PART II
THE
MACHINE 
The Almighty Lecturer, by displaying the principles of 
science in the structure of the universe, has invited 
man to study and to imitation. It is as if He had said to 
the inhabitants of this globe that we call ours, “I have 
made an earth for man to dwell upon, and I have 
rendered the starry heavens visible, to teach him 
science and the arts. he can now provide for his own 
comfort, and learn from my munificence to all to be 
kind to each other.
	-THOMAS PAINE
	The Age of Reason (1794)

CHAPTER 10
Precession of the
Equinoxes 
Do we, holding that gods exist,
deceive ourselves with insubstantial dreams
and lies, while random careless chance and
change alone control the world?
	-EURIPIDES
	Hecuba

It was odd the way it had worked out. She had imagined that Palmer Joss would come to the Argus facility, 
watch the signal being gathered in by the radio telescopes, and take note of the huge room full of magnetic 
tapes and disks on which the previous many months of data were stored. He would ask a few scientific 
questions and then examine, in its multiplicity of zeros and ones, some of the reams of computer printout 
displaying the still incomprehensible Message. She hadn’t imagined spending hours arguing philosophy or 
theology. But Joss had refused to come to Argus. It wasn’t magnetic tape he wanted to scrutinize, he said, it 
was human character. Peter Valerian would have been ideal for this discussion: unpretentious, able to 
communicate clearly, and bulwarked by a genuine Christian faith that engaged him daily. But the President 
had apparently vetoed the idea; she had wanted a small meeting and had explicitly asked that Ellie attend.
	Joss had insisted that the discussion be held here, at the Bible Science Research Institute and 
Museum in Modesto, California. She glanced past der Heer and out the glass partition that separated the 
library from the exhibit area. Just outside was a plaster impression from a Red River sandstone of dinosaur 
footprints interspersed with those of a pedestrian in sandals, proving, so the caption said, that Man and 
Dinosaur were contemporaries, at least in Texas. Mesozoic shoemakers seemed also to be implied. The 
conclusion drawn in the caption was that evolution was a fraud. The opinion of many paleontologists that 
the sandstone was the fraud remained, Ellie had noted two hours earlier, unmentioned. The intermingled 
footprints were part of a vast exhibit called “Darwin’s Default.” To its left was a Foucault pendulum 
demonstrating the scientific assertion, this one apparently uncontested, that the Earth turns. To its right, 
Ellie could see part of a lavish Matsushita holography unit on the podium of a small theater, from which 
three-dimensional images of the most eminent divines could communicate directly to the faithful.
	Communicating still more directly to her at this moment was the Reverend Billy Jo Rankin. She had 
not known until the last moment that Joss had invited Rankin, and she was surprised at the news. There had 
been continuous theological disputation between them, on whether and Advent was at had, whether 
Doomsday is a necessary accompaniment of the Advent, and on the role of miracles in the ministry, among 
other matters. But they had recently effected a widely publicized reconciliation, done, it was said, for the 
common good of the fundamentalist community in America. The signs of rapprochement between the United 
States and the Soviet Union were having worldwide ramifications in the arbitration of disputes. Holding the 
meeting here was perhaps part of the price Palmer Joss had to pay for the reconciliation. Conceivably, 
Rankin felt the exhibits would provide factual support for his position, were there any scientific points in 
dispute. Now, two hours into their discussion, Rankin was still alternately castigating and imploring. His suit 
was immaculately tailored, his nails freshly manicured, and his beaming smile stood in some contrast to 
Joss’s rumpled, distracted, and more weather-beaten appearance. Joss, the faintest of smiles on his face, had 
his eyes half closed and his head bowed in what seemed very close to an attitude of prayer. He had not had 
to say much. Rankin’s remarks so far—except for the Rapture rap, she guessed—were doctrinally 
indistinguishable from Joss’s television address.
	“You scientists are so shy,” Rankin was saying. “You love to hide your light under a bushel basket. 
You’d never guess what’s in those articles from the titles. Einstein’s first work on the Theory of Relativity 
was called ‘The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.’ No E=mc2 up front. No sir. ‘The Electrodynamics of 
Moving Bodies.’ I suppose if God appeared to a whole gaggle of scientists, maybe at one of those big 
Association meetings, they’d write something all about it and call it, maybe, ‘On Spontaneous Dendritoform 
Combustion in Air.’ They’d have lots of equations; they’d talk about ‘economy of hypothesis’; but they’d 
never say a word about God.
	“Y’see, you scientists are too skeptical.” From the sidewise motion of his head, Ellie deduced that 
der Heer was also included in this assessment. “You question everything, or try to. You never heard about 
‘Leave well enough alone,’ or ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ You always want to check out if a thing is what 
you call ‘true.’ And ‘true’ means only empirical, sense data, things you can see and touch. There’s no room 
for inspiration or revelation in your world. Right from the beginning you rule out of court almost everything 
religion is about. I mistrust the scientists because the scientists mistrust everything.”
	Despite herself, she thought Rankin had put his case well. And he was supposed to be the dumb 
one among the modern video evangelists. No, not dumb, she corrected herself; he was the one who 
considered his parishioners dumb. He could, for all she knew, be very smart indeed. Should she respond at 
all? Both der Heer and the local museum people were recording the discussion, and although both groups 
had agreed that the recordings were not for public use, she worried about embarrassing the project or the 
President if she spoke her mind. but Rankin’s remarks had become increasingly outrageous, and no 
interventions were being made either by der Heer or by Joss.
	“I suppose you want a reply,” she found herself saying. “There isn’t an ‘official’ scientific position 
on any of these questions, and I can’t pretend to talk for all scientists or even for the Argus Project. But I 
can make some comments, if you’d like.”
	Rankin nodded his head vigorously, smiling encouragement. Languidly, Joss merely waited.
	“I want you to understand that I’m not attacking anybody’s belief system. As far as I’m concerned, 
you’re entitled to any doctrine you like, even if it’s demonstrably wrong. And many of the things you’re 
saying, and that the Reverend Joss has said—I saw you talk on television a few weeks ago—can’t be 
dismissed instantly. It takes a little work. But let me try to explain why I think they’re improbable.”
	So far, she though, I’ve been the soul of restraint.
	“You’re uncomfortable with scientific skepticism. But the reason it developed is that the world is 
complicated. It’s subtle. Everybody’s first idea isn’t necessarily right. Also, people are capable of self-
deception. Scientists, too. All sorts of socially abhorrent doctrines have at one time or another been 
supported by scientists, well-known scientists, famous brand-name scientists. And, of course, politicians. 
And respected religious leaders. Slavery, for instance, or the Nazi brand of racism. Scientists make mistakes, 
theologians make mistakes, everybody makes mistakes. It’s part of being human. You say it yourselves: ‘To 
err is.’
	“So the way you avoid the mistakes, or at least reduce the chance that you’ll make one, is to be 
skeptical. You test the ideas. You check them out by rigorous standards of evidence. I don’t think there is 
such a thing as a received truth. But when you let the different opinions debate, when any skeptic can 
perform his or her own experiment to check some contention out, then the truth tends to emerge. That’s the 
experience of the whole history of science. It isn’t a perfect approach, but it’s the only one that seems to 
work.
	“Now, when I look at religion, I see lots of contending opinions. For example, the Christians think 
the universe is a finite number of years old. From the exhibits out there, it’s clear that some Christians (and 
Jews, and Muslims) think that the universe is only six thousand years old. The Hindus, on the other had—
and there are lots of Hindus in the world—think that the universe is infinitely old, with an infinite number of 
subsidiary creations and destructions along the way. Now they can’t both be right. Either the universe is a 
certain number of years old or it’s infinitely old. Your friends out there”—she gestured out the glass door 
toward several museum workers ambling past “Darwin’s Default”—”ought to debate Hindus. God seems to 
have told them something different from what he told you. But you tend to talk only to yourselves.”
	Maybe a little too strong? she asked herself.
	“The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can’t all be correct. And 
what if all of you are wrong? It’s a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the 
way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I’m not any more skeptical about 
your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they’re 
called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation.”
	Joss now stirred a little, but it was Ranking who replied.
	“The revelations, the confirmed predictions by God in the Old Testament and the New are legion. 
The coming of the Saviour is foretold in Isaiah fifty-three, in Zechariah fourteen, in First Chronicles 
seventeen. That He would be born in Bethlehem was prophesied in Micah five. That He would come from 
the line of David was foretold in Matthew one and—”
	“In Luke. But that ought to be an embarrassment for you, not a fulfilled prophecy. Matthew and 
Luke give Jesus totally different genealogies. Worse than that, they trace the lineage from David to Joseph, 
not from David to Mary. Or don’t you believe in God the Father?”
	Rankin continued smoothly on. Perhaps he hadn’t understood her. “...the Ministry and Suffering of 
Jesus are foretold in Isaiah fifty-two and fifty-three, and the Twenty-second Psalm. That He would be 
betrayed for thirty pieces of silver is explicit in Zechariah eleven. If you’re honest, you can’t ignore the 
evidence of fulfilled prophecy.
	“And the Bible speaks to our own time. Israel and the Arabs, Gog and Magog, American and 
Russia, nuclear war—it’s all there in the Bible. Anybody with an ounce of sense can see it. You don’t have 
to be some fancy college professor.”
	“Your trouble,” she replied, “is a failure of the imagination. These prophecies are—almost ever one 
of them—vague, ambiguous, imprecise, open to fraud. They admit lots of possible interpretations. Even the 
straightforward prophecies direct from the top you try to weasel out of—like Jesus’ promise that the 
Kingdom of God would come in the lifetime of some people in his audience. And don’t tell me the Kingdom 
of God is within me. His audience understood him quite literally. You only quote the passages that seem to 
you fulfilled, and ignore the rest. And don’t forget there was a hunger to see prophecy fulfilled.
	“But imagine that your kind of god—omnipotent, omniscient, compassionate—really wanted to 
leave a record for future generations, to make his existence unmistakable to, say, the remote descendants of 
Moses. It’s easy, trivial. Just a few enigmatic phrases, and some fierce commandment that they be passed on 
unchanged...”
	“Joss leaned forward almost imperceptibly. “Such as...?”
	“Such as ‘The Sun is a star.’ Or ‘Mars is a rusty place with deserts and volcanos, like Sinai.’ Or ‘A 
body in motion tends to remain in motion.’ Or—let’s see now”—she quickly scribbled some numbers on a 
pad—”‘The Earth weighs a million million million million times as much as a child.’ Or—I recognize that 
both of you seem to have some trouble with special relativity, but it’s confirmed every day routinely in 
particle accelerators and cosmic rays—how about ‘There are no privileged frames of reference’? Or even 
‘Thou shalt not travel faster than light.’ anything they couldn’t possible have known three thousand years 
ago.”
	“Any others?” Joss asked.
	“Well, there’s an indefinite number of them—or at least one for every principal of physics. Let’s 
see... ‘Heat and light hid in the smallest pebble.’ Or even ‘The way of the Earth is as two, but the way of the 
lodestone is as three.’ I’m trying to suggest that the gravitational force follows an inverse square law, while 
the magnetic dipole force follows an inverse cube law. Or in biology”—she nodded toward der Heer, who 
seemed to have taken a vow of silence—”how about ‘Two strands entwined is the secret of life’?”
	“Now that’s an interesting one,” said Joss. “You’re talking, of course, about DNA. But you know 
the physician’s staff, the symbol of medicine? Army doctors wear it on their lapels. It’s called the caduceus. 
Shows two serpents intertwined. It’s a perfect double helix. From ancient times that’s been the symbol of 
preserving life. Isn’t this exactly the kind of connection you’re suggesting?”
	“Well, I thought it’s a spiral, not a helix. But if there are enough symbols and enough prophecies 
and enough myth and folklore, eventually a few of them are going to fit some current scientific 
understanding purely by accident. But I can’t be sure. Maybe you’re right. Maybe the caduceus is a message 
from God. Of course, it’s not a Christian symbol, or a symbol of any of the major religions today. I don’t 
suppose you’d want to argue that the gods talked only to the ancient Greeks. what I’m saying is, if God 
wanted to send us a message, and ancient writings were the only way he could think of doing it, he could 
have done a better job. And he hardly had to confine himself to writings. Why isn’t there a monster crucifix 
orbiting the Earth? Why isn’t the surface of the Moon covered with the Ten Commandments? Why should 
God be so clear in the Bible and so obscure in the world?”
	Joss had apparently been ready to reply a few sentences back, a look of genuine pleasure 
unexpectedly on his face, but Ellie’s rush of words was gathering momentum, and perhaps he felt it impolite 
to interrupt.
	“Also, why would you think that God has abandoned us? He used to chat with patriarchs and 
prophets every second Tuesday, you believe. He’s omnipotent, you say, and omniscient. So it’s no particular 
effort for him to remind us directly, unambiguously, of his wishes at least a few times in every generation. So 
how come, fellas? Why don’t we see him with crystal clarity?”
	“We do.” Rankin put enormous feeling in this phrase. “He is all around us. Our prayers are 
answered. Tens of millions of people in this country have been born again and have witnessed God’s 
glorious grace. the Bible speaks to us as clearly in this day as it did in the time of Moses and Jesus.”
	“Oh, come off it. You know what I mean. Where are the burning bushes, the pillars of fire, the 
great voice that says ‘I am that I am’ booming down at us out of the sky? Why should God manifest himself 
in such subtle and debatable ways when he can make his presence completely unambiguous?”
	“But a voice from the sky is just what you found.” Joss made this comment casually while Ellie 
paused for breath. He held her eyes with his own.
	Rankin quickly picked up the thought. “Absolutely. Just what I was going to say. Abraham and 
Moses, they didn’t have radios or telescopes. They couldn’t have heard the Almighty talking on FM. Maybe 
today God talks to us in new ways and permits us to have a new understanding. Or maybe it’s not God—”
	“Yes, Satan. I’ve heard some talk about that. It sounds crazy. Let’s leave that one alone for a 
moment, if it’s okay with you. You think the Message is the Voice of God, your God. Where in your 
religion does God answer a prayer by repeating the prayer back?”
	“I wouldn’t call a Nazi newsreel a prayer, myself,” Joss said. “You say it’s to attract our attention.”
	“Then why do you think God has chosen to talk to scientists? Why not preachers like yourself?”
	“God talks to me all the time.” Rankin’s index finger audibly thumped his sternum. “and the 
Reverend Joss here. God has told me that a revelation is at hand. When the end of the world is nigh, the 
Rapture will be upon us, the judgment of sinners, the ascension to heaven of the elect—”
	“Did he tell you he was going to make that announcement in the radio spectrum? Is your 
conversation with God recorded somewhere, so we can verify that it really happened? Or do we have only 
your say-so? Why would God choose to announce it to radio astronomers and not to men and women of the 
cloth? Don’t you think it’s a little strange that the first message from God in two thousand years or more is 
prime numbers... and Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympics? Your God must have quite a sense of humor.”
	“My God can have any sense He wants to have.”
	Der Heer was clearly alarmed at the first appearance of real rancor. “Uh, maybe I could remind us 
all about what we hope to accomplish at this meeting,” he began.
	Here’s Ken in his mollifying mode, Ellie thought. On some issues he’s courageous, but chiefly when 
he has not responsibility for action. He’s a brave talker... in private. But on scientific politics, and especially 
when representing the President, he becomes very accommodating, ready to compromise with the Devil 
himself. She caught herself. The theological language was getting to her.
	“That’s another thing.” She interrupted her own train of though as well as der Heer’s. “If that 
signal is from God, why does it come from just one place in the sky—in the vicinity of a particularly bright 
nearby star? Why doesn’t it come from all over the sky at once, like the cosmic black-body background 
radiation? Coming from one star, it looks like a signal from another civilization. Coming from everywhere, it 
would look much more like a signal from your God.”
	“God can make a signal come from the bunghole of the Little Bear if He wants.” Rankin’s face was 
becoming bright red. “Excuse me, but you’ve gotten me riled up. God can do anything.”
	“Anything you don’t understand, Mr. Rankin, you attribute to God. God for you is where you 
sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges t our intelligence. You simply turn you mind off 
and say God did it.”
	“Ma’am I didn’t come here to be insulted...”
	“‘Come here’? I thought this was where you lived.”
	“Ma’am—” Rankin was about to say something, but then thought better of it. He took a deep 
breath and continued. “This is a Christian country and Christians have true knowledge on this issue, a sacred 
responsibility to make sure that God’s sacred word is understood...”
	“I’m a Christian and you don’t speak for me. You’ve tapped yourself in some sort of fifth-century 
religious mania. Since then the Renaissance has happened, the Enlightenment has happened. Where’ve you 
been?”
	Both Joss and der Heer were half out of their chairs. “Please,” Ken implored, looking directly at 
Ellie. “If we don’t keep more to the agenda, I don’t see how we can accomplish what the President asked us 
to do.”
	“Well, you wanted ‘a frank exchange of views.’”
	“It’s nearly noon,” Joss observed. “Why don’t we take a little break for lunch?”
	Outside the library conference room, leaning on the railing surrounding the Foucault pendulum, 
Ellie began a brief whispered exchange with der Heer.
	“I’d like to punch out that cocksure, know-it-all, holier-than-thou...”
	“Why, exactly, Ellie? Aren’t ignorance and error painful enough?”
	“Yes, if he’d shut up. But he’s corrupting millions.”
	“Sweetheart, he thinks the same about you.”

When she and der Heer came back from lunch, Ellie noticed immediately that Rankin appeared subdued, 
while Joss, who was first to speak, seemed cheerful, certainly beyond the requirements of mere cordiality.
	“Dr. Arroway,” he began, “I can understand that you’re impatient to show us your findings, and 
that you didn’t come here for theological disputation. But please bear with us just a bit longer. You have a 
sharp tongue. I can’t recall the last time Brother Rankin here got so stirred up on matters of the faith. It 
must be years.”
	He glanced momentarily at his colleague, who was doodling, apparently idly, on a yellow legal pad, 
his collar unbuttoned and his necktie loosened.
	“I was struck by one or two things you said this morning. You called yourself a Christian. May I 
ask? In what sense are you a Christian?”
	“You know, this wasn’t the job description when I accepted the directorship of the Argus Project.” 
She said this lightly. “I’m a Christian in the sense that I find Jesus Christ to be an admirable historical figure. 
I think the Sermon on the Mount is one of the greatest ethical statements and one of the best speeches in 
history. I think that ‘Love your enemy’ might even be the long-shot solution to the problem of nuclear war. I 
wish he was alive today. It would benefit everybody on the planet. But I think Jesus was only a man. A great 
man, a brave man, a man with insight into unpopular truths. But I don’t think he was God or the son of God 
or the grandnephew of God.”
	“You don’t want to believe in God.” Joss said it as a simple statement. “You figure you can be a 
Christian and not believe in God. Let me ask you straight out: Do you believe in God?”
	“The question has a peculiar structure. If I say no, do I mean I’m convinced God doesn’t exist, or 
do I mean I’m not convinced he does exist? Those are two very different statements.”
	“Let’s see if they are so different, Dr. Arroway. May I call you ‘Doctor’? You believe in Occam’s 
Razor, isn’t that right? If you have two different, equally good explanations of the same experience, you pick 
the simplest. The whole history of science supports it, you say. Now, if you have serious doubts about 
whether there is a God—enough doubts so you’re unwilling to commit yourself to the Faith—then you must 
be able to imagine a world without God: a world that comes into being without God, a world where people 
die without God. No punishment. No reward. All the saints and prophets, all the faithful who have ever 
lived—why, you’d have to believe they were foolish. Deceived themselves, you’d probably say. That would 
be a world in which we weren’t here on Earth for any good reason—I mean for any purpose. It would all be 
just complicated collisions of atoms—is that right? Including the atoms that are inside human beings.
	“To me, that would be a hateful and inhuman world. I wouldn’t want to live in it. But if you can 
imagine that world, why straddle? Why occupy some middle ground? If you believe all that already, isn’t it 
much simpler to say there’s on God? You’re not being true to Occam’s Razor. I think you’re waffling. How 
can a thoroughgoing conscientious scientist be an agnostic if you can even imagine a world without God? 
Wouldn’t you just have to be an atheist?”
	“I thought you were going to argue that God is the simpler hypothesis,” Ellie said, “but this is a 
much better point. If it were only a matter of scientific discussion, I’d agree with you, Reverend Joss. 
Science is essentially concerned with examining and correcting hypotheses. If the laws of nature explain all 
the available facts without supernatural intervention, or even do only as well as the God hypothesis, then for 
the time being I’d call myself an atheist. Then, if a single piece of evidence was discovered that doesn’t fit, 
Id back off from atheism. We’re fully able to detect some breakdown in the laws of nature. The reason I 
don’t call myself an atheist is because this isn’t mainly a scientific issue. It’s a religious issue and a political 
issue. The tentative nature of scientific hypothesis doesn’t extend into these fields. You don’t talk about God 
as a hypothesis. You think you’ve cornered the truth, so I point out that you may have missed a thing or 
two. But if you ask, I’m happy to tell you: I can’t be sure I’m right.”
	“I’ve always thought an agnostic is an atheist without the courage of his convictions.”
	“You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary 
knowledge of human fallibility. When I say I’m an agnostic, I only mean that the evidence isn’t in. There 
isn’t compelling evidence that God exists—at least your kind of god—and there isn’t compelling evidence 
that he doesn’t. Since more than half the people on the Earth aren’t Jews or Christian or Muslims, I’d say 
that there aren’t any compelling arguments for your kind of god. Otherwise, everybody on Earth would have 
been converted. I say again, if you God wanted to convince us, he could have done a much better job.
	“Look at how clearly authentic the Message is. It’s being picked up all over the world. Radio 
telescopes are humming away in countries with different histories, different languages, different politics, 
different religions. Everybody’s getting the same kind of data from the same place in the sky, at the same 
frequencies with the same polarization modulation. The Muslims, the Hindus, the Christians, and the atheists 
are all getting the same message. Any skeptic can hook up a radio telescope—it doesn’t have to be very 
big—and get the identical data.”
	“You’re not suggesting that your radio message is from God,” Rankin offered.
	“Not at all. Just that the civilization on Vega—with powers infinitely less than what you attribute to 
your God—was able to make things very clear. If your God wanted to talk to us through the unlikely means 
of word-of-mouth transmission and ancient writings over thousands of years, he could have done it so there 
was no room left for debate about its existence.”
	She paused, but neither Joss nor Rankin spoke, so she tried again to steer the conversation to the 
data.
	“Why don’t we just withhold judgment for a while until we make some more progress on 
decrypting the Message? Would you like to see some of the data?”
	This time they assented, readily enough it seemed. But she could produce only reams of zeros and 
ones, neither edifying nor inspirational. she carefully explained about the presumed pagination of the 
Message and the hoped-for primer. By unspoken agreement, she and der Heer said nothing about the Soviet 
view that the Message was the blueprint for a machine. It was at best a guess, and had not yet been publicly 
discussed by the Soviets. As an afterthought, she described something about Vega itself—its mass, surface 
temperature, color, distance from the Earth, lifetime, and the ring of orbiting debris around it that had been 
discovered by the Infrared Astronomy Satellite in 1983.
	“But beyond its being one of the brightest stars in the sky, is there anything special about it?” Joss 
wanted to know. “Or anything that connects it up with Earth?”
	“Well, in terms of stellar properties, anything like that, I can’t think of a thing. But there is one 
incidental fact: Vega was the Pole Star about twelve thousand years ago, and it will be again about fourteen 
thousand years from now.”
	“I though the polestar was the Pole Star.” Rankin, still doodling, said this to the pad of paper.
	“It is, for a few thousand years. But not forever. The Earth is like a spinning top. Its axis is slowly 
precessing in a circle.” She demonstrated, using her pencil as the Earth’s axis. “It’s called the precession of 
the equinoxes.”
	“Discovered by Hipparchus of Rhodes,” added Joss. “Second century B.C.” This seemed a 
surprising piece of information for him to have at his fingertips.
	“Exactly. So right now,” she continued, “an arrow from the center of the Earth to the North Pole 
points to the star we call Polaris, in the constellation of the Little Dipper, or the Little Bear. I believe you 
were referring to this constellation just before lunch, Mr. Rankin. As the Earth’s axis slowly precesses, it 
points in some different direction in the sky, not toward Polaris, and over 26,000 years the place in the sky 
to which the North Pole points makes a complete circle. The North Pole points right now very near Polaris, 
close enough to be useful in navigation. Twelve thousand years ago, by accident, it pointed to Vega. But 
there’s no physical connection. How the stars are distributed in the Milky Way has nothing to do with the 
Earth’s axis of rotation being tipped twenty-three and a half degrees.”
	“Now, twelve thousand years ago is 10,000 B.C., the time when civilization was just starting up. 
Isn’t that right?” Joss asked.
	“Unless you believe that the Earth was created in 4004 B.C.”
	“No, we don’t believe that, do we, Brother Rankin? We just don’t think the age of the Earth is 
known with the same precision that you scientists do. On the question of the age of the Earth, we’re what 
you might call agnostics.” He had a most attractive smile.
	“So if folks were navigating ten thousand years ago, sailing the Mediterranean, say, or the Persian 
Gulf, Vega would have been their guide?”
	That’s still in the last Ice Age. Probably a little early for navigation. But the hunters who crossed 
the Bering land bridge to North America were around then. I must have seemed an amazing gift—
providential, if you like—that such a bright star was exactly to the north. I’ll bet a lot of people owed their 
lives to that coincidence.”
	“Well now, that’s mighty interesting.”
	“I don’t want you to think I used the word ‘providential’ as anything but a metaphor.”
	“I’d never think that, my dear.”
	Joss was by now giving signs that the afternoon was drawing to a close, and he did not seem 
displeased. But there were still a few items, it seemed, on Rankin’s agenda.
	“It amazes me that you don’t think it was Divine Providence, Vega being the Pole Star. My faith is 
so strong I don’t need proofs, but every time a new fact comes along it simply confirms my faith.”
	“Well then, I guess you weren’t listening very closely to what I was saying this morning. I resent 
the idea that we’re in some kind of faith contest, and you’re the hands-down winner. So far as I know 
you’ve never tested your faith? I’m willing to do it for mine. Here, take a look out that window. There’s a 
big Foucault pendulum out there. The bob must weight five hundred pounds. My faith says that the 
amplitude of a free pendulum—how far it’ll swing away from the vertical position—can never increase. It 
can only decrease. I’m willing to go out there, put the bob I front of my nose, let go, have it swing away and 
then back toward me. If my beliefs are in error, I’ll get a five-hundred-pound pendulum smack in the face. 
Come on. You want to test my faith?”
	“Truly, it’s not necessary. I believe you,” replied Joss. Rankin, though, seemed interested. He was 
imagining, she guessed, what she would look like afterward.
	“But would you be willing,” she went on, “to stand a foot closer to this same pendulum and pray to 
God to shorten the swing? What if it turns out that you’ve gotten it all wrong, that what you’re teaching 
isn’t God’s will at all? Maybe it’s the work of the Devil. Maybe it’s pure human invention. How can you be 
really sure?”
	“Faith, inspiration, revelation, awe,” Rankin answered. “Don’t judge everyone else by your own 
limited experience. Just the fact that you’ve rejected the Lord doesn’t prevent other folks from 
acknowledging His glory.”
	“Look, we all have a thirst for wonder. It’s a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both 
bound up with it. What I’m saying is, you don’t have to make stories up, you don’t have to exaggerate. 
There’s wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature’s a lot better at inventing wonders than we are.”
	“Perhaps we are all wayfarers on the road to truth,” Joss replied.
	On this hopeful note, der Heer stepped in deftly, and amidst strained civilities they prepared to 
leave. She wondered whether anything useful had been accomplished. Valerian would have been much more 
effective and much less provocative, Ellie thought. She wished she had kept herself in better check.
	“It’s been a most interesting day, Dr. Arroway, and I thank you for it.” Joss seemed a little remote 
again, courtly but distracted. He shook her hand warmly, though. On the way out to the waiting government 
car, past a lavishly rendered three-dimensional exhibit on “The Fallacy of the Expanding Universe,” a sign 
read, “Our God Is Alive and Well. Sorry About Yours.”
	She whispered to der Heer, “I’m sorry if I made your job more difficult.”
	“Oh no, Ellie. You were fine.”
	“That Palmer Joss is a very attractive man. I don’t think I did much to convert him. But I’ll tell you, 
he almost converted me.” She was joking of course.

