Contact - Carl Sagan [28]
"He told you? I didn't know that. When did you talk to Mr. Weisbrod?"
"It was a parent-teacher meeting. He said to me, `That girl of yours, she's a spunky one.' Or words to that effect. `She got so mad at me, she became a real expert on it.' `Expert.' That's what he said. I know I told you about it."
Her feet were propped up on a desk drawer as she reclined in the swivel chair; she was stabilized only by her fingers in the varnish machine. She felt the buzzer almost before she heard it, and abruptly sat up.
"Mom, I gotta go."
"I'm sure I've told you this story before. You just never pay attention to what I'm saying. Mr. Weisbrod, he was a nice man. You never could see his good side."
"Mom, really, I've gotta go. We've caught some kind of bogey."
"Bogey?"
"You know, Mom, something that might be a signal. We've talked about it."
"There we are, both of us thinking the other one isn't listening. Like mother, like daughter."
"Bye, Mom."
"I'll let you go if you promise to call me right after."
"Okay, Mom. I promise."
Through the whole conversation, her mother's need and loneliness had elicited in Ellie a wish to end the conversation, to run away. She hated herself for that.
* * *
Briskly she entered the control area and approached the main console.
"Evening, Willie, Steve. Let's see the data. Good. Now where did you tuck away the amplitude plot? Good. Do you have the interferometric position? Okay. Now let's see if there's any nearby star in that field of view. Oh my, we're looking at Vega. That's a pretty near neighbor."
Her fingers were punching away at a keyboard as she talked.
"Look, it's only twenty-six light-years away. It's been observed before, always with negative results. I looked at it myself in my first Arecibo survey. What's the absolute intensity? Holy Toledo. That's hundreds of janskys. You could practically pick that up on your FM radio.
"Okay. So we have a bogey very near to Vega in the plane of the sky It's at a frequency around 9.2 gigahertz, not very monochromatic: The bandwidth is a few hundred hertz. It's linearly polarized and it's transmitting a set of moving pulses restricted to two different amplitudes."
In response to her typed commands the screen now displayed the disposition of all the radio telescopes.
"It's being received by 116 individual telescopes. Clearly it's not a malfunction in one or two of them. Okay, now we should have plenty of time baseline. Is it moving with the stars? Or could it be some ELINT satellite or aircraft?"
"I can confirm sidereal motion, Dr. Arroway."
"Okay, that's pretty convincing. It's not down here on Earth, and it probably isn't from an artificial satellite in a Molniya orbit, although we should check that. When you get a chance, Willie, call up NORAD and see what they say about the satellite possibility. If we can exclude satellites, that will leave two possibilities: It's a hoax, or somebody has finally gotten around to sending us a message. Steve, do a manual override. Check a few individual radio telescopes-the signal strength is certainly large enough-and see if there's any chance this is a hoax; you know, a practical joke by someone who wishes to teach us the error of our ways."
"A handful of other scientists and technicians, alerted on their buzzers by the Argus computer, had gathered around the command console. There were half smiles on their faces. None of them was thinking seriously of a message from another world quite yet, but there was a sense of no-school-today, a break in the tedious routine to which they had become accustomed, and perhaps a faint air of expectation.
"If any of you can think of any other explanation besides extraterrestrial intelligence, I want to hear about it," she said, acknowledging their presence.
"There's no way it could be Vega, Dr. Arroway. The system's only a few hundred million years old. Its planets are still in the process of forming. There isn't time for intelligent life to have developed there. It has to be some background star.