“Who doesn't?”
“Well, Lunacharsky and the Russians. And Billy Jo Rankin, of course. There are still people who worry that the Machine will blow up the-world or tip the Earth's axis, or something. But what's impressed most of the scientists is how careful the instructions are, and how many different ways they go about trying to explain the same thing.”
“And what does Eleanor Arroway say?”
“She says if they want to do us in, they'll be here in twenty-five years or so and there's nothing we could do in twenty-five years to protect ourselves. They're too far ahead of us. So she says. Build it, and if you're worried about environmental hazards, build it in a remote place. Professor Drumlin says you can build it in downtown Pasadena for all he cares. In fact, he says he'll be there every minute it takes to construct the Machine, so he'll be the first to go if it blows up.”
“Drumlin, he's the fellow who figured out that this was the design for a Machine, right?”
“Not exactly, he-” “I'll read all the briefing material in time for that Thursday meeting. You got anything else for me?”
“Are you seriously considering letting Hadden build the Machine?”
“Well, it's not only up to me, as you know. That treaty they're hammering out in Paris gives us about a onequarter say. The Russians have a quarter, the Chinese and the Japanese together have a quarter, and the rest of the world has a quarter, roughly speaking. A lot of nations want to build the Machine, or at least parts of it. They're thinking about prestige, and new industries, new knowledge. As long as no one gets a jump on us, that all sounds fine to me. It's possible Hadden might have a piece of it. What's the problem? Don't you think he's technically competent?”
“He certainly is. It's just—” “If there's nothing more, Ken, I'll see you Thursday, virus willing.”
As der Heer was shutting the door and entering the adjacent sitting room, there was an explosive presidential sneeze. The Warrant Officer of the Day, sitting stiffly on a couch, was visibly startled. The briefcase at his feet was crammed with authorization codes for nuclear war. Der Heer calmed him with a repetitive gesture of his hand, fingers spread, palm down. The officer gave an apologetic smile.
“That's Vega? That's what all the fuss is about?” the President asked with some disappointment. The photo opportunity for the press was now over, and her eyes had become almost dark-adapted after the onslaught of flashbulbs and television lighting. The pictures of the President gazing steely-eyed through the Naval Observatory telescope that appeared in all the papers the next day were, of course, a minor sham. She had been unable to see anything at all through the telescope until the photographers had left and darkness returned. “Why does it wiggle?”
“It's turbulence in the air, Ms. President,” der Heer explained. “Warm bubbles of air go by and distort the image.”
“Like looking at Si across the breakfast table when there's a toaster between us. I can remember seeing one whole side of his face fall off,” she said affectionately, raising her voice so the presidential consort, standing nearby talking to the uniformed Commandant of the Observatory, could overhear.
“Yeah, no toaster on the breakfast table these days,” he replied amiably.
Seymour Lasker was before his retirement a high official of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. He had met his wife decades before when she was representing the New York Girl Coat Company, and they had fallen in love over a protracted labor settlement. Considering the present novelty of both their positions, the apparent health of their relationship was noteworthy.
“I can do without the toaster, but I'm not getting enough breakfasts with Si.” She inflected her eyebrows in his general direction, and then returned to the monocular eyepiece. “It looks like a blue amoeba, all…
squishy.”
After the difficult crew-selection meeting, the President was in a lighthearted frame of mind. Her cold was almost gone.
“What if there was no turbulence, Ken? What would I see then?”
“Then it would be just like Space Telescope above the Earth's atmosphere. You'd see a steady, unflickering point of light.”
“Just the star? Just Vega? No planets, no rings, no laser battle stations?”
“No, Ms. President. All that would be much too small and faint to see even with a very big telescope.”
“Well, I hope your scientists know what they're doing,” she said in a near whisper. “We're making an awful lot of commitments on something we've never seen.”
Der Heer was a little taken aback. “But we've seen thirty-one thousand pages of text—pictures, words, plus a huge primer.”
“In my book, that's not the same as seeing it. It's a little too… inferential. Don't tell me about scientists all over the world getting the same data. I know all that. And don't tell me about how clear and unambiguous the blueprints for the Machine are. I know that too. And if we back out, someone else is sure to build the Machine. I know all those things. But I'm still nervous.”
The party ambled back through the Naval Observatory compound to the Vice President's residence.
Tentative agreements on crew selection had been painstakingly worked out in Paris in the last weeks. The United States and the Soviet Union had argued for two crew positions each; on such matters they were reliable allies. But it was hard to sustain this argument with the other nations in the World Message Consortium. These days it was much more difficult for the United States and the Soviet Union—even on issues on which they agreed—to work their way with the other nations of the world than had once been the case.
The enterprise was now widely touted as an activity of the human species. The name “World Message Consortium” was about to be changed to “World Machine Consortium.” Nations with pieces of the Message tried to use this fact as an entree for one of their nationals as a member of the crew. The Chinese had quietly argued that by the middle of the next century there would be one and a half billion of them in the world, but with many born as only children because of the Chinese experiment on state-supported birth control. Those children, once grown, would be brighter, they predicted, and more emotionally secure than children of other nations with less stringent rules on family size. Since the Chinese would thus be playing a more prominent role in world affairs in another fifty years, they argued, they deserved at least one of the five seats on the Machine. It was an argument now being discussed in many nations by officials with no responsibility for the Message or the Machine.
Europe and Japan surrendered crew representation in exchange for major responsibility for the construction of Machine components, which they believed would be of major economic benefit. In the end, a seat was reserved for the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and India, with the fifth seat undecided.
This represented a long and difficult multilateral negotiation, with population size, economic, industrial, and military power, present political alignments, and even a little of the history of the human species as considerations.
For the fifth seat, Brazil and Indonesia made representations based on population size and geographical balance; Sweden proposed a moderating role in case of political disputes; Egypt, Iraq, Palostan and Saudi Arabia argued on grounds of religious equity. Others suggested that at least this fifth seat should be decided on grounds of individual merit rather than national affiliation. For the moment, the decision was left in limbo, a wild card for later.