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发信人: bhfbao (嗖嗖与嗖嗖), 信区: SFworld
标  题: Contact I-7
发信站: 哈工大紫丁香 (Wed Feb  2 15:23:43 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 01:02:22 2000)

发信人: Sandoval (Companion Protector), 信区: SciFiction
标　题: Contact Part I - 7
发信站: The unknown SPACE (Tue Jan 25 01:03:55 2000) WWW-POST

CHAPTER 7
The Ethanol in W-3

No credence whatever is to be given to the opinion... that
the demons act as messengers and interpreters between the
gods and men to carry all petitions from us to the gods, and
to bring back to us the help of the gods. On the contrary,
we must believe them to be spirits most eager to inflict
harm, utterly alien from righteousness, swollen with pride,
pale with envy, subtle in deceit...
-Augustine
The City of God, VIII, 22

That Heresies should arise, we have the prophesie of Christ;
but that old ones should be abolished, we hod no prediction.
-Thomas Browne
Religio Medici, I, 8 (1642)
She had planned to meet Vaygay's plane in Albuquerque and
drive him back to the Argus facility in the Thunderbird. The
rest of the Soviet delegation would have traveled in the
observatory cars. She would have enjoyed speeding to the
airport in the cool dawn air, perhaps again past an honor
guard of rampant coneys. And she had been anticipating a
long and substantive private talk with Vaygay on the return.
But the new security people from the General Services
Administration had vetoed the idea. Media attention and the
president's sober announcement at the end of her press
conference two weeks before had brought enormous crowds to
the isolated desert site. There was a potential for
violence, they had told Ellie. She must in future travel
only in government cars, and then only with discreetly armed
escorts. Their little convoy was wending its way toward
Albuquerque at a pace so sober and responsible that she
found her right foot of its own volition depressing an
imaginary accelerator on the rubber mat before her.
It would be good to spend some time with Vaygay
again. She had last seen him in Moscow three years before,
during one of those periods in which he was forbidden to
visit the West. Authorization for foreign travel had waxed
and waned through the decades in response to changing policy
fashions and Vaygay's own unpredictable behavior. Permission
would be denied him after some mild political provocation
about which he seemed unable to restrain himself, and then
granted again when no one of comparable ability could be
found to flesh out one or another scientific delegation. He
received invitations from all over the world for lectures,
seminars, colloquia, conferences, joint study groups, and a
full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, he could
afford to be a little more independent than most. He often
seemed poised precariously at the outer limits of the
patience and restraint of the governmental orthodoxy.
His full name was Vasily Gregorovich Lunacharsky,
known throughout the global community of physicists as
Vaygay after the initials of his first name and patronymic.
His fluctuating and ambiguous relations with the Soviet
regime puzzled her and others in the West. He was a distant
relative of Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky, an old
Bolshevik colleague of Gorky, Lenin, and Trotsky; the elder
Lunacharsky had later served as People's Commissar for
Education and as Soviet Ambassador to Spain until his death
in 1933. Vaygay's mother had been Jewish. He had, it was
said, worked on Soviet nuclear weapons, although surely he
was too young to have played much of a role in fashioning
the first Soviet thermonuclear explosion.
His institute was well staffed and well equipped,
and his scientific productivity was prodigious, indicating
at most infrequent distractions by the committee for State
Security. Despite the ebb and flow of permission for foreign
travel, he had been a frequent attendee at major
international conferences including the "Rochester" symposia
on high-energy physics, the "Texas" meeting on relativistic
astrophysics, and the informal but occasionally influential
"Pugwash" scientific gatherings on ways of reducing
international tension.
In the 1960s, she had been told, Vaygay visited the
University of California at Berkeley and was delighted with
the proliferation of irreverent, scatological, and
politically outrageous slogans imprinted on inexpensive
buttons. You could, she recalled with faint nostalgia, size
up someone's most pressing social concerns at a glance.
Buttons were also popular and fiercely traded in the Soviet
Union, but usually they celebrated the "Dynamo" soccer team,
or one of the successful spacecraft of the Luna series,
which had been the first spacecraft to land on the Moon. The
Berkeley buttons were different. Vaygay had bought dozens of
them, but delighted in wearing one in particular. It was the
size of his palm and read, "Pray for Sex." He even displayed
it at scientific meetings. When asked about its appeal, he
would say, "In your country, it is offensive in only one
way. In my country, it is offensive in two independent
ways." If pressed further, he would only comment that his
famous Bolshevik relative had written a book on the place of
religion in a socialist society. Since then, his English had
improved enormously-much more than Ellie's Russian-but his
propensity for wearing offensive lapel buttons had, sadly,
diminished.
