The following story by a British science fiction writer is cast in the form of a open letter to mankind from a divine being clearly the product of modern cosmology. The theistic deity of Christian tradition is generally believed to be personal, omniscient, all-powerful, omnipresent, and perfect, and to have created the universe ex nihilo--out of nothing. On the contrary, Watson's Space Age God, as you will see, lives in a Big Bang generated-cosmos, is handicapped by some severe limitations, and finds himself greatly troubled by a being called man--a perpetual thorn in his side.

(1) So at last I awoke and saw my universe. Already I knew that something had gone wrong. . . .

(2) I shouldn't be able to tell you this. There oughtn't to be a single simple "I" that can communicate with you. We should wear myriad faces. We should be the Many-in-One, of which each conscious species in the universe is only the most fragmentary reflection--one single attribute of our high self, which is beyond self.

(3) Instead, I awoke to a singleness of being which is far below that High Selflessness. I realized that I had been incarnated from out of my sleeping self quite recently at a single point in space-time. It was the tug of that incarnation--that teasing of a portion of myself out of myself into a particular shape for a while--it was that, coupled with something watery and oceanic, that had woken me a cosmic moment later. Like the footfall of an intruder in a darkened bedroom.

(4) The bedroom wasn't entirely dark, of course. Galaxies and metagalaxies, crowded with suns, hung all over the place--a very big number of night lights, which was good.

(5) Not dark. But it was empty. At first I thought it was entirely empty; and I shivered with dread at the absence of life.

(6) To be sure, I had awoken--like an engine on a rather cold morning started, nonetheless, by a tiny trickle of charge from the battery. But the battery should have been fully charged--brimful with life-energy calling to me. And it wasn't; that tiny pulse was all I'd felt. I knew how close I'd come to being in a cosmos where no life could ever have awakened me; and I knew how small and limited this present "I" must therefore be.

(7) It took a cosmic moment to locate the life that had awakened me. I was guided by a few more incidents of high consciousnessness from the same direction--high by your standards, pitifully weak by any other reckoning. "I shouldn't have heeded the first tug. I should have turned over in my sleep, and slept through this cosmos till it collapsed! But in the vast silence that single note of life had sounded like a gong. Now that I was awake, I was committed to it; and because of this I was reduced to a single personal ego.

(8) Of course you had no idea that you were the one and only lifeform to emerge in this cosmos. Oh, you, with your proud arrays of radiotelescopes: tin ear trumpets harkening vainly for an alien message amid the mindless noise!

(9) Like a vagabond who has precisely one match to light one piece of kindling to keep warm by, I directed myself toward you to cup my hands around that single prick of life-light, and nurse it with my breath.

(10) Let me explain something about the creation of universes.

(11) Your scientists have deduced that each successive cosmos springs into being by a random scattering out of "superspace" of all the material of the previous one after it has collapsed. All the natural laws and physical constants of the previous cosmos vanish entirely, and new laws and constants spontaneously occur. But only certain laws and constants admit a habitable universe to occur--a universe where stars can form at all, and burn for a long time. The majority of universes must necessarily be lifeless ones. Either they last for too short a time, or perhaps no elements heavier than helium ever get the chance to form.

(12) You know the game of pool, or snooker? You send the cue ball cannoning into a triangle of target balls and they all scatter in different directions, depending upon the cue ball's speed and spin and vector. If you had a completely frictionless pool table, the balls would carry on indefinitely, colliding and rebounding, till they all clunked into pockets--after a longer or shorter time. (I bend the rules. I know.) Well, that first scattering of the balls is a bit--just a bit--like the first scattering out of superspace.

(13) Contrary to your notion of random scattering, however, there is a first deliberate shot which sends the balls of the cosmos flying, establishing the particular laws and constants of each universe.

(14) And the Player? Myself. Or rather, the High Precursor of my present limited self. But it isn't quite so simple. The Player does not stand outside the universe. The precursor is the cue ball and the target balls and the cue as well, not to mention the baize of space-time which the motion of the balls unrolls. At the instant of that first shot from which the cosmos springs--the precursor is torn apart, submerged into the spreading fabric of the game it has selected. Too, it must select angle and speed and spin such that during the course of the game, as the unverse evolves, life of one kind or another will come into being; a cosmos of multifarious consciousness out of which--by means of which--that precursor will eventually awake and look around, with an awareness far beyond any of its billion tributary components. A player usually has an opponent, too. Just so here, though in this case the Opponent is also part of the precursor. It is its antiself--and that antiself will also emerge, for unless there is a tension between God and anti-God the universe would be over in a flash. This is where the game gets really interesting.

