Half a year after returning to Tsinghua, Ye Wenjie joins a task force designing a large radio astronomy observatory. While surveying remote northwestern sites chosen for low electromagnetic interference, Ye and her colleagues are taken to meet a foreigner the villagers call "Bethune." The man is Mike Evans, an American who has spent years planting trees to save an endangered swallow subspecies. In his crude hut and forest, Evans explains that he wants to save nonhuman life, not people, and describes the oil spill from his father's company that convinced him human civilization destroys other species for its own comfort.

Evans tells Ye that he has devoted his life to what he calls "Pan-Species Communism," the belief that all species are equal. Ye challenges the practicality of that idea, but she is deeply affected by Evans's moral seriousness and his hatred of human selfishness. On the way back, Ye's colleagues admire Evans, while Ye privately reflects that if there had been more men like him, her life and conclusions about humanity might have been different. Even so, the observatory site is rejected, not for technical reasons, but because the task force leader fears conflict with poor local villagers.

Three years later, Ye receives a postcard from Evans asking her to come and tell him how to go on. When she returns to the village, she finds the forest being cut down by workers from nearby villages. The former production team leader, now village chief, explains that Evans's trees are not legally protected, and that local officials and police are taking timber as well. Ye learns that poverty, greed, and official complicity have combined to destroy the forest Evans created.

Ye finds Evans still working among the trees. Evans says stopping the logging is not the real issue: after inheriting about 4.5 billion dollars and his father's oil company, he could easily save this forest, but he no longer believes isolated victories matter. In his view, rich and poor societies alike sacrifice the rest of life to sustain human civilization, so extinction and ecological destruction will continue no matter how much money is spent. His despair grows from the conclusion that humanity as a whole cannot change its course.

Because Evans has reached the same judgment about humanity that Ye has long held, Ye finally tells him the full story of Red Coast and Trisolaris. She argues that human civilization cannot improve through its own power and that help must come from outside humanity. Evans is stunned and says he will use his resources to verify her story, but he immediately offers his hand and says, "let us be comrades." Their alliance begins here, forming the ideological and personal foundation for the future Earth-Trisolaris movement.