“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 yon, 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.
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.
