"An Underground?"

     She recalled her sensation of falling, into the depths of Hell it had seemed for a moment, just after the Machine had been activated.

     "A Metro. A subway. These are the stations. The stops. Vega and this system and others. Passengers get on and off at the stops. You change trains here."

     He gestured at the contact binary, and she noticed that his hand cast two shadows, one anti-yellow and the other anti-red, like in---it was the only image that came to mind--a discotheque.

     "But we, we cannot get off," Eda continued. "We are in a closed railway car. We're headed for the terminal, the end of the line."

     Drumlin had called such speculations Fantasyland, and this was--so far as she knew---the first time Eda had succumbed to the temptation.

     Of the Five, she was the only observational astronomer, even though her specialty was not in the optical spectrum. She felt it her responsibility to accumulate as much data as possible, in the tunnels and in the ordinary four-dimensional space-time into which they would periodically emerge. The presumptive black hole from which they exited would always be in orbit around some star or multiple-star system. They were always in pairs, always two of them sharing a similar orbit--one from which they were ejected, and another into which they fell. No two systems were closely similar. None was very like the solar system. All provided instructive astronomical insights. Not one of them exhibited anything like an artifact--a second dodecahedron, or some vast engineering project to take apart a world and reassemble it into what Xi had called a device.

     At this time they emerged near a star visibly changing its brightness (she could tell from the progression of f/stops required)--perhaps it was one of the RR Lyrae stars; next was a quintuple system; then a feebly luminous brown dwarf. Some were in open space, some were embedded in nebulosity, surrounded by glowing molecular clouds.

     She recalled the warning `This will be deducted from your share in Paradise." Nothing had been deducted from hers. Despite a conscious effort to retain a professional calm, her heart soared at this profusion of suns. She hoped that every one of them was a home to someone. Or would be one day.

     But after the fourth jump she began to worry. Subjectively, and by her wristwatch, it felt something like an hour since they had "left" Hokkaido. If this took much longer, the absence of amenities would be felt. Probably there were aspects of human physiology that could not be deduced even after attentive television viewing by a very advanced civilization.

     And if the extraterrestrials were so smart, why were they putting us through so many little jumps? All right, maybe the hop from Earth used rudimentary equipment because only primitives were working one side of the tunnel. But after Vega? Why couldn't they jump us directly to wherever the dodec was going? Each time she came barreling out of a tunnel, she was expectant. What wonders had they in store for her next? It put her in mind of a very upscale amusement park, and she found herself imagining Hadden peering down his telescope at Hokkaido the moment the Machine had been activated.

     As glorious as the vistas offered by the Message makers were, and however much she enjoyed a kind of proprietary mastery of the subject as she explained some aspect of stellar evolution to the others, she was after a time disappointed. She had to work to track the feeling down. Soon she had it: The extraterrestrials were boasting. It was unseemly. It betrayed some defect of character.

     As they plunged down still another tunnel, this one broader and more tortuous than the others, Lunacharsky asked Eda to guess why the subway stops were put in such unpromising star systems. "Why not around a single star, a young star in good health and with no debris?"

     "Because," Eda replied, "--of course, I am only guessing as you ask--because all such systems are inhabited..."

     "And they don't want the tourists scaring the natives," Sukhavati shot back. Eda smiled. "Or the other way around."

     "But that's what you mean, isn't it? There's some sort of ethic of noninterference with primitive planets. They know that every now and then some of the primitives might use the subway..."

     "And they're pretty sure of the primitives," Ellie continued the thought, "but they can't be absolutely sure. After all, primitives are primitive. So you let them ride only on subways that go to the sticks. The builders must be a very cautious bunch. But then why did they send us a local train and not an express?"

     "Probably it's too hard to build an express tunnel," said Xi, years of digging experience behind him. Ellie thought of the Honshu-Hokkaido Tunnel, one of the prides of civil engineering on Earth, all of fifty-one kilometers long.

     A few of the turns were quite steep now. She thought about her Thunderbird, and then she thought about getting sick. She decided she would fight it as long as she could. The dodecahedron had not been equipped with airsickness bags.

     Abruptly they were on a straightaway, and then the sky was full of stars. Everywhere she looked there were stars, not the paltry scattering of a few thousand still occasionally known to naked-eye observers on Earth, but a vast multitude--many almost touching their nearest neighbors it seemed--surrounding her in every direction, many of them tinted yellow or blue or red, especially red. The sky was blazing with nearby suns. She could make out an immense spiraling cloud of dust, an accretion disk apparently flowing into a black hole of staggering proportions, out of which flashes of radiation were coming like heat lightning on a summer's night. If this was the center of the Galaxy, as she suspected, it would be bathed in synchrotron radiation. She hoped the extraterrestrials had remembered how frail humans were.

     And swimming into her field of view as the dodec rotated was...a prodigy, a wonder, a miracle. They were upon it almost before they knew it. It filled half the sky. Now they were flying over it. On its surface were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of illuminated doorways, each a different shape. Many were polygonal or circular or with an elliptical cross section, some had projecting appendages or a sequence of partly overlapping off-center circles. She realized they were docking ports, thousands of different docking ports-- some perhaps only meters in size, others clearly kilometers across, or larger. Every one of them, she decided, was the template of some interstellar machine like this one. Big creatures in serious machines had imposing entry ports. Little creatures, like us, had tiny ports. It was a democratic arrangement, with no hint of particularly privileged civilizations. The diversity of ports suggested few social distinctions among the sundry civilizations, but it implied a breathtaking diversity of beings and cultures. Talk about Grand Central Station! she thought.

     The vision of a populated Galaxy, of a universe spilling over with life and intelligence, made her want to cry for joy.

     They were approaching a yellow-lit port which, Elbe could see, was the exact template of the dodecahedron in which they were riding. She watched a nearby docking port, where something the size of the dodecahedron and shaped approximately like a starfish was gently insinuating itself onto its template. She glanced left and right, up and down, at the almost imperceptible curvature of this great Station situated at what she guessed was the center of the Milky Way. What a vindication for the human species, invited here at last! There's hope for us, she thought. There's hope! "Well, it isn't Bridgeport."

     She said this aloud as the docking maneuver completed itself in perfect silence.

    

     CHAPTER 20

Grand Central Station

    

All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.

-THOMAS BROWNE

"On Dreams" Religio Media (1642)

     Angels need an assumed body, not for themselves, but on our account.

-THOMAS AQUINAS

Summa Theologica, I, 51, 2

     The devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape.

-WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Hamlet, II, ii, 628

    

THE AIRLOCK Was designed to accommodate only one person at a time. When questions of priority had come up--which nation would be first represented on the planet of another star--the Five had thrown up their hands in disgust and told the project managers that this wasn't that kind of mission. They had conscientiously avoided discussing the issue among themselves.

     Both the interior and the exterior doors of the airlock opened simultaneously. They had given no command. Apparently, this sector of Grand central was adequately pressurized and oxygenated. "Well, who wants to go first?" Devi asked. Video camera in hand, Ellie waited in line to exit, but then decided that the palm frond should be with her when she set foot on this new world. As she went to retrieve it, she heard a whoop of delight from outside, probably from Vaygay. Ellie rushed into the bright sunlight. The threshold of the airlock's exterior doorway was flush with the sand. Devi was ankle-deep in the water, playfully splashing in Xi's direction. Eda was smiling broadly.

     It was a beach. Waves were lapping on the sand. The blue sky sported a few lazy cumulus clouds. There was a stand of palm trees, irregularly spaced a little back from the water's edge. A sun was in the sky. One sun. A yellow one. Just like ours, she thought. A faint aroma was in the air; cloves, perhaps, and cinnamon. It could have been a beach on Zanzibar.

     So they had voyaged 30,000 light-years to walk on a beach. Could be worse, she thought. The breeze stirred, and a little whirlwind of sand was created before her. Was all this just some elaborate simulation of the Earth, perhaps reconstructed from the data returned by a routine scouting expedition millions of years earlier? Or had the five of them undertaken this epic voyage only to improve their knowledge of descriptive astronomy, and then been unceremoniously dumped into some pleasant corner of the Earth? When she turned, she discovered that the dodecahedron had disappeared. They bad left the superconducting supercomputer and its reference library as well as some of the instruments aboard. It worried them for about a minute. They were safe and they had survived a trip worth writing home about. Vaygay glanced from the frond she had struggled to bring here to the colony of palm trees along the beach, and laughed.

     "Coals to Newcastle," Devi commented. But her frond was different. Perhaps they had different species here. Or maybe the local variety had been produced by an inattentive manufacturer. She looked out to sea. Irresistibly brought to mind was the image of the first colonization of the Earth's land, some 400 million years ago. Wherever this was--the Indian Ocean or the center of the Galaxy--the five of them had done something unparalleled. The itinerary and destinations were entirely out of their hands, it was true. But they had crossed the ocean of interstellar space and begun what surely must be a new age in human history. She was very proud.

     Xi removed his boots and rolled up to his knees the legs of the tacky insignia-laden jump suit the governments had decreed they all must wear. He ambled through the gentle surf. Devi stepped behind a palm tree and emerged sari-clad, her jump suit draped over her arm. It reminded Ellie of a Dorothy Lamour movie. Eda produced the sort of linen hat that was his visual trademark throughout the world. Ellie videotaped them in short jumpy takes. It would look, when they got home, exactly like a home movie. She joined Xi and Vaygay in the surf. The water seemed almost warm. It was a pleasant afternoon and, everything considered, a welcome change from the Hokkaido winter they had left little more than an hour before.

     "Everyone has brought something symbolic," said Vaygay, "except me."

     "How do you mean?"

     "Sukhavati and Eda bring national costumes. Xi here has brought a grain of rice." Indeed, Xi was holding the grain in a plastic bag between thumb and forefinger. "You have your palm frond," Vaygay continued. "But me, I have brought no symbols, no mementos from Earth. I'm the only real materialist in the group, and everything I've brought is in my head."

     Ellie had hung her medallion around her neck, under the jump suit. Now she loosened the collar and pulled out the pendant. Vaygay noticed, and she gave it to him to read.

     "It's Plutarch, I think," he said after a moment. `Those were brave words the Spartans spoke. But remember, the Romans won the battle."

     From the tone of this admonition, Vaygay must have thought the medallion a gift from der Heer. She was warmed by his disapproval of Ken--surely justified by events--and by his steadfast solicitude. She took his arm. "I would kill for a cigarette," he said amiably, using his arm to squeeze her hand to his side.

     The five of them sat together by a little tide pool. The breaking of the surf generated a soft white noise that reminded her of Argus and her years of listening to cosmic static. The Sun was well past the zenith, over the ocean. A crab scuttled by, sidewise dexterous, its eyes swiveling on their stalks. With crabs, coconuts, and the limited provisions in their pockets, they could survive comfortably enough for some time. There were no footprints on the beach besides their own.

     "We think they did almost all the work." Vaygay was explaining his and Eda's thinking on what the five of them had experienced. "All the project did was to make the faintest pucker in space-time, so they would have something to hook their tunnel onto. In all of that multidimensional geometry, it must be very difficult to detect a tiny pucker in space-time. Even harder to fit a nozzle onto it."

     "What are you saying? They changed the geometry of space?"

     "Yes. We're saying that space is topologically non-simply connected. It's like--I know Abonnema doesn't like this analogy--it's like a flat two-dimensional surface, the smart surface, connected by some maze of tubing with some other flat two-dimensional surface, the dumb surface. The only way you can get from the smart surface to the dumb surface in a reasonable time is through the tubes. Now imagine that the people on the smart surface lower a tube with a nozzle on it. They will make a tunnel between the two surfaces, provided the dumb ones cooperate by making a little pucker on their surface, so the nozzle can attach itself."

     "So the smart guys send a radio message and tell the dumb ones how to make a pucker. But if they're truly two-dimensional beings, how could they make a pucker on their surface?"

     "By accumulating a great deal of mass in one place." Vaygay said this tentatively. "But that's not what we did."

     "I know. I know. Somehow the benzels did it."

     "You see," Eda explained softly, "if the tunnels are black holes, there are real contradictions implied. There is an interior tunnel in the exact Kerr solution of the Einstein Field Equations, but it's unstable. The slightest perturbation would seal it off and convert the tunnel into a physical singularity through which nothing can pass. I have tried to imagine a superior civilization that would control the internal structure of a collapsing star to keep the interior tunnel stable. This is very difficult. The civilization would have to monitor and stabilize the tunnel forever. It would be especially difficult with something as large as the dodecahedron falling through."

     "Even if Abonnema can discover how to keep the tunnel open, there are many other problems," Vaygay said. "Too many. Black holes collect problems faster than they collect matter. There are the tidal forces. We should have been torn apart in the black hole's gravitational field. We should have been stretched like people in the paintings of El Greco or the sculptures of that Italian...." He turned to Ellie to fill in the blank.

     "Giacometti," she suggested. "He was Swiss."

     "Yes, like Giacometti. Then other problems: As measured from Earth it takes an infinite amount of time for us to pass through a black hole, and we could never, never return to Earth. Maybe this is what happened. Maybe we will never go home. Then, there should be an inferno of radiation near the singularity. This is a quantum-mechanical instability. ..."

     "Ana finally," Eda continued, "a Kerr-type tunnel can lead to grotesque causality violations. With a modest change of trajectory inside the tunnel, one could emerge from the other end as early in the history of the universe as `you might like--a picosecond after the Big Bang, for example. That would be a very disorderly universe."

     "Look, fellas," she said, "I'm no expert in General Relativity. But didn't we see black holes? Didn't we fall into them? Didn't we emerge out of them? Isn't a gram of observation worth a ton of theory?"

     "I know, I know," Vaygay said in mild agony. "It has to be something else. Our understanding of physics can't be so far off. Can it?"

     He addressed this last question, a little plaintively, to Eda, who only replied, "A naturally occurring black hole can't be a tunnel; they have impassable singularities at their centers."

     With a jerry-rigged sextant and their wristwatches, they timed the angular motion of the setting Sun. It was 360 degrees in twenty-four hours. Earth standard. Before the Sun got too low on the horizon, they disassembled Ellie's camera and used the lens to start a fire. She kept the frond by her side, fearful that someone would carelessly throw it on the flames after dark. Xi proved to be an expert fire maker. He positioned them upwind and kept the fire low.

     Gradually the stars came out. They were all there, the familiar constellations of Earth. She volunteered to stay up awhile tending the fire while the others slept. She wanted to see Lyra rise. After some hours, it did. The night was exceptionally clear, and Vega shone steady and brilliant. From the apparent motion of the constellations across the sky, from the southern hemisphere constellations that she could make out, and from the Big Dipper lying near the northern horizon, she deduced that they were in tropical latitudes. If all this is a simulation, she thought before falling asleep, they've gone to a great deal of trouble.

     She had an odd little dream. The five of them were swimming--naked, unselfconscious, underwater-- now poised lazily near a stag horn coral, now gliding into crannies that were the next moment obscured by drifting seaweed. Once she rose to the surface. A ship in the shape of a dodecahedron flew by, low above the water. The walls were transparent, and inside she could see people in dhotis and sarongs, reading newspapers and casually conversing. She dove back underwater. Where she belonged.

     Although the dream seemed to go on for a long time, none of them had any difficulty breathing. They were inhaling and exhaling water. They felt no distress--indeed, they were swimming as naturally as fish. Vaygay even looked a little like a fish--a grouper, perhaps. The water must be fiercely oxygenated, she supposed. In the midst of the dream, she remembered a mouse she had once seen in a physiology laboratory, perfectly content in a flask of oxygenated water, even paddling hopefully with its little front feet. A vermiform tail streamed behind. She tried to remember how much oxygen was needed, but it was too much trouble. She was thinking less and less, she thought. That's all right. Really.

     The others were now distinctly fishlike. Devi's fins were translucent. It was obscurely interesting, vaguely sensual. She hoped it would continue, so she could figure something out. But even the question she wanted to answer eluded her. Oh, to breathe warm water, she thought. What will they think of next? Ellie awoke with a sense of disorientation so profound it bordered on vertigo. Where was she? Wisconsin, Puerto Rico, New Mexico, Wyoming, Hokkaido? Or the Strait of Malacca? Then she remembered. It was unclear, to within 30,000 light-years, where in the Milky Way Galaxy she was; probably the all-time record for disorientation, she thought. Despite the headache, Ellie laughed; and Devi, sleeping beside her, stirred. Because of the upward slope of the beach--they had reconnoitered out to a kilometer or so the previous afternoon and found not a hint of habitation--direct sunlight had not yet reached her. Ellie was recumbent on a pillow of sand. Devi, just awakening, had slept with her head on the rolled-up jump suit.

     "Don't you think there's something candy-assed about a culture that needs soft pillows?" Ellie asked. "The ones who put their heads in wooden yokes at night, that's who the smart money's on." Devi laughed and wished her good morning. They could hear shouting from farther up the beach. The three men were waving and beckoning; Ellie and Devi roused themselves and joined them.