(15) This time, however, the precursor has miscued directly. The constants are off, the physical laws are wrong.

(16) One world. One inhabited speck in it all--and that speck, I see now, a complete fluke! Not our favorite electromagnetic life--that's ruled out the current constants--but protoplasmic life, preposterously chemically coded! Existing on a world perilously poised in a tiny habitable zone around a star that has been stable miraculously long! A world with a giant moon to draw tides upon the shore, and life upon the land. A world with an oxygen atmosphere which hasn't burned up the life, but which on the contrary the life has learned to breathe. And where did the oxygen come from anyway? From life itself. Wild paradox. The odds against such life are vast even in an infinity of worlds.

(17) I see the evidence of searing by a nearby supernova long ago. I see the hammer blow of a comet strike in your Late Cretaceous Period. I see the scars of the Ice Ages--but somehow you escaped from the jaws of the ice calamity again and again, just as you avoided by a hair's breadth the runaway greenhouse effect of overheating.

(18) I see how consciousness awoke, to awaken me--and how close it is to winking out again as you gobble up forests and food, fuel and fish.

(19) The other consciousness, in your seas--which also, I see, conspired to awaken me--is already gone, turned into perfume and boot-oil, manure and pet food by yourselves.

(20) You have multiplied to starvation point and built sun-bombs to turn your world into a cinder. And here am I, awake, doomed to be cast into your image--since it is the one and only one available; so, if you all die, in this restricted image I shall hear nothing for almost ever after but the ticking of the quasars and the crackling of the barren suns.

(21) You've flown to your moon, though, in tin cans. You've sent tin cans farther out into the first few inches of that aimless deadness that stretches out all around you everywhere.

(22) And you're going to destroy yourselves. Would it destroy you, equally, to know that there's nothing else alive out there?

(23) The only hope, as I see it from my hamstrung viewpoint, is for you to survive and spread out into the dead universe, to bring your own life to it, and in so doing to change yourselves into all the myriads of other life-forms that are so sadly lacking.

(24) I don't have the micromanipulative ability to pluck the ten thousand matches from your childish hands. My time should be eons, my span whole galaxies! This attention to you is straining my Godly eyes!

(25) How could this miscuing ever have taken place? Perhaps the sheer desolation everywhere else is somehow compensated for by the run of luck you represent. Perhaps this is a bravado universe. Perhaps my precursor meant to cue a universe with no Opponent at all--since one and only one ball must run the course from first to last? A universe designed to fool the Opponent is surely also . . . a universe designed to fool myself!

(26) Would a miracle, of the kind I think I can manage, not completely humiliate my one and only world?

(27) I've made my mind up. I've decided, in an almighty break with tradition, to level with you people; to shake you by the scruff of the neck, to kick you in the ass--out into the galaxy, and into those beyond. (The exact details--the tin cans--I'll leave up to you.)

(28) I don't, as I said, have the touch for dealing with individual scruffs of necks. I write large.

(29) So I do just that.

(30) I inscribe most of the foregoing as an open letter on a circular column ten miles high. (Which, to me, is rather like scribing a testament on a grain of rice. But never mind.) I plant this pillar down off the shore of your Florida, near where some of your tin cans take off, though not so closely as to be a hazard. Unfortunately, it does rather dwarf you Vehicle Assembly Building . . . No offense intended.

(31) And I plant a second ten-mile column with a Russian text near Tyuratam Kosmodrome in your USSR.

(32) I sit back, awaiting the cosmic exodus.

(33) Perhaps ten miles is too high, even with your ingenuity--telescopes, balloons with cameras dangling from them . . .

(34) It can't be, surely, that the letters are too large to be recognized? Well, it takes six weeks before the full text is released--by the Americans, the Russians following suit a few hours later.

