“Regardless, Mr.Dodds, the reality of this situation is that millions of ignorant people are going to wake up tomorrow, frightened to death, waiting for little green men to break into their homes, rape their wives, and steal their babies. This situation has to be handled with finesse, or it’ll blow up in all of our faces.”

The NASA director nods. “That’s why we called you in, Senator.”

The deeply set eyes lose a bit of their harshness. “Okay, let’s talk about this new telescope you’re proposing.” Chaney thumbs through his copy of the briefing. “It says here that the dish would be thirty miles in diameter and would be built on the dark side of the moon. That’s gonna cost some chunk of change. Why the hell do you need to build it on the moon?”

“For the same reasons we launched the Hubble Space Telescope. There’s too much radio interference escaping from Earth. The far side of the moon always faces away from Earth, offering us a natural radio-free zone. The idea is to construct a dish in the bottom of a massive crater, similar in design to Arecibo’s big dish, only several thousand times larger. We’ve already selected a site—Saha Crater—only three degrees on the dark side of the moon, close to the lunar equator. A lunar telescope would give us the capability to communicate with the intelligence that contacted us.”

“And why would we want to do that?” Chaney’s voice booms across the conference room, losing its rasp as it rises. “Mr.Dodds, this radio signal may be the most important discovery in the history of mankind, but what NASA is proposing is going to frighten the masses. What if the American people say no? What if they don’t want to spend a few billion dollars to contact E.T.? This is a pretty big financial pill you’re asking Congress to swallow.”

Brian Dodds knows Ennis Chaney, knows the man is testing his fortitude. “Senator, you’re right. This discovery is going to frighten a lot of people. But let me tell you what frightens a lot of us even more. It frightens us when we pick up our daily news monitor and read stories about nuclear weapons in Iran. It frightens us when we read about the growing hunger problems in Russia, or about the strategic arms buildup in China, another country capable of destroying the world. It seems like every nation suffering political and economic unrest is armed to the teeth, Senator Chaney, and that reality is a lot more frightening than any radio signal coming from eighteen hundred light-years away.”