The rabbits were much more astute in Wyoming. Or less. It was hard to figure out. The headlights on the Thunderbird had picked up an occasional rabbit near the road more than once. But hundreds of them organized in ranks–that custom, apparently, had not yet spread from New Mexico to Wyoming. The situation here was not much different from Argus, Ellie found. There was a major scientific facility surrounded by tens of thousands of square kilometers of lovely, almost uninhabited landscape. She wasn’t running the show, and she wasn’t one of the crew. But she was here, working on one of the grandest enterprises ever contemplated. Surely, no matter what happened after the Machine was activated, the Argus discovery would be judged a turning point in human history.
Just at the moment when some additional unifying force is needed, this bolt comes from the blue. From the black, she corrected herself. From twenty-six light years away, 230 trillion kilometers. It’s hard to think of your primary allegiance as Scottish or Slovenian or Szechuanese when you’re all being hailed indiscriminately by a civilization millennia ahead of you. The gap between the most technologically backward nation on the Earth and the industrialized nations was, certainly, much smaller than the gap between the industrialized nations and the beings on Vega. Suddenly, distinctions that had earlier seemed transfixing — racial, religious, national, ethnic, linguistic, economic, and cultural—began to seem a little less pressing.
“We are all humans.” This was a phrase you heard often these days. It was remarkable, in previous decades, how infrequently sentiments of this sort had been expressed, especially in the media. We share the same small planet, it was said, and–very nearly–the same global civilization. It was hard to imagine the extraterrestrials taking seriously a plea for preferential parley from representatives of one or another ideological faction. The existence of the Message–even apart from its enigmatic function–was binding up the world. You could see it happening before your eyes.
Her mother’s first question when she heard that Ellie had not been selected was “Did you cry?” Yes, she had cried. It was only natural. There was, of course, a part of her that longed to be aboard. But Drumlin was a first rate choice, she had told her mother.
No decision had been made by the Soviets between Lunacharsky and Arkhangelsky; both would “train” for the mission. It was hard to see what training might be appropriate beyond understanding the Machine as best they, or anyone else, could. Some Americans charged that this was merely an attempt by the Soviets to acquire two principal Machine spokesmen, but Ellie thought this was mean-spirited. Both Lunacharsky and Arkhangelsky were extremely capable. She wondered how the Soviets would decide which to send. Lunacharsky was in the United States, but not here in Wyoming. He was in Washington with a high level Soviet delegation meeting with the Secretary of State and Michael Kitz, newly promoted to Deputy Secretary of Defense. Arkhangelsky was back in Uzbekistan.
The new metropolis growing up in the Wyoming wilderness was called Machine; Machine, Wyoming. Its Soviet counterpart was given the Russian equivalent, Makhina. Each was a complex of residences, utilities, residential and business districts, and–most of all–factories. Some of them were unpretentious, at least on the outside. But in others you could see in a single glance their bizarre aspects–domes and minarets, miles of intricate exterior piping. Only the factories that were adjudged potentially dangerous–those manufacturing the organic components, for example–were here in the Wyoming wilderness. Technologies better understood were distributed worldwide. The core of the cluster of new industries was the Systems Integration Facility, built near what had once been Wagonwheel, Wyoming, to which completed components were consigned. Sometimes Ellie would see a component arrive and realize that she had been the first human being ever to see it as a design drawing. As each new part was uncrated, she would rush to inspect it. As components were mounted one upon another, and as subsystems passed their prescribed tests, she felt a kind of glow that she guessed was akin to maternal pride.
Ellie, Drumlin, and Valerian arrived for a routine and long-scheduled meeting on the now wholly redundant worldwide monitoring of the signal from Vega. Whc6 they arrived, they found everyone talking about the burning of Babylon. It had happened in the early hours of the morning, perhaps at a time when the place was prowled only by its most iniquitous and unregenerate habitués. A raiding party, equipped with mortars and incendiaries, had struck simultaneously through the Enlil and Ishtar gates. The Ziggurat had been put to the torch. There was a photograph of improbably and scantily clad people rushing from the Temple of Assur. Remarkably, no one was killed, although there were many injuries.
