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CHAPTER 6 Palimpsest

As the plane reached cruising altitude, with Albuquerque already more than a hundred miles behind them, Ellie idly glanced at the small white cardboard rectangle imprinted with blue letters that had been stapled to her airline ticket envelope. It read, in language unchanged since her first commercial flight, “This is not the luggage ticket (baggage check) described by Article 4 of the Warsaw Convention.” Why were the airlines so worried, she wondered, that passengers might mistake this piece of cardboard for the Warsaw Convention ticket? Why had she never seen one? Where were they storing them? In some forgotten key event in the history of aviation, an inattentive airline must have forgotten to print this caveat on cardboard rectangles and was sued into bankruptcy by irate passengers laboring under the misapprehension that this was the Warsaw luggage ticket. Doubtless there were sound financial reasons for this worldwide concern, never otherwise articulated, about which pieces of cardboard are not described by the Warsaw Convention. Imagine, she thought, all those cumulative lines of type devoted instead to something useful—the history of world exploration, say, or incidental facts of science, or even the average number of passenger miles until your airplane crashed.

If she had accepted der Heer's offer of a military airplane, she would be having other casual associations. But that would have been far too cozy, perhaps some aperture leading to an eventual militarization of the project. They had preferred to travel by commercial carrier. Valerian's eyes were already closed as he finished settling into the seat beside her. There had been no particular hurry, even after taking care of those last-minute details on the data analysis, with the hint that the second layer of the onion was about to unpeel. They had been able to make a commercial flight that would arrive in Washington well before tomorrow's meeting; in fact, in plenty of time for a good night's sleep.

She glanced at the telefax system neatly zipped into a leather carrying case under the seat in front of her. It was several hundred kilobits per second faster than Peter's old model and displayed much better graphics. Well, maybe tomorrow she would have to use it to explain to the President of the United States what Adolf Hitler was doing on Vega. She was, she admitted to herself, a little nervous about the meeting.

She had never met a President before, and by late-twentieth-century standards, this one wasn't half bad. She hadn't had time to get her hair done, much less a facial. Oh well, she wasn't going to the White House to be looked at.

What would her stepfather think? Did he still believe she was unsuited for science? Or her mother, now confined to a wheelchair in a nursing home? She had managed only one brief phone call to her mother since the discovery over a week ago, and promised herself to call again tomorrow.

As she had done a hundred times before, she peered out the airplane window and imagined what impression the Earth would make on an extraterrestrial observer, at this cruising altitude of twelve or fourteen kilometers, and assuming the alien had eyes something like ours. There were vast areas of the Midwest intricately geometrized with squared, rectangles, and circles by those with agricultural or urban predilections; and, as here, vast areas of the Southwest in which the only sign of intelligent life was an occasional straight line heading between mountains and across deserts. Are the worlds of more advanced civilizations totally geometrized, entirely rebuilt by their inhabitants? Or would the signature of a really advanced civilization be that they left no sign at all? Would they be able to tell in one swift glance precisely which stage we were in some great cosmic evolutionary sequence in the development of intelligent beings?

What else could they tell? From the blueness of the sky, they could make a rough estimate of Loschmidt's Number, how many molecules there were in a cubic centimeter at sea level. About three times ten to the nineteenth. They could easily tell the altitudes of the clouds from the length of their shadows on the ground. If they knew that the clouds were condensed water, they could roughly calculate the temperature lapse rate of the atmosphere, because the temperature had to fall to about minus forty degrees Centigrade at the altitude of the highest clouds she could see. The erosion of landforms, the dendritic patterns and oxbows of rivers, the presence of lakes and battered volcanic plugs all spoke of an ancient battle between land-forming and erosional processes. Really, you could see at a glance that this was an antique planet with a brand new civilization.

Most of the planets in the Galaxy would be venerable and pretechnical, maybe even lifeless. A few would harbor civilizations much older than ours. Worlds with technical civilizations just beginning to emerge must be spectacularly rare. It was probably the only quality fundamentally unique about the Earth.

