Contact

CHAPTER 14 Harmonic Oscillator

IT WAS On a mission of insurgency and subversion. The enemy was vastly larger and more powerful. But it knew the enemy's weakness. It could take over the alien government, turning the resources of the adversary to its own purpose. Now, with millions of dedicated agents in place…

She sneezed and tried to find a clean paper tissue in the bulging pocket of the terry-cloth presidential bathrobe. She had no makeup on, although her chapped lips revealed patches of mentholated balm.

“My doctor tells me I have to stay in bed or I'll get viral pneumonia. I ask him for an antibiotic, and he tells me there's no antibiotic for viruses. So how does he know I have a virus?”

Der Heer opened his mouth to answer, a gesture in the making, when the President cut him short.

“No, never mind. You'll start telling me about DNA and host recognition and I'll need what resources I've got left to listen to your story. If you're not afraid of my virus, pull up a chair.”

`Thank you, Ms. President. This is about the primer. I have the report here. There's a long technical section that's included as an appendix. I thought you might be interested in it also. Briefly, we're reading and actually understanding the thing with almost no difficulty. It's a fiendishly clever learning program. I don't mean “fiendishly” in any literal sense, of course. We must have a vocabulary of three thousand words by now.”

“I don't understand how it's possible. I could sec how they could teach you the names of their numbers.

You make one dot and write the letters O N E underneath, and so on. I could see how you could have a picture of a star and then write S T A R under it. But I don't see how you could do verbs or the past tense or conditionals.”

`They do some of it with movies. Movies are perfect for verbs. And a lot of it they do with numbers. Even abstractions; they can communicate abstractions with numbers. It goes something like this: First they count out the numbers for us, and then they introduce some new words—words we don't understand. Here, III indicate their words by letters. We read something like this (the letters stand for symbols the Vegans introduce).” He wrote:

1A1B2Z 1A2B3Z 1A7B8Z

“What do you think it is?”

“My high school report card? You mean there's a combination of dots and dashes that A stands for, and a different combination of dots and dashes that B stands for, and so on?”

“Exactly. You know what one and two mean, but you don't know what A and B mean. What does a sequence like this tell you?”

“A means “plus” and B means “equals. ” Is that what you're getting at?”

“Good. But we don't yet understand what Z means, right? Now along comes something like this”:

1A2B4Y

“You see?”

“Maybe. Give me another that ends in Y.”

2000A4000B0Y

“Okay, I think I got it. As long as I don't read the last three symbols as a word. Z means it's true, and Y means it's false.”

“Right. Exactly. Pretty good for a President with a virus and a South African crisis. So with a few lines of text they've taught us four words: plus, equals, true, false. Four pretty useful words. Then they teach division, divide one by zero, and tell us the word for infinity. Or maybe it's just the word for indeterminate.

Or they say, The sum of the interior angles of a triangle is two right angles. ” Then they comment that the statement is true if space is flat, but false if space is curved. So you've learned how to say “if and—”

“I didn't know space was curved. Ken, what the hell are you talking about? How can space be curved?

No, never mind, never mind. That can't have anything to do with the business in front of us.”

“Actually…” “Sol Hadden tells me it was his idea where to find the primer. Don't look at me funny, der Heer. I talk to all types.”

“I didn't mean… ah… As I understand it, Mr. Hadden volunteered a few suggestions, which had all been made by other scientists as well. Dr. Arroway checked them out and hit paydirt with one of them. It's called phase modulation, or phase coding.”

“Yes. Now, is this correct. Ken? The primer is scattered throughout the Message, right? Lots of repetitions. And there was some primer shortly after Arroway first picked up the signal.”

“Shortly after she picked up the third layer of the palimpsest, the Machine design.”

“And many countries have the technology to read the primer, right?”

“Well, they need a device called a phase correlator. But, yes. The countries that count, anyway.”

“Then the Russians could have read the primer a year ago, right? Or the Chinese or the Japanese. How do you know they're not halfway to building the Machine right now?”

