a drop of pure crimson, red as blood, caught my eye. I pointed and said, “It’s throbbing.”
“Growing larger, actually,” he said.
As the dot enlarged, it lost its circularity and took on the point and lobes of a valentine. I realized I was seeing a love note from Thom emerge from the universe. The dot had become a heart. Hubris! I thought, but I was amused and pleased, too. In a red arch across the night sky I saw letters emerging. A message: “A Valentine to all the Lucys of the Universe.” I felt embarrassed, giddy, and terribly in love.
“Oh, Thom!” I said. “You’re not going to show this at the meeting. It’s too much!”
“No,” he said. “Not this part.”
Then he made the sun rise. The stars on the ceiling dimmed, and finally the letters faded away into artificial dawn. While Thom opened the curtains to admit the real world of a busy Dutch morning, he mentioned that the flash drive held his backup data and the programs for interpreting it. “Much of it’s also on the printout in my briefcase—the part I’m ready to present at the meeting.” He unplugged the drive from the computer and placed its cord around my neck again. “But you’ll bring me the memory stick, like always?” In the early days of our travels I had wondered why Thom wanted to risk the possibility that perhaps I would be delayed, through no fault of my own. Then this gesture of trust—in me, in good luck—became a ritual of our faith in each other. Again he patted the titanium case against my heart. “I won’t show ELF my love letter,” he answered.
As he bent to kiss my forehead, he remarked, “I’m not ready to tell them yet.”
“Tell them what?”
“It’s more than statistical probability. The place marked by pure red—that’s it.”
“What do you mean?” I felt blood suffuse my face, while my body flooded with fear.
“It’s there. The red dot marks the place. It’s there. Some form of extraterrestrial life.”
I was stunned. It was as though I were seeing an alien in Thom. Then came an impulse to throw my arms around him, to recover my Thom with a barrage of kisses all over his face, his head, his neck. Instead, I kissed him once, slowly and tenderly on the mouth.
“Gabriel Plum called last night,” Thom said quietly.
Gabriel was British, very dry and rational, a dear enough friend so that sometimes we called him “Sherlock” to tease him. Part of the Geneva group, he was enthusiastic about finding planets.
Thom went on, “Some fundamentalist group feels threatened by our search for extraterrestrial life.” My husband spoke the sentence thoughtfully; it wasn’t his style to ridicule anybody. “They contacted Gabriel.”
“You’ve told Gabriel? The red dot?”
“Before showing you? Not on my life.” He smiled at me. “But we communicate. He knows my methods for analyzing the data. He knows a discovery is imminent.”
“When will you announce it? At the meeting? At lunch?”
“All the amino acids are there, in the spectra. It’s life. I’m sure of it.”
“But?” I could feel his hesitation.
Thom glanced away from me. He studied the carpet in our hotel room. He seemed embarrassed. “You know Gabriel is looking for planets.”
“We’ve found thousands,” I said.
“They’re sterile. Gabriel wants them to be sterile.”
“Why?”
“He wants us to be the only ones. Earth is God’s chosen place. Where he sent his Son, in Gabriel’s belief.”
“But Gabriel was your student, years ago. He wants ELF to succeed.” I took off the memory stick. “I don’t want to wear it, Thom. It’s too important.”
He shrugged. Then he tapped his head. “It’s all in here. I could do it again if I needed to.”
“Yes, but how long would it take?”
“A few years. The programs are on the drive, too, the ones that make sense of the data.”
I heard the enthusiasm in Thom’s voice. Next he would offer to show me the programs, but I’d seen programs before—a jungle of numbers, tedious ones strewn with symbols, full of repetition. I had no training or ability to read them.
“I want to prepare people for the news. They aren’t ready. It’s too big. It will affect everything about our identity, about being human.”
I knew myself to be shaken in a hair-raising way. “It’s an earthquake of an idea,” I agreed. “A tsunami.” I squelched the impulse to ask him again, Have you really found life in space? Real life?
“I’ve invited an anthropologist, a Franco-Egyptian, to talk to them about the social and moral impact of scientific discoveries.