Through lunch, the landscape slowly turned verdant as they approached the Mississippi Valley.

There was hardly any sense of motion in modern air travel, Ellie thought. She looked at Peter's still sleeping form; he had rejected with some indignation the prospect of an airline lunch. Beyond him, across the aisle, was a very young human being, perhaps three months old, comfortably nestled in its father's arms. What was an infant's view of air travel? You go to a special place, walk into a large room with seats in it, and sit down. The room rumbles and shakes for four hours. Then you get up and walk off. Magically, you're somewhere else. The means of transportation seems obscure to you, but the basic idea is easy to grasp, and precocious mastery of the Navier-Stokes equations is not required.

It was late afternoon when they circled Washington, awaiting permission to land. She could make out, between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, a vast crowd of people. It was, she had read only an hour earlier in the Times telefax, a massive rally of black Americans protesting economic disparities and educational inequities. Considering the justice of their grievances, she thought, they had been very patient. She wondered how the President would respond to the rally and to the Vega transmission, on both of which some official public comment would have to be made tomorrow.

“What do you mean, Ken, “They get out'?”

“I mean, Ms. President, that our television signals leave this planet and go out into space.”

“Just exactly how far do they go?”

“With all due respect, Ms. President, it doesn't work that way.”

“Well, how does it work?”

“The signals spread out from the Earth in spherical waves, a little like ripples in a pond. They travel at the speed of light—186,000 miles a second—and essentially go on forever. The better some other civilization's receivers are, the farther away they could be and still pick up our TV signals. Even we could detect a strong TV transmission from a planet going around the nearest star.”

For a moment, the President stood ramrod straight, staring out the French doors into the Rose Garden. She turned toward der Heer. “You mean… everything?”

“Yes. Everything.”

“You mean to say, all that crap on television? The car crashes? Wrestling? The porno channels?

The evening news?”

“Everything, Ms. President.” Der Heer shook his head in sympathetic consternation.

“Der Heer, do I understand you correctly? Does this mean that all my press conferences, my debates, my inaugural address, are out there?”

“That's the good news, Ms. President. The bad news is, so are all the television appearances of your predecessor. And Dick Nixon. And the Soviet leadership. And so are a lot of nasty things your opponent said about you. It's a mixed blessing.”

“My God. Okay, go on.” The President had turned away from the French doors and was now apparently preoccupied in examining a marble bust of Tom Paine, newly restored from the basement of the Smithsonian Institution, where it had been consigned by the previous incumbent.

“Look at it this way: Those few minutes of television from Vega were originally broadcast in 1936, at the opening of the Olympic Games in Berlin. Even though it was only shown in Germany, it was the first television transmission on Earth with even moderate power. Unlike the ordinary radio transmission in the thirties, those TV signals got through our ionosphere and trickled out into space. We're trying to find out exactly what was transmitted back then, but it'll probably take some time. Maybe that welcome from Hitler is the only fragment of the transmission they were able to pick up on Vega.

“So from their point of view, Hitler is the first sign of intelligent life on Earth. I'm not trying to be ironic. They don't know what the transmission means, so they record it and transmit it back to us. It's a way of saying “Hello, we heard you. ” It seems to me a pretty friendly gesture.”

“Then you say there wasn't any television broadcasting until after the Second World War?”

“Nothing to speak of. There was a local broadcast in England on the coronation of George the Sixth, a few things like that. Big time television transmission began in the late forties. All those programs are leaving the Earth at the speed of light. Imagine the Earth is here”—der Heer gestured in the air—”and there's a little spherical wave running away from it at the speed of light, starting out in 1936. It keeps expanding and receding from the Earth. Sooner or later, it reaches the nearest civilization. They seem to be surprisingly close, only twenty-six years for the Berlin Olympics to return to Earth. So the Vegans didn't take decades to figure it out. They must have been pretty much tuned, all set up, ready to go, waiting for our first television signals. They detect them, record them, and after a while play them back to us. But unless they've already been here—you know, some survey mission a hundred years ago—they couldn't have known we were about to invent television. So Dr. Arroway thinks this civilization is monitoring all the nearby planetary systems, to see if any of its neighbors develop high technology.”