CHAPTER 11
The World Message
Consortium 
The world is nearly all parceled out, and what there is 
left of it is being divided up, conquered, and 
colonized. To think of these stars that you see 
overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can 
never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I 
often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so 
clear and yet so far.
	-CECIL RHODES
	Last Will and Testament (1902)

From their table by the window she could see the downpour spattering the street outside. A soaked 
pedestrian, his collar up, gamely hurried by. The proprietor had cranked the striped awning over the tubs of 
oysters, segregated according to size and quality and providing a kind of street advertisement for the 
specialty of the house. She felt warm and snug inside the restaurant, the famous theatrical gathering place, 
Chez Dieux. Since fair weather had been predicted, she was without raincoat or umbrella.
	Likewise unencumbered, Vaygay introduced a new subject: “My friend, Meera,” he announced, “is 
an ecdysiast—that is the right word, yes? When she works in your country she performs for groups of 
professionals, at meetings and conventions. Meera says that when she takes off her clothes for working-class 
men—at trade union conventions, that sort of thing—they become wild, shout out improper suggestions, 
and try to join her on the stage. But when she gives exactly the same performance for doctors or lawyers, 
they sit there motionless. Actually, she says, some of them lick their lips. My question is: Are the lawyers 
healthier than the steelworkers?”
	That Vaygay had diverse female acquaintances had always been apparent. His approaches to 
women were so direct and extravagant—herself, for some reason that both pleased and annoyed her, 
excluded—that they could always say no without embarrassment. Many said yes. But the news about Meera 
was a little unexpected.
	They had spent the morning in a last-minute comparison of notes and interpretations of the new 
data. The continuing Message transmission had reached an important new stage. Diagrams were being 
transmitted from Vega the way newspaper wirephotos are transmitted. Each picture was an array raster. The 
number of tiny black and white dots that made up the picture was the product of two prime numbers. Again 
prime numbers were part of the transmission. There was a large set of such diagrams, on following the other, 
and not at all interleaved with the text. It was like a section of glossy illustrations inserted in the back of a 
book. Following transmission of the long sequence of diagrams, the unintelligible text continued. From at 
least some of the diagrams it seemed obvious that Vaygay and Arkhangelsky had been right, that the 
Message was in part at least the instructions, the blueprints, for building a machine. Its purpose was 
unknown. At the plenary session of the World Message Consortium, to be held tomorrow at the Elysée 
Palace, she and Vaygay would present for the first time some of the details to representatives of the other 
Consortium nations. But word had quietly been passed about the machine hypothesis.
	Over lunch, she had summarized her encounter with Rankin and Joss. Vaygay had been attentive, 
but asked no questions. It was as if she had been confessing some unseemly personal predilection and 
perhaps that had triggered his train of association.
	“You have a friend named Meera who’s a striptease artist? With international venue?”
	“Since Wolfgang Pauli discovered the Exclusion Principle while watching the Folies-Bergère, I 
have felt it my professional duty as a physicist to visit Paris as much as possible. I think of it as my homage 
to Pauli. But somehow I can never persuade the officials in my country to approve trips solely for this 
purpose. Usually I must do some pedestrian physics as well. But in such establishments—that’s where I met 
Meera—I am a student of nature, waiting for insight to strike.”
	Abruptly his tone of voice shifted from expansive to matter-of-face. “Meera says American 
professional men are sexually repressed and have gnawing doubts and guilt.”
	“Really. And what does Meera say about Russian professional men?”
	“Ah, in that category she knows only me. So, of course, she has a good opinion. I think I’d rather 
be with Meera tomorrow.”
	“But all your friends will be at the Consortium meeting,” she said lightly.
	“Yes, I’m glad you’ll be there,” he replied morosely.
	“What’s worrying you, Vaygay?”
	He took a long time before answering, and began with a slight but uncharacteristic hesitation. 
“Perhaps not worries. Maybe only concerns.... What if the Message really is the design drawings of a 
machine? Do we build the machine? Who builds it? Everybody together? The Consortium? The United 
Nations? A few nations in competition? What if it’s enormously expensive to build? Who pays? Why should 
hey want to? What if it doesn’t work? Could building the machine injure some nations economically? Could 
it injure them in some other way?”
	Without interrupting the torrent of questions, Lunacharsky emptied the last of the wine into their 
glasses. “Even if the message cycles back and even if we completely decrypt it, how good could the 
translation be? You know the opinion of Cervantes? He said that reading a translation is like examining the 
back of a piece of tapestry. Maybe it’s not possible to translate the Message perfectly. Then we wouldn’t 
build the machine perfectly. Also, are we really confident we have all the data? Maybe there’s essential 
information at some other frequency that we haven’t discovered yet.
	“You know, Ellie, I though people would be very cautious about building this machine. But there 
may be some coming tomorrow who will urge immediate construction—I mean, immediately after we 
receive the primer and decrypt the Message, assuming that we do. What is the American delegation going to 
propose?”
	“I don’t know,” she said slowly. But she remembered that soon after the diagrammatic material had 
been received der Heer began asking whether it was likely that the machine was within reach of the Earth’s 
economy and technology. She could offer him little reassurance on either score. She recalled again how 
preoccupied Ken had seemed in the last few weeks, sometimes even jittery. His responsibilities in this matter 
were, of course—
	“And Dr. der Heer and Mr. Kitz staying at the same hotel as you?”
	“No, they’re staying at the Embassy.”
	It was always the case. Because of the nature of the Soviet economy and the perceived necessity of 
buying military technology instead of consumer goods with their limited hard currency, Russians had little 
walking-around money when visiting the West. They were obliged to stay in second- or third-rate hotels, 
even rooming houses, while their Western colleagues lived in comparative luxury. It was a continuing source 
of embarrassment for scientists of both countries. Picking up the bill for this relatively simple meal would be 
effortless for Ellie but a burden for Vaygay, despite his comparatively exalted status in the Soviet scientific 
hierarchy. Now, what was Vaygay...
	“Vaygay, be straight with me. What are you saying? You think Ken and Mike are jumping the 
gun?”
	“‘Straight.’ And interesting word; not right, not left, but progressively forward. I’m concerned that 
in the next few days we will see premature discussion about building something that we have no right to 
build. The politicians think we know everything. In fact, we know almost nothing. Such a situation could be 
dangerous.”
	It finally dawned on her that Vaygay was taking a personal responsibility for figuring out the nature 
of the Message. If it led to some catastrophe, he was worried it might be his fault. He had less personal 
motives as well, of course.
	“You want me to talk to Ken?”
	“If you think it’s appropriate. You have frequent opportunities to talk to him?” He said this 
casually.
	“Vaygay, you’re not jealous, are you? I think you picked up on my feelings for Ken before I did. 
When you were back at Argus. Ken and I’ve been more or less together for the last two months. Do you 
have some reservations?”
	“Oh no, Ellie. I am not your father or a jealous lover. I wish only great happiness for you. It’s just 
that I see so many unpleasant possibilities.”
	But he did not further elaborate.
	They returned to their preliminary interpretations on some of the diagrams, with which the table 
was eventually covered. For counterpoint, they also discussed a little politics—the debate in America over 
the Mandala Principles for resolving the crisis in South Africa, and the growing war of words between the 
Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic. As always, Arroway and Lunacharsky enjoyed 
denouncing their own countries’ foreign policies to one another. This was far more interesting than 
denouncing the foreign policies of each other’s nation, which would have been equally easy to do. Over their 
ritual dispute about whether the check should be shared, she noticed that the downpour had diminished to a 
discreet drizzle.

By now, the news of the Message from Vega had reached every nook and cranny of the planet Earth. People 
who knew nothing of radio telescopes and had never heard of a prime number had been told a peculiar story 
about a voice from the stars, about strange beings—not exactly men, but not exactly gods either—who had 
been discovered living in the night sky. They did not come from Earth. Their home star could easily be seen, 
even with a full moon. Amidst the continuing frenzy of sectarian commentary, there was also—all over the 
world, it was now apparent—a sense of wonder, even of awe. Something transforming, something almost 
miraculous was happening. The air was full of possibility, a sense of new beginning.
	“Mankind has been promoted to high school,” an American newspaper editorialist had written.
	There were other intelligent beings in the universe. We could communicate with them. They were 
probably older than we, possibly wiser. They were sending us libraries of complex information. There was a 
widespread anticipation of imminent secular revelation. So the specialists in every subject began to worry. 
Mathematicians worried about what elementary discoveries they might have missed. Religious leaders 
worried that Vegan values, however alien, would find ready adherents, especially among the uninstructed 
young. Astronomers worried that there might be fundamentals about the nearby stars that they had gotten 
wrong. Politicians and government leaders worried that some other systems of government, some quite 
different from those currently fashionable, might be admired by a superior civilization. Whatever Vegans 
knew had not been influenced by peculiarly human institutions, history, or biology. What if much that we 
think true is a misunderstanding, a special case, or a logical blunder? Experts uneasily began to reassess the 
foundation of their subjects.
	Beyond this narrow vocational disquiet was a great and soaring corner, of bursting into a new 
age—a symbolism powerfully amplified by the approach of the Third Millennium. There were still political 
conflicts, some of them—like the continuing South African crisis—serious. But there was also a notable 
decline in many quarters of the world of jingoist rhetoric and puerile self-congratulatory nationalism. There 
was a sense of the human species, billions of tiny beings spread over the world, collectively presented with 
an unprecedented opportunity, or even a grave common danger. To many, it seemed absurd for the 
contending nation states to continue their deadly quarrels when faced with a nonhuman civilization of vastly 
greater capabilities. There was a whiff of hope in the air. Some people were unaccustomed to it and mistook 
it for something else—confusion, perhaps, or cowardice.
	For decades after 1945, the world stockpile of strategic nuclear weapons had steadily grown. 
Leaders changed, weapons systems changed, strategy changed, but the number of strategic weapons only 
increased. The time came when there were more than 25,000 of them on the planet, ten for every city. The 
technology was pushing toward short flight time, incentives for hard-target first strike, and at least de facto 
launch-on-warning. Only so monumental a danger could undo so monumental a foolishness, endorsed by so 
many leaders in so many nations for so long a time. but finally the world came to its senses, at least to this 
extent, and an accord was signed by the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China. It was 
not intended to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Few expected it to carry some Utopia in its wake. But the 
Americans and the Russians undertook to diminish the strategic arsenals down to a thousand nuclear 
weapons each. The details were carefully designed so that neither superpower was at any significant 
disadvantage at any stage of the dismantling process. Britain, France, and China agreed to begin reducing 
their arsenals once the superpowers had gone below the 3,200 mark. The Hiroshima Accords were signed, 
to worldwide rejoicing, next to the famous commemorative plaque for the victims in the first city ever 
obliterated by a nuclear weapon: “Rest in peace, for it shall never happen again.”
	Every day the fission triggers from an equal number of U.S. and Soviet warheads were delivered to 
a special facility run by American and Russian technicians. The plutonium was extracted, logged, sealed, and 
transported by bilateral teams to nuclear power plants where it was consumed and converted into electricity. 
This scheme, known as the Gayler Plan after an American admiral, was widely hailed as the ultimate in 
beating swords into plowshares. Since each nation still retained a devastating retaliatory capability, even the 
military establishments eventually welcomed it. Generals no more wish for their children to die than anyone 
else, and nuclear war is the negation of the conventional military virtues; it is hard to find much valor in 
pressing a button. The first divestment ceremony—televised live, and rebroadcast many times—featured 
white-clad American and Soviet technicians wheeling in two of the dull gray metallic objects, each about as 
big as an ottoman and festooned variously with stars and stripes, hammers and sickles. It was witnessed by a 
huge fraction of the world population. The evening television news programs regularly counted how many 
strategic weapons on both sides had been disassembled, how many more to go. In a little over two decades, 
this news, too, would reach Vega.
	In the following years, the divestitures continued, almost without a hitch. At first the fat in the 
arsenals was surrendered, with little change in strategic doctrine; but now the cuts were being felt, and the 
most destabilizing weapons systems were being dismantled. It was something the experts had called 
impossible and declared “contrary to human nature.” But a sentence of death, as Samuel Johnson had noted, 
concentrates the mind wonderfully. In the past half year, the dismantling of nuclear weapons by the United 
States and the Soviet Union had made new strides, with fairly intrusive inspection teams of each nation soon 
to be installed on the territory of the other—despite the disapproval and concern publicly voiced by the 
military staffs on both nations. The United Nations found itself unexpectedly effective in mediating 
international disputes, with the West Irian and the Chile-Argentina border wars both apparently resolved. 
There was even talk, not all of it fatuous, of a nonaggression treaty between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
	The delegates arriving at the first plenary session of the World Message Consortium were 
predisposed toward cordiality to an extent unparalleled in recent decades.

Every nation with even a handful of Message bits was represented, sending both scientific and political 
delegates; a surprising number sent military representatives as well. In a few cases, national delegations were 
led by foreign ministers or even heads of state. The United Kingdom delegation included Viscount Boxforth, 
the Lord Privy Seal—an honorific Ellie privately found hilarious. The U.S.S.R. delegation was headed by B. 
Ya. Abukhimov, President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, with Gotsridze, the Minister of Medium 
Heavy Industry, and Arkhangelsky playing significant roles. The President of the United States had insisted 
that der Heer head the American delegation, although it included Undersecretary of State Elmo Honicutt and 
Michael Kitz, among others, for the Department of Defense.
	A vast and elaborate map in equal-area projection showed the disposition of radio telescopes over 
the planet, including the Soviet oceangoing tracking vessels. Ellie glanced around the newly completed 
conference hall, adjacent to the offices and residence of the President of France. In only the second year of 
his seven-year term, he was making every effort to guarantee the meeting’s success. A multitude of faces, 
flags, and national dress was reflected off the long arcing mahogany tables and the mirrored walls. She 
recognized few of the political and military people, but in every delegation there seemed to be at least one 
familiar scientist or engineer: Annunziata and Ian Broderick from Australia; Fedirka from Czechoslovakia; 
Braude, Crebillon, and Boileau from France; Kemar Chandrapurana and Devi Sukhavati from India; 
Hironaga and Matsui from Japan... Ellie reflected on the strong technological rather than radio-astronomical 
background of many of the delegates, especially the Japanese. The idea that the construction of some vast 
machine might be on the agenda of this meeting had motivated last-minute changes in the composition of 
delegations.
	She also recognized Malatesta of Italy; Bedenbaugh, a physicist fallen into politics, Clegg, and the 
venerable Sir Arthur Chatos chatting behind the sort of Union Jack one can find on restaurant tables in 
European resorts; Jaime Ortiz of Spain; Prebula from Switzerland, which was puzzling, since Switzerland 
did not, so far as she knew, even have a radio telescope; Bao, who had done brilliantly in putting together 
the Chinese radio telescope array; Wintergarden from Sweden. There were surprisingly large Saudi, 
Pakistani and Iraqi delegations; and, of course, the Soviets, among whom Nadya Rozhdestvenskaya and 
Genrikh Arkhangeldky were sharing a moment of genuine hilarity.
	Ellie looked for Lunacharsky, and finally spotted him with the Chinese delegation. He was shaking 
hands with Yu Renqiong, the director of the Beijing Radio Observatory. She recalled that the two men had 
been friends and colleagues during the period of Sino-Soviet cooperation. But the hostilities between their 
two nations had ended all contact between them, and Chinese restrictions on foreign travel by their senior 
scientists were still almost as severe as Soviet constraints. She was witnessing, she realized, their first 
meeting in perhaps a quarter century.
	“Who’s the old Chinaperson Vaygay’s shaking hands with?” This was, for Kitz, an attempt at 
cordiality. He had been making small offerings of this sort for the last few days—a development she 
regarded as unpromising.
“Yu, Director of the Beijing Observatory.”
“I thought those guys hated each other’s guts.”
“Michael,” she said, “the world is both better and worse than you imagine.”
“You can probably beat me on ‘better,’ “ he replied, “but you can’t hold a candle to me on ‘worse.’ ”

After the welcome by the President of France (who, to mild astonishment, stayed to hear the opening 
presentations) and a discussion of procedure and agenda by der Heer and Abukhirnov as conference co-
chairmen, Ellie and Vaygay together summarized the data. They made what were by now standard 
presentations—not too technical, because of the political and military people—of how radio telescopes 
work, the distribution of nearby stars in space, and the history of the palimpsest Message. Their tandem 
presentation concluded with a survey, displayed on the monitors before each delegation, of the diagrammatic 
material recently received. She was careful to show how the polarization modulation was converted into a 
sequence of zeros and ones, how the zeros and ones fit together to make a picture, and how in most cases 
they had not the vaguest notion of what the picture conveyed.
The data points reassembled themselves on the computer screens. She could see faces illuminated in white, 
amber, and green by the monitors in the now partly darkened hall. The diagrams showed intricate branching 
networks; lumpy, almost indecently biological forms; a perfectly formed regular dodecahedron. A long series 
of pages had been reassembled into an elaborately detailed three-dimensional construction which slowly 
rotated. Each enigmatic object was joined by an unintelligible caption.
Vaygay stressed the uncertainties still more strongly than she did. Nevertheless, it was, in his opinion, now 
beyond doubt that the Message was a handbook for the construction of a machine. He neglected to mention 
that the idea of the Message as a blueprint had originally been his and Arkhangelsky’s, and Ellie seized the 
opportunity to rectify the oversight.
She had talked about the subject enough over the past few months to know that both scientific and general 
audiences were often fascinated by the details of the unraveling of the Message, and tantalized by the still 
unproved concept of a primer. But she was unprepared for the response from this—one would expect—
staid audience. Vaygay and she had interdigitated their presentations. As they finished, there was a sustained 
thunder of applause. The Soviets and Eastern European delegations applauded in unison, with a frequency of 
about two or three handclaps per heartbeat. The Americans and many others applauded separately, their 
unsynchronized clapping a sea of white noise rising from the crowd. Enveloped by an unfamiliar kind of joy, 
she could not resist thinking about the differences in national character—the Americans as individualists, and 
the Russians engaged in a collective endeavor. Also, she recalled that Americans in crowds tried to maximize 
their distance from their fellows, while Soviets tended to lean on each other as much as possible. Both styles 
of applause, the American clearly dominant, delighted her. For just a moment she permitted herself to think 
about her stepfather. And her father.
After lunch there was a succession of other presentations on the data collection and interpretation. David 
Drumlin gave an extraordinarily capable discussion of a statistical analysis he had recently performed of all 
previous pages of the Message that referred to the new numbered diagrams. He argued that the Message 
contained not just a blueprint for building a machine but also descriptions of the designs and means of 
fabrication of components and subcomponents. In a few cases, he thought, there were descriptions of whole 
new industries not yet known on Earth. Ellie, mouth agape, shook her finger toward Drumlin, silently asking 
Valerian whether he had known about this. His lips pursed, Valerian hunched his shoulders and rotated his 
hands palms up. She scanned the other delegates for some expression of emotion, but could detect mainly 
signs of fatigue; the depth of technical material and the necessity, sooner or later, of making political 
decisions were already producing strain. After the session, she complimented Drumlin on the interpretation 
but asked why she had not heard of it until now. He replied before walking away, “Oh, I didn’t think it was 
important enough to bother you with. It was just a little something I did while you were out consulting 
religious fanatics.”
If Drumlin had been her thesis adviser, she would still be pursuing her Ph.D., she thought. He had never 
fully accepted her. They would never share an easygoing coUegial relationship. Sighing, she wondered 
whether Ken had known about Drumlin’s new work. But as conference cochairman, der Heer was sitting 
with his Soviet opposite number on a raised dais facing the horseshoe of delegate tiers. He was, as he had 
been for weeks, nearly inaccessible. Drumlin was not obliged to discuss his findings with her, of course; she 
knew they both had been preoccupied recently. But in conversation with him why was she always 
accommodating—and argumentative only in extremis? A part of her evidently felt that the granting of her 
doctorate and the opportunity to pursue her science were still future possibilities firmly in Drumlin’s hands.
On the morning of the second day, a Soviet delegate was given the floor. He was unknown to her. “Stefan 
Alexeivich Banida,” the vitagraphics on her computer screen read out, “Director, Institute for Peace Studies, 
Soviet Academy of Sciences, Moscow; Member, Central Committee, Communist Party of the U.S.S.R.”
“Now we start to play hardball,” she heard Michael Kitz say to Eirno Honicutt of the State Department.
Baruda was a dapper man, wearing an elegantly tailored and impeccably fashionable Western business 
suit, perhaps of Italian cut. His English was fluent and almost unaccented. He had been born in one of the 
Baltic republics, was young to be head of such an important organization— formed to study the long-term 
implications for strategic policy of the deaccessioning of nuclear weapons—and was a leading example of 
the “new wave” in the Soviet leadership.
“Let us be frank,” Baruda was saying. “A Message is being sent to us from the far reaches of space. Most 
of the information has been gathered by the Soviet Union and the United States. Essential pieces have also 
been obtained by other countries. All of those countries are represented at this conference. Any one nation—
the Soviet Union, for example—could have waited until the Message repeated itself several times, as we all 
hope it will, and fill in the many missing pieces in such a way. But it would take years, perhaps decades, and 
we are a little impatient. So we have all shared the data.
“Any one nation—the Soviet Union, for example—could place into orbit around the Earth large radio 
telescopes with sensitive receivers that work at the frequencies of the Message. The Americans could do this 
as well. Perhaps Japan or France or the European Space Agency could. Then any one nation by itself could 
acquire all the data, because in space a radio telescope can point at Vega all the time. But that might be 
thought a hostile act. It is no secret that the United States or the Soviet Union might be able to shoot down 
such satellites. So, perhaps for this reason, too, we have all shared the data.
“It is better to cooperate. Our scientists wish to exchange not only the data they have gathered, but also their 
speculations, their guesses, their. . . dreams. All you scientists are alike in that respect. I am not a scientist. 
My specialty is government. So I know that the nations are also alike. Every nation is cautious. Every nation 
is suspicious. None of us would give an advantage to a potential adversary if we could prevent it. And so 
there have been two opinions—perhaps more, but at least two—one that counsels exchange of all the data, 
and another that counsels each nation to seek advantage over the others. ‘You can be sure the other side is 
seeking some advantage,’ they say. It is the same in most countries.
“The scientists have won this debate. So, for example, most of the data—although, I wish to point out, 
not all— acquired by the United States and the Soviet Union have been exchanged. Most of the data from all 
other countries have been exchanged worldwide. We are happy we have made this decision.”
Ellie whispered to Kitz, “This doesn’t sound like ‘hard-ball’ to me.”
	“Stay tuned,” he whispered back. “But there are other kinds of dangers. We would like now to 
raise one of them for the Consortium to consider.” Baruda’s tone reminded her of Vaygay’s at lunch the 
other day. What was the bee in the Soviet bonnet?
“We have heard Academician Lunacharsky, Dr. Arroway, and other scientists agree that we are receiving 
the instructions for building a complex machine. Suppose that, as everyone seems to expect, the end of the 
Message comes; the Message recycles to the beginning; and we receive the introduction or—the English 
word is ‘primer’?—primer which lets us read the Message. Suppose also that we continue to cooperate fully, 
all of us. We exchange all the data, all the fantasies, all the dreams.
“Now the beings-on Vega, they are not sending us these instructions for their amusement. They want us to 
build a machine. Perhaps they will tell us what the machine is supposed to do. Perhaps not. But even if they 
do, why should we believe them? So I raise my own fantasy, my own dream. It is not a happy one. What if 
this machine is a Trojan Horse? We build the machine at great expense, turn it on, and suddenly an invading 
army pours out of it. Or what if it is a Doomsday Machine? We build it, turn it on, and the Earth blows up. 
Perhaps this is their way to suppress civilizations just emerging into the cosmos. It would not cost much; 
they pay only for a telegram, and the upstart civilization obediently destroys itself.
“What I am about to ask is only a suggestion, a talking point. I raise it for your consideration. I mean it to be 
con-
structive. On this issue, we all share the same planet, we all have the same interests. No doubt I will put it 
too bluntly. Here is my question: Would it be better to burn the data and destroy the radio telescopes?”
A commotion ensued. Many delegations asked simultaneously to be recognized. Instead, the conference 
co-chairmen seemed mainly motivated to remind the delegates that sessions were not to be recorded or 
videotaped. No interviews were to be granted to the press. There would be daily press releases, agreed upon 
by the conference co-chairmen and the leaders of delegations. Even the integuments of the present 
discussion were to remain in this conference chamber.
Several delegates asked for clarification from the Chair. “If Baruda is right about a Trojan Horse or a 
Doomsday Machine,” shouted out a Dutch delegate, “isn’t it our duty to inform the public?” But he had not 
been recognized and his microphone had not been activated. They went on to other, more urgent, matters.
Ellie had quickly punched into the institutional computer terminal before her for an early position in the 
queue. She discovered that she was scheduled second, after Suk-havati and before one of the Chinese 
delegates.
Ellie knew Devi Sukhavati slightly. A stately woman in her mid-forties, she was wearing a Western coiffure, 
high-heeled sling-back pumps, and an exquisite silk sari. Originally trained as a physician, she had become 
one of the leading Indian experts in molecular biology and now shared her time between King’s College, 
Cambridge, and the Tata Institute in Bombay. She was one of a handful of Indian Fellows of the Royal 
Society of London, and was said to be well placed politically. They had last met a few years before, at an 
international symposium in Tokyo, before receipt of the Message had eliminated the obligatory question 
marks in the titles of some of their scientific papers. Ellie had sensed a mutual affinity, due only in part to the 
fact that they were among the few women participating in scientific meetings on extraterrestrial life. “I 
recognize that Academician Baruda has raised an im- portant and sensitive issue,” Sukhavati began, “and it 
would be foolish to dismiss the Trojan Horse possibility carelessly. Given most of recent history, this is a 
natural idea, and I’m surprised it took so long to be raised. However, I would like to caution against such 
fears. It is unlikely in the extreme that the beings on a planet of the star Vega are exactly at our level of 
technological advance. Even on our planet, cultures do not evolve in lockstep. Some start earlier, others 
later. I recognize that some cultures can catch up at least technologically. When there were high civilizations 
in India, China, Iraq, and Egypt, there were, at best, iron-age nomads in Europe and Russia, and stone-age 
cultures in America.
“But the differences in the technologies will be much greater in the present circumstances. The 
extraterrestrials are likely to be far ahead of us, certainly more than a few hundred years farther along—
perhaps thousands of years ahead of us, or even millions. Now, I ask you to compare that with the pace of 
human technological advancement in the last century.
“I grew up in a tiny village in South India. In my grandmother’s time the treadle sewing machine was a 
technological wonder. What would beings who are thousands of years ahead of us be capable of? Or 
millions? As a philosopher in our part of the world once said: The artifacts of a sufficiently advanced 
extraterrestrial civilization would be indistinguishable from magic.’
“We can pose no threat to them whatever. They have nothing to fear from us, and that will be true for a 
very long time. This is no confrontation between Greeks and Trojans, who were evenly matched. This is no 
science-fiction movie where beings from different planets fight with similar weapons. If they wish to destroy 
us, they can certainly do so with or without our coopera—”
“But at what cost?” someone interrupted from the floor. “Don’t you see? That’s the point. Baruda is 
saying our television broadcasts to space are their notice that it’s time to destroy us, and the Message is the 
means. Punitive expeditions are dear. The Message is cheap.” Ellie could not make out who had shouted out 
this intervention. It seemed to be someone in the British delegation. His remarks had not been amplified by 
the audio system, because again the speaker had not been recognized by the Chair. But the acoustics in the 
conference hall were sufficiently good that he could be heard perfectly well. Der Heer, in the Chair, tried to 
keep order. Abukhirnov leaned over and whispered something to an aide.
“You think there is a danger in building the machine,” Sukhavati replied. “I think there is a danger in not 
building the machine. I would be ashamed of our planet if we turned our back on the future. Your 
ancestors”—she shook a finger at her interlocutor—”were not so timid when they first set sail for India or 
America.”
This meeting was getting to be full of surprises, Ellie thought, although she doubted whether Clive or 
Raleigh were the best role models for present decision making. Perhaps Sukhavati was only tweaking the 
British for past colonial offenses. She waited for the green speaker’s light on her console to illuminate, 
indicating that her microphone was activated.
“Mr. Chairman.” She found herself in this formal and public posture addressing der Heer, whom she had 
hardly seen in the last few days. They had arranged to spend tomorrow afternoon together during a break in 
the meeting, and she felt some anxiety about what they would say. Oops, wrong thought, she thought.
“Mr. Chairman, I believe we can shed some light on these two questions—the Trojan Horse and the 
Doomsday Machine. I had intended to discuss this tomorrow morning, but it certainly seems relevant now.” 
On her console, she punched in the code numbers for a few of her slides. The great mirrored hall darkened.
“Dr. Lunacharsky and I are convinced that these are different projections of the same three-dimensional 
configuration. We showed the entire configuration in computer-simulated rotation yesterday. We think, 
though we can’t be sure, that this is what the interior of the ma- chine will look like. There is as yet no clear 
indication of scale. Maybe it’s a kilometer across, maybe it’s submicroscopic. But notice these five objects 
evenly spaced around the periphery of the main interior chamber, inside the dodecahedron. Here’s a closeup 
of one of them. They’re the only things in the chamber that look at all recognizable.
“This appears to be an ordinary overstuffed armchair, perfectly configured for a human being. It’s very 
unlikely that extraterrestrial beings, evolved on another quite different world, would resemble us sufficiently 
to share our preferences in living-room furniture. Here, look at this close-up. It looks like something from 
my mother’s spare room when I was growing up.”
Indeed, it almost seemed to have flowered slipcovers. A small flutter of guilt entered her mind. She had 
neglected to call her mother before leaving for Europe, and, if truth be told, had called her only once or 
twice since the Message was received. Ellie, how could you? she remonstrated with herself.
She looked again at the computer graphics. The fivefold symmetry of the dodecahedron was reflected in 
the five interior chairs, each facing a pentagonal surface. “So it’s our contention—Dr. Lunacharsky and I—
that the five chairs are meant for us. For people. That would mean that the interior chamber of the machine 
is only a few meters across, the exterior, perhaps ten or twenty meters across. The technology is 
undoubtedly formidable, but we don’t think we’re talking about building something the size of a city. Or as 
complex as an aircraft carrier. We might very well be able to build this, whatever it is, if we all work 
together.
“What I’m trying to say is that you don’t put chairs inside a bomb. I don’t think this is a Doomsday 
Machine, or a Trojan Horse. I agree with what Dr. Sukhavati said, or maybe only implied: the idea that this 
is a Trojan Horse is itself an indication of how far we have to go.”
Again there was an outburst. But this time der Heer made no effort to stop it; indeed, he actually turned the 
complainant’s microphone on. It was the same delegate who had interrupted Sukhavati a few minutes 
earlier, Philip Bedenbaugh of the United Kingdom, a Labour Party minister in the shaky coalition 
government.
“. . . simply doesn’t understand what our concern is. If it was literally a wooden horse, we would not be 
tempted to bring the alien device within the city gates. We have read our Homer. But flounce it up with 
some upholstery and our suspicions are allayed. Why? Because we are being flattered. Or bribed. There’s an 
historic adventure implied. There’s the promise of new technologies. There’s a hint of acceptance by—how 
to put it?—greater beings. But I say no matter what lofty fantasies the radio astronomers may entertain, if 
there is even a tiny chance the machine is a means of destruction, it should not be built. Better, as the Soviet 
delegate has proposed, to burn the data tapes and make the construction of radio telescopes a capital crime.”
The meeting was becoming unruly. Scores of delegates were electronically queuing for authorization to 
speak. The hubbub rose to a subdued roar that reminded Ellie of her years of listening to radio-astronomical 
static. A consensus did not seem readily within reach, and the co-chairmen were clearly unable to restrain the 
delegates.
As the Chinese delegate rose to speak, the vitagraphics were slow to appear on Ellie’s screen and she 
looked around for help. She had no idea who this man was either. Nguyen “Bobby” Bui, a National Security 
Council staffer now assigned to der Heer, leaned over and said: “Xi Qiaomu’s his name. Spelled ‘ex,’ ‘eye.’ 
Pronounced ‘she.’ Heavy dude. Born on the Long March. Volunteer as a teenager in Korea. Government 
official, mainly political. Knocked down for a nine count in the Cultural Revolution. Central Committee 
member now. Very influential. Been in the news lately. Also directs Chinese archeological digging.”
Xi Qiaomu was a tall, broad-shouldered man around sixty. The wrinkles on his face made him seem older, 
but his posture and physique gave him an almost youthful appearance. He wore his tunic buttoned at the 
collar in the fashion that was as obligatory for Chinese political leaders as three-picce suits were for 
American governmental leaders, the President, of course, excepted. The vitagraphics now came through on 
her console, and she could remember having read a long article about Xi Qiaomu in one of the video 
newsmagazines.
“If we are frightened,” he was saying, “we will do nothing. That will delay them a little. But remember, 
they know we are here. Our television arrives at their planet. Every day they are reminded of us. Have you 
looked at our television programs? They will not forget us. If we do nothing and if they are worried about 
us, they will come to us, machine or no machine. We cannot hide from them. If we had kept quiet, we would 
not face this problem. If we had cable television only and no big military radar, then maybe they would not 
know about us. But now it is too late. We cannot go back. Our course is set.
“If you are seriously frightened about this machine destroying the Earth, do not build it on the Earth. Build 
it somewhere else. Then if it is a Doomsday Machine and blows up a world . . . it will not be our world. But 
this will be very expensive. Probably too expensive. Or if we arc not so frightened, build it in some isolated 
desert. You could have a very big explosion in the Takopi Wasteland in Xinjing Province and still kill 
nobody. And if we are not frightened at all, we can build it in Washington. Or Moscow. Or Beijing. Or in 
this beautifill city.
“In Ancient China, Vega and two nearby stars were called Chih Neu. It means the young woman with the 
spinning wheel. It is an auspicious symbol, a machine to make new clothes for the people of the Earth.
“We have received an invitation. A very unusual invitation. Maybe it is to go to a banquet. The Earth has 
never been invited to a banquet before. It would be impolite to refuse.”

