Contact - Carl Sagan [115]
"Peter, why do you have to look at the ceiling when you think?"
Drumlin was reputed to have mellowed over the last few years, but, as with this comment, his reform was not always apparent. Being chosen by the President of the United States to represent the nation to the extraterrestrials was, he would say, a great honor. The trip, he told his intimates, would be the crowning point of his life. His wife, temporarily transplanted to Wyoming and still doggedly faithful, had to endure the same slide shows presented to new audiences of scientists and technicians building the Machine. Since the site was near his native Montana, Drumlin visited there briefly from time to time. Once Ellie had driven him to Missoula. For the first time in their relationship, he had been cordial to her for a few consecutive hours.
"Shhhh! I'm thinking," replied Valerian. "It's a noise suppression technique. I'm trying to minimize the distractions in my visual field, and then you present a distraction in the audio spectrum. You might ask me why I don't just as well stare at a piece of blank paper. But the trouble is that the paper's too small. I can see things in my peripheral vision. Anyway, what I was thinking is this: Why are we still getting the Hitler message, the Olympic broadcast? Years have passed. They must have received the British Coronation broadcast by now. Why haven't we seen some close ups of Orb and Scepter and ermine, and a voice intoning `…now crowned as George the Sixth, by the Grace of God, King of England and Northern Ireland, and Emperor of India'?"
"Are you sure Vega was over England at the time of the Coronation transmission?" Ellie asked.
"Yes, we checked that out within a few weeks of receipt of the Olympic broadcast. And the intensity was stronger than the Hitler thing. I'm sure Vega could have picked up the Coronation transmission."
"You're worried that they don't want us to know everything they know about us?" she asked.
`They're in a hurry," said Valerian. He was given occasionally to delphic utterances.
"More likely," offered Ellie, "they want to keep reminding us that they know about Hitler."
"That's not entirely different from what I'm saying," Valerian replied.
"All right. Let's not waste too much time in Fantasyland," Drumlin groaned. He was always impatient with speculation on extraterrestrial motivation. It was a total waste of time to guess, he would say; we'll know soon enough. Meanwhile, he urged all and sundry to concentrate on the Message; it was hard data- redundant, unambiguous, brilliantly composed.
"Here, a little reality might fix you two up. Why don't we go into the assembly area? I think they're doing systems integration with the erbium dowels."
The geometric design of the Machine was simple. The details were extremely complex. The five chairs in which the crew would sit were amidships in the dodecahedron where it bulged out most prominently. There were no facilities for eating or sleeping or other bodily functions, clear evidence that the trip aboard the Machine-if there was one-would be short. Some thought this meant that the Machine, when activated, would quickly rendezvous with an interstellar space vehicle in the vicinity of the Earth. The only difficulty was that meticulous radar and optical searches could find no trace of such a ship. It seemed scarcely likely that the extraterrestrials had overlooked elementary human physiological needs. Maybe the Machine didn't go anywhere. Maybe it did something to the crew. There were no instruments in the crew area, nothing to steer with, not even an ignition key-just the five chairs, pointed inward, so each crew member could watch the others. And there was a carefully prescribed upper limit on the weight of the crew and their belongings. In practice, the constraint worked to