Once, during a vigorous discussion on the relative
merits of the two political systems, Ellie had boasted that
she had been free to march in front of the White House
protesting American involvement in the Vietnam War. Vaygay
replied that in the same period he had been equally free to
march in front of the Kremlin protesting American
involvement in the Vietnam War.
He had never been inclined, say, to photograph the
garbage scows burdened with malodorous refuse and squawking
seagulls lumbering in front of the Statue of Liberty, as
another Soviet scientist had when for fun she had escorted
him on the Staten Island ferry during a break in a meeting
in New York City. Nor had he, as had some of his colleagues,
ardently photographed the tumble-down shanties and
corrugated metal huts of the Puerto Rican poor during a bus
excursion from a luxurious beachfront hotel to the Arecibo
Observatory. To whom did they submit these pictures? Ellie
wondered. She conjured up some vast KGB library dedicated to
the infelicities, injustices, and contradictions of
capitalist society. Did it warm them, when disconsolate with
some of the failures of Soviet society, to browse through
the fading snapshots of their imperfect American cousins?
There were many brilliant scientists in the Soviet
Union who, for unknown offenses, had not been permitted out
of Eastern Europe in decades. Konstantinov, for example, had
never been to the West until the mid-1960s. When, at an
international meeting in Warsaw-over a table encumbered with
dozens of depleted Azerbaijani brandy snifters, their
missions completed-Konstantinov was asked why, he replied,
"Because the bastards know, they let me out, I never come
back." Nevertheless, they had let him out, sure enough,
during the thaw in scientific relations between the two
countries in the late '60s and early '70s, and he had come
back every time. But now they let him out no more, and he
was reduced to sending his Western colleagues New Year's
cards in which he portrayed himself forlornly cross-legged,
head bowed, seated on a sphere below which was the
Schwarzschild equation for the radius of a black hole. He
was in a deep potential well, he would tell visitors to
Moscow in the metaphors of physics. They would never let him
out again.
In response to questions, Vaygay would say that the
official Soviet position was that the Hungarian revolution
of 1956 had been organized by cryptofascists, and that the
Prague Spring of 1968 was brought about by an
unrepresentative anti-socialist group in the leadership.
But, he would add, if what he had been told was mistaken, if
these were genuine popular uprisings, then his country had
been wrong in suppressing them. On Afghanistan he did not
even bother quoting the official justifications. Once in his
office at the Institute he had insisted on showing Ellie his
personal shortwave radio, on which were frequencies labeled
London and Paris and Washington, neatly spelled out in
Cyrillic letters. He was free, he told her, to listen to the
propaganda of all nations.
There had been a time when many of his fellows had
surrendered to national rhetoric about the yellow peril.
"Imagine the entire frontier between China and the Soviet
Union occupied by Chinese soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, an
invading army, " on of them requested, challenging Ellie's
powers of imagination. They were standing around the samovar
in the Director's office at the Institute. "How long would
it be, with the present Chinese birthrate, before they all
passed over the border?" And the answer was pronounced, in
an unlikely mix of dark foreboding and arithmetic delight,
"Never." William Randolph Hearst would have felt at home.
But not Lunacharsky. Stationing so many Chinese soldiers on
the frontier would automatically reduce the birthrate, he
argued; their calculations were therefore in error. He had
phrased it as thought eh misuse of mathematical models was
the subject of his disapproval, but few mistook his meaning.
In the worst of the Sino-Soviet tensions, he had never, so
far as Ellie knew, allowed himself to be swept up in the
endemic paranoia and racism.
Ellie loved the samovars and could understand the
Russian affection for them. Their Lunakhod, the successful
unmanned lunar rover that looked like a bathtub on wire
wheels, seemed to her to have a little samovar technology
somewhere in its ancestry. Vaygay had once taken her to see
a model of Lunakhod in a sprawling exhibition park outside
of Moscow on a splendid June morning. There, next to a
building displaying the wares and charms of the Tadzhik
Autonomous Republic, was a great hall filled to the rafters
with full-scale models of Soviet civilian space vehicles.
