The Sparrow

Emilio, who had played the music again and again, catching more of it each time, finding a pattern or two, suddenly sat very still. But before he could say anything, A

"Pretty complicated. Three suns. A yellow one that's a lot like Sol and two others, red and orange. People have thought for years that the system was a good candidate for having planets. But it isn't easy to sort things out when you've got three stars to contend with, so I guess it never seemed worth the effort. Jeez, it's going to be a hot prospect now."

The discussion went on for some time, with George, A

Sofia alone had neither comment on the music itself nor any speculation about the singers, but when the talk finally slowed to a halt, she asked, "Mr. Qui

In the excitement, Jimmy had forgotten the embarrassment of the previous evening, and now he was feeling too good to care. "Well, there was all the music last night," he said evenly. "And when I was in school, I had a part-time job cleaning up old recordings from a Soviet archive for digitizing. The signal just looked like music to me. So I decided to give it a try."

"It would be fair to say that you used your intuition."

"I guess so. It was a hunch."

"Would another astronomer have known what a musical signal looks like and come to the same conclusion?"

"Hard to say. Probably. Sure—somebody would have thought of it eventually."

"Would it ever have occurred to you, do you think, to suggest to me that the AI system wash all signals through an audio output to screen for transmissions such as this?"

"Only to eliminate them as ETs," Jimmy admitted. "See, we always expected a string of primes, some kind of mathematical sequence. I think I'd have suggested that anything that looked like music was definitely not ET. Remember? Yesterday?" He yawned enormously and stood to stretch, which required A

"Yes. Odd, isn't it. That would have been my assumption as well," she said without emotion, but she was twisting the metal bracelet around and around. Triple time. She'd be perhaps thirty-seven or thirty-eight. Not forever. Hubris, to have made the wager. "Mr. Qui

"We could go, couldn't we…if we wanted to?" Emilio said in the silence that followed her remarks. "I mean, there'd be a way to get there, if we decided to try."

The others looked at him blankly, still thinking about Sofia's unenviable position.

"We could use a meteor—no, an asteroid, yes?" he corrected himself, looking directly at Sofia. "It wouldn't be any worse than the little wooden ships people used to cross the Atlantic in the 1500s."

At first, only Sofia saw what he was driving at. "Yes," she said, glad to be distracted by him for once. "The asteroids aren't bad, really. The miners' quarters can be rather comfortable—"

"Yeah, sure," George said. "You've already got the mass-drivers grafted on and the lifepod in place. Get a big enough asteroid and you could just keep feeding slag into the engines. We do it now on a small scale to bring the rocks into Earth orbit from the asteroid belt. I thought years ago that you could go as far as you wanted, if you got a big enough rock. There just wasn't any reason to leave the solar system."

"Until now," Emilio said.

"Until now," George agreed.

"Did I miss something?" A

But George was starting to laugh and Emilio looked positively beatific. "Sofia," George said, "tell A

"— with Ohbayashi," Sofia finished for him. She looked at A

Emilio, who had been leaning forward and watching her carefully as she spoke, clapped once and sat back in his chair, smiling broadly.

"But it would take four years, wouldn't it?" A

"Four years isn't so bad," Emilio said.

"Whoa," Jimmy said, looking at Sofia and Sandoz. "Okay, first off, it's four point three and it's light years, not plain solar years. Even a third of a light year is a nontrivial distance. And anyway, that's the time it takes for light and radio waves to travel the distance, not a ship. It would take a ship a lot longer…but even so…" he said, starting to think about it now.

George gestured for Sofia's notebook and stylus. Emilio saved his file and handed it over. "Okay, so do the problem," George said, blanking the screen so he could sketch the idea out on the tablet. "At thirty-two feet per second per second, you'd have one G of gravity. Say you accelerate for half the trip and then rotate the rock a hundred and eighty degrees and decelerate for the second half…"

For a while there was no sound except the muttering of numbers and the tapping of a keyboard, Jimmy begi

Jimmy continued to work on his own line of calculation. "No, wait. It might seem to the crew more like six or seven months."

"Six or seven months!" Emilio exclaimed.

"Jeez," Jimmy said, staring at the numbers. "You could get real close to light speed in less than a year or so, even at one G, constant acceleration. Like maybe ninety-three percent. Anybody want to take on Einstein? I wonder if you'd run out of rock…How big would the asteroid have to be?" he asked himself and went back to the calculations.

"Wait a minute. I don't understand about people sleeping," A

"Nah—navigation would be mostly automated, at least until you got near the system," George told her. "You'd just launch yourself in the right direction—"

"And pray," said Emilio, laughing a little crazily.

They fell quiet, talked out for the moment. "What do we do now?" Jimmy asked. It was almost eight o'clock, and he was begi

It was Emilio Sandoz, face solemn and eyes alight, who answered him. "Start pla