Arecibo’s behemoth telescope was designed to be used by scientists in four separate fields. Radio astronomers use the dish to analyze the natural radio energy emitted by galaxies, pulsars, and other celestial bodies as far as ten million light-years away. Radar astronomers come to Arecibo to bounce powerful beams of radio energy off objects within our solar system, then record and study the echoes. Atmospheric scientists and astronomers use the telescope to study the Earth’s ionosphere, analyzing the atmosphere and its dynamic relationship with our planet.

The last field of study involves the SETI program, or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. SETI’s goal of locating intelligent life within the cosmos uses a twofold approach. The first is to send radio transmissions into deep space in the hopes that, someday, an intelligent species will receive our message of peace. SETI’s second approach uses the Gregorian dome and its two smaller dishes to receive incoming radio waves from deep space in an attempt to discern an intelligible pattern, proving that we are not alone in the universe.

Astronomers refer to the task of hunting for radio signals in the vastness of space as searching for a needle in the cosmic haystack. To simplify the search, Professor Frank Drake and his colleagues in Project Ozma, the founders of SETI, concluded that any intelligent life existing within the cosmos would (logically) have to be associated with water. With all of the radio frequencies to choose from, astronomers hypothesized that an extraterrestrial intelligence would broadcast its radio signals at 1.42 gigahertz, the point on the electromagnetic spectrum at which energy is released from hydrogen. Drake dubbed the region the waterhole, and since then, it has been the exclusive hunting ground for all interstellar radio signals.

An adjunct of the SETI project is SERENDIP, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations. With telescope time expensive and difficult to come by, SERENDIP simply piggybacks its receivers to the big dish during all observations. The major limitation for these SETI scientists is that they have no say in what they are listening to, their targets being chosen for them by their host.

Kenny Wong stands on the concrete-and-steel overlook situated just outside of the lab’s huge bay windows. The disgruntled Princeton graduate student leans against the protective railing and stares at the tangle of metal and cable suspended over the heart of the big dish.

Fucking NASA. It’s not enough that they cut our funding, now they have to hog telescope time to locate their damn probe …

“Hey, Kenny—”

Piggybacking is a goddam waste of time if we’re not even tuned into the waterhole. I might as well hit the beach, for all the fucking good I’m doing here—

“Kenny, get the hell in here, your equipment’s giving me a headache!”

“Huh?”

The grad student rushes into the lab, his pulse racing as he hears a sound he has never heard before.