Contact - Carl Sagan [62]
"That's not an awfully compelling arguments, guys," replied Ellie. "Maybe it's a set of mathematical exercises, the later ones building on the earlier ones. Maybe it's a long novel-they might have very long lifetimes compared to us-in which events are connected with childhood experiences or whatever they have on Vega when they're young. Maybe it's a tightly cross-referenced religious manual."
"The Ten Billion Commandments." Der Heer laughed.
"Maybe," said Lunacharsky, starting through a cloud of cigarette smoke out the window at the telescopes. They seemed to be staring longingly at the sky. "But when you look at the patterns of cross- references, I think you'll agree it looks more like the instruction manual for building a machine. God knows what the machine is supposed to do."
CHAPTER 9
The Numinous
Wonder is the basis of worship.
-THOMAS CARLYLE
Sartor Resartus (1833-34)
I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.
-ALBERT EINSTEIN
Ideas and Opinions (1954)
She could recall the exact moment when, on one of many trips to Washington, she discovered that she was falling in love with Ken der Heer.
Arrangements for the meeting with Palmer Joss seemed to be taking forever. Apparently Joss was reluctant to visit the Argus facility; it was the impiety of the scientists, not their interpretation of the Message, he now said, that interested him. And to probe their character, some more neutral ground was needed. Ellie was willing to go anywhere, and a special assistant to the President was negotiating. Other radio astronomers were not to go; the President wanted it to be Ellie alone.
Ellie was also waiting for the day, still some weeks off, when she would fly to Paris for the first full meeting of the World Message Consortium. She and Vaygay were coordination the global data-collection program. The signal acquisition was now fairly routine, and in recent months there had been not one gap in the coverage. So she found to her surprise that she had a little time on her hands. She vowed to have a long talk with her mother, and to remain civil and friendly no matter what provocation was offered. There was an absurd amount of backed-up paper and electronic mail to go through, not just congratulations and criticisms from colleagues, but religious admonitions, pseudoscientific speculations proposed with great confidence, and fan mail from all over the world. She had not read The Astrophysical Journal in months, although she was the first author of a very recent paper that was surely the most extraordinary article that had ever appeared in the august publication. The signal from Vega was so strong that many amateurs-tired of "ham" radio-had begun constructing their own small radio telescopes and signal analyzers. In the early stages of Message acquisition, they had turned up some useful data, and Ellie was still besieged by amateurs who thought they had acquired something unknown to the SETI professionals. She felt an obligation to write encouraging letters. There were other meritorious radio astronomy programs at the facility-the quasar survey, for example-that needed attending to. But instead of doing all these things, she found herself spending almost all her time with Ken.
Of course, it was her duty to involve the President's Science Adviser in Project Argus as deeply as he wished. It was important that the President be fully and competently informed. She hoped the leaders of other nations would be as thoroughly