Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill Read Free Book Online

of business is. “Always be efficient,” he says.
    I think about this rule. What would my life be like if I followed it? It is true that the almost astronaut never wastes a minute. There are always energy bar wrappers in the bathroom trash can. He eats while on the toilet.
    That night, my daughter asks me to read to her from a book her teacher has given her.
    In it, alliteratively named animals go on extremely modest adventures and return with lessons learned. A child in a wheelchair is thoughtfully penciled in in the background. My daughter yawns as I finish it. “Tell me a better story,” she says.
    I tell her about
Voyager 1
and
2
and the Golden Record. They were like messages in a bottle, I explain, but thrown into outer space instead of the ocean. My daughter is mildly interested. She wants to know what sounds were recorded for the aliens. I find the list and read it to her.
    Music of the Spheres
    Volcanoes, Earthquake, Thunder
    Mud Pots
    Wind, Rain, Surf
    Crickets, Frogs
    Birds, Hyena, Elephant
    Whale Song
    Chimpanzee
    Wild Dog
    Footsteps, Heartbeat, Laughter
    The First Tools
    Tame Dog
    Herding Sheep, Birdsong, Blacksmith, Sawing Riveter
    Morse Code, A Ship’s Horn
    Horse and Cart
    Train
    Tractor, Bus, Auto
    F-111 Flyby
, Saturn 5
Liftoff
    Kiss, Mother and Child
    Life Signs, Pulsar
    My husband is hunched over his computer, just as he was when I went in. All day long he has been following the news about an earthquake in another country. Every time the death count is updated, he updates me. I open the window. The air is cold, but it smells sweet. Outside, someone is yelling something about something.
Give the people what they want
, I think.
    A few weeks later, the almost astronaut calls me to tell me that
Voyager 2
may be nearingthe edge of our galaxy. “Perfect timing,” he says. “We’ll tie it into marketing.”
    I tell him I have too much work to do already, but he insists that we move quickly. “I’ll pay you more,” he says. “Much more.” He even hires an intern to fact-check for me.
    I have an intern. All of my life now appears to be one happy moment.
    It turns out there is a famous love story attached to the Golden Record project. A “cosmic” love story is how I describe it to the intern because who can resist the urge to say silly things about Carl Sagan?
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the Universe
. I remember how he stood there in that turtleneck, an oven mitt on his hand.
    I fill him in on how the project started in 1976 when NASA asked Sagan to assemble a committee to decide what exactly this celestial mix tape should contain. It took almost two yearsto decide everything. Carl Sagan and his wife, Linda, collaborated on the project. They even enlisted their six-year-old son to do one of the greetings. Other key members of the team included the astronomer Frank Drake and the writers Ann Druyan and Timothy Ferriss. The engineers constructed the record so that it might survive for a billion years.
    The Golden Record included greetings in fifty-four human and one whale language, ninety minutes of music from around the world, and 117 pictures of life on Earth. These pictures were meant to suggest the widest possible range of human experiences. Only two things were off-limits. NASA decreed that no pictures could depict sex and no pictures could depict violence. No sex because NASA was prudish and no violence because images of ruins or bombs exploding might be interpreted by aliens as threatening. Ann Druyan tells what happened next.
    In the course of my daunting search for the single most worthy piece of Chinese music, I phoned
Carl and left a message at his hotel in Tucson … An hour later the phone rang in my apartment in Manhattan. I picked it up and heard a voice say: “I got back to my room and found a message that said Annie called. And I asked myself, why didn’t you leave me that message ten years ago?”
    Bluffing, joking, I responded