There was a message waiting for her at the hotel—not a pink “while you were out” form filled in by the hotel operator, but a sealed unstamped hand-delivered letter. It read: “Meet me at the National Science and Technology Museum, 8:00 pm tonight. Palmer Joss.”
No hello, no explanations, no agenda, and no yours truly, she thought. This really is a man of faith. The stationery was her hotel's, and there was no return address. He must have sauntered in this afternoon, knowing from the Secretary of State himself, for all she knew, that Ellie was in town, and expecting her to be in. It had been a tiresome day, and she was annoyed at having to spend any time away from piecing together the Message. Although a part of her was reluctant to go, she showered, changed, bought a bag of cashews, and was in a taxi in forty-five minutes.
It was about an hour before closing, and the museum was almost empty. Huge dark machinery was stuffed into every corner of a vast entrance hall. Here was the pride of the nineteenth-century shoemaking, textile, and coal industries. A steam calliope from the 1876 Exposition was playing a jaunty piece, originally written for brass, she judged, for a tourist group from West Africa. Joss was nowhere to be seen. She suppressed the impulse to turn on her heel and leave.
If you had to meet Palmer Joss in this museum, she thought, and the only thing you had ever talked to him about was religion and the Message, where would you meet him? It was a little like the frequency selection problem in SETI: You haven't yet received a message from an advanced civilization and you have to decide on which frequencies these beings—about whom you know virtually nothing, not even their existence—have decided to transmit. It must involve some knowledge that both you and they share. You and they certainly both know what the most abundant kind of atom in the universe is, and the single radio frequency at which it characteristically absorbs and emits. That was the logic by which the 1420 megahertz line of neutral atomic hydrogen had been included in all the early SETI searches. What would the equivalent be here? Alexander Graham Bell's telephone? The telegraph? Marconi's— Of course.
“Does this museum have a Foucault pendulum?” she asked the guard.
The sound of her heels echoed on the marble floors as she approached the rotunda. Joss was leaning over the railing, peering at a mosaic tile representation of the cardinal directions. There were small vertical hour marks, some upright, others evidently knocked down by the bob earlier in the day. Around 7 PM. SOmeone had stopped its swing, and it now hung motionless. They were entirely alone. He had heard her approach for a minute at least and had said nothing.
“You've decided that prayer can stop a pendulum?” She smiled.
`That would be an abuse of faith,” he replied. “I don't see why. You'd make an awful lot of converts. It's easy enough for God to do, and if I remember correctly, you talk to Him regularly…. That's not it, huh?
You really want to test my faith in the physics of harmonic oscillators? Okay.”
A part of her was amazed that Joss would put her through this test, but she was determined to pass muster. She let her handbag slide off her shoulder and removed her shoes. He gracefully hurdled the brass guardrail and helped her over. They half walked and half slid down the tiled slope until they were standing alongside the bob. It had a dull black finish, and she wondered whether it was made of steel or lead.
“You'll have to give me a hand,” she said. She could easily put her arms around the bob, and together they wrestled it until it was inclined at a good angle from the vertical and flush against her face. Joss was watching her closely. He didn't ask her whether she was sure, he neglected to warn her about falling forward, he offered no cautions about giving the bob a horizontal component of velocity as she let go.
Behind her was a good meter or meter and a half of level floor, before it started sloping upward to become a circumferential wall. If she kept her wits about her, she said to herself, this was a lead-pipe cinch. She let go.
The bob fell away from her. The period of a simple pendulum, she thought a little giddily, is 2? square root L over g, where L is the length of the pendulum and g is the acceleration due to gravity. Because of friction in the bearing, the pendulum can never swing back farther than its original position. All I have to do is not sway forward, she reminded herself.
Near the opposite railing, the bob slowed and came to a dead stop. Reversing its trajectory, it was suddenly moving much faster than she had expected. As it careened toward her, it seemed to grow alarmingly in size. It was enormous and almost upon her. She gasped.
“I flinched,” Ellie said in disappointment as the bob fell away from her. “Only the littlest bit.” “No, I flinched.”
“You believe. You believe in science. There's only a tiny smidgen of doubt.”
“No, that's not it. That was a million years of brains fighting a billion years of instinct. That's why your job is so much easier than mine.”
“In this matter, our jobs are the same. My turn,” he said, and jarringly grabbed the bob at the highest point in its trajectory.
“But we're not testing your belief in the conservation of energy.”
He smiled and tried to dig in his feet. “What you doin” down there?” a voice asked. “Are you folks crazy?” A museum guard, dutifully checking that all visitors would leave by closing time, had come upon this unlikely prospect of a man, a woman, a pit and a pendulum in an otherwise deserted recess of the cavernous building.
“Oh, it's all right, officer,” Joss said cheerfully. “We're just testing our faith.”
“You can't do that in the Smithsonian Institution,” the guard replied. “This is a museum.”
Laughing, Joss and Ellie wrestled the bob to a nearly stationary position and clambered up the sloping tile walls.
“It must be permitted by the First Amendment,” she said.
“Or the First Commandment,” he replied. She slipped on her shoes, shouldered her bag, and, head held high, accompanied Joss and the guard out of the rotunda. Without identifying themselves and without being recognized, they managed to talk him out of arresting them. But they were escorted out of the museum by a tight phalanx of uniformed personnel, who were concerned perhaps that Ellie and Joss might next sidle aboard the steam calliope in pursuit of an elusive God.
The street was deserted. They walked wordlessly along the Mall. The night was clear, and Ellie made out Lyra against the horizon.
“The bright one over there. That's Vega,” she said. He stared at it for a long time. “That decoding was a brilliant achievement,” he said at last.
“Oh, nonsense. It was trivial. It was the easiest message an advanced civilization could think of. It would have been a genuine disgrace if we hadn't been able to figure it out.”
“You don't take compliments well, I've noticed. No, this is one of those discoveries that change the future. Our expectations of the future, anyway. It's like fire, or writing, or agriculture. Or the Annunciation.”
He stared again at Vega. “If you could have a seat in that Machine, if you could ride it back to its Sender, what do you think you would see?”
“Evolution is a stochastic process. There are just too many possibilities to make reasonable predictions about what life elsewhere might be like. If you had seen the Earth before the origin of life, would you have predicted a katydid or a giraffe?”
“I know the answer to that question. I guess you imagine that we just make this stuff up, that we read it in some book, or pick it up in some prayer tent. But that's not how it is. I have certain, positive knowledge from my own direct experience. I can't put it any plainer than that. I have seen God face to face.” About the depth of his commitment there seemed no doubt. “Tell me about it.” So he did.
“Okay,” she said finally, “you were clinically dead, then you revived, and you remember rising through the darkness into a bright light. You saw a radiance with a human form that you took to be God. But there was nothing in the experience that told you the radiance made the universe or laid down moral law. The experience is an experience. You were deeply moved by it, no question. But there are other possible explanations.”
“Such as?”
“Well, like birth. Birth is rising through a long, dark tunnel into abrilliant light. Don't forget how brilliant it is —the baby has spent nine months in the dark. Birth is its first encounter with light. Think of how amazed and awed you'd be in your first contact with color, or light and shade, or the human face—which you're probably preprogrammed to recognize. Maybe, if you almost die, the odometer gets set back to zero for a moment. Understand, I don't insist on this explanation. It's just one of many possibilities. I'm suggesting you may have