CHAPTER 12
The One-Delta Isomer 
Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as 
simply as I dream over the black dots representing 
towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, 
shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible 
as the black dots on the map of France?
	-VINCENT VAN GOGH

IT WAS a splendid autumn afternoon, so unseasonably warm that Devi Sukhavati had left her coat behind. 
She and Ellie walked along the crowded Champs-Elysées toward the Place de la Concorde. The ethnic 
diversity was rivaled by London, Manhattan, and only a few other cities on the planet. Two women walking 
together, one in a skirt and sweater, the other in a sari, were in no way unusual.
Outside a tobacconist’s there was a long, orderly, and polyglot line of people attracted by the first week of 
legalized sale of cured cannabis cigarettes from the United States. By French law they could not be sold to 
or consumed by those under eighteen years of age. Many in line were middle-aged and older. Some might 
have been naturalized Algerians or Moroccans. Especially potent varieties of cannabis were grown, mainly in 
California and Oregon, for the export trade. Featured here was a new and admired strain, which had in 
addition been grown in ultraviolet light, converting some of the inert cannabinoids into the 1? isomer. It was 
called “Sun-Kissed.” The package, illustrated in a window display a meter and a half high, bore in French the 
slogan ‘This will be deducted from your share in Paradise.”
The shop windows along the boulevard were a riot of color. The two women bought chestnuts from a 
street vendor and reveled in the taste and texture. For some reason, every time Ellie saw a sign advertising 
BNP, the Banque Nationale de Paris, she read it as the Russian word for beer, with the middle letter inverted 
left to right. BEER, the signs—lately corrupted from their usual and respectable fiduciary vocations—seemed 
to be exhorting her, RUSSIAN BEER. The incongruity amused her, and only with difficulty could she convince 
the part of her brain in charge of reading that this was the Latin, not the Cyrillic alphabet. Further on, they 
marveled at L’Obé1isque—an ancient military commemorative stolen at great expense to become a modern 
military commemorative. They decided to walk on.

Der Heer had broken the date, or at least that’s what it amounted to. He had called her up this morning, 
apologetic but not desperately so. There were too many political issues being raised at the plenary session. 
The Secretary of State was flying in tomorrow, interrupting a visit to Cuba. Der Heer’s hands were full, and 
he hoped Ellie would understand. She understood. She hated herself for sleeping with him. To avoid an 
afternoon alone she had dialed Devi Sukhavati.
“One of the Sanskrit words for ‘vitorious’ is abhijit. That’s what Vega was called in ancient India. Abhijit. 
It was under the influence of Vega that the Hindu divinities, our culture heroes, conquered the asuras, the 
gods of evil. Ellie, are you listening? ... Now, it’s a curious thing. In Persia there are asuras also, but in 
Persia the asuras were the gods of good. Eventually religions sprang up in which the chief god, the god of 
light, the Sun god, was called Ahura-Mazda. The Zoroastrians, for example, and the Mithraists. Ahura, 
Asura, it’s the same name. There are still Zoroastrians today, and the Mithraists gave the early Christians a 
good fright. But in this same story, those Hindu divinities—they were mainly female, by the way— were 
called Devis. It’s the origin of my own name. In India, the Devis are gods of good. In Persia, the Devis 
become gods of evil. Some scholars think this is where the English word ‘devil’ ultimately comes from. The 
symmetry is complete. All this is probably some vaguely remembered account of the Aryan invasion that 
pushed the Dravidians, my ancestors, to the south. So, depending on which side of the Kirthar Range one 
lives on, Vega supports either God or the Devil.”
This cheerful story had been proffered as a gift by Devi, who clearly had heard something of Ellie’s 
California religious adventures two weeks before. Ellie was grateful. But it reminded her that she had not 
even mentioned to Joss the possibility that the Message was the blueprint for a machine of unknown 
purpose. Now he would soon enough be hearing all this through the media. She should really, she told 
herself sternly, make an overseas call to explain to him the new developments. But Joss was said to be in 
seclusion. He had offered no public statement following their meeting in Modesto. Rankin, in a press 
conference, announced that while there might be some dangers, he was not opposed to letting the scientists 
receive the full Message. But translation was another matter. Periodic review by all segments of society was 
required, he said, especially by those entrusted to safeguard spiritual and moral values.
They were now approaching the Tuilerics Gardens, where the garish hues of autumn were on display. Frail 
and elderly men—Ellie judged them to be from Southeast Asia—were in vigorous dispute. Ornamenting the 
black cast-iron gates were multicolored balloons on sale. At the center of a pool of water was a marble 
Amphitrite. Around her, toy sailboats were racing, urged on by an exuberant crowd of small children with 
Magellanic aspirations. A catfish suddenly broke water, swamping the lead boat, and the boys and girls 
became subdued, chastened by this wholly unexpected apparition. The Sun was low in the west, and Ellie 
felt a momentary chill.
They approached L’Orangerie, in the annex of which was a special exhibition, so the poster proclaimed, 
“Images Martiennes.” The joint American-French-Sovict robot roving vehicles on Mars had produced a 
spectacular windfall of color photographs, some—like the Voyager images of the outer solar system around 
1980—soaring beyond their mere scientific purpose and becoming art. The poster featured a landscape 
photographed on the vast Elysium Plateau. In the foreground was a three-sided pyramid, smooth, highly 
eroded, with an impact crater near the base. It had been produced by millions of years of high-speed 
sandblasting by the fierce Martian winds, the planetary geologists had said. A second rover—assigned to 
Cydonia, on the other side of Mars—had become mired in a drifting dune, and its controllers in Pasadena 
had been so far unable to respond to its forlorn cries for help.
Ellie found herself riveted on Sukhavati’s appearance: her huge black eyes, erect bearing, and yet another 
magnificent sari. She thought to herself, I’m not graceful. Usually she found herself able to continue her part 
of a conversation while mentally addressing other matters as well. But today she had trouble following one 
line of thought, never mind two. While they were discussing the merits of the several opinions on whether to 
build the Machine, in her mind’s eye she returned to Devi’s image from the Aryan invasion of India 3,500 
years ago: a war between two peoples, each of whom claimed victory, each of whom patrioti-cally 
exaggerated the historical accounts. Ultimately, the story is transformed into a war of the gods. “Our” side, 
of course, is good. The other side, of course, is evil. She imagined the goateed, spade-tailed, cloven-hoofed 
Devil of the West evolving by slow evolutionary steps over thousands of years from some Hindu antecedent 
who, for all Ellie knew, had the head of an elephant and was painted blue.
“Baruda’s Trojan Horse—maybe it’s not a completely foolish idea,” she found herself saying. “But I don’t 
see that we have any choice, as Xi said. They can be here in twenty-some-odd years if they want to.”
They arrived at a monumental arch in the Roman style surmounted by a heroic, indeed apotheotic, statue 
of Napoleon as chariot driver. From the long view, from an extraterrestrial perspective, how pathetic this 
posturing was. They rested on a nearby bench, their long shadows cast over a bed of flowers planted in the 
colors of the French Republic.
Ellie longed to discuss her own emotional predicament, but that might have political overtones. It would, 
at the very least, be indiscreet. She did not know Sukhavati very well. Instead she encouraged her 
companion to speak about her personal life. Sukhavati acquiesced readily enough.
She had been born to a Brahman but unprosperous family with matriarchal proclivities in the southern 
state of Tamil Nadu. Matriarchal households were still common all over South India. She matriculated at 
Banares Hindu University. At medical school in England she had met and fallen deeply in love with Surindar 
Ghosh, a fellow medical student. But Surindar was a harijan, an untouchable, of
a caste so loathed that the mere sight of them was held by orthodox Brahmans to be polluting. Surindar’s 
ancestors had been forced to live a nocturnal existence, like bats and owls. Her family threatened to disown 
her if they married. Her father declared that he had no daughter who would consider such a union. If she 
married Ghosh, he would mourn her as though she were dead. She married him anyway. “We were too 
much in love,” she said. “I really had no choice.” Within the year, he died from septicemia acquired while 
performing an autopsy under inadequate supervision.
Instead of reconciling her to her family, however, Surin-dar’s death accomplished the opposite, and after 
receiving her medical degree, Devi decided to remain in England. She discovered a natural affinity for 
molecular biology and considered it an effortless continuation of her medical studies. She soon found she 
had real talent in this meticulous discipline. Knowledge of nucleic acid replication led her to work on the 
origin of life, and that in turn led her to consider life on other planets.
“You could say that my scientific career has been a sequence of free associations. One thing just led to 
another.”
She had recently been working on the characterization of Martian organic matter, measured in a few 
locales on Mars by the same roving vehicles whose stunning photographic products they had just seen 
advertised. Devi had never remarried, although she had made it plain there were some who pursued her. 
Lately she had been seeing a scientist in Bombay whom she described as a “computer wallah.”
Walking a little farther on, they found themselves in the Cour Napoleon, the interior courtyard of the Louvre 
Museum. In its center was the newly completed and wildly controversial pyramidal entrance, and in high 
niches around the courtyard were sculptural representations of the heroes of French civilization. Captioned 
under each statue of a revered man—they could see little evidence of revered women—was his surname. 
Occasionally, letters were eroded—by natural weathering, or in a few cases perhaps effaced by some 
offended passerby. For one or two statues, it was difficult to piece together who the savant had been. On the 
statue that had evidently evoked the greatest public resentment, only the letters LTA remained.
Although the Sun was setting and the Louvre was open until mid-evening, they did not enter, but instead 
ambled along the Seine embankment, following the river back along the Quai d’Orsay. The proprietors of 
bookstallswere fastening shutters and closing up shop for the day. For a while they strolled on, arm in arm in 
the European manner.
A French couple was walking a few paces ahead of them, each parent holding one hand of their daughter, 
a girl of about four who would periodically launch herself off the pavement. In her momentary suspension in 
zero g, she experienced, it was apparent, something akin to ecstasy. The parents were discussing the World 
Message Consortium, which was hardly a coincidence since the newspapers had been full of little else. The 
man was for building the Machine; it might create new technologies and increase employment in France. The 
woman was more cautious, but for reasons she had difficulty articulating. The daughter, braids flying, was 
wholly unconcerned about what to do with a blueprint from the stars.
Der Heer, Kitz, and Honicutt had called a meeting at the American Embassy early the following morning to 
prepare for the arrival of the Secretary of State later in the day. The meeting was to be classified and held in 
the Embassy’s Black Room, a chamber electromagnetically decoupled from the outside world, making even 
sophisticated electronic surveillance impossible. Or so it was claimed. Ellie thought there might be 
instrumentation developed that could make an end run around these precautions.
After spending the afternoon with Devi Sukhavati, she had received the message at her hotel and had tried to 
call der Heer, but was able only to reach Michael Kitz. She opposed a classified meeting on this subject, she 
said; it was a matter of principle. The Message was clearly intended for the entire planet. Kitz replied that 
there were no data being withheld from the rest of the world, at least by Americans; and that the meeting 
was merely advisory—to assist the United States in the difficult procedural negotiations ahead. He appealed 
to her patriotism, to her self-interest, and at last invoked again the Hadden Decision. “For all I know, that 
thing is still sitting in your safe unread. Read it,” he urged.
She tried, again unsuccessfully, to reach der Heer. First the man turns up everywhere in the Argus facility, 
like a bad penny. He moves in with you in your apartment. You’re sure, for the first time in years, you’re in 
love. The next minute you can’t even get him to answer the phone. She decided to attend the meeting, if 
only to see Ken face to face.
Kitz was enthusiastically for building the Machine, Drumlin cautiously in favor, der Heer and Honicutt at 
least outwardly uncommitted, and Peter Valerian in an agony of indecision. Kitz and Drumlin were even 
talking about where to build the thing. Freightage costs alone made manufacture or even assembly on the far 
side of the Moon prohibitively expensive, as Xi had guessed.
“If we use aerodynamic braking, it’s cheaper to send a kilogram to Phobos or Deimos than to the far side 
of the Moon,” Bobby Bui volunteered.
“Where the bell is Fobuserdeemus?” Kitz wanted to know.
‘The moons of Mars. I was talking about aerodynamic braking in the Martian atmosphere.”
“And how long does it take to get to Phobos or Deimos?” Drumlin was stirring his cup of coffee.
“Maybe a year, but once we have a fleet of interplanetary transfer vehicles and the pipeline is full—”
“Compared with three days to the Moon?” sputtered Drumlin. “Bui, stop wasting our time.”
“It’s only a suggestion,” he protested. “You know, just something to think about.”
Der Heer seemed impatient, distracted. He was clearly under great pressure—alternately avoiding her eyes 
and, she thought, making some unspoken appeal. She took it as a hopeful sign.
“If you want to worry about Doomsday Machines,” Drumlin was saying, “you have to worry about energy 
supplies. If it doesn’t have access to an enormous amount of energy, it can’t be a Doomsday Machine. So as 
long as the instructions don’t ask for a gigawatt nuclear reactor, I don’t think we have to worry about 
Doomsday Machines.”
“Why are you guys in such a hurry to commit to construction?” she asked Kitz and Drumlin collectively. 
They were sitting next to each other with a plate of croissants between them.
Kitz looked from Honicutt to der Heer before answering: “This is a classified meeting,” he began. “We all 
know you won’t pass anything said here on to your Russian friends. It’s like this: We don’t know what the 
Machine will do, but it’s clear from Dave Drumlin’s analysis that there’s new technology in it, probably new 
industries. Constructing the Machine is bound to have economic value—1 mean, think of what we’d learn. 
And it might have military value. At least that’s what the Russians are thinking. See, the Russians are in a 
box. Here’s a whole new area of technology they’re going to have to keep up with the U.S. on. Maybe 
there’s instructions for some decisive weapon in the Message, or some economic advantage. They can’t be 
sure. They’ll have to bust their economy trying. Did you notice how Baruda kept referring to what was cost-
effective? If all this Message stuff went away—burn the data, destroy the telescopes—then the Russians 
could maintain military parity. That’s why they’re so cautious. So, of course, that’s why we’re gung ho for 
it.” He smiled.
Temperamentally, Kitz was bloodless, she thought; but he was far from stupid. When he was cold and 
withdrawn, people tended not to like him. So he had developed an occasional veneer of urbane amiability. In 
Ellie’s view, it was a molecular monolayer thick.
“Now let me ask you a question,” he continued. “Did you catch Baruda’s remark about withholding some 
of the data? Is there any missing data?”
	“Only from very early on,” she replied. “Only from the first few weeks, I’d guess. There were a few 
holes in the Chinese coverage a little after that. There’s still a small amount of data that hasn’t been 
exchanged, on all sides. But I don’t see any signs of serious holding back. Anyway, we’ll pick up any 
missing data swatches after the Message recycles.”
“If the Message recycles,” Drumlin growled. Der Heer moderated a discussion on contingency planning: 
what to do when the primer was received; which American, German, and Japanese industries to notify early 
about possible major development projects; how to identify key scientists and engineers for constructing the 
Machine, if the decision was made to go ahead; and, briefly, the need to build enthusiasm for the project in 
Congress and with the American public. Der Heer hastened to add that these would be contingency plans 
only, that no final decision was being made, and that no doubt Soviet concerns about a Trojan Horse were at 
least partly genuine. Kitz asked about the composition of “the crew.”
	“They’re asking us to put people in five upholstered chairs. Which people? How do we decide? It’ll 
probably have to be an international crew. How many Americans? How many Russians? Anybody else? We 
don’t know what happens to those five people when they sit down in those chairs, but we want to have the 
best men for the job.”
Ellie did not rise to the bait, and he continued. “Now a major question is going to be who pays for what, 
who builds what, who’s in charge of overall systems integration. I think we can do some real horse trading 
on this, in exchange for significant American representation in the crew.”
“But we still want to send the best possible people,” der Heer noted, a little obviously.
“Sure,” returned Kitz, “but what do we mean by ‘best’? Scientists? People with military intelligence 
backgrounds? Physical strength and endurance? Patriotism? (That’s not a dirty word, you know.) And 
then”—he looked up from buttering another croissant to glance directly at Ellie— “there’s the question of 
sex. Sexes, I mean. Do we send only men? If it’s men and women, there has to be more of one sex than the 
other. There’s five places, an odd number. Are all the crew members going to work together okay? If we go 
ahead with this project, there’s gonna be a lot of tough negotiation.”
“This doesn’t sound right to me,” said Ellie. “This isn’t some ambassadorship you buy with a campaign 
contribution. This is serious business. Also, do you want some muscle-bound moron up there, some kid in 
his twenties who knows nothing about how the world works—just how to run a respectable hundred-yard 
dash and how to obey orders? Or some political hack? That can’t be what this trip is about.”
“No, you’re right.” Kitz smiled. “I think we’ll find people who satisfy all our criteria.”
Der Heer, the bags under his eyes making him look almost haggard, adjourned the meeting. He managed 
to give Ellie a small private smile, but it was all lips, no teeth. The Embassy limousines were waiting to take 
them back to the Elysée Palace.
“I’ll tell you why it would be better to send Russians,” Vaygay was saying. “When you Americans were 
opening up your country—pioneers, trappers, Indian scouts, all that—you were unopposed, at least by 
anyone at your level of technology. You raced across your continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. After a 
while, you expected everything would be easy. Our situation was different. We were conquered by the 
Mongols. Their horse technology was much superior to ours. When we expanded eastward we were careful. 
We never crossed the wilderness and expected it would be easy. We’re more adjusted to adversity than you 
are. Also, Americans are used to being ahead techno-logically. We’re used to catching up technologically. 
Now, everybody on Earth is a Russian—you understand, I mean in our historical position. This mission 
needs Soviets more than it needs Americans.” Merely meeting with her alone entailed certain risks for 
Vaygay—and for her as well, as Kitz had gone out of his way to remind her. Sometimes, during a scientific 
meeting in America or Europe, Vaygay would be permitted to spend an afternoon with her. More often he 
was accompanied by colleagues or a RGB baby-sitter—who would be described as a translator, even when 
his English was clearly inferior to Vaygay’s; or as a scientist from the secretariat of this or that Academy 
commission, except that his knowledge of the scientific matters often proved superficial. Vaygay would 
shake his head when asked about them. But by and large, he considered the baby-sitters a part of the game, 
the price you must pay when they let you visit the West, and more than once she thought she detected a note 
of affection in Vaygay’s voice when he talked to the baby-sitter: To go to a foreign country and pretend to 
be expert in a subject you know poorly must be filled with anxiety. Perhaps, in their heart of hearts, the 
baby-sitters detested their assignment as much as Vaygay did.
They were seated at the same window table at Chez Dieux. A distinct chill was in the air, a premonition of 
winter, and a young man wearing a long blue scarf as his only concession to the cold strode briskly past the 
tubs of chilled oysters outside the window. From Lunacharsky’s continuing (and uncharacteristically) 
guarded remarks, she deduced disarray in the Soviet delegation. The Soviets were concerned that the 
Machine might somehow redound to the strategic advantage of the United States in the five-decade-old 
global competition. Vaygay had in fact been shocked by Baruda’s question about burning the data and 
destroying the radio telescopes. He had had no advance knowledge of Baruda’s position. The Soviets had 
played a vital role in gathering the Message, with the largest longitude coverage of any nation, Vaygay 
stressed, and they had the only serious oceangoing radio telescopes. They would expect a major role in 
whatever came next. Ellie assured him that, as far as she was concerned, they should have such a role. 
“Look, Vaygay, they know from our television transmis- sions that the Earth rotates, and that there are 
many different nations. The Olympic broadcast alone might have told them that. Subsequent transmissions 
from other nations would have nailed it down. So if they’re as good as we think, they could have phased the 
transmission with the Earth’s rotation, so only one nation got the Message. They chose not to do that. They 
want the Message to be received by everybody on the planet. They’re expecting the Machine to be built by 
the whole planet. This can’t be an all-American or an all-Russian project. It’s not what our . . . client 
wants.”
But she was not sure, she told him, that she would be playing any role in decisions on Machine 
construction or crew selection. She was returning to the United States the next day, mainly to get on top of 
the new radio data from the past few weeks. The Consortium plenary sessions seemed interminable, and no 
closing date had been set. Vaygay had been asked by his people to stay on at least a little longer. The 
Foreign Minister had just arrived and was now leading the Soviet delegation.
“I’m worried all this will end badly,” he said. ‘There are so many things that can go wrong. Technological 
failures. Political failures. Human failures. And even if we get through all that, if we don’t have a war 
because of the Machine, if we build it correctly and without blowing ourselves up, I’m still worried.”
	“About what? How do you mean?”
	“The best that can happen is we will be made fools of.”
	“Who will?”
“Arroway, don’t you understand?” A vein in Lunacharsky’s neck throbbed. “I’m amazed you don’t see it. 
The Earth is a . . . ghetto. Yes, a ghetto. All human beings are trapped here. We have heard vaguely that 
there are big cities out there beyond the ghetto, with broad boulevards filled with droshkys and beautiful 
perfumed women in furs. But the cities are too far away, and we are too poor ever to go there, even the 
richest of us. Anyway, we know they don’t want us. That’s why they’ve left us in this pathetic little village in 
the first place.

