Carl Sagan: A Life

Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan

A Life

Keay Davidson

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

New York • Chichester • Weinheim • Brisbane • Singapore • Toronto

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Copyright © 1999 by Keay Davidson. All rights reserved

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 750-4744. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158-0012, (212) 850-6011, fax (212) 850-6008, e-mail: [email protected].

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Davidson, Keay.

Carl Sagan : a life / Keay Davidson.

    p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-471-25286-7 (alk. paper)

1. Sagan, Carl, 1934–1996. 2. Astronomers—United States

Biography. I. Sagan, Carl, 1934–1996. II. Title.

QB36.S15D38 1999

520′.92—dc21

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to the memory of space scientist

James B. Pollack (1938–1994)

and to the work of the

National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists

and Technical Professionals Inc. (NOGLSTP) in Pasadena, California.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

Each psyche is really an ant-hill of opposing predispositions. Personality as something with fixed attributes is an illusion.

—Lawrence Durrell

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1   Brooklyn

2   Chicago

3   The Dungeon

4   High Ground

5   California

6   Harvard

7   Mars and Manna

8   Mr. X

9   Gods Like Men

10   The Shadow Line

11   The Dragons of Eden

12   Annie

13   Cosmos

14   Contact

15   The Value of L

16   Look Back, Look Back

17   Hollywood

18   The Night Freight

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations follow page 282

Preface

One autumn evening in 1969, when I was sixteen, I skipped my homework and instead sprawled on my bed, reading a wondrous book published a few years earlier: Intelligent Life in the Universe. The authors were two astronomers, a Russian named I. S. Shklovskii and an American, Carl Sagan. This book changed my life. I suspect that if I hadn’t read it, I would not have spent much of the past three decades thinking, reading, and writing about many of the things about which I think, read, and write. Early in the book appears a black-and-white photo of a cloud of stars, somewhere near the center of our galaxy. There are approximately a million stars in this photograph, the caption states. According to the estimates of Chapter 29, a planet of one of these stars holds a technical civilization vastly in advance of our own. I stared at that photograph, entranced, for a long time.

By the late 1960s I had ceased to believe in God. Without God, the cosmos seemed drabber—just molecules and plasma—and quite pointless. But a new, more enchanting cosmos was offered by Sagan and Shklovskii. In their conception, the galaxies were like mammoth Petri dishes, brimming with life. On millions of worlds, microbes had probably evolved into intelligent beings. Perhaps these beings were curious about the rest of the cosmos and were seeking other beings by transmitting radio signals in all directions. Perhaps their centuries of accumulated learning, encoded in invisible electromagnetic waves, were passing through my bedroom at that very moment. Sagan and Shklovskii defended this view on grounds that seemed perfectly rational and perfectly scientific, and that remain so today.

However, people can believe in rational things for irrational reasons. Indeed, as historians of science increasingly acknowledge, the history of science makes more sense if one takes into account the occasional importance of non-rational factors (social prejudices, political tendencies, religious influences, and so on). In retrospect, I realize that as a youth, I accepted the notion of alien life for a fundamentally psychological reason, namely to fill a spiritual void within. I wanted to believe in aliens, so I did, and I tacked on the scientific rationales (which are perfectly valid in their own right) after the fact.

And—truth be told—Sagan, the great rationalist, did the same thing. He admitted as much in his 1985 novel, Contact, through the introspections of his alter ego, the fictional radioastronomer Ellie Arroway. This contradicts the accusations of those (especially on the political right) who accused him of being scientistic and hyper-logical. On the contrary, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Dragons of Eden (1977), Sagan affirmed the value of both rational and irrational (intuitive, some prefer to call them) insights; they walk hand in hand down the great road to Truth.

Sagan and Shklovskii’s book was enthralling for terrestrial reasons as well. It was published in 1966, not too many years after the United States and the Soviet Union had almost blown each other to smithereens over Cuba. To a generation of schoolchildren raised on cold war propaganda and trained in duck and cover exercises, the idea that Soviet and American scientists might coauthor a book (such collaborations are routine nowadays) seemed only slightly less fantastic than the notion that invisible alien messages were passing through my suburb. Shklovskii and Sagan’s remarkable collaboration (as the Washington Post called it) presaged the other great activity of Sagan’s life: helping to prevent our civilization from self-destructing. In time, he would become a feared foe of the military, the Reagan Administration, and the nuclear weapons establishment.

Sagan was different things to different people. To a generation of young Americans, his eloquence on television and the printed page was an irresistible summons to scientific careers. To his scientific colleagues, he was a sometimes stimulating, sometimes upsetting gadfly who proposed both brilliant and irresponsible ideas about the solar system. To NASA, he was its most valued—albeit unofficial and erratic—propagandist. To diehard cold warriors, he was a fuzzy-headed, left-leaning academic who meddled in the machinery of nuclear weapons policy. To some conservatives and cultural traditionalists, he was a suspicious symbol of atheism, secularism, and naively rationalistic scientism.

But to the general public—which tends to resent science for undermining religious faith and New Age folklore—he offered an alluring compensation for all that science has destroyed. That compensation was a vast and fascinating cosmos, wherein exotic beings chatter by radiotelescope and explore via starship. Critics had accused science of robbing the cosmos of old enchantments—gods, angels, astrological forces. But Sagan re-enchanted the stars in new, scientific-sounding ways purged of medieval irrationalisms (but invested with new, modern, alluring ones, such as the idea of benevolent aliens who would transmit instructions for solving terrestrial problems).

He was a hero of my childhood and youth. But a childhood hero is a dangerous thing to have, because one eventually outgrows childhood. One summer evening at a poolside party in Santa Cruz, I was seated next to the physicist-author Freeman Dyson. I asked him if he ever had a hero. Yes, he replied, and I was unfortunate enough to meet him. (Dyson’s hero was the brilliant but cantankerous geneticist J. B. S. Haldane.) In that regard, when I began this project, the writer Timothy Ferris warned me that some biographers end up hating the subjects of their biographies. Indeed, I was worried about what I might learn about Sagan; like all professional science writers, I had heard some less than flattering stories about him. (Not all proved to be true.) His most serious flaws involved interpersonal relations. Three marriages—that tells you something. And consider this: he dedicated three of his books to intimates (The Dragons of Eden to Linda Salzman, Comet to Shirley Arden, and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors to Lester Grinspoon); he eventually had falling-outs with them all, one by one. One of his oldest associates, the distinguished planetary scientist Tobias Owen, declined to discuss Sagan with me because he felt uncomfortable talking about what he called Sagan’s Jekyll and Hyde character. Yet after scrutinizing Sagan’s life in detail, I must say that I not only still like him but respect him more than ever; his personal foibles are not atypical of ambitious males, and are far outweighed by his virtues. Because he lived, the world is a better place.

