I pointed at the screen. “I see music, but I don’t recognize it. Some kind of encryption system?”

“Sort of, but that’s not the purpose.” He seemed briefly embarrassed, but he faced me, determined. “It’s a SETI site.”

“SETI?”

“Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”

“Oh, right.”

He talked quickly. “We’ve spent forty years now listening for radio whispers from the sky. But that’s twentieth-century thinking. If you were an ETI, and you wanted to learn something about the Earth, what would you study? What better than the Internet? It’s by far the largest, most organized information source on the planet.”

I said carefully, “You imagine aliens are logging on?”

“Well, why not? You’d learn a lot more about humankind than by sticking a probe up the rectum of a farmer from Kansas.” He seemed to sense what I was thinking. He grimaced. “Let’s just say I’ve been intrigued by the possibility of extraterrestrial life on Earth since the first showing of Fireball XL-Five. Haven’t you?”

“I suppose so. But you’ve stayed interested. You’ve become—um, an expert on this stuff.”

“As much as anybody is. I’m plugged into the right networks, I suppose. My name is known. Which is how I got on the TV.”

“And your site is designed to catch their attention?” I peered at it. “It looks a little busy.”

“Well, I doubt an ETI is going to be interested in snazzy Web page design. The site is information-rich, though—you’re looking at the works of Chopin, here, rendered in compressed binary—and encoded in forms that ought to make it easy for the ETIs to pick up. Bait, you see. And if the ETIs do find my site—look, this is a long shot, but it’s cheap to set up and maintain . . . and the payoff would be of incalculable value. Isn’t it worth trying? I’m not alone in this,” he said, a bit defensively. “There’s a network of researchers, mostly in the States . . .”

He told me something of a bizarre-sounding online community of like minds. “We call ourselves the Slan(t).” He had to write that down for me. “Slan is an old science fiction reference—made up to date, you see . . . It sums up how we see ourselves. The Slan(t)ers are a new kind of community, a bunch of outsiders, the fringe united by new technology.”

“I bet there are a lot of Californians.”