“What does it say?” the President asked. “What’s it about?”
“We haven’t the foggiest idea, Ms. President. Some of the people at Project Argus tumbled to it early this morning Washington time. We’ve been working on it all night.”
“Over an open phone?” asked Kitz.
“With standard commercial encryption.” Ellie looked a little flushed. Opening her telefax case, she quickly generated a transparency printout and, when an overhead projector, cast its image against a screen.
“Here’s all we know up to now: We’ll get a block of information comprising about a thousand bits. There’ll be a pause, and then the same block will be repeated, bit for bit. Then there’ll be another pause, and we’ll go on to the next block. It’s repeated as well. The repetition of every block is probably to minimize transmission errors. They must think it’s very important that we get whatever it is they’re saying down accurately. Now, let’s call each of these blocks of information a page. Argus is picking up a few dozen of these pages a day. But we don’t know what they’re about. They’re not a simple picture code like the Olympic message. This is something much deeper and much richer. It appears to be, for the first time, information they’ve generated. The only clue we have so far is that the pages seem to be numbered. At the beginning of every page there’s a number in binary arithmetic. See this one here? And every time another pair of identical pages shows up, it’s labeled with the next higher number. Right now we’re on page… 10,413. It’s a big book. Calculating back, it seems that the message began about three months ago. We’re lucky to have picked it up as early as we did.”
“I was right, wasn’t I?” Kitz leaned across the table to der Heer. “This isn’t the kind of message you want to give to the Japanese or the Chinese or the Russians, is it?”
“Is it going to be easy to figure out?” the President asked over the whispering Kitz.
“We will, of course, make out best efforts. And it probably would be useful to have the National Security Agency work on it also. But without an explanation from Vega, without a primer, my guess is that we’re not going to make much progress. It certainly doesn’t seem to be written in English or German or any other Earthly language. Our hope is that the Message will come to an end, maybe on page 20,000 or page 30,000, and then start right over from the beginning, so we’ll be able to fill in the missing parts. Maybe before the whole Message repeats, there’ll be a primer, a kind of McGuffey’s Reader, that will enable us to understand the Message.”
“If I may, Ms. President–”
“Ms. President, this is Dr. Peter Valerian of the California Institute of Technology, one of the pioneers in this field.”
“Please go ahead, Dr. Valerian.”
“This is an intentional transmission to us. They know we’re here. They have some idea, from having intercepted out 1936 broadcast, of where our technology is, of how smart we are. They wouldn’t be going to all this trouble if they didn’t want us to understand the Message. Somewhere in there is the key to help us understand it. It’s only a question of accumulating all the data and analyzing it very carefully.”
“Well, what do you suppose the Message is about?”
“I don’t see any way to tell, Ms. President. I can only repeat what Dr. Arroway said. It’s an intricate and complex Message. The transmitting civilization is eager for us to receive it. Maybe all this is one small volume of the Encyclopedia Galactica. The star Vega is about three times more massive than the Sun and about fifty times brighter. Because it burns its nuclear fuel so fast, it has a much shorter lifetime than the Sun–”
“Yes. Maybe something’s about to go wrong on Vega,” the Director of Central Intelligence interrupted. “Maybe their planet will be destroyed. Maybe they want someone else to know about their civilization before they’re wiped out.”
“Or,” offered Kitz, “maybe they’re looking for a new place to move to, and the Earth would suit them just fine. Maybe it’s no accident they chose to send us a picture of Adolf Hitler.”
“Hold on,” Ellie said, “there are a lot of possibilities, but not everything is possible. There’s no way for the transmitting civilization to know whether we’ve received the Message, much less whether we’re making any progress in decoding it. If we find the Message offensive we’re not obliged to reply. And even if we did reply, it would be twenty-six years before they received the reply, and another twenty-six years before they can answer it. The speed of light is fast, but it’s not infinitely fast. We’re very nicely quarantined from Vega. And if there’s anything that worries us about this new Message, we have decades to decide what to do about it. Let’s not panic quite yet.” She enunciated these last words while offering a pleasant smile to Kitz.
“I appreciate those remarks, Dr. Arroway,” returned the President. “But things are happening fast. Too damn fast. And there are too many maybes. I haven’t even made a public announcement about all of this. Not even the prime numbers, never mind the Hitler bullcrap. Now we have to think about this `book’ you say they’re sending. And because you scientists think nothing of talking to each other, the rumors are flying. Phyllis, where’s that file? Here, look at these headlines.”
Brandished successively at arm’s length, they all carried the same message, with minor variations in journalistic artistry: “Space Doc Says Radio Show from Bug-Eyed Monsters,” “Astronomical Telegram Hints at Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” “Voice from Heaven?” and “The Aliens Are Coming! The Aliens Are Coming! “She let the clippings flutter tot he table.
“At least the Hitler story hasn’t broken yet. I’m waiting for those headlines: `Hitler Alive and Well in Space, U.S. Says.’ And worse. Much worse. I think we’d better curtail this meeting and reconvene later.”
“If I may, Ms. President,” der Heer interrupted haltingly, with evident reluctance. “I beg your pardon, but there are some international implications that I think have to be raised now.”
The President merely exhaled, acquiescing.
Der Heer continued. “Tell me if I have this right, Dr. Arroway. Every day the star Vega rises over the New Mexico desert, and then you get whatever page of this complex transmission–whatever it is–they happen to be sending to the Earth at the moment. Then, eight hours later or something, the star sets. Right so far? Okay. Then the next day the star rises again in the east, but you’ve lost some pages during the time you weren’t able to look at it, after it had set the previous night. Right? So it’s as if you were getting pages thirty through fifty and then pages eighty through a hundred, and so on. No matter how patiently we observe, we’re going to have enormous amounts of information missing. Gaps. Even if the message eventually repeats itself, we’re going to have gaps.”
“That’s entirely right.” Ellie rose and approached an enormous globe of the world. Evidently the White House was opposed to the obliquity of the Earth; the axis of this globe was defiantly vertical. Tentatively, she gave it a spin. “The Earth turns. You need radio telescopes distributed evenly over many longitudes if you don’t want gaps. Any one nation observing only from its own territory is going to dip into the message and dip out–maybe even at the most interesting parts. Now this is the same kind of problem that an American interplanetary spacecraft faces. It broadcasts its findings back to Earth when it passes by some planet, but the United States might be facing the other way at the time. So NASA has arranged for three radio tracking stations to be distributed evenly in longitude around the Earth. Over the decades they’ve performed superbly. But…” Her voice trailed off diffidently, and she looked directly at P.L. Garrison, the NASA Administrator. A thin, sallow, friendly man, he blinked.
“Uh, thank you. Yes. It’s called the Deep S[ace Network, and we’re very proud of it. We have stations in the Mojave Desert, in Spain, and in Australia. Of course, we’re underfunded, but with a little help, I’m sure we could get up to speed.”
“Spain and Australia?” the President asked.
“For purely scientific work,” the Secretary of State was saying, “I’m sure there’s no problem. However, if this research program had political overtones, it might be a little tricky.”
American relations with both countries had become cool of late.
“There’s no question this has political overtones,” the President replied a little testily.
“But we don’t have to be tied to the surface of the earth,” interjected an Air Force general. “We can beat the rotation period. All we need is a large radio telescope in Earth orbit.”
“All right.” The President again glanced around the table. “Do we have a space radio telescope? How long would it take to get one up? Who knows about this? Dr. Garrison?”