As a scientist, Sagan speculated freely, sometimes wildly, and outraged his more cautious colleagues. A few regarded him as a charlatan. Even some of his closer mentors, notably Gerard Kuiper and Harold Urey, nursed serious doubts about his sense of scientific responsibility. Yet he helped to pioneer much of modern space science, particularly the subject of planetary atmospheres. He also raised a crop of graduate students, who now launch robotic explorers to the planets.

Sagan was also something of a prophet. He anticipated some interesting scientific discoveries, although sometimes (and oddly) for the wrong reasons. A striking example has come to light since his death. In the mid-1960s he and his colleague Jim Pollack suggested that Mars once underwent horizontal crustal motion (partly akin to terrestrial plate tectonics). They based this suggestion on the belief that Mars was covered with linear geological ridges, which they thought might be the true nature of the legendary canals. They argued that horizontal crustal motion had compressed the crust, raising the ridges. Sure enough, in May 1999, NASA scientists reported magnetic observations of Mars indicating that the planet might have undergone horizontal crustal motion some four billion years ago. Yet (as has been positively known since the 1970s) the canals do not exist; they are purely psychophysiological illusions! In other words, Sagan’s crustal theory was on the right track, yet it was based on a completely erroneous assumption.

What are we to make of this? Should the Sagan-Pollack paper be dismissed as a lucky guess? Or do they deserve some credit for vaguely anticipating an important geological discovery about Mars? (The history of science is full of scientists who anticipated correct theories for at least partly incorrect reasons—for example, Nicolaus Copernicus, who argued that Earth orbits the Sun, and Alfred Wegener, the best-known pioneer of continental drift theory.) Sagan’s career contains a number of other such lucky guesses. Another example is a paper that Sagan and Richard Isaacman published in 1977 that suggested, based on computer modeling of planetary formation, that giant planets might form extremely close to alien stars. Is it just a coincidence, then, that astronomers have recently discovered many giant extrasolar planets, an amazing number of which are far closer to their parent stars than once thought possible?¹ Sagan may also have been prophetic in his and George Mullen’s early work on the possible role of ammonia in warming Earth’s early atmosphere. Long criticized, this notion was revived in a paper written by Sagan and Christopher Chyba and published in Science magazine after Sagan’s death. As space scientist James P. Kasting observed in an editorial for Science several months after Sagan’s death, It seems likely that his excellent scientific intuition will once again be found to be correct.²

Even if such lucky guesses are nothing more than that—lucky guesses—they are instructive reminders of a little-appreciated fact: Science does not usually evolve in the simple, linear, logical ways still described in many high school textbooks (as well as many scientific papers). Rather, science often advances via lucky guesses, offbeat hunches, reckless speculation. This is especially true of frontier sciences such as space science, where little is known and the race often goes to the swift and the imaginative rather than to the plodding and the cautious. Appropriately, after Sagan’s death in December 1996, Nature magazine called him a pivotal figure in [the] exploration of the solar system.

He is best known, though, as a science popularizer—in particular, as the host of the 1980 television series Cosmos, which drew about a half-billion viewers around the world. Sagan was the greatest popularizer of the 20th century, Stephen Jay Gould wrote in Science magazine after Sagan’s death. The National Academy of Sciences, awarding him its Public Welfare Medal in 1994, noted that to the public, Carl Sagan’s name may be associated more with science than that of any other living U.S. scientist.

The price of fame is a big head, and Sagan’s head grew mighty big; eyewitness testimony to this effect abounds. As much as I admired him, I was always bothered by his seeming imperturbability and omniscience. Nothing seemed to rattle him, at least in public, and he had an answer (sometimes a glib one) for almost everything. Most scientists, by contrast, are rarely so self-assured. To them Truth is like a blob of mercury—it’s hard to pin down. Sagan’s air of omniscience made him seem sometimes slightly inhuman, more like Mr. Spock than Mr. Wizard.

Now that I have explored his life for two years, I understand him better. Now his imperturbability strikes me less as arrogance than as a half-conscious pose—the objective pose that is part of the propagandistic and rhetorical style of elite scientists. This hyper-dignified, above-it-all, judgelike and priestlike demeanor inspires others to perceive these scientists as they wish to be perceived; that is, as objective, neutral, and able to assess data without prejudice. That public perception accounts (justifiably or not) for much of the prestige of science. If scientists were not any of these things, then why would they be any more trustworthy than poets, artists, preachers, or politicians?

Which raises a troubling point. In hands other than Sagan’s, that rhetorical style—that priestlike self-assurance—has often led modern society to grief. Witness science and technology’s recent debacles, from Bhopal and thalidomide to Chernobyl and the Challenger explosion. Such tragedies often stem from the entrenchment of scientific decision-making in too few hands. Witness, also, the scientific-sounding (and often near-demented) reasoning behind the construction of the two superpowers’ nuclear weapons complexes, which for almost a half-century threatened all life on Earth. Incredible as it seems now, in the late 1960s the mayor of Libertyville, Illinois, proposed acquiescing to a nearby military nuclear weapons project because the experts knew what was best for the American people. (The almost miraculous technology of our world today has far surpassed our meager ability to comprehend, the mayor explained. Under these circumstances, it would certainly seem more prudent to place our confidence and security in the hands of those whose lives are dedicated to the profession of defending and protecting our lives, our loved ones, and our properties than to try to accumulate sufficient knowledge to make an independent decision.)

If experts could always be trusted to make the right moral decision, then public participation would not be necessary—but they cannot be, and so it is. Too often, the expertise of experts is a camouflage for special interests, prejudices, and bureaucratic priorities. No one should be required to have a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering to be entitled to an opinion on nuclear power, or in genetics to hold one on the genetic engineering of crops, any more than one should be required to have a doctorate in constitutional law to have an opinion on a candidate for the Supreme Court, or a degree in monetary policy to comment on an appointment to the Federal Reserve.

Still, a certain minimal knowledge is essential; otherwise, in a high-tech, knowledge-based society, democracy becomes meaningless. Hence the need (an ever-growing one) for popularizers. That was one reason Sagan worked so hard to educate the public about nuclear winter issues in the 1980s—to convince people that the technical issues of nuclear strategy and weaponry were not incomprehensible and that they were entitled to have opinions on them. Warfare is too important to be left to the generals, Clemenceau said; likewise, nuclear weapons are too important to be left to the weaponeers.