     Standing upright on the sand was a door. A wooden door--with paneling and a brass doorknob. Anyway it looked like brass. The door had black-painted metal hinges and was set in two jambs, a lintel, and a threshold. No nameplate. ft was in no way extraordinary. For Earth. "Now go `round the back," Xi invited. From the back, the door was not there at all. She could see Eda and Vaygay and Xi, Devi standing a little apart, and the sand continuous between the four of them and her. She moved to the side, the heels of her feet moistened by the surf, and she could make out a single dark razor-thin vertical line. She was reluctant to touch it. Returning to the back again, she satisfied herself that there were no shadows or reflections in the air before her, and then stepped through.

     "Bravo." Eda laughed. She turned around and found the closed door before her. "What did you see?" she asked. "A lovely woman strolling through a closed door two centimeters thick."

     Vaygay seemed to be doing well, despite the dearth of cigarettes. "Have you tried opening the door?" she asked.

     "Not yet," Xi replied.

     She stepped back again, admiring the apparition. "It looks like something by-- What's the name of that French surrealist?" Vaygay asked. "René Magritte," she answered. "He was Belgian."

     "We're agreed, I take it, that this isn't really the Earth," Devi proposed, her gesture encompassing ocean, beach, and sky.

     "Unless we're in the Persian Gulf three thousand years ago, and there are djinns about." Ellie laughed. "Aren't you impressed by the care of the construction?"

     "All right," Ellie answered. "They're very good, I'll grant them that. But what's it for? Why go to the trouble of all this detail work?"

     "Maybe they just have a passion for getting things right."

     "Or maybe they're just showing off."

     "I don't see," Devi continued, "how they could know our doors so well. Think of how many different ways there are to make a door. How could they know?"

     "It could be television," Ellie responded. "Vega has received television signals from Earth up to---let's see--1974 programming. Clearly, they can send the interesting clips here by special delivery in no time flat. Probably thereto been a lot of doors on television between 1936 and 1974. Okay," she continued, as if this were not a change of subject, "what do we think would happen if we opened the door and walked in?"

     "If we are here to be tested," said Xi, "on the other side of that door is probably the Test, maybe one for each of us."

     He was ready. She wished she were. The shadows of the nearest palms were now falling on the beach. Wordlessly they regarded one another. All four of them seemed eager to open the door and step through. She alone felt some...reluctance. She asked Eda if he would like to go first. We might as well put our best foot forward, she thought. He doffed his cap, made a slight but graceful bow, tinned, and approached the door. Ellie ran to him and kissed him on both cheeks. The others embraced him also. He turned again, opened the door, entered, and disappeared into thin air, his striding foot first, his trailing hand last. With the door ajar, there had seemed to be only the continuation of beach and surf behind him. The door dosed. She ran around it, but there was no trace of Eda.

     Xi was next. Ellie found herself struck by how docile they all had been, instantly obliging every anonymous invitation proffered. They could have told us where they were taking us, and what all this was for, she thought. It could have been part of the Message, or information conveyed after the Machine was activated. They could have told us we were docking with a simulation of a beach on Earth. They could have told us to expect the door. True, as accomplished as they are, the extraterrestrials might know English imperfectly, with television as their only tutor. Their knowledge of Russian, Mandarin, Tamil, and Hausa would be even more rudimentary. But they had invented the language introduced in the Message primer. Why not use it? To retain the element of surprise? Vaygay saw her staring at the closed door and asked if she wished to enter next.

     `Thanks, Vaygay. I've been thinking. I know it's a little crazy. But it just struck me: Why do we have to jump through every hoop they hold out for us? Suppose we don't do what they ask?"

     "Ellie, you are so American. For me, this is just like home. I'm used to doing what the authorities suggest-- especially when I have no choice." He smiled and turned smartly on his heel.

     "Don't take any crap from the Grand Duke," she called after him.

     High above, a gull squawked. Vaygay had left the door ajar. There was still only beach beyond. "Are you all right?" Devi asked her. "I'm okay. Really. I just want a moment to myself. I'll be along."

     "Seriously, I'm asking as a doctor. Do you feel all right?"

     "I woke up with a headache, and I think I had some very fanciful dreams. I haven't brushed my teeth or had my black coffee. I wouldn't mind reading the morning paper either. Except for all that, really I'm fine."

     "Well, that sounds all right. For that matter I have a bit of a headache, too. Take care of yourself, Ellie. Remember everything, so you'll be able to tell it to me....ext time we meet."

     "I will," Ellie promised.

     They kissed and wished each other Well. Devi stepped over the threshold and vanished. The door closed behind her. Afterward, Ellie thought she had caught a whiff of curry.

     She brushed her teeth in salt water. A certain fastidious streak had always been a part of her nature. She break-fasted on coconut milk. Carefully she brushed accumulated sand off the exterior surfaces of the microcamera system and its tiny arsenal of videocassettes on which she had recorded wonders. She washed the palm frond in the surf, as she had done the day she found it on Cocoa Beach just before the launch up to Methuselah.

     The morning was already warm and she decided to take a swim. Her clothes carefully folded on the palm frond, she strode boldly out into the surf. Whatever else, she thought, the extraterrestrials are unlikely to find themselves aroused by the sight of a naked woman, even if she is pretty well preserved. She tried to imagine a microbiologist stirred to crimes of passion after viewing a paramecium caught in flagrante delicto in mitosis.

     Languidly, she floated on her back, bobbing up and down, her slow rhythm in phase with the arrival of successive wave crests. She tried to imagine thousands of comparable...chambers, simulated worlds, whatever these were--each a meticulous copy of the nicest part of someone's home planet. Thousands of them, each with sky and weather, ocean, geology, and indigenous life indistinguishable from the originals. It seemed an extravagance, although it also suggested that a satisfactory outcome was within reach. No matter what your resources, you don't manufacture a landscape on this scale for five specimens from a doomed world.

     On the other hand...The idea of extraterrestrials as zookeepers had become something of a cliché. What if this sizable Station with its profusion of docking ports and environments was actually a zoo? "See the exotic animals in their native habitats," she imagined some snail-headed barker shouting. Tourists come from all over the Galaxy, especially during school vacations. And then when there's a test, the Stationmasters temporarily move the critters and the tourists out, sweep the beach free of footprints, and give the newly arriving primitives a half day of rest and recreation before the test ordeal begins.

     Or maybe this was how they stocked the zoos. She thought about the animals locked away in terrestrial zoos who were said to have experienced difficulties breeding in captivity. Somersaulting in the water, she dived beneath the surface in a moment of self-consciousness. She took a few strong strokes in toward the beach, and for the second time in twenty-four hours wished that she had had a baby.

     There was no one about, and not a sail on the horizon. A few seagulls were stalking the beach, apparently looking for crabs. She wished die had brought some bread to give them. After die was dry, she dressed and inspected the doorway again. It was merely waiting. She felt a continuing reluctance to enter. More than reluctance. Maybe dread.

     She withdrew, keeping it in view. Beneath a palm tree, her knees drawn up under her chin, she looked out over the long sweep of white sandy beach.

     After a while she got up and stretched a little. Carrying the frond and the microcamera with one hand, she approached the door and turned the knob. It opened slightly. Through the crack she could see the whitecaps offshore. She gave it another push, and it swung open without a squeak. The beach, bland and disinterested, stared back at her. She shook her head and returned to the tree, resuming her pensive posture.

     She wondered about the others. Were they now in some outlandish testing facility avidly checking away on the multiple-choice questions? Or was it an oral examination? And who were the examiners? She felt the uneasiness well up once again. Another intelligent being--independently evolved on some distant world under unearthly physical conditions and with an entirely different sequence of random genetic mutations-- such a being would not resemble anyone she knew. Or even imagined. If this was a Test station, then there were Stationmasters, and the Stationmasters would be thoroughly, devastatingly nonhuman. There was something deep within her that was bothered by insects, snakes, star-nosed moles. She was someone who felt a little shudder--to speak plainly, a tremor of loathing-- when confronted with even slightly malformed human beings. Cripples, children with Down syndrome, even the appearance of Parkinsonism evoked in her, against her clear intellectual resolve, a feeling of disgust, a wish to flee. Generally she had been able to contain her fear, although she wondered if she had ever hurt someone because of it. It wasn't something she thought about much; she would sense her own embarrassment and move on to another topic.

     But now she worried that she would be unable even to confront--much less to win over for the human species-- an extraterrestrial being. They hadn't thought to screen the Five for that. There had been no effort to determine whether they were afraid of mice or dwarfs or Martians. It had simply not occurred to the examining committees. She wondered why they hadn't thought of it; it seemed an obvious enough point now.

     It had been a mistake to send her. Perhaps when confronted with some serpent-haired galactic Stationmaster, she would disgrace herself--or far worse, tip the grade given to the human species, in whatever unfathomable test was being administered, from pass to fail. She looked with both apprehension and longing at the enigmatic door, its lower boundary now under water. The tide was coming in.

     There was a figure on the beach a few hundred meters away. At first she thought it was Vaygay, perhaps out of the examining room early and come to tell her the good news. But whoever it was wasn't wearing a Machine Project jump suit. Also, it seemed to be someone younger, more vigorous. She reached for the long lens, and for some reason hesitated. Standing up, she shielded her eyes from the Sun. Just for a moment, it bad seemed...It was clearly impossible. They would not take such shameless advantage of her.

     But she could not help herself. She was racing toward him on the hard sand near the water's edge, her hair streaming behind her. He looked as he bad in the most re-cent picture of him she had seen, vigorous, happy. He had a day's growth of beard. She flew into his arms, sobbing.

     "Hello, Presh," he said, his right hand stroking the back of her head.

     His voice was right. She instantly remembered it. And his smell, his gait, his laugh. The way his beard abraded her cheek. All of it combined to shatter her self-possession. She could feel a massive atone seal being pried open and the first rays of light entering an ancient, almost forgotten tomb.

     She swallowed and tried to gain control of herself, but seemingly inexhaustible waves of anguish poured out of her and she would weep again. He stood there patiently, reassuring her with the same look she now remembered he had given her from his post at the bottom of the staircase during her first solo journey down the big steps. More than anything else she had longed to see him again, but she had suppressed the feeling, been impatient with it, because it was so clearly impossible to fulfill. She cried for all the years between herself and him.

     In her girlhood and as a young woman she would dream that be had come to her to tell her that his death had been a mistake. He was really fine. He would sweep her up into his arms. But she would pay for those brief respites with poignant reawakenings into a world in which he no longer was. Still, she had cherished those dreams and willingly paid their exorbitant tariff when the next morning she was forced to rediscover her loss and experience the agony again. Those phantom moments were all she had left of him.

     And now here he was--not a dream or a ghost, but flesh and blood. Or close enough. He had called to her from the stars, and she had come.

     She hugged him with all her might. She knew it was a trick, a reconstruction, a simulation, but it was flawless. For a moment she held him by the shoulders at arm's length. He was perfect. It was as if her father had these many years ago died and gone to Heaven, and finally--by this unorthodox route--she had managed to rejoin him. She sobbed and embraced him again.

     It took her another minute to compose herself. If it had been Ken, say, she would have at least toyed with the idea that another dodecahedron--maybe a repaired Soviet Machine--had made a later relay from the Earth to the center of the Galaxy. But not for a moment could such a possibility be entertained for him. His remains were decaying in a cemetery by a lake.

     She wiped her eyes, laughing and crying at once.

     "So, what do I owe this apparition to--robotics or hypnosis?"

     "Am I an artifact or a dream? You might ask that about anything."

     "Even today, not a week goes by when I don't think that I'd give anything--anything I had--just to spend a few minutes with my father again."

     "Well, here I am," he said cheerfully, his hands raised, making a half turn so she could be sure that the back of him was there as well. But he was so young, younger surely than she. He had been only thirty-six when he died.

     Maybe this was their way of calming her fears. If so, they were very...thoughtful. She guided him back toward her few possessions, her aim around his waist. He certainly felt substantial enough. If there were gear trains and integrated circuits underneath his skin, they were well hidden.

     "So how are we doing?" she asked. The question was ambiguous. "I mean--"

     "I know. It took you many years from receipt of the Message to your arrival here."

     "Do you grade on speed or accuracy?"

     "Neither."

     "You mean we haven't completed the Test yet?" He did not answer.

     "Well, explain it to me." She said this in some distress. "Some of us have spent years decrypting the Message and building the Machine. Aren't you going to tell me what it's all about?"

     "You've become a real scrapper," he said, as if he really were her father, as if he were comparing his last recollections of her with her present, still incompletely developed self.

     He gave her hair an affectionate tousle. She remembered that from childhood also. But how could they, 30,000 light-years from Earth, know her father's affectionate gestures in long-ago and faraway Wisconsin? Suddenly she knew.

     "Dreams," she said. "Last night, when we were all dreaming, you were inside our heads, right? You drained everything we know."

     "We only made copies. I think everything that used to be in your head is still there. Take a look. Tell me if anything's missing." He grinned, and went 0n.

     "There was so much your television programs didn't tell us. Oh, we could figure out your technological level pretty well, and a lot more about you. But there's so much more to your species than that, things we couldn't possibly learn indirectly. I recognize you may feel some breach of privacy-"

     "You're joking."

     "--but we have so little time."

     "You mean the Test is over? We answered all your questions while we were asleep last night? So? Did we pass or fail?"

     "It isn't like that," he said. "It isn't like sixth grade." She had been in the sixth grade the year he died. "Don't think of us as some interstellar sheriff gunning down outlaw civilizations. Think of us more as the Office of the Galactic Census. We collect information. I know you think nobody has anything to learn from you because you're technologically so backward. But there are other merits to a civilization."

     "What merits?"

     "Oh, music. Loving kindness. (I like that word.) Dreams. Humans are very good at dreaming, although you'd never know it from your television. There are cultures all over the Galaxy that trade dreams."

     "You operate an interstellar cultural exchange? That's what this is all about? You don't care if some rapacious, bloodthirsty civilization develops interstellar spaceflight?"

     "I said we admire loving kindness."

     "If the Nazis had taken over the world, our world, and then developed interstellar spaceflight, wouldn't you have stepped in?"

     "You'd be surprised how rarely something like that happens. In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always. It's their nature. They can't help it. In such a case, our job would be to leave them alone. To make sure that no one bothers them. To let them work out their destiny."

     "Then why didn't you leave us alone? I'm not complaining, mind you. I'm only curious as to how the Office of the Galactic Census works. The first thing you picked up from us was that Hitler broadcast. Why did you make contact?"

     "The picture, of course, was alarming. We could tell you were in deep trouble. But the music told us something else. The Beethoven told us there was hope. Marginal cases are our specialty. We thought you could use a little help. Really, we can offer only a little. You understand. There are certain limitations imposed by causality."

     He had crouched down, running his hands through the water, and was now drying them on his pants.

     "Last night, we looked inside you. All five of you. There's a lot in there: feelings, memories, instincts, learned behavior, insights, madness, dreams, loves. Love is very important. You're an interesting mix."

     "All that in one night's work?" She was taunting him a little.

     "We had to hurry. We have a pretty tight schedule."

     "Why, is something about to..."

     "No, it's just that if we don't engineer a consistent causality, it'll work itself out on its own. Then it's almost always worse." She had no idea what he meant. " `Engineer a consistent causality.' My dad never used to talk like that."

     "Certainly he did. Don't you remember how he spoke to you? He was a well-read man, and from when you were a little girl he--1--talked to you as an equal. Don't you remember?"

     She remembered. She remembered. She thought of her mother in the nursing home.

     "What a nice pendant," he said, with just that air of fatherly reserve she had always imagined he would have cultivated had he lived to see her adolescence. "Who gave it to you?"

     "Oh this," she said, fingering the medallion. "Actually it's from somebody I don't know very well. He tested my faith....He...But you must know all this already." Again the grin.

     "I want to know what you think of us," she said shortly, "what you really think."

     He did not hesitate for a moment. "All right. I think it's amazing that you've done as well as you have. You've got hardly any theory of social organization, astonishingly backward economic systems, no grasp of the machinery of historical prediction, and very little knowledge about yourselves. Considering how fast your world is changing, it's amazing you haven't blown yourselves to bits by now.

     That's why we don't want to write you off just yet. You humans have a certain talent for adaptability-- at least in the short term."

     "That's the issue, isn't it?"

     "That's one issue. You can see that, after a while, the civilizations with only short-tem perspectives just aren't around. They work out their destinies also."

     She wanted to ask him bow he honestly felt about humans. Curiosity? Compassion? No feelings whatever, just all in a day's work? In his heart of hearts--or whatever equivalent internal organs he possessed--did he think of her as she thought of...an ant? But she could not bring herself to raise the question. She was too much afraid of the answer.