“I thought of that, but Marvin Yang says it's impossible. Satellite photography, electronic intelligence, people on the scene, all confirm that there's no sign of the kind of major construction project you'd need to build the Machine. No, we've all been asleep at the switch. We were seduced by the idea that the primer had to come at the beginning and not interspersed through the Message. It's only when the Message recycled and we discovered it wasn't there that we started thinking of other possibilities. All this work has been done in close cooperation with the Russians and everybody else. We don't think anybody has the jump on us, but on the other hand everybody has the primer now. I don't think there's any unilateral course of action for us.”

“I don't want a unilateral course of action for us. I just want to make sure that nobody else has a unilateral course of action. Okay, so back to your primer. You know how to say true-false, if-then, and space is curved. How do you build a Machine with that?”

“You know, I don't think this cold or whatever you've got has slowed you down a bit. Well, it just takes off from there. For example, they draw us a periodic table of the elements, so they get to name all the chemical elements, the idea of aa atom, the idea of a nucleus, protons, neutrons, electrons. Then they run through some quantum mechanics just to make sure we're paying attention—there are already some new insights for us in the remedial stuff. Then it starts concentrating on the particular materials needed for the construction. For example, for some reason we need two tons of erbium, so they run through a nifty technique to extract it from ordinary rocks.”

Der Heer raised his hand palm outward in a placatory gesture. “Don't ask why we need two tons of erbium. Nobody has the faintest idea.”

“I wasn't going to ask that. I want to know how they told you how much a ton is.”

“They counted it out for us in Planck masses. A Planck mass is—”

“Never mind, never mind. It's something that physicists all over the universe know about, right? And I've never heard of it. Now, the bottom line. Do we understand the primer well enough to start reading the Message? Will we be abile to build the thing or not?”

“The answer seems to be yes. We've only had the primer for a few weeks now, but whole chapters of the Message are falling into our lap in clear. Its painstaking design, redundant explanations, and as far as we can tell, tremendous redundancy in the Machine design. We should have a three-dimensional model of the Machine for you in time for that crew-selection meeting on Thursday, if you feel up to it. So far, we haven't a clue as to what the Machine does, or how it works. And there are some funny organic chemical components that don't make any sense as part of a machine. But almost everybody seems to think we can build the thing.”

“Who doesn't?”

“Well, Lunacharsky and the Russians. And Billy Jo Rankin, of course. There are still people who worry that the Machine will blow up the-world or tip the Earth's axis, or something. But what's impressed most of the scientists is how careful the instructions are, and how many different ways they go about trying to explain the same thing.”

“And what does Eleanor Arroway say?”

“She says if they want to do us in, they'll be here in twenty-five years or so and there's nothing we could do in twenty-five years to protect ourselves. They're too far ahead of us. So she says. Build it, and if you're worried about environmental hazards, build it in a remote place. Professor Drumlin says you can build it in downtown Pasadena for all he cares. In fact, he says he'll be there every minute it takes to construct the Machine, so he'll be the first to go if it blows up.”

“Drumlin, he's the fellow who figured out that this was the design for a Machine, right?”

“Not exactly, he-” “I'll read all the briefing material in time for that Thursday meeting. You got anything else for me?”

“Are you seriously considering letting Hadden build the Machine?”

“Well, it's not only up to me, as you know. That treaty they're hammering out in Paris gives us about a onequarter say. The Russians have a quarter, the Chinese and the Japanese together have a quarter, and the rest of the world has a quarter, roughly speaking. A lot of nations want to build the Machine, or at least parts of it. They're thinking about prestige, and new industries, new knowledge. As long as no one gets a jump on us, that all sounds fine to me. It's possible Hadden might have a piece of it. What's the problem? Don't you think he's technically competent?”

“He certainly is. It's just—” “If there's nothing more, Ken, I'll see you Thursday, virus willing.”

As der Heer was shutting the door and entering the adjacent sitting room, there was an explosive presidential sneeze. The Warrant Officer of the Day, sitting stiffly on a couch, was visibly startled. The briefcase at his feet was crammed with authorization codes for nuclear war. Der Heer calmed him with a repetitive gesture of his hand, fingers spread, palm down. The officer gave an apologetic smile.