Unfortunately, Sagan leaves no obvious successor—no other scientist who shares his extraordinarily diverse interests, literary ability, showmanship, scientific prowess, and progressive politics. He was a Renaissance man. But sadly, the trend in science is away from Renaissance men (and women). As Big Science becomes Big Business—as universities clamor for software and biotechnology contracts, for example—it undergoes an increasing division of labor, akin to that in factories. Hence we see fewer and fewer multidisciplinarians like Sagan who are unafraid of breaching the walls between specialties. In turn, this decline of multidis-ciplinarity could have long-term political consequences. People who are afraid of transgressing intellectual boundaries are less likely to see the forest as well as the trees and, hence, to challenge societal misuses of science. Now, we only rarely find the distinguished scientist or other type of public figure capable of exercising moral leadership, Paul Joseph laments in the socialist journal New Politics. The Carl Sagans are few and far between.³

Sagan was part of the great tradition of knowledge popularization, a tradition with expressions as diverse as Will and Ariel Durant’s histories, the popular science books of Isaac Asimov and Lancelot Hogben, and the television shows of Mr. Wizard. This tradition has a core conviction: For democracy to continue working in an increasingly knowledge-dependent age, knowledge must be democratized. Knowledge is power.

Acknowledgments

Hundreds of people assisted me in this project. Here are some of the more important ones.

First thanks goes to Carl Sagan himself, who, through his writings, helped inspire me to become a science writer.

Emily Loose, my editor at Wiley, originally proposed this project. She then oversaw it from start to finish; her wisdom, patience, and good humor are a writer’s dream. Also thanks to my copy editor, Nancy Tenney, to Marcia Samuels, who managed production, and to my agent, Russell Galen.

Other than Emily, my closest confidante in this project was my friend Barbara Gallagher. She carefully read the entire manuscript and made numerous shrewd suggestions, especially on psychological issues and the history and philosophy of science. She also brought to the project her great warmth, humor, and energy, which made the bad times easier.

I am especially indebted to the brilliant and endearing Annie Druyan, who persuaded other Sagan family members to talk to me; to Nick Sagan, whose affectionate but frank observations on his father’s psyche influenced my own; to Dorion Sagan, whose erudite and irreverent critique of his dad’s philosophy of science convinced me that mine was on the right track; and to Sagan’s sister, Cari Greene, who offered irreplaceable insights into the lives of their parents, Rachel and Sam Sagan. Also thanks to the amazing Lynn Margulis, who for two days welcomed me into her home and treated me like a son.

Also much appreciation to Lucille Nahemow, for sharing her priceless oral history interview with her mother, a onetime intimate of the young Rachel Sagan.

I am profoundly grateful to Ronald E. Doel. A historian of science, he brilliantly critiqued the manuscript line by line. Sometimes we disagreed, and I did not always take his advice (probably to my misfortune), but I always learned from him. In the best spirit of scholarship, he selflessly shared unpublished documents from his research on the history of solar system astronomy, including his unpublished taped interview with Sagan in 1991. In this interview, Sagan’s remarkably frank and self-critical remarks (quoted extensively herein, with permission from Doel and Annie Druyan) shed light on numerous otherwise puzzling aspects of his career.

I am also deeply thankful to the distinguished astronomers/planetary scientists who read virtually the entire manuscript and offered many important suggestions. They are Donald Goldsmith, David Morrison, and Dale Cruikshank. Sir Arthur C. Clarke corrected a few minor errors, and numerous people reviewed smaller parts of the manuscript; I am indebted to them all.

Special thanks are due to my assistants at university archives, who scoured them for crucial papers. Yeoman work was done by Jeremiah James at Harvard and Gavi Hanssen at the University of Arizona-Tucson. Also thanks to Steve Secker at the University of Chicago for searching records related to Sagan’s college years. Thanks, too, to the librarians and archivists who recovered valuable papers at the University of California campuses at Berkeley and San Diego, Indiana University, Cornell University, the Truman Library, and Oregon State University, as well as the American Philosophical Society and the Neils Bohr Library at the American Institute of Physics. Also thanks to staffers at the beautiful University of California libraries at Santa Cruz and San Francisco, where much of this book was researched and written.

I am indebted to Lawrence Wittner for his advice and for generously sharing documents from his seminal research into the history of the peace movement. Also, Raymond Jeanloz and Kathryn Day-Huh of the Miller Institute at Berkeley granted me access to an invaluable document that radically altered my interpretation of Sagan’s early relationship with the U.S. national security apparatus. And I cannot thank Tim Willard of the National Archives enough for recovering the seventeen-year-old Sagan’s letter on UFOs to Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

Also much gratitude to the general historians who personally inspired me in the 1970s, notably Arnold M. Shankman and James Harvey Young at Emory University, and to the historians of science, including Robert Silliman of Emory and David Lindberg, Aaron J. Ihde, R. C. Stauffer, Ron Numbers, Victor Hilts, Gunter Risse, and Robert Siegfried of the University of Wisconsin. Also to former Emory president Sanford Atwood, who, after hearing my Stipe Society lecture on the history of the idea of extraterrestrial life, uttered one wonderful, encouraging word that kept me going for the next quarter of a century. And thanks to Joel Van Pelt, my editor at the Oxford University Press multi-volume American National Biography, from whom I learned much.

In early 1999 I lectured on early findings of this book at the University of California at Berkeley and Oregon State University in Corvallis, and benefited from suggestions and criticisms by certain audience members—particularly Gunther S. Stent at Berkeley and Doel and Mary Jo Nye at Oregon State.

Amelia K. (Amy) Smith, who was with this project almost from the beginning, transcribed mountains of taped interviews and dictations. She also offered many suggestions for the book itself, and was a delight to work with. Also much thanks to Tom Burdan for extensive additional transcriptions. Without Amy and Tom, I could not have finished this book.

