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    Ebook498 pages10 hours

    Contact

    By Carl Sagan

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    About this ebook

    Pulitzer Prize-winning author and astronomer Carl Sagan imagines the greatest adventure of all—the discovery of an advanced civilization in the depths of space.

    In December of 1999, a multinational team journeys out to the stars, to the most awesome encounter in human history. Who—or what—is out there? In Cosmos, Carl Sagan explained the universe. In Contact, he predicts its future—and our own.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateDec 20, 2016
    ISBN9781501172311
    Author

    Carl Sagan

    Carl Sagan was Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University. He played a leading role in the Mariner, Viking, and Voyager spacecraft expeditions, for which he received the NASA medals for Exceptional Scientific Achievement. Dr. Sagan received the Pulitzer Prize and the highest awards of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation for his contributions to science, literature, education, and the preservation of the environment. His book Cosmos was the bestselling science book ever published in the English language, and his bestselling novel, Contact, was turned into a major motion picture.

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    Reviews for Contact

    4/5

    2,310 ratings62 reviews

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    • 3/5
      A good solid science fiction novel. Sagan boldly creates a female lead character and makes her, for the most part, believable. His story flows along well, but the ending is...well, disappointing. It seems possible that, once he got to the end, he simply didn't really know how to end it, so he went in a strange ending, grafting a spiritual ending onto a scientific novel.
    • 4/5
      I'm giving this one, in all honesty, something like a 3.7. It's well enough written it shouldn't be a three and yet not compelling enough to deserve a four. And yet I truly enjoyed it. It's been a long time since I spent so much time reading a hard core Sci-Fi novel, and Stephanie and I read them by parts one a week.

      I love getting to delve back into Sagan's mind. I've read his texts, but never his non-fiction, and there's a lovely thrill to reading about scientific details you know are completely true based on the background of the author.

