Contact - Carl Sagan [125]
"Then one day there's an alarm. A message from Earth. `What? They have television already? Let's see what they're into.' Olympic stadium. National flags. Bird of prey. Adolf Hitler. Thousands of cheering people. `Uh-oh,' they say. They know the warning signs. Quick as a flash they tell us, `Cut it out, you guys. That's a perfectly good planet you have there. Disorganized, but serviceable. Here, build this Machine instead.' They're worried about us. They see we're on a downward slope. They think we should be in a hurry to get repaired. So I think so, too. We have to build the Machine."
She knew what Drumlin would have thought of arguments like this. Although much that Hadden had just said resonated with her own thinking, she was tired of these beguiling and confident speculations on what the Vegans had in mind. She wanted the project to continue, the Machine completed and activated, the new stage in human history begun. She still mistrusted her own motives, was still wary even when she was mentioned as a possible member of the crew on a completed Machine. So the delays in resuming construction served a purpose for her. They bought time for her to work her problems through.
"We'll have dinner with Yamagishi. You'll like him. But we're a little worried about him. He keeps his oxygen partial pressure so low at night."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, the lower the oxygen content in the air, the longer you live. At least that's what the doctors tell us. So we all get to pick the amount of oxygen in our rooms. In daytime you can't bring it much below twenty percent, because you get groggy. It impairs mental functioning. But at night, when you're sleeping anyway, you can lower the oxygen partial pressure. There's a danger, though. You can lower it too much. Yamagishi's down to fourteen percent these days, because he wants to live forever. As a result, he's not lucid until lunchtime."
"I've been that way all my life, at twenty percent oxygen." She laughed.
"Now he's experimenting with noцtropic drugs to remove the grogginess. You know, like piracetam. They definitely improve memory. I don't know that it actually makes you smarter, but that's what they say. So Yamagishi is taking an awful lot of noцtropics, and he's not breathing enough oxygen at night."
"So does he behave cuckoo?"
"Cuckoo? It's hard to tell. I don't know very many ninety-two-year-old Class A war criminals."
"That's why every experiment needs a control," she said. He smiled.
Even at his advanced age, Yamagishi displayed the erect bearing he had acquired during his long service in the Imperial Army. He was a small man, entirely bald, with an inconspicuous white mustache and a fixed, benign expression on his face.
"I am here because of hips," he explained. "I know about cancer, and lifetimes. But I am here because of hips.
At my age bones break easily. Baron Tsukuma died from falling from his futon onto his tatami. One-half meter, he fell. One-half meter. And his bones broke. In zero g, hips do not break." This seemed very sensible.
A few gastronomic compromises had been made, but the dinner was of surprising elegance. A specialized small technology had been developed for weightless dining. Serving utensils had lids, wine glasses had tops and straws. Foods such as nuts or dried corn flakes were prohibited.
Yamagishi urged the caviar on her. It was one of the few Western foods, be explained, that cost more per kilogram to buy on Earth than to ship to space. The cohesion of the individual caviar eggs was a lucky break, Ellie mused. She tried to imagine thousands of separate eggs in individual