Further thanks to my friends Dale Carter and Inger H. Dalsgaard, who independently proposed the idea for a Sagan book and offered valuable suggestions; Sir Martin Rees and Fred Whipple, for their encouragement and suggestions early in the project; Stanley Miller, for reminiscing at length about Sagan and hastening my access to Harold C. Urey’s papers; Maria Goodavage and her family, who shared the late Joseph Goodavage’s taped interview with Sagan in 1972, just before Sagan’s early fame turned incandescent; Nanette Asimov, for guiding me to her uncle Isaac’s letters; Rabbi Morrison Bial and Rabbi Valerie Lieber, for their guidance on religious issues and the former’s charming memories of the young Sagan’s training for his bar mitzvah; and Gail Foorman, who talked me through this project’s darkest moment. Also thanks to the 3 A.M. gang at Kinko’s, especially Natalie.

Also much gratitude to my San Francisco Examiner colleague Bob Stephens and to Frank M. Robinson and Vincent Di Fate, who enthusiastically shared their expertise on the literature and history of science fiction; to my bosses at the Examiner, Dick Rogers and Phil Bronstein, for their enthusiasm, generosity, and great patience; to Emily Gurnon, a great sounding board; and to Andy Pollack, for a reason he surely won’t soon forget. Also to veteran science writer David Perlman of the San Francisco Chronicle, one of the first reporters to cover Sagan, who shared reminiscences and documents.

I also wish to thank the New York Times Book Review for quickly running my author’s query, which requested interviews with anyone who had known Sagan as a child or youth. A small flood of responses ensued, almost all of them useful.

Special thanks to the filmmaker Lynda Obst, who interrupted her killer schedule while shooting Denzel Washington and Annette Bening to sip tea and share her fascinating reminiscences with me, then let me take over her office for two days while I read voluminous documents from the making of the movie Contact. Also thanks to Johnny Carson and his staff at Carson Productions in Santa Monica for providing documents and videotapes; and to Geoff Haines-Stiles of the Cosmos production team.

I also wish to thank the good folks at the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) in Amherst, N.Y., whose work I have often written about, and usually admired, over two decades. Special gratitude to Tim Binga for providing abundant documents from the Center for Inquiry and CSICOP archives, especially on the prehistory of the 1969 AAAS debate on UFOs. One caveat: Sagan was a co-founder of CSICOP, but he was not totally uncritical of the organization. Nor am I. I hope that the organization’s membership accept my gentle criticisms with good humor, while remembering this: we disagree on short-term tactics, not on long-term strategy. Also, a word of advice to readers in general—those who wonder why the main text doesn’t cite their favorite Sagan anecdote (e.g., his comic run-in with Apple Corp.) should check the footnotes: that’s where it is, along with many other gems that didn’t make it into the narrative.

For inspiring me over the years, I wish to thank Timothy Ferris (although he doesn’t like everything written herein, specifically my critique of the Voyager records), medical writer Andrew Skolnick (the bravest reporter I know), Andrew Fraknoi, John Wilkes, Deborah Blum, Tom Lucas, William J. Broad, Kimberly Shlain Brooks (the smartest blonde in Los Angeles), and the irreplaceable Martin Gardner (whose writings on skepticism had a lifelong impact on at least two adolescents—Sagan and me). Numerous other people who contributed to this project are listed in the notes at the back of the book.

I sincerely apologize to anyone whose name I have forgotten to include. There are two, though, whom I shall never forget, although they are now lost in America. Here’s to ME and LK, wherever you are.

Obviously, all mistakes in this book are my responsibility alone.

1

Brooklyn

All his life, Carl Sagan was troubled by grand dichotomies—between reason and irrationalism, between wonder and skepticism. The dichotomies clashed within him. He yearned to believe in marvelous things—in flying saucers, in Martians, in glistening civilizations across the Milky Way. Yet reason usually brought him back to Earth. Usually; not always. A visionary dreams of a better world than this one. He refuses to think that modern society and its trappings—money, marriage, children, a nine-to-five career, and obeisance to a waving flag and an inscrutable God—are all there is. Sagan was blinded, but not by these. He was blinded by the sheer glory of the new cosmos that was unveiled by science during the first two decades of his life. This cosmos was an ever-expanding, unbounded wonderland of billions of galaxies. And across the light-years, Sagan dreamed, random molecular jigglings had perhaps spawned creeping, crawling, thinking creatures on alien landscapes bathed in the glow of alien suns.

This vision blinded Sagan, sometimes, to the needs of the people around him. These included friends who worshiped him, although he hurt them; wives who were entranced by his passions, although they were enraged by his absenteeism and often illogical logic; sons who were enthralled by his example, even as they struggled to escape his shadow; and colleagues who envied and honored him, even while they scorned his wilder notions and mocked his pomposities. Hardly anyone who knew Carl Sagan intimately has an unmixed opinion of him. In the final analysis, he was the dichotomy: the prophet and the hard-boiled skeptic, the boyish fantasist and the ultrarigorous analyst, the warm companion and the brusque colleague, the oracle whose smooth exterior concealed inner fissures, which, in the end, only one woman could heal.

Sagan’s inner war stemmed, in part, from his childhood relations with his parents. Rachel and Sam’s marriage epitomized a great philosophical principle: Opposites attract. Sagan later traced his analytical urges to Rachel, a cunning, acid-tongued neurotic who had known extreme poverty and been abandoned by her family. Her intellectual ambitions had been thwarted by the grand irrationalisms of her time—by societal bigotries against the poor, against Jews, against women (and wives in particular). She worshiped her only son, Carl. He would fulfill her unfulfilled dreams.

And Carl’s sense of wonder came from Sam, a quiet, soft-hearted escapee from the czar. Sam gave apples to the poor and soothed labor-management tensions in New York’s tumultuous garment industry. He was awed by the young Carl’s brilliance, his boyish chatter about stars and dinosaurs—but not overawed. Sam would have adored his son had he been just another Jewish kid in wartime Brooklyn who played kickball in the streets while Nazi subs haunted the coastline.

Posterity’s judgment of Rachel Molly Gruber Sagan (1907–1982) is wildly contradictory. Vivacious, a witch, brilliant, very perky, very bright, insane—very paranoid, you knew she was coming from a mile away, completely loving, a waif . . . who needed all the affection she could get—so say those who enjoyed or endured her.¹ Her education was meager, her looks unlovely. Neglected by her family, she grew up almost homeless in New York City during World War I and the 1920s. Yet she had flash and charisma, a feisty sense of fashion, and a rapid, eloquent tongue. She made (and dumped) friends fast, and boyfriends faster. She wrote well, too. Her first child, Carl, would inherit her literary skill.

