Rollback

Sarah reached out her arms in a way that said "help me up." Carl stepped forward and did just that, gently bringing his mother to her feet. "Sure, I’d like to know," she said. "But it’s still coming in." She looked at her daughter-in-law. "So let’s get started making dinner."

The kids and grandkids left around 9:00 p.m. Carl, Angela, and Emily had done all the work cleaning up after dinner, and so Don and Sarah simply sat on the living-room couch, enjoying the restored calm. Emily had gone around at one point, shutting off all the other ringers on the phones, and they were still off. But the answering machine’s digital display kept changing every few minutes. Don was reminded of another old joke, this one from his teenage years, about the guy who liked to follow Elizabeth Taylor to McDonald’s so he could watch the numbers change. Those signs had been stuck at "Over 99 Billion Served" for decades, but he remembered the hoopla when they’d all finally been replaced with new ones that read, "Over 1 Trillion Served."

Sometimes it was better to just stop counting, he thought — especially when it’s a counting down instead of a counting up. They’d both made it to eighty-seven, and to sixty years together. But they surely wouldn’t be around for a seventieth anniversary; that just wasn’t in the cards. In fact…

In fact, he was surprised they’d lived this long, but maybe they’d been holding on, striving to reach the diamond milestone.

All his life, he’d read about people who died just days after their eightieth, ninetieth, or hundredth birthdays. They’d clung to life, literally by the force of their wills, until the big day had been reached, and then they’d just let go.

Don had turned eighty-seven three months ago, and Sarah had done so five months before that. That hadn’t been what they’d been holding on for. But a sixtieth wedding anniversary! How rare that was!

He would have liked to put his arm around Sarah’s shoulders as they sat side by side on the couch, but it pained him to rotate his own shoulder that much, and—

And then it hit him. Maybe she hadn’t been hanging on for their anniversary. Maybe what had really kept her going all this time was waiting to see what reply the Dracons would send. He wished contact had been made with a star thirty or forty light-years away, instead of just nineteen. He wanted her to keep holding on. He didn’t know what he’d do if she let go, and—

And he’d read that news story, too, dozens of times over the years: the husband who dies only days after his wife; the wife who finally seems to give up and let go shortly after hubby passes away.

Don knew a day like today called for some comment, but when he opened his mouth, what came out were just two words, that, he guessed, summarized it all:

"Sixty years."

She nodded. "A long time."

He was quiet for a while, then: "Thank you."

She turned her head to look at him. "For what?"

"For—" He lifted his eyebrows and raised his shoulders a bit as he sought an answer. And then, finally, he said, very softly, "Everything."

Next to them, on the little table beside the couch, the counter on the answering machine tallied up another call. "I wonder what the aliens’ reply says," Don said. "I hope it’s not just one of those damn autoresponders. ‘I’m sorry, but I’ll be away from the planet for the next million years.’ " Sarah laughed, and Don went on. " ‘If you need immediate assistance, please contact my assistant Zagdorf at…’ "

"You are a supremely silly man," she said, patting the back of his hand.

Though they only had voice phones, Sarah and Don did have a modern answering machine. "Forty-eight calls were received since you last reviewed your messages," the device’s smooth male voice said the next morning as they sat at the dining-room table. "Of those, thirty-nine left messages. All thirty-nine were for Sarah. Thirty-one were from the media. Rather than presenting them in order of receipt, I suggest you let me prioritize them for you, sorting by audience size. Starting with the TV networks, CNN—"

"What about the calls that weren’t from the media?" Sarah asked.

"The first was from your hairdresser. The second is from the SETI Institute. The third is from the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. The fourth—"

"Play the one from U of T."

A squeaky female voice came on. "Good morning, Professor Halifax. This is Lenore again — you know, Lenore Darby. Sorry to be phoning so early, but I thought someone should give you a call. Everyone’s been working on interpreting the message as it comes in — here, over in Mountain View, at the Allen, everywhere — and, well, you’re not going to believe this, Professor Halifax, but we think the message is" — the voice lowered a bit, as if its owner was embarrassed to go on — "encrypted. Not just encoded for transmission, but actually encrypted — you know, scrambled so that it can’t be read without a decryption key."