“Ken, there's a lot of things her to think about. Are you sure those—what do you call them, Vegans? — you sure they don't understand what that television program was about?”

“Ms. President, there's no doubt they're smart. That was a very weak signal in 1936. Their detectors have to be fantastically sensitive to pick it up. But I don't see how they could possibly understand what it means. They probably look very different from us. They must have different history, different customs. There's no way for them to know what a swastika is or who Adolf Hitler was.”

“Adolf Hitler! Ken, it makes me furious. Forty million people die to defeat that megalomaniac, and he's the star of the first broadcast to another civilization? He's representing us. And them. It's that madman's wildest dream come true.”

She paused and continued in a calmer voice. “You know, I never thought Hitler could manage that Hitler salute. He never gave it straight on, it was always skewed at some wacko angle. And then there was that fruity bent elbow salute. If anyone else had done his Heil Hitlers so incompetently he would've been sent to the Russian front.”

“But isn't there a difference? He was only returning the salutes of others. He wasn't Heiling Hitler.”

“Oh yes he was,” returned the President and, with a gesture, ushered der Heer out of the Rose Room and down a corridor. Suddenly she stopped and regarded her Science Adviser.

“What if the Nazis didn't have television in 1936? Then what would have happened?”

“Well, then I suppose it would be the coronation of George the Sixth, or one of the transmissions about the New York World's Fair in 1939, if any of them were strong enough to be received on Vega. Or some programs from the late forties, early fifties. You know, Howdy Doody, Milton Berle, the ArmyMcCarthy hearings—all those marvelous signs of intelligent life on Earth.”

“Those goddamn programs are our ambassadors into space… the Emissary from Earth.” She paused a moment to savor the phrase. “With an ambassador, you're supposed to put your best foot forward, and we've been sending mainly crap to space for forty years. I'd like to see the network executives come to grips with this one. And that madman Hitler, that's the first news they have about Earth? What are they going to think of us?”

As der Heer and the President entered the Cabinet Room, those who had been standing in small groups fell silent, and some who had been seated made efforts to stand. With a perfunctory gesture, the President conveyed a preference for informality and casually greeted the Secretary of State and an Assistant Secretary of Defense. With a slow and deliberate turn of the head, she scanned the group. Some returned her gaze expectantly. Others, detecting an expression of minor annoyance on the President's face, averted their eyes.

“Ken, isn't that astronomer of yours here? Arrowsmith? Arrowroot?”

“Arroway, Ms. President. She and Dr. Valerian arrived last night. Maybe they've been held up in traffic.”

“Dr. Arroway called from her hotel, Ms. President,” volunteered a meticulously groomed young man. “She said there were some new data coming through on her telefax, and she wanted to bring it to this meeting. We're supposed to start without her.”

Michael Kitz leaned forward, his tone and expression incredulous. “They're transmitting new data on this subject over an open telephone, insecure, in a Washington hotel room?”

Der Heer responded so softly that Kitz had to lean still further forward to hear. “Mike, I think there's at least commercial encryption on her telefax. But remember there are no security guidelines established in this matter. I'm sure that Dr. Arroway will be cooperative if guidelines are established.”

“All right, let's begin,” said the President. “This is a joint informal meeting of the National Security Council and what for the time being we're calling the Special Contingency Task Group. I want to impress on all of you that nothing said in this room—I mean nothing—is to be discussed with anyone who isn't here, except for the Secretary of Defense and the Vice President, who are overseas. Yesterday, Dr. der Heer gave most of you a briefing on this unbelievable TV program from the star Vega. It's the view of Dr. der Heer and others”—she looked around the table—”that it's just a fluke that the first television program to get to Vega starred Adolf Hitler. But it's… an embarrassment. I've asked the Director of Central Intelligence to prepare an assessment of any national security implications in all of this. Is there any direct threat from whoever the hell is sending this? Are we going to be in trouble if there's some new message, and some other country decodes it first? But first let me ask, Marvin, does this have anything to do with flying saucers?”

