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 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—”