Contact - Carl Sagan [101]
"Yes. Now, is this correct. Ken? The primer is scattered throughout the Message, right? Lots of repetitions. And there was some primer shortly after Arroway first picked up the signal."
"Shortly after she picked up the third layer of the palimpsest, the Machine design."
"And many countries have the technology to read the primer, right?"
"Well, they need a device called a phase correlator. But, yes. The countries that count, anyway."
"Then the Russians could have read the primer a year ago, right? Or the Chinese or the Japanese. How do you know they're not halfway to building the Machine right now?"
"I thought of that, but Marvin Yang says it's impossible. Satellite photography, electronic intelligence, people on the scene, all confirm that there's no sign of the kind of major construction project you'd need to build the Machine. No, we've all been asleep at the switch. We were seduced by the idea that the primer had to come at the beginning and not interspersed through the Message. It's only when the Message recycled and we discovered it wasn't there that we started thinking of other possibilities. All this work has been done in close cooperation with the Russians and everybody else. We don't think anybody has the jump on us, but on the other hand everybody has the primer now. I don't think there's any unilateral course of action for us."
"I don't want a unilateral course of action for us. I just want to make sure that nobody else has a unilateral course of action. Okay, so back to your primer. You know how to say true-false, if-then, and space is curved. How do you build a Machine with that?"
"You know, I don't think this cold or whatever you've got has slowed you down a bit. Well, it just takes off from there. For example, they draw us a periodic table of the elements, so they get to name all the chemical elements, the idea of a atom, the idea of a nucleus, protons, neutrons, electrons. Then they run through some quantum mechanics just to make sure we're paying attention-there are already some new insights for us in the remedial stuff. Then it starts concentrating on the particular materials needed for the construction. For example, for some reason we need two tons of erbium, so they run through a nifty technique to extract it from ordinary rocks."
Der Heer raised his hand palm outward in a placatory gesture. "Don't ask why we need two tons of erbium. Nobody has the faintest idea."
"I wasn't going to ask that. I want to know how they told you how much a ton is."
"They counted it out for us in Planck masses. A Planck mass is-"
"Never mind, never mind. It's something that physicists all over the universe know about, right? And I've never heard of it. Now, the bottom line. Do we understand the primer well enough to start reading the Message? Will we be able to build the thing or not?"
"The answer seems to be yes. We've only had the primer for a few weeks now, but whole chapters of the Message are falling into our lap in clear. Its painstaking design, redundant explanations, and as far as we can tell, tremendous redundancy in the Machine design. We should have a three-dimensional model of the Machine for you in time for that crew selection meeting on Thursday, if you feel up to it. So far, we haven't a clue as to what the Machine does, or how it works. And there are some funny organic chemical components that don't make any sense as part of a machine. But almost everybody seems to think we can build the thing."
"Who doesn't?"
"Well, Lunacharsky and the Russians. And Billy Jo Rankin, of course. There are still people who worry that the Machine will blow up the world or tip the Earth's axis, or something. But what's impressed most of the scientists is how careful the instructions are, and how many different ways they go about trying to explain the same thing."
"And what does Eleanor