Contact - Carl Sagan [165]
"Meeting your father in Heaven and all that, Dr. Arroway, is telling, because you've been raised in the Judeo-Christian culture. You're essentially the only one of the Five from that culture, and you're the only one who meets your father. Your story is just too pat. It's not imaginative enough."
This was worse than she had thought possible. She felt a moment of epistemological panic-as when your car is not where you parked it, or the door you locked last night ajar in the morning. "You think we made all this up?"
"Well, I'll tell you. Dr. Arroway. When I was very young, I worked in the Cook County Prosecutor's office. When they were thinking about indicting somebody, they asked three questions." He ticked them off on his fingers. "Did he have the opportunity? Did he have the means? Did he have the motive?"
"To do what?" He looked at her in disgust.
"But our watches showed that we'd been gone more than a day," she protested.
"I don't know how I could have been so stupid," Kitz said, striking his forehead with his palm. "You've demolished my argument. I forgot that it's impossible to set your watch ahead by a day."
"But that implies a conspiracy. You think Xi lied? You think Eda lied? You-"
"What I think is we should move on to something more important. You know, Peter"-Kitz turned toward Valerian-"I'm persuaded you're right. A first draft of the Materials Assessment Report will be here tomorrow morning. Let's not waste more time on…stories. We'll adjourn till then."
Der Heer had said not a word through the entire afternoon's session. He offered her an uncertain grin, and she couldn't help contrasting it with her father's. Sometimes Ken's expression seemed to urge her, to implore her. But to what end she had no way of knowing; perhaps to change her story. He had remembered her recollections of her childhood, and he knew how she had grieved for her father. Clearly he was weighing the possibility that she had gone crazy. By extension, she supposed, he was also considering the likelihood that the others had gone crazy, too. Mass hysteria. Shared delusion. Folie а cinq. "Well, here it is," Kitz said. The report was about a centimeter thick. He let it fall to the table, scattering a few pencils. "You'll want to look through it, Dr. Arroway, but I can give you a quick summary. Okay?"
She nodded assent. She had heard through the grapevine that the report was highly favorable to the account the Five had given. She hoped it would put an end to the nonsense.
"The dodecahedron apparently"-he laid great stress on this word-"has been exposed to a very different environment than the benzels and the supporting structures. It's apparently been subjected to huge tensile and compressional stresses. It's a miracle the thing didn't fall to pieces. So it's a miracle you and the others didn't fall to pieces at the same time. Also, it's apparently seen an intense radiation environment- there's low-level induced radioactivity, cosmic ray tracks, and so on. It's another miracle that you survived the radiation. Nothing else has been added or taken away. There's no sign of erosion or scraping on the side vertices that you claim kept bumping into the walls of the tunnels. There's not even any scoring, as there would have been if it entered the Earth's atmosphere at high velocity."
"So doesn't that confirm our story? Michael, think about it. Tensile and compressional stresses-tidal forces-are exactly what you expect if you fall down a classical black hole. That's been known for fifty years at least. I don't know why we didn't feel it, but maybe the dodec protected us somehow. And high radiation doses from the inside of the black hole and from the environment of the Galactic Center, a known gamma ray source. There's independent evidence for black holes,