Contact - Carl Sagan [108]
"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 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