“That's Vega? That's what all the fuss is about?” the President asked with some disappointment. The photo opportunity for the press was now over, and her eyes had become almost dark-adapted after the onslaught of flashbulbs and television lighting. The pictures of the President gazing steely-eyed through the Naval Observatory telescope that appeared in all the papers the next day were, of course, a minor sham. She had been unable to see anything at all through the telescope until the photographers had left and darkness returned. “Why does it wiggle?”

“It's turbulence in the air, Ms. President,” der Heer explained. “Warm bubbles of air go by and distort the image.”

“Like looking at Si across the breakfast table when there's a toaster between us. I can remember seeing one whole side of his face fall off,” she said affectionately, raising her voice so the presidential consort, standing nearby talking to the uniformed Commandant of the Observatory, could overhear.

“Yeah, no toaster on the breakfast table these days,” he replied amiably.

Seymour Lasker was before his retirement a high official of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. He had met his wife decades before when she was representing the New York Girl Coat Company, and they had fallen in love over a protracted labor settlement. Considering the present novelty of both their positions, the apparent health of their relationship was noteworthy.

“I can do without the toaster, but I'm not getting enough breakfasts with Si.” She inflected her eyebrows in his general direction, and then returned to the monocular eyepiece. “It looks like a blue amoeba, all…

squishy.”

After the difficult crew-selection meeting, the President was in a lighthearted frame of mind. Her cold was almost gone.

“What if there was no turbulence, Ken? What would I see then?”

“Then it would be just like Space Telescope above the Earth's atmosphere. You'd see a steady, unflickering point of light.”

“Just the star? Just Vega? No planets, no rings, no laser battle stations?”

“No, Ms. President. All that would be much too small and faint to see even with a very big telescope.”

“Well, I hope your scientists know what they're doing,” she said in a near whisper. “We're making an awful lot of commitments on something we've never seen.”

Der Heer was a little taken aback. “But we've seen thirty-one thousand pages of text—pictures, words, plus a huge primer.”

“In my book, that's not the same as seeing it. It's a little too… inferential. Don't tell me about scientists all over the world getting the same data. I know all that. And don't tell me about how clear and unambiguous the blueprints for the Machine are. I know that too. And if we back out, someone else is sure to build the Machine. I know all those things. But I'm still nervous.”

The party ambled back through the Naval Observatory compound to the Vice President's residence.

Tentative agreements on crew selection had been painstakingly worked out in Paris in the last weeks. The United States and the Soviet Union had argued for two crew positions each; on such matters they were reliable allies. But it was hard to sustain this argument with the other nations in the World Message Consortium. These days it was much more difficult for the United States and the Soviet Union—even on issues on which they agreed—to work their way with the other nations of the world than had once been the case.

The enterprise was now widely touted as an activity of the human species. The name “World Message Consortium” was about to be changed to “World Machine Consortium.” Nations with pieces of the Message tried to use this fact as an entree for one of their nationals as a member of the crew. The Chinese had quietly argued that by the middle of the next century there would be one and a half billion of them in the world, but with many born as only children because of the Chinese experiment on state-supported birth control. Those children, once grown, would be brighter, they predicted, and more emotionally secure than children of other nations with less stringent rules on family size. Since the Chinese would thus be playing a more prominent role in world affairs in another fifty years, they argued, they deserved at least one of the five seats on the Machine. It was an argument now being discussed in many nations by officials with no responsibility for the Message or the Machine.

Europe and Japan surrendered crew representation in exchange for major responsibility for the construction of Machine components, which they believed would be of major economic benefit. In the end, a seat was reserved for the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and India, with the fifth seat undecided.

This represented a long and difficult multilateral negotiation, with population size, economic, industrial, and military power, present political alignments, and even a little of the history of the human species as considerations.

For the fifth seat, Brazil and Indonesia made representations based on population size and geographical balance; Sweden proposed a moderating role in case of political disputes; Egypt, Iraq, Palostan and Saudi Arabia argued on grounds of religious equity. Others suggested that at least this fifth seat should be decided on grounds of individual merit rather than national affiliation. For the moment, the decision was left in limbo, a wild card for later.

