Since college, Steven Allard and Benjamin Raines have competed to be the first to make genuine alien contact. Corporate mega-science versus home-grown improvisation. Now they both apparently succeed at the same time -- but one such contact is a transmission, and the other seems to be a ghost. What Steven calls "the Envoy" offers enormous benefits to humankind on Earth. But Ben receives another, more sinister Creature who warns against the Envoy's...