“I know the answer to that question. I guess you imagine that we just make this stuff up, that we read it in some book, or pick it up in some prayer tent. But that’s not how it is. I have certain, positive knowledge from my own direct experience. I can’t put it any plainer than that. I have seen God face to face.”
About the depth of his commitment there seemed no doubt. “Tell me about it.” So he did.
“Okay,” she said finally, “you were clinically dead, then you revived, and you remember rising through the darkness into a bright light. You saw a radiance with a human form that you took to be God. But there was nothing in the experience that told you the radiance made the universe or laid down moral law. The experience is an experience. You were deeply moved by it, no question. But there are other possible explanations.”
“Such as?”
“Well, like birth. Birth is rising through a long, dark tunnel into a brilliant light. Don’t forget how brilliant it is–the baby has spent nine months in the dark. Birth is its first encounter with light. Think of how amazed and awed you’d be in your first contact with color, or light and shade, or the human face–which you’re probably preprogrammed to recognize. Maybe, if you almost die, the odometer gets set back to zero for a moment. Understand, I don’t insist on this explanation. It’s just one of many possibilities. I’m suggesting you may have misinterpreted the experience.”
“You haven’t seen what I’ve seen.” He looked up once more at the cold flickering blue-white light from Vega, and then turned to her. “Don’t you ever feel…lost in your universe? How do you know what to do, how to behave, if there’s no God? Just obey the law or get arrested?”
“You’re not worried about being lost, Palmer. You’re worried about not being central, not the reason the universe was created. There’s plenty of order in my universe. Gravitation, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, superunification, they all involve laws. And as for behavior, why can’t we figure out what’s in our best interest–as a species?”
“That’s a warmhearted and noble view of the world, I’m sure, and I’d be the last to deny that there’s goodness in the human heart. But how much cruelty has been done when there was no love of God?”
“And how much cruelty when there was? Savonarola and Torquemada loved God, or so they said. Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they’ll behave. You want people to believe in God so they’ll obey the law. That’s the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by an all-seeing God for whatever the police overlook. You sell human beings short.
“Palmer, you think if I haven’t had your religious experience I can’t appreciate the magnificence of your god. But it’s just the opposite. I listen to you, and I think. His god is too small! One paltry planet, a few thousand years–hardly worth the attention of a minor deity, much less the Creator of the universe.”
“You’re confusing me with some other preacher. That museum was Brother Rankin’s territory. I’m prepared for a universe billions of years old. I just say the scientists haven’t proved it.”
“And I say you haven’t understood the evidence. How can it benefit the people if the conventional wisdom, the religious `truths,’ are a lie? When you really believe that people can be adults, you’ll preach a different sermon.”
There was a brief silence, punctuated only by the echoes of their footfalls.
“I’m sorry if I’ve been a little too strident,” she said. “It happens to me from time to time.”
“I give you my word. Dr. Arroway, I’ll carefully ponder what you’ve said this evening. You’ve raised some questions I should have answers for. But in the same spirit, let me ask you a few questions. Okay?”
She nodded, and he continued. `Think of what consciousness feels like, what it feels like this minute. Does that feel like billions of tiny atoms wiggling in place? And beyond the biological machinery, where in science can a child learn what love is? Here’s–”
Her beeper buzzed. It was probably Ken with the news she had been waiting for. If so, it had been a very long meeting for him. Maybe it was good news nevertheless. She glanced at the letters and numbers forming in the liquid crystal: Ken’s office number. There were no public telephones in sight, but after a few minutes they were able to flag down a taxicab.
“I’m sorry I have to leave so suddenly,” she apologized. “I enjoyed our conversation, and I’ll think seriously about your questions….You wanted to pose one more?”
“Yes. What is there in the precepts of science that keeps a scientist from doing evil?”
CHAPTER 15 Erbium Dowel
The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them.
-WALT WHITMAN Leaves of Grass “Song of the Open Road” (1855)
IT TOOK years, it was a technological dream and a diplomatic nightmare, but finally they got around to building the Machine. Various neologisms were proposed, and project names evocative of ancient myths.
But from the beginning everyone had called it simply the Machine, and that became its official designation. The continuing complex and delicate international negotiations were described by Western editorial writers as “Machine Politics.” When the first reliable estimate of the total cost was generated, even the titans of the aerospace industry gasped. Eventually, it came to half a trillion dollars a year for some years, roughly a third of the total military budget–nuclear and conventional–of the planet. There were fears that building the Machine would ruin the world economy. “Economic Warfare from Vega?” asked the London Economist. The daily headlines in The New York Times were, by any dispassionate measure, more bizarre than any in the now defunct National Enquirer a decade earlier.
The record will show that no psychic, seer, prophet, or soothsayer, no person with claimed precognitive abilities, no astrologer, no numerologist, and no late December copywriter on “The Year Ahead” had predicted the Message or the Machine–much less Vega, prime numbers, Adolf Hitler, the Olympics, and the rest. There were many claims, however, by those who had clearly foreseen the events but had carelessly neglected to write the precognition down. Predictions of surprising events always prove more accurate if not set down on paper beforehand. It is one of those odd regularities of everyday life. Many religions were in a slightly different category: A careful and imaginative perusal of their sacred writings will reveal, it was argued, a clear foretelling of these wondrous happenings.
For others, the Machine represented a potential bonanza for the world aerospace industry, which had been in worrisome decline since the Hiroshima Accords took full force.
Very few new strategic weapons systems were under development. Habitats in space were a growing business, but they hardly compensated for the loss of orbiting laser battle stations and other accoutrements of the strategic defense envisioned by an earlier administration. Thus, some of those who worried about the safety of the planet if the Machine were to be built swallowed their scruples when contemplating the implications for jobs, profits, and career advancement.
A well placed few argued that there was no richer prospect for the high technology industries than a threat from space. There would have to be defenses, immensely powerful surveillance radars, eventual outposts on Pluto or in the Oort Comet Cloud. No amount of discourse about military disparities between terrestrials and extraterrestrials could daunt these visionaries. “Even if we can’t defend ourselves against them,” they asked, “don’t you want us to see them coming?” There was profit here and they could smell it. They were building the Machine, of course, trillions of dollars’ worth of Machine; but the Machine was only the beginning, if they played their cards right.
An unlikely political alliance coalesced behind the reelection of President Lasker, which became in effect a national referendum on whether to build the Machine. Her opponent warned of Trojan Horses and Doomsday Machines and the prospect of demoralization of American ingenuity in the face of aliens who had already “invented everything.” The President pronounced herself confident that American technology would rise to the challenge and implied, although she did not actually say, that American ingenuity would eventually equal anything they had on Vega. She was re-elected by a respectable but by no means overwhelming margin.
The instructions themselves were a decisive factor. Both in the primer on language and basic technology and in the Message on the construction of the Machine nothing was left unclear. Sometimes intermediate steps that seemed entirely obvious were spelled out in tedious detail–as when, in the foundations of arithmetic, it is proved that if two times three equals six, then three times two also equals six. At every stage of construction there were checkpoints: The erbium produced by this process should be 96 percent pure, with no more than a fraction of a percent impurity from the other rare earths. When Component 31 is completed and placed in a 6 molar solution of hydrofluoric acid, the remaining structural elements should look like the diagram in the accompanying figure. When Component 408 is assembled, application of a two megagauss transverse magnetic field should spin the rotor up to so many revolutions per second before it returns itself to a motionless state. If any of the tests failed, you went back and redid the whole business.