Rollback

  —and he was transfixed, unable to move. The doors opened, making their mechanical drumroll sound, and people jostled in and out. Then the three descending tones sounded, indicating that the doors were closing, and the train started moving again. He found himself stepping right up to the edge of the platform, looking at its departing back.

  A little boy, no more than five or six, was staring out the rear window at him. Don remembered when he used to like sitting in the front car as a kid, watching the tunnel speed by; the rear car, looking back, was almost as good. There was a grinding sound as the train banked, turning to go north, and then it was gone. He looked down onto the tracks, maybe four feet below, his toes sticking over the platform’s edge. He saw a gray mouse scuttle by, and he saw the third rail, and the notices, covered with grime, that warned of the electrocution danger.

  Soon enough, another train was coming down the curving track; its headlights cast mad shadows in the tunnel before it became visible. Don felt the vibration of the train, inches from his face, as it zoomed past him, and felt his hair whipping again.

  The train stopped. He looked into the window facing him. Most riders got out at Union, although a few people always rode the train around the bend.

  Around the bend.

  This was the time-honored method to do this, wasn’t it? Here, in Toronto, it was the way the despondent had handled things since before he’d been born. The subway trains roared into the station at high speed. If you waited at the right end of the platform, you could jump in front of an incoming one, and—

  And that would be it.

  Of course, it wouldn’t be fair to the train’s operator. Don remembered reading years ago, in the Star, about how devastating it was for subway drivers when people killed themselves this way. The drivers often had to go on extended leave, and some were so afraid that the same thing would happen again they were never able to return to their jobs. Stations in the downtown core were forty-five seconds apart; there wasn’t even time for the drivers to relax between them.

  But that had been back when the trains had had human drivers. These days, they were operated by sleek mechanicals, courtesy of McGavin Robotics.

  The irony was tempting, and—

  And he was trembling from head to toe. Suddenly, his body sprang into action, moving as fast as it could, and—

  —and he just barely squeezed through the doors before they rumbled shut. Don clung tightly onto a metal pole for the whole trip home, like a drowning man grasping a log.

  –-- Chapter 19 --–

  BACK IN 2009, Sarah had spent at least as much time discussing the Dracon questionnaire as she did teaching astronomy, and the topic often spilled over into evening conversations with Don. One night, when Carl was down in the basement playing The Sims 4, and ten-year-old Emily was at her Girl Guides meeting, Sarah said, “Here’s an ethical dilemma that came up on the SETI newsgroup today. Some of the SETI researchers think they know what the aliens are trying to determine with their survey, which means we could give them the answers they want, in hopes that they’ll keep up contact with us. So, should we lie to get what we want? This is, just how unethical is it to cheat on a survey about ethics?”

  “The Dracons are probably at least as clever as we are, no?” had said Don. “So wouldn’t they see through any attempt at deception?”

  “That’s what I said!” Sarah replied, sounding pleased to be vindicated. “The instructions for the questionnaire make it quite clear that the thousand responses we send should be produced independently and in private. They say there may be follow-up questions, and any consultation among participants will ruin those. And I suspect they’ve actually got some sort of way of determining if the answers are all from one person, instead of the thousand individuals they’d asked for, or are from a group that collaborated—you know, by some sort of statistical analysis of the answers.”

  They were doing general cleaning up. With both of them working during the days, housework ended up being a low priority. Don was dusting the mantel. “You know what I’d like?” he said absently, looking at the framed Emily Carr print on the wall there. “One of those big sixty-inch flatscreen TVs. Don’t you think it’d look great right here? I know they cost a fortune right now, but I’m sure they’ll come down in price.”

  Sarah was gathering up sections of newspaper. “You should live so long.”

  “Anyway,” he continued, “you were saying about the Dracon questionnaire?”

  “Yeah. Even if we did want to fake it and have a committee draw up all the answers, for some of the questions we honestly don’t know what the ‘right’ answer is.”

  He moved on to picking up the used mugs from the coffee table. “Like what?”

  “Well, like question thirty-one. You and another person jointly find an object that has no apparent worth, and neither of you desire it. Which of you should keep it?”

  Don stopped to ponder, two yellow mugs in his right hand, and one in his left; at sixteen, Carl was learning to drink coffee. “Umm, I don’t know. I mean, it doesn’t matter, does it?”

  Sarah had finished gathering newspapers, and nipped into the kitchen to dump them in the blue box. “Who knows?” she called out. “There’s obviously some moral point here that the aliens are getting at, but no one I’ve spoken to can see what it is.”

  He followed her in, rinsed the mugs under the faucet, and then put them in the dishwasher. “Maybe neither of you should take the object. You know, just leave it where you found it.”

  She nodded. “That would be good, but that’s not one of the allowed answers. The survey is mostly multiple choice, remember.”

  He was loading a few plates into the dishwasher. “Heck, I don’t know. Um, the other guy should take it—’cause, um, ’cause that’s me being generous, see?”

  “But he doesn’t want it,” she said.

  “But it might turn out to be valuable someday.”

  “Or it might turn out to be poisonous, or to belong to somebody else who’ll be angry over it being taken, and who will exact revenge from whoever stole it.”

