“Look, Vaygay, they know from our television transmissions that the Earth rotates, and that there are many different nations. The Olympic broadcast alone might have told them that. Subsequent transmissions from other nations would have nailed it down. So if they’re as good as we think, they could have phased the transmission with the Earth’s rotation, so only one nation got the Message. They chose not to do that. They want the Message to be received by everybody on the planet. They’re expecting the Machine to be built by the whole planet. This can’t be an all American or an all Russian project. It’s not what our…client wants.”
But she was not sure, she told him, that she would be playing any role in decisions on Machine construction or crew selection. She was returning to the United States the next day, mainly to get on top of the new radio data from the past few weeks. The Consortium plenary sessions seemed interminable, and no closing date had been set. Vaygay had been asked by his people to stay on at least a little longer. The Foreign Minister had just arrived and was now leading the Soviet delegation.
“I’m worried all this will end badly,” he said. “There are so many things that can go wrong. Technological failures. Political failures. Human failures. And even if we get through all that, if we don’t have a war because of the Machine, if we build it correctly and without blowing ourselves up, I’m still worried.”
“About what? How do you mean?”
“The best that can happen is we will be made fools of.”
“Who will?”
“Arroway, don’t you understand?” A vein in Lunacharsky’s neck throbbed. “I’m amazed you don’t see it. The Earth is a…ghetto. Yes, a ghetto. All human beings are trapped here. We have heard vaguely that there are big cities out there beyond the ghetto, with broad boulevards filled with droshkys and beautiful perfumed women in furs. But the cities are too far away, and we are too poor ever to go there, even the richest of us. Anyway, we know they don’t want us. That’s why they’ve left us in this pathetic little village in the first place.
“And now along comes an invitation. As Xi said. Fancy, elegant. They have sent us an engraved card and an empty droshky. We are to send five villagers and the droshky will carry them to–who knows?–Warsaw. Or Moscow. Maybe even Paris. Of course, some are tempted to go. There will always be people who are flattered by the invitation, or who think it is a way to escape our shabby village.
“And what do you think will happen when we get there? Do you think the Grand Duke will have us to dinner? Will the President of the Academy ask us interesting questions about daily life in our filthy shtetl? Do you imagine the Russian Orthodox Metropolitan will engage us in learned discourse on comparative religion?
“No, Arroway. We will gawk at the big city, and they will laugh at us behind their hands. They will exhibit us to the curious. The more backward we are the better they’ll feel, the more reassured they’ll be.
“It’s a quota system. Every few centuries, five of us get to spend a weekend on Vega. Have pity on the provincials, and make sure they know who their betters are.”
CHAPTER 13 Babylon
With the basest of companions, I walked the streets of Babylon…
-AUGUSTINE Confessions, II, 3
THE CRAY 21 mainframe computer at Argus had been instructed to compare each day’s harvest of data from Vega with the earliest records of Level 3 of the palimpsest. In effect, one long and incomprehensible sequence of zeros and ones was being compared automatically with another, earlier, such sequence. This was part of a massive statistical intercomparison of various segments of the still unencrypted text. There were some short sequences of zeros and ones–“words” the analysts called them, hopefully–which were repeated again and again. Many sequences would appear only once in thousands of pages of text. This statistical approach to message decryption was familiar to Ellie since high school. But the subroutines supplied by the experts from the National Security Agency–made available only as a result of a presidential directive, and even then armed with instructions to self destruct if examined closely–were brilliant.
What prodigies of human inventiveness, Ellie reflected, were being directed to reading each other’s mail. The global confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union–now, to be sure, easing somewhat–was still eating up the world. It was not just the financial resources dedicated to the military establishments of all nations. That was approaching two trillion dollars a year, and by itself was ruinously expensive when there were so many other urgent human needs. But still worse, she knew, was the intellectual effort dedicated to the arms race.
Almost half the scientists on the planet, it had been estimated, were employed by one or another of the almost two hundred military establishments worldwide. And they were not the dregs of the doctoral programs in physics and mathematics. Some of her colleagues would console themselves with this thought when the awkward problem arose of what to tell a recent doctoral candidate being courted by, say, one of the weapons laboratories. “If he was any good, he’d be offered an assistant professorship at Stanford, at least,” she could recall Drumlin once saying. No, a certain kind of mind and character was drawn to the military applications of science and mathematics–people who liked big explosions, for example; or those with no taste for personal combat who, to avenge some schoolyard injustice, aspired to military command; or inveterate puzzle solvers who longed to decrypt the most complex messages known. Occasionally the spur was political, tracing back to international disputes, immigration policies, wartime horrors, police brutality, or national propaganda by this nation or that decades earlier. Many of these scientists had real ability, Ellie knew, whatever reservations she might have about their motivations. She tried to imagine that massed talent really dedicated to the well being of the species and the planet.
She pored over the studies that had accumulated during her absence. They were making almost no progress in decrypting the Message, although the statistical analyses now stacked into a pile of paper a meter tall. It was all very discouraging.
She wished there were someone, especially a close woman friend, at Argus to whom she could pour out her hurt and anger at Ken’s behavior. But there was not, and she was disinclined even to use the telephone for this purpose. She did manage to spend a weekend with her coUege friend Becky Ellenbogen in Austin, but Becky, whose appraisals of men tended to be somewhere between wry and scathing, in this case was surprisingly mild in her criticism.
“He is the President’s Science Adviser, and this is only the most amazing discovery in the history of the world. Don’t be so hard on him,” Becky urged. “He’ll come around.”
But Becky was another of those who found Ken “charming” (she had met him once at the dedication of the National Neutrino Observatory), and was perhaps too inclined to accommodate to power. Had der Heer treated Ellie in this shabby way while he was a mere professor of molecular biology somewhere, Becky would have marinated and skewered the man.
After returning from Paris, der Heer had mustered a regular campaign of apology and devotion. He had been overstressed, he told her, overwhelmed with a range of responsibilities including difficult and unfamiliar political issues. His position as leader of the American delegation and co-chairman of the plenary might have been rendered less effective if there had been public knowledge of his and Ellie’s relationship. Kitz had been insufferable. Ken had had too many consecutive nights with only a few hours’ sleep. Altogether, Ellie judged, there were too many explanations. But she permitted the relationship to continue.
When it happened, it was Willie once again, this time on the graveyard shift, who first noticed. Afterward, Willie would attribute the speed of the discovery less to the superconducting computer and the NSA programs than to the new Hadden context recognition chips. At any rate, Vega had been low in the sky an hour or so before dawn when the computer triggered an understated alarm. With some annoyance, Willie put down what he was reading–it was a new textbook on Fast Fourier Transform Spectroscopy–and noticed these words being printed out on the screen:
RPT. TEXT PP. 41617-41619: BIT MISMATCH 0/2271. CORRELATION COEFFICIENT 0.99+
As he watched, 41619 became 41620 and then 41621. The digits after the slash were increasing in a continuous blur. Both the number of pages and the correlation coefficient, a measure of the improbability that the correlation was by chance, increased as he watched. He gave it another two pages before picking up the direct line to Ellie’s apartment.
She had been in a deep sleep and was momentarily disoriented. But she quickly turned on the bedside light and after a moment gave instructions for senior Argus staff to be assembled. She would, she told him, locate der Heer, who was somewhere on the facility. This proved not very difficult. She shook his shoulder.