      Definitely not time wasted.
    • 5/5
      I read the book first. It's very different from the movie. I like both. I think the movie took a lot of liberties with Sagan's vision that certainly pissed off the purists. Readers of the book will not find the same sympathy for faith that was exhibited in the movie. The book is a tour de force of science over religion. It's a good story. Sagan's writing shows a definite ivory tower disconnection with what passes for believable social situations. But the story is compelling enough to drag you through these. If you didn't enjoy the movie, you may be interested in the atheistic theme presented in the book. If you did enjoy the movie, you should read the book to hear what Sagan was really trying to say. You'll appreciate the genius of the filmmaker even more that he was able to turn Contact into a statement of faith.
    • 4/5
      Some Spoilers Below***This is Sagan’s treatise on first contact with aliens, and there are a lot of hefty ideas to chew on in this book. A radio astronomer, Ellie Arroway, discovers a message broadcast from Vega, 26 light years away. When decoded, the message contains instructions for building a machine with an unknown purpose, but presumably will allow humans to travel to Vega to meet the aliens behind the message.Sagan takes his time getting to the most interesting part of the story, after the machine is turned on. While the process of first discovering and then decoding the message is both interesting and necessary to describe, I felt that Sagan had a tendency to ramble on subject that weren’t germane to the plot or themes of the novel; some editing might have been in order. Sagan writes with a very detached, impersonal voice that sometimes separates us from his characters, particularly Ellie. The descriptions of Ellie’s disappointment over a failed love affair, for instance, are so dry as to keep us from fully empathizing with her.Once Ellie and her fellow travelers do get into the machine, some of the most interesting events quickly unfold. I was fascinated by their journey through wormholes, and for the first time, I had a vague sense of how such interdimensional travel might be possible (I am not a scientist). Once we meet the aliens, we discover that although they are capable of amazing, god-like feats, they didn’t build the original wormhole, transportation system; they are only caretakers. Those original builders have departed for parts unknown, a mystery as tantalizing as the disappearance on the Anasazi.However, I was somewhat uncomfortable with the conclusions drawn about God and religion in the final chapters. I prefer ambiguity to certainty when it comes to these maters, because proof of a god implies the necessity of worship of that god. I also felt Ellie’s emotional denouement was clumsily handled, and it might have been better to leave her alone. In those senses, the novel ended on a sour note for me, but I mostly enjoyed reading it and thought overall that it was miles better than the film adaptation.
    • 4/5
      Contact is less a science-fiction novel then a discourse on controversial science topics in popular culture. Science and young people, science and women, science and religion, science and skepticism, science and politics, science and funding grants. Replace the aliens with .. global warming .. and it's the same story. In that sense it's a good novel for looking at these topics as reoccurring themes. The story itself ends in a way that isn't too corny leaving open the mystery and endless nature of space. Curiously in the 1970s and early 80s, when the book was being written, SETI was a new thing but now that 35 years have passed, with no signal, it seems increasingly remote, maybe, and the book has lost some its exciting potential, an artifact of another age.
    • 4/5
      A radio-astronomer has her array set toward the heavens, when after many years, something that could be a bi-numeral code is detected. Code it is, and it also contains codes within codes. The receiving civilization must be advanced enough to detect, decipher, and eventually build a machine using technologies and materials not known to mankind but detailed in the received manual.This is an interesting twist to the ‘aliens show up and humans react’ scenario. There are years, decades, in between receiving the message and deciding what to do. Not everyone reacts the same – some believe the machine should not be built because it will be a doomsday machine for earth or perhaps a portal for hostile aliens; others have religious reasons for denying the machine be built. And when it's built, who can say what really did happen? And who should know?Lots of really good scientific details in this one.Now I need to re-watch the movie.
    • 5/5
      My favorite SF novel. Sagan proves he can captivate the public not only with his non-fiction, but also with his fiction. Amazing story.
    • 3/5
      Carl Sagan has interesting things to tell us, but he best not in a fiction format.
    • 4/5
      Much better than the movie.
    • 4/5
      The movie and the novel aer both enjouable for different reasons, though the basic storyline is one that will always make me feel that the author actually gets that I want to be challenged and that I dont need to see what teh alien culture looks like in order to accept them as real characters in the story. I also liked the fact that the politics of science was dealt with in way that didn't hide from the fact that discoveries of greater truths often have their work stloen from them by the very people than ran their work down. Just try getting a grant to fund your research - it is soul destroying!
    • 4/5
      My first impression of Contact was the horrible motion picture released all those years ago, and it took me until recently to pick up a copy and actually get around to reading it.Now, since I saw the film, I had learned more and more about Sagan, and how he was actually a bright fellow, so I decided to give him a chance by reading Contact, and I have to say that I did not regret my decision.Like any book that was later adapted for the silver screen, they are liable to alter or remove very vital pieces, or change them for pacing or whatever other things they do to make the movies less than enjoyable. Maybe the film producers are in a way trying to promote literacy, and are thus making horrid movies so you go out an read the original source material, and be glad that you did. Or maybe the mindset that the movie is never as good as the book is less a trend and more a physical law of nature, and these movie makers are helpless to make anything better than the book. These theories would effectively forgive abominations such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (later novelized by the topmost fanfic-er, Kevin J. Anderson. Congrats, you can write a book based on a movie based on a comic book. You want a cookie? What next? Causing an established Sci-Fi writer or two to spin in their graves as you desecrate their magnum opera?), but I digress.Contact, the book, is a great book. It's always interesting to read books written by professional scientists (I have a few), as it lends an air of credibility and believability to the story, versus soft sci-fi tales that are essentially fantasy stories in space. Sagan, however, does not hard sci-fi it up (at least, not to the point that writers like Alastair Reynolds do), so it could actually be enjoyed by people not familiar with quantum physics, or even grade school physics.The story tells a tale of Ellie Arroway, and shows her transition from girl to woman in the first part of the book. Here we learn how Arroway excels at what she does when she puts her mind to it, eventually becoming anything from a slight annoyance to a thorn in the sides of the male physics majors. This she does all while dealing with her horrid physics professor of a step father who discourages her every chance he gets.She excels, and grabs a post at a radio telescope lab where she monitors the heavens for any extraterrestrial signs of life. Then, it happens, and its not a hoax. A transmission seems to come from Vega, and it's too constructed to seem like static. It starts as prime numbers, but beyond that, another layer is discovered in the transmission. Reading layer after layer into the transmission, they discover step-by-step instructions on building a machine, but what the machine does is beyond their understanding.The world must then come together to decided if the machine will be built, where it will be built, and who the five people aboard it will be.This is a great novel, and is bound to be enjoyed by any fan of Sagan's other work (though I suspect for many that Contact provides the gateway to other Sagan works, not vice-versa), and is sure to be enjoyed by most sci-fi readers, particularly those that like a realistic story with sci-fi elements than a plotless journey through an alien wonderland by an avid sportsman with a really big laser gun.
    • 3/5
      Carl Sagan was a science writer first and it shows. Many of the characters are undeveloped and his prose at times reads like a text book. The plot is pretty thin as well.
    • 4/5
      The film: ignore it. You're best off doing so right from the start. Theories abound as to why it was so bad, and here's mine: Sagan passed away early in its production, and in his stead rose his wife Ann Druyan; now, this is pure speculation but one has to wonder if she didn't decide to lessen the atheistic tendencies of the book in favour of a more mainstream, and perhaps forgiving, audience.The book itself is captivating, and follows much the same theme as the film - aliens make contact with Earth. Ellie Arroway, a brilliant young scientist, works to decode their message, and to make first contact. That we all know.But what I liked most about the Sagan book is the cold reality of what contact means, about the growth industries that would appear to take advantage of alien technology, about the cultural shifts that would take place; this is, inevitably, ignored on celluloid, but is part of what makes the novel so compelling.
    • 5/5
      Great novel on the logistics of extra-terrestrial contact and communication, some gentle reminders about what "alien" means, and a good exploration of the nature of belief, whether based on evidence or faith - both types can be shaken when unusual things start to happen.I saw the movie first and loved it. The book holds up very well for its age (except for the "portable fax machines"!) and I think the movie is a pretty faithful adaptation with changes that don't harm (and in one case probably strengthen) the plot.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book.

      It was first published in 1985 and set in 1999, so it's a little dated... I especially enjoyed in this future the Soviet Union never fell.

      This book is rife with great atheist and feminist quotes. The main character is a strong, self-assured woman in a field dominated by men. She's a great character. This book is way deeper and way more interesting than the Jodi Foster movie.

