Contact - Carl Sagan [166]
"The problem is you people are too clever. Too clever. Look at it from the point of view of a skeptic. Step back and look at the big picture. There's a bunch of bright people in different countries who think the world is going to hell in a hand basket. They claim to receive a complex Message from space."
"Claim?"
"Let me continue. They decrypt the Message and announce instructions on how to build a very complicated Machine at a cost of trillions of dollars. The world's in a funny condition, the religions are all shaky about the oncoming Millennium, and to everybody's surprise the Machine gets built. There's one or two slight changes in personnel, and then essentially these same people-"
"It's not the same people. It's not Sukhavati, it's not Eda, it's not Xi, and there were-"
"Let me continue. Essentially these same people then get to sit down in the Machine. Because of the way the thing is designed, no one can see them and no one can talk to them after the thing is activated. So the Machine is turned on and then it turns itself off. Once it's on, you can't make it stop in less than twenty minutes. Okay. Twenty minutes later, these same people emerge from the Machine, all jaunty-jolly, with some bullshit story about traveling faster than light inside black holes to the center of the Galaxy and back. Now suppose you hear this story and you're just ordinarily cautious. You ask to see their evidence. Pictures, videotapes, any other data. Guess what? It's all been conveniently erased. Do they have artifacts of the superior civilization they say is at the center of the Galaxy? No. Mementos? No. A stone tablet? No. Pets? No. Nothing. The only physical evidence is some subtle damage done to the Machine. So you ask yourself, couldn't people who were so motivated and so clever arrange for what looks like tension stresses and radiation damage, especially if they could spend two trillion dollars faking the evidence?"
She gasped. She remembered the last time she had gasped. This was a truly venomous reconstruction of events. She wondered what had made it attractive to Kitz. He must, she thought, be in real distress. "I don't think anybody's going to believe your story," he continued. "This is the most elaborate-and the most expensive-hoax ever perpetrated. You and your friends tried to hoodwink the President of the United States and deceive the American people, to say nothing of all the other governments on the Earth. You must really think everybody else is stupid."
"Michael, this is madness. Tens of thousands of people worked to acquire the Message, to decode it, and to build the Machine. The Message is on magnetic tapes and printouts and laserdisks in observatories all over the world. You think there's a conspiracy involving all the radio astronomers on the planet, and the aerospace and cybernetics companies, and-"
"No, you don't need a conspiracy that big. All you need is a transmitter in space that looks as if it's broadcasting from Vega. I'll tell you how I think you did it. You prepare the Message, and get somebody- somebody with an established launch capability-to put it up. Probably as an incidental part of some other mission. And into some orbit that looks like sidereal motion. Maybe there's more than one satellite. Then the transmitter turns on, and you're all ready in your handy-dandy observatory to receive the Message, make the big discovery, and tell us poor slobs what it all means."
This was too much even for the impassive der Heer. He roused himself from a slumped position in his chair. "Really, Mike-" he began, but Ellie cut him short.
"I wasn't responsible for most of the decoding.