“Second, what if from some place, somewhere a radio message had been sent? The Earth is four and one-half billion years old. Some solar systems are 10 to 15 billion years old. If we intercept messages sent from them, they could have been sent not only before Columbus discovered America or the birth of Christ, but before the Earth itself existed. The overwhelming odds are that such civilizations, even if they once existed, are now dead and gone.
“Third, NASA didn’t even select the least expensive way to do it. A less expensive, more narrowly focused SETI proposal from the Ames Research Center (cost $6.5 million over 7 years) was rejected in favor of the $14 to $15 million Jet Propulsion Lab project. However, to add insult to injury NASA has told my office that what it may do is to plug in the Ames project in the fiscal year 1980 budget so that both projects would be operating at the same time.
“At a time when the country is faced with a $61 billion budget deficit, the attempt to detect radio waves from solar systems should be postponed until right after the federal budget is balanced and income and social security taxes are reduced to zero.”
Edouard Reynaud sipped at his fourth brandy while he reclined as far back in his seat as the chair would go. It seemed to him that he’d been inside this chartered airplane forever: Rome, Amsterdam, New York, San Francisco, Honolulu and now—would it ever stop? Was this purgatory, perhaps? A millennium or two of being locked inside an aluminum canister, able to do nothing except eat, sleep and eliminate?
It’s like being a baby again, he thought to himself, drowsy from the brandy. A flying metal nursery, that’s what they’ve put us in. And the stewards are the nursemaids.
He was fighting off sleep. He knew it would come if he relaxed, and with it would come the bad dreams, the guilt dreams, unless he had the proper level of alcohol in his blood. So he drank brandy after brandy, calling for a fresh one as soon as he finished the one in his hand.
The young blond angel in the chair beside him slept innocently, his mouth slightly open, his breath easing in and out of him as calmly as the ebb and flow of the tides.
Reynaud suppressed a desire to touch his sweet face, stroke his beardless cheek.
Instead, he turned to the window and looked out at the dark, starry sky. He recognized Orion, the Bull, the Dogs. Yes, everything is in its place, as usual, he saw. Deep in that infinite sky, he knew, new stars were being born and old ones torn apart by titanic explosions. Galaxies whirled out there in the darkness and quasars burned with a fierceness that no human mind could comprehend.
“How long,” Reynaud whispered to himself, “will you keep your secrets? If God set you in place, when did He do the job? And how?”
It did not occur to him to ask why. That was the province of the theologians. Reynaud was a cosmologist.
He saw his own reflection in the glass of the airplane’s window, and he frowned at it. A fat, round face atop a fat, round body. Sagging jowls and baggy eyes, bloodshot and failing. A man who sought refuge in the monastic life when the world became too much for him to bear, and still managed to stay fat, and drunk, still managed to lapse into homosexuality now and then, despite all the controls and the punishments the Abbot could wield over him.
Reynaud smiled bitterly at his memory of the Abbot’s face, when that stern master of the monastery was told that the Pope himself wanted Reynaud sent to him.
“What His Holiness wants with you is beyond my comprehension,” said the Abbot, his hawklike visage grim with self-control, his piercing eyes ablaze. “If the Vatican had seen fit to ask my opinion in this matter, you would spend the remainder of your days cleaning the stables, which is what you deserve.”
Reynaud bobbed his head in agreement.
But the Vatican had asked for him, for Reynaud, the famous cosmologist, the Nobel laureate. What they are getting, he told his reflection in the plane’s window, is Reynaud the drunkard, the pervert, the ruins of the man they believe they are getting.
The boy beside him stirred, sighed softly, opened his sky-blue eyes.
“Did you sleep well?” Reynaud asked in French.
He answered in some Germanic tongue, and Reynaud remembered that he had gotten aboard in Amsterdam.
With a shake of his head, Reynaud asked, “Do you speak English, perhaps?”
“Yes.” The boy smiled. Feeling old and very, very tired, Reynaud smiled back at him.
“Hans Schmidt is my name. I am from the University of Leiden.”
With a slight nod of his head, Reynaud replied, “Edouard Reynaud. I have no university affiliation, but I was…”
“Edouard Reynaud!” Schmidt’s eyes went round. “I’ve read your books!”
Feeling ancient and foolish in his shabby black suit and unshaven jowls, Reynaud shrugged. “They were written long ago. They are all outdated now.”
“Yes, of course,” Schmidt answered with the unconscious cruelty of youth, “but they were classics in their field. We had to read them in undergraduate classes.”
“You are an astronomer?”
Schmidt’s enthusiasm turned sour. “I was,” he said, growing gloomy. “Now I am a prisoner.”
“So are we all,” said Reynaud. “But don’t worry, the plane will land soon enough on Kwajalein and then we can walk in the sunlight.”
“You don’t understand,” the young man said. “All the others on this plane—astronomers and astrophysicists from all over Europe—they volunteered for this assignment. They are happy to be going to Kwajalein, to study the alien signals.”
“You are not?”
Schmidt shook his head slowly. “I discovered the radio signals. But I’ll never get credit for it.”
Reynaud made a sympathetic noise.
“I was working for Professor Voorne at the big dish in Dwingeloo, last summer. I picked up the signals before the Americans or anyone else did,” Schmidt explained, his voice going almost sulky. “We checked on their dates; I had the signals before they did.”
“Then you should get the credit,” Reynaud said.
“Fat chance! Voorne is so slow and conservative that your grandmother could run circles around him. He refused to let me send a note in to the astrophysics journal until we had triple-checked everything. By that time the NATO bureaucrats came around and put secrecy stamps on every piece of paper I had. They wouldn’t let me publish anything, not one word.”
“Too bad,” said Reynaud.
“And now they’ve exiled me to this blasted little island. I don’t want to go. They forced me to! I have my girl in Leiden; we were going to be engaged in another few weeks. But the government said either I go to Kwajalein or I go into the Army and get sent to Kwajalein anyway.”
Reynaud shook his head.
“It’s the Americans,” Schmidt muttered. “They’re behind all this. They want to get all the credit for themselves and make sure that I don’t get any.”
Reynaud pursed his lips, then replied, “Don’t you think that the matter of finding an intelligent extraterrestrial race is the really important thing?”
“Sure! That’s why the Americans want all the credit for the discovery.”
“Well…I’ve been ordered to Kwajalein, too. I had no desire to go, but my superiors have sent me anyway. That’s why I’m on this plane, just as you are. But I don’t think it’s an American plot, really.”