Ted was a longstanding advocate for life on other worlds, and a supporter of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which other scientists considered a waste of time and money. He grinned happily at Norman now.

“I always knew this would happen-sooner or later, we’d get our proof of intelligent life on other worlds. Now at last we have it, Norman. This is a great moment. And I am especially pleased about the shape.”

“The shape?”

“Of the object down there.”

“What about it?” Norman hadn’t heard anything about the shape.

“I’ve been in the monitor room watching the video feed from the robots. They’re beginning to define the shape beneath the coral. And it’s not round. It is not a flying saucer,” Ted said. “Thank God. Perhaps this will silence the lunatic fringe.” He smiled. “ ‘All things come to him who waits,’ eh?”

“I guess so,” Norman said. He wasn’t sure what Fielding meant, but Ted tended to literary quotations. Ted saw himself as a Renaissance man, and random quotations from Rousseau and Lao-tsu were one way to remind you of it. Yet there was nothing mean-spirited about him; someone once said that Ted was “a brand-name guy,” and that carried over to his speech as well. There was an innocence, almost a naivete to Ted Fielding that was endearing and genuine. Norman liked him.

He wasn’t so sure about Harry Adams, the reserved Princeton mathematician Norman hadn’t seen for six years. Harry was now a tall, very thin black man with wire-frame glasses and a perpetual frown. He wore a T-shirt that said “Mathematicians Do It Correctly”; it was the kind of thing a student would wear, and indeed, Adams appeared even younger than his thirty years; he was clearly the youngest member of the group-and arguably the most important.

Many theorists argued that communication with extraterrestrials would prove impossible, because human beings would have nothing in common with them. These thinkers pointed out that just as human bodies represented the outcome of many evolutionary events, so did human thought. Like our bodies, our ways of thinking could easily have turned out differently; there was nothing inevitable about how we looked at the universe.