A Case of Conscience

In the year 2049, Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, a Peruvian Jesuit priest and biologist, is stationed on Lithia, a habitable planet fifty light-years from Earth, as part of a four-man commission tasked with determining whether the planet should be opened to human contact. The other members are Paul Cleaver, a physicist; Mike Michelis, a chemist; and Agronski, a geologist. When Cleaver returns from the jungle poisoned by a toxic plant spine, Ruiz-Sanchez treats him and puts him under heavy sedation, then ventures out to send a message summoning Michelis and Agronski from the northern continent.

Lithia is a warm, perpetually cloudy world whose climate has been stable for seven hundred million years. Its dominant species, the Lithians, are twelve-foot-tall intelligent bipedal reptiles who have built an advanced civilization without metal, relying instead on ceramics, glass, and wood. Their planet-wide communications network centers on the Message Tree, a giant living structure whose root system generates radio pulses by stressing a buried piezoelectric cliff, a formation of crystals that produce electrical charges under mechanical pressure. The Lithians have no crime, no religion, no money, no political parties, and no concept of greed. Their society operates through pure reason and an unwritten moral code that, point for point, mirrors the highest Christian ethical principles.

At the Message Tree, Ruiz-Sanchez encounters Chtexa, a Lithian metallurgist, who sends the message on his behalf and invites the priest to his home. There, Chtexa reveals a startling fact about Lithian biology: Their young undergo complete physical recapitulation outside the body. Females lay eggs in abdominal pouches, then give birth in the sea, where the offspring hatch as fish. These fish develop lungs and crawl ashore as amphibians, then transform into small leaping reptiles in the jungle before finally emerging as fully grown adults ready for education. Ruiz-Sanchez realizes with shock that the barking lungfish and small leaping creatures he has observed throughout the landscape are all juvenile Lithians at different developmental stages.

Returning at dawn, deeply shaken, Ruiz-Sanchez finds that Michelis and Agronski have arrived on their own, alarmed by prolonged silence from the south. Cleaver, drifting in and out of consciousness, has been unable to speak to them. After everyone rests, Cleaver recovers enough to participate in the commission's deliberations. He confesses that he deliberately avoided communicating with Michelis and Agronski, hoping to make the Lithians appear dangerous. His real objective is to have Lithia sealed off and converted into a thermonuclear weapons facility, exploiting its vast lithium deposits for fusion bombs.

Michelis delivers a forceful rebuttal. He argues that introducing money or forced labor to the Lithians amounts to slavery, that shipping lithium across fifty light-years is economically absurd, and that Lithia's true value lies in what humanity can learn from its balanced society and advanced sciences. Agronski wavers between the two positions.

Then Ruiz-Sanchez stuns everyone. He agrees with Cleaver that Lithia should be classified Unfavorable but goes further, voting for permanent quarantine to seal the planet off from humanity forever. He argues that Lithia's moral perfection, its point-for-point correspondence with Christian ethics achieved entirely without faith or God, is not a coincidence but a deliberate trap set by Satan. The Lithians' visible external recapitulation, he contends, is the Devil's most sophisticated argument yet, designed to convince humanity that evolution disproves divine creation. Michelis identifies the flaw: Granting Satan creative power is the ancient heresy of Manichaeanism, a doctrine the Church condemned for asserting that evil possesses power equal to God's. Ruiz-Sanchez acknowledges this but insists the evidence compels him.

The commission deadlocks two-to-two, deferring the question to Earth. As they prepare to depart, Chtexa appears and presents Ruiz-Sanchez with a magnificent ceramic vase containing a fertilized living egg: Chtexa's own child, a gift for the Earthmen to raise on their world.