     From the intonation of his voice, from the nuances of his speech, she tried to gain some glimpse of who it was here disguised as her father. She bad an enormous amount of direct experience with human beings; the Stationmasters had less than a day's. Could she not discern something of their true nature beneath this amiable and informative facade? But she couldn't. In the content of his speech he was, of course, not her father, nor did he pretend to be. But in every other respect he was uncannily close to Theodore F. Arroway, 1924-1960, vendor of hardware, loving husband and father. If not for a continuous effort of will, she knew she would be slobbering over this, this....copy. Part of her kept wanting to ask him how things had been since he had gone to Heaven. What were his views on Advent and Rapture? Was anything special in the works for the Millennium? There were human cultures that taught an afterlife of the blessed on mountaintops or in clouds, in caverns or oases, but she could not recall any in which if you were very, very good when you died you went to the beach.

     "Do we have time for some questions before...whatever it is we have to do next?"

     "Sure. One or two anyway." `Tell me about your transportation system."

     "I can do better than that," he said. "I can show you. Steady now."

     An amoeba of blackness leaked out from the zenith, obscuring Sun and blue sky. "That's quite a trick," she gasped. The same sandy beach was beneath her feet. She dug her toes in. Overhead...was the Cosmos. They were, it seemed, high above the Milky Way Galaxy, looking down on its spiral structure and falling toward it at some impossible speed. He explained matter-of-factly, using her own familiar scientific language to describe the vast pinwheel-shaped structure. He showed her the Orion Spiral Arm, JH which the Sun was, in this epoch, embedded. Interior to it, in decreasing order of mythological significance, were the Sagittarius Arm, the Norma/Scutum Arm, and the Three Kiloparsec Arm.

     A network of straight lines appeared, representing the transportation system they had used. It was like the illuminated maps in the Paris Metro. Eda had been right. Each station, she deduced, was in a star system with a low-mass double black hole. She knew the black holes couldn't have resulted from stellar collapse, from the normal evolution of massive star systems, because they were too small. Maybe they were primordial, left over from the Big Bang, captured by some unimaginable starship and towed to their designated station. Or maybe they were made from scratch. She wanted to ask about this, but the tour was pressing breathlessly onward.

     There was a disk of glowing hydrogen rotating about the center of the Galaxy, and within it a ring of molecular clouds rushing outward toward the periphery of the Milky Way. He showed her the ordered motions in the giant molecular cloud complex Sagittarius B2, which had for decades been a favorite hunting ground for complex organic molecules by her radio-astronomical colleagues on Earth. Closer to the center, they encountered another giant molecular cloud, and then Sagittarius A West, an intense radio source that Ellie herself had observed at Argus.

     And just adjacent, at the very center of the Galaxy, locked in a passionate gravitational embrace, was a pair of immense black holes. The mass of one of them was five million suns. Rivers of gas the size of solar systems were pouring down its maw. Two colossal--she ruminated on the limitations of the languages of Earth--two super massive black holes are orbiting one another at the center of the Galaxy. One had been known, or at least strongly suspected. But two? Shouldn't that have shown up as a Doppler displacement of spectral lines? She imagined a sign under one of them reading ENTRANCE and under the other EXIT. At the moment, the entrance was in use; the exit was merely there.

     And that was where this Station, Grand Central Station, was-just safely outside the black holes at the center of the Galaxy. The skies were made brilliant by millions of nearby young stars; but the stars, the gas, and the dust were being eaten up by the entrance black hole. "It goes somewhere, right?" she asked. "Of course."

     "Can yon tell me where?"

     "Sure. All this stuff winds up in Cygnus A." Cygnus A was something she knew about. Except only for a nearby supernova remnant in Cassiopeia, it was the brightest radio source in the sides of Earth. She had calculated that in one second Cygnus A produces more energy than the Sun does in 40,000 years. The radio source was 600 million light-years away, far beyond the Milky Way, out in the realm of the galaxies. As with many extragalactic radio sources, two enormous jets of gas, fleeing apart at almost the speed of tight, were making a complex web of Rankine-Hugoniot shock fronts with the thin intergalactic gas--and producing in the process a radio beacon that shone brightly over most of the universe. All the matter in this enormous structure, 500,000 light-years across, was pouring out of a tiny, almost inconspicuous point in space exactly midway between the jets. "You're making Cygnus A?"

     She half-remembered a summer's night in Michigan when she was a girl. She had feared she would fall into the sky. "Oh, it's not just us. This is a...cooperative project of many galaxies. That's what we mainly do--engineering. Only....few of us are involved with emerging civilizations."

     At each pause she had felt a kind of tingling in her head, approximately in the left parietal lobe.

     `There are cooperative projects between galaxies?" she asked. "Lots of galaxies, each with a kind of Central Administration? With hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy. And then those administrations cooperate. To pour millions of suns into Centaurus...sorry, Cygnus A? The...Forgive me. I'm just staggered by the scale. Why would you do all this? Whatever for?"

     "You mustn't think of the universe as a wilderness. It hasn't been that for billions of years," he said. "Think of it more as...cultivated." Again a tingling.

     "But what for? What's there to cultivate?"

     "The basic problem is easily stated. Now don't get scared off by the scale. You're an astronomer, after all. The problem is that the universe is expanding, and there's not enough matter in it to stop the expansion. After a while, no new galaxies, no new stars, no new planets, no newly arisen lifeforms--just the same old crowd. Everything's getting run-down. It'll be boring. So in Cygnus A we're testing out the technology to make something new. You might call it an experiment in urban renewal. It's not our only trial run. Sometime later we might want to close off a piece of the universe and prevent space from getting more and more empty as the aeons pass. Increasing the local matter density's the way to do it, of course. It's good honest work." Like running a hardware store in Wisconsin. If Cygnus A was 600 million light-years away, then astronomers on Earth--or anywhere in the Milky Way for that matter--were seeing it as it had been 600 million years ago. But on Earth 600 million years ago, she knew, there had hardly been any life even in the oceans big enough to shake a stick at. They were old. Six hundred million years ago, on a beach like this one...except no crabs, no gulls, no palm trees. She tried to imagine some microscopic plant washed ashore, securing a tremulous toehold just above the water line, while these beings were occupied with experimental galactogenesis and introductory cosmic engineering.

     "You've been pouring matter into Cygnus A for the last six hundred million years?"

     "Well, what you've detected by radio astronomy was just some of our early feasibility testing. We're much further along now."

     And in due course, in another few hundred million years she imagined, radio astronomers on Earth--if any--will detect substantial progress in the reconstruction of the universe around Cygnus A. She steeled herself for further revelations and vowed she would not let them intimidate her. There was a hierarchy of beings on a scale she had not imagined. But the Earth had a place, a significance in that hierarchy; they would not have gone to all this trouble for nothing.

     The blackness rushed back to the zenith and was consumed; Sun and blue sky returned. The scene was the same: surf, sand, palms, Magritte door, microcamera, frond, and her...father.

     "Those moving interstellar clouds and rings near the center of the Galaxy--aren't they due to periodic explosions around here? Isn't it dangerous to locate the Station here?"

     "Episodic, not periodic. It only happens on a small scale, nothing like the sort of thing we're doing in Cygnus A. And it's manageable. We know when it's coming and we generally just hunker down. If it's really dangerous, we take the Station somewhere else for a while. This is all routine, you understand."

     "Of course. Routine. You built it all? The subways, I mean. You and those other...engineers from other galaxies?"

     "Oh no, we haven't built any of it."

     "I've missed something. Help me understand."

     "It seems to be the same everywhere. In our case, we emerged a long time ago on many different worlds in the Milky Way. The first of us developed interstellar space-flight, and eventually chanced on one of the transit stations. Of course, we didn't know what it was. We weren't even sore it was artificial until the first of us were brave enough to slide down."

     "Who's `we'? You mean the ancestors of your...race, your species?"

     "No, no. We're many species from many worlds. Eventually we found a large number of subways-- various ages, various styles of ornamentation, and all abandoned. Most were still in good working condition. All we did was make some repairs and improvements."

     "No other artifacts? No dead cities? No records of what happened? No subway builders left?" He shook his head. "No industrialized, abandoned planets?" He repeated the gesture.

     "There was a Galaxy-wide civilization that picked up and left without leaving a trace--except for the stations?"

     "That's more or less right. And it's the same in other galaxies also. Billions of years ago, they all went somewhere. We haven't the slightest idea where."

     "But where could they go?" He shook his head for the third time, but now very slowly.

     "So then you're not..."

     "No, we're just caretakers," he said. "Maybe someday they'll come back."

     "Okay, just one more," she pleaded, holding her index finger up before her as, probably, had been her practice at age two. "One more question."

     "All right," he answered tolerantly. "But we only have a few minutes left."

     She glanced at the doorway again, and suppressed a tremor as a small, almost transparent crab sidled by.

     "I want to know about your myths, your religions. What fills you with awe? Or are those who make the numinous unable to feel it?"

     "You make the numinous also. No, I know what you're asking. Certainly we feel it. You recognize that some of this is hard for me to communicate to you. But I'll give yon an example of what you're asking for. I don't say this is it exactly, but it'll give you...."

     He paused momentarily and again she felt a tingle, this time in her left occipital lobe. She entertained the notion that he was rifling through her neurons. Had he missed something last night? If so, she was glad. It meant they weren't perfect.

     "...flavor of our numinons. It concerns pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. You know it well, of course, and you also know you can never come to the end of pi. There's no creature in the universe, no matter how smart, who could calculate pi to the last digit--because there is no last digit, only an infinite number of digits. Your mathematicians have made an effort to calculate it out to ..."

     Again she felt the tingle.

     "...none of you seem to know.. .. Let's say the ten-billionth place. You won't be surprised to bear that other mathematicians have gone further. Well, eventually--let's say it's in the ten-to-the-twentieth-power place--something happens. The randomly varying digits disappear, and for an unbelievably long time there's nothing but ones and zeros."

     Idly, he was tracing a circle out on the sand with his toe. She paused a heartbeat before replying.

     "And the zeros and ones finally stop? You get back to a random sequence of digits?" Seeing a faint sign of encouragement from him, she raced on. "And the number of zeros and ones? Is it a product of prime numbers?"

     "Yes, eleven of them."

     "You're telling me there's a message in eleven dimensions hidden deep inside the number pi? Someone in the universe communicates by...mathematics? But...help me, I'm really having trouble understanding you. Mathematics isn't arbitrary. I mean pi has to have the same value everywhere. How can you hide a message inside pi? It's built into the fabric of the universe."

     "Exactly." She stared at him.

     "It's even better than that," he continued. "Let's assume that only in base-ten arithmetic does the sequence of zeros and ones show up, although you'd recognize that something funny's going on in any other arithmetic. Let's also assume that the beings who first made this discovery had ten fingers. You see how it looks? It's as if pi has been waiting for billions of years for ten-fingered mathematicians with fast computers to come along. You see, the Message was kind of addressed to us."

     "But this is just a metaphor, right? It's not really pi and the ten to the twentieth place? You don't actually nave ten fingers."

     "Not really." He smiled at her again. "Well, for heaven's sake, what does the Message say?" He paused for a moment, raised an index finger, and then pointed to the door. A small crowd of people was excitedly pouring out of it.

     They were in a jovial mood, as if this were a long-delayed picnic outing. Eda was accompanying a stunning young woman in a brightly colored blouse and skirt, her hair neatly covered with the lacy gele favored by Moslem women in Yorubaland; he was clearly overjoyed to see her. From photographs he had shown, Ellie recognized her as Eda's wife. Sukhavati was holding hands with an earnest young man, his eyes large and soulful; she assumed it was Surindar Ghosh, Devi's long-dead medical-student husband. Xi was in animated discourse with a small vigorous man of commanding demeanor, he had drooping wispy mustaches and was garbed in a richly brocaded and beaded gown. Ellie imagined him personally overseeing the construction of the funerary model of the Middle Kingdom, shouting instructions to those who poured the mercury.

     Vaygay ushered over a girl of eleven or twelve, her blond braids bobbing as she walked.

     "This is my granddaughter, Nina...more or less. My Grand Duchess. I should have introduced you before. In Moscow."

     Ellie embraced the girl. She was relieved that Vaygay had not appeared with Meera, the ecdysiast. Ellie observed his tenderness toward Nina and decided she liked him more than ever. Over all the years she had known him, he had kept this secret place within his heart well hidden.

     "I have not been a good father to her mother," he confided. `These days, I hardly see Nina at all."

     She looked around her. The Stationmasters had produced for each of the Five what could only be described as their deepest loves. Perhaps it was only to ease the barriers of communication with another, appallingly different species. She was glad none of them were happily chatting with an exact copy of themselves.

     What if you could do this back on Earth? she wondered. What if, despite all our pretense and disguise, it was necessary to appear in public with the person we loved most of all? Imagine this a prerequisite for social discourse on Earth. It would change everything. She imagined a phalanx of members of one sex surrounding a solitary member of the other. Or chains of people. Circles. The letters "H" or "Q." Lazy figure-8s. You could monitor deep affections at a glance, just by looking at the geometry--a kind of general relativity applied to social psychology. The practical difficulties of such an arrangement would be considerable, but no one would be able to lie about love.

     The Caretakers were in a polite but determined hurry. There was not much time to talk. The entrance to the air-lock of the dodecahedron was now visible, roughly where it had been when they first arrived. By symmetry, or perhaps because of some interdimensional conservation law, the Magritte doorway had vanished. They introduced everyone. She felt silly, in more ways than one, explaining in English to the Emperor Qin who her father was. But Xi dutifully translated, and they all solemnly shook hands as if this were their first encounter, perhaps at a suburban barbecue. Eda's wife was a considerable beauty, and Surindar Ghosh was giving her a more than casual inspection. Devi did not seem to mind; perhaps she was merely gratified at the accuracy of the imposture.

     "Where did you go when you stepped through the doorway?" Ellie softly asked her. "Four-sixteen Maidenhall Way," she answered. Ellie looked at her blankly. "London, 1973. With Surindar." She nodded her head in his direction. "Before he died." Ellie wondered what she would have found had she crossed that threshold on the beach. Wisconsin in the late `50s, probably. She hadn't shown up on schedule, so he had come to find her. He had done that in Wisconsin more than once.

     Eda had also been told about a message deep inside a transcendental number, but in his story it was not ? or e, the base of natural logarithms, but a class of numbers she had never heard of. With an infinity of transcendental numbers, they would never know for sure which number to examine back on Earth.

     "I hungered to stay and work on it," he told Ellie softly, "and I sensed they needed help--some way of thinking about the decipherment that hadn't occurred to them. But I think it's something very personal for them. They don't want to share it with others. And realistically, I suppose we just aren't smart enough to give them a hand."

     They hadn't decrypted the message in ?? The Station-masters, the Caretakers, the designers of new galaxies hadn't figured out a message that had been sitting under their thumbs for a galactic rotation or two? Was the message that difficult, or were they...? "Time to go home," her father said gently. It was wrenching. She didn't want to go. She tried staring at the palm frond. She tried asking more questions.

     "How do you mean `go home'? You mean we're going to emerge somewhere in the solar system? How will we get down to Earth?"

     "You'll see," he answered. "It'll be interesting." He put his arm around her waist, guiding her toward the open airlock door.

     It was like bedtime. You could be cute, you could ask bright questions, and maybe they'd let you stay up a little later. It used to work, at least a little.

     "The Earth is linked up now, right? Both ways. If we can go home, you can come down to us in a jiffy. You know, that makes me awfully nervous. Why don't yon just sever the link? We'll take it from here."

     "Sorry, Presh," he replied, as if she had already shamelessly prolonged her eight o'clock bedtime. Was he sorry about bedtime, or about being unready to denozzle the tunnel? "For a while at least, it'll be open only to inbound traffic," he said. "But we don't expect to use it."

     She liked the isolation of the Earth from Vega. She preferred a fifty-two-year-long leeway between unacceptable behavior on Earth and the arrival of a punitive expedition. The black hole link was uncomfortable. They could arrive almost instantaneously, perhaps only in Hokkaido, perhaps anywhere on Earth. It was a transition to what Hadden had called microintervention. No matter what assurances they gave, they would watch us more closely now. No more dropping in for a casual look-see every few million years.

     She explored her discomfort further. How....heological...the circumstances had become. Here were beings who live in the sky, beings enormously knowledgeable and powerful, beings concerned for our survival, beings with a set of expectations about how we should behave. They disclaim such a role, but they could clearly visit reward and punishment, life and death, on the puny inhabitants of Earth. Now how is this different, she asked herself, from the old-time religion? The answer occurred to her instantly: It was a matter of evidence. In her videotapes, in the data the others had acquired, there would be hard evidence of the existence of the Station, of what went on here, of the blackhole transit system. There would be five independent, mutually corroborative stories supported by compelling physical evidence. This one was fact, not hearsay and hocus-pocus.

