Contact - Carl Sagan [168]
"Michael, listen. It's how we were able to get from here to there and back in no time flat. Twenty minutes, anyway. It can be acausal around a singularity. I'm not an expert on this. You should be talking to Eda or Vaygay."
"Thank you for the suggestion," he said. "We already have."
She imagined Vaygay under some comparably stem interrogation by his old adversary Archangelsky or by Baruda, the man who had proposed destroying the radio telescopes and burning the data. Probably they and Kitz saw eye to eye on the awkward matter before them. She hoped Vaygay was bearing up all right.
"You understand, Dr. Arroway. I'm sure you do. But let me explain again. Perhaps you can show me where I missed something. Twenty-six years ago those radio waves were heading out for Earth. Now imagine them in space between Vega and here. Nobody can catch the radio waves after they've left Vega. Nobody can stop them. Even if the transmitter knew instantaneously-through the black hole, if you like- that the Machine had been activated, it would be twenty-six years before the signal stops arriving on Earth. Your Vegans couldn't have known twenty-six years ago when the Machine was going to be activated. And to the minute. You would have to send a message back in time to twenty-six years ago, for the Message to stop on December thirty-first, 1999. You do follow, don't you?"
"Yes, I follow. This is wholly unexplored territory. You know, it's not called a space-time continuum for nothing. If they can make tunnels through space, I suppose they can make some kind of tunnels through time. The fact that we got back a day early shows that they have at least a limited kind of time travel. So maybe as soon as we left the Station, they sent a message twenty-six years back into time to turn the transmission off. I don't know."
"You see how convenient it is for you that the Message stops just now. If it was still broadcasting, we could find your little satellite, capture it, and bring back the transmission tape. That would be definitive evidence of a hoax. Unambiguous. But you couldn't risk that. So you're reduced to black hole mumbo- jumbo. Probably embarrassing for you." He looked concerned.
It was like some paranoid fantasy in which a patchwork of innocent facts are reassembled into an intricate conspiracy. The facts in this case were hardly commonplace, and it made sense for the authorities to test other possible explanations. But Kitz's rendition of events was so malign that it revealed, she thought, someone truly wounded, afraid, in pain. In her mind, the likelihood that all this was a collective delusion diminished a little. But the cessation of the Message transmission-if it had happened as Kitz had said-was worrisome.
"Now, I tell myself, Dr. Arroway, you scientists had the brains to figure all this out, and the motivation. But by yourselves you didn't have the means. If it wasn't the Russians who put up this satellite for you, it could have been any one of half a dozen other national launch authorities. But we've looked into all that. Nobody launched a free-flying satellite in the appropriate orbits. That leaves private launch capability. And the most interesting possibility that's come to our notice is a Mr. S. R. Hadden. Know him?"
"Don't be ridiculous, Michael. I talked to you about Hadden before I went up to Methuselah."
"Just wanted to be sure we agree on the basics. Try this on for size: You and the Russian concoct this scheme. You get Hadden to bankroll the early stages-the satellite design, the invention of the Machine, the encrypting of the Message, faking the radiation damage, all that. In return, after the Machine Project gets going, he gets to play with some of that two trillion