During a chamber music performance in the Cornell Student Center I began to think of the possibilities of gamma-ray astronomy. By the end of 1958, I had published a summary of what might be learned from gamma-ray astronomy... the paper was challenging, and a few months later, in the spring of 1959, Guiseppe Cocconi came into my office. We were thinking about gamma-rays of natural origin when we realized that we knew how to make them, too. We were making lots of them downstairs at the Cornell synchrotron. So Cocconi asked whether they could be used for communicating between the stars. It was plain that they would work, but they weren't very easy to use. My reply was enthusiastic but cautious. Shouldn't we look through the whole electromagnetic spectrum to find the best wavelength for any such communication? That was the germ of the idea.