     She turned toward him and dropped the frond. Wordlessly, he stooped and returned it to her.

     "You've been very generous in answering all my questions. Can I answer any for you?"

     "Thanks. You answered all our questions last night."

     "That's it? No commandments? No instructions for the provincials?"

     "It doesn't work that way, Presh. You're grown up now. You're on your own." He tilted his head, gave her that grin, and she flew into his arms, her eyes again filling with tears. It was a long embrace. Eventually, she felt him gently disengage her arms. It was time to go to bed. She imagined holding up her index finger and asking for still one more minute. But she did not want to disappoint him. "Bye, Presh," he said. "Give your mother my love." `Take care," she replied in a small voice. She took one last look at the seashore at the center of the Galaxy. A pair of seabirds, petrels perhaps, were suspended on some rising column of air. They remained aloft with hardly a beat of their wings. Just at the entrance to the airlock, she turned and called to him.

     "What does your Message say? The one in pi?"

     "We don't know," he replied a little sadly, taking a few steps toward her. "Maybe it's a kind of statistical accident. We're still working on it." The breeze stirred up, tousling her hair once again. "Well, give us a call when you figure it out," she said.

    

     CHAPTER 21

Causality

    

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods-- They kill us for their sport.

-WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

King Lear, IV, i, 36

     Who is all-powerful should fear everything.

-PIERRE CORNEILLE

Cinna (1640), Act IV, Scene II

    

They were overjoyed to be back. They whooped it up, giddy with excitement. They climbed over the chairs. They bugged and patted erne another on the back. All of them were dose to tears. They had succeeded--but not only that, they had returned, safely negotiating all the tunnels. Abruptly, amidst a bail of static, the radio began blaring out the Machine status report. All three benzels were decelerating. The built-up electrical charge was dissipating. From the commentary, it was clear that Project had no idea of what had happened.

     Ellie wondered how much time had passed. She glanced at her watch. It had been a day at least, which would bring them well into the year 2000. Appropriate enough. Oh, wait till they hear what we have to tell them, she thought. Reassuringly, she patted the compartment where the dozens of video microcassettes were stored. How the world would change when these films were released! The space between and around the benzels had been re-pressurized. The airlock doors were being opened. Now there were radio inquiries about their well-being.

     "We're fine!" she shouted back into her microphone. "Let us out. You won't believe what happened to us."

     The Five emerged from the airlock happy, effusively greeting their comrades who had helped build and operate the Machine. The Japanese technicians saluted them. Project officials surged toward them.

     Devi said quietly to Ellie, "As far as I can tell, everyone's wearing exactly the same clothing they did yesterday. Look at that ghastly yellow tie on Peter Valerian."

     "Oh, he wears that old thing all the time," Ellie replied. "His wife gave it to him." The clocks read 15:20. Activation had occurred close to three o'clock the previous afternoon. So they had been gone just a little over twenty-four...

     "What day is it?" she asked. They looked at her uncomprehendingly. Something was wrong. "Peter, for heaven's sake, what day is it?"

     "How do you mean?" Valerian answered. "It's today. Friday, December 31, 1999. It's New Year's Eve. Is that what you mean? Ellie, are you all right?"

     Vaygay was telling Archangelsky to let him begin at the beginning, but only after his cigarettes were produced. Project officials and representatives of the Machine Consortium were converging around them. She saw der Heer wedging his way to her through the crowd.

     "From your perspective, what happened?" she asked as finally he came within conversational range.

     "Nothing. The vacuum system worked, the benzels spun up, they accumulated quite an electrical charge, they reached the prescribed speed, and then everything reversed."

     "What do you mean, `everything reversed'?"

     "The benzels slowed down and the charge dissipated. The system was repressurized, the benzels stopped, and all of you came out. The whole thing took maybe twenty minutes, and we couldn't talk to you while the benzels were spinning. Did you experience anything at all?"

     She laughed. "Ken, my boy," she said, "have I got a story for you."

     There was a party for project personnel to celebrate Machine Activation and the momentous New Year. Ellie and her traveling companions did not attend. The television stations were full of celebrations, parades, exhibits, retrospectives, prognostications and optimistic addresses by national leaders. She caught a glimpse of remarks by the Abbot Utsumi, beatific as ever. But she could not dawdle. Project Directorate had quickly concluded, from the fragments of their adventures that the Five had time to recount, that something had gone wrong. They found themselves hustled away from the milling crowds of government and Consortium officials for a preliminary interrogation. It was thought prudent, project officials explained, for each of the Five to be questioned separately. Der Heer and Valerian conducted her debriefing in a small conference room. There were other project officials present, including Vaygay's former student Anatoly Goldmann. She understood that Bobby Bui, who spoke Russian, was sitting in for the Americans during Vaygay's interrogation.

     They listened politely, and Peter was encouraging now and again. But they had difficulty understanding the sequence of events. Much of what she related somehow worried them. Her excitement was noncontagious. It was hard for them to grasp that the dodecahedron had been gone for twenty minutes, much less a day, because the armada of instruments exterior to the benzels had filmed and recorded the event, and reported nothing extraordinary. All that had happened. Valerian explained, was that the benzels had reached their prescribed speed, several instruments of unknown purpose had the equivalent of their needles move, the benzels slowed down and stopped, and the Five emerged in a state of great excitement. He didn't exactly say "babbling nonsense," but she could sense his concern. They treated her with deference, but she knew what they were thinking: The only function of the Machine was in twenty minutes to produce a memorable illusion, or--just possibly--to drive the Five of them mad.

     She played back the video microcassettes for them, each carefully labeled: "Vega Ring System," for example, or "Vega Radio (?) Facility,"

     "Quintuple System,"

     "Galactic Center Starscape," and one bearing the inscription "Beach." She inserted them in "play" mode one after the other. They had nothing on them. The cassettes were blank. She couldn't understand what had gone wrong. She had carefully learned the operation of the video microcamera system and had used it successfully in tests before Machine Activation. She had even done a spot check on some of the footage after they had left the Vega system. She was further devastated later when she was told that the instruments carried by the others had also somehow failed. Peter Valerian wanted to believe her, der Heer also. But it was hard for them, even with the best will in the world. The story the Five had come back with was a little, well, unexpected--and entirely unsupported by physical evidence. Also, there hadn't been enough time. They had been out of sight for only twenty minutes.

     This was not the reception she had expected. But she was confident it would all sort itself out. For the moment, she was content to play the experience back in her mind and make some detailed notes. She wanted to be sure she would forget nothing.

     Although a front of extremely cold air was moving in from Kamchatka, it was still unseasonably warm when late on New Year's Day, a number of unscheduled flights arrived at Sapporo International Airport. The new American Secretary of Defense, Michael Kitz, and a team of hastily gathered experts arrived in an airplane marked "The United States of America." Their presence was confirmed by Washington only when the story was about to break in Hokkaido. The terse press release noted that the visit was routine, that there was no crisis, no danger, and that "nothing extraordinary has been reported at the Machine Systems Integration Facility northeast of Sapporo." A Tu-120 had flown overnight from Moscow, carrying, among others, Stefan Baruda and Timofei Gotsridze. Doubtless neither group was delighted to spend this New Year's holiday away from their families. But the weather in Hokkaido was a pleasant surprise; it was so warm that the sculptures in Sapporo were melting, and the dodecahedron of ice had become an almost featureless small glacier, the water dripping off rounded surfaces that once had been the edges of the pentagonal surfaces.

     Two days later, a severe winter storm struck, and all traffic into the Machine facility, even by four- wheel-drive vehicles, was interrupted. Some radio and all television links were severed; apparently a microwave relay tower had been blown down. During most of the new interrogations, the only communication with the outside world was by telephone. And just conceivably, Ellie thought, by dodecahedron. She was tempted to steal herself onboard and spin up the benzels. She enjoyed elaborating on this fantasy. But in fact there was no way to know whether the Machine would ever work again, at least from this side of the tunnel. He had said it would not. She allowed herself to think of the seashore again. And him. Whatever happened next, a wound deep within her was being healed. She could feel the scar tissue knitting. It had been the most expensive psychotherapy in the history of the world. And that's saying a lot, she thought.

     Debriefings were given to Xi and Sukhavati by representatives of their nations. Although Nigeria played no significant role in Message acquisition or Machine construction, Eda acquiesced readily enough to a long interview with Nigerian officials. But it was perfunctory compared with the interrogations administered to them by project personnel. Vaygay and Ellie underwent still more elaborate debriefings by the high-level teams brought from the Soviet Union and the United States for this specific purpose. At first these American and Soviet interrogations excluded foreign nationals, but after complaints were carried through the World Machine Consortium, the U.S. and the S.U. relented, and the sessions were again internationalized.

     Kitz was in charge of her debriefing, and considering what short notice he must have been given, he had arrived surprisingly well prepared. Valerian and der Heer put in an occasional good word for her, and every now and then asked a searching question. But it was Kitz's show.

     He told her he was approaching her story skeptically but constructively, in what he hoped was the best scientific tradition. He trusted she would not mistake the directness of his questions for some personal animus. He held her only in the greatest respect. He, in turn, would not permit his judgment to be clouded by the fact that he had been against the Machine Project from the beginning. She decided to let this pathetic deception pass unchallenged, and began her story. At first he listened closely, asked occasional questions of detail, and apologized when he interrupted. By the second day no such courtesies were in evidence.

     "So the Nigerian is visited by his wife, the Indian by her dead husband, the Russian by his cute granddaughter, the Chinese by some Mongol warlord--"

     "Qin was not a Mongol--"

     "--and you, for crissake, you get visited by your dearly departed father, who tells you that he and his friends have been busy rebuilding the universe, for crissake. `Our Father Who art in Heaven...'? This is straight religion. This is straight cultural anthropology. This is straight Sigmund Freud. Don't you see that? Not only do you claim your . own father came back from the dead, you actually expect us to believe that he made the universe--"

     "You're distorting what--"

     "Come off it, Arroway. Don't insult our intelligence. You don't present us with a shred of evidence, and you expect us to believe the biggest cock-and-bull story of all time? You know better than that. You're a smart lady. How could you figure to get away with it?"

     She protested. Valerian protested also; this kind of interrogation, he said, was a waste of time. The Machine was undergoing sensitive physical tests at this moment. That was how the validity of her story could be checked. Kitz agreed the physical evidence would be important. But the nature of Arroway^s story, he argued, was revealing, a means of understanding what had actually happened.

     "Meeting your father in Heaven and all that, Dr. Arroway, is telling, because you've been raised in the Judeo-Christian culture. You're essentially the only one of the Five from that culture, and you're the only one who meets your father. Your story is just too pat. It's not imaginative enough."

     This was worse than she had thought possible. She felt a moment of epistemological panic--as when your car is not where you parked it, or the door you locked last night ajar in the morning. "You think we made all this up?"

     "Well, I'll tell you. Dr. Arroway. When I was very young, I worked in the Cook County Prosecutor's office. When they were thinking about indicting somebody, they asked three questions." He ticked them off on his fingers. "Did he have the opportunity? Did he have the means? Did he have the motive?"

     "To do what?" He looked at her in disgust.

     "But our watches showed that we'd been gone more than a day," she protested.

     "I don't know how I could have been so stupid," Kitz said, striking his forehead with his palm. "You've demolished my argument. I forgot that it's impossible to set your watch ahead by a day."

     "But that implies a conspiracy. You think Xi lied? You think Eda lied? You--"

     "What I think is we should move on to something more important. You know, Peter"--Kitz turned toward Valerian--"I'm persuaded you're right. A first draft of the Materials Assessment Report will be here tomorrow morning. Let's not waste more time on...stories. We'll adjourn till then."

     Der Heer had said not a word through the entire afternoon's session. He offered her an uncertain grin, and she couldn't help contrasting it with her father's. Sometimes Ken's expression seemed to urge her, to implore her. But to what end she had no way of knowing; perhaps to change her story. He had remembered her recollections of her childhood, and he knew how she had grieved for her father. Clearly he was weighing the possibility that she had gone crazy. By extension, she supposed, he was also considering the likelihood that the others had gone crazy, too. Mass hysteria. Shared delusion. Folie à cinq. "Well, here it is," Kitz said. The report was about a centimeter thick. He let it fall to the table, scattering a few pencils. "You'll want to look through it, Dr. Arroway, but I can give you a quick summary. Okay?"

     She nodded assent. She had heard through the grapevine that the report was highly favorable to the account the Five had given. She hoped it would put an end to the nonsense.

     "The dodecahedron apparently"--he laid great stress on this word--"has been exposed to a very different environment than the benzels and the supporting structures. It's apparently been subjected to huge tensile and compressional stresses. It's a miracle the thing didn't fall to pieces. So it's a miracle you and the others didn't fall to pieces at the same time. Also, it's apparently seen an intense radiation environment-- there's low-level induced radioactivity, cosmic ray tracks, and so on. It's another miracle that you survived the radiation. Nothing else has been added or taken away. There's no sign of erosion or scraping on the side vertices that you claim kept bumping into the walls of the tunnels. There's not even any scoring, as there would have been if it entered the Earth's atmosphere at high velocity."

     "So doesn't that confirm our story? Michael, think about it. Tensile and compressional stresses--tidal forces--are exactly what you expect if you fall down a classical black hole. That's been known for fifty years at least. I don't know why we didn't feel it, but maybe the dodec protected us somehow. And high radiation doses from the inside of the black hole and from the environment of the Galactic Center, a known gamma ray source. There's independent evidence for black holes, and there's independent evidence for a Galactic Center. We didn't make those things up. I don't understand the absence of scraping, but that depends on the interaction of a material we've hardly studied with a material that's completely unknown. I wouldn't expect any scoring or charring, because we don't claim we entered through the Earth's atmosphere. It seems to me the evidence almost entirely confirms our story. What's the problem?"

     "The problem is you people are too clever. Too clever. Look at it from the point of view of a skeptic. Step back and look at the big picture. There's a bunch of bright people in different countries who think the world is going to hell in a hand basket. They claim to receive a complex Message from space."

     "Claim?"

     "Let me continue. They decrypt the Message and announce instructions on how to build a very complicated Machine at a cost of trillions of dollars. The world's in a funny condition, the religions are all shaky about the oncoming Millennium, and to everybody's surprise the Machine gets built. There's one or two slight changes in personnel, and then essentially these same people--"

     "It's not the same people. It's not Sukhavati, it's not Eda, it's not Xi, and there were--"

     "Let me continue. Essentially these same people then get to sit down in the Machine. Because of the way the thing is designed, no one can see them and no one can talk to them after the thing is activated. So the Machine is turned on and then it turns itself off. Once it's on, you can't make it stop in less than twenty minutes. Okay. Twenty minutes later, these same people emerge from the Machine, all jaunty-jolly, with some bullshit story about traveling faster than light inside black holes to the center of the Galaxy and back. Now suppose you hear this story and you're just ordinarily cautious. You ask to see their evidence. Pictures, videotapes, any other data. Guess what? It's all been conveniently erased. Do they have artifacts of the superior civilization they say is at the center of the Galaxy? No. Mementos? No. A stone tablet? No. Pets? No. Nothing. The only physical evidence is some subtle damage done to the Machine. So you ask yourself, couldn't people who were so motivated and so clever arrange for what looks like tension stresses and radiation damage, especially if they could spend two trillion dollars faking the evidence?"

     She gasped. She remembered the last time she had gasped. This was a truly venomous reconstruction of events. She wondered what had made it attractive to Kitz. He must, she thought, be in real distress. "I don't think anybody's going to believe your story," he continued. "This is the most elaborate--and the most expensive--hoax ever perpetrated. You and your friends tried to hoodwink the President of the United States and deceive the American people, to say nothing of all the other governments on the Earth. You must really think everybody else is stupid."

     "Michael, this is madness. Tens of thousands of people worked to acquire the Message, to decode it, and to build the Machine. The Message is on magnetic tapes and printouts and laserdisks in observatories all over the world. You think there's a conspiracy involving all the radio astronomers on the planet, and the aerospace and cybernetics companies, and--"

     "No, you don't need a conspiracy that big. All you need is a transmitter in space that looks as if it's broadcasting from Vega. I'll tell you how I think you did it. You prepare the Message, and get somebody-- somebody with an established launch capability--to put it up. Probably as an incidental part of some other mission. And into some orbit that looks like sidereal motion. Maybe there's more than one satellite. Then the transmitter turns on, and you're all ready in your handy-dandy observatory to receive the Message, make the big discovery, and tell us poor slobs what it all means."

     This was too much even for the impassive der Heer. He roused himself from a slumped position in his chair. "Really, Mike--" he began, but Ellie cut him short.

     "I wasn't responsible for most of the decoding. Lots of people were involved. Drumlin, especially. He started out as a committed skeptic, as you know. But once the data came in, Dave was entirely convinced. You didn't hear any reservations from him."