      I'd recommend it to anyone interested in spirituality and/or philosophy.
    • 4/5
      Much better than the movie.
    • 5/5
      What an awesome book. I had seen the movie of course and thought the book would be the same, it was in the basic content of the novel, but different enough to enjoy for entirely different reasons. I skipped over most of the science as it was completely over my head and I didn't know how much of it was made up anyway just to continue the story. The characters are well done, the conversations concerning religion, alien contact and nationalism are well thought out and clever.6-2010
    • 5/5
      "She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love." A great last sentence - the most compelling work of fiction I've read in a long time.
    • 3/5
      Book club book. Book is better than the movie especially the ending info.
    • 3/5
      Books about contact with extra-terrestrials are adime a dozen however what makes this one worth the read is the fact that a scientist of significance (Carl Sagan) has written it. The plot started aittle slowly however his description of how the world might react to a message from space and what action it might take is quite interesting. I haven't seen the movie however I enjoyed the bokk immensely.
    • 4/5
      a fantastic journey.
    • 5/5
      I'd forgotten about this book ... I loved it.
    • 5/5
      Tricky to discuss wihout spoilers, if you're very sensitive or unaware of the plot at all, maybe you'd bbest skip this amazing work from a "real" scientist, however it is already beginning to date itself quite a bit. Set over about a decade of the 90s the opening 2/3rds of the book are definetly the most insightful, and the real Sci-fi doesn't start until the end.(Dr.) Ellie Arroway is the central character of the story which is told in third person from the moment she was born thourgh to somewhere in her 50s. And we get a series of snapshot scenes from her developing years through to the beginning of the story proper when she is Director of the Argus SETI program, a vast radio telescope array primarily dedicated to searching for alien life. One day a genuine non-random signal is detected eminating from close to the star Vega. The middle third of the book is then another series of disjointed sketches of how Ellie interacts with the various different views and politics involved in such a momentus occasion. There is a lot of religious controversy, and quite a bit of government back covering and general manouvering for advantage. There are some great discussions on the power and testability of scientific and religious faith, and the smallness of human gods. And also the fickleness of human hearts.The major downsides apart from the generally slow pace is that as a near future book, written in '85 it has already dated. Cell phones, the internet, optical storage devices are all not present. But by 1999 major habitable orbital platforms, the continuing of the Cold War, a female US president, and the demise of global media companies are predicted but without the spark that another author could give them. Instead they are taken for granted and they grate occasionally - particularly the Cold War attitudes, although the US defense dept.'s mindsets are probably likely enough.The ending is unexpected, but it's clear that whoever Ellie meets is not the same as the builder of the tunnels. Sagan is famously an athiest, but this is not an easy position to substantiate as the it's a staggering co-incidence that the universe formed such that to 10 fingered beings pi becomes non-random like that. However it is fairly clear that Sagan has no time for an activist interventionist God, and Ellie clearly wins all the discussions on this point - even if some of the opposition is not that sophisticated. Are we likely to recieve a message from aliens. No of course not, but if we did I think a lot of the world would react in the ways various characters do in this book do, and hopefully the Machindo - the spiritual worldwide coming togethre in the way of the Machine would also come to pass. A fascinatng read about western society, religion and our ways of coping with change.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book. What isn’t there to like: strong female protagonist, sci-fi theory, real-world projection, and even a love story. Sagan wove the story incredibly well into a near future setting, giving the fiction an imminent truth. I also enjoyed that he didn’t shy away from reflecting the impact of the “contact” on society.
    • 5/5
      Sagan's foray into fiction is a solid home run. Who says scientists can't write? Not me.
    • 4/5
      Loved this book... except for the last 30 or so pages. I'm sorry, Carl, but you lost me there.
    • 5/5
      I first read this book when I was sixteen years old. I re-read it every few years and discover something new and beautiful about it each time. It's one of a handful of books I can point to and honestly say, "This book had a lot to do with who I am today."
    • 3/5
      I was surprised by how much this book mentions God and religion. I can't say that there were actual aliens in this book. It is suggested but not definite. Interesting story of receiving a radio transmission from space and deciphering the code. I am glad I read the book but it wasn't quite what I was expecting.
    • 3/5
      This is unusual, but I think the movie was actually better than the book!
    • 5/5
      I have found this book as unique as any other. This one of the books that I would love to the end of my life. Carl is a genious. Especially in his unique approach to visualizing the aliens in such a manner as no other book I have read so far. Most of the authors see aliens as similar to humans with advanced capabilities or with some hideous looking creature from outer space. Carl is totally unique in that matter.

    Book preview

    Contact - Carl Sagan

    PART I

    THE MESSAGE

    My heart trembles like a poor leaf.

    The planets whirl in my dreams.

    The stars press against my window.

    I rotate in my sleep.

    My bed is a warm planet.

    —MARVIN MERCER P.S. 153, Fifth Grade, Harlem New York City, N.Y. (1981)

    CHAPTER 1

    Transcendental Numbers

    Little fly,

    Thy summer’s play

    My thoughtless hand

    Has brushed away.

    Am not I

    A fly like thee?

    Or art not thou

    A man like me?

    For I dance

    And drink and sing,

    Till some blind hand

    Shall brush my wing.

    —WILLIAM BLAKE Songs of Experience The Fly, Stanzas 1-3 (1795)

    By human standards it could not possibly have been artificial: It was the size of a world. But it was so oddly and intricately shaped, so clearly intended for some complex purpose that it could only have been the expression of an idea. Gliding in polar orbit about the great blue-white star, it resembled some immense, imperfect polyhedron, encrusted with millions of bowl-shaped barnacles. Every bowl was aimed at a particular part of the sky. Every constellation was being attended to. The polyhedral world had been performing its enigmatic function for eons. It was very patient. It could afford to wait forever.

    WHEN THEY pulled her out, she was not crying at all. Her tiny brow was wrinkled, and then her eyes grew wide. She looked at the bright lights, the white- and green-clad figures, the woman lying on the table below her. Somehow familiar sounds washed over her. On her face was an odd expression for a newborn—puzzlement perhaps.

    •  •  •

    When she was two years old, she would lift her hands over her head and say very sweetly, Dada, up. His friends expressed surprise. The baby was polite. It’s not politeness, her father told them. She used to scream when she wanted to be picked up. So once I said to her, ‘Ellie, you don’t have to scream. Just say, Daddy, up. ’ Kids are smart. Right, Presh?