The Director of Central Intelligence, an authoritative man in late middle age, wearing steel-rimmed glasses, summarized. Unidentified Flying Objects, called UFO's, have been of intermittent concern to the CIA and the Air Force, especially in the 50s and 60s, in part because rumors about them might be a means for hostile power to spread confusion or to overload communications channels. A few of the more reliably reported incidents turned out to be penetrations of U. S. air space or overflights of U. S. overseas bases by high-performance aircraft from the Soviet Union or Cuba. Such overflights are a common means of testing a potential adversary's readiness, and the United States had more than its fair share of penetrations, and feints at penetration, of Soviet air space. A Cuban MiG penetrating 200 miles up the Mississippi Basin before being detected was considered undesirable publicity by NORAD. The routine procedure had been for the Air Force to deny that any of its aircraft were in the vicinity of the UFO sighting, and to volunteer nothing about unauthorized penetrations, thus solidifying public mystification. At these explanations, the Air Force Chief of Staff looked marginally uncomfortable but said nothing.

The great majority of UFO reports, the DCI continued, were natural objects misapprehended by the observer. Unconventional or experimental aircraft, automobile headlights reflected off overcast, balloons, birds, luminescent insects, even planets and stars seen under unusual atmospheric conditions, had all been reported as UFO's. A significant number of reports turned out to be hoaxes or real psychiatric delusions.

There had been more than a million UFO sightings reported worldwide since the term “flying saucer” had been invented in the late 40s, and not one of them seemed on good evidence to be connected with an extraterrestrial visitation. But the idea generated powerful emotions, and there were fringe groups and publications, and even some academic scientists, that kept alive the supposed connection between UFO's and life on other worlds. Recent millenarian doctrine included its share of saucer-borne extraterrestrial redeemers. The official Air Force investigation, called in one of its final incarnations Project Blue Book, had been closed down in the 60s for lack of progress, although a low-level continuing interest had been maintained jointly by the Air Force and the CIA. The scientific community had been so convinced there was nothing to it that when Jimmy Carter requested the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to make a comprehensive study of UFO's, NASA uncharacteristically refused a presidential request.

“In fact,” interjected one of the scientists at the table, unfamiliar with the protocol in meetings such as this, “the UFO business has made it more difficult to do serious SETI work.”

“All right.” The President sighed. “Is there anybody around this table who thinks UFO's and this signal from Vega have anything to do with each other?” Der Heer inspected his fingernails. No one spoke.

“Just the same, there's going to be an awful lot of I-told-you-so's from the UFO yo-yos. Marvin, why don't you continue?”

“In 1936, Ms. President, a very faint television signal transmits the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games to a handful of television receivers in the Berlin area. It's an attempt at a public relations coup. It shows the progress and superiority of German technology. There were a few earlier TV transmissions, but all at very low power levels. Actually, we did it before the Germans. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover made a brief television appearance on… April twenty-seventh, 1927. Anyway, the German signal leaves the Earth at the speed of light, and twenty-six years later it arrives on Vega. They sit on the signal for a few years—whoever “they” are—and then send it back to us hugely amplified. Their ability to receive that very weak signal is impressive, and their ability to return it at such high power levels is impressive. There certainly are security implications here. The electronic intelligence community, for example, would like to know how such weak signals can be detected. Those people, or whatever they are, on Vega are certainly more advanced than we are—maybe only a few decades further along, but maybe much further along than that.

“They've given us no other information about themselves—except at some frequencies the transmitted signal doesn't show the Doppler effect from the motion of their planet around their star. They've simplified that data reduction step for us. They're… helpful. So far, nothing of military or any other interest has been received. All they've been saying is that they're good at radio astronomy, they like prime numbers, and they can return our first TV transmission back to us. It couldn't hurt for any other nation to know that.