     "Oh yes, poor Dave Drumlin. The late Dave Drumlin. Yon set him up. The professor you never liked."

     Der Heer slumped still further down in his chair, and she had a sudden vision of him regaling Kitz with secondhand pillow talk. She looked at him more closely. She couldn't be sure. "During the decrypting of the Message, you couldn't do everything. There was so much you had to do. So you overlooked this and you forgot that. Here's Drumlin growing old, worried about his former student eclipsing him and getting all the credit. Suddenly he sees how to be involved, how to play a central role. You appealed to his narcissism, and you hooked him. And if he hadn't figured out the decryption, you would have helped him along. If worse came to worst, you would have peeled all the layers off the onion yourself."

     "You're saying that we were able to invent such a Message. Really, it's an outrageous compliment to Vaygay and me. It's also impossible. It can't be done. You ask any competent engineer if that kind of Machine--with brand-new subsidiary industries, components wholly unfamiliar on Earth--you ask if that could have been invented by a few physicists and radio astronomers on their days off. When do you imagine we had time to invent such a Message even if we knew how? Look how many bits of information are in it. It would have taken years."

     "You had years, while Argus was getting nowhere. The project was about to be closed. Drumlin, you remember, was pushing that. So just at the right moment you find the Message. Then there's no more talk about closing down your pet project. I think you and that Russian did cook the whole thing up in your spare time. You had years."

     "This is madness," she said softly. Valerian interrupted. He had known Dr. Arroway well during the period in question. She had done productive scientific work. She never had the time required for so elaborate a deception. Much as he admired her, he agreed that the Message and the Machine were far beyond her ability--or indeed anybody's ability. Anybody on Earth.

     But Kitz wasn't buying it "That's a personal judgment, Dr. Valerian. There are many persons, and there can be many judgments. You're fond of Dr. Arroway. I understand. Fm fond of her, too. It's understandable you would defend her. I don't take it amiss. But there's a clincher. You don't know about it yet. I'm going to tell you." He leaned forward, watching Elite intently. Clearly he was interested to see how she would respond to what he was about to say.

     "The Message stopped the moment we activated the Machine. The moment the benzels reached cruising speed. To the second. All over the world. Every radio observatory with a line-of-sight to Vega saw the same thing. We've held back telling you about it so we wouldn't distract you from your debriefing. The Message stopped in mid-bit. Now that was really foolish of you."

     "I don't know anything about it, Michael. But so what if the Message stopped? It's fulfilled its purpose. We built the Machine, and we went to...where they wanted us to go."

     "It puts you in a peculiar position," he went on. Suddenly she saw where he was headed. She hadn't expected this. He was arguing conspiracy, but she was contemplating madness. If Kitz wasn't mad, might she be? If our technology can manufacture substances that induce delusions, could a much more advanced technology induce highly detailed collective hallucinations? Just for a moment it seemed possible.

     "Let's imagine it's last week," he was saying. `The radio waves arriving on Earth right now are supposed to have been sent from Vega twenty-six years ago. They take twenty-six years to cross space to us. But twenty-six years ago, Dr. Arroway, there wasn't any Argus facility, and you were sleeping with acid- heads, and moaning about Vietnam and Watergate. You people are so smart, but you forgot the speed of light. There's no way that activating the Machine can turn the Message off until twenty-six years pass-- unless in ordinary space you can send a message faster than light. And we both know that's impossible. I remember you complaining about how stupid Rankin and Joss were for not knowing you can't travel faster than light. I'm surprised you thought you could get away with this one."

     "Michael, listen. It's how we were able to get from here to there and back in no time flat. Twenty minutes, anyway. It can be acausal around a singularity. I'm not an expert on this. You should be talking to Eda or Vaygay."

     "Thank you for the suggestion," he said. "We already have."

     She imagined Vaygay under some comparably stem interrogation by his old adversary Archangelsky or by Baruda, the man who had proposed destroying the radio telescopes and burning the data. Probably they and Kitz saw eye to eye on the awkward matter before them. She hoped Vaygay was bearing up all right.

     "You understand, Dr. Arroway. I'm sure you do. But let me explain again. Perhaps you can show me where I missed something. Twenty-six years ago those radio waves were heading out for Earth. Now imagine them in space between Vega and here. Nobody can catch the radio waves after they've left Vega. Nobody can stop them. Even if the transmitter knew instantaneously--through the black hole, if you like-- that the Machine had been activated, it would be twenty-six years before the signal stops arriving on Earth. Your Vegans couldn't have known twenty-six years ago when the Machine was going to be activated. And to the minute. You would have to send a message back in time to twenty-six years ago, for the Message to stop on December thirty-first, 1999. You do follow, don't you?"

     "Yes, I follow. This is wholly unexplored territory. You know, it's not called a space-time continuum for nothing. If they can make tunnels through space, I suppose they can make some kind of tunnels through time. The fact that we got back a day early shows that they have at least a limited kind of time travel. So maybe as soon as we left the Station, they sent a message twenty-six years back into time to turn the transmission off. I don't know."

     "You see how convenient it is for you that the Message stops just now. If it was still broadcasting, we could find your little satellite, capture it, and bring back the transmission tape. That would be definitive evidence of a hoax. Unambiguous. But you couldn't risk that. So you're reduced to black hole mumbo- jumbo. Probably embarrassing for you." He looked concerned.

     It was like some paranoid fantasy in which a patchwork of innocent facts are reassembled into an intricate conspiracy. The facts in this case were hardly commonplace, and it made sense for the authorities to test other possible explanations. But Kitz's rendition of events was so malign that it revealed, she thought, someone truly wounded, afraid, in pain. In her mind, the likelihood that all this was a collective delusion diminished a little. But the cessation of the Message transmission--if it had happened as Kitz had said--was worrisome.

     "Now, I tell myself, Dr. Arroway, you scientists had the brains to figure all this out, and the motivation. But by yourselves you didn't have the means. If it wasn't the Russians who put up this satellite for you, it could have been any one of half a dozen other national launch authorities. But we've looked into all that. Nobody launched a free-flying satellite in the appropriate orbits. That leaves private launch capability. And the most interesting possibility that's come to our notice is a Mr. S. R. Hadden. Know him?"

     "Don't be ridiculous, Michael. I talked to you about Hadden before I went up to Methuselah."

     "Just wanted to be sure we agree on the basics. Try this on for size: You and the Russian concoct this scheme. You get Hadden to bankroll the early stages--the satellite design, the invention of the Machine, the encrypting of the Message, faking the radiation damage, all that. In return, after the Machine Project gets going, he gets to play with some of that two trillion dollars. He likes the idea. There might be enormous profit in it, and from his history, he'd love to embarrass the government. When you get stuck in decrypting the Message, when you can't find the primer, you even go to him. He tells you where to look for it. That was also careless. It would have been better if you figured it out yourself."

     "It's too careless," offered der Heer. "Wouldn't someone who was really perpetrating a hoax..."

     "Ken, I'm surprised at you. You've been very credulous, you know? You're demonstrating exactly why Arroway and the others thought it would be clever to ask Hadden's advice. And to make sure we knew she'd gone to see him."

     He returned his attention to her. "Dr. Arroway, try to look at it from the standpoint of a neutral observer..."

     Kitz pressed on, making sparkling new patterns of facts assemble themselves in the air before her, rewriting whole years of her life. She hadn't thought Kitz dumb, but she hadn't imagined him this inventive either. Perhaps he had received help. But the emotional propulsion for this fantasy came from Kitz.

     He was full of expansive gestures and rhetorical flourishes. This was not merely part of his job. This interrogation, this alternative interpretation of events, had roused something passionate in him. After a moment she thought she saw what it was. The Five had come back with no immediate military applications, no political liquid capital, but only a story that was surpassing strange. And that story bad certain implications. Kitz was now master of the most devastating arsenal on Earth, while the Caretakers were building galaxies. He was a lineal descendant of a progression of leaders, American and Soviet, who had devised the strategy of nuclear confrontation, while the Caretakers were an amalgam of diverse species from separate worlds working together in concert. Their very existence was an unspoken rebuke. Then consider the possibility that the tunnel could be activated from the other end, that there might be nothing he could do to prevent it. They could be here in an instant. How could Kitz defend the United States under such circumstances? His role in the decision to build the Machine--the history of which he seemed to be actively rewriting--could be interpreted by an unfriendly tribunal as dereliction of duty. And what account could Kitz give the extraterrestrials of his stewardship of the planet, he and his predecessors? Even if no avenging angels came storming out of the tunnel, if the truth of the journey got out the world would change. It was already changing. It would change much more.

     Again she regarded him with sympathy. For a hundred generations, at least, the world had been run by people much worse than he. It was his misfortune to come to bat just as the rules of the game were being rewritten.

     "...even if you believed every detail of your story," he was saying, "don't you think the extraterrestrials treated you badly? They take advantage of your tenderest feelings by dressing themselves up as dear old Dad. They don't tell you what they're doing, they expose all your film, destroy all your data, and don't even let you leave that stupid palm frond up there. Nothing on the manifest is missing, except for a little food, and nothing that isn't on the manifest is returned, except for a little sand. So in twenty minutes you gobbled some food and dumped a little sand out of your pockets. You come back one nanosecond or something after you leave, so to any neutral observer you never left at all.

     "Now, if the extraterrestrials wanted to make it unambiguously clear you'd really gone somewhere, they would've brought you back a day later, or a week. Right? If there was nothing inside the benzels for a while, we'd be dead certain that you'd gone somewhere. If they wanted to make it easy for you, they wouldn't have turned off the Message. Right? That makes it look bad, you know. They could've figured that out. Why would they want to make it bad for you? And there's other ways they could've supported your story. They could've given you something to remember them by. They could've let you bring back your movies. Then nobody could claim all this is just a clever fake. So how come they didn't do that? How come the extraterrestrials don't confirm your story? You spent years of your life trying to find them. Don't they appreciate what you've done?

     "Ellie, how can you be so sure your story really happened? If, as you claim, all this isn't a hoax, couldn't it be a...delusion? It's painful to consider, I know. Nobody wants to think they've gone a little crazy. Considering the strain you've been under, though, it's no big deal. And if the only alternative is criminal conspiracy...Maybe you want to carefully think this one through." She had already done so.

     Later that day she met with Kitz alone. A bargain had in effect been proposed. She had no intention of going along with it. But Kitz was prepared for that possibility as well.

     "You never liked me from the first," he said. "But I'm going to rise above that. We're going to do something really fair.

     "We've already issued a news release saying that the Machine just didn't work when we tried to activate it. Naturally, we're trying to understand what went wrong. With all the other failures, in Wyoming and Uzbekistan, nobody is doubting this one.

     "Then in a few weeks we'll announce that we're still not getting anywhere. We've done the best we could. The Machine is too expensive to keep working on. Probably we're just not smart enough to figure it out yet. Also, there's still some danger, after all. We always knew that. The Machine might blow up or something. So all in all, it's best to put the Machine Project on ice--at least for a while. It's not that we didn't try.

     "Hadden and his friends would oppose it, of course, but as he's been taken from us..."

     "He's only three hundred kilometers overhead," she pointed out.

     "Oh, haven't you heard? Sol died just around the time the Machine was activated. Funny how it happened. Sorry, I should have told you. I forgot you were...close to him."

     She did not know whether to believe Kitz. Hadden was in his fifties and had certainly seemed in good physical health. She would pursue this topic later. "And what, in your fantasy, becomes of us?" she asked. "Us? Who's `us'?"

     "Us. The five of us. The ones who went aboard the Machine that you claim never worked."

     "Oh. After a little more debriefing you'll be free to leave. I don't think any of you will be foolish enough to tell this cock-and-bull story on the outside. But just to be safe, we're preparing some psychiatric dossiers on the five of you. Profiles. Low-key. You've always been a little rebellious, mad at the system--whichever system you grew up in. It's okay. It's good for people to be independent. We encourage that, especially in scientists. But the strain of the last few years has been trying--not actually disabling, but trying. Especially for Doctors Arroway and Lunacharsky. First they're involved in finding the Message, decrypting it, and convincing the governments to build the Machine. Then problems in construction, industrial sabotage, sitting through an Activation that goes nowhere...It's been tough. All work and no play. And scientists are highly strung anyway. If you've all become a little unhinged at the failure of the Machine, everybody will be sympathetic. Understanding. But nobody'll believe your story. Nobody. If you behave yourselves, there's no reason that the dossiers ever have to be released.

     "It'll be clear that the Machine is still here. We're having a few wire service photographers in to photograph it as soon as the roads are open. We'll show them the Machine didn't go anywhere. And the crew? The crew is naturally disappointed. Maybe a little disheartened. They don't want to talk to the press just yet.

     "Don't you think it's a neat plan?" He smiled. He wanted her to acknowledge the beauty of the scheme. She said nothing.

     "Don't you think we're being very reasonable, after spending two trillion dollars on that pile of shit? We could put you away for life, Arroway. But we're letting you go free. You don't even have to put up bail. I think we're behaving like gentlemen. It's the Spirit of the Millennium. It's Machindo."

    

     CHAPTER 22

Gilgamesh

    

That it will never come again Is what makes life so sweet.

     -EMILY DICKINSON

Poem Number 1741

    

In this time--heralded expansively as the Dawn of a New Age--burial in space was an expensive commonplace. Commercially available and a competitive business, it appealed especially to those who, in former times, would have requested that their remains be scattered over the county of their birth, or at least the mill town from which they had extracted their first fortune. But now you could arrange for your remains to circumnavigate the Earth forever--or as close to forever as matters in the workaday world. You need only insert a short codicil in your will. Then--assuming, of course, that you have the wherewithal--when you die and are cremated, your ashes are compressed into a tiny almost toy like bier, on which is embossed your name and your dates, a short memorial verse, and the religious symbol of your choice (choose one of three). Along with hundreds of similar miniature coffins, it is then boosted up and dumped out at an intermediate altitude, expeditiously avoiding both the crowded corridors of geosynchronous orbit and the disconcerting atmospheric drag of low-Earth orbit. Instead, your ashes triumphantly circle the planet of your birth in the midst of the Van Allen I radiation belts, a proton blizzard where no satellite in its right mind would risk going to in the first place. But ashes do not mind.

     At these heights, the Earth had become enveloped in the remains of its leading citizens, and an uninstructed visitor from a distant world might rightly believe he had chanced upon some somber space-age necropolis. The hazardous location of this mortuary would explain the absence of memorial visits from grieving relatives.

     S. R. Hadden, contemplating this image, had been appalled at what minor portions of immortality these deceased worthies had been willing to settle for. All their organic parts--brains, hearts, everything that distinguished them as a person--were atomized in their cremations. There isn't any of you left after cremation, he thought, just powdered bone, hardly enough even for a very advanced civilization to reconstruct you from the remains. And then, for good measure, your coffin is placed smack in the Van Alien belts, where even your ashes get slowly fried.

     How much better if a few of your cells could be preserved. Real living cells, with the DNA intact. He visualized a corporation that would, for a healthy fee, freeze a little of your epithelial tissue and orbit it high--well above the Van Alien belts, maybe even higher than geosynchronous orbit. No reason to die first. Do it now, while it's on your mind. Then, at least, alien molecular biologists--or their terrestrial counterparts of the far future-- could reconstruct you, clone you, more or less from scratch. You would rub your eyes, stretch, and wake up in the year ten million. Or even if nothing was done with your remains, there would still be in existence multiple copies of your genetic instructions. You would be alive in principle. In either case it could be said that you would live forever.

     But as Hadden ruminated on the matter further, this scheme also seemed too modest. Because that wasn't really you, a few cells scraped off the soles of your feet. At best they could reconstruct your physical form. But that's not the same as you. If you were really serious, you should include family photographs, a punctiliously detailed autobiography, all the books and tapes you've enjoyed, and as much else about yourself as possible. Favorite brands of after-shave lotion, for example, or diet cola. It was supremely egotistical, he knew, and he loved it. After all, the age had produced a sustained eschatological delirium. It was natural to think of your own end as everyone else was contemplating the demise of the species, or the planet, or the massed celestial ascent of the Elect.

     You couldn't expect the extraterrestrials to know English. If they're to reconstruct you, they'd have to know your language. So you must include a kind of translation, a problem Hadden enjoyed. It was almost the obverse of the Message decryption problem.

     All of this required a substantial space capsule, so substantial that you need no longer be limited to mere tissue samples. You might as well send your body whole. If you could quick-freeze yourself after death, so to say, there was a subsidiary advantage. Maybe enough of you would be in working order that whoever found you could do better than just reconstructing you. Maybe they could bring you back to life--of course, after fixing whatever it was that you had died of. If you languished a little before freezing, though-- because, say, the relatives had not realized you were dead yet--prospects for revival diminished. What would really make sense, he thought, was to freeze someone just before death. That would make eventual resuscitation much more likely, although there was probably limited demand for this service.