    So now she was up all right, at a giddy altitude, perched on her father’s shoulders and clutching his thinning hair. Life was better up here, far safer than crawling through a forest of legs. Somebody could step on you down there. You could get lost. She tightened her grip.

    Leaving the monkeys, they turned a corner and came upon a great spindly-legged, long-necked dappled beast with tiny horns on its head. It towered over them. Their necks are so long, the talk can’t get out, her father said. She felt sorry for the poor creature, condemned to silence. But she also felt a joy in its existence, a delight that such wonders might be.

    •  •  •

    Go ahead, Ellie, her mother gently urged her. There was a lilt in the familiar voice. Read it. Her mother’s sister had not believed that Ellie, age three, could read. The nursery stories, the aunt was convinced, had been memorized. Now they were strolling down State Street on a brisk March day and had stopped before a store window. Inside, a burgundy-red stone was glistening in the sunlight. Jeweler, Ellie read slowly, pronouncing three syllables.

    •  •  •

    Guiltily, she let herself into the spare room. The old Motorola radio was on the shelf where she remembered it. It was very big and heavy and, hugging it to her chest, she almost dropped it. On the back were the words Danger. Do Not Remove. But she knew that if it wasn’t plugged in, there was no danger in it. With her tongue between her lips, she removed the screws and exposed the innards. As she had suspected, there were no tiny orchestras and miniature announcers quietly living out their small lives in anticipation of the moment when the toggle switch would be clicked to on. Instead there were beautiful glass tubes, a little like light bulbs. Some resembled the churches of Moscow she had seen pictured in a book. The prongs at their bases were perfectly designed for the receptacles they were fitted into. With the back off and the switch on, she plugged the set into a nearby wall socket. If she didn’t touch it, if she went nowhere near it, how could it hurt her?

    After a few moments, tubes began to glow warmly, but no sound came. The radio was broken, and had been retired some years before in favor of a more modern variety. One tube was not glowing. She unplugged the set and pried the uncooperative tube out of its receptacle. There was a metallic square inside, attached to tiny wires. The electricity runs along the wires, she thought vaguely. But first it has to get into the tube. One of the prongs seemed bent, and she was able after a little work to straighten it. Reinserting the tube and plugging the set in again, she was delighted to see it begin to glow, and an ocean of static arose around her. Glancing toward the closed door with a start, she lowered the volume. She turned the dial marked frequency, and came upon a voice talking excitedly—as far as she could understand, about a Russian machine that was in the sky, endlessly circling the Earth. Endlessly, she thought. She turned the dial again, seeking other stations. After a while, fearful of being discovered, she unplugged the set, screwed the back on loosely, and with still more difficulty lifted the radio and placed it back on the shelf.

    As she left the spare room, a little out of breath, her mother came upon her and she started once more.

    Is everything all right, Ellie?

    Yes, Mom.

    She affected a casual air, but her heart was beating, her palms were sweating. She settled down in a favorite spot in the small backyard and, her knees drawn up to her chin, thought about the inside of the radio. Are all those tubes really necessary? What would happen if you removed them one at a time? Her father had once called them vacuum tubes. What was happening inside a vacuum tube? Was there really no air in there? How did the music of the orchestras and the voices of the announcers get in the radio? They liked to say, On the air. Was radio carried by the air? What happens inside the radio set when you change stations? What was frequency? Why do you have to plug it in for it to work? Could you make a kind of map showing how the electricity runs through the radio? Could you take it apart without hurting yourself? Could you put it back together again?

    Ellie, what have you been up to? asked her mother, walking by with laundry for the clothesline.

    Nothing, Mom. Just thinking.

    •  •  •

    In her tenth summer, she was taken on vacation to visit two cousins she detested at a cluster of cabins along a lake in the Northern Peninsula of Michigan. Why people who lived on a lake in Wisconsin would spend five hours driving all the way to a lake in Michigan was beyond her. Especially to see two mean and babyish boys. Only ten and eleven. Real jerks. How could her father, so sensitive to her in other respects, want her to play day in and day out with twerps? She spent the summer avoiding them.

    One sultry moonless night after dinner she walked down alone to the wooden pier. A motorboat had just gone by, and her uncle’s rowboat tethered to the dock was softly bobbing in the starlit water. Apart from distant cicadas and an almost subliminal shout echoing across the lake, it was perfectly still. She looked up at the brilliant spangled sky and found her heart racing.

    Without looking down, with only her outstretched hand to guide her, she found a soft patch of grass and laid herself down. The sky was blazing with stars. There were thousands of them, most twinkling, a few bright and steady. If you looked carefully you could see faint differences in color. That bright one there, wasn’t it bluish?

    She felt again for the ground beneath her; it was solid, steady . . . reassuring. Cautiously she sat up and looked left and right, up and down the long reach of lakefront. She could see both sides of the water. The world only looks flat, she thought to herself. Really it’s round. This is all a big ball . . . turning in the middle of the sky . . . once a day. She tried to imagine it spinning, with millions of people glued to it, talking different languages, wearing funny clothes, all stuck to the same ball.

    She stretched out again and tried to sense the spin. Maybe she could feel it just a little. Across the lake, a bright star was twinkling between the topmost branches. If you squinted your eyes you could make rays of light dance out of it. Squint a little more, and the rays would obediently change their length and shape. Was she just imagining it, or . . . the star was now definitely above the trees. Just a few minutes ago it had been poking in and out of the branches. Now it was higher, no doubt about it. That’s what they meant when they said a star was rising, she told herself. The Earth was turning in the other direction. At one end of the sky the stars were rising. That way was called East. At the other end of the sky, behind her, beyond the cabins, the stars were setting. That way was called West. Once every day the Earth would spin completely around, and the same stars would rise again in the same place.

