Contact - Carl Sagan [32]
At first they had tried to keep the finding quiet. After all, they were not absolutely sure it was an extraterrestrial message. A premature or mistaken announcement would be a public relations disaster. But worse than that, it would interfere with the data analysis. If the press descended, the science would surely suffer. Washington as well as Argus was keen to keep the story quiet. But the scientists had told their families, the International Astronomical Union telegram had been sent all over the world, and still rudimentary astronomical data-basing systems in Europe, North America, and Japan were all carrying news of the discovery.
Although there had been a range of contingency plans for the public release of any findings, the actual circumstances had caught them largely unprepared. They drafted as innocuous a statement as they could and released it only when they had to. It caused, of course, a sensation.
They had asked the media's forbearance, but knew there would be only a brief period before the press would descend in force. They had tried to discourage reporters from visiting the site, explaining that there was no real information in the signals they were receiving, just tedious and repetitive prime numbers. The press was impatient with the absence of hard news. "You can only do so many sidebars on `What is a prime number?'" one reporter explained to Ellie over the telephone.
Television camera crews in fixed-wing air taxis and chartered helicopters began making low passes over the facility, sometimes generating strong radio interference easily detected by the telescopes. Some reporters stalked the officials from Washington when they returned to their motels at night. A few of the more enterprising had attempted to enter the facility unobserved-by beach buggy, motorcycle, and in one case on horseback. She had been forced to inquire about bulk rates on cyclone fencing.
Immediately after der Heer arrived, he had received an early version of what was by now Ellie's standard briefing: the surprising intensity of the signal, its location in very much the same part of the sky as the star Vega, the nature of the pulses.
"I may be the President's Science Adviser," he had said, "but I'm only a biologist. So please explain it to me slowly. I understand that if the radio source is twenty-six light-years away, then the message had to be sent twenty-six years ago. In the 1960s, some funny-looking people with pointy ears thought we'd want to know that they like prime numbers. But prime numbers aren't difficult. It's not like they're boasting. It's more like they're sending us remedial arithmetic. Maybe we should be insulted."
"No, look at it this way," she said, smiling. "This is a beacon. It's an announcement signal. It's designed to attract our attention. We get strange patterns of pulses from quasars and pulsars and radio galaxies and God-knows-what. But prime numbers are very specific, very artificial. No even number is prime, for example. It's hard to imagine some radiating plasma or exploding galaxy sending out a regular set of mathematical signals like this. The prime numbers are to attract our attention."
"But what for?" he had asked, genuinely baffled.
"I don't know. But in this business you have to be very patient. Maybe in a while the prime numbers will turn off and be replaced by something else, something very rich, the real message. We just have to keep on listening."
This was the hardest part to explain to the press, that the signals had essentially no content, no meaning-just the first few hundred prime numbers in order, a cycling back to the beginning, and again the simple binary arithmetic representations: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31… Nine wasn't a prime number, she'd explain, because it was divisible by 3 (as well as