Contact - Carl Sagan [146]
"Qiaomu," she said, handing him the long lens, "look over there. Tell me what you sec."
"Where?"
She pointed again. After a moment he had found it. She could tell because of his slight but quite unmistakable intake of breath. "Another black hole," he said. "Much bigger."
They were falling again. This time the tunnel was more commodious, and they were making better time.
"That's it?" Ellie found herself shouting at Devi. "They take us to Vega to show off their black holes. They give us a look at their radio telescopes from a thousand kilometers away. We spend ten minutes there, and they pop us into another black hole and ship us back to Earth. That's why we spent two trillion dollars?"
"Maybe we're beside the point," Lunacharsky was saying. "Maybe the only real point was to plug themselves into the Earth."
She imagined nocturnal excavations beneath the gates of Troy.
Eda, fingers of both hands outspread, was making a calming gesture. "Wait and see," he said. "This is a different tunnel. Why should you think it goes back to Earth?"
"Vega's not where we're intended to go?" Devi asked. "The experimental method. Let's see where we pop out next." In this tunnel there was less scraping of the walls and fewer undulations. Eda and Vaygay were debating a space-time diagram they had drawn in Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates. Ellie had no idea what they were talking about. The deceleration stage, the part of the passage that felt uphill, was still disconcerting.
This time the light at the end of the tunnel was orange. They emerged at a considerable speed into the system of a contact binary, two suns touching. The outer layers of a swollen elderly red giant star were pouring onto the photosphere of a vigorous middle-aged yellow dwarf, something like the Sun. The zone of contact between the two stars was brilliant. She looked for debris rings or planets or orbiting radio observatories, but could find none. That doesn't mean very much, she told herself. These systems could have a fair number of planets and I'd never know it with this dinky long lens. She projected the double sun onto the piece of paper and photographed the image with a short-focal-length lens.
Because there were no rings, there was less scattered light in this system than around Vega; with the wide-angle lens she was able, after a bit of searching, to recognize a constellation that sufficiently resembled the Big Dipper. But she had difficulty recognizing the other constellations. Since the bright stars in the Big Dipper are a few hundred light-years from Earth, she concluded that they had not jumped more than a few hundred light-years. She told this to Eda and asked him what he thought. "What do I think? I think this is an Underground."
"An Underground?"
She recalled her sensation of falling, into the depths of Hell it had seemed for a moment, just after the Machine had been activated.
"A Metro. A subway. These are the stations. The stops. Vega and this system and others. Passengers get on and off at the stops. You change trains here."
He gestured at the contact binary, and she noticed that his hand cast two shadows, one anti-yellow and the other anti-red, like in--it was the only image that came to mind-a discotheque.
"But we, we cannot get off," Eda continued. "We are in a closed railway car. We're headed for the terminal, the end of the line."
Drumlin had called such speculations Fantasyland, and this was-so far as she knew--the first time Eda had succumbed to the temptation.
Of the Five, she was the only observational astronomer, even though her specialty was not in the optical spectrum. She felt it her responsibility to accumulate as much data as possible, in the tunnels and in the ordinary four-dimensional space-time into which they would periodically emerge. The presumptive black hole from which they exited would always be in orbit around some star or multiple-star system. They were always in pairs, always two of them sharing a similar orbit-one from which they were ejected, and another into which they fell. No two systems