    But if something as big as the Earth turned once a day, it had to be moving ridiculously fast. Everyone she knew must be whirling at an unbelievable speed. She thought she could now actually feel the Earth turn—not just imagine it in her head, but really feel it in the pit of her stomach. It was like descending in a fast elevator. She craned her neck back further, so her field of view was uncontaminated by anything on Earth, until she could see nothing but black sky and bright stars. Gratifyingly, she was overtaken by the giddy sense that she had better clutch the clumps of grass on either side of her and hold on for dear life, or else fall up into the sky, her tiny tumbling body dwarfed by the huge darkened sphere below.

    She actually cried out before she managed to stifle the scream with her wrist. That was how her cousins were able to find her. Scrambling down the slope, they discovered on her face an uncommon mix of embarrassment and surprise, which they readily assimilated, eager to find some small indiscretion to carry back and offer to her parents.

    •  •  •

    The book was better than the movie. For one thing, there was a lot more in it. And some of the pictures were awfully different from the movie. But in both, Pinocchio—a life-sized wooden boy who magically is roused to life—wore a kind of halter, and there seemed to be dowels in his joints. When Geppetto is just finishing the construction of Pinocchio, he turns his back on the puppet and is promptly sent flying by a well-placed kick. At that instant the carpenter’s friend arrives and asks him what he is doing sprawled on the floor. I am teaching, Geppetto replies with dignity, the alphabet to the ants.

    This seemed to Ellie extremely witty, and she delighted in recounting it to her friends. But each time she quoted it there was an unspoken question lingering at the edge of her consciousness: Could you teach the alphabet to the ants? And would you want to? Down there with hundreds of scurrying insects who might crawl all over your skin, or even sting you? What could ants know, anyway?

    •  •  •

    Sometimes she would get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and find her father there in his pajama bottoms, his neck craned up, a kind of patrician disdain accompanying the shaving cream on his upper lip. Hi, Presh, he would say. It was short for precious, and she loved him to call her that. Why was he shaving at night, when no one would know if he had a beard? Because—he smiled—your mother will know. Years later, she discovered that she had understood this cheerful remark only incompletely. Her parents had been in love.

    •  •  •

    After school, she had ridden her bicycle to a little park on the lake. From a saddlebag she produced The Radio Amateur’s Handbook and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. After a moment’s consideration, she decided on the latter. Twain’s hero had been conked on the head and awakened in Arthurian England. Maybe it was all a dream or a delusion. But maybe it was real. Was it possible to travel backwards in time? Her chin on her knees, she scouted for a favorite passage. It was when Twain’s hero is first collected by a man dressed in armor who he takes to be an escapee from a local booby hatch. As they reach the crest of the hill they see a city laid out before them:

    " ‘Bridgeport?’ said I . . .

    ‘Camelot,’ said he.

    She stared out into the blue lake, trying to imagine a city which could pass as both nineteenth-century Bridgeport and sixth-century Camelot, when her mother rushed up to her.

    I’ve looked for you everywhere. Why aren’t you where I can find you? Oh, Ellie, she whispered, something awful’s happened.

    •  •  •

    In the seventh grade they were studying pi. It was a Greek letter that looked like the architecture at Stonehenge, in England: two vertical pillars with a crossbar at top—π. If you measured the circumference of a circle and then divided it by the diameter of the circle, that was pi. At home, Ellie took the top of a mayonnaise jar, wrapped a string around it, straightened the string out, and with a ruler measured the circle’s circumference. She did the same with the diameter, and by long division divided the one number by the other. She got 3.21. That seemed simple enough.

    The next day the teacher, Mr. Weisbrod, said that π was about 22/7, about 3.1416. But actually, if you wanted to be exact, it was a decimal that went on and on forever without repeating the pattern of numbers. Forever, Ellie thought. She raised her hand. It was the beginning of the school year and she had not asked any questions in this class.

    How could anybody know that the decimals go on and on forever?

    That’s just the way it is, said the teacher with some asperity.

    But why? How do you know? How can you count decimals forever?

    Miss Arroway—he was consulting his class list—this is a stupid question. You’re wasting the class’s time.

    No one had ever called Ellie stupid before, and she found herself bursting into tears. Billy Horstman, who sat next to her, gently reached out and placed his hand over hers. His father had recently been indicted for tampering with the odometers on the used cars he sold, so Billy was sensitive to public humiliation. Ellie ran out of the class sobbing.

    After school she bicycled to the library at the nearby college to look through books on mathematics. As nearly as she could figure out from what she read, her question wasn’t all that stupid. According to the Bible, the ancient Hebrews had apparently thought that π was exactly equal to three. The Greeks and Romans, who knew lots of things about mathematics, had no idea that the digits in π went on forever without repeating. It was a fact that had been discovered only about 250 years ago. How was she expected to know if she couldn’t ask questions? But Mr. Weisbrod had been right about the first few digits. Pi wasn’t 3.21. Maybe the mayonnaise lid had been a little squashed, not a perfect circle. Or maybe she’d been sloppy in measuring the string. Even if she’d been much more careful, though, they couldn’t expect her to measure an infinite number of decimals.

