(FORTUNE Magazine) – Matters. Hey, fellows, where's the Inquisition when we really need it? Are we just going to stand around and watch while this crazy astronomer keeps pushing his politics on millions of universe fans and furthermore has an unsuppressed oeuvre called Contact that is No. 3 on the New York Times list of fiction best-sellers? That's right, Carl Sagan also writes novels. In addition to which the former star of TV's Cosmos show, not to mention his repeat appearances on Johnny Carson, has a book on Halley's comet coming along, so there is his agent salivating all over the Times reporter's notebook while hypothesizing that old Carl will soon enough be No. 1 on both the fiction and nonfiction lists, a parlay that Galileo never even came close to. Cornell's David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences is really most maddening. He is now repeatedly using his cosmos platform to pronounce on geopolitical issues while not exactly being Clausewitz. We personally place Carl's oleaginous message somewhere in the zone between Ed Asner and Henry Wallace. The schmaltzy central idea is that these superpower disagreements observed by us earthlings reflect some great big misunderstanding. Everybody is so suspicious of everybody else. Americans felt they had to have the atomic bomb, and that led the Russians to decide they also needed it. In Cosmos, the book made from the television show, Carl actually seems to be saying the Russkies would never have bothered if the Yanks hadn't gone and nuked up first. (''There is a dreary chain of causality . . . If the Americans had one, the Soviets had to have one.'') Collectors of lovable liberal fantasies can ill afford to bypass Contact. The novel, whose events take place some time in the future, features an Oval Office lady they call Ms. President. Somewhere along the way, it emerges that basketball teams of the future will have both men and women players. A Nigerian is identified as maybe the smartest person in the whole world. Pretty enlightened, eh? The heroine, an astronomer, detentishly allies herself with a Soviet astrophysicist in fighting miscellaneous bad guys. To your average mistrustful hardliner, the Soviet Union will often seem a bit out of focus in Contact. The story line at one point requires both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to be working on machines that will ultimately enable our planet to contact those other characters. ''Both nations,'' Sagan solemnly states, do the construction in remote areas, for fear of ''curiosity seekers, protesters, and the media.'' Having cagily turned the reader's brain to - tapioca with this assortment of female Julius Ervings and investigative reporters from Pravda, the author finally sidles up to his editorial message. After the ''contact,'' earth folks suddenly see that the differences dividing various nations of the world are less important than previously posited. Sagan has lately been pushing the idea of a manned mission to Mars, the main justification for which is avowedly not scientific. The point is the opportunity it would offer for a joint Soviet-American effort, which might feature extensive cuddling en route and would definitely require massive suspicion-dissipating cooperation on the ground. A New York Times reporter on whom Carl was recently dumping this fantasy asked a great question: which country's spaceperson would first set foot on the planet? Sagan's solution to this problem will make terrific sense to progressive thinkers everywhere, especially those who have never participated in the potato sack race event. Solomonic solution: ''You tie the legs of the Russian and American commanders and make them hop down together.''