Her prose style might be described as Take no prisoners. Shortly before her death, unmellowed by age, she gleefully wrote to two married friends about Carl and his third wife Ann Druyan’s new Ithaca mansion, describing it as

a weirdo of a house, most of it underground (great protection from a nuclear blast) . . . the result of a lurid nightmare of the architect. Because I was aghast and against it, they don’t speak to me. . . . [Carl] must and will have installed a sophisticated burglar alarm—there are threats against him by some crazy people who claim he appears in their dreams and keeps them from sleeping. One such was apprehended.²

Rachel’s bilious prose camouflaged her pride. How far she had come from her rotten beginnings! Through the Depression and Hitler and Alger Hiss, she had raised to adulthood a boy who, by the century’s twilight, had become the world’s best-known living scientist, a multimillionaire TV star and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and recently wed to a brainy, luminous brunette (a lady so desirable that a prior suitor had written a novel about her³). He was so famous, in fact, that he haunted the minds of the mad. My son, the specter!

Bragged Rachel, the onetime waif, at the end of her letter:

We are not the run of the mill, are we, or the rank and file or the ordinary plebeian.

Aren’t you glad you know us?

Hysterically, Rachel

Rachel’s origins were vague; she preferred it that way. She and her family tended to be secretive about embarrassing family matters, Carl Sagan wrote in a November 28, 1994, letter to lifelong friend Lucille Nahemow, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, who specializes in family issues and who studied Rachel’s life.⁴

Carl’s sole sibling was his sister, Carol, nicknamed Cari. A social worker, she is married to a Union Carbide executive. In the living room of their handsome home in Houston, she showed this writer a faded black-and-white photo of a middle-aged couple standing on a boardwalk at the beach. The man in the photo is Leib Gruber, Rachel’s father. Tall and unsmiling, he wears a dark suit and a big black hat. He looks like a movie mobster. The rumor, Cari said as she served coffee and Passover muffins, is that he was a murderer.⁵

Leib Gruber was born in the late nineteenth century in the village of Sassow, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—an empire creaking in all its multi-national joints, as Arthur Koestler put it, waiting to fall to pieces. Across the continent, the vipers of anti-Semitism stirred: the Dreyfus case in France, village slaughters in rural Russia. Conspiracy theorists touted the fraudulent Protocols of Zion as proof of a global Jewish conspiracy. In reality, few Jews outside an intellectual and artistic elite—Freud, for example—found influential careers within Emperor Francis Joseph’s doomed empire. Leib’s father sold fish. Young Leib was big-boned and strong, and raised cash in a medieval manner—carrying travelers on his back across the shallow stretches of a river. In the words of his grandson Carl Sagan, he was a beast of burden.⁶

According to one version of a family legend, in 1904 Leib killed an anti-Semite.⁷ He fled to the New World, leaving behind his young wife, Chaiya. (His loyal brother supposedly stayed in Austria to take the rap for the crime.) Leib got a job in the United States. He made enough money to transport Chaiya to New York on a Hamburg-based ship, the Batavia. She arrived with one dollar in her bag. The couple anglicized their names, from Leib to Louis and from Chaiya to Clara. Then they settled down and bred two children. The first was Rachel, whose official birthdate was November 23, 1907. (The true birthdate is uncertain because Rachel was secretive about her age.)⁸ Chaiya died during a second childbirth.

For whatever reason, Leib/Louis decided that he couldn’t manage little Rachel. He sent her to Austria, where she lived with relatives. In the meantime, he remarried. Unfortunately, the Austrian relatives didn’t want—or couldn’t stand—the energetic little girl. After a few years, they shipped Rachel back to New York, to her father and her stepmother, Rose (the woman in the photo). Rose received her stepchild with less than open arms. By the time she was eight, Professor Nahemow observes, Rachel was rejected on two continents.⁹

Rachel’s family was dysfunctional before dysfunctional was a cliche. Leib gave his children nasty nicknames. He called Rachel hair lice (she had returned from Austria with lice in her hair).¹⁰ Rachel’s stepbrother Abraham was institutionalized for mysterious reasons; his very existence was a family secret. (Carl Sagan first heard about his stepuncle at Rachel’s funeral in 1982.)¹¹

Leib had a good side. On one occasion, Rachel’s schoolteacher reprimanded her for misbehavior. Leib protected Rachel from Rose’s wrath by lying to his wife, claiming that the reprimand was actually a compliment. Still, Rachel avoided home as much as possible. She hated Rose. Rachel never accepted Rose as her mother. She knew she wasn’t her birth mother, Cari Sagan says. She was a rather rebellious child and young adult . . . ‘emancipated woman,’ we’d call her now. Professor Nahemow obtained many details about Rachel’s childhood from Nahemow’s mother, Flora Bernstein, one of Rachel’s closest childhood friends. Once Rose stormed into Flora’s childhood home, accusing Rachel of being a whore. Flora’s mother unceremoniously threw her out.¹²

Flora, a resident of Liberty Avenue in Brooklyn, met seven-year-old Rachel when she was skipping rope with friends. Rachel invited the shy, pretty new girl to play. Rachel, Flora learned, was inventive and fun to be with. In turn, Flora offered Rachel access to her home. The Bernstein residence was much nicer than the Grubers’ grubby digs. The Bernsteins threw many parties with interesting people (none of whom were wanted for murder in Austria). Ambitious, Rachel seized her opportunity: she became outgoing and very affectionate toward Flora’s mother. In turn, Mrs. Bernstein adored Rachel—enough to make Flora jealous. Rachel, Flora now believes, was a waif, an unfortunate child who needed all the affection she could get.

Rachel had a reputation for taking chances. She would come to [Mrs. Bernstein’s] Hebrew school and pick up boys, Flora recalls. She was always . . . very conscious of the opposite sex. She dressed well and had a good sense of fashion. Rachel was the first one in the crowd who bought a bathing suit. There was a law about the length of suits and Rachel’s was too short. She was thrown off the boardwalk in Coney Island.¹³

Rachel was smart. She completed an equivalency test to receive a high school diploma. Brilliant, a very perky little woman, smart, well read, very interesting to talk to, recalls one of her relatives, Beatrice Rubenstein.¹⁴ Rachel explored New York’s high culture with the guidance of a savvy relative, Sarah Cohen. They lacked money but managed to get into concerts, plays, and ballets via hook, crook, and subway. Sarah learned to get through turnstiles without paying, and took Rachel along. Sometimes they entered [the show] at intermission and stood in the back.¹⁵