“And now along comes an invitation. As Xi said. Fancy, elegant. They have sent us an engraved card and 
an empty droshky. We are to send five villagers and the droshky will carry them to—who knows?—
Warsaw. Or Moscow. Maybe even Paris. Of course, some are tempted to go. There will always be people 
who are flattered by the invitation, or who think it is a way to escape our shabby village.
“And what do you think will happen when we get there? Do you think the Grand Duke will have us to 
dinner? Will the President of the Academy ask us interesting questions about daily life in our filthy shtetl? Do 
you imagine the Russian Orthodox Metropolitan will engage us in learned discourse on comparative 
religion?
“No, Arroway. We will gawk at the big city, and they will laugh at us behind their hands. They will exhibit 
us to the curious. The more backward we are the better they’ll feel, the more reassured they’ll be.
“It’s a quota system. Every few centuries, five of us get to spend a weekend on Vega. Have pity on the 
provincials, and make sure they know who their betters are.”

CHAPTER 13
Babylon 
With the basest of companions, I walked the streets of 
Babylon…
	-AUGUSTINE
Confessions, II, 3	

THE CRAY 21 mainframe computer at Argus had been instructed to compare each day’s harvest of data from 
Vega with the earliest records of Level 3 of the palimpsest. In effect, one long and incomprehensible 
sequence of zeros and ones was being compared automatically with another, earlier, such sequence. This 
was part of a massive statistical intercomparison of various segments of the still unde-crypted text. There 
were some short sequences of zeros and ones—”words” the analysts called them, hopefully—which were 
repeated again and again. Many sequences would appear only once in thousands of pages of text. This 
statistical approach to message decryption was familiar to Ellie since high school. But the subroutines 
supplied by the experts from the National Security Agency—made available only as a result of a presidential 
directive, and even then armed with instructions to self-destruct if examined closely—were brilliant.
What prodigies of human inventiveness, Ellie reflected, were being directed to reading each other’s mail. 
The global confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union—now, to be sure, easing 
somewhat—was still eating up the world. It was not just the financial resources dedicated to the military 
establishments of all nations. That was approaching two trillion dollars a year, and by itself was ruinously 
expensive when there were so many other urgent human needs. But still worse, she knew, was the 
intellectual effort dedicated to the arms race.
Almost half the scientists on the planet, it had been estimated, were employed by one or another of the 
almost two hundred military establishments worldwide. And they were not the dregs of the doctoral 
programs in physics and mathematics. Some of her colleagues would console themselves with this thought 
when the awkward problem arose of what to tell a recent doctoral candidate being courted by, say, one of 
the weapons laboratories. “If he was any good, he’d be offered an assistant professorship at Stanford, at 
least,” she could recall Drumlin once saying. No, a certain kind of mind and character was drawn to the 
military applications of science and mathematics—people who liked big explosions, for example; or those 
with no taste for personal combat who, to avenge some schoolyard injustice, aspired to military command; 
or inveterate puzzle solvers who longed to decrypt the most complex messages known. Occasionally the 
spur was political, tracing back to international disputes, immigration policies, wartime horrors, police 
brutality, or national propaganda by this nation or that decades earlier. Many of these scientists had real 
ability, Ellie knew, whatever reservations she might have about their motivations. She tried to imagine that 
massed talent really dedicated to the well-being of the species and the planet.
She pored over the studies that had accumulated during her absence. They were making almost no 
progress in decrypting the Message, although the statistical analyses now stacked into a pile of paper a meter 
tall. It was all very discouraging.
She wished there were someone, especially a close woman friend, at Argus to whom she could pour out 
her hurt and anger at Ken’s behavior. But there was not, and she was disinclined even to use the telephone 
for this purpose. She did manage to spend a weekend with her coUege friend Becky Ellenbogen in Austin, 
but Becky, whose appraisals of men tended to be somewhere between wry and scathing, in this case was 
surprisingly mild in her criticism.
“He is the President’s Science Adviser, and this is only the most amazing discovery in the history of the 
world. Don’t be so hard on him,” Becky urged. “He’ll come around.”
But Becky was another of those who found Ken “charming” (she had met him once at the dedication of 
the National Neutrino Observatory), and was perhaps too inclined to accommodate to power. Had der Heer 
treated Ellie in this shabby way while he was a mere professor of molecular biology somewhere, Becky 
would have mari-nated and skewered the man.

After returning from Paris, der Heer had mustered a regular campaign of apology and devotion. He had 
been overstressed, he told her, overwhelmed with a range of responsibilities including difficult and unfamiliar 
political issues. His position as leader of the American delegation and co-chairman of the plenary might have 
been rendered less effective if there had been public knowledge of his and Ellie’s relationship. Kitz had been 
insufferable. Ken had had too many consecutive nights with only a few hours’ sleep. Altogether, Ellie 
judged, there were too many explanations. But she permitted the relationship to continue.
When it happened, it was Willie once again, this time on the graveyard shift, who first noticed. Afterward, 
Willie would attribute the speed of the discovery less to the superconducting computer and the NSA 
programs than to the new Hadden context-recognition chips. At any rate, Vega had been low in the sky an 
hour or so before dawn when the computer triggered an understated alarm. With some annoyance, Willie 
put down what he was reading—it was a new textbook on Fast Fourier Transform Spectroscopy— and 
noticed these words being printed out on the screen:

RPT. TEXT PP. 41617-41619: BIT MISMATCH 0/2271. CORRELATION COEFFICIENT 0.99+

As he watched, 41619 became 41620 and then 41621. The digits after the slash were increasing in a 
continuous blur. Both the number of pages and the correlation coefficient, a measure of the improbability 
that the correlation was by chance, increased as he watched. He gave it another two pages before picking up 
the direct line to Ellie’s apartment.
She had been in a deep sleep and was momentarily disoriented. But she quickly turned on the bedside 
light and after a moment gave instructions for senior Argus staff to be assembled. She would, she told 
him, locate der Heer, who was somewhere on the facility. This proved not very difficult. She shook his 
shoulder.

“Ken, get up. There’s word that we’ve repeated.”
	“What?”
‘The Message has cycled back. Or at least that’s what Willie says. I’m on my way there. Why don’t you 
wait another ten minutes so we can pretend you were in your room in BSQ?”
She was almost at the door before he shouted after her, “How can we recycle? We haven’t gotten the primer 
yet.”
Racing across the screens was a paired sequence of zeros and ones, a real-time comparison of the data just 
being received and the data from an early page of text received at Argus a year before. The program would 
have culled out any differences. So far, there were none. It reassured them that they had not mistranscribed, 
that there were no apparent transmission errors, and that if some small dense interstellar cloud between 
Vega and the Earth was able to eat the occasional zero or one, this was an infrequent occurrence. Argus was 
by now in real-time communication with dozens of other telescopes that were part of the World Message 
Consortium, and the news of recycling was passed on to the next observing stations westward, to California, 
Hawaii, the Marshal Nedelin now in the South Pacific, and to Sydney. Had the discovery been made when 
Vega was over one of the other telescopes in the network, Argus would have been informed instantly.
The absence of the primer was an agonizing disappointment, but it was not the only surprise. The Message 
page numbers had jumped discontinuously from the 40,000s to the 10,000s, where recycling had been 
uncovered. Evidently Argus had discovered the transmission from Vega almost at the moment it first arrived 
at Earth. It was a remarkably strong signal, and would have been picked up even by small omnidirectional 
telescopes. But it was a surprising coincidence that the broadcast should arrive at Earth at the very moment 
Argus was looking at Vega. Also, what did it mean for the text to begin on a page in the 10,000s? Were 
there 10,000 pages of text missing? Was it a backward practice of the provincial Earth to start numbering 
books on page I? Were these sequential numbers perhaps not page numbers but something else? Or— and 
this worried Ellie the most—was there some fundamental and unexpected difference between how humans 
thought of things and how the aliens thought? If so, it would have worrisome implications about the ability 
of the Consortium to understand the Message, primer or no primer.
The Message repeated exactly, the gaps were all filled in and nobody could read a word of it. It seemed 
unlikely that the transmitting civilization, meticulous in all else, had simply overlooked the need for a primer. 
At least the Olympic broadcast and the interior design of the Machine seemed to be tailored specifically for 
humans. They would hardly go to all this trouble to devise and transmit the Message without making some 
provision for humans to read it. So humans must have overlooked something. It soon became generally 
agreed that somewhere was a fourth layer to the palimpsest. But where?
The diagrams were published in an eight-volume “coffee table” book set that was soon reprinted worldwide. 
All over the planet people tried to figure out the pictures. The dodecahedron and the quasi-biological forms 
were especially evocative. Many clever suggestions were made by the public and carefully sifted by the 
Argus team. Many harebrained interpretations were also widely available, especially in weekly newspapers. 
Whole new industries developed—doubtless unforeseen by those who devised the Message—dedicated to 
using the diagrams to bilk the public. The Ancient and Mystical Order of the Dodecahedron was announced. 
The Machine was a UFO. The Machine was Ezekiel’s Wheel. An angel revealed the meaning of the Message 
and the diagrams to a Brazilian businessman, who distributed—at first, at his own expense—his 
interpretation worldwide. With so many enigmatic diagrams to interpret, it was inevitable that many religions 
would recognize some of their iconography in the Message from the stars. A principal cross section of the 
Machine looked something like a chrysanthemum, a fact that stirred great enthusiasm in Japan. If there had 
been an image of a human face among all the diagrams, messianic fervor might have reached a flash point.
As it was, a surprisingly large number of people were winding up their affairs in preparation for the 
Advent. Industrial productivity was off worldwide. Many had given away all their possessions to the poor 
and then, as the end of the world was delayed, were obliged to seek help from a charity or the State. 
Because gifts of this sort constituted a major fraction of the resources of such charities, some of the 
philanthropists ended up being supported by their own gifts. Delegations approached government leaders to 
urge that schistosomiasis, say, or world hunger be ended by the Advent; otherwise there was no telling what 
would happen to us. Others counseled, more quietly, that if there was a decade of real world madness in the 
offing, there must be a considerable monetary or national advantage in it somewhere.
Some said that there was no primer, that the whole exercise was to teach humans humility, or to drive us 
mad. There were newspaper editorials on how we’re not as smart as we think we are, and some resentment 
directed at the scientists who, after all the support given to them by the governments, have failed us in our 
time of need. Or maybe humans are much dumber than the Vegans gave us credit for. Maybe there was 
some point that had been entirely obvious to all previous emerging civilizations so contacted, something no 
one in the history of the Galaxy had ever missed before. A few commentators embraced this prospect of 
cosmic humiliation with real enthusiasm. It demonstrated what they’d been saying about people all along. 
After a while, Ellie decided that she needed help.
They entered surreptitiously through the Enlil Gate, with an escort dispatched by the Proprietor. The 
General Services Administration security detail was edgy despite, or perhaps because of, the additional 
protection.
Although there was a little sunlight still left, the dirt streets were lit by braziers, oil lamps, and an occasional 
guttering torch. Two amphoras, each large enough to contain an adult human being, flanked the entrance to 
a retail olive oil establishment. The advertising was in cuneiform. On an adjacent public building was a 
magnificent bas-relief of a lion hunt from the reign of Assurbanipal. As they approached the Temple of 
Assur, there was a scuffle in the crowd, and her escort made a wide berth. She now had an unobstructed 
view of the Ziggurat down a wide torchlit avenue. It was more breathtaking than in the pictures. There was 
a martial flourish on an unfamiliar brass instrument; three men and a horse clattered by, the charioteer in 
Phrygian headdress. As in some medieval rendition of a cautionary tale from the book of Genesis, the top of 
the Ziggurat was enveloped in low twilit clouds. They left the Ishtarian Way and entered the Ziggurat 
through a side street. In the private elevator, her escort pressed the button for the topmost floor: “Forty,” it 
read. No numerals. Just the word. And then, to leave no room for doubt, a glass panel flashed, ‘The Gods.”
Mr. Hadden would be with her shortly. Would she like something to drink while she waited? Considering 
the reputation of the place, Ellie demurred. Babylon lay spread out before her—magnificent, as everyone 
said, in its recreation of a long-gone time and place. During daylight hours busloads from museums, a very 
few schools, and the tourist agencies would arrive at the Ishtar Gate, don appropriate clothes, and travel 
back in time. Hadden wisely donated all profits from his daytime clientele to New York City and Long Island 
charities. The daytime tours were immensely popular, in part because it was a respectable opportunity to 
look the place over for those who would not dream of visiting Babylon at night. Well, maybe they would 
dream.
After dark, Babylon was called an adult amusement park. It was of an opulence, scale, and imaginativeness 
that dwarfed, say, the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. It was by far the largest tourist attraction in the New York 
metropolitan area, with by far the largest gross revenues. How Hadden had been able to convince the city 
fathers of Babylon, New York, and how he had lobbied for an “easement” of local and state prostitution 
laws was well known. It was now a half-hour train ride from midtown Manhattan to the Ishtar Gate. Ellie 
had insisted on taking this train, despite the entreaties of the security people, and had found almost a third of 
the visitors to be women. There were no graffiti, little danger of mugging, but a much inferior brand of white 
noise compared with the conveyances of the New York City subway system.
Although Hadden was a member of the National Academy of Engineering, he had never, so far as Ellie 
knew, attended a meeting, and she had never set eyes on him. His face became well known to millions of 
Americans, however, years before as a result of the Advertising Council’s campaign against him: ‘The 
Unamerican” had been the caption under an unflattering portrait of Hadden. Even so, she was taken aback 
when in the midst of her reverie by the slanted glass wall she was interrupted by a small, fat beckoning 
person.
“Oh. Sorry. I never understand how anyone can be afraid of me.”
His voice was surprisingly musical. In fact, he seemed to talk in fifths. He hadn’t thought it necessary to 
introduce himself and once again inclined his head to the door he had left ajar. It was hard to believe that 
some crime of passion was about to be visited upon her under these circumstances, and wordlessly she 
entered the next room.
He ushered her to a meticulously crafted tabletop model of an ancient city of less pretentious aspect than 
Babylon “Pompeii,” he said by way of explanation. “The stadium here is the key. With the restrictions on 
boxing there aren’t any healthy blood sports left in America. Very important. Sucks out some of the poisons 
from the national bloodstream. The whole thing is designed, permits issued, and now this.”
	“What’s ‘this’?”
“No gladiatorial games. I just got word from Sacramento. There’s a bill before the legislature to outlaw 
gladiatorial games in California. Too violent, they say. They authorize a new skyscraper, they know they’ll 
lose two or three construction workers. The unions know, the builders know, and that’s just to build offices 
for oil companies or Beverly Hills lawyers. Sure, we’d lose a few. But we’re geared more to trident and net 
than the short sword. Those legislators don’t have their priorities straight.”
He beamed at her owlishly and offered a drink, which again she refused. “So you want to talk to me about 
the Machine, and I want to talk to you about the Machine. You first. You want to know where the primer 
is?”
“We’re asking for help from a few key people who might have some insight. We thought with your record 
of invention—and since your context-recognition chip was involved in the recycling discovery—that you 
might put yourself in the place of the Vegans and think of where you’d put the primer. We recognize you’re 
very busy, and I’m sorry to—”
“Oh, no. It’s all right. It’s true I’m busy. I’m trying to regularize my affairs, because I’m gonna make a big 
change in my life . . .”
“For the Millennium?” She tried to imagine him giving away S. R. Hadden and Company, the Wall Street 
brokerage house; Genetic Engineering, Inc.; Hadden Cybernetics; and Babylon to the poor.
“Not exactly. No. It was fun to think about. It made me feel good to be asked. I looked at the diagrams.” He 
waved at the commercial set of eight volumes spread in disarray on a worktable. “There are wonderful 
things in there, but I don’t think that’s where the primer is hiding. Not in the diagrams. I don’t know why 
you think the primer has to be in the Message. Maybe they left it on Mars or Pluto or in the Oort Comet 
Cloud, and well discover it in a few centuries. Right now, we know there’s this wonderful Machine, with 
design drawings and thirty thousand pages of explanatory text. But we don’t know whether we’d be able to 
build the thing if we could read it. So we wait a few centuries, improving our technology, knowing that 
sooner or later we’ll have to be ready to build it. Not having the primer binds us up with future generations. 
Human beings are sent a problem that takes generations to solve. I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. Might 
be very healthy. Maybe you’re making a mistake looking for a primer. Maybe it’s better not to find it.”
“No, I want to find the primer right away. We don’t know it’ll be waiting for us forever. If they hang up 
because there was no answer, it would be much worse than if they’d never called at all.”
“Well, maybe you have a point. Anyway, I thought of as many possibilities as I could. I’ll give you a 
couple of trivial possibilities, and then a nontrivial possibility. Trivial first: The primer’s in the Message but 
at a very different data rate. Suppose there was another message in there at a bit an hour—could you detect 
that?”
“Absolutely. We routinely check for long-term receiver drift in any case. But also a bit an hour only buys 
you—let me see—ten, twenty thousand bits tops before the Message recycles.”
“So that makes sense only if the primer is much easier than the Message. You think it isn’t. / think it isn’t. 
Now, what about much faster bit rates? How do you know that under every bit of your Machine Message 
there aren’t a million bits of primer message?”
“Because it would produce monster bandwidths. We’d know in an instant.”
“Okay, so there’s a fast data dump every now and then. Think of it as microfilm. There’s a tiny dot of 
microfilm that’s sitting in repetitious—1 mean in repetitive—parts of the Message. I’m imagining a little box 
that says in your regular language, ‘I am the primer.’ Then right after that there’s a dot. And in that dot is a 
hundred million bits, very fast. You might see if you’ve got any boxes.”
“Believe me, we would have seen it.”
“Okay, how about phase modulation? We use it in radar and spacecraft telemetry, and it hardly 
messes up the spectrum at all. Have you hooked up a phase correlator?”
	“No. That’s a useful idea. I’ll look into it.”
	“Now, the nontrivial idea is this: If the Machine ever gets made, if our people are gonna sit in it, 
somebody’s gonna press a button and then those five are gonna go somewhere. Never mind where. Now, 
there’s an interesting question whether those five are gonna come back. Maybe not. I like the idea that all 
this Machine design was invented by Vegan body snatchers. You know, their medical students, or 
anthropologists or something. They need a few human bodies. It’s a big hassle to come to Earth—you need 
permission, passes from the transit authority—hell, it’s more trouble than it’s worth. But with a little effort 
you can send the Earth a Message and then the earthlings’ll go to all the trouble to ship you five bodies.
“It’s like stamp collecting. I used to collect stamps when I was a kid. You could send a letter to 
somebody in a foreign country and most of the time they’d write back. It didn’t matter what they said. All 
you wanted was the stamp. So that’s my picture: There’s a few stamp collectors on Vega. They send letters 
out when they’re in the mood, and bodies come flying back to them from all over space. Wouldn’t you like 
to see the collection?”
He smiled up at her and continued. “Okay, so what does this have to do with finding the primer? Nothing. 
It’s relevant only if I’m wrong. If my picture is wrong, if the five people are coming back to Earth, then it 
would be a big help if we’ve invented spaceflight. No matter how smart they are, it’s gonna be tough to land 
the Machine. Too many things are moving. God knows what the propulsion system is. If you pop out of 
space a few meters below ground, you’ve had it. And what’s a few meters in twenty-six light-years? It’s too 
risky. When the Machine comes back it’ll pop out—or whatever it does—in space, somewhere near the 
Earth, but not on it or in it. So they have to be sure we have spaceflight, so the five people can be rescued in 
space. They’re in a hurry and can’t sit tight until the 1957 evening news arrives on Vega. So what do they 
do? They arrange so part of the Message can only be detected from space. What part is that? The primer. If 
you can detect the primer, you’ve got spaceflight and you can come back safe. So I imagine the primer is 
being sent at the frequency of the oxygen absorptions in the microwave spec- trum, or in the near-infrared—
some part of the spectrum you can’t detect until you’re well out of the Earth’s atmosphere ...”
“We’ve had the Hubble Telescope looking at Vega all through the ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared. 
Not a hint of anything. The Russians have repaired their millimeter wave instrument. They’ve hardly been 
looking at anything besides Vega and they haven’t found anything. But we’ll keep looking. Other 
possibilities?”
“Sure you wouldn’t like a drink? I don’t drink myself, but so many people do.” Ellie again declined. “No, 
no other possibilities. Now it’s my turn?
“See, I want to ask you for something. But I’m not good at asking for things. I never have been. My 
public image is rich, funny-looking, unscrupulous—somebody who looks for weaknesses in the system so he 
can make a fast buck. And don’t tell me you don’t believe any of that. Everybody believes at least some of it. 
You’ve probably heard some of what I’m gonna say before, but give me ten minutes and I’ll tell you how all 
this began. I want you to know something about me.”
She settled back, wondering what he could possibly want of her, and brushed away idle fantasies involving 
the Temple of Ishtar, Hadden, and perhaps a charioteer or two thrown in for good measure.
Years before, he had invented a module that, when a television commercial appeared, automatically muted 
the sound. It wasn’t at first a context-recognition device. Instead, it simply monitored the amplitude of the 
carrier wave. TV advertisers had taken to running their ads louder and with less audio clutter than the 
programs that were their nominal vehicles. News of Hadden’s module spread by word of mouth. People 
reported a sense of relief, the lifting of a great burden, even a feeling of joy at being freed from the 
advertising barrage for the six to eight hours out of every day that the average American spent in front of the 
television set. Before there could be any coordinated response from the television advertising industry, 
Adnix had become wildly popular. It forced advertisers and net- works into new choices of carrier-wave 
strategy, each of which Hadden countered with a new invention. Sometimes he invented circuits to defeat 
strategies that the agencies and the networks had not yet hit upon. He would say that he was saving them the 
trouble of making inventions, at great cost to their shareholders, which were at any rate doomed to failure. 
As his sales volume increased, he kept cutting prices. It was a kind of electronic warfare. And he was 
winning.
They tried to sue him—something about a conspiracy in restraint of trade. They had sufficient political 
muscle that his motion for summary dismissal was denied, but insufficient influence to actually win the case. 
The trial had forced Hadden to investigate the relevant legal codes. Soon after, he applied, through a well-
known Madison Avenue agency in which he was now a major silent partner, to advertise his own product on 
commercial television. After a few weeks of controversy his commercials were refused. He sued all three 
networks and in this trial was able to prove conspiracy in restraint of trade. He received a huge settlement 
that was, at the time, a record for cases of this sort, and which contributed in its modest way to the demise 
of the original networks.
There had always been people who enjoyed the commercials, of course, and they had no need for Adnix. 
But they were a dwindling minority. Hadden made a great fortune by eviscerating broadcast advertising. He 
also made many enemies.
By the time context-recognition chips were commercially available, he was ready with Preachnix, a 
submodule which could be plugged into Adnix. It would simply switch channels if by chance a doctrinaire 
religious program should be tuned in. You could preselect key words, such as “Advent” or “Rapture,” and 
cut great swaths through the available programming. Preachnix was a godsend for a long-suffering but 
significant minority of television viewers. There was talk, some of it half-serious, that Hadden’s next 
submodule would be called Jivenix, and would work only on public addresses by presidents and premiers.

As he further developed context-recognition chips, it became obvious to him that they had much wider 
applications—from education, science, and medicine, to military intelligence and industrial espionage. It was 
on this issue that the lines were drawn for the famous suit United States v. Hadden Cybernetics. One of 
Hadden’s chips was considered too good for civilian life, and on recommendation of the National Security 
Agency, the facilities and key personnel for the most advanced context-recognition chip production were 
taken over by the government. It was simply too important to read the Russian mail. God knows, they told 
him, what would happen if the Russians could read our mail.
Hadden refused to cooperate in the takeover and vowed to diversify into areas that could not possibly be 
connected with national security. The government was nationalizing industry, he said. They claimed to be 
capitalists, but when push came to shove they showed their socialist face. He had found an unsatisfied public 
need and employed an existing and legal new technology to deliver what they wanted. It was classic 
capitalism. But there were many sober capitalists who would tell you that he had already gone too far with 
Adnix, that he had posed a real threat to the American way of life. In a dour column signed V. Petrov, 
Pravda called it a concrete example of the contradictions of capitalism. The Wall Street Journal countered, 
perhaps a little tangentially, by calling Pravda, which in Russian means “truth,” a concrete example of the 
contradictions of communism.
He suspected that the takeover was only a pretext, that his real offense had been to attack advertising and 
video evangelism. Adnix and Preachnix were the essence of capitalist entrepreneurship, he argued 
repeatedly. The point of capitalism was supposed to be providing people with alternatives.
“Well, the absence of advertising is an alternative, I told them. There are huge advertising budgets only 
when there’s no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the 
one that’s bet- ter. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be 
stupid. A strong country needs smart people. So Adnix is patriotic. The manufacturers can use some of their 
advertising budgets to improve their products. The consumer will benefit. Magazines and newspapers and 
direct mail business will boom, and that’ll ease the pain in the ad agencies. I don’t see what the problem is.”
Adnix, much more than the innumerable libel suits against the original commercial networks, led directly 
to their demise. For a while there was a small army of unemployed advertising executives, down-and-out 
former network officials, and penniless divines who had sworn blood oaths to revenge themselves on 
Hadden. And there was an ever-growing number of still more formidable adversaries. Without a doubt, she 
thought, Hadden was an interesting man.
“So I figure it’s time to go. I’ve got more money than I know what to do with, my wife can’t stand me, 
and I’ve got enemies everywhere. I want to do something important, something worthy. I want to do 
something so that hundreds of years from now people will look back and be glad I was around.”
“You want—”
“I want to build the Machine. Look, I’m perfectly suited for it. I’ve got the best cybernetics expertise, 
practical cybernetics, in the business—better than Camegie-Mellon, better than MIT, better than Stanford, 
better than Santa Barbara. And if there’s anything clear from those plans, it’s that this isn’t a job for an old-
time tool-and-die maker. And you’re going to need something like genetic engineering. You won’t find 
anybody more dedicated to this job. And I’ll do it at cost.”
“Really, Mr. Hadden, who builds the Machine, if we ever get to that point, isn’t up to me. It’s an 
international decision. All sorts of politics is involved. They’re still debating in Paris about whether to build 
the thing, if and when we decrypt the Message.”
	“Don’t you think I know that? I’m also applying through the usual channels of influence and 
corruption. I just want to have a good word put in for me for the right reasons, by the side of the angels. 
Yon understand? And speaking of angels, you really shook up Palmer Joss and Billy Jo Ran-kin. I haven’t 
seen them so agitated since that trouble they had about Mary’s waters. Rankin saying he was deliberately 
misquoted about supporting the Machine. My, my.”
He shook his head in mock consternation. That some long-standing personal enmity existed between these 
active proselytizers and the inventor of Preachnix seemed probable enough, and for some reason she was 
moved to their defense.
“They’re both a lot smarter than you might think. And Palmer Joss is ... well, there’s something genuine 
about him. He’s not a phony.”
“You’re sure it’s not just another pretty face? Excuse me, but it’s important that people understand their 
feelings on this. It’s too important not to. I know these clowns. Underneath, when push comes to shove, 
they’re jackals. A lot of people find religion attractive—you know, personally, sexually. You ought to see 
what happens in the Temple of Ishtar.”
She repressed a small shiver of revulsion. “I think I will have that drink,” she said.
Looking down from the penthouse, she could see the gradated tiers of the Ziggurat, each draped with 
flowers, some artificial, some real, depending on the season. It was a reconstruction of the Hanging Gardens 
of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Miraculously, it was so arranged that it did not 
closely resemble a Hyatt Hotel. Far below, she could make out a torchlit procession headed back from the 
Ziggurat to the Enlil Gate. It was led by a kind of sedan chair held by four burly men stripped to the waist. 
Who or what was in it she could not make out.
“It’s a ceremony in honor of Gilgamesh, one of the ancient Sumerian culture heroes.”
“Yes, I’ve heard of him.”