  He shook his head, and put an Electrasol tab into the detergent cup. “There just isn’t enough information.”

  “The aliens think there is, apparently.”

  He started the dishwasher, and motioned for Sarah to follow him out of the room; the machine was noisy. “Okay,” he said, “so you can’t just give the Dracons the answers that’ll make us look good, because you don’t know what those are in all cases.”

  “Right,” said Sarah. “And, anyway, even for those questions we do understand, there’s debate about which answers would make us look good. See, some of our morals are rational, and others are based in emotion—and it’s not clear which ones the aliens would prize most.”

  “I thought all morals were rational,” Don said. He looked around the living room, gauging if anything else needed tending to. “Isn’t that the definition of morality: a rational, reasoned response, instead of a knee-jerk, visceral one?”

  “Oh?” she said, straightening the pile of current magazines—Maclean’s, Mix, Discover, The Atlantic Monthly—that lived on the little table between the couch and the La-Z-Boy. “Try this one on for size. It’s a standard puzzle in moral philosophy, a little number called ‘the trolley problem.’ It’s called that because a British philosopher came up with it. Her name, by the way, was Philippa Foot—two fetishes in one, if you stop to think about it. Anyway, she said this: say a streetcar is out of control, rushing along its tracks. And say there are five people stuck on those tracks, unable to get away in time—if the train hits, it’ll kill them all. But you happen to be watching all this from a bridge over the tracks, and on the bridge are the switching controls, including a lever that if you pull it will cause the streetcar to be diverted to another track, off to the left, missing the five people. What do you do?”

  “Pull the lever, of course,” he said. Deciding there was nothing else that needed doing tonight, he sat down on the co
uch.

  “That’s what almost everyone says,” Sarah said, joining him. “Most people feel a moral obligation to intervene in situations where human life is at risk. Oh, but I forgot to tell you one thing. There’s a really big guy stuck on that other track. If you divert the streetcar, he’ll be killed. Now what do you do?”

  He put his arm around her. “Well, um, I’d—I guess I’d still pull the lever.”

  She leaned her head against his shoulder. “That’s what most people say. Why?”

  “Because only one person dies rather than five.”

  He could hear in her voice that she was smiling. “A Trekker to the core. ‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.’ No wonder that’s what Mr. Spock believes; it’s clearly the product of rational thinking. Now, what about this? Say there’s no second track. And say instead of being the one hapless fellow stuck on the left, the big guy isn’t stuck at all. Instead he’s standing right next to you on the bridge. You know for a fact that if you push him off so that he falls in front of the streetcar, hitting him will be enough to make it stop before it hits the five other people. But you yourself are a little guy. The streetcar wouldn’t be stopped by hitting you, so there’s no point in jumping yourself, but it’ll definitely be stopped by hitting this big fellow. Now what do you do?”

  “Nothing.”

  Don could feel her head nodding. “Again, that’s what most people say—they wouldn’t do a thing. But why not?”

  “Because, um, because it’s wrong to…well, ah…” He frowned, opened his mouth to try again, but then closed it.

  “See?” said Sarah. “They’re comparable situations. In both scenarios you choose to have one guy die—the same guy, in fact—to save five others. But in the first, you do it by throwing a lever. In the second, you actually push the guy to his death. The rational equation is exactly the same. But the second scenario feels different emotionally. For most people, what was judged right in the first scenario is judged wrong in the second.” She paused. “The aliens didn’t ask that specific question about the streetcar, but there are others for which there’s an emotionally ethical response and a logically ethical response. As to which one the Dracons would prefer to see, I’m not sure.”

  Don frowned again. “But wouldn’t advanced beings naturally prefer logic to emotion?”

  “Not necessarily. Fairness and a desire for reciprocity seem to be emotional responses: they occur in animals who obviously aren’t reasoning in an abstract, symbolic way, and yet those are some of the things we prize most. The aliens might prize them, too, meaning the emotional answers might in fact be what they’re looking for. Still, some of my colleagues do argue that the logical answers are the better ones, because they denote more sophisticated cognition. And yet giving the purely logical answers wouldn’t really portray who we are. I mean, consider this, for instance—the aliens didn’t ask about it, but it makes a good point. We’ve got two kids, a boy and a girl. Suppose when Emily’s older, Carl and Emily both went away somewhere for a weekend, and decided to have sex with each other—just once, just to see what it was like.”

  “Sarah!”

  “See, you’re immediately disgusted. And, of course, so am I. But why are we disgusted? Well, presumably because evolution has bred into us a desire to promote exogamy and avoid the birth defects that often come out of incestuous unions. But say they were practicing birth control—you know any daughter of mine will be. That means the concern about birth defects isn’t relevant. Plus, say that both were free of venereal disease. Say they only did it that once, and that it caused them no psychological harm at all, and they never told anyone else about it. Is it still disgusting? My gut—and I bet yours, too—says yes, even though we can’t articulate a rational reason for the disgust.”

  “I suppose,” he said.