In the four selected nations, scientists, national leaders, and others were going through the exercise of choosing their candidates. A kind of national debate ensued in the United States. In surveys and opinion polls, religious leaders, sports heroes, astronauts, Congressional Medal of Honor winners, scientists, movie actors, a former presidential spouse, television talk show hosts and news anchors, members of Congress, millionaires with political ambitions, foundation executives, singers of country-and-western and rock-androll music, university presidents, and the current Miss America were all endorsed with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

By long tradition, ever since the Vice President's residence was moved to the grounds of the Naval Observatory, the house servants had been Filipino petty officers on active duty in the U. S. Navy. Wearing smart blue blazers with a patch embroidered “Vice President of the United States,” they were now-serving coffee. Most of the participants in the all-day crew-selection meeting had not been invited to this informal evening session.

It had been Seymour Lasker's singular fate to be America's first First Gentleman. He bore his burden—the editorial cartoons, the smarmy jokes, the witticism that he had gone where no man had gone before—with such di-rectness and good nature that at last America was able to forgive him for marrying a woman with the nerve to imagine that she could lead half the world. Lasker had the Vice President's wife and teenaged son laughing uproariously as the President guided der Heer into an adjacent library annex.

“All right,” she began. “There's no official decision to be made today and no public announcement of our deliberations. But let's see if we can sum up. We don't know what the goddamn Machine will do, but it's a reasonable guess that it goes to Vega. Nobody has the slightest idea of how it would work or even how long it would take. Tell me again, how far away is Vega?” “Twenty-six light-years, Ms. President.”

“And so if this Machine were a kind of spaceship and could travel as fast as light—1 know it can't travel as fast as light, only close to it, don't interrupt—then it would take twenty-six years for it to get there, but only as we measure time here on Earth. Is that right, der Heer?”

“Yes. Exactly. Plus maybe a year to get up to light speed and a year to decelerate into the Vega system.

But from the standpoint of the crew members, it would take a lot less. Maybe only a couple of years, depending on how close to light speed they travel.”

“For a biologist, der Heer, you've been learning a lot of astronomy.”

`Thank you, Ms. President. I've tried to immerse myself in the subject.”

She stared at him for just a moment and then went on. “So as long as the Machine goes very close to the speed of light, it might not matter much how old the crew members are. But if it takes ten or twenty years or more—and you say that's possible—then we ought to have somebody young. Now, the Russians aren't buying this argument. We understand it's between Arkhangelsky and Lunacharsky, both in their sixties.”

She had read the names somewhat haltingly off a file card in front of her.

“The Chinese are almost certainly sending Xi. He's also in his sixties. So if I thought they knew what they're doing, I'd be tempted to say, “What the hell, let's send a sixty-year-old man. ” “

Drumlin, der Heer knew, was exactly sixty years old. “On the other hand…” he counterposed. “I know, I know. The Indian doctor; she's in her forties…. In a way, this is the stupidest thing I ever heard of. We're picking somebody to enter the Olympics, and we don't know what the events are. I don't know why we're talking about sending scientists. Mahatma Gandhi, that's who we should send. Or, while we're at it, Jesus Christ. Don't tell me they're not available, der Heer. I know that.”

“When you don't know what the events are, you send a decathlon champion.”

“And then you discover the event is chess, or oratory, or sculpture, and your athlete finishes last. Okay, you say that it ought to be someone who's thought about extraterrestrial life and who's been intimately involved with the receipt and decrypting of the Message.”

“At least a person like that will be intimately involved with how the Vegans think. Or at least how they expect us to think.”

“And for really top-rate people, you say that reduces the field to three.”

Again she consulted her notes. “Arroway, Drumlin, and… the one who thinks he's a Roman general.”

