Contact - Carl Sagan [182]
"And if nothing happens to you?"
"If nothing happens to me? Then, when we find what we're looking for, that manuscript will confirm our story. If we find evidence of a double black hole at the Galactic Center, or some huge artificial construction in Cygnus A, or a message hiding inside pi, this"-she tapped him lightly on the chest-"will be my evidence. Then I'll speak out…Meantime, don't lose it."
"I still don't understand," he confessed. "We know there's a mathematical order to the universe. The law of gravity and all that. How is this different? So there's order inside the digits of pi. So what?"
"No, don't you see? This would be different. This isn't just starting the universe out with some precise mathematical laws that determine physics and chemistry. This is a message. Whoever makes the universe hides messages in transcendental numbers so they'll be read fifteen billion years later when intelligent life finally evolves. I criticized you and Rankin the time we first met for not understanding this. If God wanted us to know that he existed, why didn't he send us an unambiguous message?' I asked. Remember?"
"I remember very well. You think God is a mathematician."
"Something like that. If what we're told is true. If this isn't a wild-goose chase. If there's a message hiding in pi and not one of the infinity of other transcendental numbers. That's a lot of ifs."
"You're looking for Revelation in arithmetic. I know a better way."
"Palmer, this is the only way. This is the only thing that would convince a skeptic. Imagine we find something. It doesn't have to be tremendously complicated. Just something more orderly than could accumulate by chance that many digits into pi That's all we need. Then mathematicians all over the world can find exactly the same pattern or message or whatever it proves to be. Then there are no sectarian divisions. Everybody begins reading the same Scripture. No one could then argue that the key miracle in the religion was some conjurer's trick, or that later historians had falsified the record, or that it's just hysteria or delusion or a substitute parent for when we grow up. Everyone could be a believer."
"You can't be sure you'll find anything. You can hide here and compute till the cows come home. Or you can go out and tell your story to the world. Sooner or later you'll have to choose."
"I'm hoping I won't have to choose. Palmer. First the physical evidence, then the public announcements. Otherwise…Don't you see how vulnerable we'd be? I don't mean for myself, but…"
He shook his head almost imperceptibly. A smile was playing at the corners of his lips. He had detected a certain irony in their circumstances.
"Why are you so eager for me to tell my story?" she asked.
Perhaps he took it for a rhetorical question. At any rate he did not respond, and she continued.
"Don't you think there's been a strange…reversal of our positions? Here I am, the bearer of the profound religious experience I can't prove-really, Palmer, I can barely fathom it. And here you are, the hardened skeptic trying- more successfully than I ever did-to be kind to the credulous."
"Oh no, Eleanor," he said, "I'm not a skeptic. I'm a believer."
"Are you? The story I have to tell isn't exactly about Punishment and Reward. It's not exactly Advent and Rapture. There's not a word in it about Jesus. Part of my message is that we're not central to the purpose of the Cosmos. What happened to me makes us all seem very small."
"It does. But it also makes God very big." She glanced at him for a moment and rushed on. "You know, as the Earth races around the Sun, the powers of this world-the religious powers, the secular powers- once pretended the Earth wasn't moving at all. They were in the business of being powerful. Or at least pretending to be powerful And the truth made