     But then why just before dying? Suppose you knew you had only a year or two to live. Wouldn't it be better to be frozen immediately, Hadden mused--before the meat goes bad? Even then--he sighed--no matter what the nature of the deteriorating illness, it might still be irremediable after you were revived; you would be frozen for a geological age, and then awakened only to die promptly from a melanoma or a cardiac infarction about which the extraterrestrials might know nothing.

     No, he concluded, there was only one perfect realization of this idea: Someone in robust health would have to be launched on a one-way journey to the stars. As an incidental benefit, you would be spared the humiliation of disease and old age. Far from the inner solar system, your equilibrium temperature would fall to only a few degrees above absolute zero. No further refrigeration would be necessary. Perpetual care provided. Free.

     By this logic he came to the final step of the argument: If it requires a few years to get to the interstellar cold, you might as well stay awake for the show, and get quick-frozen only when yon leave the solar system. It would also minimize over dependence on the cryogenics.

     Hadden had taken every reasonable precaution against an unexpected medical problem in Earth orbit, the official account went, even to preemptive sonic disintegration of his gall and kidney stones before he ever set foot in his chateau in the sky. And then he went and died of anaphylactic shock. A bee had buzzed angrily out of a bouquet of freesias sent up on Narnia by an admirer. Carelessly, Methuselah's capacious pharmacy had not stocked the appropriate antiserum. The insect had probably been immobilized by the low temperatures in Narnia's cargo bay and was not really to blame. Its small and broken body had been sent down for examination by forensic entomologists. The irony of the billionaire felled by a bee did not escape the notice of newspaper editorials and Sunday sermons.

     But in fact, this was all a deception. There had been no bee, no sting, and no death. Hadden remained in excellent health. Instead, on the stroke of the New Year, nine hours after the Machine had been activated, the rocket engines flamed on a sizable auxiliary vehicle docked to Methuselah. It rapidly achieved escape velocity from the Earth-Moon system. He called it Gilgamesh.

     Hadden had spent his life amassing power and contemplating time. The more power you have, he found, the more you crave. Power and time were connected, because all men are equal in death. That is why the ancient kings built monuments to themselves. But the monuments become eroded, the royal accomplishments obliterated, the very names of the kings forgotten. And, most important, they themselves were dead as doornails. No, this was more elegant, more beautiful, more satisfying. He had found a low door in the wall of time.

     Had he merely announced his plans to the world, certain complications would ensue. If Hadden was frozen to four degrees Kelvin at ten billion kilometers from Earth, what exactly was his legal status? Who would control his corporations? This way was much tidier. In a minor codicil of an elaborate last will and testament, he had left his heirs and assigns a new corporation, skilled in rocket engines and cryogenics, that would eventually be called Immortality, Inc. He need never think of the matter again. Gilgamesh was not equipped with a radio. He no longer wished to know what had happened to the Five. He wanted no more news of Earth--nothing cheering, nothing to make him disconsolate, none of the pointless tumult he had known. Only solitude, elevated thoughts....silence. If anything adverse should occur in the next few years, Gilgamesh's cryogenics could be activated by the flip of a switch. Until then, there was a full library of his favorite music, and literature and videotapes. He would not be lonely. He had never really been much for company. Yamagishi had considered coming, but ultimately reneged; he would be lost, he said, without "staff." And on this journey there were insufficient inducements, as well as inadequate space. for staff. The monotony of the food and the modest scale of the amenities might be daunting to some, but Hadden knew himself to be a man with a great dream. The amenities mattered not at all.

     In two years, this flying sarcophagus would fall into the gravitational potential well of Jupiter, just outside its radiation belt, be slingshot around the planet and then flung off into interstellar space. For a day he would have a view still more spectacular than that out the window of his study on Methuselah--the roiling multicolored clouds of Jupiter. the largest planet. If it were only a matter of the view. Hadden would have opted for Saturn and the rings. He preferred the rings. But Saturn was at least four years from Earth and that was, all things considered, taking a chance. If you're stalking immortality, you have to be very careful.

     At these speeds it would take ten thousand years to travel even the distance to the nearest star. When you're frozen to four degrees above absolute zero, though, you have plenty of time. But some fine day--he was sure of it, though it be a million years from now--Gilgamesh would by chance enter someone else's solar system. Or his funeral bark would be intercepted in the darkness between the stars, and other beings-- very advanced, very far-seeing--would take the sarcophagus aboard and know what had to be done. It had never really been attempted before. No one who ever lived on Earth had come this close. Confident that in his end would be his beginning, he closed his eyes and folded his arms experimentally across his chest, as the engines flared again, this time more briefly, and the burnished craft was sleekly set on its long journey to the stars.

     Thousands of years from now, God knows what would be happening on Earth, he thought. It was not his problem. It never really had been. But he, he would be asleep, deep-frozen, perfectly preserved, his sarcophagus hurtling through the interstellar void, surpassing the Pharaohs, besting Alexander, outshining Qin. He had contrived his own Resurrection.

    

     CHAPTER 23

Reprogramming

    

We have not followed cunningly devised fables...but were eyewitnesses.

-II PETER 1:16

     Look and remember. Look upon this sky; Look deep and deep into the sea-clean air, The unconfined, the terminus of prayer. Speak now and speak into the hallowed dome. What do you hear? What does the sky reply? The heavens are taken; this is not your home.

     -KARL JAY SHAPIRO

Travelogue for Exiles

    

The telephone lines had been repaired, the roads plowed clean, and carefully selected representatives of the world's press were given a brief look at the facility. A few reporters and photographers were taken through the three matching apertures in the benzels, through the air-lock, and into the dodec. There were television commentaries recorded, the reporters seated, in the chairs that the Five had occupied, telling the world of the failure of this first courageous attempt to activate the Machine. Ellie and her colleagues were photographed from a distance, to show that they were alive and well, but no interviews were to be given just yet. The Machine Project was taking stock and considering its future options. The tunnel from Honshu to Hokkaido was open again, but the passageway from Earth  to Vega was closed. They hadn't actually tested this proposition--Ellie wondered whether, when the Five finally left the site, the project would try to spin up the benzels again--but she believed what she had been told: The Machine would not work again; there would be no further access to the tunnels for the beings of Earth. We could make little indentations in space- time as much as we liked; it would do us no good if no one hooked up from the other side. We had been given a glimpse, she thought, and then were left to save ourselves. If we could.

     In the end, the Five were permitted to talk among themselves. She systematically bade farewell to each. No one blamed her for the blank cassettes.

     `These pictures on the cassettes are recorded in magnetic domains, on tape," Vaygay reminded her. "A strong electrical field accumulated on the benzels, and they were, of course, moving. A time-varying electrical field makes a magnetic field. Maxwell's equations. It seems to me that's how your tapes were erased. It was not your fault."

     Vaygay's interrogation had baffled him. They had not exactly accused him but merely suggested that he was part of an anti-Soviet conspiracy involving scientists from the West.

     "I tell you, Ellie, the only remaining open question is the existence of intelligent life in the Politburo."

     "And the White House. I can't believe the President would allow Kitz to get away with this. She committed herself to the project."

     `This planet is run by crazy people. Remember what they have to do to get where they are. Their perspective is so narrow, so...brief. A few years. In the best of them a few decades. They care only about the time they are in power." She thought about Cygnus A.

     "But they're not sure our story is a lie. They cannot prove it. Therefore, we must convince them. In their hearts, they wonder, `Could it be true?' A few even want it to be true. But it is a risky truth. They need something close to certainty....And perhaps we can provide it. We can refine gravitational theory. We can make new astronomical observations to confirm what we were told--especially for the Galactic Center and Cygnus A. They're not going to stop astronomical research. Also, we can study the dodec, if they give us access. Ellie, we will change their minds." Difficult to do if they're all crazy, she thought to herself. "I don't see how the governments could convince people this is a hoax," she said.

     "Really? Think of what else they've made people believe. They've persuaded us that we'll be safe if only we spend all our wealth so everybody on Earth can be killed in a moment--when the governments decide the time has come. I would think it's hard to make people believe something so foolish. No, Ellie, they're good at convincing. They need only say that the Machine doesn't work, and that we've gone a little mad."

     "I don't think we'd seem so mad if we all told our story together. But you may be right. Maybe we should try to find some evidence first Vaygay, will you be okay when you...go back?"

     "What can they do to me? Exile me to Gorky? I could survive that; I've had my day at the beach....No, I will be safe. You and I have a mutual-security treaty, Ellie. As long as you're alive, they need me. And vice versa, of course. If the story is true, they will be glad there was a Soviet witness; eventually, they will cry it from the rooftops. And like your people, they will wonder about military and economic uses of what we saw.

     "It doesn't matter what they tell us to do. All that matters is that we stay alive. Then we will tell our story--all five of us--discreetly, of course. At first only to those we trust. But those people will tell others. The story will spread. There will be no way to stop it. Sooner or later the governments will acknowledge what happened to us in the dodecahedron. And until then we are insurance policies for each other. Ellie, I am very happy about all this. It is the greatest thing that ever happened to me."

     "Give Nina a kiss for me," she said just before he left on the night flight to Moscow.

     Over breakfast, she asked Xi if he was disappointed.

     "Disappointed? To go there"--he lifted his eyes skyward--"to see them, and to be disappointed? I am an orphan of the Long March. I survived the Cultural Revolution. I was trying to grow potatoes and sugar beets for six years in the shadow of the Great Wall. Upheaval has been my whole life. I know disappointment.

     "You have been to a banquet, and when you come home to your starving village you are disappointed that they do not celebrate your return? This is no disappointment. We have lost a minor skirmish. Examine the...disposition of forces."

     He would shortly be departing for China, where he had agreed to make no public statements about what had happened in the Machine. But he would return to supervise the dig at Xian. The tomb of Qin was waiting for him. He wanted to see how closely the Emperor resembled that simulation on the far side of the tunnels.

     "Forgive me. I know this is impertinent," she said after a while, "but the fact that of all of us, you alone met someone who...In all your life, wasn't there anyone you loved?"

     She wished she had phrased the question better. "Everyone I ever loved was taken from me. Obliterated. I saw the emperors of the twentieth century come and go," he answered. "I longed for someone who could not be revised, or rehabilitated, or edited out. There are only a few historical figures who cannot be erased."

     He was looking at the tabletop, fingering the teaspoon. "I devoted my life to the Revolution, and I have no regrets. But I know almost nothing of my mother and father. I have no memories of them. Your mother is still alive. You remember your father, and you found him again. Do not overlook how fortunate you arc."

     In Devi, Ellie sensed a grief she had never before noticed. She assumed it was a reaction to the skepticism with which Project Directorate and the governments bad greeted their story. But Devi shook her head.

     "Whether they believe us is not very important for me. The experience itself is central. Transforming. Ellie, that really happened to us. It was real. The first night we were back here on Hokkaido, I dreamt that our experience was a dream, you know? But it wasn't, it wasn't.

     "Yes, I'm sad. My sadness is...You know, I satisfied a lifelong wish up there when I found Surindar again, after all these years. He was exactly as I remembered him, exactly as I've dreamed of him. But when I saw him, when I saw so perfect a simulation, I knew: This love was precious because it had been snatched away, because I had given up so much to marry him. Nothing more. The man was a fool. Ten years with him, and we would have been divorced. Maybe only five. I was so young and foolish."

     "I'm truly sorry," Ellie said. "I know a little about mourning a lost love."

     "Ellie," she replied, "you don't understand. For the first time in my adult life, I do not mourn Surindar. What I mourn is the family I renounced for his sake."

     Sukhavati was returning to Bombay for a few days and then would visit her ancestral village in Tamil Nadu.

     "Eventually," she said, "it will be easy to convince ourselves this was only an illusion. Every morning when we wake up, our experience will be more distant, more dreamlike. It would have been better for us all to stay together, to reinforce our memories. They understood this danger. That's why they took us to the seashore, something like our own planet, a reality we can grasp. I will not permit anyone to trivialize this experience. Remember. It really happened. It was not a dream. Ellie, don't forget."

     Eda was, considering the circumstances, very relaxed. She soon understood why. While she and Vaygay had been undergoing lengthy interrogations, he had been calculating.

     "I think the tunnels are Einstein-Rosen bridges," he said. "General Relativity admits a class of solutions, called wormholes, similar to black holes, but with no evolutionary connection--they cannot be generated, as black holes can, by the gravitational collapse of a star. But the usual sort of wormhole, once made, expands and contracts before anything can cross through; it exerts disastrous tidal forces, and it also requires--at least as seen by an observer left behind--an infinite amount of time to get through."

     Ellie did not see how this represented much progress, and asked him to clarify. The key problem was holding the wormhole open. Eda had found a class of solutions to his field equations that suggested a new macroscopic field, a kind of tension that could be used to prevent a wormhole from contracting fully. Such a wormhole would pose none of the other problems of black holes; it would have much smaller tidal stresses, two-way access, quick transit times as measured by an exterior observer, and no devastating interior radiation field. "I don't know whether the tunnel is stable against small perturbations," he said. "If not, they would have to build a very elaborate feedback system to monitor and correct the instabilities. I'm not yet sure of any of this. But at least if the tunnels can be Einstein-Rosen bridges, we can give some answer when they tell us we were hallucinating,"

     Eda was eager to return to Lagos, and she could see the green ticket of Nigerian Airlines peeking out of his jacket pocket. He wondered if he could completely work through the new physics their experience had implied. But he confessed himself unsure that he would be equal to the task, especially because of what he described as his advanced age for theoretical physics. He was thirty-eight. Most of all, he told Ellie, he was desperate to be reunited with his wife and children.

     She embraced Eda. She told him that she was proud to have known him.

     "Why the past tense?" he asked. "You will certainly sec me again. And Ellie," he added, almost as an afterthought, "will you do something for me? Remember everything that happened, every detail. Write it down. And send it to me. Our experience represents experimental data. One of us may have seen some point that the others missed, something essential for a deep understanding of what happened. Send me what you write. I have asked the others to do the same."

     He waved, lifted his battered briefcase, and was ushered into the waiting project car.

     They were departing for their separate nations, and it felt to Ellie as if her own family were being sundered, broken, dispersed. She too had found the experience transforming. How could she not? A demon had been exorcised. Several. And just when she felt more capable of love than she had ever been, she found herself alone.

     They spirited her out of the facility by helicopter. On the long flight to Washington in the government airplane, she slept so soundly that they had to shake her awake when the White House people came aboard-- just after the aircraft landed briefly on an isolated runway at Hickam Field, Hawaii.

     They had made a bargain. She could go back to Argus, although no longer as director, and pursue any scientific problem she pleased. She had, if she liked, lifetime tenure.

     "We're not unreasonable," Kitz had finally said in agreeing to the compromise. "You come back with a solid , piece of evidence, something really convincing, and we'll join you in making the announcement. We'll say we asked you to keep the story quiet until we could be absolutely sure. Within reason, we'll support any research you want to do. If we announce the story now, though, there'll be an initial wave of enthusiasm and then the skeptics will start carping. It'll embarrass you and it'll embarrass us. Much better to gather the evidence, if you can." Perhaps the President had helped him change his mind. It was unlikely Kitz was enjoying the compromise.

     But in return she must say nothing about what had happened aboard the Machine. The Five had sat down in the dodecahedron, talked among themselves, and then walked off. If she breathed a word of anything else, the spurious psychiatric profile would find its way to the media and, reluctantly, she would be dismissed.

     She wondered whether they had attempted to buy Peter Valerian's silence, or Vaygay's, or Abonnema's. She couldn't see how--short of shooting the debriefing teams of five nations and the World Machine Consortium--they could hope to keep this quiet forever. It was only a matter of time. So, she concluded, they were buying time.

     It surprised her how mild the threatened punishments were, but violations of the agreement, if they happened would not come on Kitz's watch. He was shortly retiring; in a year, the Lasker Administration would be leaving office after the constitutionally mandated maximum of two terms. He had accepted a partnership in a Washington law firm known for its defense-contractor clientele.

     Ellie thought Kitz would attempt something more. He seemed unworried about anything she might claim occurred at the Galactic Center. What he agonized about, she was sure, was the possibility that the tunnel was still open to even if not from the Earth. She thought the Hokkaido facility would soon be disassembled. The technicians would return to their industries and universities. What stories would they tell? Perhaps the dodecahedron would be displayed in the Science City of Tsukuba. Then, after a decent interval when the world's attention was to some extent distracted by other matters, perhaps there would be an explosion at the Machine site--nuclear, if Kitz could contrive a plausible explanation for the event If it was a nuclear explosion, the radiological contamination would be an excellent reason to declare the whole area a forbidden zone. It would at least isolate the site from casual observers and might just shake the nozzle loose. Probably Japanese sensibilities about nuclear weapons, even if exploded underground, would force Kitz to settle for conventional explosives. They might disguise it as one of the continuing series of Hokkaido coal- mine disasters. She doubted if any explosion--nuclear or conventional--could disengage the Earth from the tunnel.

