Contact - Carl Sagan [36]
"Ken, I trust you. I believe you didn't set me up for this Hadden Decision threat." She waved the document in front of her and paused, seeking his eyes. "Do you know that Drumlin thinks there's another message in the polarization?"
"I don't understand."
"Just a few hours ago, Dave finished a rough statistical study of the polarization. He's represented the Stokes parameters by Poin-carй spheres; there's a nice movie of them varying in time."
Der Heer looked at her blankly. Don't biologists use polarized light in their microscopes? she asked herself.
"When a wave of light comes at you-visible light, radio light, any kind of light-it's vibrating at right angles to your line of sight. If that vibration rotates, the wave is said to be elliptically polarized. If it rotates clockwise, the polarization is called right-handed; counterclockwise, it's left-handed. I know it's a dumb designation. Anyway, by varying between the two kinds of polarization, you could transmit information. A little right polarization and that's a zero; a little left and it's a one. Follow? It's perfectly possible. We have amplitude modulation and frequency modulation, but our civilization, by convention, ordinarily just doesn't do polarization modulation.
"Well, the Vega signal looks as if it has polarization modulating. We're busy checking it out right now. But Dave found that there wasn't an equal amount of the two sorts of polarization. It wasn't left polarized as much as it was right polarized. It's just possible that there's another message in the polarization that we've missed so far. That's why I'm suspicious about your friend. Kitz isn't just giving me general gratuitous advice. He knows we may be onto something else."
"Ellie, take it easy. You've hardly slept for four days. You've been juggling the science, the administration, and the press. You've already made one of the major discoveries of the century, and if I understand you right, you might be on the verge of something even more important. You've got every right to be a little on edge. And threatening to militarize the project was clumsy of Kitz. I don't have any trouble understanding why you're suspicious of him. But there's some sense to what he says."
"Do you know the man?"
"I've been in a few meetings with him. I can hardly say I know him. Ellie, if there's a possibility of a real message coming in, wouldn't it be a good idea to thin out the crowd a little?"
"Sure. Give me a hand with some of the Washington deadwood."
"Okay. And if you leave that document on your desk, someone'll be in here and draw the wrong conclusion. Why don't you put it away somewhere?"
"You're going to help?"
"If the situation stays anything like what it is now, I'll help. We're not going to make our best effort if this thing gets classified."
Smiling, Ellie knelt before her small office safe, and punched in the six-digit combination, 314159. She took one last glance at the document that was titled in large black letters THE UNITED STATES VS. HADDEN CYBERNETICS, and locked it away.
* * *
It was a group of about thirty people-technicians and scientists associated with Project Argus, a few senior government officials, including the Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in civilian clothes. Among them were Valerian, Drumlin, Kitz, and der Heer. Ellie was the only woman. They had set up a large television projection system, focused on a two-meter-by-two-meter screen set flush against the far wall. Ellie was simultaneously addressing the group and the decryption program, her fingers on the keyboard before her.
"Over the years we've prepared for the computer decryption of many kinds of possible messages. We've just learned from Dr. Drumlin's analysis that there's information in the polarization modulation. All that frenetic switching between left and right means something. It's not random noise. It's as if you're flipping a coin. Of course, you expect as many heads as tails, but instead you get twice as many heads as tails. so you conclude that the