She nodded assent. She had heard through the grapevine that the report was highly favorable to the account the Five had given. She hoped it would put an end to the nonsense.
“The dodecahedron apparently”–he laid great stress on this word–“has been exposed to a very different environment than the benzels and the supporting structures. It’s apparently been subjected to huge tensile and compressional stresses. It’s a miracle the thing didn’t fall to pieces. So it’s a miracle you and the others didn’t fall to pieces at the same time. Also, it’s apparently seen an intense radiation environment– there’s low-level induced radioactivity, cosmic ray tracks, and so on. It’s another miracle that you survived the radiation. Nothing else has been added or taken away. There’s no sign of erosion or scraping on the side vertices that you claim kept bumping into the walls of the tunnels. There’s not even any scoring, as there would have been if it entered the Earth’s atmosphere at high velocity.”
“So doesn’t that confirm our story? Michael, think about it. Tensile and compressional stresses–tidal forces–are exactly what you expect if you fall down a classical black hole. That’s been known for fifty years at least. I don’t know why we didn’t feel it, but maybe the dodec protected us somehow. And high radiation doses from the inside of the black hole and from the environment of the Galactic Center, a known gamma ray source. There’s independent evidence for black holes, and there’s independent evidence for a Galactic Center. We didn’t make those things up. I don’t understand the absence of scraping, but that depends on the interaction of a material we’ve hardly studied with a material that’s completely unknown. I wouldn’t expect any scoring or charring, because we don’t claim we entered through the Earth’s atmosphere. It seems to me the evidence almost entirely confirms our story. What’s the problem?”
“The problem is you people are too clever. Too clever. Look at it from the point of view of a skeptic. Step back and look at the big picture. There’s a bunch of bright people in different countries who think the world is going to hell in a hand basket. They claim to receive a complex Message from space.”
“Claim?”
“Let me continue. They decrypt the Message and announce instructions on how to build a very complicated Machine at a cost of trillions of dollars. The world’s in a funny condition, the religions are all shaky about the oncoming Millennium, and to everybody’s surprise the Machine gets built. There’s one or two slight changes in personnel, and then essentially these same people–”
“It’s not the same people. It’s not Sukhavati, it’s not Eda, it’s not Xi, and there were–”
“Let me continue. Essentially these same people then get to sit down in the Machine. Because of the way the thing is designed, no one can see them and no one can talk to them after the thing is activated. So the Machine is turned on and then it turns itself off. Once it’s on, you can’t make it stop in less than twenty minutes. Okay. Twenty minutes later, these same people emerge from the Machine, all jaunty-jolly, with some bullshit story about traveling faster than light inside black holes to the center of the Galaxy and back. Now suppose you hear this story and you’re just ordinarily cautious. You ask to see their evidence. Pictures, videotapes, any other data. Guess what? It’s all been conveniently erased. Do they have artifacts of the superior civilization they say is at the center of the Galaxy? No. Mementos? No. A stone tablet? No. Pets? No. Nothing. The only physical evidence is some subtle damage done to the Machine. So you ask yourself, couldn’t people who were so motivated and so clever arrange for what looks like tension stresses and radiation damage, especially if they could spend two trillion dollars faking the evidence?”
She gasped. She remembered the last time she had gasped. This was a truly venomous reconstruction of events. She wondered what had made it attractive to Kitz. He must, she thought, be in real distress. “I don’t think anybody’s going to believe your story,” he continued. “This is the most elaborate–and the most expensive–hoax ever perpetrated. You and your friends tried to hoodwink the President of the United States and deceive the American people, to say nothing of all the other governments on the Earth. You must really think everybody else is stupid.”
“Michael, this is madness. Tens of thousands of people worked to acquire the Message, to decode it, and to build the Machine. The Message is on magnetic tapes and printouts and laserdisks in observatories all over the world. You think there’s a conspiracy involving all the radio astronomers on the planet, and the aerospace and cybernetics companies, and–”
“No, you don’t need a conspiracy that big. All you need is a transmitter in space that looks as if it’s broadcasting from Vega. I’ll tell you how I think you did it. You prepare the Message, and get somebody– somebody with an established launch capability–to put it up. Probably as an incidental part of some other mission. And into some orbit that looks like sidereal motion. Maybe there’s more than one satellite. Then the transmitter turns on, and you’re all ready in your handy-dandy observatory to receive the Message, make the big discovery, and tell us poor slobs what it all means.”
This was too much even for the impassive der Heer. He roused himself from a slumped position in his chair. “Really, Mike–” he began, but Ellie cut him short.
“I wasn’t responsible for most of the decoding. Lots of people were involved. Drumlin, especially. He started out as a committed skeptic, as you know. But once the data came in, Dave was entirely convinced. You didn’t hear any reservations from him.”
“Oh yes, poor Dave Drumlin. The late Dave Drumlin. Yon set him up. The professor you never liked.”
Der Heer slumped still further down in his chair, and she had a sudden vision of him regaling Kitz with secondhand pillow talk. She looked at him more closely. She couldn’t be sure. “During the decrypting of the Message, you couldn’t do everything. There was so much you had to do. So you overlooked this and you forgot that. Here’s Drumlin growing old, worried about his former student eclipsing him and getting all the credit. Suddenly he sees how to be involved, how to play a central role. You appealed to his narcissism, and you hooked him. And if he hadn’t figured out the decryption, you would have helped him along. If worse came to worst, you would have peeled all the layers off the onion yourself.”
“You’re saying that we were able to invent such a Message. Really, it’s an outrageous compliment to Vaygay and me. It’s also impossible. It can’t be done. You ask any competent engineer if that kind of Machine–with brand-new subsidiary industries, components wholly unfamiliar on Earth–you ask if that could have been invented by a few physicists and radio astronomers on their days off. When do you imagine we had time to invent such a Message even if we knew how? Look how many bits of information are in it. It would have taken years.”
“You had years, while Argus was getting nowhere. The project was about to be closed. Drumlin, you remember, was pushing that. So just at the right moment you find the Message. Then there’s no more talk about closing down your pet project. I think you and that Russian did cook the whole thing up in your spare time. You had years.”
“This is madness,” she said softly. Valerian interrupted. He had known Dr. Arroway well during the period in question. She had done productive scientific work. She never had the time required for so elaborate a deception. Much as he admired her, he agreed that the Message and the Machine were far beyond her ability–or indeed anybody’s ability. Anybody on Earth.
But Kitz wasn’t buying it “That’s a personal judgment, Dr. Valerian. There are many persons, and there can be many judgments. You’re fond of Dr. Arroway. I understand. Fm fond of her, too. It’s understandable you would defend her. I don’t take it amiss. But there’s a clincher. You don’t know about it yet. I’m going to tell you.” He leaned forward, watching Elite intently. Clearly he was interested to see how she would respond to what he was about to say.
“The Message stopped the moment we activated the Machine. The moment the benzels reached cruising speed. To the second. All over the world. Every radio observatory with a line-of-sight to Vega saw the same thing. We’ve held back telling you about it so we wouldn’t distract you from your debriefing. The Message stopped in mid-bit. Now that was really foolish of you.”
“I don’t know anything about it, Michael. But so what if the Message stopped? It’s fulfilled its purpose. We built the Machine, and we went to…where they wanted us to go.”