“But we still want to send the best possible people,” der Heer noted, a little obviously.
“Sure,” returned Kitz, “but what do we mean by “best'? Scientists? People with military intelligence backgrounds? Physical strength and endurance? Patriotism? (That's not a dirty word, you know.) And then”—he looked up from buttering another croissant to glance directly at Ellie— “there's the question of sex. Sexes, I mean. Do we send only men? If it's men and women, there has to be more of one sex than the other. There's five places, an odd number. Are all the crew members going to work together okay? If we go ahead with this project, there's gonna be a lot of tough negotiation.”
“This doesn't sound right to me,” said Ellie. “This isn't some ambassadorship you buy with a campaign contribution. This is serious business. Also, do you want some muscle-bound moron up there, some kid in his twenties who knows nothing about how the world works—just how to run a respectable hundred-yard dash and how to obey orders? Or some political hack? That can't be what this trip is about.”
“No, you're right.” Kitz smiled. “I think we'll find people who satisfy all our criteria.” Der Heer, the bags under his eyes making him look almost haggard, adjourned the meeting. He managed to give Ellie a small private smile, but it was all lips, no teeth. The Embassy limousines were waiting to take them back to the Elysee Palace.
“I'll tell you why it would be better to send Russians,” Vaygay was saying. “When you Americans were opening up your country—pioneers, trappers, Indian scouts, all that—you were unopposed, at least by anyone at your level of technology. You raced across your continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. After a while, you expected everything would be easy. Our situation was different. We were conquered by the Mongols. Their horse technology was much superior to ours. When we expanded eastward we were careful.
We never crossed the wilderness and expected it would be easy. We're more adjusted to adversity than you are. Also, Americans are used to being ahead techno-logically. We're used to catching up technologically.
Now, everybody on Earth is a Russian—you understand, I mean in our historical position. This mission needs Soviets more than it needs Americans.” Merely meeting with her alone entailed certain risks for Vaygay—and for her as well, as Kitz had gone out of his way to remind her. Sometimes, during a scientific meeting in America or Europe, Vaygay would be permitted to spend an afternoon with her. More often he was accompanied by colleagues or a RGB baby-sitter—who would be described as a translator, even when his English was clearly inferior to Vaygay's; or as a scientist from the secretariat of this or that Academy commission, except that his knowledge of the scientific matters often proved superficial. Vaygay would shake his head when asked about them. But by and large, he considered the baby-sitters a part of the game, the price you must pay when they let you visit the West, and more than once she thought she detected a note of affection in Vaygay's voice when he talked to the baby-sitter: To go to a foreign country and pretend to be expert in a subject you know poorly must be filled with anxiety. Perhaps, in their heart of hearts, the baby-sitters detested their assignment as much as Vaygay did.
They were seated at the same window table at Chez Dieux. A distinct chill was in the air, a premonition of winter, and a young man wearing a long blue scarf as his only concession to the cold strode briskly past the tubs of chilled oysters outside the window. From Lunacharsky's continuing (and uncharacteristically) guarded remarks, she deduced disarray in the Soviet delegation. The Soviets were concerned that the Machine might somehow redound to the strategic advantage of the United States in the five-decade-old global competition. Vaygay had in fact been shocked by Baruda's question about burning the data and destroying the radio telescopes. He had had no advance knowledge of Baruda's position. The Soviets had played a vital role in gathering the Message, with the largest longitude coverage of any nation, Vaygay stressed, and they had the only serious oceangoing radio telescopes. They would expect a major role in whatever came next. Ellie assured him that, as far as she was concerned, they should have such a role.
“Look, Vaygay, they know from our television transmissions that the Earth rotates, and that there are many different nations. The Olympic broadcast alone might have told them that. Subsequent transmissions from other nations would have nailed it down. So if they're as good as we think, they could have phased the transmission with the Earth's rotation, so only one nation got the Message. They chose not to do that. They want the Message to be received by everybody on the planet. They're expecting the Machine to be built by the whole planet. This can't be an all-American or an all-Russian project. It's not what our… client wants.”
But she was not sure, she told him, that she would be playing any role in decisions on Machine construction or crew selection. She was returning to the United States the next day, mainly to get on top of the new radio data from the past few weeks. The Consortium plenary sessions seemed interminable, and no closing date had been set. Vaygay had been asked by his people to stay on at least a little longer. The Foreign Minister had just arrived and was now leading the Soviet delegation.
“I'm worried all this will end badly,” he said. “There are so many things that can go wrong. Technological failures. Political failures. Human failures. And even if we get through all that, if we don't have a war because of the Machine, if we build it correctly and without blowing ourselves up, I'm still worried.”
“About what? How do you mean?”
“The best that can happen is we will be made fools of.”
“Who will?”
“Arroway, don't you understand?” A vein in Lunacharsky's neck throbbed. “I'm amazed you don't see it.
The Earth is a… ghetto. Yes, a ghetto. All human beings are trapped here. We have heard vaguely that there are big cities out there beyond the ghetto, with broad boulevards filled with droshkys and beautiful perfumed women in furs. But the cities are too far away, and we are too poor ever to go there, even the richest of us. Anyway, we know they don't want us. That's why they've left us in this pathetic little village in the first place.
“And now along comes an invitation. As Xi said. Fancy, elegant. They have sent us an engraved card and an empty droshky. We are to send five villagers and the droshky will carry them to—who knows? — Warsaw. Or Moscow. Maybe even Paris. Of course, some are tempted to go. There will always be people who are flattered by the invitation, or who think it is a way to escape our shabby village.
“And what do you think will happen when we get there? Do you think the Grand Duke will have us to dinner? Will the President of the Academy ask us interesting questions about daily life in our filthy shtetl? Do you imagine the Russian Orthodox Metropolitan will engage us in learned discourse on comparative religion?
“No, Arroway. We will gawk at the big city, and they will laugh at us behind their hands. They will exhibit us to the curious. The more backward we are the better they'll feel, the more reassured they'll be.
“It's a quota system. Every few centuries, five of us get to spend a weekend on Vega. Have pity on the provincials, and make sure they know who their betters are.”
CHAPTER 13
Babylon
With the basest of companions, I walked the streets of Babylon…
THE CRAY 21 mainframe computer at Argus had been instructed to compare each day's harvest of data from Vega with the earliest records of Level 3 of the palimpsest. In effect, one long and incomprehensible sequence of zeros and ones was being compared automatically with another, earlier, such sequence. This was part of a massive statistical intercomparison of various segments of the still unde-crypted text. There were some short sequences of zeros and ones—”words” the analysts called them, hopefully—which were repeated again and again. Many sequences would appear only once in thousands of pages of text. This statistical approach to message decryption was familiar to Ellie since high school. But the subroutines supplied by the experts from the National Security Agency—made available only as a result of a presidential directive, and even then armed with instructions to self-destruct if examined closely—were brilliant.