What interested me in this was to take a book in which a very extreme situation was presented to a group of people and then to see how this group of people responded to the extreme situation. I didn’t really want to spend too much time challenging the extreme situation itself—to say, “How realistic is this?” What I was trying to do the book about was just to say, “What would happen to people if they were confronted by—as a premise—the possibility of time travel, the possibility of contact with an extraterrestrial artifact, something that comes from another civilization that’s very much more advanced than ours?” All I would say in defense of the extreme premise is: Take anyone from a hundred years ago—take Charles Darwin, a pretty knowledgeable guy from that time—and plunk him in front of a Macintosh. The chances are he would run screaming from the room: “It cannot be anything but witchcraft.” If you decide to sit down and say “Okay, Chuck. Let me explain to you how this works”—it involves whole fields of highly developed knowledge he doesn’t know anything about. The electron hasn’t been discovered yet—he doesn’t know what an electron is. He certainly doesn’t know anything about electronics; doesn’t know anything about solid-state electronics; doesn’t know anything about cathode-ray tubes. This is one giant piece of magic to him, and all he can really do is sit on the outside and look at it as some very strange rectangular object that that has funny black and white shifting images on it. It that’s true in a hundred years, then there must be something very much like it fifty or a hundred years in the future if we could see ahead—see what kinds of things we would be doing. This is a book about people who find something from, as it turns out, our own future. It’s pretty mysterious.