Rollback

McGavin chuckled. "A proposal, then."

"Still here," said Don.

"Hee hee," said McGavin. "Let’s call it an offer, then. An offer I don’t think you’ll want to refuse."

Don used to do a good Brando in his youth. He puffed out his cheeks, frowned, and moved his head as if shaking jowls, but said nothing. Sarah laughed silently and swatted his arm affectionately. "Yes?" she said, into the datacom.

"I’d like to discuss it with you face-to-face. You’re in Toronto, right?"

"Yes."

"Would you mind coming down here, to Cambridge? I’d have one of my planes bring you down."

"I… I wouldn’t want to travel without my husband."

"Of course not; of course not. This affects him, too, in a way. Won’t you both come down?"

"Um, ah, give us a moment to discuss it."

"Of course," said McGavin.

She covered the mike and looked at Don with raised eyebrows.

"Back in high school," he said, "we had to make a list of twenty things we wanted to do before we die. I came across mine a while ago. One of the ones I haven’t checked off yet is ‘Take a ride in a private jet.’ "

"All right," she said, into the datacom. "Sure. Why not?"

"Terrific, terrific," said McGavin. "We’ll have a limo pick you up and take you to Trudeau in the morning, if that’s okay."

Trudeau was in Montreal; the Toronto airport was Pearson — but Sarah knew what he meant. "Fine, yes."

"Wonderful. I’ll have my assistant come on, and he’ll look after all the details. We’ll see you in time for lunch tomorrow."

And the Bach started up again.

Chapter 4

It was ironic, now that Don thought back on it, how often he and Sarah had talked about SETI’s failure prior to its success. He’d come home one day, around — let’s see; they’d been in their mid-forties, so it must have been something like 2005 — to find her sitting in their just-bought La-Z-Boy, listening to her iPod. Don could tell she wasn’t playing music; she couldn’t resist tap-ping her fingers or toes whenever she was doing that.

"What are you listening to?" he asked.

"It’s a lecture," shouted Sarah.

"Oh, really!" he shouted back, grinning.

She took out the little white earbuds, looking sheepish. "Sorry," she said, in a normal volume. "It’s a lecture Jill did for the Long Now Foundation."

SETI, Don often thought, was like Hollywood, with its stars. In Tinsel Town, having to use last names marked you as an outsider, and the same was true in Sarah’s circles, where Frank was always Frank Drake, Paul was Paul Shuch, Seth was Seth Shostak, Sarah was indeed Sarah Halifax, and Jill was Jill Tarter.

"The long what?" Don said.

"The Long Now," repeated Sarah. "They’re a group that tries to encourage long-term thinking, thinking about now as an epoch rather than a point in time. They’re building a giant clock — the Clock of The Long Now — that ticks once a year, chimes once a century, and has a cuckoo that comes out every millennium."

"Good work if you can get it," he said. "Say, where are the kids?" Carl had been twelve then; Emily, six.

"Carl’s downstairs watching TV. And I sent Emily to her room for drawing on the wall again."

He nodded. "So what’s Jill talking about?" He’d never met Jill, although Sarah had.

"Why SETI is, by necessity, a long-term proposition," Sarah said. "Except she’s skirting the issue."

"You and she are practically the only SETI researchers who can do that."

"What? Oh."

"I’m here all week."

"Lucky me. Anyway, she doesn’t seem to be getting to the point, which is that SETI is something that must be a multigenerational activity, like building a great cathedral.

It’s a trust, something we hand down to our children, and they hand down to their children."

"We don’t have a good track record with things like that," he said, perching now on the La-Z-Boy’s broad, padded arm. "I mean, you know, the environment is something we hold in trust and pass on to Carl and Emily’s generation, too. And look at how little our generation has done to combat global warming."

She sighed. "I know. But Kyoto’s a step forward."

"It’ll hardly make a dent."

"Yeah, well."

"But, you know," said Don, "we’re not cut out for this — what did you call it? — this ‘Long Now’ sort of thinking. It’s anti-Darwinian. We’re hardwired against it."

She sounded surprised. "What?"

"We did something about kin selection on Quirks and Quarks last month; I spent forever editing the interview." Don was an audio engineer at CBC Radio. "We had Richard Dawkins on again, by satellite through the Beeb. He said that in a competitive situation, you automatically favor your own son over your brother’s son, right? Of course: your son has half your DNA, and your brother’s son only has a quarter of it. But if things got tough between your brother’s son and your cousin, well, you’d favor your brother’s son — that is, your nephew — because your cousin only has an eighth of your DNA."

"That’s right," Sarah said. She was scratching his back. It felt very nice.