This is what was overheard

The GROVER (Gamma Ray Observatory Verification Enhancement and Research) satellite hung in space, seemingly unmoving although its actual velocity relative to earth was close to 20,000 kilometers an hour. Its long solar collectors pointed towards the sun, its radio dish pointed towards the earth which the sun would occlude in another three months. After that, the satellite would be on its own for another two.

The satellite's main job was to track gamma rays and other highly charged particles from the space, its far orbit putting it outside the earth's zone of impact so its readings could be as close to natural as possible.

At this distance it took signals from earth almost 15 minutes to reach it, and its return signals an equal time. However in the constant night of space there was never anything so important that a 30 minute round trip couldn't handle. Almost nothing as it turned out.

On a typical day its detectors would pick up the faint but constant static ticking of gamma rays as they traveled the hundreds or thousands of light years from stars and supernovas. Tick then silence. Tick tick, then silence. In its fifteen year life the most busy day had been a super nova in the right arm of Sagittarius as NGC-15550283 had gone nova. It had registered a burst of twelve gamma rays over an hour's period.

Almost one hundred and seventy million miles away Sheldon Tavish dropped his half eaten subway sandwich on the console. Over the span of two bites, his station had gone from all green lights to amber to red and finally watching the real time data stream end in a "connection terminated" warning on his screen.

He began pouring over the incoming data. There was a flood of it. Much more than normal. He turned the gamma ray detection output to audio to hear the gamma detectors go from the sound of the first stages of popcorn being popped to in the span of about 30 seconds the roar of the ocean, then nothing.

After three days of sending the reboot sequence Sheldon's team gave up trying to contact the wayward satellite. It just wasn't responding any more. Jerry, over in mechanical systems, had put up the temperature gauge screen and they watched as the temperature gauges went from the 3 degrees Kelvin of space to 10 to 20 to 40 to 80 eventually surpassing the tested range of the thermometers. Sheldon kept pouring over the gamma ray data.

Four days later and the last video picture had been deciphered, the camera had automatically swung towards the first fault and began snapping images in timed intervals. The images were that of the port solar collector ending in a smooth edge, some sort of material fluorescenceing in a trail perpendicular to the probe, the vapor trail growing as the solar collector shrank.

By sunrise of the fifth day, Sheldon took his glasses off ran his fingers through his hair and tried to stifle a yawn. The readouts just didn't make sense. It was like the probe had passed through something that had ended up melting the entire craft and ripping it apart into its component atoms.

The amount of data that came in over the probe's last thirty seconds had been incredible. It had filled up all bandwidth channels. In fact there was so much data that the probe had automatically shut down its incoming channels from NASA to use those for outgoing broadcast as well.

Sheldon stopped massaging his temples and looked again at the reams of paper telemetry that had been spat out of the computer.

"Singh," Sheldon called, "Singh, come over here a sec would you?"

"What's going on? You finally find which battery faulted and caused the meltdown?"

"No, look at this. See this little cluster of gamma rays here?"

"Right, that's where we think the plutonium casing got cracked by the micrometeorite the probe hit."

"Yeah, but look, here's a same cluster and here, and here. Its a pattern that gets repeated."

"So the CMOS chip got stuck. It was a catastrophic meltdown man."

"No, no no look." He shuffled the papers. "look, there's that pattern, now look at this bigger pattern here. And then a bigger pattern here."

"So its just the feedback from all the CMOS chips as they wink out."

"Are you sure? Because doesn't this pattern look like something else?"

"Well on the surface it looks like a broadcasting sine wave. But its way too complicated and way to powerful to be TV or even Military."

"Bingo!"

"You need some sleep. You think you just picked up on E.T. Radio? I thought those SETI guys said anything ET would send would be in the microwave band not in gamma rays. Sheldon think how much power it would take to send any meaningful information via gamma rays. Then add that to the odds and incredibly off chance that poor little GROVER happened to intercept it? The numbers of zeros alone boggle the mind"

"They do but the SETI guys assume that ET has the same power problems we do. What if ET doesn't worry about fossil fuels. What else melted GROVER that also contains data like this?"

"A micrometeorite hit the plutonium casing and there was a small fission reaction."

"GROVER had time to call for help. He winked out slowly over 30 seconds from the left solar panel thru the body to the right. A fission reaction would have taken it out in less than a second and from the center. Look, the temperature gauges didn't all heat up uniformly. If you look at the telemetry it looks like GROVER hit the edge of something that got denser the further in it went. My estimate was that this is a concentrated gamma ray beam about 10 kilometers across."

"Keep dreaming man. There's nothing we can do about it now. Take your papers home and we'll meet about it on Monday."

Sheldon shuffled out, papers in tow. He wasn't heading home that was for sure. He needed to make a quick stop by a friend of his.

Five years and countless man and computer hours later Sheldon became vindicated. The 30 seconds of data had proved we were not alone. In five years Sheldon and his friend from the SETI team had figure out that A) the beam GROVER flew through had contained as much data in each second of transmission as the entire earth had generated since radio was discovered. B) that there was more to decode in "Sheldon's 30" as it became known as than would ever be understood in his life time. and C) when the time came for the first indication of what we had overheard ET saying, that it would be Sheldon's turn to announce it to the world.

He looked nervous up at the podium. It had been decided that the UN would be the best place to make such a historic announcement. The auditorium was silent. Five years and one phrase had been teased out of the code.

"Before I start, I uh, just wanted to, uh, thank everyone on my team and the generous donations from Microsoft, Apple and Sun for the computing power and for all the linguist specialists." He realized he was mumbling. "Um, look this is going to be difficult. I know according to the last Pew poll that, like, 67% of the world thinks we faked this. And..." He stopped and sipped from a glass of water." "And um. Well. um. I don't think this is going to help sway you. And before I... I'm just going to read it. We've been able to translate one phrase so far from the data. There's a bit of context missing but we've got a shitload of. Oh, oh crap, can I say that at the U.N.? Um, sorry, we have a boat load of other markers so we think its accurate, or as accurate as we can turn it into english and..." He saw Singh motion for him to hurry up from the front row.

"So ah the phrase, um that we translated is: Sirius Sentients 22, Orion 18. Um, that's it. We think we over heard ET announcing some sports scores." With that the entire auditorium broke into shouting and chatter.