Contact - Carl Sagan [61]
"What are you thinking of?" der Heer asked. "Something like emergency generators for every observatory in the Consortium?"
"Yes, and independent amplifiers, spectrometers, autocorrelators, disk drives, and so forth at each observatory. And some provision for fast airlift of liquid helium to remote observatories if necessary."
"Ellie, do you agree?"
"Absolutely."
"Anything else?"
"I think we should continue to observe Vega on a very broad range of frequencies," Vaygay said. "Perhaps tomorrow a different message will come through on only one of the message frequencies. We should also monitor other regions of the sky. Maybe the key to the Message won't come from Vega, but from somewhere else-"
"Let me say why I think Vaygay's point is important," interjected Valerian. "This is a unique moment, when we're receiving a message but have made no progress at all in decrypting it. We have no previous experience along these lines. We have to cover all the bases. We don't want to wind up a year or two from now kicking ourselves because there was some simple precaution we forgot to take, or some simple measurement that we overlooked. The idea that the Message will cycle back on itself, as far as we can see, that promises cycling back. Any opportunities lost now may be lost for all time. I also agree there's more instrumental development that needs doing. For all we know there's a fourth layer to the palimpsest."
"There's also the question of personnel," Vaygay continued. "Suppose this message goes on not for a year or two but for decades. Or suppose this is just the first in a long series of messages from all over the sky. There are at most a few hundred really capable radio astronomers in the world. That is a very small number when the stakes are so high. The industrialized countries must start producing many more radio astronomers and radio engineers with first-rate training."
Ellie noted that Gotsridze, who had said little, was taking detailed notes. She was again struck by how much more literate the Soviets were in English than the Americans in Russian. Near the beginning of the century, scientists all over the world spoke-or at least read-German. Before that it had been French, and before that Latin. In another century there might be some other obligatory scientific language-Chinese, perhaps. For the moment it was English, and scientists all over the planet struggled to learn its ambiguities and irregularities.
Lighting a fresh cigarette from the glowing tip of its predecessor, Vaygay went on. "There is something else to be said. This is just speculation. It's not even as plausible as the idea that the Message will cycle back on itself-which Professor Valerian quite properly stressed was only a guess. I would not ordinarily mention so speculative an idea at such an early stage. But if the speculation is sound, there are certain further actions we must begin thinking about immediately. I would not have the courage to raise this possibility if Academician Arkhangelsky had not come tentatively to the same conclusion. He and I have disagreed about the quantization of quasar red shifts, the explanation of superluminal light sources, the rest mass of the neutrino, quark physics in neutron stars… We have had many disagreements. I must admit that sometimes he has been right and sometimes I have been right. Almost never, it seems to me, in the early speculative stage of a subject, have we agreed. But on this, we agree.
"Genrikh Dmit'ch, would you explain?"
Arkhangelsky seemed tolerant, even amused. He and Lunacharsky had been for years engaged in personal rivalry, heated scientific disputes, and a celebrated controversy on the prudent level of support for Soviet fusion research.
"We guess," he said, "that the Message is the instructions for building a machine. Of course, we have no knowledge about how to decode the Message. The evidence is in internal references. I give you an example. Here on page