Sputnik 1, the first orbital spacecraft; Sputnik 2, the
first spacecraft to carry an animal, the dog Laika, who died
in space; Luna 2, the first spacecraft to reach another
celestial body; Luna 3, the first spacecraft to photograph
the far side of the Moon; Venera 7, the first spacecraft to
land safely on another planet; and Vostok 1, the first
manned spacecraft, that carried Hero of the Soviet Union
Cosmonaut Yuri A. Gagarin on a single orbit of the Earth.
Outside, children were using the fins of the Vostok launch
booster as slides, their pretty blond curls and red Komsomol
neckerchiefs flaring as, to much hilarity, the descended to
land. Zemlya, it was called in Russian. The large Soviet
island in the Arctic Sea was called Novaya Zemlya, New Land.
It was there in 1961 that they had detonated a
fifty-eight-megaton thermonuclear weapon, the largest single
explosion so far contrived by the human species. But on that
spring day, with the vendors hawking the ice cream in which
Moscovites take so much pride, with families on outings and
a toothless old man smiling at Ellie and Lunacharsky as if
they were lovers, the old land had seemed nice enough.
In her infrequent visits to Moscow or Leningrad,
Vaygay would often arrange the evenings. A group of six or
eight of them would go to the Bolshoi or the Kirov ballet.
Lunacharsky somehow would arrange for the tickets. She would
thank her hosts for the evening, and they-explaining that it
was only in the company of foreign visitors that they
themselves were able to attend such performances-would thank
her. Vaygay would only smile. He never brought his wife, and
Ellie had never met her. She was, he said, a physician who
was devoted to her patients. Ellie had asked him what his
greatest regret was, because his parents had not, as they
had once contemplated, emigrated to America. "I have only
one regret," he had said in his gravelly voice. "My daughter
married a Bulgarian."
Once he arranged a dinner at a Caucasian restaurant
in Moscow. A professional toastmaster, or tamada, named
Khaladze had been engaged for the evening. The man was a
master of this art form, but Ellie's Russian was bad enough
that she was obliged to ask for most of the toasts to be
translated. He turned to her and, foreshadowing the rest of
the evening, remarked, "We call the man who drinks without a
toast an alcoholic." An early and comparatively mediocre
toast had ended "To peace on all planets," and Vaygay had
explained to her that the word mir meant world, peace and a
self-governing community of peasant households that went
back to ancient times. They had talked about whether the
world had been more peaceful when its largest political
units had been no larger than villages. "Every village is a
planet," Lunacharsky had said, his tumbler held high. "And
every planet a village," she had returned.
Such gatherings would be a little raucous. Enormous
quantities of brandy and vodka would be drunk, but no one
ever seemed seriously inebriated. They would emerge noisily
from the restaurant at one or two in the morning and try,
often vainly, to find a taxicab. Several times he had
escorted her on foot a distance of five or six kilometers
from the restaurant back to her hotel. He was attentive, a
little avuncular, tolerant in his political judgments,
fierce in his scientific pronouncements. Although his sexual
escapades were legendary among his colleagues, he never
permitted himself so much as a good-night kiss with Ellie.
This had always distressed her a little, although his
affection for her was plain.
There were many women in the Soviet scientific
community, proportionately more so than in the United
States. But they tended to occupy menial to middle-level
positions, and male Soviet scientists, like their American
counterparts, were puzzled about a pretty woman with evident
scientific competence who forcefully expressed her views.
Some would interrupt her or pretend not to hear her. Then,
Lunacharsky would always lean over and ask in a louder voice
than usual, "What did you say, Dr. Arroway? I didn't quite
manage to hear." The others would then fall silent and she
would continue about doped gallium arsenide detectors, or
the ethanol content of the galactic cloud W-3. The quantity
of 200-proof alcohol in this single interstellar cloud was
more than enough to maintain the present population of the
Earth, if every adult were a dedicated alcoholic, for the
age of the solar system. The tamada had appreciated the
remark. In their subsequent toasts, they had speculated on
whether other forms of life would be intoxicated by ethanol,
whether public drunkenness was a Galaxy-wide problem, and
whether a toastmaster on any other world could be as
skillful as our Trofim Sergeivich Khaladze.



