Contact - Carl Sagan [27]
"Hey, look, it's a monochromatic signal."
Another display, labeled "Intensity vs. Time," showed a set of pulses moving left to right and then off the screen.
"Those are numbers," Willie said faintly. "Somebody's broadcasting numbers."
"It's probably some Air Force interference. I saw an AWACS, probably from Kirtland, about sixteen hundred hours. Maybe they're spoofing us for fun."
There had been solemn agreements to safeguard at least some radio frequencies for astronomy. But precisely because these frequencies represented a clear channel, the military found them occasionally irresistible. If global war ever came, perhaps the radio astronomers would be the first to know, their windows to the cosmos overflowing with orders to battle-management and damage-assessment satellites in geosynchronous orbit, and with the transmission of coded launch commands to distant strategic outposts. Even with no military traffic, in listening to a billion frequencies at once the astronomers had to expect some disruption. Lightning, automobile ignitions, direct broadcast satellites were all sources of radio interference. But the computers had their number, knew their characteristics and systematically ignored them. To signals that were more ambiguous the computer would listen with greater care and make sure they matched no inventory of data it was programmed to understand. Every now and then an electronic intelligence aircraft on a training mission-sometimes with a radar dish coyly disguised as a flying saucer camped on its haunches-would fly by, and Argus would suddenly detect unmistakable signatures of intelligent life. But it would always turn out to be life of a peculiar and melancholy sort, intelligent to a degree, extraterrestrial just barely. A few months before, an F-29E with state-of-the-art electronic countermeasures passed overhead at 80,000 feet and sounded the alarms on all 131 telescopes. To the unmilitary eyes of the astronomers, the radio signature had been complex enough to be a plausible first message from an extraterrestrial civilization. But they found the westernmost radio telescope had received the signal a full minute before the easternmost, and it soon become clear that it was an object streaking through the thin envelop of air surrounding the Earth rather than a broadcast from some unimaginably different civilization in the depths of space. Almost certainly this one was the same thing.
* * *
The fingers of her right hand were inserted into five evenly spaced receptacles in a low box on her desk. Since the invention of this device, she was able to save half an hour a week. But there hadn't really been a great deal to do with that extra half hour.
"And I was telling Mrs. Yarborough all about it. She's the one in the next bed, now that Mrs. Wertheimer passed on. I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I take a lot of credit for what you've done."
"Yes, Mother."
She examined the gloss on her fingernails and decided that they needed another minute, maybe a minute-thirty.
"I was thinking about that time in fourth grade-remember? When it was pouring and you didn't want to go to school? You wanted me to write a note the next day saying you'd been out because you were sick. And I wouldn't do it. I said, `Ellie, apart from being beautiful, the most important thing in the world is an education. You can't do much about being beautiful, but you can do something about an education. Go to school. You never know what you might learn today.' Isn't that right?"
"Yes, Mother."
"But, I mean, isn't that what I told you then?"
"Yes, I remember, Mom."
The gloss on her four fingers was perfect, but her thumb still had a dull matte appearance.
"So I got your galoshes and your raincoat-it was one of those yellow slickers, you looked cute as a button in it-and scooted you off to school. And that's the day you couldn't answer a question in Mr. Weisbrod's mathematics class? And you got so furious you marched down to the college library and read up on it till you knew