Bob Henderson had been a weather station technician for seventeen years, and in seventeen years, nothing exciting had ever happened at the Reno County National Weather Service office. This was not a complaint. Bob liked it that way. Exciting things tended to ruin your credit rating, your marriage, or both, and Bob had worked hard to achieve the kind of comfortable mediocrity that kept all three intact.

His job was simple. Automated sensors on the roof of the office building collected data -- temperature, humidity, wind speed, barometric pressure -- and transmitted it to a computer in Bob's office. Bob's job was to input that data into the system and calibrate the anemometer once a month. The rest of the day, after the actual work was done, Bob spent sitting at his desk, staring at the wall, and thinking about nothing in particular.

This was, by Bob's own assessment, a very good way to live.

It was raining on the night Bob picked up the signal. He was not trying to pick up the signal. He was bored. The weather station's backup receiver -- a shortwave radio that the previous technician, a guy named Rick who had moved to Florida and apparently found excitement there, had left behind -- was tuned to a frequency that shouldn't have had anything on it. But something was on it. A repeating sequence of numbers, clean and precise, coming from a star that didn't appear on any of the weather satellites' databases.

Bob told his wife, Barb, at dinner. She said: "That's nice, honey. Pass the salt."

Bob called the National Weather Service hotline in Denver. A woman named Linda told him he should "take a vacation."

Bob told nobody at work because what would he say? "Hey guys, I think I found aliens." They'd laugh. They'd also probably report him to HR, and Bob had spent seventeen years building a reputation for reliability and predictability, and he was not going to throw that away for a hunch about a radio signal.

So he did what any reasonable man would do. He bought a telescope.

It was a six-inch reflector from a magazine ad, the kind of telescope that serious astronomers laugh at and amateur astronomers love. Bob assembled it in his backyard one Saturday afternoon while Barb was at the library and the neighbors were at the grocery store, and by Sunday evening he had it pointed at the coordinates that the signal seemed to be coming from.

The star was there. It was a red dwarf, unremarkable in appearance, about as exciting as a smudge on a photograph. But when Bob adjusted the telescope and watched through the eyepiece for twenty minutes, he noticed that the star was pulsing. Not with the random flickering of atmospheric turbulence, but with a regular, measured pulse that matched the signal's rhythm. Once every forty-seven seconds. The star was pulsing once every forty-seven seconds.

Bob sat in his folding chair in his backyard and watched the star pulse once every forty-seven seconds for three months. He did this every night after work. He told no one. He sat in that chair, in the Kansas rain and the Kansas heat and the Kansas wind, and he watched the star pulse, and he thought about nothing in particular, which was what he was very good at.

And then things started getting weird.

Not sci-fi weird. Not "aliens landed in my backyard" weird. More like "reality is slightly broken" weird. The first thing Bob noticed was the pigeons. Every evening, as he sat in his chair, the pigeons in his yard would gather and sit in what Bob initially thought was a random grouping. But after a week of watching, he noticed that they were sitting in hexagonal formations. Perfect hexagons. Six pigeons arranged around a central point, each one equidistant from its neighbors, like molecules in a crystal lattice.

Bob told Barb. She looked at him over the top of her coffee mug and said: "Bob, those are pigeons. Pigeons don't do geometry."

"I know what pigeons do," Bob said.

The next thing was the dogs. The dogs next door, a pair of beagles named Sprinkles and Tuffesy (Barb refused to know their real names because the real names were embarrassing), started barking in unison. Not the usual random barking of suburban dogs who hear a leaf blow across the lawn, but a synchronized, rhythmic pattern that matched the signal's pulse. Bark. Forty-seven seconds. Bark. Forty-seven seconds. Bark. Forty-seven seconds.

Barb noticed because the dogs had been barking in unison for an hour and she was trying to watch a cooking show. "Bob," she said, "why are the dogs barking like a metronome?"

"I don't know," Bob said. But he did know. He knew because he had been watching the star pulse and hearing the signal and his brain, which was not designed for cosmic mysteries, was doing its best to make sense of a universe that had clearly misfiled the instructions.

The phenomena escalated. The water from Bob's kitchen faucet began running in geometric patterns down the drain -- not swirling, which is normal, but flowing in perfectly straight lines that converged at the drain in a pattern that looked like a mathematical proof. The static on the television produced images that Bob recognized, vaguely, from his high school geometry class: triangles within triangles within triangles, infinite fractals of angular precision. The local news station reported "unexplained anomalies in satellite data" and then moved on to a story about the high school football team's annual disappointment, which was comforting in its predictability.

Sheriff Del Monroe came to check on things one Tuesday evening. He was a good man, Del Monroe. He had been sheriff of Reno County for twenty-two years, and his most exciting recent accomplishment had been catching someone stealing lawn chairs from the park. He pulled into Bob's driveway in his patrol car, parked next to Bob's rusty Ford, and walked up the path with the easy gait of a man who had never been in a hurry about anything in his life.

He found Bob in the backyard, sitting in his folding chair, watching the star.

"Evening, Henderson," the sheriff said.

"Evening, Sheriff."

The sheriff stood in the yard for a moment, looking at the star, looking at Bob, looking at the telescope. "What are you doing out here?"

"Watching the star."

"The which one?"

"The red one. The pulsing one."

The sheriff was a practical man. He did not ask Bob how he knew a star was red and pulsing from three hundred yards away with a six-inch telescope from a magazine. He just came over, stood in the yard, and looked up for an hour in silence while Bob watched the star pulse and the sheriff watched Bob watch the star.

Finally, the sheriff said: "I've been doing this job a long time, Henderson. I've seen a lot of strange things. But this? This is new."

Bob said: "I think they're trying to talk to us."

The sheriff said: "I hope they're polite about it."

On the fourth morning after the sheriff's visit, a balloon appeared in Bob's yard.

It was red. It was about the size of a beach ball. It was floating at about head height, tied to nothing, drifting gently in the Kansas wind. It had something attached to it -- a small piece of paper, fluttering in the breeze like a flag.

Bob untied it. (It was, he realized, not untied to anything. He had just imagined it was tied and reached out and grabbed the string, and when he did, the balloon stopped drifting and hung in his hands like a red apple.)

He read the paper. He showed it to Barb, who was in the kitchen making breakfast and who looked at the paper and looked at Bob and said: "What does it say?"

Bob read it aloud: "We heard you calling. Is this the good part?"

Barb read it. She handed it to the sheriff, who was standing in the kitchen because he had come over for coffee and never left. He read it. He set down his coffee mug very carefully.

Bob said: "I didn't call anyone."

Barb said: "Bob, you sit in that chair every night for three months. The whole town knows you're talking to the sky."

The sheriff said: "Maybe it heard you."

Bob looked up at the sky. The balloon floated gently in his hands, red against the Kansas blue. Somewhere in it, perhaps, was the first contact between human civilization and whatever was out there.

Bob said: "Okay."

That was all. "Okay."

But Barb said it too, to herself, because she didn't know what else to say. And the sheriff said it, because he had seen enough of life to know that okay was sometimes the bravest word a man could speak.

Outside, the balloon drifted slowly toward the horizon, where the Kansas plains met the endless sky, carrying its message into a universe that had apparently been listening all along, wondering if the little man in the folding chair was ready for whatever came next, and wondering, with something that might have been curiosity or might have been kindness, if he was.