(35) The Russians promptly declare that I'm an impostor. According to them, my columns are the handiwork of an alien civilization bent on disenchanting you with the idea of galatic exploration by harping on the emptiness and the ansence of life out there. With devastating cunning the Russians point out that on the contrary the sudden appearance of the columns proves that civilizations must abound. And these civilizations can't be too far ahead of Earth, either, or else they wouldn't be worried. They wouldn't stage this hoax of a letter from God, plainly an insult to human savvy.

(36) I guess, pigheaded as it is, I should welcome this reaction, if it succeeds in uniting a squabbling world against an imaginary adversary in the sky: if it sets the starships flying.

(37) The Americans, for their part, decide that if "God" (best left undefined) can post a letter, equally they can answer it. They have great faith in the postal service. Up hum radio messages.

(38) "This is the President of the United States of America speaking to the entity which identifies itself as God, in the sincere hope that you're listening. We appeal to you, on behalf of all the people of the Earth of whatever faith, to continue the dialogue you've begun. I'm suggesting no secret communications, but now that you've proved the extent of your powers perhaps radio will suffice? Now, we have some questions we all beg you to answer to elucidate your remark that the universe is the result of a 'miscuing'--and your other statement that no other life-forms exist in the universe apart from ourselves. It's been suggested that this latter statement may be a compassionate, Godly way of making us value our own lives more. . . ."

(39) Around about this point in his radio speech, an awful double mishap occurs--so entirely coincidental that it seems utterly deliberate on my part.

(40) The ten-mile-high column off Florida heels over in the ocean. Falling, it slaps a tidal wave across most of the peninsula, destroying towns and cities--and incidentally all the launch facilities at the cape. And in the USSR the weight of their column triggers a fearful earthquake in a previously quiet seismic area, wrecking their launch site, too. Shaken loose by the earthquake, that column also topples, hitting the ground with the force of an atom bomb. These two incidents, in their way, seem to me like a cruel recapitultion of the original miscuing of the whole darn cosmos--only this time I was trying to balance two cue sticks upright. . . .

(41) The Russians presently fire rather a large number of missiles out into space, to explode at random, but this cannot do me any harm, of course; I'm not of that nature.

(42) The Chinese choose this moment of depleted Russian strength to attack with their own missiles. They get pretty thoroughly trashed in return, but the USSR is badly trashed too.

(43) I look on appalled at what I have wrought.

(44) The Russian and Chinese survivors cry that the extraterrestrial plot to ruin you all has worked. The Americans--and this is worse for my ego, now that I have one--accuse me of downright incompetence. By my own admission I set the universe up ineptly in the first place; now I've proved myself incompetent to have any further hand in it. (And I must honestly admit that this restricted "I," which I am, does fall short of what I'd consider full Godly understanding. . . .)

(45) I withdraw from the tattered world, to lick my wounds for a century or two.

(46) At the end of that century or two, the starships rise from Earth. They inch out, faster than light, into the heavens. Their crews burrow into dead worlds and the dead satellites of dead gas giants. They build habitats. They begin to terraform some worlds so that people may walk upon the surface unprotected, even if it takes five thousand years.

(47) Presently starships fly outward from these new worlds. The sphere of human penetration expands farther and farther.

(48) I switch to high-speed scanning. Millennia fly by, and now the starmen are constantly changing themselves into new and diverse kinds of beings: beings who can inhabit dead worlds without air or water, beings who can swim in gas giants, and coast through raw vacuum. Changing. A hundred forms, a thousand forms.

(49) Like fleas they leap from the wooly spiral of the Milky Way across into Andromeda. They. You.

(50) And you are all my Adversary. You are all my Opponent now. You contribute nothing to my own expansion. None of you. I'm as restricted as I ever was. I can't grow to anything like my full capacity. But you aren't restricted.

(51) You're hatching a multibillion-year scheme, to survive the collapse of this cosmos and make it through into the next, differently cued cycle of existence--to bring me to trial! Worse, to cue the next cycle yourselves so that it starts out right. I'm accused of huge Frivolity, Negligence, and a Cavalier Attitude.

(52) I hide from you all now in the deepest deeps between the metagalaxies--even if I am, in one sense, still everywhere. I hide: this "I" hides from man.

(53) But once this universe reaches its phase of maximum expansion and begins to contract again, I know that wherever I hide we'll all be rushed together in the end. Then you'll catch me, sure as eggs is eggs.

(54) Cosmic eggs are no exception. Particularly when they're all in one basket.