And remember: All those other countries are receiving this same three-minute Hitler clip, over and over again. They just haven't figured out how to read it yet. The Russians or the Germans or someone is likely to tumble to this polarization modulation sooner or later. My personal impression, Ms. President—I don't know if State agrees—is that it would be better if we released it to the world before we're accused of covering something up. If the situation remains static—with no big change from where we are right now— we could think about making a public announcement, or even releasing that three-minute film clip.

“Incidentally, we haven't been able to find any record from German archives of what was in that original broadcast. We can't be absolutely sure that the people on Vega haven't made some change in the content before sending it back to us. We can recognize Hitler, all right, and the part of the Olympic stadium we see corresponds accurately to Berlin in 1936. But if at that moment Hitler had really been scratching his mustache instead of smiling as in that transmission, we'd have no way to know.”

Ellie arrived slightly breathless, followed by Valerian. They attempted to take obscure chairs against the wall, but der Heer noticed and directed the President's attention to them.

“Dr. arrow-uh-way? I'm glad to see you've arrived safely. First, let me congratulate you on a splendid discovery. Splendid. Um, Marvin…”

“I've reached a stopping point, Ms. President.”

“Good. Dr. Arroway, we understand you have something new. Would you care to tell us about it?”

“Ms. President, sorry to be late, but I think we've just hit the cosmic jackpot. We've.. It's… Let me try and explain it this way: In classical times, thousands of years ago, when parchment was in short supply, people would write over an old parchment, making what's called a palimpsest. There was writing under writing under writing. This signal from Vega is, of course, very strong. As you know, there's the prime numbers, and “underneath” them, in what's called polarization modulation, this eerie Hitler business. But underneath the sequence of prime numbers and underneath the retransmitted Olympic broadcast, we've just uncovered an incredibly rich message—at least we're pretty sure it's a message. As far as we can tell, it's been there all along. We've just detected it. It's weaker than the announcement signal, but I'm embarrassed we didn't find it sooner.”

“What does it say?” the President asked. “What's it about?”

“We haven't the foggiest idea, Ms. President. Some of the people at Project Argus tumbled to it early this morning Washington time. We've been working on it all night.”

“Over an open phone?” asked Kitz.

“With standard commercial encryption.” Ellie looked a little flushed. Opening her telefax case, she quickly generated a transparency printout and, when an overhead projector, cast its image against a screen.

“Here's all we know up to now: We'll get a block of information comprising about a thousand bits.

There'll be a pause, and then the same block will be repeated, bit for bit. Then there'll be another pause, and we'll go on to the next block. It's repeated as well. The repetition of every block is probably to minimize transmission errors. They must think it's very important that we get whatever it is they're saying down accurately. Now, let's call each of these blocks of information a page. Argus is picking up a few dozen of these pages a day. But we don't know what they're about. They're not a simple picture code like the Olympic message. This is something much deeper and much richer. It appears to be, for the first time, information they've generated. The only clue we have so far is that the pages seem to be numbered. At the beginning of every page there's a number in binary arithmetic. See this one here? And every time another pair of identical pages shows up, it's labeled with the next higher number. Right now we're on page…

10,413. It's a big book. Calculating back, it seems that the message began about three months ago. We're lucky to have picked it up as early as we did.”

“I was right, wasn't I?” Kitz leaned across the table to der Heer. “This isn't the kind of message you want to give to the Japanese or the Chinese or the Russians, is it?”

“Is it going to be easy to figure out?” the President asked over the whispering Kitz.

“We will, of course, make out best efforts. And it probably would be useful to have the National Security Agency work on it also. But without an explanation from Vega, without a primer, my guess is that we're not going to make much progress. It certainly doesn't seem to be written in English or German or any other Earthly language. Our hope is that the Message will come to an end, maybe on page 20,000 or page 30,000, and then start right over from the beginning, so we'll be able to fill in the missing parts. Maybe before the whole Message repeats, there'll be a primer, a kind of McGuffey's Reader, that will enable us to understand the Message.”

