source might have been. And any kind of scan near that pile of iron is suspect. The gravity well distorts everything.”

“Keep looking,” said Packwood, speaking as if he were in charge.

“Is there any other likely explanation?” Tora asked. Her wide white brow was furrowed. She was really intrigued by the event.

“There’s always the possibility of an equipment malfunction. But Bill says no.”

She glanced over at Pete, her gray eyes pleading for him to turn the mission into a hunt for the signal.

“This isn’t something,” Pete said, “that we want to write off until we have an idea what caused the transmission.” He was tall, long-legged, solemn. His eyes were furtive, always suggesting he was hiding something. Langley thought he looked like a pickpocket who’d made good. But he kept his word. You could believe what he said. “What have you actually got, Mike?” he asked.