CHAPTER 14
Harmonic Oscillator 
Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is 
shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first 
comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and 
proudly through long youth, until at last, in the 
ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely 
exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
	-GEORGE SANTAYANA
Scepticism and Animal Faith, IX

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 
abstrac- tions; 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 Mes- sage 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 re- dundancy 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 one-
quarter 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 knowl- edge. 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 dis- putes; 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-and-
roll 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 crew-
selection 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 trans- mit. 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?”

CHAPTER 15
Erbium Dowel
The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the 
constellations any nearer, I know they are very well 
where they are, I know they suffice for those who 
belong to them.
	-WALT WHITMAN
Leaves of Grass
“Song of the Open Road” (1855)

IT TOOK Years, it was a technological dream and a diplomatic nightmare, but finally they got around to 
building the Machine. Various neologisms were proposed, and project names evocative of ancient myths. 
But from the beginning everyone had called it simply the Machine, and that became its official designation. 
The continuing complex and delicate international negotiations were described by Western editorial writers 
as “Machine Politics.” When the first reliable estimate of the total cost was generated, even the titans of the 
aerospace industry gasped. Eventually, it came to half a trillion dollars a year for some years, roughly a third 
of the total military budget—nuclear and conventional—of the planet. There were fears that building the 
Machine would ruin the world economy. “Economic Warfare from Vega?” asked the London Economist. 
The daily headlines in The New York Times were, by any dispassionate measure, more bizarre than any in the 
now defunct National Enquirer a decade earlier.
The record will show that no psychic, seer, prophet, or soothsayer, no person with claimed precognitive 
abilities, no astrologer, no numerologist, and no late-December copywriter on “The Year Ahead” had 
predicted the Message or the Machine—much less Vega, prime numbers, Adolf Hitler, the Olympics, and 
the rest. There were many claims, however, by those who had clearly foreseen the events but had carelessly 
neglected to write the precognition down. Predictions of surprising events always prove more accurate if not 
set down on paper beforehand. It is one of those odd regularities of everyday life. Many religions were in a 
slightly different category: A careful and imaginative perusal of their sacred writings will reveal, it was 
argued, a clear foretelling of these wondrous happenings.
For others, the Machine represented a potential bonanza for the world aerospace industry, which had been in 
worrisome decline since the Hiroshima Accords took full force.

Very few new strategic weapons systems were under development. Habitats in space were a growing 
business, but they hardly compensated for the loss of orbiting laser battle stations and other accoutrements 
of the strategic defense envisioned by an earlier administration. Thus, some of those who worried about the 
safety of the planet if the Machine were to be built swallowed their scruples when contemplating the 
implications for jobs, profits, and career advancement.
A well-placed few argued that there was no richer prospect for the high-technology industries than a 
threat from space. There would have to be defenses, immensely powerful surveillance radars, eventual 
outposts on Pluto or in the Oort Comet Cloud. No amount of discourse about military disparities between 
terrestrials and extraterrestrials could daunt these visionaries. “Even if we can’t defend ourselves against 
them,” they asked, “don’t you want us to see them coming?” There was profit here and they could smell it. 
They were building the Machine, of course, trillions of dollars’ worth of Machine; but the Machine was only 
the beginning, if they played their cards right.
An unlikely political alliance coalesced behind the reelection of President Lasker, which became in effect a 
national referendum on whether to build the Machine. Her opponent warned of Trojan Horses and 
Doomsday Machines and the prospect of demoralization of American ingenuity in the face of aliens who had 
already “invented everything.” The President pronounced herself confident that American technology would 
rise to the challenge and implied, although she did not actually say, that American ingenuity would 
eventually equal anything they had on Vega. She was re-elected by a respectable but by no means 
overwhelming margin.
The instructions themselves were a decisive factor. Both in the primer on language and basic technology and 
in the Message on the construction of the Machine nothing was left unclear. Sometimes intermediate steps 
that seemed entirely obvious were spelled out in tedious detail—as when, in the foundations of arithmetic, it 
is proved that if two times three equals six, then three times two also equals six. At every stage of 
construction there were checkpoints: The erbium produced by this process should be 96 percent pure, with 
no more than a fraction of a percent impurity from the other rare earths. When Component 31 is completed 
and placed in a 6 molar solution of hydrofluoric acid, the remaining structural elements should look like the 
diagram in the accompanying figure. When Component 408 is assembled, application of a two megagauss 
transverse magnetic field should spin the rotor up to so many revolutions per second before it returns itself 
to a motionless state. If any of the tests failed, you went back and redid the whole business.
After a while you got used to the tests, and you expected to be able to pass them. It was akin to rote 
memorization. Many of the underlying components, constructed by special factories designed from scratch 
by following the primer instructions, defied human understanding. It was hard to see why they should work. 
But they did. Even in such cases, practical applications of the new technologies could be contemplated. 
Occasionally promising insights seemed to be available for the skimming—in metallurgy, for example, or in 
organic semiconductors. In some cases several alternative technologies were supplied to produce an 
equivalent component; the extraterrestrials could not be sure, apparently, which approach would be easiest 
for the technology of the Earth.
As the first factories were built and the first prototypes produced, pessimism diminished about human ability 
to reconstruct an alien technology from a Message written in no known language. There was the heady 
feeling of arriving unprepared for a school test and finding that you can figure out the answers from your 
general education and your common sense. As in all competently designed examinations, taking it was a 
learning experience. All the first tests were passed: The erbium was of adequate purity; the pictured 
superstructure was left after the inorganic material was etched away by hydrofluoric acid; the rotor spun up 
as advertised. The Message flattered the scientists and engi- neers, critics said; they were becoming caught 
up in the technology and losing sight of the dangers.
For the construction of one component, a particularly intricate set of organic chemical reactions was 
specified and the resulting product was introduced into a swimming pool-sized mixture of formaldehyde and 
aqueous ammonia. The mass grew, differentiated, specialized, and then just sat there—exquisitely more 
complex than anything like it humans knew how to build. It had an intricately branched network of fine 
hollow tubes, through which perhaps some fluid was to circulate. It was colloidal, pulpy, dark red. It did not 
make copies of itself, but it was sufficiently biological to scare a great many people. They repeated the 
procedure and produced something apparently identical. How the end product could be significantly more 
complicated than the instructions that went into building it was a mystery. The organic mass squatted on its 
platform and did, so far as anyone could tell, nothing. It was to go inside the dodecahedron, just above and 
below the crew area.
Identical machines were under construction in the United States and the Soviet Union. Both nations had 
chosen to build in fairly remote places, not so much to protect population centers in case it was a Doomsday 
Machine as to control access by curiosity seekers, protesters, and the media. In the United States the 
Machine was built in Wyoming; in the Soviet Union, just beyond the Caucasus, in the Uzbek S.S.R. New 
factories were established near the assembly sites. Where components could be manufactured with 
something like existing industry, manufacturing was widely dispersed. An optical subcontractor in Jena, for 
example, would make and test components to go to the American and Soviet Machines; and to Japan, where 
every component was systematically examined to understand how it worked, so far as was possible. 
Progress out of Hokkaido had been slow.
There was concern that a component subjected to a test unauthorized in the Message might destroy some 
subtle symbiosis of the various components in a functioning Ma- chine. A major substructure of the Machine 
was three exterior concentric spherical shells, arranged with axes perpendicular to each other, and designed 
to spin at high velocities. The spherical shells were to have precise and intricate patterns cut into them. 
Would a shell that had been whirled a few times in an unauthorized test function improperly when assembled 
into the Machine? Would an inexperienced shell, by contrast, work perfectly?
Hadden Industries was the American prime contractor for Machine construction. Sol Hadden had insisted 
on no unauthorized testing or even mounting of components intended for eventual assembly into the 
Machine. The instructions, he ordered, were to be followed to the bit, there being no letters per se in the 
Message. He urged his employees to think of themselves as medieval necromancers, fastidiously following 
the words of a magic spell. Do not dare to mispronounce a syllable, he told them.
This was, depending on which calendrical or eschato-logical doctrine you fancied, two years before the 
Millennium. So many people were “retiring,” in happy anticipation of Doomsday or the Advent or both, that 
in some industries skilled laborers were in short supply. Hadden’s willingness to restructure his work force 
to optimize Machine construction, and to provide incentives for subcontractors, was seen to be a major 
factor in the American success so far.
But Hadden had also “retired”—a surprise, considering the well-known views of the inventor of Preachnix. 
“The chiliasts made an atheist out of me,” he was quoted as saying. Key decisions were still in his hands, his 
subordinates said. But communication with Hadden was via fast asynchronous telenetting: His subordinates 
would leave progress reports, authorization requests, and questions for him in a locked box of a popular 
scientific telenetting service. His answers would come back in another locked box. It was a peculiar 
arrangement, but it seemed to be working. As the early, most difficult steps were cleared and the Machine 
actually was beginning to take shape, less and less was heard from S. R. Hadden. The executives of the 
World Machine Consortium were concerned, but after what was described as a lengthy visit with Mr. 
Hadden in an unrevealed location, they came away reassured. His whereabouts were unknown to everyone 
else.
The world strategic inventories fell below 3,200 nuclear weapons for the first time since the middle 1950s. 
Multilateral talks on the more difficult stages of disarmament, down to a minimum nuclear deterrent, were 
making progress. The fewer the weapons on one side, the more dangerous would be the sequestering of a 
small number of weapons by the other. And with the number of delivery systems—which were much easier 
to verify—also diminishing steeply, with new means of automatic monitoring of treaty compliance being 
deployed, and with new agreements on on-site inspection, the prospects for further reductions seemed good. 
The process had generated a kind of momentum of its own in the minds of both the experts and the public. 
As occurs in the usual kind of arms race, the two powers were vying to keep up with one another but this 
time in arms reductions. In practical military terms they had not yet given up very much; they still retained 
the capability of destroying the planetary civilization. However, in the optimism generated for the future, in 
the hope engendered in the emerging generation, this beginning had already accomplished much. Aided 
perhaps by the imminent worldwide Millennial celebrations) both secular and canonical, the number of armed 
hostilities between nations per year had diminished still further. ‘The Peace of God,” the Cardinal 
Archbishop of Mexico City had called it.
In Wyoming and Uzbekistan new industries had been created and whole cities were rising from the 
ground. The cost was borne disproportionately by the industrialized nations, of course, but the pro rata cost 
for everyone on Earth was something like one hundred dollars per year. For a quarter of the Earth’s 
population, one hundred dollars was a significant fraction of annual income. The money spent on the 
Machine produced no goods or services directly. But in stimulating new technology, it was deemed a great 
bargain, even if the Machine itself never worked.

There were many who felt that the pace had been too swift, that every step should be understood before 
moving on to the next. If the construction of the Machine took generations, it was argued, so what? 
Spreading the development costs over decades would lessen the economic burden to the world economy of 
building the Machine. By many standards this was prudent advice, but it was difficult to implement. How 
could you develop only one component of the Machine? All over the world, scientists and engineers of 
varying disciplinary persuasions were straining to be let loose on those aspects of the Machine that 
overlapped their areas of expertise.
There were some who worried that were the Machine not built quickly, it would never be built. The 
American President and the Soviet Premier had committed their nations to the construction of the Machine. 
This was not guaranteed for all possible successors. Also, for perfectly understandable personal reasons, 
those controlling the project wished to see it completed while they were still in positions of responsibility. 
Some argued that there was an intrinsic urgency to a Message broadcast on so many frequencies so loudly 
and for so long. They were not asking us to build the Machine when we were ready. They were asking us to 
build it now. The pace quickened.
All the early subsystems were based on elementary technologies described in the first part of the primer. 
The prescribed tests had been passed readily enough. As the later, more complex subsystems were tested, 
occasional failures were noted. This was apparent in both nations, but was more frequent in the Soviet 
Union. Since no one knew how the components worked, it was usually impossible to trace backwards from 
failure mode to identification of the flawed step in the manufacturing process. In some cases the components 
were made in parallel by two different manufacturers, with competition for speed and accuracy. If there were 
two components, both of which had passed tests, there was a tendency for each nation to select the domestic 
product. Thus, the Machines that were being assembled in the two countries were not absolutely identical.
260 Finally, in Wyoming, the day came to begin systems integration, the assembling of the separate 
components into a complete Machine. It was likely to be the easiest part of the construction process. 
Completion within a year or two seemed likely. Some thought that activating the Machine would end the 
world right on schedule.

The rabbits were much more astute in Wyoming. Or less. It was hard to figure out. The headlights on the 
Thunderbird had picked up an occasional rabbit near the road more than once. But hundreds of them 
organized in ranks—that custom, apparently, had not yet spread from New Mexico to Wyoming. The 
situation here was not much different from Argus, Ellie found. There was a major scientific facility 
surrounded by tens of thousands of square kilometers of lovely, almost uninhabited landscape. She wasn’t 
running the show, and she wasn’t one of the crew. But she was here, working on one of the grandest 
enterprises ever contemplated. Surely, no matter what happened after the Machine was activated, the Argus 
discovery would be judged a turning point in human history.
Just at the moment when some additional unifying force is needed, this bolt comes from the blue. From the 
black, she corrected herself. From twenty-six light-years away, 230 trillion kilometers. It’s hard to think of 
your primary allegiance as Scottish or Slovenian or Szechuanese when you’re all being hailed 
indiscriminately by a civilization millennia ahead of you. The gap between the most technologically backward 
nation on the Earth and the industrialized nations was, certainly, much smaller than the gap between the 
industrialized nations and the beings on Vega. Suddenly, distinctions that had earlier seemed transfixing —
racial, religious, national, ethnic, linguistic, economic, and cultural—-began to seem a little less pressing.
“We are all humans.” This was a phrase you heard often these days. It was remarkable, in previous decades, 
how infrequently sentiments of this sort had been expressed, especially in the media. We share the same 
small planet, it was said, and—very nearly—the same global civilization. It was hard to imagine the 
extraterrestrials taking seriously a plea for preferential parley from representatives of one or another 
ideological faction. The existence of the Message—even apart from its enigmatic function—was binding up 
the world. You could see it happening before your eyes.
Her mother’s first question when she heard that Ellie had not been selected was “Did you cry?” Yes, she 
had cried. It was only natural. There was, of course, a part of her that longed to be aboard. But Drumlin was 
a first-rate choice, she had told her mother.
No decision had been made by the Soviets between Lunacharsky and Arkhangelsky; both would “train” 
for the mission. It was hard to see what training might be appropriate beyond understanding the Machine as 
best they, or anyone else, could. Some Americans charged that this was merely an attempt by the Soviets to 
acquire two principal Machine spokesmen, but Ellie thought this was mean-spirited. Both Lunacharsky and 
Arkhangelsky were extremely capable. She wondered how the Soviets would decide which to send. 
Lunacharsky was in the United States, but not here in Wyoming. He was in Washington with a high-level 
Soviet delegation meeting with the Secretary of State and Michael Kitz, newly promoted to Deputy 
Secretary of Defense. Arkhangelsky was back in Uzbekistan.
The new metropolis growing up in the Wyoming wilderness was called Machine; Machine, Wyoming. Its 
Soviet counterpart was given the Russian equivalent, Makhina. Each was a complex of residences, utilities, 
residential and business districts, and—most of all—factories. Some of them were unpretentious, at least on 
the outside. But in others you could see in a single glance their bizarre aspects—domes and minarets, miles 
of intricate exterior piping. Only the factories that were adjudged potentially dangerous—those 
manufacturing the organic components, for example—were here in the Wyoming wilderness. Technologies 
better understood were distributed worldwide. The core of the cluster of new industries was the Systems 
Integration Facility, built near what had once been Wagon-wheel, Wyoming, to which completed 
components were consigned. Sometimes Ellie would see a component arrive and realize that she had been 
the first human being ever to see it as a design drawing. As each new part was uncrated, she would rush to 
inspect it. As components were mounted one upon another, and as subsystems passed their prescribed tests, 
she felt a kind of glow that she guessed was akin to maternal pride.

Ellie, Drumlin, and Valerian arrived for a routine and long-scheduled meeting on the now wholly redundant 
worldwide monitoring of the signal from Vega. Whc6 they arrived, they found everyone talking about the 
burning of Babylon. It had happened in the early hours of the morning, perhaps at a time when the place was 
prowled only by its most iniquitous and unregenerate habitués. A raiding party, equipped with mortars and 
incendiaries, had struck simultaneously through the Enlil and Ishtar gates. The Ziggurat had been put to the 
torch. There was a photograph of improbably and scantily clad people rushing from the Temple of Assur. 
Remarkably, no one was killed, although there were many injuries.
Just before the attack, the New York Sun, a paper controlled by the Earth-Firsters and sporting a globe 
shattered by a lightning bolt on its masthead, received a call announcing that the attack was under way. It 
was divinely inspired retribution, the caller volunteered, carried out on behalf of decency and American 
morality, by those sick and tired of filth and corruption. There were statements by the president of Babylon, 
Inc., decrying the attack and condemning an alleged criminal conspiracy, but—at least so far—not a word 
from S. R. Hadden, wherever he might be.
Because Ellie was known to have visited Hadden in Babylon, a few of the project personnel sought out her 
reaction. Even Drumlin was interested in her opinion on this matter, although from his evident knowledge of 
the geogra- phy of the place, it seemed possible that he had visited it more than once himself. She had no 
trouble imagining him as charioteer. But perhaps he had only read about Babylon. Photomaps had been 
published in the weekly newsmaga-zines.
Eventually, they got back to business. Fundamentally, the Message was continuing on the same 
frequencies, bandpasses, time constants, and polarization and phase modulation; the Machine design and the 
primer were still sitting underneath the prime numbers and the Olympic’ broadcast. The civilization in the 
Vega system seemed very dedicated. Or maybe they had just forgotten to turn off the transmitter. Valerian 
had a faraway look in his eyes.
“Peter, why do you have to look at the ceiling when you think?”
Drumlin was reputed to have mellowed over the last few years, but, as with this comment, his reform was 
not always apparent. Being chosen by the President of the United States to represent the nation to the 
extraterrestrials was, he would say, a great honor. The trip, he told his intimates, would be the crowning 
point of his life. His wife, temporarily transplanted to Wyoming and still doggedly faithful, had to endure the 
same slide shows presented to new audiences of scientists and technicians building the Machine. Since the 
site was near his native Montana, Drumlin visited there briefly from time to time. Once Ellie had driven him 
to Missoula. For the first time in their relationship, he had been cordial to her for a few consecutive hours.
“Shhhh! I’m thinking,” replied Valerian. “It’s a noise-suppression technique. I’m trying to minimize the 
distractions in my visual field, and then you present a distraction in the audio spectrum. You might ask me 
why I don’t just as well stare at a piece of blank paper. But the trouble is that the paper’s too small. I can 
see things in my peripheral vision. Anyway, what I was thinking is this: Why are we still getting the Hitler 
message, the Olympic broadcast? Years have passed. They must have received the British Coronation 
broadcast by now. Why haven’t we seen some close-ups of Orb and Scepter and ermine, and a voice in-
264 toning ‘. . . now crowned as George the Sixth, by the Grace of God, King of England and Northern 
Ireland, and Emperor of India’?”
“Are you sure Vega was over England at the time of the Coronation transmission?” Ellie asked.
“Yes, we checked that out within a few weeks of receipt of the Olympic broadcast. And the intensity was 
stronger than the Hitler thing. I’m sure Vega could have picked up the Coronation transmission.”
“You’re worried that they don’t want us to know everything they know about us?” she asked.
‘They’re in a hurry,” said Valerian. He was given occasionally to delphic utterances.
“More likely,” offered Ellie, “they want to keep reminding us that they know about Hitler.”
“That’s not entirely different from what I’m saying,” Valerian replied.
“All right. Let’s not waste too much time in Fantasy-land,” Drumlin groaned. He was always impatient with 
speculation on extraterrestrial motivation. It was a total waste of time to guess, he would say; we’ll know 
soon enough. Meanwhile, he urged all and sundry to concentrate on the Message; it was hard data—
redundant, unambiguous, brilliantly composed.
“Here, a little reality might fix you two up. Why don’t we go into the assembly area? I think they’re doing 
systems integration with the erbium dowels.”
The geometric design of the Machine was simple. The details were extremely complex. The five chairs in 
which the crew would sit were amidships in the dodecahedron where it bulged out most prominently. There 
were no facilities for eating or sleeping or other bodily functions, clear evidence that the trip aboard the 
Machine—if there was one—would be short. Some thought this meant that the Machine, when activated, 
would quickly rendezvous with an interstellar space vehicle in the vicinity of the Earth. The only difficulty 
was that meticulous radar and optical searches could find no trace of such a ship. It seemed scarcely likely 
that the extraterrestrials had overlooked ele- mentary human physiological needs. Maybe the Machine didn’t 
go anywhere. Maybe it did something to the crew. There were no instruments in the crew area, nothing to 
steer with, not even an ignition key—just the five chairs, pointed inward, so each crew member could watch 
the others. And there was a carefully prescribed upper limit on the weight of the crew and their belongings. 
In practice, the constraint worked to the advantage of people of small stature.
Above and below the crew area, in the tapering part of the dodecahedron, were the organics, with their 
intricate and puzzling architecture. Placed throughout the interior of this part of the dodecahedron, 
apparently at random, were the dowels of erbium. And surrounding the dodecahedron were the three 
concentric spherical shells, each in a way representing one of the three physical dimensions. The shells were 
apparently magnetically suspended—at least the instructions included a powerful magnetic field generator,’ 
and the space between the spherical shells and the dodecahedron was to be a high vacuum.
The Message did not name any Machine component. Erbium was identified as the atom with sixty-eight 
protons and ninety-nine neutrons. The various parts of the Machine were also described numerically—
Component 31, for example. So the rotating concentric spherical shells were named benzels by a Czech 
technician who knew something of the history of technology; Gustav Benzel had, in 1870, invented the 
merry-go-round.
The design and function of the Machine were unfathomed, it required whole new technologies to 
construct, but it was made of matter, the structure could be diagrammed—indeed cutaway engineering 
drawings had appeared in mass media all over the world—and its finished form was readily visualized. There 
was a continuing mood of technological optimism.
Drumlin, Valerian, and Arroway went through the usual identification sequence, involving credentials, 
thumbprint and voiceprint, and were then admitted to the vast assembly bay. Three-story overhead cranes 
were positioning er- bium dowels in the organic matrix. Several pentagonal panels for the exterior of the 
dodecahedron were hanging from an elevated railroad track. While the Soviets had had some problems, the 
U.S. subsystems had finally passed all their tests, and the overall architecture of the Machine was gradually 
emerging. It’s all coming together, Ellie thought. She looked to where the benzels would be assembled. 
When completed, the Machine would look from the outside like one of those armillary spheres of the 
Renaissance astronomers. What would Johannes Kepler have made of all this?
The floor and the circumferential tracks at various altitudes in the assembly building were crowded with 
technicians, government officials, and representatives of the World Machine Consortium. As they watched. 
Valerian mentioned that the President had established an occasional correspondence with his wife, who 
would not tell Peter even what it was about. She had pleaded the right of privacy.
The positioning of the dowels was almost completed, and a major systems integration test was about to be 
attempted for the first time. Some thought the prescribed monitoring device was a gravity wave telescope. 
Just as the test was to begin, they walked around a stanchion to get a better view.
Suddenly Drumlin was in the air, flying. Everything else seemed to be flying, too. It reminded her of the 
tornado that had carried Dorothy to Oz. As in a slow motion film, Drumlin careened toward her, arms 
outstretched, and knocked her roughly to the ground. After all these years, she thought, was this his notion 
of a sexual overture? He had a lot to learn.
It was never determined who did it. Organizations publicly claiming responsibility included the Earth-
Firsters, the Red Army Faction, the Islamic Jihad, the now underground Fusion Energy Foundation, the Sikh 
Separatists, Shining Path, the Khmer Vert, the Afghan Renaissance, the radical wing of Mothers Against the 
Machine, the Reunified Re- unification Church, Omega Seven, the Doomsday Chiliasts (although Billy Jo 
Rankin denied any connection and claimed that the confessions were called in by the impious, in a doomed 
attempt to discredit God), the Broederbond, El Catorce de Febrero, the Secret Army of the Kuomin-tang, 
the Zionist League, the Party of God, and the newly resuscitated Symbionese Liberation Front. Most of 
these organizations did not have the wherewithal to execute the sabotage; the length of the list was merely 
an index of how widespread opposition to the Machine had become.
The Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, the Democratic National Socialist Party, and a few like-
minded organizations restrained themselves and did not claim responsibility. An influential minority of their 
membership believed that the Message had been dispatched by Hitler himself. According to one version, he 
had been spirited off the Earth by German rocket technology in May 1945, and quite some progress had 
been made by the Nazis in the intervening years.
“I don’t know where the Machine was going,” the President said some months later, “but if it was half as 
whacked-out as this planet is, it probably wasn’t worth the trip anyway.”
As reconstructed by the Commission of Inquiry, one of the erbium dowels was sundered by an explosion; 
the two pillbox-shaped fragments careened downward from a height of twenty meters, and were also 
propelled laterally with considerable velocity. A weight-bearing interior wall was struck and collapsed under 
the impact. Eleven people were killed and forty-eight injured. A number of major Machine components were 
destroyed; and, since an explosion was not among the testing protocols prescribed by the Message, the 
explosion might have ruined apparently unaffected components. When you had no idea at all about how the 
thing worked, you had to be very careful about building it.
Despite the profusion of organizations that craved credit, suspicion in the United States focused 
immediately on two of the few groups that had not claimed responsibility: the extraterrestrials and the 
Russians. Talk about Doomsday Machines filled the air once again. The extraterrestrials had designed the 
Machine to explode catastrophically when assembled, but fortunately, some said, we were careless in 
assembling it and only a small charge—perhaps the trigger for the Doomsday Machine—blew up. They 
urged halting construction before it was too late and burying the surviving components in widely dispersed 
salt mines.
But the Commission of Inquiry found evidence that the Machine Disaster, as it came to be known, was of 
more Earthly origin. The dowels had a central ellipsoidal cavity of unimown purpose, and its interior wall 
was lined with an intricate network of fine gadolinium wires. This cavity had been packed with plastic 
explosive and a timer, materials not on the Message’s Inventory of Parts. The dowel had been machined, the 
cavity lined, and the finished product tested and sealed in a Hadden Cybernetics facility in Terre Haute, 
Indiana. The gadolinium wiring had been too intricate to do by hand; robot servomechanisms were required, 
and they in turn had required a major factory to be constructed. The cost of building the factory was 
defrayed entirely by Hadden Cybernetics, but there would be other, more profitable, applications for its 
wares.
The other three erbium dowels in the same lot were inspected and revealed no plastic explosive. (Soviet 
and Japanese crews had performed a range of remote sensing experiments before daring to split their dowels 
open.) Somebody had carefully packed a tamped charge and timer into the cavity near the end of the 
construction process in Terre Haute. Once out of the factory this dowel— and those from other batches—
had been transported by special train and under armed guard to Wyoming. The timing of the explosion and 
the nature of the sabotage suggested someone with knowledge of the Machine construction; it was an inside 
job.
But the investigation made little progress. There were several dozen people—technicians, quality control 
analysts, inspectors who sealed the component for transshipment—who had the opportunity to commit the 
sabotage, if not the means and the motivation. Those who failed polygraph tests had ironclad alibis. None of 
the suspects let drop a confession in an unguarded moment at the neighborhood bar. None began to spend 
more than their means allowed. No one “broke” under interrogation. Despite what were said to be vigorous 
efforts by law-enforcement agencies, the mystery remained unsolved.
Those who believed the Soviets responsible argued that their motive was to prevent the United States 
from activating its Machine first. The Russians had the technical capability for the sabotage, and, of course, 
detailed knowledge of Machine construction protocols and practice on both sides of the Atlantic. As soon as 
the disaster occurred, An-atoly Goldmann, a former student of Lunacharsky’s, who was working as Soviet 
liaison in Wyoming, urgently called Moscow and told them to take down all their dowels. At face value, this 
conversation—which had been routinely monitored by the NSA—seemed to show no Russian involvement, 
but some argued that the phone call was a sham to deflect suspicion, or that Goidmann had not been told of 
the sabotage beforehand. The argument was picked up by those in the United States made uneasy by the late 
reduction of tensions between the two nuclear superpowers. Understandably, Moscow was outraged at the 
suggestion.
In fact, the Soviets were having more difficulties in constructing their Machine than was generally known. 
Using the decrypted Message, the Ministry of Medium Heavy Industry made considerable progress in ore 
extraction, metallurgy, machine tools, and the like. The new microelectronics and cybernetics were more 
difficult, and most of those components for the Soviet Machine were produced under contract elsewhere in 
Europe and in Japan. Even more difficult for Soviet domestic industry was the organic chemistry, much of 
which required techniques developed in molecular biology.
A nearly fatal blow had been dealt Soviet genetics when in the 1930s Stalin decided that modern Mendelian 
genetics was ideologically unsuitable, and decreed as scientifi-cally orthodox the crackpot genetics of a 
politically sophisticated agriculturalist named Trofirn Lysenko. Two generations of bright Soviet students 
were taught essentially nothing of the fundamentals of heredity. Now, sixty years later, Soviet molecular 
biology and genetic engineering were comparatively backward, and few major discoveries in the subject had 
been made by Soviet scientists. Something similar had happened, but abortively, in the United States, where 
for theological reasons attempts had been made to prevent public school students from learning about 
evolution, the central idea of modern biology. The issue was clear-cut, because a fundamentalist 
interpretation of the Bible was .widely held to be inconsistent with the evolutionary process. Fortunately for 
American molecular biology, the fundamentalists were not as influential in the United States as Stalin had 
been in the Soviet Union.
The National Intelligence Estimate prepared for the President on the matter concluded that there was no 
evidence of Soviet involvement in the sabotage. Rather, since the Soviets had parity with the Americans in 
crew membership, they had strong incentives to support the completion of the American Machine. “If your 
technology is at Level Three,” explained the Director of Central Intelligence, “and your adversary is ahead 
of you at Level Four, you’re happy when, out of the blue, Level Fifteen technology appears. Provided you 
have equal access to it and adequate resources.” Few officials of the American government believed the 
Soviets were responsible for the explosion, and the President said as much publicly on more than one 
occasion. But old habits die hard.
“No crackpot group, however well organized, will deflect humanity from this historic goal,” the President 
declared. In practice, though, it was now much more difficult to achieve a national consensus. The sabotage 
had given new life to every objection, reasonable and unreasonable, that had earlier been raised. Only the 
prospect of the Soviets’ completing their Machine kept the American project going.