“If I may, Ms. President—”

“Ms. President, this is Dr. Peter Valerian of the California Institute of Technology, one of the pioneers in this field.”

“Please go ahead, Dr. Valerian.”

“This is an intentional transmission to us. They know we're here. They have some idea, from having intercepted out 1936 broadcast, of where our technology is, of how smart we are. They wouldn't be going to all this trouble if they didn't want us to understand the Message. Somewhere in there is the key to help us understand it. It's only a question of accumulating all the data and analyzing it very carefully.”

“Well, what do you suppose the Message is about?”

“I don't see any way to tell, Ms. President. I can only repeat what Dr. Arroway said. It's an intricate and complex Message. The transmitting civilization is eager for us to receive it. Maybe all this is one small volume of the Encyclopedia Galactica. The star Vega is about three times more massive than the Sun and about fifty times brighter. Because it burns its nuclear fuel so fast, it has a much shorter lifetime than the Sun—”

“Yes. Maybe something's about to go wrong on Vega,” the Director of Central Intelligence interrupted. “Maybe their planet will be destroyed. Maybe they want someone else to know about their civilization before they're wiped out.”

“Or,” offered Kitz, “maybe they're looking for a new place to move to, and the Earth would suit them just fine. Maybe it's no accident they chose to send us a picture of Adolf Hitler.”

“Hold on,” Ellie said, “there are a lot of possibilities, but not everything is possible. There's no way for the transmitting civilization to know whether we've received the Message, much less whether we're making any progress in decoding it. If we find the Message offensive we're not obliged to reply. And even if we did reply, it would be twenty-six years before they received the reply, and another twenty-six years before they can answer it. The speed of light is fast, but it's not infinitely fast. We're very nicely quarantined from Vega. And if there's anything that worries us about this new Message, we have decades to decide what to do about it. Let's not panic quite yet.” She enunciated these last words while offering a pleasant smile to Kitz.

“I appreciate those remarks, Dr. Arroway,” returned the President. “But things are happening fast.

Too damn fast. And there are too many maybes. I haven't even made a public announcement about all of this. Not even the prime numbers, never mind the Hitler bullcrap. Now we have to think about this “book” you say they're sending. And because you scientists think nothing of talking to each other, the rumors are flying. Phyllis, where's that file? Here, look at these headlines.”

Brandished successively at arm's length, they all carried the same message, with minor variations in journalistic artistry: “Space Doc Says Radio Show from Bug-Eyed Monsters,” “Astronomical Telegram Hints at Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” “Voice from Heaven?” and “The Aliens Are Coming! The Aliens Are Coming! “She let the clippings flutter tot he table.

“At least the Hitler story hasn't broken yet. I'm waiting for those headlines: “Hitler Alive and Well in Space, U. S. Says. ” And worse. Much worse. I think we'd better curtail this meeting and reconvene later.”

“If I may, Ms. President,” der Heer interrupted haltingly, with evident reluctance. “I beg your pardon, but there are some international implications that I think have to be raised now.”

The President merely exhaled, acquiescing.

Der Heer continued. “Tell me if I have this right, Dr. Arroway. Every day the star Vega rises over the New Mexico desert, and then you get whatever page of this complex transmission—whatever it is—they happen to be sending to the Earth at the moment. Then, eight hours later or something, the star sets. Right so far? Okay. Then the next day the star rises again in the east, but you've lost some pages during the time you weren't able to look at it, after it had set the previous night. Right? So it's as if you were getting pages thirty through fifty and then pages eighty through a hundred, and so on. No matter how patiently we observe, we're going to have enormous amounts of information missing. Gaps. Even if the message eventually repeats itself, we're going to have gaps.”

“That's entirely right.” Ellie rose and approached an enormous globe of the world. Evidently the White House was opposed to the obliquity of the Earth; the axis of this globe was defiantly vertical.