     But perhaps Kitz was imagining none of these things. Perhaps she was selling him short. After all, he too must have been influenced by Machindo. He must have a family, friends, someone be loved. He must have caught at least a whiff of it.

     The next day, the President awarded her the National Medal of Freedom in a public ceremony at the White House. Logs were burning in a fireplace set in a white marble wall. The President had committed a great deal of political as well as the more usual sort of capital to the Machine Project and was determined to make the best face of it before the nation and the world. Investments in the Machine by the United States and other nations, the argument went, had paid off handsomely. New technologies, new industries were blossoming, promising at least as much benefit for ordinary people as the inventions of Thomas Edison. We had discovered that we are not alone, that intelligences more advanced than we existed out there in space. They had changed forever, the President said, our conception of who we are. Speaking for herself--but also, she thought, for most Americans--the discovery had strengthened her belief in God, now revealed to be creating life and intelligence on many worlds, a conclusion that the President was sure would be in harmony with all religions. But the greatest good granted us by the Machine, the President said, was the spirit it had brought to Earth--the increasing mutual understanding within the human community, the sense that we were all fellow passengers on a perilous journey in space and in time, the goal of a global unity of purpose that was now known all over the planet as Machindo.

     The President presented Ellie to the press and the television cameras, told of her perseverance over twelve long years, her genius in detecting and decoding the Message, and her courage in going aboard the Machine. No one knew what the Machine would do. Dr. Arroway had willingly risked her life. It was not Dr. Arroway's fault that nothing happened when the Machine was activated. She had done as much as any human possibly could. She deserved the thanks of all Americans, and of all people everywhere on Earth. Ellie was a very private person. Despite her natural reticence, she had when the need arose shouldered the burden of explaining the Message and the Machine. Indeed, she had shown a patience with the press that she, the President, admired particularly. Dr. Arroway should now be permitted some real privacy, so she could resume her scientific career. There had been press announcements, briefings, interviews with Secretary Kitz and Science Adviser der Heer. The President hoped the press would respect Dr. Arroway's wish that there be no press conference. There was, however, a photo opportunity. Ellie left Washington without determining how much the President knew.

     They flew her back in a small sleek jet of the Joint Military Airlift Command, and agreed to stop in Janesville on the way. Her mother was wearing her old quilted robe. Someone had put a little color on her cheeks. Ellie pressed her face into the pillow beside her mother. Beyond regaining a halting power of speech, the old woman had recovered the use of her right arm sufficiently to give Ellie a few feeble pats on her shoulder.

     "Morn, I've got something to tell you. It's a great thing. But try to be calm. I don't want to upset you. Mom...I saw Dad. I saw him. He sends you his love."

     "Yes ..." The old woman slowly nodded. "Was here yesterday."

     John Staughton, Ellie knew, had been to the nursing home the previous day. He had begged off accompanying Ellie today, pleading an excess of work, but it seemed possible that Staughton merely did not wish to intrude on this moment. Nevertheless, she found herself saying, with some irritation, "No, no. I'm talking about Dad."

     `Tell him..." The old woman's speech was labored. `Tell him, chiffon dress. Stop cleaners...way home from store."

     Her father evidently still ran the hardware store in her mother's universe. And Ellie's.

     The long sweep of cyclone fencing now stretched uselessly from horizon to horizon, blighting the expanse of scrub desert. She was glad to be back, glad to be setting up a new, although much smaller-scale, research program.

     Jack Hibbert had been appointed Acting Director of the Argus facility, and she felt unburdened of the administrative responsibilities. Because so much telescope time had been freed when the signal from Vega had ceased, there was a beady air of progress in a dozen long-languishing subdisciplines of radio astronomy. Her co-workers offered not a hint of support for Kitz's notion of a Message hoax. She wondered what der Heer and Valerian were telling their friends and colleagues about the Message and the Machine.

     Ellie doubted that Kitz had breathed a word of it outside the recesses of his soon-to-be-vacated Pentagon office. She had been there once; a Navy enlisted man--sidearm in leather holster and hands clasped behind his back--had stiffly guarded the portal, in case in the warren of concentric hallways some passerby should succumb to an irrational impulse.

     Willie had himself driven the Thunderbird from Wyoming, so it would be waiting for her. By agreement she could drive it only on the facility, which was large enough for ordinary joyriding. But no more West Texas landscapes, no more coney honor guards, no more mountain drives to glimpse a southern star. This was her sole regret about the seclusion. But the ranks of saluting rabbits were at any rate unavailable in winter.

     At first a sizable press corps haunted the area in hopes of shouting a question at her or photographing her through a telescopic lens. But she. remained resolutely isolated. The newly imported public relations staff was effective, even a little ruthless, in discouraging inquiries. After all, the President had asked for privacy for Dr. Arroway.

     Over the following weeks and months, the battalion of reporters dwindled to a company and then to a platoon. Now only a squad of the most steadfast remained, mostly from The World Hologram and other sensationalist weekly newspapers, the chiliast magazines, and a lone representative from a publication that called itself Science and God. No. one knew what sect it belonged to, and its reporter wasn't telling.

     When the stories were written, they told of twelve years of dedicated work, culminating in the momentous, triumphant decryption of the Message and followed by the construction of the Machine. At the peak of world expectation, it had, sadly, failed. The Machine had gone nowhere. Naturally Dr. Arroway was disappointed, maybe, they speculated, even a little depressed. Many editorialists commented that this pause was welcome. The pace of new discovery and the evident need for major philosophical and religious reassessments represented so heady a mix that a time of retrenchment and slow reappraisal was needed. Perhaps the Earth was not yet ready for contact with alien civilizations. Sociologists and some educators claimed that the mere existence of extra-terrestrial intelligences more advanced than we would require several generations to be properly assimilated. It was a body blow to human self-esteem, they said. There was enough on our plate already. In another few decades we would much better understand the principles underlying the Machine. We would see what mistake we had made, and we would laugh at how trivial an oversight bad prevented it from functioning in its first full trial back in 1999.

     Some religious commentators argued that the failure of the Machine was a punishment for the sin of pride, for human arrogance. Billy Jo Rankin in a nationwide television address proposed that the Message had in fact come straight from a Hell called Vega, an authoritative consolidation of his previous positions on the matter. The Message and the Machine, he said, were a latter-day Tower of Babel. Humans foolishly, tragically, had aspired to reach the Throne of God. There had been a city of fornication and blasphemy built thousands of years ago called Babylon, which God had destroyed. In our time, there was another such city with the same name. Those dedicated to the Word of God had fulfilled His purpose there as well. The Message and the Machine represented still another assault of wickedness upon the righteous and God- fearing. Here again the demonic initiatives had been forestalled--in Wyoming by a divinely inspired accident, in Godless Russia through the confounding of Communist scientists by the Divine Grace.

     But despite these clear warnings of God's will, Rankin continued, humans had for a third time tried to build the Machine. God let them. Then, gently, subtly, He caused the Machine to fail, deflected the demonic intent, and once more demonstrated His care and concern for His wayward and sinful--if truth be told. His unworthy-children on Earth. It was time to learn the lessons of our sinfulness, our abominations, and, before the coming Millennium, the real Millennium that would begin on January 1, 2001, rededicate our planet and ourselves to God.

     The Machines should be destroyed. Every last one of them, and all their parts. The pretense that by building a machine rather than by purifying their hearts humans could stand at the right hand of God must be expunged, root and branch, before it was too late.

     la her little apartment Ellie heard Rankin out, turned off the television set and resumed her programming.

     The only outside calls she was permitted were to the rest home in Janesville, Wisconsin. All incoming calls except from Janesville were screened out. Polite apologies were provided. Letters from der Heer, Valerian, from her old college friend Becky Ellenbogen, she filed unopened. There were a number of messages delivered by express mail services, and then by courier, from South Carolina, from Palmer Joss. She was much more tempted to read these, but did not. She wrote him a note that read only, "Dear Palmer, Not yet. Ellie," and posted it with no return address. She had no way to know if it would be delivered.

     A television special on her life, made without her consent, described her as more reclusive now than Neil Arm-strong, or even Greta Garbo. Ellie took it all with cheerful equanimity. She was otherwise occupied. Indeed, she was working night and day.

     The prohibitions on communication with the outside world did not extend to purely scientific collaboration, and through open-channel asynchronous telenetting she and Vaygay organized a long-term research program. Among the objects to be examined were the vicinity of Sagittarius A at the center of the Galaxy, and the great extragalactic radio source, Cygnus A. The Argus telescopes were employed as part of a phased array, linked with the Soviet telescopes in Samarkand. Together, the American-Soviet array acted as if they were part of a single radio telescope the size of the Earth. Operating at a wavelength of a few centimeters, they could resolve sources of radio emission as small as the inner solar system if they were as faraway as the center of the Galaxy.

     She worried that this was not good enough, that the two orbiting black holes were considerably smaller than that. Still, a continuous monitoring program might turn up something. What they really needed, she thought, was a radio telescope launched by space vehicle to the other side of the Sun, and working in tandem with radio telescopes on Earth. Humans could thereby create a telescope effectively the size of the Earth's orbit. With it, she calculated, they could resolve something the size of the Earth at the center of the Galaxy. Or maybe the size of the Station.

     She spent most of her time writing, modifying existing programs for the Cray 21, and setting down an account--as detailed as she possibly could make it--of the salient events that had been squeezed into the twenty minutes of Earth-time after they activated the Machine. Halfway through, she realized she was writing samizdat. Typewriter and carbon paper technology. She locked the original and two copies in her safe--beside a yellowing copy of the Hadden Decision--secreted the third copy behind a loose plank in the electronics bay of Telescope 49, and burned the carbon paper. It generated a black acrid smoke. In six weeks she had finished reprogramming and just as her thoughts returned to Palmer Joss, he presented himself at the Argus front gate.

     His way had been cleared by a few phone calls from a special assistant to the President, with whom, of coarse, Joss had been acquainted for years. Even here in the Southwest with its casual sartorial codes, he wore, as always, a jacket, a white shirt, and a tie. She gave him the palm frond, thanked him for the pendant, and despite all of Kite's admonitions to keep her delusional experience quiet, immediately told him everything.

     They adopted the practice of her Soviet colleagues, who whenever anything politically unorthodox needed to be said, discovered the urgent necessity for a brisk walk. Every now and then he would stop and, a distant observer would see, lean toward her. Each time she would take his arm and they would walk on.

     He listened sympathetically, intelligently, indeed generously--especially for someone whose doctrines must, she thought, be challenged at their fundaments by her account...if he gave them any credence at all. After all his reluctance at the time the Message had first been received, at last she was showing Argus to him. He was companionable, and she found herself happy to see him. She wished she had been less preoccupied when she had seen him last, in Washington.

     Apparently at random, they climbed up the narrow metal exterior stairways that straddled the base of Tele-scope 49. The vista of 130 radio telescopes--most of them rolling stock on their own set of railway tracks--was like nothing else on Earth. In the electronics bay she slid back the plank and retrieved a bulky envelope with Joss's name upon it. He put it in his inside breast pocket, where it made a discernible bulge.

     She told him about the Sag A and Cyg A observing protocols. She told him about her computer program.

     "It's very time-consuming, even with the Cray, to calculate pi out to something like ten to the twentieth place. And we don't know that what we're looking for is in pi. They sort of said it wasn't. It might be e. It might be one of the family of transcendental numbers they told Vaygay about It might be some altogether different number. So a simple-minded brute-force approach--just calculating fashionable transcendental numbers forever--is a waste of time. But here at Argus we have very sophisticated decryption algorithms, designed to find patterns in a signal, designed to pull out and display anything that looks nonrandom. So I rewrote the programs ..."

     From the expression on his face, she was afraid she had not been clear. She made a small swerve in the monologue. "...but not to calculate the digits in a number like pi, print than out, and present them for inspection. There isn't enough time for that. Instead, the program races through the digits in pi and pauses even to think about it only when there's some anomalous sequence of zeros and ones. You know what I'm saying? Something nonrandom. By chance, there'll be some zeros and ones, of course. Ten percent of the digits will be zeros, and another ten percent will be ones. On average. The more digits we race through, the longer the sequences of pure zeros and ones that we should get by accident. The program knows what's expected statistically and only pays attention to unexpectedly long sequences of zeros and ones. And it doesn't only look in base ten."

     "I don't understand. If you look at enough random numbers, won't you get any pattern you want simply by chance?"

     "Sure. But you can calculate how likely that is. If you get a very complex message very early on, you know it can't be by chance. So, every day in the early hours of the morning the computer works on this problem. No data from the outside world goes in. And so far no data from the inside world comes out. It just runs through the optimum series expansion for pi and watches the digits fly. It minds its own business. Unless it finds something, it doesn't speak unless it's spoken to. It's sort of contemplating its navel."

     "I'm no mathematician, God knows. But could you give me a f'r instance?"

     "Sure." She searched in the pockets of her jump suit for a piece of paper and could find none. She thought about reaching into his inside breast pocket, retrieving the envelope she had just given him and writing on it, but decided that was too risky out here in the open. After a moment, he understood and produced a small spiral notebook.

     "Thanks. Pi starts out 3.1415926...You can see that the digits vary pretty randomly. Okay, a one appears twice in the first four digits, but after yon keep on going for a while it averages out. Each digit--0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9--appears almost exactly ten percent of the time when you've accumulated enough digits. Occasionally you'll get a few consecutive digits that are the same--4444, for example-- but not more than you'd expect statistically. Now, suppose you're running merrily through these digits and suddenly you find nothing but fours. Hundreds of fours all in a row. That couldn't carry any information, but it also couldn't be a statistical fluke. You could calculate the digits in pi for the age of the universe and, if the digits are random, you'd never go deep enough to get a hundred consecutive fours."

     "It's like the search you did for the Message. With these radio telescopes."

     "Yes; in both cases we were looking for a signal that's well out of the noise, something that can't be just a statistical fluke."

     "But it doesn't have to be a hundred fours--is that right? It could speak to us?"

     "Sure. Imagine after a while we get a long sequence of just zeros and ones. Then, just as we did with the Message, we could pull a picture out, if there's one in there. You understand, it could be anything."

     "You mean you could decode a picture hiding in pi and it would be a mess of Hebrew letters?"

     "Sure. Big blade letters, carved in stone." He looked at her quizzically.

     "Forgive me, Eleanor, but don't you think you're being a mite too...indirect? You don't belong to a silent order of Buddhist nuns. Why don't you just tell your story?"

     "Palmer, if I had hard evidence, I'd speak up. But if I don't have any, people like Kitz will say that I'm lying. Or hallucinating. That's why that manuscript's in your inside pocket. You're going to seal it, date it, notarize it, and put it in a safety-deposit box. If anything happens to me, you can release it to the world. I give you full authority to do anything you want with it."

     "And if nothing happens to you?"

     "If nothing happens to me? Then, when we find what we're looking for, that manuscript will confirm our story. If we find evidence of a double black hole at the Galactic Center, or some huge artificial construction in Cygnus A, or a message hiding inside pi, this"--she tapped him lightly on the chest--"will be my evidence. Then I'll speak out....Meantime, don't lose it."

     "I still don't understand," he confessed. "We know there's a mathematical order to the universe. The law of gravity and all that. How is this different? So there's order inside the digits of pi. So what?"

     "No, don't you see? This would be different. This isn't just starting the universe out with some precise mathematical laws that determine physics and chemistry. This is a message. Whoever makes the universe hides messages in transcendental numbers so they'll be read fifteen billion years later when intelligent life finally evolves. I criticized you and Rankin the time we first met for not understanding this. If God wanted us to know that he existed, why didn't he send us an unambiguous message?' I asked. Remember?"

     "I remember very well. You think God is a mathematician."

     "Something like that. If what we're told is true. If this isn't a wild-goose chase. If there's a message hiding in pi and not one of the infinity of other transcendental numbers. That's a lot of ifs."

     "You're looking for Revelation in arithmetic. I know a better way."

     "Palmer, this is the only way. This is the only thing that would convince a skeptic. Imagine we find something. It doesn't have to be tremendously complicated. Just something more orderly than could accumulate by chance that many digits into pi That's all we need. Then mathematicians all over the world can find exactly the same pattern or message or whatever it proves to be. Then there are no sectarian divisions. Everybody begins reading the same Scripture. No one could then argue that the key miracle in the religion was some conjurer's trick, or that later historians had falsified the record, or that it's just hysteria or delusion or a substitute parent for when we grow up. Everyone could be a believer."

     "You can't be sure you'll find anything. You can hide here and compute till the cows come home. Or you can go out and tell your story to the world. Sooner or later you'll have to choose."

     "I'm hoping I won't have to choose. Palmer. First the physical evidence, then the public announcements. Otherwise...Don't you see how vulnerable we'd be? I don't mean for myself, but ..."