  “Right. But for an awfully long time, in a lot of places, homosexual unions were greeted with disgust, too, as were interracial ones. These days, most people don’t react negatively to them at all. So, just because something disgusted people once doesn’t mean it’s universally wrong. Morals change, in part because people can be won over to new positions. It was mostly rational argument, after all, that made the women’s rights and civil-rights movements possible. People became convinced that slavery and discrimination were wrong on a principled basis; you educate people about an issue, and their view of what’s moral changes. In fact, that’s what happens with children. Their behavior gets more moral as their reasoning powers develop. They go from thinking something is wrong simply because they might get caught, to thinking something is wrong in principle. Well, maybe we’re grown up enough for the Dracons to want to continue being in contact with us, and maybe we’re not, and if we’re not there’s no way we can guess what the right answers are.” Sarah snuggled against him. “No, in the end, I think the only thing we can do is exactly what they asked: send a thousand, independent sets of answers, each done in isolation, each one as honest and truthful as possible.”

  “And then?”

  “And then wait for whatever reply they might eventually send.”

  –-- Chapter 20 --–

  ANOTHER HOT AUGUST day. Don had headed downtown again, but this time it wasn’t for a job interview, and so he was actually wearing clothes appropriate for the weather: cutoff denim shorts and a light-blue T-shirt. He was grateful for them as he effortlessly climbed the stairs from the subway station, and exited out into the muggy, searing heat.

  Sarah, along with the rest of the SETI community, was still trying to find the decryption key for the second message from Sigma Draconis, and last night an idea had occurred to her. But to try it she needed some old paper records that were stored down at the University.

  It was only a short walk from Queen’s Park subway station to the McLennan Physical Laboratories tower, which housed the University of Toronto’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. On its roof were two observatory domes. Don remembered what he used to think when he saw them: that they couldn’t possibly do any good, surrounded by the glare of downtown Toronto. But, to his surprise, as he glanced up at them now, he found himself thinking that they looked like a nice, firm pair of breasts.

  As he came out of the elevator on the fourteenth floor of the tower, he saw that along one wall of the corridor there was a display about famous people who had been associated with the department. Included were Dr. Helen Sawyer Hogg, dead for fifty-five years now, whose weekly astronomy columns Don remembered reading as a boy in the Saturday Star; Ian Shelton, who discovered Supernova 1987a in the Large Magellanic Cloud; and Sarah herself. He paused and read the placard about Sarah, then looked at her photo, which must have been taken at least forty years ago; she hadn’t worn her hair that long since.

  Ah, well. Timeworn photos were appropriate here. Universities themselves were an anachronism, bucking the long-established trend to do everything online, everything by telecommuting. Hallowed halls, ivory towers—the synonyms his mental thesaurus provided just underscored how quaint and old-fashioned such institutions were. And yet, somehow, they endured.

  He looked again at the photo of Sarah and found himself grinding his teeth. If things had gone the way they were supposed to, his wife would be even younger-looking now. This photo would be of what she’d have had to look forward to, when she gracefully entered middle age for a second time…around 2070, he supposed.

  He headed around a bend in the corridor, the walls now lined with framed astronomical photos, until he found the door he was looking for. He knocked lightly on it. Old habits die hard, he realized; he’d long ago given up fervent rapping, since it used to hurt his arthritic knuckles, but now he wondered if anyone could have possibly heard him through the thick wood. He was about to knock again, and more loudly, when he heard a female voice call out, “Come in.”

  He entered, leaving the door open behind him. A young redhead, seated at a computer workstation, looked up at him expectantly.

  “I’m looking for Lenore Darb
y,” Don said.

  She raised a hand. “Guilty.”

  He felt his eyebrows going up. Now that he saw her, he did remember that there’d been a redhead among the grad students at the last Christmas party, but he’d forgotten, or, more likely, had failed to notice then, just how pretty she was.

  Lenore looked to be twenty-five—a real twenty-five, no doubt. Her orange hair cascaded down to her shoulders, and she had freckled white skin and bright green eyes. She was wearing green denim shorts and a white T-shirt that said “Onderdonk” on it, which he guessed was the name of a musical group. The shirt’s lower half had been tied in a knot around her stomach, revealing a couple of inches of midriff that hadn’t bunched at all even though she was sitting down.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, smiling a perfect smile. So many of Don’s contemporaries had spent their whole adult lives, as Don had until recently, with various dental imperfections—misalignments and gaps, overbites and underbites—but young people today almost always had perfect teeth, brightly white, totally straight, and completely free of cavities.

  He steeled himself for giving the spiel, then: “I’m Don Halifax,” he said. “I know I—”

  “Oh, my goodness!” exclaimed Lenore. She looked him up and down, causing him to feel embarrassed and awkward, and probably even to blush. “I’d been expecting—well, he must be your grandfather. Are you named for him?”

  She’d met an eighty-seven-year-old man back in December named Don Halifax, and she’d been told someone with that name was coming by to pick up some papers for Sarah, so…

  So, yeah, it was a perfectly reasonable guess on her part. “That’s right,” he said. Indeed, what she’d suggested was in fact true, just not in the way she meant it. His full name was Donald Roscoe Halifax, and Roscoe had been his father’s father’s name.