From Cass's notebook. He dates things like this: "Aug 9, thinking about Ohio."
August 15, 1977. Jerry Ehman is volunteering at the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State, going through computer printouts of sky noise. And there it is: a seventy-two-second narrowband signal, right at the hydrogen line, coming from the direction of Sagittarius.
He circles it. Writes "Wow!" in the margin. Which, for a scientist, is roughly the equivalent of screaming.
They pointed the dish back at that patch of sky for years. Nothing. Decades of nothing. One shout, seventy-two seconds long, and then the universe went back to minding its own business.
So here's what I keep coming back to. If it was equipment, it never malfunctioned that way again. If it was us, a satellite, a plane, nobody's found the match. And if it was them, well. They said it once. Maybe once was enough.
Selene asked me what I think it was. I told her I don't do that kind of thinking before coffee. She made the coffee. I still don't know.