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发信人: bhfbao (嗖嗖与嗖嗖), 信区: SFworld
标  题: Contact I-6
发信站: 哈工大紫丁香 (Wed Feb  2 15:23:27 2000), 转信

发信人: isabel (伊莎贝尔~戒网中), 信区: SFworld
发信站: BBS 水木清华站 (Thu Jan 27 00:56:43 2000)

发信人: Sandoval (Companion Protector), 信区: SciFiction
标　题: Contact Part I - 6
发信站: The unknown SPACE (Tue Jan 25 01:03:30 2000) WWW-POST

CHAPTER 6
Palimpsest

And if the Guardians are not happy, who else can be?
-Aristotle
The Politics
Book 2, Chapter 5
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 Army-McCarthy 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."

--
... In 2345, on the 10th anniversary of the Shivan attack
on Ross 128, the Vasudan emperor Khonsu II addressed the
newly formed GTVA General Assembly. The emperor inaugurated
an ambiguous and unprecedented joint endeavor: the GTVA
Colossus...

※ 来源:．The unknown SPACE bbs.mit.edu．[FROM: 204.91.54.100]

--

  --我对我自己的生活负责，是好是坏，是泪是笑，我一力承担。

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☆ 来源:．哈工大紫丁香 bbs.hit.edu.cn．[FROM: baohf.bbs@smth.org]

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