They arrived at the Albuquerque airport to discover that,
miraculously, the commercial flight from New York with the
Soviet delegation aboard had landed a half hour early. Ellie
found Vaygay at an airport souvenir shop negotiating the
price of some trinket. He must have seen her out of the
corner of his eye. Without turning to face her, he lifted a
finger: "One second, Arroway. Nineteen ninety-five?" he
continued, addressing the elaborately disinterested sales
clerk. "I saw the identical set in New York yesterday for
seventeen fifty." She edged closer and observed Vaygay
spreading a set of holographic playing cards displaying
nudes of both sexes in poses, now considered merely
indecorous, that would have scandalized the previous
generation. The clerk was making halfhearted attempts to
gather the cards up as Lunacharsky made vigorous and
successful efforts to cover the counter with the cards.
Vaygay was winning. "I'm sorry, sir, I don't set prices. I
only work here," complained the clerk.
"You see the deficiencies of a planned economy,"
Vaygay said to Ellie while proffering a twenty-dollar bill
to the clerk. "In a true free-enterprise system, I probably
could purchase this for fifteen dollars. Maybe twelve
ninety-five. Don't look at me in that way, Ellie. This is
not for me. With the jokers there are fifty-four cards here.
Each of them will make a nice gift for some worker at my
institute."
She smiled and took his arm. "It's good to see you
again, Vaygay."
"A rare pleasure, my dear."



On the drive to Socorro, by mutual but unspoken agreement,
they mainly talked pleasantries. Valerian and the driver,
one of the new security people, were in the front seats.
Peter, not a voluble man even in ordinary circumstances, was
content to lean back and listen to their conversation, which
touched only tangentially on the issue the Soviets had come
to discuss: the third level of the palimpsest, the
elaborate, complex, and still undecoded Message they were
collectively receiving. The U.S. government had, more or
less reluctantly, concluded that Soviet participation was
essential. This was true especially because the signal from
Vega was so intense that even modest radio telescopes could
detect it. Years before, the Soviets had prudently deployed
a number of small telescopes across the entire Eurasian land
mass, stretching 9,000 kilometers over the surface of the
Earth, and recently had completed a major radio observatory
near Samarkand. In addition, Soviet oceangoing satellite
tracking vessels were patrolling both the Atlantic and the
Pacific.
Some of the Soviet data were redundant, because
observatories in Japan, China, India, and Iraq were
recording those signals as well. Indeed, every substantial
radio telescope in the world that had Vega in its sky was
listening. Astronomers in Britain, France, the Netherlands,
Sweden, Germany, and Czechoslovakia, in Canada and Venezuela
and Australia, were recording small pieces of the Message,
following Vega from starrise to starset. In some
observatories the detection equipment was not sensitive
enough even to make out the individual pulses. They listened
anyway to an audio blur. Each of these nations had a piece
of the jigsaw puzzle, because, as Ellie had reminded Kitz,
the Earth turns. Every nation tried to make some sense out
of the pulses. But it was difficult. No one could tell even
if the Message was written in symbols or in pictures.
It was perfectly conceivable that they would not
decrypt the Message until it cycled back to page one-if it
ever did-and began again with the introduction, the primer,
the decoding key. Maybe it was a very long message, Ellie
thought as Vaygay idly compared taiga with scrub desert;
maybe it wouldn't cycle back for a hundred years. Or maybe
there was no primer. Maybe the Message (all over the planet,
the word was beginning to be capitalized) was an
intelligence test, so those worlds too stupid to decrypt it
would be unable to misuse its contents. It suddenly struck
her what a humiliation she would feel for the human species
if in the end they failed to understand the Message. The
moment the Americans and the Soviets decided to collaborate
and the Memorandum of Agreement was solemnly signed, every
other nation with a radio telescope had agreed to cooperate.
There was a kind of World Message Consortium, and people
were actually talking in those terms. They needed one
another's data and brain power if the Message was to be
decrypted.
The newspapers were full of little else. The pitiful
few facts that were known-the prime numbers, the Olympic
broadcast, the existence of a complex message-were endlessly
reviewed. It was hard to find anyone on the planet who had
not in one way or another heard about eh Message from Vega.
Religious sects, established and marginal, and some
newly invented for the purpose, were dissecting the
theological implications of the Message. Some thought it was
from God, and some from the Devil. Astonishingly, some were
even unsure. There was a nasty resurgence of interest in
Hitler and the Nazi regime, and Vaygay mentioned to her that
he had found a total of eight swastikas in the
advertisements in that Sunday's New York Times Book Review.