His wife had wanted to keep Drumlin’s funeral a family affair, but in this, as in much else, her well-meaning 
intentions were thwarted. Physicists, parasailors, hang-gliding aficionados, government officials, scuba 
enthusiasts, radio astronomers, sky divers, aquaplaners, and the world SETI community all wanted to attend. 
For a while, they had contemplated holding the services at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York 
City, as the only church in the country of adequate size. But Drumlin’s wife won a small victory, and the 
ceremony was held outdoors in his hometown of Missoula, Montana. The authorities had agreed because 
Missoula simplified the security problems.
Although Valerian was not badly injured, his physicians advised him against attending the funeral; 
nevertheless, he gave one of the eulogies from a wheelchair. Drumlin’s special genius was in knowing what 
questions to ask. Valerian said. He had approached the SETI problem skeptically, because skepticism was at 
the heart of science. Once it was clear that a Message was being received, no one was more dedicated or 
resourceful in figuring it out. The Deputy Secretary of Defense, Michael Kitz, representing the President, 
stressed Drumlin’s personal qualities—his warmth, his concern for the feelings of others, his brilliance, his 
remarkable athletic ability. If not for this tragic and dastardly event, Drumlin would have gone down in 
history as the first American to visit another star.
No peroration from her, Ellie had told der Heer. No press interviews. Maybe a few photographs—she 
understood the importance of a few photographs. She didn’t trust herself to say the right thing. For years 
she had served as a kind of public spokesperson for SETI, for Argus, and then for the Message and the 
Machine. But this was different. She needed some time to work this one through.
As nearly as she could tell, Drumlin had died saving her life. He had seen the explosion before others heard 
it, bad spied the several-hundred-kilogram mass of erbium arcing toward them. With his quick reflexes, he 
had leaped to push her back behind the stanchion. She had mentioned this as a possibility to der Heer, who
272 replied, “Drumlin was probably leaping to save himself, and you were just in the way.” The remark was 
ungracious; was it also intended to be ingratiating? Or perhaps, der Heer had gone on, sensing her 
displeasure, Drumlin had been thrown into the air by the concussion of the erbium hitting the staging 
surface.
But she was absolutely sure. She had seen the whole thing. Drumlin’s concern was to save her life. And he 
had. Except for a few scratches, Ellie was physically unhurt. Valerian, who had been entirely protected by 
the stanchion, had both legs broken by a collapsing wall. She had been fortunate in more ways than one. She 
had not even been knocked unconscious.
Her first thought—as soon as she had understood what had happened—was not for her old teacher David 
Drumlin crushed horribly before her eyes; not amazement at the prospect of Drumlin giving up his life for 
hers; not the setback to the entire Machine Project. No, clear as a bell, her thought had been I can go, they’ll 
have to send me, there’s nobody else, I get to go.
She had caught herself in an instant. But it was too late. She was aghast at her self-involvement, at the 
contemptible egotism she had revealed to herself in this moment of crisis. It didn’t matter that Drumlin might 
have had similar failings. She was appalled to find them, even momentarily, within her—so . . . vigorous, 
busy, planning future courses of action, oblivious of everything except herself. What she detested most was 
the absolute unselfconsciousness of her ego. It made no apologies, gave no quarter, and plunged on. It was 
unwholesome. She knew it would be impossible to tear it out, root and branch. She would have to work on 
it patiently, reason with it, distract it, maybe even threaten it.
When the investigators arrived on the scene, she was uncommunicative. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you much. 
The three of us were walking together in the staging area and suddenly there was an explosion and 
everything was flying up into the air. I’m sorry I can’t help. I wish I could.” She made it clear to her 
colleagues that she did not want to talk about it, and disappeared into her apartment for so long that they 
sent a scouting party to inquire after her. She tried recalling every nuance of the incident. She tried to 
reconstruct their conversation before they had entered the staging area, what she and Drumlin had talked 
about on their drive to Missoula, what Drumlin had seemed like when she first met him at the beginning of 
her graduate school career. Gradually she discovered that there was a part of her that had wished Drumlin 
dead—even before they became competitors for the American seat on the Machine. She hated him for 
having diminished her before the other students in class, for opposing Argus, for what he had said to her the 
moment after the Hitler film had been reconstructed. She had wanted him dead. And now he was dead. By a 
certain reasoning—she recognized it immediately as convoluted and spurious—she believed herself 
responsible.
Would he even have been here if not for her? Certainly, she told herself; someone else would have 
discovered the Message, and Drumlin would have leaped in. So to say. But had she not-through her own 
scientific carelessness, perhaps—provoked him into deeper involvement in the Machine Project? Step by 
step, she worked through the possibilities. If they were distasteful, she worked especially hard on them; there 
was something hiding there. She thought about men, men who for one reason or another she had admired. 
Drumlin. Valerian. Der Heer. Hadden. . . . Joss. Jesse. . . . Staughton? . . . Her father. “Dr. Arroway?”
Ellie was roused somewhat gratefully from this meditation by a stout blond woman of middle age in a blue 
print dress. Her face was somehow familiar. The cloth identification badge on her ample bosom read “H. 
Bork, Gøte-borg.”
“Dr. Arroway, I’m so sorry for your ... for our loss. David told me all about you.”
Of course! The legendary Helga Bork, Drumlin’s scuba-diving companion in so many tedious graduate-
student slide shows. Who, she wondered for the first time, had taken those pictures? Did they invite a 
photographer to accompany them on their underwater trysts? “He told me how close you both were.” What 
is this woman trying to tell me? Did Drumlin insinuate to her . . . Her eyes welled with tears. “I’m sorry. Dr. 
Bork, I don’t feel very well right now.” Head lowered, she hurried away. There were many at the funeral she 
wanted to see: Vay-gay, Arkhangelsky, Gotsridze, Baruda, Yu, Xi, Devi. And Abonnema Eda, who was 
increasingly being talked about as the fifth crew member—if the nations had any sense, she thought, and if 
there was to be such a thing as a completed Machine. But her social stamina was in tatters and she could not 
now abide long meetings. For one thing, she didn’t trust herself to speak. How much that she’d be saying 
would be for the good of the project, and how much to satisfy her own needs? The others were sympathetic 
and understanding. She had, after all, been the person closest to Drumlin when the erbium dowel struck and 
pulped him.

CHAPTER 16
The Elders of Ozone
The God whom science recognizes must be a 
God of universal laws exclusively, a God who 
does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot 
accommodate his processes to the convenience of 
individuals.
-WILLIAM JAMES
The Varieties of Religious
Experience (1902)

AT A FEW hundred kilometers altitude, the Earth fills half your sky, and the band of blue that stretches from 
Mindanao to Bombay, which your eye encompasses in a single glance, can break your heart with its beauty. 
Home, you think. Home. This is my world. This is where I come from. Everyone I know, everyone I ever 
heard of, grew up down there, under that relentless and exquisite blue. You race eastward from horizon to 
horizon, from dawn to dawn, circling the planet in an hour and a half. After a while, you get to know it, you 
study its idiosyncrasies and anomalies. You can see so much with the naked eye. Florida will soon be in view 
again. Has that tropical storm system you saw last orbit, swirling and racing over the Caribbean, reached 
Fort Lauderdale? Are any of the mountains in the Hindu Kush snow-free this summer? You tend to admire 
the aquamarine reefs in the Coral Sea. You look at the West Antarctic Ice Pack and wonder whether its 
collapse could really inundate all the coastal cities on the planet.
In the daylight, though, it’s hard to see any sign of human habitation. But at night, except for the polar 
aurora, everything you see is due to humans, humming and blinking all over the planet. That swath of light is 
eastern North America, continuous from Boston to Washington, a megalopolis in fact if not in name. Over 
there is the burnoff of natural gas in Libya. The dazzling lights of the Japanese shrimp fishing fleet have 
moved toward the South China Sea. On every orbit, the Earth tells you new stories. You can see a volcanic 
eruption in Kamchatka, a Saharan sandstorm approaching Brazil, unseasonably frigid weather in New 
Zealand. You get to thinking of the Earth as an organism, a living thing. You get to worry about it, care for 
it, wish it well. National boundaries are as invisible as meridians of longitude, or the Tropics of Cancer and 
Capricorn. The boundaries are arbitrary. The planet is real. Spaceflight, therefore, is subversive. If they are 
fortunate enough to find themselves m Earth orbit, most people, after a little meditation, have similar 
thoughts. The nations that had instituted spaceflight had done so largely for nationalistic reasons; it was a 
small irony that almost everyone who entered space received a startling glimpse of a transnational 
perspective, of the Earth as one world.
It wasn’t hard to imagine a time when the predominant loyalty would be to this blue world, or even to the 
cluster of worlds huddling around the nearby yellow dwarf star on which humans, once unaware that every 
star is a sun, had bestowed the definite article: the Sun. It was only now, when many people were entering 
space for long periods and had been afforded a little time for reflection, that the power of the planetary 
perspective began to be felt. A significant number of these occupants of low Earth orbit, it turned out, were 
influential down there on Earth.
They had—from the beginning, from before humans ever entered space—sent animals up there. Amoebas, 
fruit flies, rats, dogs, and apes had become hardy space veterans. As spaceflights of longer and longer 
duration became possible, something unexpected was found. It had no effect on microorganisms and little 
effect on fruit flies. But for mammals, it seemed, zero gravity extended the lifespan. By 10 or 20 percent. If 
you lived in zero g, your body would spend less energy fighting the force of gravity, your cells would 
oxidize more slowly, and you would live longer. There were some physicians who claimed that the effects 
would be much more pronounced on humans than on rats. There was the faintest aroma of immortality in the 
air.
The rate of new cancers was down 80 percent for the orbital animals compared with a control group on the 
Earth. Leukemia and lymphatic carcinomas were down 90 percent. There was even some evidence, perhaps 
not yet statistically significant, that the spontaneous remission rate for neoplastic diseases was much greater 
in zero gravity. The German chemist Otto Warburg had, half a century before, proposed that oxidation was 
the cause of many cancers. The lower cellular oxygen consumption in the weightless condition suddenly 
seemed very attractive. People who in earlier decades would have made a pilgrimage to Mexico for laetrile 
now clamored for a ticket into space. But the price was exorbitant. Whether preventive or clinical medicine, 
spaceflight was for the few.
Suddenly, hitherto unheard-of sums of money became available for investment in civilian orbital stations. 
By the very end of the Second Millennium there were rudimentary retirement hotels a few hundred 
kilometers up. Aside from the expense, there was a serious disadvantage, of course: Progressive osteological 
and vascular damage would make it impossible for you ever to come back to the gravitational field at the 
surface of the Earth. But for some of the wealthy elderly, this was no major impediment. In exchange for 
another decade of life, they were happy to retire to the sky and, eventually, to die there.
There were those who worried that this was an imprudent investment of the limited wealth of the planet; 
there were too many urgent needs and just grievances of the poor and powerless to spend it on pampering 
the rich and powerful. It was foolhardy, they said, to permit an elite class to emigrate to space, with the 
masses left back on Earth—a planet in effect given over to absentee landlords. Others professed it to be a 
godsend: The owners of the planet were picking up in droves and leaving; they couldn’t do nearly as much 
damage up there, it was argued, as down here.
Hardly anyone anticipated the principal outcome, the transfer of a vivid planetary perspective to those 
who could do the most good. After some years, there were few nationalists left in Earth orbit. Global 
nuclear confrontation poses real problems for those with a penchant for immortality.
There were Japanese industrialists, Greek shipping tycoons, Saudi crown princes, one ex-President, a former 
Party General Secretary, a Chinese robber baron, and a retired heroin kingpin. In the West, aside from a few 
promotional invitations, there was only one criterion for residence in Earth orbit: You had to be able to pay. 
The Soviet hostel was different; it was called a space station, and the former Party Secretary was said to be 
there for “gerontological re- search.” By and large, the multitudes were not resentful. One day, they 
imagined, they would go, too.
Those in Earth orbit tended to be circumspect, careful, quiet. Their families and staffs had similar personal 
qualities. They were the focus of discreet attention by other rich and powerful people still on Earth. They 
made no public pronouncements, but their views gradually permeated the thinking of leaders worldwide. The 
continuing divestment of nuclear weapons by the five nuclear powers was something the venerables in orbit 
supported. Quietly, they had endorsed the building of the Machine, because of its potential to unify the 
world. Occasionally nationalist organizations would write aboat a vast conspiracy in Earth orbit, doddering 
do-gooders selling out their Motherlands. There were pamphlets that parported to be stenographic 
transcripts of a meeting aboard Methuselah attended by representatives of the other private space stations 
who had been ferried over for the purpose. A list of “action items” was produced, calculated to strike terror 
in the heart of the most lukewarm patriot. The pamphlets were spurious. Times-week announced; it called 
them “The Protocols of the Elders of Ozone.”
On the days immediately before launch, she tried to spend some time—often just after dawn—on Cocoa 
Beach. Ellie had borrowed an apartment that overlooked the beach and the Atlantic Ocean. She would bring 
pieces of bread along and practice throwing them to the seagulls. They were good at catching morsels on the 
fly, with a fielding average, she calculated, about that of a major league outfielder. There were moments 
when twenty or thirty seagulls would hover in the air just a meter or two above her head. They flapped 
vigorously to stay in place, their beaks wide, straining in anticipation of the miraculous appearance of food. 
They grazed past each other in apparent random motion, but the overall effect was a stationary pattern. On 
her way back, she noticed a small and, in its humble way, perfect palm frond lying at the edge of the beach. 
She picked it up and carried it back to her apartment, carefully wiping off the sand with her fingers.
Hadden had invited her up for a visit to his home away from home, his chateau in space. Methuselah, he 
called it. She could tell no one outside the government about the invitation, because of Hadden’s passion to 
stay out of the public eye. Indeed, it was still not generally known that he had taken up residence in orbit, 
retired to the sky. All those inside the government she asked were for it. Der Heer’s advice was ‘The change 
of scene will do you good.” The President clearly was in favor of her visit, because a place had suddenly 
been made available on the next shuttle launch, the aging STS Intrepid. Passage to an orbiting rest home 
was usually by commercial carrier. A much larger nonreusable launch vehicle was undergoing final flight 
qualification. But the aging shuttle fleet was still the work-horse of U.S. government space activities, both 
military and civilian.
“We jus’ flake off tiles by the handful when we re-enter, and then we jus’ stick ‘em back on again before 
liftoff,” one of the astronaut-pilots explained to her.
Beyond general good health, there were no special physical requirements for the flight. Commercial 
launches tended to go up full and come back empty. By contrast, the shuttle flights were crowded both on 
the way up and on the way down. Before Intrepid’s latest landing the previous week, it had rendezvoused 
and docked with Methuselah to return two passengers to Earth. She recognized their names; one was a 
designer of propulsion systems, the other a cryobiologist. Ellie wondered what they had been doing on 
Methuselah.
“You’ll see,” the pilot continued, “it’ll be like fallin’ off a log. Hardly anybody hates it, and most folks jus’ 
love it.” She did. Crowded in with the pilot, two mission specialists, a tight-lipped military officer, and an 
employee of the Internal Revenue Service, she experienced a flawless liftoff and the exhilaration of her first 
experience in zero gravity longer than the ride in the high-deceleration elevator at the World Trade Center in 
New York. One and a half orbits later, they rendezvoused with Methuselah. In two days the commercial 
transport Narnia would bring Ellie down.
The Chateau—Hadden insisted on calling it that—was slowly spinning, one revolution about every ninety 
minutes, so that the same side of it was always facing the Earth. Hadden’s study featured a magnificent 
panorama on the Earthward bulkhead—not a television screen but a real transparent window. The photons 
she was seeing had been reflected off the snowy Andes just a fraction of a. second ago. Except toward the 
periphery of the window, where the slant path through the thick polymer was longer, hardly any distortion 
was evident.
There were many people she knew, even people who considered themselves religious, for whom the 
feeling of awe was an embarrassment. But you would have to be made of wood, she thought, to stand before 
this window and not feel it. They should be sending up young poets and composers, artists, filmmakers, and 
deeply religious people not wholly in thrall to the sectarian bureaucracies. This experience could easily be 
conveyed, she thought, to the average person on Earth. What a pity it had not yet been attempted seriously. 
The feeling was . . . numinous.

“You get used to it,” Hadden told her, “but you don’t get tired of it. From time to time it’s still inspiring.”
Abstemiously he was nursing a diet cola. She had refused the offer of something stronger. The premium 
on ethanol in orbit must be high, she thought.
“Of course, you miss things—long walks, swimming in the ocean, old friends dropping in unannounced. 
But I was never much into those things anyway. And as you see, friends can come by for a visit.”
“At huge expense,” she replied.
“A woman comes up to visit Yamagishi, my neighbor in the next wing. Second Tuesday of every month, 
rain or shine. I’ll introduce you to him later. He’s quite a guy. Class A war criminal—but only indicted, you 
understand, never convicted.”
	“What’s the attraction?” she asked. “You don’t think the world is about to end. What are you 
doing up here?”
“I like the view. And there are certain legal niceties.” She looked at him querulously.
“You know, someone in my position—new inventions, new industries—is always on the thin edge of 
breaking some law or other. Usually it’s because the old laws haven’t caught up with the new technology. 
You can spend a lot of your time in litigation. It cuts down your effectiveness. While all this”—he gestured 
expansively, taking in both the Chateau and the Earth—”doesn’t belong to any nation. This Chateau belongs 
to me, my friend Yamagishi, and a few others. There could never be anything illegal about supplying me 
with food and material needs. Just to be on the safe side, though, we’re working on closed ecological 
systems. There’s no extradition treaty between this Chateau and any of the nations down there. It’s more . . . 
efficient for me to be up here.
“I don’t want you to think that I’ve done anything really illegal. But we’re doing so many new things, it’s 
smart to be on the safe side. For instance, there are people who actually believe I sabotaged the Machine, 
when I spent a ridiculous amount of my own money trying to build it. And you know what they did to 
Babylon. My insurance investigators think it might have been the same people in Babylon and Terre Haute. I 
seem to have a lot of enemies. I don’t understand why. I think I’ve done a lot of good for people. Anyway, 
all in all, it’s better for me to be up here. . . .
“Now, it’s the Machine I wanted to talk to you about. That was awful—that erbium-dowel catastrophe in 
Wyoming. I’m really sorry about Drumlin. He was a tough old pisser. And it must have been a big shock for 
you. Sure you don’t want a drink?”
But she was content to look out at the Earth and listen. “If I’m not disheartened about the Machine,” he 
went on, “I don’t see why you should be. You’re probably worried that there never will be an American 
Machine, that there are too many people who want it to fail. The President’s worried about the same thing. 
And those factories we built, those aren’t assembly lines. We’ve been making custom-made products. It’s 
gonna be expensive to replace all the broken parts. But mainly you’re thinking, maybe it was a bad idea in 
the first place. Maybe we’ve been foolish to go so fast. So let’s take a long, careful look at the whole thing. 
Even if you’re not thinidng like that, the President is.
“But if we don’t do it soon. I’m worried we’ll never do it. And there’s another thing: I don’t think this 
invitation is open forever.”
“Funny you should say that. That’s just what Valerian, Drumlin, and I were talking about before the 
accident. The sabotage,” she corrected herself. “Please go on.”
“You see, the religious people—most of them—really think this planet is an experiment. That’s what their 
beliefs come down to. Some god or other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen’s 
wives, giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling people what words 
they can say and what words they can’t say, making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like 
that. Why can’t the gods leave well enough alone? All this intervention speaks of incompetence. If God 
didn’t want Lot’s wife to look back, why didn’t he make her obedient, so she’d do what her husband told 
her? Or if he hadn’t made Lot such a shithead, maybe she would’ve listened to him more. If God is 
omnipotent and omniscient, why didn’t he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the 
way he wants? Why’s he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there’s one thing the Bible makes clear: 
The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He’s not good at design, he’s not good at execution. He’d be out 
of business if there was any competition.
“That’s why I don’t believe we’re an experiment. There might be lots of experimental planets in the 
universe, places where apprentice gods get to test out their skills. What a shame Rankin and Joss weren’t 
born on one of those planets. But on this planet”—again he waved at the window—”there isn’t any 
microintervention. The gods don’t drop in on us to fix things up when we’ve botched it. You look at human 
history and it’s clear we’ve been on our own.”
“Until now,” she said. “Deus ex machina? That’s what yon think? You think the gods finally took pity on 
us and sent the Machine?”
“More like Machina ex deo, or whatever the right Latin is. No, I don’t think we’re the experiment. I think 
we’re the control, the planet that nobody was interested in, the place where nobody intervened at all. A 
calibration world gone to seed. This is what happens if they don’t intervene. The Earth is an object lesson 
for the apprentice gods. If you really screw up,’ they get told, ‘you’ll make something like Earth.’ But of 
course it’d be a waste to destroy a perfectly good world. So they look in on us from time to time, just in 
case. Maybe each time they bring by the gods who screwed up. Last time they looked we’re frolicking in the 
savannas, trying to outrace the antelopes. ‘Okay, that’s fine,’ they say. These guys aren’t gonna give us any 
trouble. Look in on ‘em in another ten million years. But just to be on the safe side, monitor ‘em at radio 
frequencies.’
“Then one day there’s an alarm. A message from Earth. ‘What? They have television already? Let’s see 
what they’re into.’ Olympic stadium. National flags. Bird of prey. Adolf Hitler. Thousands of cheering 
people. ‘Uh-oh,’ they say. They know the warning signs. Quick as a flash they tell us, ‘Cut it out, you guys. 
That’s a perfectly good planet you have there. Disorganized, but serviceable. Here, build this Machine 
instead.’ They’re worried about us. They see we’re on a downward slope. They think we should be in a 
hurry to get repaired. So I think so, too. We have to build the Machine.”
She knew what Drumlin would have thought of arguments like this. Although much that Hadden had just 
said resonated with her own thinking, she was tired of these beguiling and confident speculations on what 
the Vegans had in mind. She wanted the project to continue, the Machine completed and activated, the new 
stage in human history begun. She still mistrusted her own motives, was still wary even when she was 
mentioned as a possible member of the crew on a completed Machine. So the delays in resuming 
construction served a purpose for her. They bought time for her to work her problems through.
“We’ll have dinner with Yamagishi. You’ll like him. But we’re a little worried about him. He keeps his 
oxygen partial pressure so low at night.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the lower the oxygen content in the air, the longer you live. At least that’s what the doctors tell us. 
So we all get to pick the amount of oxygen in our rooms. In daytime you can’t bring it much below twenty 
percent, because you get groggy. It impairs mental functioning. But at night, when you’re sleeping anyway, 
you can lower the oxygen partial pressure. There’s a danger, though. You can lower it too much. 
Yamagishi’s down to fourteen percent these days, because he wants to live forever. As a result, he’s not 
lucid until lunchtime.”
“I’ve been that way all my life, at twenty percent oxygen.” She laughed.
“Now he’s experimenting with noötropic drugs to remove the grogginess. You know, like piracetam. 
They definitely improve memory. I don’t know that it actually makes you smarter, but that’s what they say. 
So Yamagishi is taking an awful lot of noötropics, and he’s not breathing enough oxygen at night.”
“So does he behave cuckoo?”
“Cuckoo? It’s hard to tell. I don’t know very many ninety-two-year-old Class A war criminals.”
“That’s why every experiment needs a control,” she said. He smiled.

