The rain on that particular Thursday in October 1946 was the kind that doesn't fall so much as hang in the air, a fine gray mist that soaks through your coat and settles into your bones and makes you question every decision that led you to be standing on a street corner in downtown Los Angeles at eleven o'clock at night.

Jack Malone questioned it now. He had been standing on this corner for forty-five minutes, cigarette burning down between his fingers, watching the pharmacy across the street with its neon CROSS sign that flickered in a rhythm that reminded him of Morse code and that he immediately dismissed as coincidence. Private investigators saw patterns in randomness all the time. It was the first thing you learned and the last thing you unlearned and the thing you never completely succeeded at either.

Vivian Cross had given him an address for her husband's lab: a garage on Sunset, two blocks from where he now stood. "The fire destroyed everything," she had said, sitting in his office with her dark red lipstick and her hands folded in her lap like a woman praying in church. "But I need to know what he was working on. He wouldn't tell me, but I know he was working on something important. Something that killed him."

Malone had taken the case because she paid in advance and because she was the kind of woman who made you want to find out what happened to her even if the answer was something you didn't want to know.

He crossed the street and pushed open the door of the garage. It had been foreclosed after the fire, the "For Sale" sign rotting in the rain, and the lock on the side door was cheaper than the door itself. Inside, the garage smelled of wet concrete and burning and something else -- something metallic and sharp that made the back of his throat taste like copper.

He turned on his flashlight and swept the beam across the floor. Most of the contents had been destroyed: workbenches charred, shelves collapsed, tools melted into unrecognizable shapes. But in the far corner, beneath a beam that had fallen in an angle that preserved a triangle of dry space, Malone found something.

It was wrapped in oilcloth. The oilcloth was scorched but intact. Inside was a piece of metal -- or something that had been metal -- about the size of a playing card, thinner than a sheet of paper, and perfectly smooth. Not scratched, not pitted, not marked in any way. Malone held it up to the flashlight and turned it over in his fingers and noticed that it reflected light from angles that didn't exist. Light from above, from below, from the sides, all simultaneously, as if the surface of the object contained more dimensions than the space it occupied.

He stood there for a long time in the dark garage, holding a piece of something that should not exist, and thought: Arthur Cross didn't die in a fire.

The investigation that followed took Malone through three weeks of Los Angeles underworld that ranged from the mundane to the inexplicable. He learned that Arthur Cross had been funded by an organization he referred to only as "The Counting House," a shadowy group with government connections that had been monitoring radio signals from space since 1942. He learned that two of Cross's former colleagues had died in the eighteen months since Cross joined The Counting House -- one in a car accident on the Pacific Coast Highway, one in a apartment fire in Pasadena. Both ruled accidental. Malone didn't believe in either verdict.

He learned that The Counting House had been monitoring deep-space signals for four years and that Arthur Cross was the first person to successfully decode one.

On the third week, Malone found the decoded message. It was in Cross's notebook, hidden inside a hollowed-out copy of Newton's Principia that Malone acquired from a used bookdealer on Broadway for forty dollars and a promise to never ask what he was using it for.

The message was not a threat. It was not an invitation.

It was a census.

The senders were cataloging civilizations in the galaxy, recording their radio signatures, their technological level, their atmospheric composition, and then assigning each one a classification. The classifications were simple:

HARMLESS -- civilizations that posed no threat to the catalogers or to each other HUNGRY -- civilizations that expanded and consumed and multiplied without limit HUNTED -- civilizations that were expanding and consuming but had not yet developed the means to defend themselves

Humanity was classified as HUNTED.

And below the classification was a timestamp. A countdown. Sixty-seven days.

Malone sat in his office at three in the morning, the notebook open on his desk, the piece of alien metal on the corner of the desk catching the neon light from the pharmacy across the street. The rain had started again. He poured the last of the whiskey into a chipped mug and drank it standing up, reading the countdown for the eighth time.

Sixty-seven days.

He knew, with the grim certainty of a man who had spent his life reading the world and understanding what it was telling him, that the countdown was not a prediction. It was a schedule.

He picked up the phone. His hands were steady. That surprised him. He called the only person he trusted, a homicide detective named Sal Rizzo who owed him three favors and would listen to anything Malone said at three in the morning because Malone had once pulled him out of a burning car in Boyle Heights and Rizzo had never forgotten it.

"Listen to me carefully," Malone said when Rizzo answered. "You're not going to believe this. But you need to call everybody. Everybody you know. And you need to tell them to look up."

The line went dead. The rain continued. The metal on the desk caught the neon light and threw it back in angles that didn't exist.

Malone set down the phone and lit a cigarette and watched the smoke rise toward the ceiling and thought about the end of the world the way a man thinks about a storm -- not with fear exactly, but with a dull, practical recognition that some things are coming and there is nothing you can do about them except stand on a street corner in the rain and make the phone call.