Shelagh made her trademark throaty laugh. "Do as I say, not as I do."

"Exactly," said Sarah. "Still, it’s amazing, really, the sociological concepts the aliens were able to get to from talking about math. For instance, building on some discussion of set theory, several of their questions deal with in-groups and out-groups. William Sumner, who coined the term ‘ethnocentrism,’ noted that what he called ‘primitive peoples’ had very different ideas about morality for in-group versus out-group members. The aliens seem to want to know if we’ve risen above that."

"I’d like to think we have," said Shelagh.

"For sure," agreed Sarah. "One might also expect them to wonder whether we’d outgrown religion." She looked through the glass at Don. "The vocabulary the Dracons established certainly would have made it possible to formulate questions about whether we believed an intelligence existed outside the universe — essentially, whether a God exists. They could have also asked if we believed any information persisted after death — in other words, whether souls exist. But they didn’t ask those things. My husband and I were arguing about that on the way down here this morning. He said the reason they didn’t ask about religious matters is obvious: no advanced race could still be caught up in such superstitious beliefs. But maybe it’s just the opposite. Maybe it’s so blindingly obvious to the aliens that God exists that it never even occurred to them to ask us if we’d failed to notice him."

"Fascinating," said Shelagh. "But why, do you think, do the aliens want to know all this?"

Sarah took a deep breath, and let it out slowly — causing Don to briefly cringe at the dead air. But, at last, she spoke. "That’s a very good question."

Chapter 15

Like most astronomers, Sarah fondly remembered the movie Contact, based on Carl Sagan’s novel of the same name. Indeed, she argued it was one of the few cases where the movie was actually better than the overlong book. She hadn’t seen it for decades, but a reference to it in one of the news stories about the attempts to decrypt the response from Sigma Draconis had brought it to mind. With pleasant anticipation, she sat down next to Don on the couch to watch it on Wednesday night. Slowly but surely, she was getting used to his newly youthful appearance, but one of the reasons she felt like watching a movie was that she’d be doing something with Don in which they’d be sitting side by side and not really looking at each other.

Jodie Foster did a great job portraying a passionate scientist, but Sarah found herself smiling in amusement when Foster said, "There are four hundred billion stars out there, just in our galaxy alone," which was true. But then she went on to say, "If only one out of a million of those had planets, and if just one out of a million of those had life, and if just one out of a million of those had intelligent life, there would be literally millions of civilizations out there." Nope, a million-million-millionth of four hundred billion is so close to zero as to practically be zero.

Sarah looked at Don to see if he’d caught it, but he gave no sign. She knew he didn’t like being interrupted by asides during movies — you couldn’t memorize trivia the way he did if you weren’t able to concentrate — and so she let the screenwriter’s minor flub pass. And, besides, despite its inaccuracy, what Foster had said rang true, in a way. For decades, people had been plugging numbers made up out of whole cloth into the Drake equation, which purported to estimate how many intelligent civilizations existed in the galaxy. Foster’s wildly inaccurate figure, pulled out of the air, was actually quite typical of these debates.

But Sarah’s amusement soon turned to downright cringing. Foster went to see a large corporation to get funding for SETI, and, when it initially turned her down, she went ballistic, exclaiming that contacting an extraterrestrial civilization would be the biggest moment in human history, more significant than anything anyone had ever done or could possibly imagine doing, a species-altering moment that would be worth any cost to attain.

Sarah cringed because she remembered giving such patently ridiculous speeches herself. Granted, the detection of the original signal from Sigma Draconis had been page-one news. But until the second message had been received, it had been over thirty years since a mention of aliens had appeared on the front page or main screen of any newspaper that didn’t have the words "National" and "Enquirer" in its title.