Some people were lunching on the tailgates of hatchbacks; others were sampling the wares of vendors whose wheeled emporia were boldly lettered SNACKMOBILE or SPACE SOUVENIRS. There were long lines in front of small sturdy structures with maximum occupancy of one person that the project had thoughtfully provided. Children scampered among the vehicles, sleeping bags, blankets, and portable picnic tables almost never chided by the adults–except when they came too close to the highway or to the fence nearest Telescope 61, where a group of shaven-headed, kowtowed, saffron-robed young adults were solemnly intoning the sacred syllable “Om.” There were posters with imagined representations of extraterrestrial beings, some made popular by comic books or motion pictures. One read, “There Are Aliens Among Us.” A man with golden earrings was shaving, using the side-view mirror of someone’s pickup truck, and a black-haired woman in a serape raised a cup of coffee in salute as the convoy sped by.
As they drove toward the new main gate, near Telescope 101, Ellie could see a young man on a jerrbuilt platform importuning a sizable crowd. He was wearing a T-shirt that depicted the Earth being struck by a bolt of celestial lightning. Several others in the crowd, she noticed, were wearing the same enigmatic adornment. At Ellie’s urging, once through the gave, they pulled off the side of the road, rolled down the window, and listened. The speaker was turned away from them and they could see the faces in the crowd. These people are deeply moved, Ellie thought to herself.
He was in mid-oration: “…and others say there’s been a pact with the Devil, that the scientists have sold their souls. There are precious stones in every one of these telescopes.” He waved his hand toward Telescope 101. “Even the scientists admit that. Some people say it’s the Devil’s part of the bargain.”
“Religious hooliganism,” Lunacharsky muttered darkly, his eyes yearning for the open road before them.
“No, no. Let’s stay,” she said. A half smile of wonderment was playing on her lips.
“There are some people–religious people, God-fearing people–who believe this Message comes from beings in space, entities, hostile creatures, aliens who want to harm us, enemies of Man. ” He fairly shouted this last phrase, and then paused for effect. “But all of you are wearied and disgusted by the corruption, the decay in this society, a decay brought on by unthinking, unbridled, ungodly technology. I don’t know which of you is right. I can’t tell you what the Message means, or who it’s from. I have my suspicions. We’ll know soon enough. But I do know the scientists and the politicians and the bureaucrats are holding out on us. They haven’t told us all they know. They’re deceiving us, like they always do. For too long, O God, we have swallowed the lies they feed us, the corruption they bring.”
To Ellie’s astonishment a deep rumbling chorus of assent rose from the crowd. He had tapped some well of resentment she had only vaguely apprehended.
“These scientists don’t believe we’re the children of God. They think we’re the offspring of apes. There are known communists among them. Do you want people like that to decide the fat of the world?”
The crowd responded with a thunderous “No!”
“Do you want a pack of unbelievers to do the talking to God?”
“No!” they roared again.
“Or the Devil? They are bargaining away our future with monsters from an alien world. My brothers and sisters, there is an evil in this place.”
Ellie had thought the orator was unaware of their presence. But now he half turned and pointed through the cyclone fence directly at the idling convoy.
“They don’t speak for us! They don’t represent us! They have no right to parley in our name!”
Some of the crowd nearest the fence began jostling and rhythmically pushing. Both Valerian and the driver became alarmed. The engines had been left running, and in a moment they accelerated from the gate toward the Argus administration building, still many miles distant across the scrub desert. As they pulled away, over the sound of squealing tires and the murmur of the crowd, Ellie could hear the orator, his voice ringing clearly.
“The evil in this place will be stopped. I swear it.”
CHAPTER 8
Random Access
The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.
-Edward Gibbon
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, XV
Ellie ignored random access and advanced sequentially through the television stations. Lifestyles of the Mass Murderers and You Bet Your Ass were on adjacent channels. It was clear at a glance that the promise of the medium remained unfulfilled. There was a spirited basketball game between the Johnson City Wildcats and the Union-Endicott Tigers; the young men and women players were giving their all. On the next channel was an exhortation in Parsi on proper versus improper observances of Ramadan. Beyond was one of the locked channels, this one apparently devoted to universally abhorrent sexual practices. She next came upon one of the premier computer channels, dedicated to fantasy role-playing games and now fallen on hard times. Accessed to your home computer, it offered a single entry into a new adventure, today’s apparently called Galactic Gilgamesh, in holes that you would find it sufficiently attractive to order the corresponding floppy disk on one of the vending channels. Proper electronic precautions were taken so you could not record the program during your single play. Most of these video games, she thought, were desperately flawed attempts to prepare adolescents for an unknown future.
Her eye was caught by an earnest anchorman from one of the old networks discussing with unmistakable concern what was described as an unprovoked attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on two destroyers of the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Gulf of Tonkin, and the request by the President of the United States that he be authorized to “take all necessary measures” in response. The program was one of her few favorites, Yesterday’s News, reruns of network news shows of earlier years. The second half of the program consisted of a point-by-point dissection of the misinformation in the first half, and the obdurate credulity of the news organizations before any claims by any administration, no matter how unsupported and self-serving. It was one of several television series produced by an organization called REALI-TV– including Promises, Promises, devoted to follow-up analyses of unfulfilled campaign pledges at local, state, and national levels, and Bamboozles and Baloney, a weekly debunking of what were said to be widespread prejudices, propaganda, and myths. The date at the bottom of the screen was August 5, 1964, and a wave of recollection–nostalgia was not the appropriate word–about her days in high school washed over her. She pressed on.
Cycling through the channels, she rushed past an Oriental cooking series devoted this week to the hibachi, an extended advertisement for the first generation of general-purpose household robots by Hadden Cybernetics, the Soviet Embassy’s Russian-language news and comment program, several children’s and news frequencies, the mathematics station displaying the dazzling computer graphics of the new Cornell analytic geometry course, the local apartments and real estate channel, and a tight cluster of execrable daytime serials until she came upon the religious networks, where, with sustained and general excitement, the Message was being discussed.
Attendance in churches had soared all over America. The Message, Ellie believed, was a kind of mirror in which each person sees his or her own beliefs challenged or confirmed. It was considered a blanket vindication of mutually exclusive apocalyptic and eschatological doctrines. In Peru, Algeria, Mexico, Zimbabwe, Ecuador, and among the Hopi, serious public debates took place on whether their progenitor civilizations had come from space; supporting opinions were attacked as colonialist. Catholics debated the extraterrestrial state of grace. Protestants discussed possible earlier missions of Jesus to nearby planets, and of course a return to Earth. Muslims were concerned that the Message might contravene the commandment against graven images. In Kuwait, a man arose who claimed to be the Hidden Imam of the Shiites. Messianic fervor had arisen among the Sossafer Chasids. In other congregations of Orthodox Jews there was a sudden renewal of interest in Astruc, a zealot fearful that knowledge would undermine faith, who in 1305 had induced the Rabbi of Barcelona, the leading Jewish cleric of the time, to forbid the study of science or philosophy by those under twenty-five, on pain of excommunication. Similar currents were increasingly discernible in Islam. A Thessalonian philosopher, auspiciously named Nicholas Polydemos, was attracting attention with a set of passionate arguments for what he called the “reunification” of religions, governments, and peoples of the world. Critics began by questioning the “re.”