Then the technical people talked for some hours about the sorts of knowledge they could transmit, and the sorts of things they eventually could use in return. They set up a schedule, starting five days hence, for people from each discipline to begin teaching. It was easy to calculate at what time of day we would be above Key West’s horizon, and we would broadcast constantly whenever they could hear us.

O’Hara well understood the Machiavellian angle behind this generous giveaway of knowledge. We wanted to put them in our debt, and fast. Sooner or later the groundhogs would uncover a treasure-trove library and be able to unlock it. Then, if they were so disposed, they could transfer the data to ’Home in a few days or years, depending on their level of technology, and undo a large part of the damage New New had caused.

If they felt they had some reason to withhold data from us, though, there was nothing we could do. We would be back where we started, with the prospect of slowly evolving mathematics, the sciences, and engineering, but with most of history, literature, and music forever lost.

O’Hara’s first assignment in this grand dissemination of data was to teach the rules of games. That seemed less than grand, compared to the responsibilities of people delivering learned disquisitions about trigonometry or ethics, but it was arguably one of the most useful early lessons, relatively easy to follow and associated with pleasure. She brainstormed with Gunter, Lebovski, and Saijo, eliminating games with complicated pieces or rules, starting with children’s play and moving up through more elaborate games of skill and chance.

The short transmission from Earth hadn’t given them any useful clues. Teaching children how to play jacks and marbles would be sort of cruel if there were no jacks or marbles. What simple games could they be sure had survived the cataclysm—should they teach kids how to play tag, hide-and-go-seek? (They decided against that genre, so as not to appear too ridiculous.) They gambled that durable accessories like horseshoes and balls would be available, though their demonstrations of such pastimes would look strange from a groundhog viewpoint. In a rotating frame, every pitch is a curve ball. A horseshoe’s path is a sideways-twisted parabola.

The first dozen or so transmissions were fairly easy to set up, since they involved only simple introductions to selected pastimes. Once past the obvious, though, they had to decide between depth and breadth. They had demonstrated the basic moves and rules of chess, for instance. You could spend hundreds of hours explaining various strategies, but given only one hour of transmission each three days, would it be more constructive to spend it discussing a few classic chess openings or to start something new, relatively obscure—sketch out the rules of Parcheesi, or Texas Hold’-Em? The four of them spent much more time deciding what to teach than teaching.