     He shook his head almost imperceptibly. A smile was playing at the corners of his lips. He had detected a certain irony in their circumstances.

     "Why are you so eager for me to tell my story?" she asked.

     Perhaps he took it for a rhetorical question. At any rate he did not respond, and she continued.

     "Don't you think there's been a strange...reversal of our positions? Here I am, the bearer of the profound religious experience I can't prove--really, Palmer, I can barely fathom it. And here you are, the hardened skeptic trying-- more successfully than I ever did--to be kind to the credulous."

     "Oh no, Eleanor," he said, "I'm not a skeptic. I'm a believer."

     "Are you? The story I have to tell isn't exactly about Punishment and Reward. It's not exactly Advent and Rapture. There's not a word in it about Jesus. Part of my message is that we're not central to the purpose of the Cosmos. What happened to me makes us all seem very small."

     "It does. But it also makes God very big." She glanced at him for a moment and rushed on. "Yon know, as the Earth races around the Sun, the powers of this world--the religious powers, the secular powers-- once pretended the Earth wasn't moving at all. They were in the business of being powerful. Or at least pretending to be powerful And the truth made them feel too small. The truth frightened them; it undermined their power. So they suppressed it. Those people found the truth dangerous. You're sure you know what believing me entails?"

     "I've been searching, Eleanor. After all these years, believe me, I know the truth when I see it. Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe. I mean the real universe. All those light-years. All those worlds. I think of the scope of your universe, the opportunities it affords the Creator, and it takes my breath away. It's much better than bottling Him up in one small world. I never liked the idea of Earth as God's green footstool. It was too reassuring, like a children's story...like a tranquilizer. But your universe has room enough, and time enough, for the kind of God I believe in.

     "I say you don't need any more proof. There are proofs enough already. Cygnus A and all that are just for the scientists. You think it'll be hard to convince ordinary people that you're telling the truth. I think it'll be easy as pie. You think your story is too peculiar, too alien. But I've heard it before. I know it well. And I bet you do too." He closed his eyes and, after a moment, recited:

    

He dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.....surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not....This is none other but the House of God, and this is the gate of heaven.

    

He had been a little carried away, as if preaching to the multitudes from the pulpit of a great cathedral, and when he opened his eyes it was with a small self-deprecatory smile. They walked down a vast avenue, flanked left and right by enormous whitewashed radio telescopes straining at the sky, and after a moment he spoke in a more conversational tone.

     "Your story has been foretold. It's happened before. Somewhere inside of you, you must have known. None of your details are in the Book of Genesis. Of course not. How could they be? The Genesis account was right for the time of Jacob. Just as your witness is right for this time, for our time.

     "People are going to believe you, Eleanor. Millions of them. All over the world. I know it for certain..."

     She shook her head, and they walked on for another moment in silence before he continued.

     "All right, then. I understand. You take as much time as you have to. But if there's any way to hurry it up, do it--for my sake. We have less than a year to the Millennium."

     "I understand also. Bear with me a few more months. If we haven't found something in pi by then, I'll consider going public with what happened up there. Before January 1. Maybe Eda and the others would be willing to speak out also. Okay?"

     They walked in silence back toward the Argus administration building. The sprinklers were watering the meager lawn, and they stepped around a puddle that, on this parched earth, seemed alien, out of place. "Have you ever been married?" he asked. "No, I never have. I guess I've been too busy."

     "Ever been in love?" The question was direct, matter-of-fact.

     "Halfway, half a dozen times. But"--she glanced at the nearest telescope--"there was always so much noise, the signal was hard to find. And you?"

     "Never," he replied flatly. There was a pause, and then he added with a faint smile, "But I have faith."

     She decided not to pursue this ambiguity just yet, and they mounted the short flight of stairs to examine the Argus mainframe computer.

    

     CHAPTER 24

The Artist's Signature

    

Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed....

     -ORINTHIANS 15:51

     The universe seems...to have been determined and ordered in accordance with number, by the forethought and the mind of the creator of all things; for the pattern was fixed, like a preliminary sketch, by the domination of number preexistent in the mind of the world-creating God.

-NICOMACHUS OF GERASA

Arithmetic I, 6 (ca. A.D. 100)

    

She rushed up the steps of the nursing home and, on the newly repainted green veranda, marked off at regular intervals by empty rocking chairs, she saw John Staughton--stooped, immobile, his arms dead weights. In his right hand be clutched a shopping bag in which Ellie could see a translucent shower cap, a flowered makeup case, and two bedroom slippers adorned with pink pom-poms.

     "She's gone," he said as his eyes focused. "Don't go in," he pleaded. "Don't look at her. She would've hated for you to see her like this. You know how much pride she took in her appearance. Anyway, she's not in there."

     Almost reflexively, out of long practice and still unresolved resentments, Ellie was tempted to turn and enter anyway. Was she prepared, even now, to defy him as a matter of principle? What was the principle, exactly? From the havoc on his face, there was no question about the authenticity of his remorse. He had loved her mother. Maybe, she thought, he loved her more than I did, and a wave of self-reproach swept through her. Her mother had been so frail for so long that Ellie had tested, many times, how she would respond when the moment came. She remembered how beautiful her mother had been in the picture that Staughton had sent her, and suddenly, despite her rehearsals for this moment, she was wracked with sobs.

     Startled by her distress, Staughton moved to comfort her. But she put up a hand, and with a visible effort regained her self-control. Even now, she could not bring herself to embrace him. They were strangers, tenuously linked by a corpse. But she had been wrong--she knew it in the depths of her being--to have blamed Staughton for her father's death.

     "I have something for you," he said as he fumbled in the shopping bag. Some of the contents circulated between top and bottom, and she could see now an imitation-leather wallet and a plastic denture case. She had to look away. At last he straightened up, flourishing a weather-beaten envelope.

     "For Eleanor," it read. Recognizing her mother's handwriting, she moved to take it. Staughton took a startled step backward, raising the envelope in front of his face as if she had been about to strike him.

     "Wait," he said. "Wait. I know we've never gotten along. But do me this one favor: Don't read the letter until tonight. Okay?"

     In his grief, he seemed a decade older. "Why?" she asked.

     "Your favorite question. Just do me this one courtesy. Is it too much to ask?"

     "You're right," she said. "It's not too much to ask. I'm sorry."

     He looked her directly in the eye. "Whatever happened to you in that Machine," he said, "maybe it changed you."

     "I hope so, John."

     She called Joss and asked him if he would perform the funeral service. "I don't have to tell you I'm not religious. But there were times when my mother was. You're the only person I can think of whom I'd want to do it, and I'm pretty sure my stepfather will approve." He would be there on the next plane, Joss assured her.

     In her hotel room, after an early dinner, she fingered the envelope, caressing every fold and scuff. It was old. Her mother must have written it years ago, carrying it around in some compartment of her purse, debating with herself whether to give it to Ellie. It did not seem newly resealed, and Ellie wondered whether Staughton had read it. Part of her hungered to open it, and part of her hung back with a kind of foreboding. She sat for a long time in the musty armchair thinking, her knees drawn up limberly against her chin.

     A chime sounded, and the not quite noiseless carriage of her telefax came to life. It was linked to the Argus computer. Although it reminded her of the old days, there was no real urgency. Whatever the computer had found was not about to go away; ? would not set as the Earth turned. If there was a message hiding inside ?, it would wait for her forever.

     She examined the envelope again, but the echo of the chime intruded. If there was content inside a transcendental number, it could only have been built into the geometry of the universe from the beginning. This new project of hers was in experimental theology. But so is all of science, she thought. "STAND BY," the computer printed out on the telefax screen.

     She thought of her father....ell, the simulacrum of her father...about the Caretakers with their network of tunnels through the Galaxy. They had witnessed and perhaps influenced the origin and development of life on millions of worlds. They were building galaxies, closing off sectors of the universe. They could manage at least a limited kind of time travel. They were gods beyond the pious imaginings of almost all religions--all Western religions, anyway. But even they had their limitations. They had not built the tunnels and were unable to do so. They had not inserted the message into the transcendental number, and could not even read it. The Tunnel builders and the ? in-scribers were somebody else. They didn't live here anymore. They had left no forwarding address. When the Tunnel builders had departed, she guessed, those who would eventually be the Caretakers had become abandoned children. Like her, like her.

     She thought about Eda's hypothesis that the tunnels were wormholes, distributed at convenient intervals around innumerable stars in this and other galaxies. They resembled black holes, but they had different properties and different origins. They were not exactly massless, because she had seen them leave gravitational wakes in the orbiting debris in the Vega system. And through them beings and ships of many kinds traversed and bound up the Galaxy.

     Wormholes. In the revealing jargon of theoretical physics, the universe was their apple and someone had tunneled through, riddling the interior with passageways that criss-crossed the core. For a bacillus who lived on the surface, it was a miracle. But a being standing outside the apple might be less impressed. From that perspective, the Tunnel builders were only an annoyance. But if the Tunnel builders are worms, she thought, who are we? The Argus computer had gone deep into ?, deeper than anyone on Earth, human or machine, had ever gone, although not nearly so deep as the Caretakers had ventured. This was much too soon, she thought, to be the long-undecrypted message about which Theodore Arroway had told her on the shores of that uncharted sea. Maybe this was just a gearing up, a preview of coming attractions, an encouragement to further exploration, a token so humans would not lose heart. Whatever it was, it could not possibly be the message the Caretakers were struggling with. Maybe there were easy messages and hard messages, locked away in the various transcendental cumbers, and the Argus computer had found the easiest. With help.

     At the Station, she had learned a kind of humility, a reminder of how little the inhabitants of Earth really knew. There might, she thought, be as many categories of beings more advanced than humans as there are between us and the ants, or maybe even between us and the viruses. But it had not depressed her. Rather than a daunting resignation, it had aroused in her a swelling sense of wonder. There was so much more to aspire to now.

     It was like the step from high school to college, from everything coming effortlessly to the necessity of making a sustained and disciplined effort to understand at all. In high school, she had grasped her coursework more quickly than almost anybody. In college, she had discovered many people much quicker than she. There had been the same sense of incremental difficulty and challenge when she entered graduate school, and when she became a professional astronomer. At every stage, she had found scientists more accomplished than she, and each stage had been more exciting than the last. Let the revelations roll, she thought, looking at the telefax. She was ready.

     "TRANSMISSION PROBLEM. S/N<10. PLEASE STAND BY."

     She was linked to the Argus computer by a communications relay satellite called Defcom Alpha. Perhaps there had been an attitude-control problem, or a programming foul-up. Before she could think about it further, she found she had opened the envelope.

     ARROWAY HARDWARE, the letterhead said, and sure enough, the type font was that of the old Royal her father had kept at home to do both business and personal accounts. "June 13, 1964" was typed in the upper right-hand corner. She had been fifteen then. Her father could not have written it; he had been dead for years. A glance at the bottom of the page confirmed the neat hand of her mother.

    

My sweet Ellie, Now that I'm dead, I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me. I know I committed a sin against you, and not just you. I couldn't bear how you'd hate me if you knew the truth. That's why I didn't have the courage to tell you while I was alive. I know how much you loved Ted Arroway, and I want you to know I did, too. I still do. But he wasn't your real father. Your real father is John Staughton. I did something very wrong. I shouldn't have and I was weak, but if I hadn't you wouldn't be in the world, so please be kind when you think about me. Ted knew and he gave me forgiveness and we said we'd never tell you. But I look out the window right now and I see you in the backyard. You're sitting there thinking about stars and things that I never could understand and I'm so proud of you. You make such a point about the truth, I thought it was right that you should know this truth about yourself. Your beginning, I mean.

     If John is still alive, then he's given you this letter. I know he'll do it. He's a better man than you think he is, Ellie. I was lucky to find him again. Maybe you hate him so much because something inside of you figured out the truth. But really yon hate him because he isn't Theodore Arroway. I know.

     There yon are, still sitting out there. You haven't moved since I started this letter. You're just thinking. I hope and pray that whatever you're seeking, you'll find.

     Forgive me. I was only human.

     Love, Mom

    

Ellie had assimilated the letter in a single gulp, and immediately read it again. She had difficulty breathing. Her hands were clammy. The impostor had turned out to be the real thing. For most of her life, she had rejected her own father, without the vaguest notion of what she was doing. What strength of character he had shown during all those adolescent outbursts when she taunted him for not being her father, for having no right to tell her what to do.

     The telefax chimed again, twice. It was now inviting her to press the RETURN key. But she did not have the will to go to it. It would have to wait. She thought of her Fa...of Theodore Arroway, and John Staughton, and her mother. They had sacrificed much for her, and she had been too self-involved even to notice. She wished Palmer were with her.

     The telefax chimed once more, and the carriage moved tentatively, experimentally. She had programmed the computer to be persistent, even a little innovative, in attracting her attention if it thought it had found something in ?. But she was much too busy undoing and reconstructing the mythology of her life. Her mother would have been sitting at the desk in the big bedroom upstairs, glancing out the window as she wondered how to phrase the letter, and her eye had rested on Ellie at age fifteen, awkward, resentful, rebellious.

     Her mother had given her another gift. With this letter, Ellie had cycled back and come upon herself all those years ago. She had learned so much since then. There was so much more to learn.

     Above the table on which the chattering telefax sat was a mirror. In it she saw a woman neither young nor old, neither mother nor daughter. They had been right to keep the truth from her. She was not sufficiently advanced to receive that signal, much less decrypt it. She had spent her career attempting to make contact with the most remote and alien of strangers, while in her own life she had made contact with hardly anyone at all. She had been fierce in debunking the creation myths of others, and oblivious to the lie at the core of her own. She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

     The Argus computer was so persistent and inventive in its attempts to contact Eleanor Arroway that it almost conveyed an urgent personal need to share the discovery.

     The anomaly showed up most starkly in Base 11 arithmetic, where it could be written out entirely as zeros and ones. Compared with what had been received from Vega, this could be at best a simple message, but its statistical significance was high. The program reassembled the digits into a square raster, an equal number across and down. The first line was an uninterrupted file of zeros, left to right. The second line showed a single numeral one, exactly in the middle, with zeros to the borders, left and right. After a few more lines, an unmistakable arc had formed, composed of ones. The simple geometrical figure had been quickly constructed, line by line, self-reflexive, rich with promise. The last line of the figure emerged, all zeros except for a single centered one. The subsequent line would be zeros only, part of the frame.

     Hiding in the alternating patterns of digits, deep inside the transcendental number, was a perfect circle, its form traced out by unities in a field of noughts.

     The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle--another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There would be richer messages farther in. It doesn't matter what you look like, or what you're made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later you'll find it. It's already here. It's inside everything. You don't have to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe. The circle had closed. She found what she had been searching for.

    

- end -

    

    

     Author's Note

     Although of course I have been influenced by those I know, none of the characters herein is a close portrait of a real person. Nevertheless, this book owes much to the world SETI community--a small band of scientists from all over our small planet, working together, sometimes in the face of daunting obstacles, to listen for a signal from the skies. I would like to acknowledge a special debt of gratitude to the SETI pioneers Frank Drake, Philip Morrison, and the late I. S. Shkiovskii. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is now entering a new phase, with two major programs under way--the 8-million-channel META/Sentinel survey at Harvard University, sponsored by the Pasadena-based Planetary Society, and a still more elaborate program under the auspices of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. My fondest hope for this book is that it will be made obsolete by the pace of real scientific discovery.

     Several friends and colleagues have been kind enough to read an earlier draft and/or make detailed comments that have influenced the book's present form. I am deeply grateful to them, including Frank Drake, Pearl Druyan, Lester Grinspoon, lrving Gruber, Jon Lomberg, Philip Morrison, Nancy Palmer, Will Provine, Stuart Shapiro, Steven Soter, and Kip Thorne. Professor Thorne took the trouble to consider the galactic transportation system described herein, generating fifty lines of equations in the relevant gravitational physics. Helpful advice on content or style came from Scott Meredith, Michael Korda, John Herman, Gregory Weber, Clifton Fadiman, and the late Theodore Sturgeon. Through the many stages of the preparation of this book Shirley Arden has worked long and flawlessly; I am very grateful to her, and to Kel Arden. I thank Joshua Lederberg for first suggesting to me many years ago and perhaps playfully that a high form of intelligence might live at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. The idea has antecedents, as all ideas do, and something similar seems to have been envisioned around 1750 by Thomas Wright, the first person to mention explicitly that the Galaxy might have a center. A woodcut by Wright depicting the center of the Galaxy is shown on the inside front cover.

     This book has grown out of a treatment for a motion picture that Ann Druyan and I wrote in 1980-81. Lynda Obst and Gentry Lee facilitated that early phase. At every stage in the writing of this book I have benefited tremendously from Ann Druyan--from the earliest conceptualization of the plot and central characters to the final galley proofing. What I learned from her in the process is what I cherish most about the writing of this book.