Even at his advanced age, Yamagishi displayed the erect bearing he had acquired during his long service in 
the Imperial Army. He was a small man, entirely bald, with an inconspicuous white mustache and a fixed, 
benign expression on his face.
“I am here because of hips,” he explained. “I know about cancer, and lifetimes. But I am here because of 
hips.

At my age bones break easily. Baron Tsukuma died from falling from his futon onto his tatami. One-half 
meter, he fell. One-half meter. And his bones broke. In zero g, hips do not break.” This seemed very 
sensible.
A few gastronomic compromises had been made, but the dinner was of surprising elegance. A specialized 
small technology had been developed for weightless dining. Serving utensils had lids, wine glasses had tops 
and straws. Foods such as nuts or dried corn flakes were prohibited.
Yamagishi urged the caviar on her. It was one of the few Western foods, be explained, that cost more per 
kilogram to buy on Earth than to ship to space. The cohesion of the individual caviar eggs was a lucky 
break, Ellie mused. She tried to imagine thousands of separate eggs in individual fiee-fall, clouding the 
passageways of this orbiting retirement home. Suddenly she remembered that her mother was also in a 
retirement home, several orders of magnitude more modest than this one. In fact, orienting herself by the 
Great Lakes, visible out the window at this moment, she could pinpoint her mother’s location. She could 
spend two days chatting it up in Earth orbit with bad-boy billionaires, but couldn’t spare fifteen minutes for a 
phone call with her mother? She promised herself to call as soon as she landed in Cocoa Beach. A 
communique from Earth orbit, she told herself, might be too much novelty for the senior citizens’ rest home 
in Janesville, Wisconsin.
Yamagishi interrupted her train of thought to inform her that he was the oldest man in space. Ever. Even 
the former Chinese Vice Premier was younger. He removed his coat, rolled up his right sleeve, flexed his 
biceps, and asked her to feel bis muscle. He was soon full of vivid and quantitative detail about the worthy 
charities to which he had been a major contributor.
She tried to make polite conversation. “It’s very placid and quiet up here. You must be enjoying your 
retirement.”
She had addressed this bland remark to Yamagishi, but Hadden replied.

“It’s not entirely uneventful. Occasionally there’s a crisis and we have to move fast.”
“Solar flare, extremely bad. Make you sterile,” Yamagishi volunteered.
“Yeah, if there’s a major solar flare monitored by telescope, you have about three days before the charged 
particles hit the Chateau. So the permanent residents, like Yamagishi-san and me, we go to the storm 
shelter. Very spartan, very confined. But it has enough radiation shielding to make a difference. There’s 
some secondary radiation, of course. The thing is, all the nonpermanent staff and visitors have to leave in 
the three-day period. That kind of an emergency can tax the commercial fleet. Sometimes we have to call in 
NASA or the Soviets to rescue people. You wouldn’t believe who you flush out in solar-flare events— 
Mafiosi, heads of intelligence services, beautiful men and women...”
“Why do I get the feeling that sex is high on the list of imports from Earth?” she asked a little reluctantly.
“Oh, it is, it is. There’s lots of reasons. The clientele, the location. But the main reason is zero g. In zero g 
you can do things at eighty you never thought possible at twenty. You ought to take a vacation up here—
with your boyfriend. Consider it a definite invitation.”
	“Ninety,” said Yamagishi. “I beg your pardon?”
“You can do things at ninety you didn’t dream of at twenty. That’s what Yamagishi-san is saying. That’s 
why everyone wants to come up here.”
Over coffee, Hadden returned to the topic of the Machine.
“Yamagishi-san and me are partners with some other people. He’sthe Honorary Chairman of the Board of 
Yamagishi Industries. As you know, they’re the prime contractor for the Machine component testing going 
on in Hokkaido. Now imagine our problem. I’ll give you a for-instance. There are three big spherical shells, 
one inside the other. They’re made of a niobium alloy, they have peculiar patterns cut into them, and they’re 
obviously designed to rotate in three orthogonal directions very fast in a vacuum. Benzels, they’re called. 
You know all this, of course. What happens if you make a scale model of the three benzels and spin them 
very fast? What happens? All knowledgeable physicists think nothing will happen. But, of course, no-body’s 
done the experiment. This precise experiment. So nobody really knows. Suppose something does happen 
when the full Machine is activated. Does it depend on the speed of rotation? Does it depend on the 
composition of the benzels? On the pattern of the cutouts? Is it a question of scale? So we’ve been building 
these things, and running them—scale models and full-scale copies, both. We want to spin our version of the 
big benzels, the ones that’ll be mated to the other components in the two Machines. Suppose nothing 
happens then. Then we’d want to add additional components, one by one. We’d keep plugging them in, a 
small systems integration job at every step, and then maybe there’d be a time when we plug in a component, 
not the last one, and the Machine does something that knocks our socks off. We’re only trying to figure out 
how the Machine works. You see what I’m driving at?”
“You mean you’ve been secretly assembling an identical copy of the Machine in Japan?”
“Well, it’s not exactly a secret. We’re testing out the individual components. Nobody said we can only 
test them one at a time. So here’s what Yamagishi-san and I propose: We change the schedule on the 
experiments in Hokkaido. We do full-up systems integration now, and if nothing works we’ll do the 
component-by-component testing later. The money’s all been allocated anyway.
“We think it’ll be months—maybe years—before the American effort gets back on track. And we don’t 
think the Russians can do it even in that time. Japan’s the only possibility. We don’t have to announce it 
right away. We don’t have to make a decision about activating the Machine right away. We’re just testing 
components.”
“Can you two make this kind of decision on your own?”
	“Oh, it’s well within what they call our designated re- sponsibilities. We figure we can catch up to 
where the Wyoming Machine was in about six months. We’ll have to be much more careful about sabotage, 
of course. But if the components are okay, I think the Machine will be okay: Hokkaido’s kind of hard to get 
to. Then, when everything is checked and ready, we can ask the World Machine Consortium if they’d like to 
give it a try. If the crew is willing, I bet you the Consortium will go along. What do you think, Yamagishi-
san?”
Yamagishi had not heard the question. He was softly singing “Free-Fall” to himself; it was a current hit 
song full of vivid detail about succumbing to temptation in Earth orbit. He did not know all the words, he 
explained when the question was repeated.
Unperturbed, Hadden continued. “Now some of the components will have been spun or dropped or 
something. But in any case they’ll have to pass the prescribed tests. I didn’t think that would be enough to 
scare you off. Personally, I mean.”
“Personally? What makes you think I’m going? Nobody’s asked me, for one thing, and there are a number 
of new factors.”
“The probability is very high that the Selection Committee will ask you, and the President will be for it 
Enthusiastically. C’mon,” he said, grinning, “you wanna spend your whole life in the sticks?”
It was cloudy over Scandinavia and the North Sea, and the English Channel was covered with a lacy, 
almost transparent, cobweb of fog.
“Yes, you go.” Yamagishi was on his feet, his hands stiffly at his sides. He gave her a deep bow.
“Speaking for the twenty-two million employees of the corporations I control, very nice to meet you.”

She dozed fitfully in the sleeping cubicle they had assigned her. It was tethered loosely to two walls so she 
would not, in the course of turning over in zero g, propel herself against some obstacle. She awoke while 
everyone else seemed to be still asleep and pulled herself along a series of handholds until she found herself 
before the grand window. They were over the night side. The Earth was in darkness except for a patchwork 
and sprinkle of light, the plucky attempt of humans to compensate for the opacity of the Earth when their 
hemisphere was averted from the Sun. Twenty minutes later, at sunrise, she decided that, if they asked her, 
she would say yes.
Hadden came up behind her, and she started just a little. “It looks great, I admit. I’ve been up here for years 
and it still looks great. But doesn’t it bother you that there’s a spaceship around you? See, there’s an 
experience no one’s ever had yet. You’re in a space suit, there’s no tether, no spacecraft. Maybe the Sun is 
behind you, and you’re surrounded on all sides by stars. Maybe the Earth is below you. Or maybe some 
other planet. I kind of fancy Saturn myself. There you are, floating in space, like you really are one with the 
cosmos. Space suits nowadays have enough consumables to last you for hours. The spacecraft that dropped 
you off could be long gone. Maybe they’ll rendezvous with you in an hour. Maybe not.
“The best would be if the ship wasn’t coming back. Your last hours, surrounded by space and stars and 
worlds. If you had an incurable disease, or if you just wanted to give yourself a really nifty last indulgence, 
how could you top that?”
“You’re serious? You want to market this . . . scheme?”
	“Well, too soon to market. Maybe it’s not exactly the right way to go about it. Let’s just say I’m 
thinking of feasibility testing.”
She decided that she would not tell Hadden of her decision, and he did not ask. Later, as the Narnia was 
beginning its rendezvous and docking with Methuselah, Hadden took her aside.
“We were saying that Yamagishi is the oldest person up here. Well, if you talk about permanently up here—
1 don’t mean staff and astronauts and dancing girls—I’m the young-est person up here. I’ve got a vested 
interest in the answer, I know, but it’s a definite medical possibility that zero g’ll keep me alive for centuries. 
See, I’m engaged in an experiment on immortality.
“Now, I’m not bringing this up so I can boast. I’m bringing it up for a practical reason. If we’re figuring 
out ways to extend our lifespans, think of what those creatures on Vega must have done. They probably are 
immortal, or close enough. I’m a practical person, and I’ve thought a lot now about immortality. I’ve 
probably thought longer and more seriously about it than anybody else. And I can tell you one thing for sure 
about immortals: They’re very careful. They don’t leave things to chance. They’ve invested too much effort 
in becoming immortal. I don’t know what they look like, I don’t know what they want from you, but if you 
ever get to see them, this is the only piece of practical advice I have for you: Something you think is dead 
cinch safe, they’ll consider an unacceptable risk. If there’s any negotiating you get to do up there, don’t 
forget what I’m telling you.”

CHAPTER 17
The Dream of the Ants
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we 
tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we 
long to make music that will melt the stars.
-GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary (1857)

Popular theology... is a massive inconsistency derived 
from ignorance.... The gods exist because nature 
herself has imprinted a conception of them on the 
minds of men.
-CICERO
De Natura Deorum, I, 1


ELLIE WAS in the midst of packing notes, magnetic tapes, and a palm frond for shipment to Japan when she 
received word that her mother had suffered a stroke. Immediately afterward, she was brought a letter by 
project courier. It was from John Staughton, and there were no polite preliminaries:
Your mother and I would often discuss your deficiencies and shortcomings. It was always 
a difficult conversation. When I defended you (and, although you may not believe it, this 
happened often), she told me that I was putty in your hands. When I criticized you, she 
told me to mind my own business.
But I want you to know that your unwillingness to visit her in the last few years, since 
this Vega business, was a source of continuing pain to her. She would tell her cronies at 
that dreadful nursing home she insisted on going to that you’d be visiting her soon. For 
years she told them that. “Soon.” She planned how she would show her famous daughter 
around, in what order she’d introduce you to that decrepit bunch.
You probably won’t want to hear this, and I tell it to you with sorrow. But it’s for your 
own good. Your behavior was more painful to her than anything that ever happened to 
her, even your father’s death. You may be a big shot now, your hologram available all 
over the world, hobnobbing with politicians and so on, but as a human being, you haven’t 
learned anything since high school. . .

Her eyes welling with tears, she began to crumple the letter and its envelope, but discovered some stiff piece 
of paper inside, a partial hologram made from an old two-dimensional photograph by a computer 
extrapolation technique. You had a faint but satisfactory sense of being able to see around edges and 
corners. It was a photo she had never seen before. Her mother as a young woman, quite lovely, smiled out 
of the picture, her aim casually draped over the shoulder of Ellie’s father, who sported what seemed to be a 
day’s growth of beard. They both seemed radiantly happy. With a surge of anguish, guilt, fury at Staughton, 
and a little self-pity, Ellie weighed the evident reality that she would never see either of the people in that 
picture again.

Her mother lay immobile in the bed. Her expression was oddly neutral, registering neither joy nor regret, 
merely... a kind of waiting. Her only motion was an occasional blink of her eyes. Whether she could hear or 
understand what Ellie was saying was unclear. Ellie thought about communications schemes. She couldn’t 
help it; the thought arose unbidden: one blink for yes, two blinks for no. Or hook up an encephalograph with 
a cathode ray tube that her mother could see, and teach her to modulate her beta waves. But this was her 
mother, not Alpha Lyrae, and what was called for here was not decryption algorithms but feeling.
She held her mother’s hand and talked for hours. She rambled on about her mother and her father, her 
childhood. She recalled being a toddler among the newly washed sheets, being swept up to the sky. She 
talked about John Staughton. She apologized for many things. She cried a little.
Her mother’s hair was awry and, finding a brush, she prettified her. She examined the lined face and 
recognized her own. Her mother’s eyes, deep and moist, stared fixedly, with only an occasional blink into, it 
seemed, a great distance.
“I know where I come from,” Ellie told her softly. Almost imperceptibly, her mother shook her head from 
side to side, as though she were regretting all those years in which she and her daughter had been estranged. 
Ellie gave her mother’s hand a little squeeze and thought she felt one in return.
Her mother’s life was not in danger, she was told. If there was any change in her condition, they would call 
at once to her office in Wyoming. In a few days, they would be able to move her from the hospital back to 
the nursing home, where the facilities, she was assured, were adequate.
Staughton seemed subdued, but with a depth of feeling for her mother she had not guessed at. She would 
call often, she told him.
The austere marble lobby displayed, perhaps incongruously, a real statue—not a holograph—of a nude 
woman in the style of Praxiteles. They ascended in an Otis-Hitachi elevator, in which the second language 
was English rather than braille, and she found herself ushered through a large barn of a room in which 
people were huddled over word processors. A word would be typed in Hiragana, the fifty-one-letter 
Japanese phonetic alphabet, and on the screen would appear the corresponding Chinese ideogram in Kanji. 
There were hundreds of thousands of such ideograms, or characters, stored in the computer memories, 
although only three or four thousand were generally needed to read a newspaper. Because many characters 
of entirely different meanings were expressed by the same spoken word, all possible translations into Kanji 
were printed out, in order of probability. The word processor had a contextual subroutine in which the 
candidate characters were also queued according to the computer’s estimate of the intended meaning. It was 
rarely wrong. In a language which had until recently never had a typewriter, the word processor was 
working a communications revolution not fully admired by traditionalists.
In the conference room they seated themselves on low chairs—an evident concession to Western tastes—
around a low lacquered table, and tea was poured. In Ellie’s field of view, beyond the window was the city 
of Tokyo. She was spending much time before windows, she thought. The newspaper was the Asahi 
Shimbun—the Rising Sun News—and she was interested to see that one of the political reporters was a 
woman, a rarity by the standards of the American and Soviet media. Japan was engaged in a national 
reassessment of the role of women. Traditional male privileges were being surrendered slowly in what 
seemed to be an unreported strect-by-strect battle. Just yesterday the president of a firm called 
Nanoelectronics had bemoaned to her that there wasn’t a “girl” in Tokyo who still knew how to tie an obi. 
As with clip-on bow ties, an easily donned simulacrum had captured the market. Japanese women bad better 
things to do than spend half an hour every day wrapping and tucking. The reporter was dressed in an austere 
business suit, the hem falling to her calves.
To maintain security, no press visitors were permitted at the Hokkaido Machine site. Instead, when crew 
members or project officials came to the main island of Honshu, they routinely scheduled a round of 
interviews with the Japanese and foreign news media. As always, the questions were familiar. Reporters all 
over the world had nearly the same approach to the Machine, if you made a few allowances for local 
idiosyncrasies. Was she pleased that, after the American and Soviet “disappointments,” a Machine was being 
built in Japan? Did she feel isolated in the northern island of Hokkaido? Was she concerned because the 
Machine components being used in Hokkaido had been tested beyond the strictures of the Message?
Before 1945, this district of the city had been owned by the Imperial Navy, and indeed, immediately 
adjacent she could see the roof of the Naval Observatory, its two silver domes housing telescopes still used 
for timekeeping and calendrical functions. They were gleaming in the noonday Sun.
Why did the Machine include a dodecahedron and the three spherical shells called benzels? Yes, the 
reporters understood that she didn’t know. But what did she think? She explained that on an issue of this 
sort it was foolish to have an opinion in the absence of evidence. They persisted, and she pleaded the virtues 
of a tolerance for ambiguity. If there was a real danger, should they send robots instead of people, as a 
Japanese artificial intelligence expert had rec- ommended? Are there any personal effects she would be 
taking with her? Any family pictures? Microcomputers? A Swiss Army knife?
Ellie noticed two figures emerge through a trapdoor onto the roof of the nearby observatory. Their faces 
were obscured by visors. They were garbed in the blue-gray quilted armor of medieval Japan. Brandishing 
wooden staffs taller than they were, they bowed one to another, paused for a heartbeat, and then pummeled 
and parried for the next half hour. Her answers to the reporters became a little stilted; she was mesmerized 
by the spectacle before her. No one else seemed to notice. The staffs must have been heavy, because the 
ceremonial combat was slow, as if they were warriors from the ocean bottom.
Had she known Dr. Lunacharsky and Dr. Sukhavati for many years before the receipt of the Message? 
What about Dr. Eda? Mr. Xi? What did she think of them, their accomplishments? How well were the five 
of them getting on? Indeed, she marveled to herself that she was a member of such a select group.
What were her impressions of the quality of the Japanese components? What could she say about the 
meeting the Five had had with Emperor Akihito? Were their discussions with Shinto and Buddhist leaders 
part of a general effort by the Machine Project to gain the insights of world religious figures before the 
Machine was activated, or just a courtesy to Japan as the host country? Did she think the device could be a 
Trojan Horse or a Doomsday Machine? In her answers she tried to be courteous, succinct, and 
noncontroversial. The Machine Project public relations officer who had accompanied her was visibly 
pleased.
Abruptly the interview was over. They wished her and her colleagues all success, the Managing Editor said. 
They had every expectation of interviewing her when she returned. They hoped she would visit Japan often 
afterward. Her hosts were smiling and bowing. The quilted warriors had retreated down the trapdoor. She 
could see her security people, eyes darting, outside the now open door of the con- ference room. On the way 
out she asked the woman reporter about the apparitions from medieval Japan.
“Oh yes,” she replied. “They are astronomers for the Coast Guard. They practice Kendo at their lunch 
hour every day. You can set your watch by them.”
Xi had been born on the Long March, and had fought the Kuomintang as a youngster during the Revolution. 
He served as an intelligence officer in Korea, rising eventually to a position of authority over Chinese 
strategic technology. But in the Cultural Revolution he was publicly humiliated and condemned to domestic 
exile, although later he was rehabilitated with some fanfare.

One of Xi’s crimes in the eyes of the Cultural Revolution had been to admire some of the ancient 
Confucian virtues, and especially one passage from the Great Learning, which for centuries before every 
Chinese with even a rudimentary education knew by heart. It was upon this passage, Sun Yat-sen had said, 
that his own revolutionary nationalist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century was based: The 
ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the Kingdom first ordered well their own 
states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, 
they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing 
to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in then-thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their 
thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the 
investigation of things. Thus, Xi believed, the pursuit of knowledge was central for the well-being of China. 
But the Red Guards had thought otherwise.
During the Cultural Revolution, Xi had been consigned as a worker on an impoverished collective farm in 
Ningxia Province, near the Great Wall, a region with a rich Muslim tradition—where, while plowing an 
unpromising field, he uncovered an intricately ornamented bronze helmet from the Han Dynasty. When 
reestablished in the leadership, he turned his attention from strategic weapons to arche-ology. The Cultural 
Revolution had attempted to sever a 5,000-year-old continuous Chinese cultural tradition. Xi’s response was 
to help build bridges to the nation’s past. Increasingly he devoted his attention to the excavation of the 
underground funerary city of Xian.
It was there that the great discovery had been made of the terra-cotta army of the Emperor after whom 
China itself was named. His official name was Qin Shi Huangdi, but through the vagaries of transliteration 
had come to be widely known in the West as Ch’in. In the third century B.C., Qin unified the country, built 
the Great Wall, and compassionately decreed that upon his death lifelike terracotta models be substituted for 
the members of his entourage—soldiers, servants, and nobles—who, according to earlier tradition, would 
have been buried alive with his body. The terra-cotta army was composed of 7,500 soldiers, roughly a 
division. Every one of them had distinct facial features. You could see that people from all over China were 
represented. The Emperor had welded many separate and warring provinces into one nation. A nearby grave 
contained the almost perfectly preserved body of the Marchioness of Tai, a minor functionary in the 
Emperor’s court. The technology for preserving bodies—you could dearly see the severe expression on the 
face of the Marchioness, refined perhaps from decades of dressing down the servants—was vastly superior 
to that of ancient Egypt.
Qin had simplified the writing, codified the law, built roads, completed the Great Wall, and unified the 
country. He also confiscated weapons. While he was accused of massacring scholars who criticized his 
policies, and burning books because some knowledge was unsettling, be maintained that he bad eliminated 
endemic corruption and instituted peace and order. Xi was reminded of the Cultural Revolution. He 
imagined reconciling these conflicting tendencies in the heart of a single person. Qin’s arrogance had reached 
staggering proportions—to punish a mountain that had offended him, he ordered it denuded of vegetation 
and painted red, the color worn by condemned criminals. Qin was great, but he was also mad. Could you 
unify a collection of diverse and contentious nations without being a little mad? You’d have to be crazy even 
to attempt it, Xi laughingly told Ellie.
With increasing fascination, Xi had arranged for massive excavations at Xian. Gradually, he became 
convinced that the Emperor Qin himself was also lying in wait, perfectly preserved, in some great tomb near 
the disinterred terracotta army. Nearby, according to ancient records, was also buried under a great mound a 
detailed model of the nation of China in 210 B.C., With every temple and pagoda meticulously represented. 
The rivers, it was said, were made of mercury, with the Emperor’s barge in miniature perpetu-ally navigating 
his underground domain. When the ground at Xian was found to be contaminated with mercury, Xi’s 
excitement grew.
Xi had unearthed a contemporary account that described a great dome the Emperor had commissioned to 
overarch this miniature realm, called, like the real one, the Celestial Kingdom. As written Chinese had hardly 
changed in 2,200 years, he was able to read the account directly, without benefit of an expert linguist. A 
chronicler from the time of Qin was speaking to Xi directly. Many nights Xi would put himself to sleep 
trying to envision the great Milky Way that sundered the vault of the sky in the domed tomb of the great 
Emperor, and the night ablaze with comets which had appeared at his passing to honor his memory.
The search for Qin’s tomb and for his model of the universe had occupied Xi over the last decade. He had 
not found it yet, but his quest bad captured the imagination of China. It was said of him, “There are a billion 
people in China, but there is only one Xi.” In a nation slowly easing restraints on individuality, he was seen 
as exerting a constructive influence.

Qin, it was clear, had been obsessed by immortality. The man who gave his name to the most populous 
nation on Earth, the man who built what was then the largest structure on the planet, was, predictably 
enough, afraid he would be forgotten. So he caused more monumental structures to be erected; preserved, 
or reproduced for the ages, the bodies and faces of his courtiers; built his own still-elusive tomb and world 
model; and sent repeated expeditions into the Eastern Sea to seek the elixir of life. He complained bitterly of 
the expense as he launched each new voyage. One of these missions involved scores of ocean-going junks 
and a crew of 3,000 young men and women. They never returned, and their fate is unknown. The water of 
immortality was unavailable.
Just fifty years later, wet rice agriculture and iron metallurgy suddenly appeared in Japan—developments 
that profoundly altered the Japanese economy and created a class of warrior aristocrats. Xi argued that the 
Japanese name for Japan clearly reflected the Chinese origin of Japanese culture: The Land of the Rising 
Sun. Where would you have to be standing, Xi asked, for the Sun to be rising over Japan? So the very name 
of the daily newspaper that Ellie had just visited was, Xi proposed, a reminder of the life and times of the 
Emperor Qin. Ellie thought that Qin made Alexander the Great a schoolyard bully by comparison. Well, 
almost.
If Qin had been obsessed with immortality, Xi was obsessed with Qin. Ellie told him about her visit to Sol 
Had-den in Earth orbit, and they agreed that were the Emperor Qin alive in the waning years of the 
twentieth century, Earth orbit is where he would be. She introduced Xi to Hadden by videophone and then 
left them to talk alone. Xi’s excellent English had been honed during his recent involvement in the transfer of 
the Crown Colony of Hong Kong to the Chinese People’s Republic. They were still talking when the 
Methuselah set, and bad to continue through the network of communications satellites in geosynchronous 
orbit. They must have hit it off. Soon after, Hadden requested that the activation of the Machine be 
synchronized so that he would beoverhead at that moment. He wanted Hokkaido in the focus of his 
telescope, he said, when the time came.

