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streaking aircraft, and beeping satellites. But not many of those now. A truck, over the hill, come for me at last? Or could the current surge have upset a chip or surprised my program?”
    That was an encouraging thought, and he savored it for a while. But then he took notice of the wavelength at which the oddity had been caught and was shaken out of his complacency.
    Between the 18-centimetre note of the OH or hydroxyl radical and the clear 21-centimetre song of hydrogen is a quiet region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Because OH and H combine to form the precious life substance, water, the quiet region was known colloquially as the Water Hole. For a time in Chandliss’s youth it had been popular among some radio astronomers to suggest that interstellar life would “gather” at the Water Hole just as Earth life was wont to, using that quiet region for a powerful radioed hello. For a few years, there had even been a serious effort to search the sky for extraterrestrial “phone calls” at those frequencies. Chandliss had always considered the whole idea the worst sort of anthropocentric pseudoscientific bunk, and he had had the satisfaction of seeing the SETI programs phased out in favor of more serious work.
    But as near as he could tell, this emission had been at 20 cm, smack in the middle of the Water Hole. Chandliss’s cultivated raised-eyebrow skepticism was shaken. Either someone, Mother of the Galaxy included, was playing an educated joke on him, or—
    Chandliss refused to complete the thought. The relentless motion of the earth had swept the source of the signal away from the focus of his telescope, but that same motion would return it tomorrow. When it arrived, he would be ready to listen again.
    For thirty years Allen Chandliss had listened to the song of the heavens. Three distinguished years at Agassiz, then on to Kitt Peak for work on detecting interstellar molecules. His eight years there were crowned by the perfection of the first technique for directly measuring the distance to the cool hydrogen clouds known as the H-l regions.
    Just two years later, his relative fame, his promising future, and his very position were stripped from him. He was not alone in that. Radio astronomy, like all other endeavors deemed nonessential, disappeared as a means of gainful employment. Those who had practiced it left the observatories and universities, and all over the world the great dishes came to an indefinite rest in the neutral position, as if gripped by a paralytic disease.
    Green Bank, Mr. Wilson, Hat Creek, and the other North American instruments were shut down by government fiat, their funding cut off, their utilities shut off. The disease spread: Efflesburg, Serpukov, even Jodrell Bank. The end came seemingly without warning, but the warning had been there. The radio astronomers, their ears to the heavens, had simply not heard it until it was too late.
    At least in America, the scientists’ stock had begun to fall the moment the fission blanket became a reality. For President Martin Novak, the fission blanket symbolized the arrogance of a meddling minority who held themselves above the “plain folks.” His excoriation of them began with “traitor” and then turned unfriendly. Novak laid the nation’s loss of manhood and the calamities still to come at the scientists’ feet. And he painted with a broad brush, holding biologists and astronomers as culpable as physicists.
    Novak’s campaign was only the most extreme example of a wider phenomenon. The government of every nuclear nation was livid, with a series of “people’s assassinations” of publicly identified Project Hope scientists one result. But the citizens of those same nations were, for the most part, delighted. For a brief time, a refreshing if unwarranted wave of global optimism blunted Novak’s attacks.
    But Novak returned to his theme in the wake of the Saudi embargo. “Where are our benefactors now? Why can they only take and not