Contact - Carl Sagan [26]
The first pulses in the train of radio waves insinuated themselves through the atmosphere and clouds, struck the landscape and were partially reflected back to space. As the Earth turned beneath them, successive pulses arrived, engulfing not just this one planet but the entire system. Very little of the energy was intercepted by any of the worlds. Most of it passed effortlessly onward-as the yellow star and its attendant worlds plunged, in an altogether different direction, into the inky dark.
Wearing a Dacron jacket displaying the word "Marauders" above a stylized felt volleyball, the duty officer, beginning the night shift, approached the control building. A klatch of radio astronomers was just leaving for dinner.
"How long have you guys been looking for little green men? It's more than five years, isn't it now, Willie?"
They chided him good-naturedly, but he could detect an edge to their banter.
"Give us a break, Willie," another of them said. "The quasar luminosity program is going great guns. But it's gonna take forever if we only have two percent of the telescope time."
"Sure, Jack, sure."
"Willie, we're looking back toward the origin of the universe. There's a big stake in our program, too-and we know there's a universe out there; you don't know there's a single little green man."
"Take it up with Dr. Arroway. I'm sure she'll be glad to hear your opinion." he replied a little sourly.
The duty officer entered the control area. He made a quick survey of dozens of television screens monitoring the progress of the radio search. They had just finished examining the constellation Hercules. They had peered into the heart of a great swarm of galaxies far beyond the Milky Way, the Hercules Cluster-a hundred million light-years away; they had tuned in on M-13, a swarm of 300,000 stars, give or take a few, gravitationally bound together, moving in orbit around the Milky Way Galaxy 26,000 light-years away; they had examined Ras Algethi, a double system, and Zeta and Lambda Herculis-some stars different from the Sun, some similar to it, all nearby. Most of the stars you can see with the naked eye are less that a few hundred light-years away. They had carefully monitored hundreds of little sectors of the sky within the constellation Hercules at a billion separate frequencies, and they had heard nothing. In previous years they had searched the constellations immediately west of Hercules-Serpens, Corona Borealis, Boцtes, Canes Venatici… and there also they had heard nothing.
A few of the telescopes, the duty officer could see, were devoted to picking up some missed data in Hercules. The remainder were aiming, boresighted, at an adjacent patch of sky, the next constellation east of Hercules. To people in the eastern Mediterranean a few thousand years ago, it had resembled a stringed musical instrument and was associated with the Greek culture hero Orpheus. It was a constellation named Lyra, the Lyre.
The computers turned the telescopes to follow the stars in Lyra from starrise to starset, accumulated the radio photons, monitored the health of the telescopes, and processed the data in a format convenient for their human operators. Willie approached the command console. He nodded pleasantly to the afternoon duty officer, now collecting his notes and preparing to leave for dinner. Because the day's data were conveniently summarized in amber on the master display, there was no need for Willie to inquire about the progress of the preceding hours.
"As you can see, nothing much. There was a pointing glitch-at least that's what it looked like-in forty-nine," he said, waving vaguely toward the window. "The quasar bunch freed up the one-tens and one- twenties about an hour ago. They seem to be getting very good data."
"Yeah, I heard. They don't understand…"
His voice trailed off as an alarm light flashed decorously on the console in front of them. On a display marked