A story about the search for and then contact with an alien intelligence. Extremely well written by a renowned scientist and populariser, it contains a wealth of information about actual past and current SETI activities and its possibilities in the future. This is a must read for anyone with any interest in SETI . Also a fast and very pleasant way to learn about the subject.

"She heard as always, a kind of static, a continuous echoing random noise. Once, when listening to a part of the sky that included the star AC +79 3888 in Cassiopeia, she felt she heard a kind of singing, fading tantalizingly in and out, lying just beyond her ability to convince herself that there was something really there."

"Okay. So we have a bogey very near to Vega in the plane of the sky. It's at a frequency around 9.2 gigahertz, not very monochromatic: The bandwidth is a few hundred hertz. It's linearly polarized and it's transmitting a set of moving pulses restricted to two different amplitudes"