    There was another possibility, though. You could calculate pi as accurately as you wanted. If you knew something called calculus, you could prove formulas for π that would let you calculate it to as many decimals as you had time for. The book listed formulas for pi divided by four. Some of them she couldn’t understand at all. But there were some that dazzled her: π/4, the book said, was the same as 1 – ¹/3 + ¹/5 – ¹/7 + . . ., with the fractions continuing on forever. Quickly she tried to work it out, adding and subtracting the fractions alternately. The sum would bounce from being bigger than π/4 to being smaller than π/4, but after a while you could see that this series of numbers was on a beeline for the right answer. You could never get there exactly, but you could get as close as you wanted if you were very patient. It seemed to her a miracle that the shape of every circle in the world was connected with this series of fractions. How could circles know about fractions? She was determined to learn calculus.

    The book said something else: π was called a transcendental number. There was no equation with ordinary numbers in it that could give you π unless it was infinitely long. She had already taught herself a little algebra and understood what this meant. And π wasn’t the only transcendental number. In fact there was an infinity of transcendental numbers. More than that, there were infinitely more transcendental numbers than ordinary numbers, even though π was the only one of them she had ever heard of. In more ways than one, π was tied to infinity.

    She had caught a glimpse of something majestic. Hiding between all the ordinary numbers was an infinity of transcendental numbers whose presence you would never have guessed unless you looked deeply into mathematics. Every now and then one of them, like π, would pop up unexpectedly in everyday life. But most of them—an infinite number of them, she reminded herself—were hiding, minding their own business, almost certainly unglimpsed by the irritable Mr. Weisbrod.

    •  •  •

    She saw through John Staughton from the first. How her mother could even contemplate marrying him—never mind that it was only two years after her father’s death—was an impenetrable mystery. He was nice enough looking, and he could pretend, when he put his mind to it, that he really cared about you. But he was a martinet. He made his students come over weekends to weed and garden at the new house they had moved into, and then made fun of them after they left. He told Ellie that she was just beginning high school and was not to look twice at any of his bright young men. He was puffed up with imaginary self-importance. She was sure that as a professor he secretly despised her dead father, who had been only a shopkeeper. Staughton had made it clear that an interest in radio and electronics was unseemly for a girl, that it would not catch her a husband, that understanding physics was for her a foolish and aberrational notion. Pretentious, he called it. She just didn’t have the ability. This was an objective fact that she might as well get used to. He was telling her this for her own good. She’d thank him for it in later life. He was, after all, an associate professor of physics. He knew what it took. These homilies would always infuriate her, even though she had never before—despite Staughton’s refusal to believe it—considered a career in science.

    He was not a gentle man, as her father had been, and he had no idea what a sense of humor was. When anyone assumed that she was Staughton’s daughter, she would be outraged. Her mother and stepfather never suggested that she change her name to Staughton; they knew what her response would be.

    Occasionally there was a little warmth in the man, as when, in her hospital room just after her tonsillectomy, he had brought her a splendid kaleidoscope.

    When are they going to do the operation, she had asked, a little sleepily.

    They’ve already done it, Staughton had answered. You’re going to be fine. She found it disquieting that whole blocks of time could be stolen without her knowledge, and blamed him. She knew at the time it was childish.

    That her mother could truly love him was inconceivable. She must have remarried out of loneliness, out of weakness. She needed someone to take care of her. Ellie vowed she would never accept a position of dependence. Ellie’s father had died, her mother had grown distant, and Ellie felt herself exiled to the house of a tyrant. There was no one to call her Presh anymore.

    She longed to escape.

    " ‘Bridgeport?’ said I.

    ‘Camelot,’ said he.

    CHAPTER 2

    Coherent Light

    Since I first gained the use of reason my

    inclination toward learning has been so violent

    and strong that neither the scoldings of other

    people . . . nor my own reflections . . . have

    been able to stop me from following this

    natural impulse that God gave me. He alone

    must know why; and He knows too that I

    have begged Him to take away the light of

    my understanding, leaving only enough for

    me to keep His law, for anything else is

    excessive in a woman, according to some

    people. And others say it is even harmful.

    —JUANA INES DE LA CRUZ Reply to the Bishop of Puebla (1691), who had attacked her scholarly work as inappropriate for her sex

    I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable

    consideration a doctrine which may, I fear,

    appear wildly paradoxical and subversive.

    The doctrine in question is this: that it is

    undesirable to believe a proposition when there

    is no ground whatever for supposing it true. I

    must, of course, admit that if such an

    opinion became common it would completely

    transform our social life and our political

    system; since both are at present faultless,

    this must weigh against it.

    —BERTRAND RUSSELL Skeptical Essays, I (1928)

    Surrounding the blue-white star in its equatorial plane was a vast ring of orbiting debris—rocks and ice, metals and organics—reddish at the periphery and bluish closer to the star. The world-sized polyhedron plummeted through a gap in the rings and emerged out the other side. In the ring plane, it had been intermittently shadowed by icy boulders and tumbling mountains. But now, carried along its trajectory toward a point above the opposite pole of the star, the sunlight gleamed off its millions of bowl-shaped appendages. If you looked very carefully you might have seen one of them make a slight pointing adjustment. You would not have seen the burst of radio waves washing out from it into the depths of space.

    FOR ALL the tenure of humans on Earth, the night sky had been a companion and an inspiration. The stars were comforting. They seemed to demonstrate that the heavens were created for the benefit and instruction of humans. This pathetic conceit became the conventional wisdom worldwide. No culture was free of it. Some people found the skies an aperture to the religious sensibility. Many are awestruck and humbled by the glory and scale of the cosmos. Others were stimulated to the most extravagant flights of fancy.

