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was meeting to argue about targeting priorities, when Sandy knocked on the door and stuck his head in. McGill was up at the whiteboard, writing down lines of mathematical symbols. He caught the words “synchrotron radiation” and “anomalous jets.” Whatever that meant—whatever it was, it seemed to impress the working group. As they turned from the whiteboard to look at Sandy,Fletcher rolled his eyes back into his skull. Then, with an effort, he controlled the reaction and said, with poorly concealed impatience, “What is it, Sanders?”
    Sandy, knowing precisely how much he’d begun to irritate Fletcher, put on his best toothy smile and asked, “How’s it going, big guy?”
    Fletcher ground his teeth. “I’m in a meeting here, Sanders, as you can see. If you could come back in an hour, or maybe tomorrow . . .”
    “The computer found a critical anomaly in Chuck’s Eye and Medium Eye images,” Sandy said. “I thought I should tell you before I called the
LA Times
.”
    In the momentary silence, one of the postdocs said to Fletcher, “He’s looking at the test images from the vibe fix.”
    Fletcher muttered something to himself, which might have included the word “prick,” and asked Sandy, “Well, Sanders . . . did you get a report?”
    Sandy peered at the piece of paper in his hand, as if he were having trouble reading it, and said, “The computer said there’s a critical anomaly. It says there is an object approaching Saturn, that it is real, that it is kilometers long and across, that its spectra is UV-rich-hot, and that it is emitting hydrogen.”
    Slight pause for effect; Sandy knew he was now the center of attention and didn’t mind milking it for another fraction of a second.
    “Oh yeah, it’s decelerating, and it will achieve Saturn orbit in thirteen hours.”
    The Real Scientists all looked at each other, and then Fletcher said, “Give me that paper.”
    A minute later, he said, “We need to run a confirming series.”
    “Done that,” Sandy said, holding up a second sheet.
    Fletcher looked even more annoyed, started to snap out something, and thought better of it. He took a deep breath. “Okay, and what did that tell us?”
    Sandy handed him the second sheet of paper.
    The working group stampeded down the length of the table to crowdbehind Fletcher’s rounded shoulders, as they all read the paper together. After a minute, somebody said, “Sweet bleedin’ Jesus.”
    Fifteen hours later, Fletcher, exhausted from hyperactivity and lack of sleep, scrubbed his balding pate with his fingernails, looked around at the others in the room—the working group plus a couple of Astro Ultra Stars, plus a thin, dark-eyed man from Washington who had managed to scare the shit out of everybody in Astro—and said, “So, what we’re saying is . . . Sanders Heacock Darlington made the most important scientific discovery in history? That asshole?”
    “He couldn’t change a fuckin’ tire,” somebody said.
    “Maybe not,” said the man from Washington, who scared them all. “But he found an alien starship.”

3 .
    President Amanda Santeros tapped her pen, rapidly and unconsciously, against her teeth, as she skimmed the executive summary. She was a thin woman, narrow-shouldered with expertly coiffed dark brown hair. She wore a blue suit and a gold necklace with small turquoise cabochons, a gesture toward her home state of New Mexico. A hint of Chanel No. 5 hung about her, barely discernible through the odors of the waxes and cleaners that kept the Oval Office spotless, sanitary, and bug-free.
    There were eight people with her: Senator Anson Sweet, the Senate Majority Leader; Representative Frances Cline, the Speaker of the House; Admiral Paula White and General Richard Emery, the chairwoman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gene Lossness, director of DARPA; Jacob Vintner, her chief science adviser; and Ed Fletcher, of the Caltech Astrophysics Working Group, who’d arrived in