“Dr. Valerian, Ms. President. I don't know that he thinks he's a Roman general; it's just his name.” “Valerian wouldn't even answer the Selection Committee's questionnaire. He wouldn't consider it because he won't leave his wife? Is that right? I'm not criticizing him. He's no dope. He knows how to make a relationship work. It's not that his wife is sick or anything?”

“No, as far as I know, she's in excellent health.”

“Good. Good for them. Send her a personal note from me—something about how she must be some woman for an astronomer to give up the universe for her. But fancy up the language, der Heer. You know what I want. And throw in some quotation. Poetry, maybe. But not too gushy.” She waved her index finger at him. “Those Valerians can teach us all something. Why don't we invite them to a state dinner? The King of Nepal's here in two weeks. That'll be about right.”

Der Heer was scribbling furiously. He would have to call the White House Appointments Secretary at home as soon as this meeting was over, and he had a still more urgent call. He had not been able to get to the telephone for hours. “So that leaves Arroway and Drumlin. She's something like twenty years younger, but he's in terrific physical shape. He hang-glides, skydives, scuba dives… he's a brilliant scientist, he helped in a big way to crack the Message, and he'll have a fine time arguing with all the other old men. He didn't work on nuclear weapons, did he? I don't want to send anybody who worked on nuclear weapons.

“Now, Arroway's also a brilliant scientist. She's led this whole Argus Project, she knows all the ins and outs of the Message, and she has an inquiring mind. Everybody says that her interests are very broad. And she'd convey a younger American image.” She paused.

“And you like her, Ken. Nothing wrong with that. I like her too. But sometimes she's a loose cannon. Did you listen carefully to her questionnaire?”

“I think I know the passage you're talking about, Ms. President. But the Selection Committee had been asking her questions for almost eight hours and sometimes she gets annoyed at what she considers dumb questions. Drumlin's the same way. Maybe she learned it from him. She was his student for a while, you know.”

“Yeah, he said some dumb things, too. Here, it's supposed to be all cued up for us on this VCR. First Arroway's questionnaire, then Drumlin's. Just press the “play” button, Ken.”

On the television screen, Ellie was being interviewed in her office at the Argus Project. He could even make out the yellowing piece of paper with the quote from Kafka. Perhaps, all things considered, Ellie would have been happier had she received only silence from the stars. There were lines around her mouth and bags under her eyes. There were also two unfamiliar vertical creases on her forehead just above her nose. Ellie on videotape looked terribly tired, and der Heer felt a pang of guilt.

“What do I think of “the world population crisis'?” Ellie was saying. “You mean am I for it or against it?

You think this is a key question I'm going to be asked on Vega, and you want to make sure I give the right answer? Okay. Overpopulation is why I'm in favor of homosexuality and a celibate clergy. A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.”

Ellie waited, deadpan, indeed frozen, for the next question. The President had pushed the “pause” button.

“Now, I admit that some of the questions may not have been the best,” the President continued. “But we didn't want anybody in such a prominent position, on a project with really positive international implications, who turns out to be some racist bozo. We want the developing world on our side in this one. We had a good reason to ask a question like that. Don't you find her answer shows some… lack of tact? She's a bit of a wiseass, your Dr. Arroway. Now take a look at Drumlin.”

Wearing a blue polka-dot bow tie, Drumlin was looking tanned and very fit. “Yes, I know we all have emotions,” he was saying, “but let's bear in mind exactly what emotions are. They're motivations for adaptive behavior from a time when we were too stupid to figure things out. But I can figure out that if a pack of hyenas are headed toward me with their fangs bared there's trouble ahead. I don't need a few cc's of adrenaline to help me understand the situation. I can even figure out that it might be important for me to make some genetic contribution to the next generation. I don't really need testosterone in my bloodstream to help me along. Are you sure that an extraterrestrial being far in advance of us is going to be saddled with emotions? I know there are people who think I'm too cold, too reserved. But if you really want to understand the extraterrestrials, you'll send me. I'm more like them than anyone else you'll find.”

“Some choice!” the President said. “The one's an atheist, and the other thinks he's from Vega already. Why do we have to send scientists? Why can't we send somebody… normal? Just a rhetorical question,” she quickly added. “I know why we have to send scientists. The Message is about science and it's written in scientific language. Science is what we know we share with the beings on Vega. No, those are good reasons, Ken. I remember them.”

