Contact - Carl Sagan [104]
It had been Seymour Lasker's singular fate to be America's first First Gentleman. He bore his burden-the editorial cartoons, the smarmy jokes, the witticism that he had gone where no man had gone before-with such directness and good nature that at last America was able to forgive him for marrying a woman with the nerve to imagine that she could lead half the world. Lasker had the Vice President's wife and teenaged son laughing uproariously as the President guided der Heer into an adjacent library annex.
"All right," she began. `There's no official decision to be made today and no public announcement of our deliberations. But let's see if we can sum up. We don't know what the goddamn Machine will do, but it's a reasonable guess that it goes to Vega. Nobody has the slightest idea of how it would work or even how long it would take. Tell me again, how far away is Vega?" `Twenty-six light-years, Ms. President."
"And so if this Machine were a kind of spaceship and could travel as fast as light-I know it can't travel as fast as light, only close to it, don't interrupt-then it would take twenty-six years for it to get there, but only as we measure time here on Earth. Is that right, der Heer?"
"Yes. Exactly. Plus maybe a year to get up to light speed and a year to decelerate into the Vega system. But from the standpoint of the crew members, it would take a lot less. Maybe only a couple of years, depending on how close to light speed they travel."
"For a biologist, der Heer, you've been learning a lot of astronomy."
`Thank you, Ms. President. I've tried to immerse myself in the subject."
She stared at him for just a moment and then went on. "So as long as the Machine goes very close to the speed of light, it might not matter much how old the crew members are. But if it takes ten or twenty years or more-and you say that's possible-then we ought to have somebody young. Now, the Russians aren't buying this argument. We understand it's between Arkhangelsky and Lunacharsky, both in their sixties."
She had read the names somewhat haltingly off a file card in front of her.
"The Chinese are almost certainly sending Xi. He's also in his sixties. So if I thought they knew what they're doing, I'd be tempted to say, `What the hell, let's send a sixty year old man.'"
Drumlin, der Heer knew, was exactly sixty years old. "On the other hand…" he counterposed. "I know, I know. The Indian doctor; she's in her forties…In a way, this is the stupidest thing I ever heard of. We're picking somebody to enter the Olympics, and we don't know what the events are. I don't know why we're talking about sending scientists. Mahatma Gandhi, that's who we should send. Or, while we're at it, Jesus Christ. Don't tell me they're not available, der Heer. I know that."
"When you don't know what the events are, you send a decathlon champion."
"And then you discover the event is chess, or oratory, or sculpture, and your athlete finishes last. Okay, you say that it ought to be someone who's thought about extraterrestrial life and who's been intimately involved with the receipt and decrypting of the Message."
"At least a person like that will be intimately involved with how the Vegans think. Or at least how they expect us to think."
"And for really top rate people, you say that reduces the field to three."
Again she consulted her notes. "Arroway, Drumlin, and…the one who thinks he's a Roman general."
"Dr. Valerian, Ms. President. I don't know that he thinks he's a Roman general; it's just his name."
"Valerian wouldn't even answer the Selection Committee's questionnaire. He wouldn't consider it because he won't leave his wife? Is that right? I'm not criticizing him. He's no dope. He knows how to make a relationship work. It's not that his wife is sick or anything?"
"No, as far as I know, she's in excellent health."
"Good. Good for them. Send her a personal note from me-something