“I don’t understand. If you look at enough random numbers, won’t you get any pattern you want simply by chance?”
“Sure. But you can calculate how likely that is. If you get a very complex message very early on, you know it can’t be by chance. So, every day in the early hours of the morning the computer works on this problem. No data from the outside world goes in. And so far no data from the inside world comes out. It just runs through the optimum series expansion for pi and watches the digits fly. It minds its own business. Unless it finds something, it doesn’t speak unless it’s spoken to. It’s sort of contemplating its navel.”
“I’m no mathematician, God knows. But could you give me a f’r instance?”
“Sure.” She searched in the pockets of her jump suit for a piece of paper and could find none. She thought about reaching into his inside breast pocket, retrieving the envelope she had just given him and writing on it, but decided that was too risky out here in the open. After a moment, he understood and produced a small spiral notebook.
“Thanks. Pi starts out 3.1415926…You can see that the digits vary pretty randomly. Okay, a one appears twice in the first four digits, but after yon keep on going for a while it averages out. Each digit–0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9–appears almost exactly ten percent of the time when you’ve accumulated enough digits. Occasionally you’ll get a few consecutive digits that are the same–4444, for example– but not more than you’d expect statistically. Now, suppose you’re running merrily through these digits and suddenly you find nothing but fours. Hundreds of fours all in a row. That couldn’t carry any information, but it also couldn’t be a statistical fluke. You could calculate the digits in pi for the age of the universe and, if the digits are random, you’d never go deep enough to get a hundred consecutive fours.”
“It’s like the search you did for the Message. With these radio telescopes.”
“Yes; in both cases we were looking for a signal that’s well out of the noise, something that can’t be just a statistical fluke.”
“But it doesn’t have to be a hundred fours–is that right? It could speak to us?”
“Sure. Imagine after a while we get a long sequence of just zeros and ones. Then, just as we did with the Message, we could pull a picture out, if there’s one in there. You understand, it could be anything.”
“You mean you could decode a picture hiding in pi and it would be a mess of Hebrew letters?”
“Sure. Big blade letters, carved in stone.” He looked at her quizzically.
“Forgive me, Eleanor, but don’t you think you’re being a mite too…indirect? You don’t belong to a silent order of Buddhist nuns. Why don’t you just tell your story?”
“Palmer, if I had hard evidence, I’d speak up. But if I don’t have any, people like Kitz will say that I’m lying. Or hallucinating. That’s why that manuscript’s in your inside pocket. You’re going to seal it, date it, notarize it, and put it in a safety-deposit box. If anything happens to me, you can release it to the world. I give you full authority to do anything you want with it.”
“And if nothing happens to you?”
“If nothing happens to me? Then, when we find what we’re looking for, that manuscript will confirm our story. If we find evidence of a double black hole at the Galactic Center, or some huge artificial construction in Cygnus A, or a message hiding inside pi, this”–she tapped him lightly on the chest–“will be my evidence. Then I’ll speak out….Meantime, don’t lose it.”
“I still don’t understand,” he confessed. “We know there’s a mathematical order to the universe. The law of gravity and all that. How is this different? So there’s order inside the digits of pi. So what?”
“No, don’t you see? This would be different. This isn’t just starting the universe out with some precise mathematical laws that determine physics and chemistry. This is a message. Whoever makes the universe hides messages in transcendental numbers so they’ll be read fifteen billion years later when intelligent life finally evolves. I criticized you and Rankin the time we first met for not understanding this. If God wanted us to know that he existed, why didn’t he send us an unambiguous message?’ I asked. Remember?”
“I remember very well. You think God is a mathematician.”
“Something like that. If what we’re told is true. If this isn’t a wild-goose chase. If there’s a message hiding in pi and not one of the infinity of other transcendental numbers. That’s a lot of ifs.”
“You’re looking for Revelation in arithmetic. I know a better way.”
“Palmer, this is the only way. This is the only thing that would convince a skeptic. Imagine we find something. It doesn’t have to be tremendously complicated. Just something more orderly than could accumulate by chance that many digits into pi That’s all we need. Then mathematicians all over the world can find exactly the same pattern or message or whatever it proves to be. Then there are no sectarian divisions. Everybody begins reading the same Scripture. No one could then argue that the key miracle in the religion was some conjurer’s trick, or that later historians had falsified the record, or that it’s just hysteria or delusion or a substitute parent for when we grow up. Everyone could be a believer.”
“You can’t be sure you’ll find anything. You can hide here and compute till the cows come home. Or you can go out and tell your story to the world. Sooner or later you’ll have to choose.”
“I’m hoping I won’t have to choose. Palmer. First the physical evidence, then the public announcements. Otherwise…Don’t you see how vulnerable we’d be? I don’t mean for myself, but …”
He shook his head almost imperceptibly. A smile was playing at the corners of his lips. He had detected a certain irony in their circumstances.
“Why are you so eager for me to tell my story?” she asked.
Perhaps he took it for a rhetorical question. At any rate he did not respond, and she continued.
“Don’t you think there’s been a strange…reversal of our positions? Here I am, the bearer of the profound religious experience I can’t prove–really, Palmer, I can barely fathom it. And here you are, the hardened skeptic trying– more successfully than I ever did–to be kind to the credulous.”
“Oh no, Eleanor,” he said, “I’m not a skeptic. I’m a believer.”
“Are you? The story I have to tell isn’t exactly about Punishment and Reward. It’s not exactly Advent and Rapture. There’s not a word in it about Jesus. Part of my message is that we’re not central to the purpose of the Cosmos. What happened to me makes us all seem very small.”
“It does. But it also makes God very big.” She glanced at him for a moment and rushed on. “Yon know, as the Earth races around the Sun, the powers of this world–the religious powers, the secular powers– once pretended the Earth wasn’t moving at all. They were in the business of being powerful. Or at least pretending to be powerful And the truth made them feel too small. The truth frightened them; it undermined their power. So they suppressed it. Those people found the truth dangerous. You’re sure you know what believing me entails?”
“I’ve been searching, Eleanor. After all these years, believe me, I know the truth when I see it. Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe. I mean the real universe. All those light-years. All those worlds. I think of the scope of your universe, the opportunities it affords the Creator, and it takes my breath away. It’s much better than bottling Him up in one small world. I never liked the idea of Earth as God’s green footstool. It was too reassuring, like a children’s story…like a tranquilizer. But your universe has room enough, and time enough, for the kind of God I believe in.
“I say you don’t need any more proof. There are proofs enough already. Cygnus A and all that are just for the scientists. You think it’ll be hard to convince ordinary people that you’re telling the truth. I think it’ll be easy as pie. You think your story is too peculiar, too alien. But I’ve heard it before. I know it well. And I bet you do too.” He closed his eyes and, after a moment, recited:
He dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it…..surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not….This is none other but the House of God, and this is the gate of heaven.