Just before the attack, the New York Sun, a paper controlled by the Earth Firsters and sporting a globe shattered by a lightning bolt on its masthead, received a call announcing that the attack was under way. It was divinely inspired retribution, the caller volunteered, carried out on behalf of decency and American morality, by those sick and tired of filth and corruption. There were statements by the president of Babylon, Inc., decrying the attack and condemning an alleged criminal conspiracy, but–at least so far–not a word from S. R. Hadden, wherever he might be.
Because Ellie was known to have visited Hadden in Babylon, a few of the project personnel sought out her reaction. Even Drumlin was interested in her opinion on this matter, although from his evident knowledge of the geography of the place, it seemed possible that he had visited it more than once himself. She had no trouble imagining him as charioteer. But perhaps he had only read about Babylon. Photomaps had been published in the weekly news magazines.
Eventually, they got back to business. Fundamentally, the Message was continuing on the same frequencies, bandpasses, time constants, and polarization and phase modulation; the Machine design and the primer were still sitting underneath the prime numbers and the Olympic’ broadcast. The civilization in the Vega system seemed very dedicated. Or maybe they had just forgotten to turn off the transmitter. Valerian had a faraway look in his eyes.
“Peter, why do you have to look at the ceiling when you think?”
Drumlin was reputed to have mellowed over the last few years, but, as with this comment, his reform was not always apparent. Being chosen by the President of the United States to represent the nation to the extraterrestrials was, he would say, a great honor. The trip, he told his intimates, would be the crowning point of his life. His wife, temporarily transplanted to Wyoming and still doggedly faithful, had to endure the same slide shows presented to new audiences of scientists and technicians building the Machine. Since the site was near his native Montana, Drumlin visited there briefly from time to time. Once Ellie had driven him to Missoula. For the first time in their relationship, he had been cordial to her for a few consecutive hours.
“Shhhh! I’m thinking,” replied Valerian. “It’s a noise suppression technique. I’m trying to minimize the distractions in my visual field, and then you present a distraction in the audio spectrum. You might ask me why I don’t just as well stare at a piece of blank paper. But the trouble is that the paper’s too small. I can see things in my peripheral vision. Anyway, what I was thinking is this: Why are we still getting the Hitler message, the Olympic broadcast? Years have passed. They must have received the British Coronation broadcast by now. Why haven’t we seen some close ups of Orb and Scepter and ermine, and a voice intoning `…now crowned as George the Sixth, by the Grace of God, King of England and Northern Ireland, and Emperor of India’?”
“Are you sure Vega was over England at the time of the Coronation transmission?” Ellie asked.
“Yes, we checked that out within a few weeks of receipt of the Olympic broadcast. And the intensity was stronger than the Hitler thing. I’m sure Vega could have picked up the Coronation transmission.”
“You’re worried that they don’t want us to know everything they know about us?” she asked.
`They’re in a hurry,” said Valerian. He was given occasionally to delphic utterances.
“More likely,” offered Ellie, “they want to keep reminding us that they know about Hitler.”
“That’s not entirely different from what I’m saying,” Valerian replied.
“All right. Let’s not waste too much time in Fantasyland,” Drumlin groaned. He was always impatient with speculation on extraterrestrial motivation. It was a total waste of time to guess, he would say; we’ll know soon enough. Meanwhile, he urged all and sundry to concentrate on the Message; it was hard data– redundant, unambiguous, brilliantly composed.
“Here, a little reality might fix you two up. Why don’t we go into the assembly area? I think they’re doing systems integration with the erbium dowels.”
The geometric design of the Machine was simple. The details were extremely complex. The five chairs in which the crew would sit were amidships in the dodecahedron where it bulged out most prominently. There were no facilities for eating or sleeping or other bodily functions, clear evidence that the trip aboard the Machine–if there was one–would be short. Some thought this meant that the Machine, when activated, would quickly rendezvous with an interstellar space vehicle in the vicinity of the Earth. The only difficulty was that meticulous radar and optical searches could find no trace of such a ship. It seemed scarcely likely that the extraterrestrials had overlooked elementary human physiological needs. Maybe the Machine didn’t go anywhere. Maybe it did something to the crew. There were no instruments in the crew area, nothing to steer with, not even an ignition key–just the five chairs, pointed inward, so each crew member could watch the others. And there was a carefully prescribed upper limit on the weight of the crew and their belongings. In practice, the constraint worked to the advantage of people of small stature.