As the war-mad 1910s became the money-mad 1920s, Rachel and her female pals formed a club. They called themselves the ‘It’ Girls after screen heartthrob Clara Bow. By that time Rachel was a brassy, bold, five-foot-two cyclone. She was hardly a beauty. But no one, male or female, could resist her allure as she blew into a room and leveled it with her street-smart mouth and radiant eyes. Rachel was unpredictable, recalls Flora Bernstein. She sometimes stole other girls’ boyfriends just to show that she could do it. But at other times she was very protective of her friends. I once went in a car with a boy. Rachel wrote down the license number and said, ‘You take good care of my friend. If anything happens to her, I have your number.’ ¹⁶

At a party, ‘It’ Girl Mary Brodsky introduced Rachel to a quiet young man. He was skinny, red-haired, and covered with freckles. When they went swimming, she gasped at the extent of his red-splotched flesh. "Are you freckled everywhere? she demanded. Everywhere! he boasted. Samuel Sagan made Rachel’s hormones race, and she his. She saw dad’s red hair and immediately fell in love, Cari Sagan says. And he was swept off his feet by her, which is understandable because she was very, very charismatic and vivacious." They were married within weeks.¹⁷

In Carl Sagan’s lakeside home in upstate New York, his widow, Ann Druyan, keeps a black-and-white photo of the young Sam and Rachel. They are kissing enthusiastically, Hollywood-style, on a boardwalk. They wed in the early 1930s, the bleakest days of the Great Depression. At that time, Sam was a poorly paid usher at a movie theater.¹⁸ In Germany, Nazis were marching. American Jews feared an upsurge of local fascism. The apprehensiveness of American Jews, Fortune magazine observed, has become one of the important influences in the social life of our time.¹⁹ No matter; Rachel and Sam were in love. They married, had two kids, survived it all. They lived long enough to retire to Florida, to play Scrabble and shoot pool, to watch their son grow famous on television. Sagan’s secretary Shirley Arden recalls how playful the couple remained to the end: Sam took the golfer’s stance à la Johnny Carson, gave Rachel a lecherous look, and said, ‘Just you and me, babe.’ Rachel was a sensuous woman. Sam adored her and put up with her foibles.

Rachel, Cari Sagan Greene recalls, would fuss over Sam’s hair and make sure that the little dip in my father’s hair was just so. . . . She wanted the man that she married to look the way she thought ‘good’ looked. . . . He was sort of indulgent; he knew it was inevitable; it didn’t bother him a bit. In 1979, at age seventy-four, Sam lay in a hospital dying of lung cancer. Rachel slipped into the bed with him, to hug and comfort him.²⁰

When sam sagan* was five years old, he left the Ukraine and joined the hungry, hopeful millions then streaming to America. As an adult, he would recall little about his Ukrainian hometown, save one detail: it was near a prison.²¹ An appropriate memory. The entire Pale of Settlement, a vast expanse of farmland between the Baltic and the Black Seas, was effectively a prison where the Jews of the Russian Empire were forced to live, subjected to many governmental restrictions. Incorporating fragments of dismembered medieval states, the Pale seethed with ever-growing numbers of impoverished peoples, including former serfs.²² Their lives were humdrum at best, nightmarish at worst—more like Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer than Fiddler on the Roof.

Sam was born on March 2, 1905. It was a triumphant year in the history of science, and an ominous one in Russian history. Outside Russia, the year 1905 was the turning point in several areas of science, heralding radical changes, says historian of science Stephen G. Brush.²³ That year brought pivotal accomplishments by many researchers, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein among them.

Freud and Einstein—two Jews, who overcame anti-Semitism and rose to fame by challenging our view of reality. In 1905, Freud published Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,²⁴ one of his classic explorations of the unconscious. As he explained, the mind is not merely a reasoning machine, as Victorian optimists had believed. Rather, the mind is haunted by ghosts, by irrational forces of desire and repression. Freud believed that these ghosts surface in symbolic forms. One form is the self-destructive group behavior called war.

Also in 1905, Einstein published three historic papers. The most radical was his theory of special relativity, which transformed concepts of time, space, mass, and energy.²⁵ Special relativity paved the way toward his later, even stranger work on general relativity. In general relativity theory, gravity is not a Newtonian force or action-at-distance; rather, it is the consequence of the curvature of space. General relativity implied a whole new cosmology, a cosmos that (as it turned out) expands over time. As astrophysicists later showed, the cosmos expands because it was born billions of years ago from the big bang, a kind of explosion whose ejecta cooled into innumerable galaxies.²⁶ And each galaxy is an ocean of stars, whose light may illumine countless planets, many of them perhaps inhabited.

The Freudian and Einsteinian revolutions posed big questions, questions that tormented Carl Sagan much of his adult life. Reason and irrationalism—polar opposites, yet uncomfortably united. Earth and the cosmos—different realms, yet part of each other. Sagan explored such dichotomies in many of his books, in cosmological ruminations such as Cosmos and Contact, and in his essay-poems on consciousness and evolution, The Dragons of Eden and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Humanity, he believed, must reconcile its rational and irrational sides. Succeed, and empyrean vistas open before us; the cosmos is ours to explore, with all its strange and wonderful sights and (perhaps) peoples. Fail, and we won’t make it out of the solar system alive. All our bright promise will be lost; all our long progress will end in a bright, noisy flash.

Freud’s outlook grew dark as Europe tore itself to bits in one war, then rearmed for a worse one; and darker as the cancer attacked his mouth. By contrast, Sagan was an optimist—always was, even as the blood disease ravaged his body, even as he waited to be arrested at an atomic site, even as he gazed into the poker faces of nuclear weaponeers and realized that they really believe in their research, believe that instruments of annihilation will forever keep the peace. Sagan experienced all this yet still believed in the future, in humanity, in the eventual triumph of reason. At heart, he was a child.