    At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all. For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population had abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless. New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Without even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that ended only with the dawn of space exploration.

    •  •  •

    Ellie would look up at Venus and imagine it was a world something like the Earth—populated by plants and animals and civilizations, but each of them different from the kinds we have here. On the outskirts of town, just after sunset, she would examine the night sky and scrutinize that unflickering bright point of light. By comparison with nearby clouds, just above her, still illuminated by the Sun, it seemed a little yellow. She tried to imagine what was going on there. She would stand on tiptoe and stare the planet down. Sometimes, she could almost convince herself that she could really see it; a swirl of yellow fog would suddenly clear, and a vast jeweled city would briefly be revealed. Air cars sped among the crystal spires. Sometimes she would imagine peering into one of those vehicles and glimpsing one of them. Or she would imagine a young one, glancing up at a bright blue point of light in its sky, standing on tiptoe and wondering about the inhabitants of Earth. It was an irresistible notion: a sultry, tropical planet brimming over with intelligent life, and just next door.

    She consented to rote memorization, but knew that it was at best the hollow shell of an education. She did the minimum work necessary to do well in her courses, and pursued other matters. She arranged to spend free periods and occasional hours after school in what was called shop—a dingy and cramped small factory established when the school devoted more effort to vocational education than was now fashionable. Vocational education meant, more than anything else, working with your hands. There were lathes, drill presses, and other machine tools which she was forbidden to approach, because no matter how capable she might be, she was still a girl. Reluctantly, they granted her permission to pursue her own projects in the electronics area of the shop. She built radios more or less from scratch, and then went on to something more interesting.

    She built an encrypting machine. It was rudimentary, but it worked. It could take any English-language message and transform it by a simple substitution cipher into something that looked like gibberish. Building a machine that would do the reverse—converting an encrypted message into clear when you didn’t know the substitution convention—that was much harder. You could have the machine run through all the possible substitutions (A stands for B, A stands for C, A stands for D . . .), or you could remember that some letters in English were used more often than others. You could get some idea of the frequency of letters by looking at the sizes of the bins for each letter of type in the print shop next door. ETAOIN SHRDLU, the boys in print shop would say, giving pretty closely the order of the twelve most frequently used letters in English. In decoding a long message, the letter that was most common probably stood for an E. Certain consonants tended to go together, she discovered; vowels distributed themselves more or less at random. The most common three-letter word in the language was the. If within a word there was a letter standing between a T and an E, it was almost certainly H. If not, you could bet on R or a vowel. She deduced other rules and spent long hours counting up the frequency of letters in various schoolbooks before she discovered that such frequency tables had already been compiled and published. Her decrypting machine was only for her own enjoyment. She did not use it to convey secret messages to friends. She was unsure to whom she might safely confide these electronic and cryptographic interests; the boys became jittery or boisterous, and the girls looked at her strangely.

    •  •  •

    Soldiers of the United States were fighting in a distant place called Vietnam. Every month, it seemed, more young men were being scooped off the street or the farm and packed off to Vietnam. The more she learned about the origins of the war, and the more she listened to the public pronouncements of national leaders, the more outraged she became. The President and the Congress were lying and killing, she thought to herself, and almost everyone else was mutely assenting. The fact that her stepfather embraced official positions on treaty obligations, dominoes, and naked Communist aggression only strengthened her resolve. She began attending meetings and rallies at the college nearby. The people she met there seemed much brighter, friendlier, more alive than her awkward and lusterless high school companions. John Staughton first cautioned her and then forbade her to spend time with college students. They would not respect her, he said. They would take advantage of her. She was pretending to a sophistication she did not have and never would. Her style of dress was deteriorating. Military fatigues were inappropriate for a girl and a travesty, a hypocrisy, for someone who claimed to oppose the American intervention in Southeast Asia.

    Beyond pious exhortations to Ellie and Staughton not to fight, her mother participated little in these discussions. Privately she would plead with Ellie to obey her stepfather, to be nice. Ellie now suspected Staughton of marrying her mother for her father’s life insurance—why else? He certainly showed no signs of loving her—and he was not predisposed to be nice. One day, in some agitation, her mother asked her to do something for all their sakes: attend Bible class. While her father, a skeptic on revealed religions, had been alive, there was no talk of Bible class. How could her mother have married Staughton? The question welled up in her for the thousandth time. Bible class, her mother continued, would help instill the conventional virtues; but even more important, it would show Staughton that Ellie was willing to make some accommodation. Out of love and pity for her mother, she acquiesced.

    So every Sunday for most of one school year Ellie went to a regular discussion group at a nearby church. It was one of the respectable Protestant denominations, untainted by disorderly evangelism. There were a few high school students, a number of adults, mainly middle-aged women, and the instructor, the minister’s wife. Ellie had never seriously read the Bible before and had been inclined to accept her father’s perhaps ungenerous judgment that it was half barbarian history, half fairy tales. So over the weekend preceding her first class, she read through what seemed to be the important parts of the Old Testament, trying to keep an open mind. She at once recognized that there were two different and mutually contradictory stories of Creation in the first two chapters of Genesis. She did not see how there could be light and days before the Sun was made, and had trouble figuring out exactly who it was that Cain had married. In the stories of Lot and his daughters, of Abraham and Sarah in Egypt, of the betrothal of Dinah, of Jacob and Esau, she found herself amazed. She understood that cowardice might occur in the real world—that sons might deceive and defraud an aged father, that a man might give craven consent to the seduction of his wife by the King, or even encourage the rape of his daughters. But in this holy book there was not a word of protest against such outrages. Instead, it seemed, the crimes were approved, even praised.