“Do Buddhists believe in God, or not?” Ellie asked on their way to have dinner with the Abbot.
“Their position seems to be,” Vaygay replied dryly, “that their God is so great he doesn’t even have to 
exist.”
As they sped through the countryside, they talked about Utsumi, the Abbot of the most famous Zen 
Buddhist monastery in Japan. A few years before, at ceremonies marking the fiftieth anniversary of the 
destruction of Hiroshima, Utsumi had delivered a speech that commanded worldwide attention. He was well 
connected in Japanese political life, and served as a kind of spiritual adviser to the ruling political party, but 
he spent most of his time in monastic and devotional activities.
“His father was also the Abbot of a Buddhist monastery,” Sukhavad mentioned. Ellie raised her eyebrows.
“Don’t look so surprised. Marriage was permitted to them, like the Russian Orthodox clergy. Isn’t that 
right, Vaygay?”
“That was before my time,” he said, a little distractedly. The restaurant was set in a grove of bamboo and 
was called Ungetsu—the Clouded Moon; and indeed there was a clouded moon in the early evening sky. 
Their Japanese hosts had arranged that there be no other guests. Ellie and her companions removed their 
shoes and, padding in their stocking feet, entered a small dining room which looked out on stalks of 
bamboo.
The Abbot’s head was shaved, his garment a robe of black and silver. He greeted them in perfect colloquial 
English, and his Chinese, Xi later told her, turned out to be passable as well. The surroundings were restful, 
the conversation lighthearted. Each course was a small work of art, edible jewels. She understood how 
nouvelle cuisine had its origins in the Japanese culinary tradition. If the custom were to eat the food 
blindfolded, she would have been content. If, instead, the delicacies were brought out only to be admired and 
never to be eaten, she would also have been content. To look and eat both was an intimation of heaven.
Ellie was seated across from the Abbot and next to Lu-nacharsky. Others inquired about the species—or 
at least the kingdom—of this or that morsel. Between the sushi and the ginkgo nuts, the conversation 
turned, after a fashion, to the mission.
“But why do we communicate?” the Abbot asked. ‘To exchange information,” replied Lunacharsky, 
seemingly devoting full attention to his recalcitrant chopsticks. “But why do we wish to exchange 
information?”
	“Because we feed on information. Information is necessary for our survival Without information we 
die.”
Lunacharsky was inteat on a ginkgo nut that slipped off his chopsticks each time be attempted to raise it 
to his mouth. He lowered his head to meet the chopsticks halfway.
“I believe,” continued the Abbot, “that we communicate out of love or compassion.” He reached with his 
fingers for one of his own ginkgo nuts and placed it squarely in his mouth.
“Then you think,” she asked, “that the Machine is an instrument of compassion? You think there is no 
risk?”
“I can communicate with a flower,” he went on as if in response. “I can talk to a stone. You would have 
no difficulty understanding the beings—that is the proper word?—of some other world.”
“I am perfectly prepared to believe that the stone communicates to you,” Lunacharsky said, chewing on 
the ginkgo nut. He had followed the Abbot’s example. “But I wonder about you communicating to the 
stone. How would you convince us that you can communicate with a stone? The world is full of error. How 
do you know you are not deceiving yourself?”
“Ah, scientific skepticism.” The Abbot flashed a smile that Ellie found absolutely winning; it was innocent, 
almost childlike.
“To communicate with a stone, you must become much less . . . preoccupied. You must not do so much 
thinking, so much talking. When I say I communicate with a stone, I am not talking about words. The 
Christians say. ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ But I am talking about a communication much earlier, 
much more fundamental than that.”
“It’s only the Gospel of Saint John that talks about the Word,” Ellie commented—a little pedantically, she 
thought as soon as the words were out of her mouth. ‘The earlier Synoptic Gospels say nothing about it. It’s 
really an accretion from Greek philosophy. What kind of preverbal communication do you mean?”
“Your question is made of words. You ask me to use words to describe what has nothing to do with 
words. Let me see. There is a Japanese story called The Dream of the Ants.’ It is set in the Kingdom of the 
Ants. It is a long story, and I will not tell it to you now. But the point of the story is this: To understand the 
language of the ants, you must become an ant.”
“The language of the ants is in fact a chemical language,” said Lunacharsky, eyeing the Abbot keenly. 
“They lay down specific molecular traces to indicate the path they have taken to find food. To understand 
the language of the ants, I need a gas chromatograph, or a mass spectrometer. I do not need to become an 
ant.”
“Probably, that is the only way you know to become an ant,” returned the Abbot, looking at no one in 
particular. ‘Tell me, why do people study the signs left by the ants?”
“Well,” Ellie offered, “I guess an entomologist would say it’s to understand the ants and ant society. 
Scientists take pleasure in understanding.”
“That is only another way of saying that they love the ants.”
She suppressed a small shudder.
“Yes, but those who fund the entomologists say something else. They say it’s to control the behavior of ants, 
to make them leave a house they’ve infested, say, or to understand the biology of soil for agriculture. It 
might provide an alternative to pesticides. I guess you could say there’s some love of the ants in that,” Ellie 
mused.
“But it’s also in our self-interest,” said Lunacharsky. ‘The pesticides are poisonous to us as well.”
“Why are you talking about pesticides in the midst of such a dinner?” shot Sukhavati from across the 
table.
“We will dream the dream of the ants another time,” the Abbot said softly to Ellie, flashing again that 
perfect, untroubled smile.
Reshod with the aid of meter-long shoehorns, they approached their small fleet of automobiles, while the 
serving women and proprietress smiled and bowed ceremoniously. Ellie and Xi watched the Abbot enter a 
limousine with some of their Japanese hosts.
“I asked him, If he could talk with a stone, could he communicate with the dead?” Xi told her. “And what 
did he say?”
“He said the dead were easy. His difficulties were with the living.”

CHAPTER 18
Superunification
A rough sea!
Stretched out over Sado
The Milky Way.
-MATSUO BASHO (1644-94)
Poem

PERHAPS THEY had chosen Hokkaido because of its maverick reputation. The climate required construction 
techniques that were highly unconventional by Japanese standards, and this island was also the home of the 
Ainu, the hairy aboriginal people still despised by many Japanese. Winters were as severe as the ones in 
Minnesota or Wyoming. Hokkaido posed certain logistical difficulties, but it was out of the way in case of a 
catastrophe, being physically separated from the other Japanese islands. It was by no means isolated, 
however, now that the fifty-one-kilometer-long tunnel connecting it with Honshu had been completed; it was 
the longest submarine tunnel in the world.
Hokkaido had seemed safe enough for the testing of individual Machine components. But concern had 
been expressed about actually assembling the Machine in Hokkaido. This was, as the mountains that 
surrounded the facility bore eloquent testimony, a region surging with recent volcanism. One mountain was 
growing at the rate of a meter a day. Even the Soviets—Sakhalin Island was only forty-three kilometers 
away, across the Soya, or La Pérouse Strait—had voiced some misgivings on this score. But in for a kopek, 
in for a ruble. For all they knew, even a Machine built on the far side of the Moon could blow up the Earth 
when activated. The decision to build the Machine was the key fact in assessing dangers; where the thing 
was built was an entirely secondary consideration.
By early July, the Machine was once again taking shape. In America, it was still embroiled inpolitical and 
sectarian controversy; and there were apparently serious technical problems with the Soviet Machine. But 
here—in a facility much more modest than that in Wyoming—the dowels had been mounted and the 
dodecahedron completed, although no public announcement had been made. The ancient Pythagoreans, who 
first discovered the dodecahedron, had declared its very existence a secret, and the penalties for disclosure 
were severe. So perhaps it was only fitting that this house-sized dodecahedron, halfway around the world 
and 2,600 years later, was known only to a few.
The Japanese Project Director had decreed a few days’ rest for everyone. The nearest city of any size was 
Obihiro, a pretty place at the confluence of the Yubetsu and Toka-chi rivers. Some went to ski on strips of 
unmelted snow on Mount Asahi; others to dam thermal streams with a makeshift rock wall, warming 
themselves with the decay of radioactive elements cooked in some supernova explosion billions of years 
before. A few of the project personnel went to the Bamba races, in which massive draft horses pulled heavy 
ballasted sledges over parallel strips of farmland. But for a serious celebration, the Five flew by helicopter to 
Sapporo, the largest city on Hokkaido, situated less than 200 kilometers away.
Propitiously enough, they arrived in time for the Tana-bata Festival. The security risk was considered 
small, because it was the Machine itself much more than these five people that was essential for the success 
of the project. They had undergone no special training, beyond thorough study of the Message, the Machine, 
and the miniaturized instruments they would take with them. In a rational world, they would be easy to 
replace, Ellie thought, although the political impediments in selecting five humans acceptable to all members 
of the World Machine Consortium had been considerable.
Xi and Vaygay had “unfinished business,” they said, which could not be completed except over sake. So 
she, Devi Sukhavati, and Abonneba Eda found themselves guided by their Japanese hosts along one of the 
side streets of the Odori Promenade, past elaborate displays of paper streamers and lanterns, pictures of 
leaves, turtles, and ogres, and appealing cartoon representations of a young man and woman in medieval 
costume. Between two buildings was stretched a large piece of sailcloth on which had been painted a 
peacock rampant.
She glanced at Eda in his flowing, embroidered linen robe and high stiff cap, and at Sukhavati in another 
stun- ning silk sari, and delighted in the company. The Japanese Machine had so far passed all the prescribed 
tests, and a crew had been agreed upon that was not merely representative—if imperfectly—of the 
population of the planet, but which included genuine individuals not stamped out by the official cookie 
cutters of five nations. Every one of them was in some sense a rebel.
Eda, for instance. Here he was, the great physicist, the discoverer of what was called superunification—
one elegant theory, which included as special cases physics that ran the gamut from gravitation to quarks. It 
was an achievement comparable to Isaac Newton’s or Albert Einstein’s, and Eda was being compared to 
both. He had been born a Muslim in Nigeria, not unusual in itself, but he was an adherent of an unorthodox 
Islamic faction called the Ahmadiyah, which encompassed the Sufis. The Sufis, he explained after the 
evening with Abbot Utsumi, were to Islam what Zen was to Buddhism. Ahmadiyah proclaimed “a Jihad of 
the pen, not the sword.”
Despite his quiet, indeed humble demeanor, Eda was a fierce opponent of the more conventional Muslim 
concept of Jihad, holy war, and argued instead for the most vigorous free exchange of ideas. In this he was 
an embarrassment for much of conservative Islam, and opposition to his participation in the Machine crew 
had been made by some Islamic nations. Nor were they alone. A black Nobel laureate—said occasionally to 
be the smartest person on Earth—proved too much for some who had masked their racism as a concession 
to the new social amenities. When Eda visited Tyrone Free in prison four years earlier, there was a marked 
upsurge in pride among black Americans, and a new role model for the young. Eda brought out the worst in 
the racists and the best in everyone else.
“The time necessary to do physics is a luxury,” he told Ellie. ‘There are many people who could do the 
same if they had the same opportunity. But if you must search the streets for food, you will not have enough 
time for physics. It is my obligation to improve conditions for young scientists in my country.” As he had 
slowly become a national hero in Nigeria, he spoke out increasingly about corruption, about an unfair sense 
of entitlement, about the importance ‘ of honesty in science and everywhere else, about how great a nation 
Nigeria could be. It had as many people as the United States in the 1920s, he said. It was rich in resources, 
and its many cultures were a strength. If Nigeria could overcome its problems, he argued, it would be a 
beacon for the rest of the world. Seeking quiet and isolation in all other things, on these issues he spoke out. 
Many Nigerian men and women—Muslims, Christians, and Animists, the young but not only the young—
took his vision seriously.
Of Eda’s many remarkable traits, perhaps the most striking was his modesty. He rarely offered opinions. 
His answers to most direct questions were laconic. Only in his writings—or in spoken language after you 
knew him well—did you glimpse his depth. Amidst all the speculation about the Message and the Machine 
and what would happen after its activation, Eda had volunteered only one comment: In Mozambique, the 
story goes, monkeys do not talk, because they know if they utter even a single word some man will come 
and put them to work.
With such a voluble crew it was strange to have someone as taciturn as Eda. Like many others, Ellie paid 
especial attention to even his most casual utterances. He would describe as “foolish errors” his earlier, only 
partly successful version of superunification. The man was in his thirties and, Ellie and Devi had privately 
agreed, devastatingly attractive. He was also, she knew, happily married to one wife; she and their children 
were in Lagos at the moment.
A stand of bamboo cuttings that had been planted for such occasions was adorned, festooned, indeed 
weighed down with thousands of strips of colored paper. Young men and women especially could be seen 
augmenting the strange foliage. The Tanabata Festival is unique in Japan for its celebration of love. 
Representations of the central story were displayed on multipaneled signs and in a performance on a 
makeshift outdoor stage: Two stars were 61 love, but separated by the Milky Way. Only once a year, on the 
seventh day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar, could the lovers contrive to meet—provided it did 
not rain. Ellie looked up at the crystalline blue of this alpine sky and wished the lovers well. The young man 
star, the legend went, was a Japanese sort of cowboy, and was represented by the A7 dwarf star Altair. The 
young woman was a weaver, and represented by Vega. It seemed odd to Ellie that Vega should be central to 
a Japanese festival a few months before Machine activation. But if you survey enough cultures, you will 
probably find interesting legends about every bright star in the sky. The legend was of Chinese origin, and 
had been alluded to by Xi when she had heard him years ago at the first meeting of the World Message 
Consortium in Paris.
In most of the big cities, the Tanabata Festival was dying. Arranged marriages had ceased to be the norm, 
and the anguish of the separated lovers no longer struck so responsive a chord as it once had. But in a few 
places—Sapporo, Sendai, a few others—the Festival - grew more popular each year. In Sapporo it had a 
special poignancy because of the still widespread outrage at Japanese-Ainu marriages. There was an entire 
cottage industry of detectives on the island who would, for a fee, investigate the relatives and antecedents of 
possible spouses for your children. Ainu ancestry was still held to be a ground for summary rejection. Devi, 
remembering her young husband of many years before, was especially scathing. Eda doubtless had heard a 
story or two along the same line, but he was silent.
The Tanabata Festival in the Honshu city of Sendai was now a staple on Japanese television for people who 
now could rarely see the real Altair or Vega. She wondered if the Vegans would continue broadcasting the 
same Message to the Earth forever. Partly because the Machine was being completed in Japan, it received 
considerable attention in the television commentary accompanying this year’s Tanabata Festival. But the 
Five, as they were now sometimes called, had not been required to appear on Japanese television, and their 
presence here in Sapporo for the Festival was not generally known. Nevertheless, Eda, Sukhavati, and she 
were readily recognized, and they made their way back to the Obori Promenade to the accompaniment of 
polite scattered applause by passersby. Many also bowed. A loudspeaker outside a music shop blared a rock-
and-roll piece that Ellie recognized. It was “I Wanna Ricochet Off You,” by the black musical group White 
Noise. In the afternoon sun was a rheumy-eyed, elderly dog, which, as she approached, wagged its tail 
feebly.
Japanese commentators talked of Machindo, the Way of the Machine—the increasingly common 
perspective of the Earth as a planet and of all humans sharing an equal stake in its future. Something like it 
had been proclaimed in some, but by no means all, religions. Practitioners of those religions understandably 
resented the insight being attributed to an alien Machine. If the acceptance of a new insight on our place in 
the universe represents a religious conversion, she mused, then a theological revolution was sweeping the 
Earth. Even the American and European chiliasts had been influenced by Machindo. But if the Machine 
didn’t work and the Message went away, how long, she wondered, would the insight last? Even if we had 
made some mistake in interpretation or construction, she thought, even if we never understood anything 
more about the Vegans, the Message demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were other beings 
in the universe, and that they were more advanced than we. That should help keep the planet unified for a 
while, she thought.
She asked Eda if he had ever had a transforming religious experience. “Yes,” he said.
    “When?” Sometimes you bad to encourage him to talk. “When I first picked up Euclid. Also when I first 
understood Newtonian gravitation. And Maxwell’s equations, and general relativity. And during my work on 
superunifi-cation. I have been fortunate enough to have had many religious experiences.”
“No,” she returned. “You know what I mean. Apart from science.”
	“Never,” he replied instantly. “Never apart from science.”
He told her a little of the religion he had been born into. He did not consider himself bound by all its 
tenets, he said, but he was comfortable with it. He thought it could do much good. It was a comparatively 
new sect—contemporaneous with Christian Science or the Jehovah’s Witnesses— founded by Mirza 
Ghulam Ahmad in the Punjab. Devi apparently knew something about the Ahmadiyah as a proselytizing sect. 
It had been especially successful in West Africa. The origins of the religion were wrapped in escha-tology. 
Ahmad had claimed to be the Mahdi, the figure Muslims expect to appear at the end of the world. He also 
claimed to be Christ come again, an incarnation of Krishna, and a buruz, or reappearance of Mohammed. 
Christian chiliasm had now infected the Ahmadiyah, and his reappearance was imminent according to some 
of the faithful. The year 2008, the centenary of Ahmad’s death, was now a favored date for his Final Return 
as Mahdi. The global messianic fervor, while sputtering, seemed on average to be swelling still further, and 
Ellie confessed concern about the irrational predilections of the human species.
“At a Festival of Love,” said Devi, “you should not be such a pessimist.” 

In Sapporo there had been an abundant snowfall, and the local custom of making snow and ice sculptures of 
animals and mythological figures was updated. An immense dodecahedron had been meticulously carved and 
was shown regularly, as a kind of icon, on the evening news. After unseasonably warm days, the ice 
sculptors could be seen packing, chipping, and grinding, repairing the damage.
That the activation of the Machine might, one way or another, trigger a global apocalypse was a fear now 
often being voiced. The Machine Project responded with confident guarantees to the public, quiet assurances 
to the governments, and decrees to keep the activation time secret. Some scientists proposed activation on 
November 17, an evening on which was predicted the most spectacular meteor shower of the century. An 
agreeable symbolism, they said. But Valerian argued that if the Machine was to leave the Earth at that 
moment, having to fly through a cloud of cometary debris would provide an additional and unnecessary 
hazard. So activation was postponed for a few weeks, until the end of the last month of nineteen hundred 
and anything. While this date was not literally the Turn of the Millennium, but a year before, celebrations on 
a lavish scale were planned by those who could not be bothered to understand the calendrical conventions, 
or who wished to celebrate the coming of the Third Millennium in two consecutive Decembers.
Although the extraterrestrials could not have known how much each crew member weighed, they 
specified in painstaking detail the mass of each machine component and the total permissible mass. Very 
little was left over for equipment of terrestrial design. This fact had some years before been used as an 
argument for an all-woman crew, so that the equipment allowance could be increased; but the suggestion 
had been rejected as frivolous.
There was no room for space suits. They would have to hope the Vegans would remember that humans 
had a propensity for breathing oxygen. With virtually no equipment of their own, with their cultural 
differences and their unknown destination, it was clear that the mission might entail great risk. The world 
press discussed it often; the Five themselves, never.
A variety of miniature cameras, spectrometers, superconducting supercomputers, and microfilm libraries 
were being urged on the crew. It made sense and it didn’t make sense. There were no sleeping or cooking or 
toilet facilities on board the Machine. They were taking only a minimum of provisions, some of them stuffed 
in the pockets of their coveralls. Devi was to carry a rudimentary medical kit. As far as she was concerned, 
Ellie thought, she was barely planning to bring a toothbrush and a change of underwear. If they can get me 
to Vega in a chair, she thought, they’ll probably be able to provide the amenities as well. If she needed a 
camera, she told project officials, she’d just ask the Vegans for one.
There was a body of opinion, apparently serious, that the Five should go naked; since clothing had not 
been specified it should not be included, because it might somehow disturb the functioning of the Machine. 
Ellie and Devi, among many others, were amused, and noted that there was no proscription against wearing 
clothing, a popular human custom evident in the Olympic broadcast. The Vegans knew we wore clothes, Xi 
and Vaygay protested. The only restrictions were on total mass. Should we also extract dental work, they 
asked, and leave eyeglasses bebind? Their view carried the day, in part because of the reluctance of many 
nations to be associated with a project culminating so indecorously. But the debate generated a little raw 
humor among the press, the technicians, and the Five.
“For that matter,” Lunacharsky said, “it doesn’t actually specify that human beings are to go. Maybe they 
would find five chimpanzees equally acceptable.”
Even a single two-dimensional photograph of an alien machine could be invaluable, she was told. And 
imagine a picture of the ahens themselves. Would she please reconsider and bring a camera? Der Heer, who 
was now on Hokkaido with a large American delegation, told her to be serious. The stakes were too high, 
he said, for—but she cut him short with a look so withering that he could not complete the sentence. In her 
mind, she knew what he was going to say—for childish behavior. Amazingly, der Heer was acting as if he 
had been the injured party in their relationship. She described it all to Devi, who was not fully sympathetic. 
Der Heer, she said, was “very sweet.” Eventually, Ellie agreed to take an ultraminiaturized video camera.
In the manifest that the project required, under “Personal Effects,” she listed “Frond, palm, 0.811 
kilograms.” Der Heer was sent to reason with her. “You know there’s a splendid infrared imaging system 
you can carry along for two-thirds of a kilogram. Why would you want to take the branch of a tree?”
	“A frond. It’s a palm frond. I know you grew up in New York, but you must know what a palm 
tree is. It’s all in lvanhoe. Didn’t you read it in high school? At the time of the Crusades, pilgrims who made 
the long journey to the Holy Land took back a palm frond to show they’d really been there. It’s to keep my 
spirits up. I don’t care how advanced they are. The Earth is my Holy Land. I’ll bring a frond to them to show 
them where I came from.”
Der Heer only shook his head. But when she described her reasons to Vaygay, he said, ‘This 1. 
understand very well.”
Ellie remembered Vaygay’s concerns and the story he had told her in Paris about the droshky sent to the 
impoverished village. But this was not her worry at all. The palm frond served another purpose, she realized. 
She needed something to remind her of Earth. She was afraid she might be tempted not to come back.

The day before the Machine was to be activated she received a small package that had been delivered by 
hand to her apartment on the site in Wyoming and transshipped by courier. There was no return address and, 
inside, no note and no signature. The package held a gold medallion on a chain. Conceivably, it could be 
used as a pendulum. An inscription had been engraved on both sides, small but readable. One side read
Hera, superb Queen With the golden robes, Commanded Argus, Whose glances bristle 
Out through the world.
On the obverse, she read:

This is the response of the defenders of Sparta to the Commander of the Roman Army: “If 
you are a god, you will not hurt those who have never injured you. If you are a man, 
advance—and you will find men equal to yourself.” And women.
She knew who had sent it.
Next day, Activation Day, they took an opinion poll of the senior staff on what would happen. Most thought 
nothing would happen, that the Machine would not work. A smaller number believed that the Five would 
somehow find themselves very quickly in the Vega system, relativity to the contrary notwithstanding. Others 
suggested, variously, that the Machine was a vehicle for exploring the solar system, the most expensive 
practical joke in history, a classroom, a time machine, or a galactic telephone booth. One scientist wrote: 
“Five very ugly replacements with green scales and sharp teeth will slowly materialize in the chairs.” This 
was the closest to the Trojan Horse scenario in any of the responses. Another, but only one, read 
“Doomsday Machine.”
There was a ceremony of sorts. Speeches were made, food and drink were served. People hugged one 
another. Some cried quietly. Only a few were openly skeptical. You could sense that if anything at ail 
happened on Activation the response would be thunderous. There was an intimation of joy in many faces.
Ellie managed to call the nursing home and wish her mother goodbye. She spoke the word into the 
mouthpiece on Hokkaido, and in Wisconsin the identical sound was generated. But there was no response. 
Her mother was recovering some motor functions on her stricken side, the nurse told her. Soon she might be 
able to speak a few words. By the time the call had been completed, Ellie was feeling almost lighthearted.
The Japanese technicians were wearing hachimaki, cloth bands around their heads, that were traditionally 
donned in preparation for mental, physical, or spiritual effort, especially combat. Printed on the headband 
was a conventional projection of the map of the Earth. No single nation held a dominant position.
There had not been much in the way of national briefings. As far as she could tell, no one had been urged 
to rally round the flag. National leaders sent short statements on videotape. The President’s was especially 
fine, Ellie thought:
“This is not a briefing, and not a farewell. It’s just a so long. Each of you makes this journey on behalf of a 
billion souls. You represent all the peoples of the planet Earth. If you are to be transported to somewhere 
else, then see for all of us—not just the science, but everything you can learn. You represent the entire 
human species, past, present, and future. Whatever happens, your place in history is secure. You are heroes 
of our planet. Speak for all of us. Be wise. And . .. come back.”
A few hours later, for the first time, they entered the Machine—one by one, through a small airlock. 
Recessed interior lights, very low-key, came on. Even after the Machine had been completed and had passed 
every prescribed test, they were afraid to have the Five take their places prematurely. Some project 
personnel worried that merely sitting down might induce the Machine to operate, even if the benzels were 
stationary. But here they were, and nothing extraordinary was happening so far. This was the first moment 
she was able to lean back, a little gingerly to be sure, into the molded and cushioned plastic. She had wanted 
chintz; chintz slipcovers would have been perfect for these chairs. But even this, she discovered, was a 
matter of national pride. The plastic seemed more modern, more scientific, more serious.
Knowing of Vaygay’s careless smoking habits, they had decreed that no cigarettes could be carried on board 
the Machine. Lunacharsky had uttered fluent maledictions in ten languages. Now he entered after the others, 
having finished his last Lucky Strike. He wheezed just a little as he sat down beside her. There were no seat 
belts in the design ex- tracted from the Message, so there were none in the Machine. Some project personnel 
had argued, nevertheless, that it was foolhardy to omit them.

The Machine goes somewhere, she thought. It was a means of conveyance, an aperture to elsewhere . . . or 
elsewhen. It was a freight train barreling and wailing into the night. If you had climbed aboard, it could carry 
you out of the stifling provincial towns of your childhood, to the great crystal cities. It was discovery and 
escape and an end to loneliness. Every logistical delay in manufacture and every dispute over the proper 
interpretation of some subcodicil of the instructions had plunged her into despair. It was not glory she was 
seeking . . . not mainly, not much . . . but instead a kind of liberation.
She was a wonder junkie. In her mind, she was a hill tribesman standing slack-jawed before the real Ishtar 
Gate of ancient Babylon; Dorothy catching her first glimpse of the vaulted spires of the Emerald City of Oz; 
a small boy from darkest Brooklyn plunked down in the Corridor of Nations of the 1939 World’s Fair, the 
Trylon and Perisphere beckoning in the distance; she was Pocahontas sailing up the Thames estuary with 
London spread out before her from horizon to horizon.
Her heart sang in anticipation. She would discover, she was sure, what else is possible, what could be 
accomplished by other beings, great beings—beings who had, it seemed likely, been voyaging between the 
stars when the ancestors of humans were still brachiating from branch to branch in the dappled sunlight of 
the forest canopy.
Drumlin, like many others she had known over the years, had called her an incurable romantic; and she 
found herself wondering again why so many people thought it some embarrassing disability. Her 
romanticism had been a driving force in her life and a fount of delights. Advocate and practitioner of 
romance, she was off to see the Wizard.

A status report came through by radio. There were no apparent malfunctions, so far as could be detected 
with the battery of instrumentation that had been set up exterior to the Machine. Their main wait was for the 
evacuation of the space between and around the benzels. A system of extraordinary efficiency was pumping 
out the air to attain the highest vacuum ever reached on Earth. She double-checked the stowage of her video 
microcamera system and gave the palm frond a pat. Powerful lights on the exterior of the dodecahedron had 
turned on. Two of the spherical shells had now spun up to what the Message had defined as critical speed. 
They were already a blur to those watching outside. The third benzel would be there in a minute. A strong 
electrical charge was building up. When all three spherical shells with their mutually perpendicular axes were 
up to speed, the Machine would be activated. Or so the Message had said.
Xi’s face showed fierce determination, she thought; Lunacharsky’s a deliberate calm; Sukhavati’s eyes 
were open wide; Eda revealed only an attitude of quiet attentiveness. Devi caught her glance and smiled.
She wished she had had a child. It was her last thought before the walls flickered and became transparent 
and, it seemed, the Earth opened up and swallowed her.