Ellie replied that eight was about par, but she knew she was
exaggerating; some weeks there were only two or three. A
group that called themselves "Spacaryans" offered definitive
evidence that flying saucers had been invented in Hitler
Germany. A new "unmongrelized" race of Nazis had grown up on
Vega and was now ready to put things right on Earth.
There were those who considered listening to the
signal an abomination and who urged the observatories to
stop; there were those who considered it a Token of Advent
and urged the construction of still larger radio telescopes,
some of them in space. Some cautioned against working with
the Soviet data, on grounds that they might be falsified or
fraudulent, although in the longitudes of overlap they
agreed well with the Iraqi, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese
data. And there were those who sensed a change in the world
political climate and contended that the very existence of
the Message, even if it was never decrypted, was exercising
a steadying influence on the quarrelsome nation states.
Since the transmitting civilization was clearly more
advanced than ours, and because it clearly-at least as of
twenty-six years ago-had not destroyed itself, it followed,
some argued, that technological civilizations did not
inevitably self-destruct. In a world gingerly experimenting
with major divestitures of nuclear weapons and their
delivery systems, the Message was taken by whole populations
as a reason for hope. Many considered the Message the best
news in a long time. For decades, young people had tried not
to think too carefully about tomorrow. Now, there might be a
benign future after all.
Those with predispositions favoring such cheerful
prognoses sometimes found themselves edging uncomfortably
toward ground that had been occupied for a decade by the
chiliastic movement. Some chiliasts held that the imminent
arrival of the Third Millennium would be accompanied by the
return of Jesus or Buddha or Krishna or The Prophet, who
would establish on Earth a benevolent theocracy, severe in
its judgment of mortals. Perhaps this would presage the mass
celestial Ascent of the Elect. But there were other
chiliasts, and there were far more of these, who held that
the physical destruction of the world was the indispensable
prerequisite for the Advent, as had been unerringly foretold
in various otherwise mutually contradictory ancient
prophetic works. The Doomsday Chiliasts were uneasy with the
whiff of world community in the air and troubled by the
steady annual decline in the global stockpiles of strategic
weapons. The most readily available means for fulfilling the
central tenet of their faith was being disassembled day by
day. Other candidate catastrophes-overpopulation, industrial
pollution, earthquakes, volcanic explosions, greenhouse
warming, ice ages, or cometary impact with the Earth-were
too slow, too improbably, or insufficiently apocalyptic for
the purpose.
Some chiliast leaders had assured mass rallies of
devoted followers that, except for accidents, life insurance
was a sign of wayward faith; that, except for the very
elderly, to purchase a gravesite or make funeral
arrangements in other than urgent necessity was a flagrant
impiety. All who believed would be raised bodily to heaven
and would stand before the throne of God in only a few
years.
Ellie knew that Lunacharsky's famous relative had
been that rarest of beings, a Bolshevik revolutionary with a
scholarly interest in the world's religions. But the
attention Vaygay directed to the growing worldwide
theological ferment was apparently muted. "The main
religious question in my country," he said, "will be whether
the Vegans have properly denounced Leon Trotsky."



As they approached the Argus site, the roadside became dense
with parked automobiles, recreation vehicles, campers,
tents, and great crowds of people. At night the once
tranquil Plains of San Augustin were illuminated by
campfires. The people along the highway were by no means all
well-to-do. She noticed two young couples. The men were in
T-shirts and worn jeans, belted around their hips,
swaggering a little as they had been taught by their seniors
upon entering high school, talking animatedly. One of them
pushed a ragged stroller in which sat a carefree boy about
two years old. The women followed behind their husbands, one
of them holding the hand of a toddler new to the human art
of walking, and the other cantilevered forward with what in
another month or two would be a further life born on this
obscure planet.
There were mystics from sequestered communities
outside Taos who used psilocybin as a sacrament, and nuns
from a convent near Albuquerque who used ethanol for the
same purpose. There were leather-skinned, crinkly-eyed men
who had spent their whole lives under the open sky, and
bookish, sallow-faced students from the University of
Arizona in Tucson. There were silk cravats and burnished
silver string ties sold by Navajo entrepreneurs at
exorbitant prices, a small reversal of the historical
commercial relations between whites and Native Americans.
Chewing tobacco an bubble gum were being vigorously deployed
by enlisted men on leave from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.
