Excerpt:

It sounds quaint now, but it seemed profound then that such a simple message could bear the weight of the most significant event in human history. But there was no time for profound thought because Christmas was near. With my observatory time up, I headed home to Chicago for another year's celebration by myself. It's not that I have nobody to celebrate with; they just make too much fuss about it, so I pretend to them that I don't celebrate anything, and then I do it privately in my own way. The eggnog was mediocre, and my present to myself was another book, this time Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End. An old classic. I fell asleep while reading it on the couch and spilled my eggnog on the cornflower-blue carpet.