Contact - Carl Sagan [43]
"Incidentally, we haven't been able to find any record from German archives of what was in that original broadcast. We can't be absolutely sure that the people on Vega haven't made some change in the content before sending it back to us. We can recognize Hitler, all right, and the part of the Olympic stadium we see corresponds accurately to Berlin in 1936. But if at that moment Hitler had really been scratching his mustache instead of smiling as in that transmission, we'd have no way to know."
Ellie arrived slightly breathless, followed by Valerian. They attempted to take obscure chairs against the wall, but der Heer noticed and directed the President's attention to them.
"Dr. arrow-uh-way? I'm glad to see you've arrived safely. First, let me congratulate you on a splendid discovery. Splendid. Um, Marvin…"
"I've reached a stopping point, Ms. President."
"Good. Dr. Arroway, we understand you have something new. Would you care to tell us about it?"
"Ms. President, sorry to be late, but I think we've just hit the cosmic jackpot. We've… It's… Let me try and explain it this way: In classical times, thousands of years ago, when parchment was in short supply, people would write over an old parchment, making what's called a palimpsest. There was writing under writing under writing. This signal from Vega is, of course, very strong. As you know, there's the prime numbers, and `underneath' them, in what's called polarization modulation, this eerie Hitler business. But underneath the sequence of prime numbers and underneath the retransmitted Olympic broadcast, we've just uncovered an incredibly rich message-at least we're pretty sure it's a message. As far as we can tell, it's been there all along. We've just detected it. It's weaker than the announcement signal, but I'm embarrassed we didn't find it sooner."
"What does it say?" the President asked. "What's it about?"
"We haven't the foggiest idea, Ms. President. Some of the people at Project Argus tumbled to it early this morning Washington time. We've been working on it all night."
"Over an open phone?" asked Kitz.
"With standard commercial encryption." Ellie looked a little flushed. Opening her telefax case, she quickly generated a transparency printout and, when an overhead projector, cast its image against a screen.
"Here's all we know up to now: We'll get a block of information comprising about a thousand bits. There'll be a pause, and then the same block will be repeated, bit for bit. Then there'll be another pause, and we'll go on to the next block. It's repeated as well. The repetition of every block is probably to minimize transmission errors. They must think it's very important that we get whatever it is they're saying down accurately. Now, let's call each of these blocks of information a page. Argus is picking up a few dozen of these pages a day. But we don't know what they're about. They're not a simple picture code like the Olympic message. This is something much deeper and much richer. It appears to be, for the first time, information they've generated. The only clue we have so far is that the pages seem to be numbered. At the beginning of every page there's a number in binary arithmetic. See this one here? And every time another pair of identical pages shows up, it's labeled with the next higher number. Right now we're on page… 10,413. It's a big book. Calculating back, it seems that the message began about three months ago. We're lucky to have picked it up as early as we did."
"I was right, wasn't I?" Kitz leaned across the table to der Heer. "This isn't the kind of message you want to give to the Japanese or the Chinese or the Russians, is it?"
"Is it going to be easy to figure out?" the President asked over the whispering Kitz.
"We will, of course, make out best efforts. And it probably would be useful