“She's not an atheist. She's an agnostic. Her mind is open. She's not trapped by dogma. She's intelligent, she's tough, and she's very professional. The range of her knowledge is broad. She's just the person we need in this situation.”

“Ken, I'm pleased by your commitment to uphold the integrity of this project. But there's a great deal of fear out there. Don't think I don't know how much the men out there have had to swallow already. More than half the people I talk to believe we've got no business building this thing. If there's no turning back, they want to send somebody absolutely safe. Arroway may be all the things you say she is, but safe she isn't.

I'm catching a lot of heat from the Hill, from the Earth-Firsters, from my own National Committee, from the churches. I guess she impressed Palmer Joss in that California meeting, but she managed to infuriate Billy Jo Rankin. He called me up yesterday and said “Ms. President'—he can't disguise his distaste at saying “Ms. — 'Ms. President,” he says, “that Machine's gonna fly straight to God or the Devil. Whichever one it is, you better send an honest-to-God Christian. ” He tried to use his relationship with Palmer Joss to muscle me, for God's sake. I don't think there's any doubt he was angling to go himself. Drumlin's going to be much more acceptable to somebody like Rankin than Arroway is.

“I recognize Drumlin's something of a cold fish. But he's reliable, patriotic, sound. He has impeccable scientific credentials. And he wants to go. No, it has to be Drumlin. The best I can offer is to have her as backup.”

“Can I tell her that?”

“We can't have Arroway knowing before Drumlin, can we? I'll let you know the moment a final decision is made and we've informed Drumlin…. Oh, cheer up, Ken. Don't you want her to stay here on Earth?”

It was after six when Ellie finished her briefing of the State Department's “Tiger Team” that was backstopping the American negotiators in Paris. Der Heer had promised to call her as soon as the crewselection meeting was done. He wanted her to hear from him whether she had been selected, not from anybody else. She had been insufficiently deferential to the examiners, she knew, and might lose out for that reason among a dozen others. Nevertheless, she guessed, there might still be a chance.

There was a message waiting for her at the hotel—not a pink “while you were out” form filled in by the hotel operator, but a sealed unstamped hand-delivered letter. It read: “Meet me at the National Science and Technology Museum, 8:00 pm tonight. Palmer Joss.”

No hello, no explanations, no agenda, and no yours truly, she thought. This really is a man of faith. The stationery was her hotel's, and there was no return address. He must have sauntered in this afternoon, knowing from the Secretary of State himself, for all she knew, that Ellie was in town, and expecting her to be in. It had been a tiresome day, and she was annoyed at having to spend any time away from piecing together the Message. Although a part of her was reluctant to go, she showered, changed, bought a bag of cashews, and was in a taxi in forty-five minutes.

It was about an hour before closing, and the museum was almost empty. Huge dark machinery was stuffed into every corner of a vast entrance hall. Here was the pride of the nineteenth-century shoemaking, textile, and coal industries. A steam calliope from the 1876 Exposition was playing a jaunty piece, originally written for brass, she judged, for a tourist group from West Africa. Joss was nowhere to be seen. She suppressed the impulse to turn on her heel and leave.

If you had to meet Palmer Joss in this museum, she thought, and the only thing you had ever talked to him about was religion and the Message, where would you meet him? It was a little like the frequency selection problem in SETI: You haven't yet received a message from an advanced civilization and you have to decide on which frequencies these beings—about whom you know virtually nothing, not even their existence—have decided to transmit. It must involve some knowledge that both you and they share. You and they certainly both know what the most abundant kind of atom in the universe is, and the single radio frequency at which it characteristically absorbs and emits. That was the logic by which the 1420 megahertz line of neutral atomic hydrogen had been included in all the early SETI searches. What would the equivalent be here? Alexander Graham Bell's telephone? The telegraph? Marconi's— Of course.

“Does this museum have a Foucault pendulum?” she asked the guard.

