* * *
The fingers of her right hand were inserted into five evenly spaced receptacles in a low box on her desk. Since the invention of this device, she was able to save half an hour a week. But there hadn’t really been a great deal to do with that extra half hour.
“And I was telling Mrs. Yarborough all about it. She’s the one in the next bed, now that Mrs. Wertheimer passed on. I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but I take a lot of credit for what you’ve done.”
“Yes, Mother.”
She examined the gloss on her fingernails and decided that they needed another minute, maybe a minute-thirty.
“I was thinking about that time in fourth grade–remember? When it was pouring and you didn’t want to go to school? You wanted me to write a note the next day saying you’d been out because you were sick. And I wouldn’t do it. I said, `Ellie, apart from being beautiful, the most important thing in the world is an education. You can’t do much about being beautiful, but you can do something about an education. Go to school. You never know what you might learn today.’ Isn’t that right?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“But, I mean, isn’t that what I told you then?”
“Yes, I remember, Mom.”
The gloss on her four fingers was perfect, but her thumb still had a dull matte appearance.
“So I got your galoshes and your raincoat–it was one of those yellow slickers, you looked cute as a button in it–and scooted you off to school. And that’s the day you couldn’t answer a question in Mr. Weisbrod’s mathematics class? And you got so furious you marched down to the college library and read up on it till you knew more about it than Mr. Weisbrod. He was impressed. He told me.”
“He told you? I didn’t know that. When did you talk to Mr. Weisbrod?”
“It was a parent-teacher meeting. He said to me, `That girl of yours, she’s a spunky one.’ Or words to that effect. `She got so mad at me, she became a real expert on it.’ `Expert.’ That’s what he said. I know I told you about it.”
Her feet were propped up on a desk drawer as she reclined in the swivel chair; she was stabilized only by her fingers in the varnish machine. She felt the buzzer almost before she heard it, and abruptly sat up.
“Mom, I gotta go.”
“I’m sure I’ve told you this story before. You just never pay attention to what I’m saying. Mr. Weisbrod, he was a nice man. You never could see his good side.”
“Mom, really, I’ve gotta go. We’ve caught some kind of bogey.”
“Bogey?”
“You know, Mom, something that might be a signal. We’ve talked about it.”
“There we are, both of us thinking the other one isn’t listening. Like mother, like daughter.”
“Bye, Mom.”
“I’ll let you go if you promise to call me right after.”
“Okay, Mom. I promise.”
Through the whole conversation, her mother’s need and loneliness had elicited in Ellie a wish to end the conversation, to run away. She hated herself for that.
* * *
Briskly she entered the control area and approached the main console.
“Evening, Willie, Steve. Let’s see the data. Good. Now where did you tuck away the amplitude plot? Good. Do you have the interferometric position? Okay. Now let’s see if there’s any nearby star in that field of view. Oh my, we’re looking at Vega. That’s a pretty near neighbor.”
Her fingers were punching away at a keyboard as she talked.
“Look, it’s only twenty-six light-years away. It’s been observed before, always with negative results. I looked at it myself in my first Arecibo survey. What’s the absolute intensity? Holy Toledo. That’s hundreds of janskys. You could practically pick that up on your FM radio.
“Okay. So we have a bogey very near to Vega in the plane of the sky It’s at a frequency around 9.2 gigahertz, not very monochromatic: The bandwidth is a few hundred hertz. It’s linearly polarized and it’s transmitting a set of moving pulses restricted to two different amplitudes.”
In response to her typed commands the screen now displayed the disposition of all the radio telescopes.
“It’s being received by 116 individual telescopes. Clearly it’s not a malfunction in one or two of them. Okay, now we should have plenty of time baseline. Is it moving with the stars? Or could it be some ELINT satellite or aircraft?”
“I can confirm sidereal motion, Dr. Arroway.”
“Okay, that’s pretty convincing. It’s not down here on Earth, and it probably isn’t from an artificial satellite in a Molniya orbit, although we should check that. When you get a chance, Willie, call up NORAD and see what they say about the satellite possibility. If we can exclude satellites, that will leave two possibilities: It’s a hoax, or somebody has finally gotten around to sending us a message. Steve, do a manual override. Check a few individual radio telescopes–the signal strength is certainly large enough–and see if there’s any chance this is a hoax; you know, a practical joke by someone who wishes to teach us the error of our ways.”
“A handful of other scientists and technicians, alerted on their buzzers by the Argus computer, had gathered around the command console. There were half smiles on their faces. None of them was thinking seriously of a message from another world quite yet, but there was a sense of no-school-today, a break in the tedious routine to which they had become accustomed, and perhaps a faint air of expectation.
“If any of you can think of any other explanation besides extraterrestrial intelligence, I want to hear about it,” she said, acknowledging their presence.
“There’s no way it could be Vega, Dr. Arroway. The system’s only a few hundred million years old. Its planets are still in the process of forming. There isn’t time for intelligent life to have developed there. It has to be some background star. Or galaxy.”
“But then the transmitter power has to be ridiculously large,” responded a member of the quasar group who had returned to see what was happening. “We need to get going right away on a sensitive proper motion study, so we can see if the radio source moves with Vega.”
“Of course, you’re right about the proper motion, Jack,” she said. “But there’s another possibility. Maybe they didn’t grow up in the Vega system. Maybe they’re just visiting.”
“That’s no good either. The system is full of debris. It’s a failed solar system or solar system still in its early stages of development. If they stay very long, their spacecraft’ll be clobbered.”
“So they only arrived recently. Or they vaporize incoming meteorites. Or they take evasive action if there’s a piece of debris on a collision trajectory. Or they’re not in the ring plane but in polar orbit, so they minimize their encounters with the debris. There’s a million possibilities. But you’re absolutely right; we don’t have to guess whether the source is in the Vega system. We can actually find out. How long will that proper motion study take? By the way, Steve, this isn’t your shift. At least tell Consuela you’re going to be late for dinner.”
Willie, who had been talking on the phone at an adjacent console, was displaying a wan smile. “Well, I got through to a Major Braintree at NORAD. He swears up and down they have nothing that’ll give this signal, especially not at nine gigahertz. ‘Course, they tell us that every time we call. Anyway, he says they haven’t detected any spacecraft at the right ascension and declination of Vega.”
“What about darks?”
By this time there were many “dark” satellites with low radar cross sections, designed to orbit Earth unannounced and undetected until an hour of need. Then they would serve as backups for launch detection or communications in a nuclear war, in case the first-line military satellites dedicated to these purposes were suddenly missing in action. Occasionally a dark would be detected by one of the major astronomical radar systems. All nations would deny that the object belonged to them, and breathless speculation would erupt that an extraterrestrial spacecraft had been detected in Earth orbit. As the Millennium approached, the UFO cults were thriving again.
“Interferometry now rules out a Molniya-type orbit, Dr. Arroway.”
“Better and better. Now let’s take a closer look at those moving pulses. Assuming that this is binary arithmetic, has anybody converted it into base ten? Do we know what the sequence of numbers is? Okay, here, we can do it in our heads… fifty-nine, sixty-one, sixty-seven… seventy-one… Aren’t these all prime numbers?”
A little buzz of excitement circulated through the control room. Ellie’s own face momentarily revealed a flutter of something deeply felt, but this was quickly replaced by a sobriety, a fear of being carried away, an apprehension about appearing foolish, unscientific.