"That's a very good idea!" he replies. "I'm thinking on my feet here, but it's an excellent idea."

"I'm full of ideas like that. I'd be happy to join the Post-Detection Science and Technology Taskgroup."

Paul looks panicked. "There's no money."

"Oh, right," I say. "Right. Yes." It is an awkward moment.

"So what will the message say?" I ask, changing the subject.

"We're talking about two civilizations communicating their finest achievements and their deepest beliefs and att.i.tudes. I feel we should send something about our level of scientific attainment and understanding of how the world works. Some fundamental physics. Maybe some biology. But primarily physics and astronomy."

"And some cla.s.sical music?" I suggest.

"Well, we could, but it's not going to mean anything to them," Paul says.

"Yes, yes, of course." I pause. "Why won't it mean anything to them?"

"There's nothing certain in this game," Paul says, "but our appreciation of art and music is very much tied to our cognitive architecture. There's no particular reason why some other intelligent species will share these aesthetic values. The general theory of relativity is impressive and will surely be understood by them. But if we send a Pica.s.so or a Mona Lisa? They wouldn't care." He pauses. "I mean the phonograph disc that went off on Voyager had speeches by Kurt Waldheim and Jimmy Carter. That's a world away from what we should be doing."

"Of course, the world will eventually discover the coordinates and start sending up their own stuff," I say.

"Yes. So one of the first things we might want to say is that there's no unitary government on this planet, no unitary political philosophy or ideology. We're a great place for freedom, if not anarchy, and so we're putting together the best possible coherent package for your consideration, but expect it to be followed up with all sorts of bizarre and incoherent babble that you must treat with some discretion." He pauses. "Although how we'll express all this when we only have mathematics in common will be something of a challenge."

We get the bill. Paul wants to end on an optimistic note and so he mentions the one time in SETI history when something broke the silence.

"We call it the Wow signal," he says. "It was a radio telescope in Ohio, back in the days when they didn't have the electronic gadgetry to go 'ping' if there was something weird. So they looked at a computer printout some weeks afterward, and it showed a signal that went on for seventy-two seconds. n.o.body was listening at the time. The researcher wrote 'Wow' in the margin. And many times radio telescopes have been turned on that star, but nothing odd has ever happened again."

"Should we feel excited by the Wow signal?"

"I've often wondered," Paul says. He puts on his coat. "What we're doing is a fantastic and challenging task. It compels us to think about all the things we should be thinking about. What is life? What is intelligence?" He pauses. "And if nothing else, it is a great deal of fun."

Stanley Kubrick's Boxes

In 1996 I received a telephone call from a man calling himself Tony.

"I'm phoning on behalf of my employer," he said. "He'd like you to send him a radio doc.u.mentary you made called Hotel Auschwitz."

"Who's your employer?" I asked.

"I can't tell you," he said.

"Really?" I said. "Oh, go on. Please. Who is it?"

I heard him sigh. "It's Stanley Kubrick," he said.

"I'm sorry?" I said.

"Let me give you the address," said the man. He sounded posh. It seemed that he didn't want to say any more about this than he had to. I sent the tape to a PO box in St. Albans and I waited. What might happen next?

BY THE TIME I RECEIVED that telephone call, nine years had pa.s.sed since Kubrick's last film-Full Metal Jacket. All anyone outside his circle knew about him was that he was living in a house somewhere near St. Albans-or a "secret lair" according to a Sunday Times article of that year-behaving presumably like some kind of mad hermit genius. n.o.body even knew what he looked like. It was sixteen years since a photograph of him had been published.

He'd gone from making a film a year in the 1950s (including the brilliant, horrific Paths of Glory), to a film every couple of years in the sixties (Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, and 2001: A s.p.a.ce Odyssey all came out within a six-year period), to two films per decade in the seventies and eighties (there had been a seven-year gap between The Shining and Full Metal Jacket), and now, in the 1990s, absolutely nothing at all. What was he doing in there? According to rumors, he was pa.s.sing his time being terrified of germs and refusing to let his chauffeur drive over 30 mph. But now I knew what he was doing. He was listening to my BBC Radio 4 doc.u.mentary, Hotel Auschwitz.

"The good news," wrote the Times that year, bemoaning the ever-lengthening gaps between his films, "is that Kubrick is reportedly a h.o.a.rder. There is apparently an extensive archive of material at his home in Childwickbury Manor. When that is eventually opened we may get close to understanding the tangled brain which brought to life HAL, the Clockwork Orange Droogs and Jack Torrance."

The thing is, once I sent the tape to the PO box, nothing happened next. I never heard anything again. Not a word. My ca.s.sette disappeared into the mysterious world of Stanley Kubrick. And then, three years later, Kubrick was dead.

Two years after that-in 2001-I got another phone call out of the blue from the man called Tony. "Do you want to get some lunch?" he asked. "Why don't you come up to Childwick?"

The journey to the Kubrick house starts normally. You drive through the St. Albans suburbs, pa.s.sing ordinary-sized postwar houses and opticians and vets. Then you turn right, past the Private Road sign, into an almost absurdly perfect picturesque model village. Even the name, Childwick Green, sounds like A. A. Milne wrote it. There's an electric gate at the end, with a Do Not Trespa.s.s sign. Drive through that, and through some woods, and past a long white fence with the paint peeling off, and then another electric gate, and then another electric gate, and then another electric gate and you're in the middle of an estate full of boxes.

There are boxes everywhere-shelves of boxes in the stable block, rooms full of boxes in the main house. In the fields, where racehorses once stood and grazed, are half a dozen Portakabins, each packed with boxes. I notice that many of the boxes are sealed. Some have, in fact, remained unopened for decades.

Tony turns out to be Tony Frewin. He started working as an office boy for Kubrick in 1965, when he was seventeen. One day, apropos of nothing, Kubrick said to him, "You have that office outside my office if I need you."

That was thirty-six years ago and Tony is still here, two years after Kubrick died and was buried in the grounds behind the house. There may be no more Kubrick movies to make, but there are DVDs to remaster and reissue in special editions. There are box sets and retrospective books to oversee. There is paperwork.

Tony gives me a guided tour through the house. We walk past boxes and more boxes and filing cabinets and past a grand staircase. Childwick was once home to a family of horse trainers called the Joels. Back then there was, presumably, busts or floral displays on either side at the bottom of this staircase. Here, instead, is a photocopier on one side and a fax machine on the other.

"This is how Stanley left it," says Tony.

Stanley Kubrick's house looks like the Inland Revenue took it over long ago. Tony takes me into a large room painted blue and filled with books.

"This used to be the cinema," he tells me.

"Is it the library now?" I ask.

"Look closer at the books," says Tony.

I do.

"b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l," I say. "Every book in this room is about Napoleon!"

"Look in the drawers," says Tony.

I do.

"It's all about Napoleon too!" I say. "Everything in here is about Napoleon!"

I must say I feel a little like Sh.e.l.ley Duvall in The Shining, chancing upon her husband's novel and finding it is consisting entirely of the line "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" typed over and over again. John Baxter wrote, in his unauthorized biography of Kubrick, "Most people attributed the purchase of Childwick to Kubrick's pa.s.sion for privacy, and drew parallels with Jack Torrance in The Shining." This room full of Napoleon stuff seems to bear that comparison out.