The sound of her heels echoed on the marble floors as she approached the rotunda. Joss was leaning over the railing, peering at a mosaic tile representation of the cardinal directions. There were small vertical hour marks, some upright, others evidently knocked down by the bob earlier in the day. Around 7 PM. SOmeone had stopped its swing, and it now hung motionless. They were entirely alone. He had heard her approach for a minute at least and had said nothing.

“You've decided that prayer can stop a pendulum?” She smiled.

`That would be an abuse of faith,” he replied. “I don't see why. You'd make an awful lot of converts. It's easy enough for God to do, and if I remember correctly, you talk to Him regularly…. That's not it, huh?

You really want to test my faith in the physics of harmonic oscillators? Okay.”

A part of her was amazed that Joss would put her through this test, but she was determined to pass muster. She let her handbag slide off her shoulder and removed her shoes. He gracefully hurdled the brass guardrail and helped her over. They half walked and half slid down the tiled slope until they were standing alongside the bob. It had a dull black finish, and she wondered whether it was made of steel or lead.

“You'll have to give me a hand,” she said. She could easily put her arms around the bob, and together they wrestled it until it was inclined at a good angle from the vertical and flush against her face. Joss was watching her closely. He didn't ask her whether she was sure, he neglected to warn her about falling forward, he offered no cautions about giving the bob a horizontal component of velocity as she let go.

Behind her was a good meter or meter and a half of level floor, before it started sloping upward to become a circumferential wall. If she kept her wits about her, she said to herself, this was a lead-pipe cinch. She let go.

The bob fell away from her. The period of a simple pendulum, she thought a little giddily, is 2? square root L over g, where L is the length of the pendulum and g is the acceleration due to gravity. Because of friction in the bearing, the pendulum can never swing back farther than its original position. All I have to do is not sway forward, she reminded herself.

Near the opposite railing, the bob slowed and came to a dead stop. Reversing its trajectory, it was suddenly moving much faster than she had expected. As it careened toward her, it seemed to grow alarmingly in size. It was enormous and almost upon her. She gasped.

“I flinched,” Ellie said in disappointment as the bob fell away from her. “Only the littlest bit.” “No, I flinched.”

“You believe. You believe in science. There's only a tiny smidgen of doubt.”

“No, that's not it. That was a million years of brains fighting a billion years of instinct. That's why your job is so much easier than mine.”

“In this matter, our jobs are the same. My turn,” he said, and jarringly grabbed the bob at the highest point in its trajectory.

“But we're not testing your belief in the conservation of energy.”

He smiled and tried to dig in his feet. “What you doin” down there?” a voice asked. “Are you folks crazy?” A museum guard, dutifully checking that all visitors would leave by closing time, had come upon this unlikely prospect of a man, a woman, a pit and a pendulum in an otherwise deserted recess of the cavernous building.

“Oh, it's all right, officer,” Joss said cheerfully. “We're just testing our faith.”

“You can't do that in the Smithsonian Institution,” the guard replied. “This is a museum.”

Laughing, Joss and Ellie wrestled the bob to a nearly stationary position and clambered up the sloping tile walls.

“It must be permitted by the First Amendment,” she said.

“Or the First Commandment,” he replied. She slipped on her shoes, shouldered her bag, and, head held high, accompanied Joss and the guard out of the rotunda. Without identifying themselves and without being recognized, they managed to talk him out of arresting them. But they were escorted out of the museum by a tight phalanx of uniformed personnel, who were concerned perhaps that Ellie and Joss might next sidle aboard the steam calliope in pursuit of an elusive God.

The street was deserted. They walked wordlessly along the Mall. The night was clear, and Ellie made out Lyra against the horizon.

“The bright one over there. That's Vega,” she said. He stared at it for a long time. “That decoding was a brilliant achievement,” he said at last.

“Oh, nonsense. It was trivial. It was the easiest message an advanced civilization could think of. It would have been a genuine disgrace if we hadn't been able to figure it out.”

“You don't take compliments well, I've noticed. No, this is one of those discoveries that change the future. Our expectations of the future, anyway. It's like fire, or writing, or agriculture. Or the Annunciation.”

