Misha thumps his desk angrily. "Why do you think they put us somewhere where your precious rockets don't work?" he demands. "Get up on high, one push of rocket exhaust and you could be halfway to anywhere! But down here we have to slog through the atmosphere. We can't get away! Does that sound like a gift from one friend to another?"
"The way you are thinking sounds paranoid to me," Gagarin insists. "I'm not saying you're wrong, mind you: only — could you be overwrought? Finding those bombed cities affected us all, I think."
Misha glances out of his airliner-sized porthole: "I fear there's more to it than that. We're not unique, comrade; we've been here before. And we all died. We're a fucking duplicate, Yuri Alexeyevich, there's a larger context to all this. And I'm scared by what the politburo will decide to do when they see the evidence. Or what the Americans will do…"
Chapter Thirteen: Last Supper
Returning to Manhattan is a comfort of sorts for Gregor, after the exposed plazas and paranoid open vistas of the capital. Unfortunately he won't be here for long — he is, after all, on an assignment from Brundle — but he'll take what comfort he can from the deep stone canyons, the teeming millions scurrying purposefully about at ground level. The Big Apple is a hive of activity, as always, teeming purposeful trails of information leading the busy workers about their tasks. Gregor's nostrils flare as he stands on the sidewalk on Lexington and East 100th. There's an Italian restaurant Brundle recommended when he gave Gregor his briefing papers. "Their spaghetti al' polpette is to die for," Brundle told him. That's probably true, but what's inarguable is that it's only a couple of blocks away from the offices of the Exobiology Annex to Cornell's New York Campus, where Sagan is head of department.
Gregor opens the door and glances around. A waiter makes eye contact. "Table for one?"
"Two. I'm meeting — ah." Gregor sees Sagan sitting in a booth at the back of the restaurant and waves hesitantly. "He's already here."
Gregor nods and smiles at Sagan as he sits down opposite the professor. The waiter drifts over and hands him a menu. "Have you ordered?"
"I just got here." Sagan smiles guardedly. "I'm not sure why you wanted this meeting, Mr., uh, Samsa, isn't it?" Clearly he thinks he gets the joke — a typical mistake for a brilliant man to make.
Gregor allows his lower lip to twitch. "Believe me, I'd rather it wasn't necessary," he says, entirely truthfully. "But the climate in DC isn't really conducive to clear thought or long-range planning — I mean, we operate under constraints established by the political process. We're given questions to answer, we're not encouraged to come up with new questions. So what I'd like to do is just have an open-ended informal chat about anything that you think is worth considering. About our situation, I mean. In case you can open up any avenues we ought to be investigating that aren't on the map right now."
Sagan leans forward. "That's all very well," he says agreeably, "but I'm a bit puzzled by the policy process itself. We haven't yet made contact with any nonhuman sapients. I thought your committee was supposed to be assessing our policy options for when contact finally occurs. It sounds to me as if you're telling me that we already have a policy, and you're looking to find out if it's actually a viable one. Is that right?"
Gregor stares at him. "I can neither confirm nor deny that," he says evenly. Which is the truth. "But if you want to take some guesses I can either discuss things or clam up when you get too close," he adds, the muscles around his eyes crinkling conspiratorially.
"Aha." Sagan grins back at him boyishly. "I get it." His smile vanishes abruptly. "Let me guess. The policy is predicated on MAD, isn't it?"
Gregor shrugs then glances sideways, warningly: the waiter is approaching. "I'll have a glass of the house red," he says, sending the fellow away as fast as possible. "Deterrence presupposes communication, don't you think?" Gregor asks.
"True." Sagan picks up his bread knife and absent-mindedly twirls it between finger and thumb. "But it's how the idiots — excuse me, our elected leaders — treat threats, and I can't see them responding to tool-using non-humans as anything else." He stares at Gregor. "Let me see if I've got this right. Your committee pulled me in because there has, in fact, been a contact between humans and non-human intelligences — or at least some sign that there are NHIs out there. The existing policy for dealing with it was drafted some time in the sixties under the influence of the hangover left by the Cuban war, and it basically makes the conservative assumption that any aliens are green-skinned Soviets and the only language they talk is nuclear annihilation. This policy is now seen to be every bit as bankrupt as it sounds but nobody knows what to replace it with because there's no data on the NHIs. Am I right?"
"I can neither confirm nor deny that," says Gregor.
Sagan sighs. "Okay, play it your way." He closes his menu. "Ready to order?"
"I believe so." Gregor looks at him. "The spaghetti al' polpette is really good here," he adds.
"Really?" Sagan smiles. "Then I'll try it."
They order, and Gregor waits for the waiter to depart before he continues. "Suppose there's an alien race out there. More than one. You know about the multiple copies of Earth. The uninhabited ones. We've been here before. Now let's see…suppose the aliens aren't like us. Some of them are recognizable, tribal primates who use tools made out of metal, sea-dwelling ensemble entities who communicate by ultrasound. But others — most of them — are social insects who use amazingly advanced biological engineering to grow what they need. There's some evidence that they've colonized some of the empty Earths. They're aggressive and territorial and they're so different that…well, for one thing we think they don't actually have conscious minds except when they need them. They control their own genetic code and build living organisms tailored to whatever tasks they want carrying out. There's no evidence that they want to talk to us, and some evidence that they may have emptied some of those empty Earths of their human population. And because of their, um, decentralized ecosystem and biological engineering, conventional policy solutions won't work. The military ones, I mean."
Gregor watches Sagan's face intently as he describes the scenario. There is a slight cooling of the exobiologist's cheeks as his peripheral arteries contract with shock: his pupils dilate and his respiration rate increases. Sour pheromones begin to diffuse from his sweat ducts and organs in Gregor's nasal sinuses respond to them.
"You're kidding?" Sagan half-asks. He sounds disappointed about something.
"I wish I was." Gregor generates a faint smile and exhales breath laden with oxytocin and other peptide messengers fine-tuned to human metabolism. In the kitchen, the temporary chef who is standing in for the regular one — off sick, due to a bout of food poisoning — will be preparing Sagan's dish. Humans are creatures of habit: once his meal arrives the astronomer will eat it, taking solace in good food. (Such a shame about the chef.) "They're not like us. SETI assumes that NHIs are conscious and welcome communication with humans and, in fact, that humans aren't atypical. But let's suppose that humans are atypical. The human species has only been around for about a third of a million years, and has only been making metal tools and building settlements for ten thousand. What if the default for sapient species is measured in the millions of years? And they develop strong defense mechanisms to prevent other species moving into their territory?"