Contact - Carl Sagan [143]
Vaygay asked, "Did anyone see a naked singularity?"
"I don't know what one looks like," Devi replied. "I beg your pardon. It probably wouldn't be naked. Did you sense any causality inversion, anything bizarre-really crazy-maybe about how you were thinking, anything like scrambled eggs reassembling themselves into whites and yolks…?"
Devi looked at Vaygay through narrowed lids. "It's okay," Ellie quickly interjected. Vaygay's a little excited, she added to herself. `These are genuine questions about black holes. They only sound crazy."
"No," replied Devi slowly, "except for the question itself." But then she brightened. "In fact it was a marvelous ride."
They all agreed. Vaygay was elated. "This is a very strong version of cosmic censorship," he was saying. "Singularities are invisible even inside black holes."
"Vaygay is only joking," Eda added. "Once you're inside the event horizon, there is no way to escape the black hole singularity."
Despite Ellie's reassurance, Devi was glancing dubiously at both Vaygay and Eda. Physicists had to invent words and phrases for concepts far removed from everyday experience. It was their fashion to avoid pure neologisms and instead to evoke, even if feebly, some analogous commonplace. The alternative was to name discoveries and equations after one another. This they did also. But if you didn't know it was physics they were talking, you might very well worry about them.
She stood up to cross over to Devi, but at the same moment Xi roused them with a shout. The walls of the tunnel were undulating, closing in on the dodecahedron, squeezing it forward. A nice rhythm was being established. Every time the dodec would slow almost to a halt, it was given another squeeze by the walls. She felt a slight motion sickness rising in her. In some places it was tough going, the walls working hard, waves of contraction and expansion rippling down the tunnel. Elsewhere, especially on the straight-aways, they would fairly skip along.
A great distance away, Ellie made out a dim point of light, slowly growing in intensity. A blue-white radiance began flooding the inside of the dodecahedron. She could see it glint off the black erbium cylinders, now almost stationary. Although the journey seemed to have taken only ten or fifteen minutes, the contrast between the subdued, restrained ambient light for most of the trip and the swelling brilliance ahead was striking. They were rushing toward it, shooting up the tunnel, and then erupting into what seemed to be ordinary space. Before them was a huge blue-white sun, disconcertingly close. Ellie knew in an instant it was Vega.
She was reluctant to look at it directly through the long-focal-length lens; this was foolhardy even for the Sun, a cooler and dimmer star. But she produced a piece of white paper, moved it so it was in the focal plane of the long lens and projected a bright image of the star. She could see two great sunspot groups and a hint, she thought, a shadow, of some of the material in the ring plane. Putting down the camera, she held her hand at arm's length, palm outward, to just cover the disk of Vega, and was rewarded by seeing a brilliant extended corona around the star; it had been invisible before, washed out in Vega's glare.
Palm still outstretched, she examined the ring of debris that surrounded the star. The nature of the Vega system had been the subject of worldwide debate ever since receipt of the prime number Message. Acting on behalf of the astronomical