Ben Bova - Voyagers

Stoner resumed his seat, but not before receiving a venomous glare from Big Mac.

You’ve won the first battle, Stoner said to himself. But it’s going to be a long, dirty war.

OFFICE OF SENATOR WILLIAM PROXMIRE

WISCONSIN

For Release After 6:30 A.M. Thursday, February 16, 1978

Senator William Proxmire (D-Wis) said Thursday, “I am giving my Golden Fleece of the Month award for February to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which, riding the wave of popular enthusiasm for ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ is proposing to spend $14 to $15 million over the next seven years to try to find intelligent life in outer space. In my view, this project should be postponed for a few million light years.”

The Golden Fleece of the Month Award is given for the biggest, most ironic or most ridiculous example of wasteful spending for the month. Proxmire is Chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee and of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee, which has jurisdiction over NASA funds.

“NASA is proposing to pay $2 million this year and $14 to $15 million over the next seven years to Pasadena, California’s, Jet Propulsion Lab to conduct ‘an all-sky, all-frequency search for radio signals from intelligent extra-terrestrial life.’ But this is only the foot in the door. Under the heading of ‘broad objectives’ the Jet Propulsion Lab proposal indicates that the purpose of the study is to:

Build an observational and technological framework on which future, more sensitive SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) programs can be based.

“What this tells me is that while the public is intrigued by the outer space phenomena, the Space Agency is so mesmerized that it is attempting to translate the momentum into a multi-million dollar, long-range program of questionable searches for intelligence beyond our solar system.

“What’s wrong with the program? Like so many other big spending projects, this is a low priority program which at this time constitutes a luxury which the country can ill afford.

“First, while theoretically possible, there is now not a scintilla of evidence that life beyond our own solar system exists. Yet NASA officials indicate that the study is predicated on the assumption that intelligent extra-terrestrial beings are out there trying to communicate with scientists here on Earth. If NASA has its way, this spending will go forward at a time when people here on Earth—Arabs and Israelis, Greeks and Turks, the United States and the Soviet Union, to name a few—are having a great difficulty in communicating with each other.

“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.”