He descended from a hopeful people. Pessimists stayed in the Ukraine, scratching their meager existences from the dark soil. Optimists said to hell with it and headed west, usually to America. The 1900s were a good time to leave: the Russian Empire quaked with revolts and pogroms, foreshocks of the greater revolution to come, in 1917. The czarist regime struck back with typically cloddish brutality. Six weeks before Sam Sagan’s birth in 1905, troops killed more than a hundred peaceful protesters in St. Petersburg. In June, sailors mutinied aboard the battleship Potemkin in Odessa. The revolts triggered an anti-Semitic backlash. Thousands of Jews, including many women, were arrested on political grounds. According to Moses Rischin, In 1904, of an estimated 30,000 organized Jewish workers, 4,476 were imprisoned or exiled to Siberia.²⁷ Young Leon Trotsky observed one of the 1905 pogroms. He noted how the gang rushes through the town, drunk on vodka and the smell of blood.²⁸

According to family legend, after Sam’s mother died in childbirth, his Ukrainian relatives sent him to New York to join his father, who had already journeyed there. Five-year-old Sam and his uncle, George, first glimpsed the New York skyline in 1910, from a ship approaching Ellis Island.²⁹ Many immigrants’ hearts raced as they read this passage in a guidebook: Hold fast, this is most necessary in America. Forget your past, your customs, and your ideals. Select a goal and pursue it with all your might. . . . You will experience a bad time but sooner or later you will achieve your goal. . . . Do not take a moment’s rest.³⁰

Do not take a moment’s rest. This might have been George Sagan’s credo, or his grandnephew Carl’s. George was old enough to join the booming New York garment industry. In 1916 he founded his own firm, the New York Girl Coat Company. Eventually he became a wealthy man, a country-club type and a member of the board of educational and public-spirited institutions. When the firm celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1966, the New York Times ran a story on the front page of its business section. The story included a photo of a grinning George Sagan admiring a little girl modeling his wares.³¹ As a joke, Carl Sagan mentioned the firm in his 1985 novel Contact.³²

Sam had more intellectual ambitions. Like many immigrant Jews, he believed in the transformative power of education. He eventually enrolled at Columbia University, hoping to become a pharmacist. Then his father died. End of dream.³³ To support his family, Sam went to work for Uncle George as a garment cutter. [H]is job, Carl Sagan later wrote, was to use a very scary power saw to cut out patterns—backs, say, or sleeves for ladies’ coats and suits—from an enormous stack of cloth. Then the patterns were conveyed to endless rows of women sitting at sewing machines.³⁴ Textile fibers wafted through the air; some, perhaps, found their way into Sam’s lungs and hastened his ultimate end.³⁵ This proletarian fate did not embitter Sam. He was good with people, liked them; they adored him. By the late 1940s he was a factory manager. He made enough money to send his son to a great university, to be taught by noted scholars who would escort him to fame.

You will experience a bad time but sooner or later you will achieve your goal. The guidebook had been right. This was America; optimism, it seemed, made sense.

Carl sagan was born in Brooklyn on November 9, 1934. His mother, Rachel, named him in honor of her biological mother, Chaiya/Clara, the mother she never knew, in Sagan’s words.³⁶

As a science popularizer, Sagan sometimes drew on childhood memories to illustrate scientific points. Most of us have a memory like this: you’re lying in your crib, having awakened from your nap, he and his wife, Ann Druyan, wrote in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. You cry for your mother, at first tentatively, but when no one comes, more emphatically. Panic mounts. Where is she? Why doesn’t she come? you think, or something along those lines—although not in words, because your verbal consciousness is still almost wholly undeveloped. She enters the room smiling, she reaches in and picks you up, you hear her musical voice, you smell her perfume—and how your heart soars!³⁷

Rachel was madly in love with her little boy. She told him he was brilliant. He believed her. Throughout Sagan’s life, Rachel’s devotion to her son awed or amused or disgusted outsiders. She worshiped the ground he floated above, joked Peter Pesch, the best man at Sagan’s first wedding. He could do no wrong. That’s got to be a good start in life—a mother that thinks you are the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth.³⁸ Sagan’s boyhood friend Robert Gritz recalls Rachel bragging to everyone about Carl—for example, gloating, Oh, Carl got an A!³⁹ The writer Timothy Ferris, who befriended Sagan in the 1970s, remembers the aged Rachel as "an ur-mother who’d made a kind of shrine to Carl in the spare bedroom with all his awards and everything, and to whom every accomplishment was just a step toward the next accomplishment."⁴⁰

There’s no way of understanding him without understanding her very well, says Sagan’s first wife, scientist-author Lynn Margulis. "His mother had made him so dependent on this one relationship—on her. He was worthy of every attention, all the time, every need [was] always filled."⁴¹

Despite this adoration, there were hidden fears in Sagan’s life. He later wrote that starting at age two, he was frightened . . . by real-seeming but wholly imaginary ‘monsters,’ especially at night or in the dark. I can still remember occasions when I was absolutely terrified, hiding under the bedclothes until I could stand it no longer, and then bolting for the safety of my parents’ bedroom—if only I could get there before falling into the clutches of . . . The Presence.⁴² Sometimes he awoke drenched in sweat, my heart pounding. (A child is terrified of the dark, then grows up and becomes an astronomer. Psychoanalysts may make of this what they will.)

Rachel’s devotion to Carl was double-edged. She had experienced life’s darker side. She had little patience with those—even children—who fantasized about life. The slightest whimsical observation might irk or anger her. In his final years, Sagan recalled a blustery fall day when he was about age five, looking out the living room window at Lower New York Bay. The water was choppy and the sun was about to set. His mother came by the window and they gazed toward the Atlantic Ocean. On the other side of the sea, World War II was beginning. There are people fighting out there, killing each other, she told him. Carl replied: I know. I can see them. She fired back: No, you can’t. They’re too far away.

This seemingly trivial incident gnawed at Sagan. His adoring mother had contradicted him! He later wrote: How could she know whether I could see them or not? . . . Squinting, I had thought I’d made out a thin strip of land at the horizon on which tiny figures were pushing and shoving and dueling with swords as they did in my comic books.⁴³

Rachel could be utterly charming, Lynn Margulis recalls. Yet Rachel also could scan a newcomer, find her or his vulnerability, and stick it in—make a caustic remark that deeply hurt.⁴⁴ Sagan’s sister, Cari, remembers how as a child, I always had a deep voice and she would imitate it, not in a pleasant way, just in a way that wiped me out emotionally. . . . It was devastating. Cari’s mother gave Carl more attention: I can never remember her hugging me, Cari said.⁴⁵

Sagan’s son Nick, a television writer, recalls his grandmother as a delightful fireball. She was a great cook and loved to make him spicy spaghetti and meatballs. But she was insane—in a sometimes wonderful, and sometimes not wonderful, way . . . very paranoid. She was convinced that restaurants weren’t sanitary and that the waiters would always spit in the food. Rachel’s eccentricities affected Sagan emotionally. Her dedication to logic, like his, sometimes bordered on the illogical. Once Carl, smelling her cooking, made an Mmm! sound. What do you mean? she snapped angrily. You haven’t even tasted it yet! Over the long run, Nick believes, his father compensated for Rachel’s wackiness: "She was irrational in certain ways, and that led to his very ultra- rational kind of way with things."⁴⁶

