“Oh. Sorry. I never understand how anyone can be afraid of me.”
His voice was surprisingly musical. In fact, he seemed to talk in fifths. He hadn’t thought it necessary to introduce himself and once again inclined his head to the door he had left ajar. It was hard to believe that some crime of passion was about to be visited upon her under these circumstances, and wordlessly she entered the next room.
He ushered her to a meticulously crafted tabletop model of an ancient city of less pretentious aspect than Babylon “Pompeii,” he said by way of explanation. “The stadium here is the key. With the restrictions on boxing there aren’t any healthy blood sports left in America. Very important. Sucks out some of the poisons from the national bloodstream. The whole thing is designed, permits issued, and now this.”
“What’s `this’?”
“No gladiatorial games. I just got word from Sacramento. There’s a bill before the legislature to outlaw gladiatorial games in California. Too violent, they say. They authorize a new skyscraper, they know they’ll lose two or three construction workers. The unions know, the builders know, and that’s just to build offices for oil companies or Beverly Hills lawyers. Sure, we’d lose a few. But we’re geared more to trident and net than the short sword. Those legislators don’t have their priorities straight.”
He beamed at her owlishly and offered a drink, which again she refused. “So you want to talk to me about the Machine, and I want to talk to you about the Machine. You first. You want to know where the primer is?”
“We’re asking for help from a few key people who might have some insight. We thought with your record of invention–and since your context recognition chip was involved in the recycling discovery–that you might put yourself in the place of the Vegans and think of where you’d put the primer. We recognize you’re very busy, and I’m sorry to–”
“Oh, no. It’s all right. It’s true I’m busy. I’m trying to regularize my affairs, because I’m gonna make a big change in my life…”
“For the Millennium?” She tried to imagine him giving away S. R. Hadden and Company, the Wall Street brokerage house; Genetic Engineering, Inc.; Hadden Cybernetics; and Babylon to the poor.
“Not exactly. No. It was fun to think about. It made me feel good to be asked. I looked at the diagrams.” He waved at the commercial set of eight volumes spread in disarray on a worktable. “There are wonderful things in there, but I don’t think that’s where the primer is hiding. Not in the diagrams. I don’t know why you think the primer has to be in the Message. Maybe they left it on Mars or Pluto or in the Oort Comet Cloud, and well discover it in a few centuries. Right now, we know there’s this wonderful Machine, with design drawings and thirty thousand pages of explanatory text. But we don’t know whether we’d be able to build the thing if we could read it. So we wait a few centuries, improving our technology, knowing that sooner or later we’ll have to be ready to build it. Not having the primer binds us up with future generations.
Human beings are sent a problem that takes generations to solve. I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. Might be very healthy. Maybe you’re making a mistake looking for a primer. Maybe it’s better not to find it.”
“No, I want to find the primer right away. We don’t know it’ll be waiting for us forever. If they hang up because there was no answer, it would be much worse than if they’d never called at all.”
“Well, maybe you have a point. Anyway, I thought of as many possibilities as I could. I’ll give you a couple of trivial possibilities, and then a nontrivial possibility. Trivial first: The primer’s in the Message but at a very different data rate. Suppose there was another message in there at a bit an hour–could you detect that?”
“Absolutely. We routinely check for long term receiver drift in any case. But also a bit an hour only buys you–let me see–ten, twenty thousand bits tops before the Message recycles.”
“So that makes sense only if the primer is much easier than the Message. You think it isn’t. Now, what about much faster bit rates? How do you know that under every bit of your Machine Message there aren’t a million bits of primer message?”
“Because it would produce monster bandwidths. We’d know in an instant.”
“Okay, so there’s a fast data dump every now and then. Think of it as microfilm. There’s a tiny dot of microfilm that’s sitting in repetitious–1 mean in repetitive–parts of the Message. I’m imagining a little box that says in your regular language, `I am the primer.’ Then right after that there’s a dot. And in that dot is a hundred million bits, very fast. You might see if you’ve got any boxes.”
“Believe me, we would have seen it.”
“Okay, how about phase modulation? We use it in radar and spacecraft telemetry, and it hardly messes up the spectrum at all. Have you hooked up a phase correlator?”
“No. That’s a useful idea. I’ll look into it.”
“Now, the nontrivial idea is this: If the Machine ever gets made, if our people are gonna sit in it, somebody’s gonna press a button and then those five are gonna go somewhere. Never mind where. Now, there’s an interesting question whether those five are gonna come back. Maybe not. I like the idea that all this Machine design was invented by Vegan body snatchers. You know, their medical students, or anthropologists or something. They need a few human bodies. It’s a big hassle to come to Earth–you need permission, passes from the transit authority–hell, it’s more trouble than it’s worth. But with a little effort you can send the Earth a Message and then the earthlings’ll go to all the trouble to ship you five bodies.
“It’s like stamp collecting. I used to collect stamps when I was a kid. You could send a letter to somebody in a foreign country and most of the time they’d write back. It didn’t matter what they said. All you wanted was the stamp. So that’s my picture: There’s a few stamp collectors on Vega. They send letters out when they’re in the mood, and bodies come flying back to them from all over space. Wouldn’t you like to see the collection?”
He smiled up at her and continued. “Okay, so what does this have to do with finding the primer? Nothing. It’s relevant only if I’m wrong. If my picture is wrong, if the five people are coming back to Earth, then it would be a big help if we’ve invented space flight. No matter how smart they are, it’s gonna be tough to land the Machine. Too many things are moving. God knows what the propulsion system is. If you pop out of space a few meters below ground, you’ve had it. And what’s a few meters in twenty-six light years? It’s too risky. When the Machine comes back it’ll pop out–or whatever it does–in space, somewhere near the Earth, but not on it or in it. So they have to be sure we have space flight, so the five people can be rescued in space. They’re in a hurry and can’t sit tight until the 1957 evening news arrives on Vega. So what do they do? They arrange so part of the Message can only be detected from space. What part is that? The primer. If you can detect the primer, you’ve got space flight and you can come back safe. So I imagine the primer is being sent at the frequency of the oxygen absorptions in the microwave spectrum, or in the near-infrared — some part of the spectrum you can’t detect until you’re well out of the Earth’s atmosphere…”
“We’ve had the Hubble Telescope looking at Vega all through the ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared. Not a hint of anything. The Russians have repaired their millimeter wave instrument. They’ve hardly been looking at anything besides Vega and they haven’t found anything. But we’ll keep looking. Other possibilities?”
“Sure you wouldn’t like a drink? I don’t drink myself, but so many people do.” Ellie again declined. “No, no other possibilities. Now it’s my turn?
“See, I want to ask you for something. But I’m not good at asking for things. I never have been. My public image is rich, funny looking, unscrupulous–somebody who looks for weaknesses in the system so he can make a fast buck. And don’t tell me you don’t believe any of that. Everybody believes at least some of it. You’ve probably heard some of what I’m gonna say before, but give me ten minutes and I’ll tell you how all this began. I want you to know something about me.”
She settled back, wondering what he could possibly want of her, and brushed away idle fantasies involving the Temple of Ishtar, Hadden, and perhaps a charioteer or two thrown in for good measure.