Tentatively, she gave it a spin. “The Earth turns. You need radio telescopes distributed evenly over many longitudes if you don't want gaps. Any one nation observing only from its own territory is going to dip into the message and dip out—maybe even at the most interesting parts. Now this is the same kind of problem that an American interplanetary spacecraft faces. It broadcasts its findings back to Earth when it passes by some planet, but the United States might be facing the other way at the time. So NASA has arranged for three radio tracking stations to be distributed evenly in longitude around the Earth. Over the decades they've performed superbly. But…” Her voice trailed off diffidently, and she looked directly at P. L. Garrison, the NASA Administrator. A thin, sallow, friendly man, he blinked.

“Uh, thank you. Yes. It's called the Deep S[ace Network, and we're very proud of it. We have stations in the Mojave Desert, in Spain, and in Australia. Of course, we're underfunded, but with a little help, I'm sure we could get up to speed.”

“Spain and Australia?” the President asked.

“For purely scientific work,” the Secretary of State was saying, “I'm sure there's no problem.

However, if this research program had political overtones, it might be a little tricky.”

American relations with both countries had become cool of late.

“There's no question this has political overtones,” the President replied a little testily.

“But we don't have to be tied to the surface of the earth,” interjected an Air Force general. “We can beat the rotation period. All we need is a large radio telescope in Earth orbit.”

“All right.” The President again glanced around the table. “Do we have a space radio telescope?

How long would it take to get one up? Who knows about this? Dr. Garrison?”

“Uh, no, Ms. President. We at NASA have submitted a proposal for the Maxwell Observatory in each of the last three fiscal years, but OMB has removed it from the budget each time. We have a detailed design study, of course, but it would take years—well, three years anyway—before we could get it up. And I feel I should remind everybody that until last fall the Russians had a working millimeter and submillimeter wave telescope in Earth orbit. We don't know why it failed, but they'd be in a better position to send some cosmonauts up to fix it than we'd be to build and launch one from scratch.”

“That's it?” the President asked. “NASA has an ordinary telescope in space but no big radio telescope. Isn't there anything suitable up there already? What about the intelligence community? National Security Agency? Nobody?”

“So, just to follow this line of reasoning,” der Heer said, “it's a strong signal and it's on lots of frequencies. After Vega sets over the United States, there are radio telescopes in half a dozen countries that are detecting and recording the signal. They're not as sophisticated as Project Argus, and they probably haven't figured out the polarization modulation yet. If we wait to prepare a space radio telescope and launch it, the message might be finished by then, gone altogether. So doesn't it follow that the only solution is immediate cooperation with a number of other nations, Dr. Arroway?”

“I don't think any nation can accomplish this project alone. It will require many nations, spread out in longitude, all the way around the Earth. It will involve every major radio astronomy facility now in place—the big radio telescopes in Australia, China, India, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and Western Europe. It would be irresponsible if we wind up with gaps in the coverage because some critical part of the message came when there's no telescope looking at Vega. We'll have to do something about the Eastern Pacific between Hawaii and Australia, and maybe something about the Mid-Atlantic also.”

“Well,” the Director of Central Intelligence responded grudgingly, “the Soviets have several satellite tracking ships that are good in S-band through X-band, the Akademik Keldysh, for example. Or the Marshal Nedelin. If we make some arrangement with them, they might be able to station ships in the Atlantic or the Pacific and fill in the gaps.”

Ellie pursed her lips to respond, but the President was already talking.

“All right, Ken. You may be right. But I say again this is moving too damn fast. There are some other things I have to attend to right now. I'd appreciate it if the Director of Central Intelligence and the national Security staff would work overnight on whether we have any options besides cooperation with other countries—especially countries that aren't our allies. I'd like the Secretary of State to prepare, in cooperation with the scientists, a contingency list of nations and individuals to be approached if we have to cooperate, and some assessment of the consequences. Is some nation going to be mad at us if we don't ask them to listen? Can we be blackmailed by somebody who promises the data and then holds back? Should we try to get more than one country at each longitude? Work through the implications. And for God's sake”— her eyes moved from face to face around the long polished table—”keep quiet about this. You too, Arroway. We've got problems enough.”