The Nine Billion Names of God

This story begins with a note from the author explaining that the famous movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was inspired by “The Sentinel.” At the time that Clarke wrote this, the first moon landing had not yet occurred.

The narrator describes entering the Mare Crisium on the moon for the first time in 1996. He describes living on the moon in protected tractors, spending his days exploring the surface and going back to base when necessary. He marvels at the beauty of the mountainous terrain and the dry riverbeds and sea floors. The men on the moon live a relatively normal, even boring life, “apart from the feeling of decreased weight and the unnatural slowness with which objects fell” (233).

As the narrator prepares breakfast for the crew, he gazes out the window and notices something shiny atop a mountain in the distance. After looking more closely through a telescope, he suspects it may be a manmade object, rather than a natural part of the moon’s landscape. He and the crew argue all day, everyone convinced that there is no chance intelligent life has ever set foot on the moon before. With help from his colleague Garnett, the narrator decides to climb the mountain the next morning to further examine the object. The men slowly climb thousands of feet, being careful not to fall. Near the top of the ascent, the narrator is almost convinced that there will be nothing of note to find when he reaches his destination. But as he pulls himself over the edge of the mountain he is shocked to find “a glittering, roughly pyramidal structure, twice as high as a man, that was set in the rock like a multi-faceted jewel” (237).

The narrator finds that the object is surrounded by a forcefield the likes of which he has never seen, and there is a thick layer of dust around it. This suggests that the object has been here for a very long time. He first imagines that an extinct lunar race must have built the object, but then experiences shock as he realizes this must have been placed on the moon by some other intelligent life.

It takes the crew 20 years to break through the protective forcefield: “[W]hat we could not understand, we broke with the savage might of atomic power” (239). They cannot decipher what the object is or who it belongs to. The narrator describes feeling haunted by the object, especially as his crew has now travelled to many other planets and found no signs of intelligent life. They use the meteoric dust to determine an age and guess that the object was placed on the moon “before life had emerged from the seas of Earth” (239).

The narrator now supplies his theory: He believes that an intelligent race looked out into the galaxy and saw nothing that resembled intelligence. They placed sentinels all over the galaxy to send signals back to them when signs of life emerged. The narrator theorizes that these creatures would not be interested in life on Earth until it had developed to the point of traveling to the moon, thus they placed the sentinel there rather than on Earth. After breaking the sphere of protection and dismantling the sentinel, the crew “has set off the fire alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long” (240). The story ends here, leaving it up to the reader to guess whether the life-forms at the other end of the sentinel’s beacon are friendly or not.

A child emerges from a forest which lines a coarse sand beach. The air is hot and humid. The boy walks cautiously onto the sand, naked with long dark hair. The narrator describes him as nearly human, perhaps an early Homo sapien: “His face, brutish though it was, might almost have passed in human society, but the eyes would have betrayed him” (241). The narrator describes this boy’s hesitant journey from the forest to the shoreline as the first ever footprint upon the sand.

The story moves forward in time. Now another boy plays in the tide pools of the same beach. There is a town and a promenade. People lie on the beach sunning themselves. The boy contentedly makes sandcastles, looking up to notice a great steamship sailing into the horizon. The narrator notes that the boy is filled with a sense of the infinite future, despite “that tomorrow would not always come, either for himself or for the world” (243).

The story moves again further into the future. A young boy named Bran plays on the beach, observed by a “machine that guarded him […] unobtrusively from the shore” (244). He pretends that the sand is the terrain of Mars and he is a great engineer named Cardenis. Ships no longer sail on the seas. He notices that there are no other children playing on the beach. Then he notices that the “great ships climbing through the skies of Earth on their way to distant worlds” (244) seem only to be outgoing these days. He wonders why voyagers no longer come to visit, and why asking about this makes people so sad. The machine calls out to him that it is time to leave the beach. Bran looks up and finds his parents walking toward him. They tell him sadly that they must leave and that he will not be able to return to the beach. He suddenly understands that he is leaving forever. Bran and his parents board a ship as the last of the humans depart planet Earth. Only the beach and the tides are left to witness the “tentacles of the Dark Nebula” (246) as the Earth is overcome by explosions. The story concludes with the matter of fact statement that “Man had come and gone” (246).

A Jesuit priest commands the crew of a spaceship returning home from an exploration of a distant star system. What the crew found on a destroyed planet has shaken the priest to his core, calling into question all of his religious faith and beliefs. He speaks to the memory of Father Loyola, wondering if he would maintain his faith if he saw what the narrator had seen.

The priest describes the Phoenix Nebula, a supernova that imploded long ago. His team’s mission was to visit the “remnants of such a catastrophe” (249). They fly through the path of destruction caused by the sun’s explosion, not expecting to find any planets that could have survived the fiery blast. They are surprised to spot one planet which the narrator compares to Pluto. Even more surprising is their discovery on the planet: a vault which contains remnants of “a civilization that knew it was about to die [and] had made its last bid for immortality” (250).

The astronauts spend a week drilling into the vault, and what they discover inside humbles them. The civilization was humanlike, its planet similar to Earth. They developed language, music, art, and interplanetary space travel. The narrator is particularly moved by this planet’s destruction because it is clear that its demise came at the peak of its development. He cannot fathom how a merciful God would allow these innocent people to be destroyed for no reason. He tries to calm himself with the argument that “God has no need to justify His actions to man. He who built the universe can destroy it when He chooses” (252). But when the priest does the calculations which give the exact date of the planet’s destruction, he completely loses faith. He realizes that the explosion of the supernova which brought total destruction to one civilization is the same date that Earth saw the new star that marks the birth of Jesus. The story ends with the painful question: “What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?” (253).