Arrogance often hides insecurity; pretentiousness usually conceals ignorance. These are psychological truisms. Rachel was touchy about her limited education. Once she and some friends went to an Arthur Miller play and argued about it afterward. Feeling slighted, Rachel reportedly stormed off, declaring: "You’ll hear from me when I get my degree."⁴⁷ She wanted to go to college, but Sam vetoed the idea. He also forbade her to get a job. Uncharacteristically, she complied; no other man could have said no to Rachel and lived. She was resentful, but she didn’t let her mind rot. She read a great deal . . . was very interesting . . . an intellectual person, Cari says. "When I was taking piano lessons, she would be resting on the couch, reading the New York Times."⁴⁸

In the 1980s and 1990s, Sagan, Ann Druyan, and their intimate friend the movie producer Lynda Obst, met in southern California to plan the film Contact. Obst recalls how they sat around for hours, telling stories about their mothers: "Hours! . . . We were all really interested in psychology and figuring ourselves out." Sagan revered his mother’s memory, but by that time he didn’t have any illusions about her; he had seen how she treated his first two wives. He was also beginning to look into his own soul, to understand the kind of person he was—the kind of person Rachel had made him. All the time we talked about Rachel . . . [Carl] wasn’t angry with her . . . but he also knew how controlling she was, and how tough and mean she was to his other wives, and how selfish she made him in certain kinds of ways—how ‘entitled’ is a better word, Obst says. Rachel had so many secrets and so many issues. . . . I think she had a lot of rage. And Carl was her production—Carl was a ‘Rachel Production.’ And she launched him into the world to stake her claim. In some sense he was shot out of a cannon.⁴⁹

Indeed, little Carl was an impressive kid, sometimes too impressive. I was thrown out of Sunday school, he recalled. Someone had asked, How did Pharaoh’s daughter know that Moses was a Hebrew child? The answer was, He was circumcised, but the teacher was too embarrassed to say it. Carl kept pushing and pushing and pushing the teacher to answer the question. Did [the child] have a Hebrew letter on it? How could you know? . . . And the teacher couldn’t give me the answer, even though he knew it, because he was embarrassed.⁵⁰

Jews were a large fraction of the populace in Bensonhurst, a Brooklyn neighborhood. The Sagans lived in a modest apartment a short walk from the Atlantic Ocean. Nearby was Coney Island, a site of frequent Sagan family outings. Old photos show Carl lolling on the beach, with baby Cari on his back.

The 1930s. The Great Depression (which fascists blamed on Jews). Framed pictures of FDR (attacked by bigots for his Jew Deal) on kitchen walls. Edward G. Robinson (born Emmanuel Goldenberg) movies at the Bijou. Father Coughlin on the radio, denouncing Jews. My family never hid the fact that they were Jewish, [but] didn’t shout it from the rooftops, Cari Sagan says.⁵¹ The exact nature of the family’s religious faith is unclear. In a 1991 interview, Sagan recalled that they were Reform Jews, the more liberal wing of Judaism’s three main groups (Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform).⁵² Cari, however, says they were Conservative (that is, more conservative than Reform but more liberal than Orthodox).⁵³ In any case, both agree that their father, Sam, showed little religious interest. Cari says Rachel definitely believed in God and was active in the temple. . . . My mother only served kosher meat. . . . There [were] never any pork products or shellfish in the family or household. The couple occasionally quarreled, but not over religion.⁵⁴ Carl said: My mother and my father were deeply in love with each other, and so my father went along for my mother’s sake.⁵⁵ In turn, Cari noted, Rachel was flexible: My dad liked bacon and eggs. And so he would go out on a weekend or some time and have it at a restaurant. And my mother was okay with that because it wasn’t brought into the house.⁵⁶ In this Judaically fluid atmosphere, the teenage Carl would nurse primal doubts.

Secularization was in the air. The great rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the originator of Reconstructionist Judaism, a new, fourth branch of Judaism, urged Jews to abandon superstition, to rebuild their lives around ethnic identification rather than ancient folk tales.⁵⁷ The Humanist movement was well under way; its diverse band of intellectuals, leftists, and religious skeptics urged Americans to concentrate not on a doubtful hereafter but on the certain here and now.⁵⁸ Trotskyists passed out literature on street corners. One’s aunt or uncle might be an active member of the Communist party. In the park right across from Carl’s, on a Sunday afternoon, his friend Gritz remembers, it was like Hyde Park in London: guys would stand up and give speeches for or against Stalin.⁵⁹

Sam was no intellectual, and as a factory boss he was certainly no Marxist. But he gave his children a social conscience. Cari was awed by his warm relationship with his workers at the factory—no mean feat in the highly unionized and combative garment industry—and decided to become a social worker.⁶⁰

As for Carl, he was four or five years old when his parents took him to the New York World’s Fair of 1939–1940. Holding their lunches, they walked by a man selling pencils. Sam took Carl’s apple and gave it to the man. Carl disliked apples; nonetheless, he started wailing. It was his apple! To avoid embarrassing the man, Sam carried Carl away until their voices were out of earshot. We don’t really need that apple, he explained to his son gently. That fellow was hungry.⁶¹ Carl never forgot the lesson. Many decades later, his enemies would include the nation’s most virulent right-wingers.

At the nadir of the Depression, Sam Sagan had been a miserably paid movie usher in New York City. Six decades later, his only son’s name would glisten on the movie screen. Sagan recalled his parents: "My relationship with them was really very good. I missed them often. Still miss them. . . .

Every now and then, when I am working or I am shaving or something like that, I hear—as clear as a bell—one of them saying my name: ‘Carl,’ just like that. . . . It’s unmistakable. I know whose voice it is. . . . I turn around before I can do any cerebration on it. . . . [Memory of their voices] has to be in many different parts of my brain. And it’s not surprising that my brain would sort of, you know, play it back . . . every now and then.⁶²

When Sagan repeated this story publicly, parapsychology buffs misunderstood his meaning. They excitedly spread the rumor (in words to this effect): Carl Sagan, the king of skeptics, is in psychic contact with his dead parents! Pseudoscientists and occultists were always misunderstanding Sagan. He was the best-known scientist of his time, and they yearned to convert him to their various causes. And it is true that throughout his life, Sagan proposed many unusual ideas, some so unusual that his more conventional colleagues scorned him as a sensationalist, a headline grabber. But for all his fancies,