An elegantly attired white-haired man in a $900 suit with a
color-coordinated Stetson was, just possibly, a rancher.
There were people who lived in barracks and skyscrapers,
adobe hovels, dormitories, trailer parks. some came because
they had nothing better to do, some because they wanted to
tell their grandchildren that they had been there. Some
arrived hoping for failure, others were confident of
witnessing a miracle. Sounds of quiet devotion, raucous
hilarity, mystic ecstasy, and subdued expectation rose from
the crowd into the brilliant afternoon sunlight. A few heads
glanced incuriously at the passing caravan of automobiles,
each marked u.s. government interagency motor pool.
Some people were lunching on the tailgates of
hatchbacks; others were sampling the wares of vendors whose
wheeled emporia were boldly lettered snackmobile or space
souvenirs. There were long lines in front of small sturdy
structures with maximum occupancy of one person that the
project had thoughtfully provided. Children scampered among
the vehicles, sleeping bags, blankets, and portable picnic
tables almost never chided by the adults-except when they
came too close to the highway or to the fence nearest
Telescope 61, where a group of shaven-headed, kowtowed,
saffron-robed young adults were solemnly intoning the sacred
syllable "Om." There were posters with imagined
representations of extraterrestrial beings, some made
popular by comic books or motion pictures. One read, "There
Are Aliens Among Us." A man with golden earrings was
shaving, using the side-view mirror of someone's pickup
truck, and a black-haired woman in a serape raised a cup of
coffee in salute as the convoy sped by.
As they drove toward the new main gate, near
Telescope 101, Ellie could see a young man on a jerrbuilt
platform importuning a sizable crowd. He was wearing a
T-shirt that depicted the Earth being struck by a bolt of
celestial lightning. Several others in the crowd, she
noticed, were wearing the same enigmatic adornment. At
Ellie's urging, once through the gave, they pulled off the
side of the road, rolled down the window, and listened. The
speaker was turned away from them and they could see the
faces in the crowd. These people are deeply moved, Ellie
thought to herself.
He was in mid-oration: "...and others say there's
been a pact with the Devil, that the scientists have sold
their souls. There are precious stones in every one of these
telescopes." He waved his hand toward Telescope 101. "Even
the scientists admit that. Some people say it's the Devil's
part of the bargain."
"Religious hooliganism," Lunacharsky muttered
darkly, his eyes yearning for the open road before them.
"No, no. Let's stay," she said. A half smile of
wonderment was playing on her lips.
"There are some people-religious people, God-fearing
people-who believe this Message comes from beings in space,
entities, hostile creatures, aliens who want to harm us,
enemies of Man. " He fairly shouted this last phrase, and
then paused for effect. "But all of you are wearied and
disgusted by the corruption, the decay in this society, a
decay brought on by unthinking, unbridled, ungodly
technology. I don't know which of you is right. I can't tell
you what the Message means, or who it's from. I have my
suspicions. We'll know soon enough. But I do know the
scientists and the politicians and the bureaucrats are
holding out on us. They haven't told us all they know.
They're deceiving us, like they always do. For too long, O
God, we have swallowed the lies they feed us, the corruption
they bring."
To Ellie's astonishment a deep rumbling chorus of
assent rose from the crowd. He had tapped some well of
resentment she had only vaguely apprehended.
"These scientists don't believe we're the children
of God. They think we're the offspring of apes. There are
known communists among them. Do you want people like that to
decide the fat of the world?"
The crowd responded with a thunderous "No!"
"Do you want a pack of unbelievers to do the talking
to God?"
"No!" they roared again.
"Or the Devil? They are bargaining away our future
with monsters from an alien world. My brothers and sisters,
there is an evil in this place."
Ellie had thought the orator was unaware of their
presence. But now he half turned and pointed through the
cyclone fence directly at the idling convoy.
"They don't speak for us! They don't represent us!
They have no right to parley in our name!"
Some of the crowd nearest the fence began jostling
and rhythmically pushing. Both Valerian and the driver
became alarmed. The engines had been left running, and in a
moment they accelerated from the gate toward the Argus
administration building, still many miles distant across the
scrub desert. As they pulled away, over the sound of
squealing tires and the murmur of the crowd, Ellie could
hear the orator, his voice ringing clearly.
"The evil in this place will be stopped. I swear
it."

--
... 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]

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