He stared again at Vega. “If you could have a seat in that Machine, if you could ride it back to its Sender, what do you think you would see?”

“Evolution is a stochastic process. There are just too many possibilities to make reasonable predictions about what life elsewhere might be like. If you had seen the Earth before the origin of life, would you have predicted a katydid or a giraffe?”

“I know the answer to that question. I guess you imagine that we just make this stuff up, that we read it in some book, or pick it up in some prayer tent. But that's not how it is. I have certain, positive knowledge from my own direct experience. I can't put it any plainer than that. I have seen God face to face.” About the depth of his commitment there seemed no doubt. “Tell me about it.” So he did.

“Okay,” she said finally, “you were clinically dead, then you revived, and you remember rising through the darkness into a bright light. You saw a radiance with a human form that you took to be God. But there was nothing in the experience that told you the radiance made the universe or laid down moral law. The experience is an experience. You were deeply moved by it, no question. But there are other possible explanations.”

“Such as?”

“Well, like birth. Birth is rising through a long, dark tunnel into abrilliant light. Don't forget how brilliant it is—the baby has spent nine months in the dark. Birth is its first encounter with light. Think of how amazed and awed you'd be in your first contact with color, or light and shade, or the human face—which you're probably preprogrammed to recognize. Maybe, if you almost die, the odometer gets set back to zero for a moment. Understand, I don't insist on this explanation. It's just one of many possibilities. I'm suggesting you may have misinterpreted the experience.”

“You haven't seen what I've seen.” He looked up once more at the cold flickering blue-white light from Vega, and then turned to her. “Don't you ever feel… lost in your universe? How do you know what to do, how to behave, if there's no God? Just obey the law or get arrested?”

“You're not worried about being lost, Palmer. You're worried about not being central, not the reason the universe was created. There's plenty of order in my universe. Gravitation, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, superunification, they all involve laws. And as for behavior, why can't we figure out what's in our best interest—as a species?”

“That's a warmhearted and noble view of the world, I'm sure, and I'd be the last to deny that there's goodness in the human heart. But how much cruelty has been done when there was no love of God?”

“And how much cruelty when there was? Savonarola and Torquemada loved God, or so they said. Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave. You want people to believe in God so they'll obey the law. That's the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by an all-seeing God for whatever the police overlook. You sell human beings short.

“Palmer, you think if I haven't had your religious experience I can't appreciate the magnificence of your god. But it's just the opposite. I listen to you, and I think. His god is too small! One paltry planet, a few thousand years—hardly worth the attention of a minor deity, much less the Creator of the universe.”

“You're confusing me with some other preacher. That museum was Brother Rankin's territory. I'm prepared for a universe billions of years old. I just say the scientists haven't proved it.”

“And I say you haven't understood the evidence. How can it benefit the people if the conventional wisdom, the religious “truths,” are a lie? When you really believe that people can be adults, you'll preach a different sermon.”

There was a brief silence, punctuated only by the echoes of their footfalls.

“I'm sorry if I've been a little too strident,” she said. “It happens to me from time to time.”

“I give you my word. Dr. Arroway, I'll carefully ponder what you've said this evening. You've raised some questions I should have answers for. But in the same spirit, let me ask you a few questions. Okay?” She nodded, and he continued. “Think of what consciousness feels like, what it feels like this minute. Does that feel like billions of tiny atoms wiggling in place? And beyond the biological machinery, where in science can a child learn what love is? Here's—”

Her beeper buzzed. It was probably Ken with the news she had been waiting for. If so, it had been a very long meeting for him. Maybe it was good news nevertheless. She glanced at the letters and numbers forming in the liquid crystal: Ken's office number. There were no public telephones in sight, but after a few minutes they were able to flag down a taxicab.

“I'm sorry I have to leave so suddenly,” she apologized. “I enjoyed our conversation, and I'll think seriously about your questions…. You wanted to pose one more?”

“Yes. What is there in the precepts of science that keeps a scientist from doing evil?”