Vaygay clearly felt himself under unusual pressures: he had resumed chain smoking. He held the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, palm up, as he talked.
“I agree that there is adequate overlap in longitude, but I'm still worried about redundancy. A failure in the helium liquifier on board the Marshal Nedelin or a power failure in Reykjavik, and the continuity of the Message is in jeopardy. Suppose the Message takes two years to cycle around to the beginning. If we miss a piece, we will have to wait two more years to fill in the gap. And remember, we don't know that the Message will be repeated. If there's no repeat, the gaps will never be repaired. I think we need to plan even for unlikely possibilities.”
“What are you thinking of?” der Heer asked. “Something like emergency generators for every observatory in the Consortium?”
“Yes, and independent amplifiers, spectrometers, autocorrelators, disk drives, and so forth at each observatory. And some provision for fast airlift of liquid helium to remote observatories if necessary.”
“Ellie, do you agree?”
“Absolutely.”
“Anything else?”
“I think we should continue to observe Vega on a very broad range of frequencies,” Vaygay said.
“Perhaps tomorrow a different message will come through on only one of the message frequencies. We should also monitor other regions of the sky. Maybe the key to the Message won't come from Vega, but from somewhere else—”
“Let me say why I think Vaygay's point is important,” interjected Valerian. “This is a unique moment, when we're receiving a message but have made no progress at all in decrypting it. We have no previous experience along these lines. We have to cover all the bases. We don't want to wind up a year or two from now kicking ourselves because there was some simple precaution we forgot to take, or some simple measurement that we overlooked. The idea that the Message will cycle back on itself, as far as we can see, that promises cycling back. Any opportunities lost now may be lost for all time. I also agree there's more instrumental development that needs doing. For all we know there's a fourth layer to the palimpsest.”
“There's also the question of personnel,” Vaygay continued. “Suppose this message goes on not for a year or two but for decades. Or suppose this is just the first in a long series of messages from all over the sky. There are at most a few hundred really capable radio astronomers in the world. That is a very small number when the stakes are so high. The industrialized countries must start producing many more radio astronomers and radio engineers with first-rate training.”
Ellie noted that Gotsridze, who had said little, was taking detailed notes. She was again struck by how much more literate the Soviets were in English than the Americans in Russian. Near the beginning of the century, scientists all over the world spoke—or at least read—German. Before that it had been French, and before that Latin. In another century there might be some other obligatory scientific language—Chinese, perhaps. For the moment it was English, and scientists all over the planet struggled to learn its ambiguities and irregularities.
Lighting a fresh cigarette from the glowing tip of its predecessor, Vaygay went on. “There is something else to be said. This is just speculation. It's not even as plausible as the idea that the Message will cycle back on itself—which Professor Valerian quite properly stressed was only a guess. I would not ordinarily mention so speculative an idea at such an early stage. But if the speculation is sound, there are certain further actions we must begin thinking about immediately. I would not have the courage to raise this possibility if Academician Arkhangelsky had not come tentatively to the same conclusion. He and I have disagreed about the quantization of quasar red shifts, the explanation of superluminal light sources, the rest mass of the neutrino, quark physics in neutron stars… We have had many disagreements. I must admit that sometimes he has been right and sometimes I have been right. Almost never, it seems to me, in the early speculative stage of a subject, have we agreed. But on this, we agree.
“Genrikh Dmit'ch, would you explain?”
Arkhangelsky seemed tolerant, even amused. He and Lunacharsky had been for years engaged in personal rivalry, heated scientific disputes, and a celebrated controversy on the prudent level of support for Soviet fusion research.
“We guess,” he said, “that the Message is the instructions for building a machine. Of course, we have no knowledge about how to decode the Message. The evidence is in internal references. I give you an example. Here on page 15441 is a clear reference to an earlier page, 13097, which, by luck, we also have.
The later page was received here in New Mexico, the earlier one at our observatory near Tashkent. On page 13097 there is another reference, this to a time when we were not covering all longitudes. There are many cases of this back referencing. In general, and this is the important point, there are complicated instructions on a recent page, but simpler instructions on an earlier page. In one case there are eight citations to earlier material on a single page.”
“That's not an awfully compelling arguments, guys,” replied Ellie. “Maybe it's a set of mathematical exercises, the later ones building on the earlier ones. Maybe it's a long novel—they might have very long lifetimes compared to us—in which events are connected with childhood experiences or whatever they have on Vega when they're young. Maybe it's a tightly cross-referenced religious manual.”
“The Ten Billion Commandments.” Der Heer laughed.
“Maybe,” said Lunacharsky, starting through a cloud of cigarette smoke out the window at the telescopes. They seemed to be staring longingly at the sky. “But when you look at the patterns of crossreferences, I think you'll agree it looks more like the instruction manual for building a machine. God knows what the machine is supposed to do.”
CHAPTER 9
The Numinous
Wonder is the basis of worship.
I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.
She could recall the exact moment when, on one of many trips to Washington, she discovered that she was falling in love with Ken der Heer.
Arrangements for the meeting with Palmer Joss seemed to be taking forever. Apparently Joss was reluctant to visit the Argus facility; it was the impiety of the scientists, not their interpretation of the Message, he now said, that interested him. And to probe their character, some more neutral ground was needed. Ellie was willing to go anywhere, and a special assistant to the President was negotiating. Other radio astronomers were not to go; the President wanted it to be Ellie alone.
Ellie was also waiting for the day, still some weeks off, when she would fly to Paris for the first full meeting of the World Message Consortium. She and Vaygay were coordination the global data-collection program. The signal acquisition was now fairly routine, and in recent months there had been not one gap in the coverage. So she found to her surprise that she had a little time on her hands. She vowed to have a long talk with her mother, and to remain civil and friendly no matter what provocation was offered. There was an absurd amount of backed-up paper and electronic mail to go through, not just congratulations and criticisms from colleagues, but religious admonitions, pseudoscientific speculations proposed with great confidence, and fan mail from all over the world. She had not read The Astrophysical Journal in months, although she was the first author of a very recent paper that was surely the most extraordinary article that had ever appeared in the august publication. The signal from Vega was so strong that many amateurs—tired of “ham” radio—had begun constructing their own small radio telescopes and signal analyzers. In the early stages of Message acquisition, they had turned up some useful data, and Ellie was still besieged by amateurs who thought they had acquired something unknown to the SETI professionals. She felt an obligation to write encouraging letters. There were other meritorious radio astronomy programs at the facility—the quasar survey, for example—that needed attending to. But instead of doing all these things, she found herself spending almost all her time with Ken.