Ellie was a very private person. Despite her natural reticence, she had when the need arose shouldered the burden of explaining the Message and the Machine. Indeed, she had shown a patience with the press that she, the President, admired particularly. Dr. Arroway should now be permitted some real privacy, so she could resume her scientific career. There had been press announcements, briefings, interviews with Secretary Kitz and Science Adviser der Heer. The President hoped the press would respect Dr. Arroway's wish that there be no press conference. There was, however, a photo opportunity. Ellie left Washington without determining how much the President knew.
They flew her back in a small sleek jet of the Joint Military Airlift Command, and agreed to stop in Janesville on the way. Her mother was wearing her old quilted robe. Someone had put a little color on her cheeks. Ellie pressed her face into the pillow beside her mother. Beyond regaining a halting power of speech, the old woman had recovered the use of her right arm sufficiently to give Ellie a few feeble pats on her shoulder.
“Morn, I've got something to tell you. It's a great thing. But try to be calm. I don't want to upset you.
Mom… I saw Dad. I saw him. He sends you his love.”
“Yes… ” The old woman slowly nodded. “Was here yesterday.”
John Staughton, Ellie knew, had been to the nursing home the previous day. He had begged off accompanying Ellie today, pleading an excess of work, but it seemed possible that Staughton merely did not wish to intrude on this moment. Nevertheless, she found herself saying, with some irritation, “No, no. I'm talking about Dad.”
`Tell him…” The old woman's speech was labored. “Tell him, chiffon dress. Stop cleaners… way home from store.”
Her father evidently still ran the hardware store in her mother's universe. And Ellie's.
The long sweep of cyclone fencing now stretched uselessly from horizon to horizon, blighting the expanse of scrub desert. She was glad to be back, glad to be setting up a new, although much smaller-scale, research program.
Jack Hibbert had been appointed Acting Director of the Argus facility, and she felt unburdened of the administrative responsibilities. Because so much telescope time had been freed when the signal from Vega had ceased, there was a beady air of progress in a dozen long-languishing subdisciplines of radio astronomy.
Her co-workers offered not a hint of support for Kitz's notion of a Message hoax. She wondered what der Heer and Valerian were tellingtheir friends and colleagues about the Message and the Machine.
Ellie doubted that Kitz had breathed a word of it outside the recesses of his soon-to-be-vacated Pentagon office. She had been there once; a Navy enlisted man—sidearm in leather holster and hands clasped behind his back—had stiffly guarded the portal, in case in the warren of concentric hallways some passerby should succumb to an irrational impulse.
Willie had himself driven the Thunderbird from Wyoming, so it would be waiting for her. By agreement she could drive it only on the facility, which was large enough for ordinary joyriding. But no more West Texas landscapes, no more coney honor guards, no more mountain drives to glimpse a southern star. This was her sole regret about the seclusion. But the ranks of saluting rabbits were at any rate unavailable in winter.
At first a sizable press corps haunted the area in hopes of shouting a question at her or photographing her through a telescopic lens. But she. remained resolutely isolated. The newly imported public relations staff was effective, even a little ruthless, in discouraging inquiries. After all, the President had asked for privacy for Dr. Arroway.
Over the following weeks and months, the battalion of reporters dwindled to a company and then to a platoon. Now only a squad of the most steadfast remained, mostly from The World Hologram and other sensationalist weekly newspapers, the chiliast magazines, and a lone representative from a publication that called itself Science and God. No. one knew what sect it belonged to, and its reporter wasn't telling.
When the stories were written, they told of twelve years of dedicated work, culminating in the momentous, triumphant decryption of the Message and followed by the construction of the Machine. At the peak of world expectation, it had, sadly, failed. The Machine had gone nowhere. Naturally Dr. Arroway was disappointed, maybe, they speculated, even a little depressed. Many editorialists commented that this pause was welcome. The pace of new discovery and the evident need for major philosophical and religious reassessments represented so heady a mix that a time of retrenchment and slow reappraisal was needed.
Perhaps the Earth was not yet ready for contact with alien civilizations. Sociologists and some educators claimed that the mere existence of extra-terrestrial intelligences more advanced than we would require several generations to be properly assimilated. It was a body blow to human self-esteem, they said. There was enough on our plate already. In another few decades we would much better understand the principles underlying the Machine. We would see what mistake we had made, and we would laugh at how trivial an oversight bad prevented it from functioning in its first full trial back in 1999.
Some religious commentators argued that the failure of the Machine was a punishment for the sin of pride, for human arrogance. Billy Jo Rankin in a nationwide television address proposed that the Message had in fact come straight from a Hell called Vega, an authoritative consolidation of his previous positions on the matter. The Message and the Machine, he said, were a latter-day Tower of Babel. Humans foolishly, tragically, had aspired to reach the Throne of God. There had been a city of fornication and blasphemy built thousands of years ago called Babylon, which God had destroyed. In our time, there was another such city with the same name. Those dedicated to the Word of God had fulfilled His purpose there as well. The Message and the Machine represented still another assault of wickedness upon the righteous and Godfearing. Here again the demonic initiatives had been forestalled—in Wyoming by a divinely inspired accident, in Godless Russia through the confounding of Communist scientists by the Divine Grace.
But despite these clear warnings of God's will, Rankin continued, humans had for a third time tried to build the Machine. God let them. Then, gently, subtly, He caused the Machine to fail, deflected the demonic intent, and once more demonstrated His care and concern for His wayward and sinful—if truth be told. His unworthy-children onEarth. It was time to learn the lessons of our sinfulness, our abominations, and, before the coming Millennium, the real Millennium that would begin on January 1, 2001, rededicate our planet and ourselves to God.
The Machines should be destroyed. Every last one of them, and all their parts. The pretense that by building a machine rather than by purifying their hearts humans could stand at the right hand of God must be expunged, root and branch, before it was too late.
la her little apartment Ellie heard Rankin out, turned off the television set and resumed her programming.
The only outside calls she was permitted were to the rest home in Janesville, Wisconsin. All incoming calls except from Janesville were screened out. Polite apologies were provided. Letters from der Heer, Valerian, from her old college friend Becky Ellenbogen, she filed unopened. There were a number of messages delivered by express mail services, and then by courier, from South Carolina, from Palmer Joss.