Roman tries to raise someone on the radio and gets a crackly response from a man who keeps repeating that his name is Tony. Roman identifies himself as a cosmonaut, but the signal stays faint and confused, with both men talking past each other.

The moment opens into a meditation on Voyager 1 and 2, drifting beyond the heliosphere with golden phonograph records of Earth’s sounds. The chapter imagines distant beings discovering the discs and hearing everything from music and animal calls to a recording of human brainwaves.

The narration dwells on the improbability of anyone decoding the EEG sounds, yet lingers on what they contain: a young woman’s thoughts, meant to convey Earth’s history, repeatedly overwhelmed by her lover—love, desire, and the feeling that Earth and beloved are continuous.

Even if never found or understood, the record’s “love-flooded brain” becomes a kind of message that outlasts Earth itself, wandering for billions of years as a relic of human feeling.

The crew recalls watching a lunar rocket launch the previous day: the fireball and smoke giving way to the rocket’s quiet ascent. They mentally follow the lunar astronauts through their final morning, the procedures and branding of launch day, and the transformation from ordinary human selves into sealed, engineered figures ready for space.