Back on Earth, the egg hatches into a fish-like larva and develops through its life stages in captivity under the care of Ruiz-Sanchez and Dr. Liu Meid, a UN xenozoologist specializing in the study of extraterrestrial animal life. Deprived of Lithia's natural tides, predators, and successive ecologies, the creature, named Egtverchi, grows into a physically and psychologically stunted specimen. Earth itself is in crisis: The legacy of the Shelter race, a decades-long competition in underground city-building spanning 1960 to 1985, has left humanity entombed in vast subterranean warrens that breed epidemic rates of mental illness and social unrest. When Egtverchi reaches adult intelligence, he passes a UN citizenship examination and quickly becomes a sponsored 3-V (three-dimensional television) news commentator. His wry, alien perspective on human customs attracts a large audience split between disaffected intellectuals and children. His popularity soars, but so does his contempt for Earth's institutions. At a lavish party hosted by the wealthy socialite Countess d'Averoigne, Egtverchi arrives with uniformed followers, dominates the evening with provocative wit, and causes a scandal that ruins the countess socially. Meanwhile, Agronski drifts into a deepening psychological crisis, losing all sense of connection to reality.

Ruiz-Sanchez travels to Rome for the Holy Year of 2050, a rare jubilee occurring once every fifty years that offers special papal indulgences. He expects to be tried for heresy, but instead Pope Hadrian VIII receives him and reveals that formal proceedings have been set aside. The Pope tells Ruiz-Sanchez that his crucial oversight was failing to recognize that if Lithia is a sending of Satan, it can be banished through exorcism, a power God has placed in priestly hands. This avoids Manichaeanism by treating Lithia as an elaborate illusion rather than a true creation. Hadrian commands Ruiz-Sanchez to attempt the exorcism and withholds both his blessing and the Holy Year's indulgence until the battle is won.

Back in New York, tensions escalate. The UN has secretly decided in Cleaver's favor: Lithia is being converted into a fusion power laboratory under Cleaver's direction. Through a prototype interstellar communicator built by the countess's husband, Count d'Averoigne, a brilliant mathematician, Ruiz-Sanchez manages to speak with Chtexa across fifty light-years. Chtexa, saddened by his son's troubles, commands Egtverchi to return home. Egtverchi contemptuously refuses, and Chtexa warns they may never speak again because Cleaver is cutting down the Message Tree.

Egtverchi then delivers his most radical broadcast, renouncing his UN citizenship and calling on his audience to do the same. He tells them to abandon the underground corridors, refuse serial numbers, and tear up their registration cards: "Your beasts, sir, are a great people" (209). He urges them to "Renounce, resist, deny!" (210). Massive rioting erupts across the globe. In Manhattan, mobs storm above-ground buildings. When rioters break into the apartment neighboring Michelis and Liu's home and hurl debris through the glass sun porch, Liu's giant tetraploid bees, insects bred to enormous size through chromosomal doubling, swarm out and attack the intruders. Ruiz-Sanchez, alone in the apartment, ventures out to administer last rites and discovers Agronski, unaffiliated with the rioters, dying of massive bee stings in a neighboring unit. The geologist dies without recognizing him.

Egtverchi vanishes during the chaos. He is eventually found aboard a cargo ship bound for Lithia, having had himself crated and shipped as freight. The UN summons Ruiz-Sanchez, Michelis, and Liu to the Moon, where the count has completed a massive telescope capable of observing Lithia in real time. The count reveals that he checked the reasoning behind Cleaver's crucial experiment and found a fatal error. Since lithium-6, a key isotope for fusion reactions, is ubiquitous on the planet, any failure would be catastrophic. He sent a warning but doubts Cleaver will listen.

On the observatory screen, Lithia floats serenely. Ruiz-Sanchez rises and performs the ancient rite of exorcism, commanding the forces of evil to depart. As the words conclude, Lithia turns white on the screen, then begins to swell. The circuit overloads and the image vanishes. The count attributes the destruction to Cleaver's flawed equation. Ruiz-Sanchez understands it differently, sensing that each commission member's deepest desires for Lithia have been fulfilled in terrible fashion. Whether the planet's end was caused by Cleaver's failed experiment or by the exorcism, the novel does not resolve. The resulting nova will not be visible to the naked eye for fifty years. The count leads the others outside, and Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, excommunicated and stripped of his certainties, is left alone with his God and his grief.