    When class began, she was eager for a discussion of these vexing inconsistencies, for an unburdening illumination of God’s Purpose, or at least for an explanation of why these crimes were not condemned by the author or Author. But in this she was to be disappointed. The minister’s wife blandly temporized. Somehow these stories never surfaced in subsequent discussion. When Ellie inquired how it was possible for the maidservants of the daughter of Pharaoh to tell just by looking that the baby in the bullrushes was Hebrew, the teacher blushed deeply and asked Ellie not to raise unseemly questions. (The answer dawned on Ellie at that moment.)

    When they came to the New Testament, Ellie’s agitation increased. Matthew and Luke traced the ancestral line of Jesus back to King David. But for Matthew there were twenty-eight generations between David and Jesus; for Luke forty-three. There were almost no names common to the two lists. How could both Matthew and Luke be the Word of God? The contradictory genealogies seemed to Ellie a transparent attempt to fit the Isaianic prophecy after the event—cooking the data, it was called in chemistry lab. She was deeply moved by the Sermon on the Mount, deeply disappointed by the admonition to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and reduced to shouts and tears after the instructor twice sidestepped her questions on the meaning of I bring not peace but the sword. She told her despairing mother that she had done her best, but wild horses wouldn’t drag her to another Bible class.

    •  •  •

    She was lying on her bed. It was a hot summer’s night. Elvis was singing, One night with you, that’s what I’m beggin’ for. The boys at the high school seemed painfully immature, and it was difficult—especially with her stepfather’s strictures and curfews—to establish much of a relationship with the young college men she met at lectures and rallies. John Staughton was right, she reluctantly admitted to herself, at least about this: The young men, almost without exception, had a penchant for sexual exploitation. At the same time, they seemed much more emotionally vulnerable than she had expected. Perhaps the one caused the other.

    She had half expected not to attend college, although she was determined to leave home. Staughton would not pay for her to go elsewhere, and her mother’s meek intercessions were unavailing. But Ellie had done spectacularly well on the standardized college entrance examinations and found to her surprise her teachers telling her that she was likely to be offered scholarships by well-known universities. She had guessed on a number of multiple-choice questions and considered her performance a fluke. If you know very little, only enough to exclude all but the two most likely answers, and if you then guess at ten straight questions, there is about one chance in a thousand, she explained to herself, that you’ll get all ten correct. For twenty straight questions, the odds were one in a million. But something like a million kids probably took this test. Someone had to get lucky.

    Cambridge, Massachusetts, seemed far enough away to elude John Staughton’s influence, but close enough to return from on vacation to visit her mother—who viewed the arrangement as a difficult compromise between abandoning her daughter and incrementally irritating her husband. Ellie surprised herself by choosing Harvard over the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    She arrived for orientation period, a pretty dark-haired young woman of middling height with a lopsided smile and an eagerness to learn everything. She set out to broaden her education, to take as many courses as possible apart from her central interests in mathematics, physics, and engineering. But there was a problem with her central interests. She found it difficult to discuss physics, much less debate it, with her predominantly male classmates. At first they paid a kind of selective inattention to her remarks. There would be a slight pause, and then they would go on as if she had not spoken. Occasionally they would acknowledge her remark, even praise it, and then again continue undeflected. She was reasonably sure her remarks were not entirely foolish, and did not wish to be ignored, much less ignored and patronized alternately. Part of it—but only a part—she knew was due to the softness of her voice. So she developed a physics voice, a professional voice: clear, competent, and many decibels above conversational. With such a voice it was important to be right. She had to pick her moments. It was hard to continue long in such a voice, because she was sometimes in danger of bursting out laughing. So she found herself leaning toward quick, sometimes cutting, interventions, usually enough to capture their attention; then she could go on for a while in a more usual tone of voice. Every time she found herself in a new group she would have to fight her way through again, just to dip her oar into the discussion. The boys were uniformly unaware even that there was a problem.

    Sometimes she would be engaged in a laboratory exercise or a seminar when the instructor would say, Gentlemen, let’s proceed, and sensing Ellie’s frown would add, Sorry, Miss Arroway, but I think of you as one of the boys. The highest compliment they were capable of paying was that in their minds she was not overtly female.

    She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. Misanthrope is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men. And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: misogynist. But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.

    More than many others, she had been encumbered with parental proscriptions. Her newfound freedoms—intellectual, social, sexual—were exhilarating. At a time when many of her contemporaries were moving toward shapeless clothing that minimized the distinctions between the sexes, she aspired to an elegance and simplicity in dress and makeup that strained her limited budget. There were more effective ways to make political statements, she thought. She cultivated a few close friends and made a number of casual enemies, who disliked her for her dress, for her political and religious views, or for the vigor with which she defended her opinions. Her competence and delight in science were taken as rebukes by many otherwise capable young women. But a few looked on her as what mathematicians call an existence theorem—a demonstration that a woman could, sure enough, excel in science—or even as a role model.

    At the height of the sexual revolution, she experimented with gradually increasing enthusiasm, but found she was intimidating her would-be lovers. Her relationships tended to last a few months or less. The alternative seemed to be to disguise her interests and stifle her opinions, something she had resolutely refused to do in high school. The image of her mother, condemned to a resigned and placatory imprisonment, haunted Ellie. She began wondering about men unconnected with the academic and scientific life.

    Some women, it seemed, were entirely without guile and bestowed their affections with hardly a moment’s conscious thought. Others set out to implement a campaign of military thoroughness, with branched contingency trees and fallback positions, all to catch a desirable man. The word desirable was the giveaway,

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