-GEORGE SANTAYANA Scepticism and Animal Faith, IX
IT WAS on a mission of insurgency and subversion. The enemy was vastly larger and more powerful. But it knew the enemy’s weakness. It could take over the alien government, turning the resources of the adversary to its own purpose. Now, with millions of dedicated agents in place…
She sneezed and tried to find a clean paper tissue in the bulging pocket of the terry cloth presidential bathrobe. She had no makeup on, although her chapped lips revealed patches of mentholated balm.
“My doctor tells me I have to stay in bed or I’ll get viral pneumonia. I ask him for an antibiotic, and he tells me there’s no antibiotic for viruses. So how does he know I have a virus?”
Der Heer opened his mouth to answer, a gesture in the making, when the President cut him short.
“No, never mind. You’ll start telling me about DNA and host recognition and I’ll need what resources I’ve got left to listen to your story. If you’re not afraid of my virus, pull up a chair.”
`Thank you, Ms. President. This is about the primer. I have the report here. There’s a long technical section that’s included as an appendix. I thought you might be interested in it also. Briefly, we’re reading and actually understanding the thing with almost no difficulty. It’s a fiendishly clever learning program. I don’t mean `fiendishly’ in any literal sense, of course. We must have a vocabulary of three thousand words by now.”
“I don’t understand how it’s possible. I could sec how they could teach you the names of their numbers. You make one dot and write the letters O-N-E underneath, and so on. I could see how you could have a picture of a star and then write S-T-A-R under it. But I don’t see how you could do verbs or the past tense or conditionals.”
`They do some of it with movies. Movies are perfect for verbs. And a lot of it they do with numbers. Even abstractions; they can communicate abstractions with numbers. It goes something like this: First they count out the numbers for us, and then they introduce some new words–words we don’t understand. Here, III indicate their words by letters. We read something like this (the letters stand for symbols the Vegans introduce).” He wrote:
1A1B2Z 1A2B3Z 1A7B8Z
“What do you think it is?”
“My high school report card? You mean there’s a combination of dots and dashes that A stands for, and a different combination of dots and dashes that B stands for, and so on?”
“Exactly. You know what one and two mean, but you don’t know what A and B mean. What does a sequence like this tell you?”
“A means `plus’ and B means `equals.’ Is that what you’re getting at?”
“Good. But we don’t yet understand what Z means, right? Now along comes something like this”: 1A2B4Y “You see?”
“Maybe. Give me another that ends in Y.”
2000A4000B0Y
“Okay, I think I got it. As long as I don’t read the last three symbols as a word. Z means it’s true, and Y means it’s false.”
“Right. Exactly. Pretty good for a President with a virus and a South African crisis. So with a few lines of text they’ve taught us four words: plus, equals, true, false. Four pretty useful words. Then they teach division, divide one by zero, and tell us the word for infinity. Or maybe it’s just the word for indeterminate.
Or they say, The sum of the interior angles of a triangle is two right angles.’ Then they comment that the statement is true if space is flat, but false if space is curved. So you’ve learned how to say `if and–”
“I didn’t know space was curved. Ken, what the hell are you talking about? How can space be curved? No, never mind, never mind. That can’t have anything to do with the business in front of us.”
“Actually…”
“Sol Hadden tells me it was his idea where to find the primer. Don’t look at me funny, der Heer. I talk to all types.”
“I didn’t mean…ah…As I understand it, Mr. Hadden volunteered a few suggestions, which had all been made by other scientists as well. Dr. Arroway checked them out and hit paydirt with one of them. It’s called phase modulation, or phase coding.”
“Yes. Now, is this correct. Ken? The primer is scattered throughout the Message, right? Lots of repetitions. And there was some primer shortly after Arroway first picked up the signal.”
“Shortly after she picked up the third layer of the palimpsest, the Machine design.”
“And many countries have the technology to read the primer, right?”
“Well, they need a device called a phase correlator. But, yes. The countries that count, anyway.”
“Then the Russians could have read the primer a year ago, right? Or the Chinese or the Japanese. How do you know they’re not halfway to building the Machine right now?”
“I thought of that, but Marvin Yang says it’s impossible. Satellite photography, electronic intelligence, people on the scene, all confirm that there’s no sign of the kind of major construction project you’d need to build the Machine. No, we’ve all been asleep at the switch. We were seduced by the idea that the primer had to come at the beginning and not interspersed through the Message. It’s only when the Message recycled and we discovered it wasn’t there that we started thinking of other possibilities. All this work has been done in close cooperation with the Russians and everybody else. We don’t think anybody has the jump on us, but on the other hand everybody has the primer now. I don’t think there’s any unilateral course of action for us.”
“I don’t want a unilateral course of action for us. I just want to make sure that nobody else has a unilateral course of action. Okay, so back to your primer. You know how to say true-false, if-then, and space is curved. How do you build a Machine with that?”
“You know, I don’t think this cold or whatever you’ve got has slowed you down a bit. Well, it just takes off from there. For example, they draw us a periodic table of the elements, so they get to name all the chemical elements, the idea of a atom, the idea of a nucleus, protons, neutrons, electrons. Then they run through some quantum mechanics just to make sure we’re paying attention–there are already some new insights for us in the remedial stuff. Then it starts concentrating on the particular materials needed for the construction. For example, for some reason we need two tons of erbium, so they run through a nifty technique to extract it from ordinary rocks.”
Der Heer raised his hand palm outward in a placatory gesture. “Don’t ask why we need two tons of erbium. Nobody has the faintest idea.”
“I wasn’t going to ask that. I want to know how they told you how much a ton is.”
“They counted it out for us in Planck masses. A Planck mass is–”
“Never mind, never mind. It’s something that physicists all over the universe know about, right? And I’ve never heard of it. Now, the bottom line. Do we understand the primer well enough to start reading the Message? Will we be able to build the thing or not?”
“The answer seems to be yes. We’ve only had the primer for a few weeks now, but whole chapters of the Message are falling into our lap in clear. Its painstaking design, redundant explanations, and as far as we can tell, tremendous redundancy in the Machine design. We should have a three-dimensional model of the Machine for you in time for that crew selection meeting on Thursday, if you feel up to it. So far, we haven’t a clue as to what the Machine does, or how it works. And there are some funny organic chemical components that don’t make any sense as part of a machine. But almost everybody seems to think we can build the thing.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Well, Lunacharsky and the Russians. And Billy Jo Rankin, of course. There are still people who worry that the Machine will blow up the world or tip the Earth’s axis, or something. But what’s impressed most of the scientists is how careful the instructions are, and how many different ways they go about trying to explain the same thing.”
“And what does Eleanor Arroway say?”
“She says if they want to do us in, they’ll be here in twenty-five years or so and there’s nothing we could do in twenty-five years to protect ourselves. They’re too far ahead of us. So she says. Build it, and if you’re worried about environmental hazards, build it in a remote place. Professor Drumlin says you can build it in downtown Pasadena for all he cares. In fact, he says he’ll be there every minute it takes to construct the Machine, so he’ll be the first to go if it blows up.”