Contact - Carl Sagan [63]
Still, it was remarkable how much time der Heer was able to spend at Argus. He did devote an hour or more each day in high-bandpass scrambled communications with his Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Old Executive Office Building in Washington. But the rest of the time, as far as she could see, he was simply… around. He would poke into the innards of the computer system, or visit individual radio telescopes. Sometimes an assistant from Washington would be with him; more often he would be alone. She would see him through the open door of the spare office they had assigned him, his feet propped up on the desk, reading some report or talking on the phone. He would offer her a cheery wave and return to his work. She would find him talking casually with Drumlin or Valerian; but equally so with junior technicians and with the secretarial staff, who had on more than one occasion pronounced him, within Ellie's hearing, "charming."
Der Heer had many questions for her as well. At first they were purely technical and programmatic, but soon they extended to plans for a wide variety of conceivable future events, and then to untrammeled speculation. These days it almost seemed that discussion of the project was only a pretext to spend a little time together.
One fine autumn afternoon in Washington, the President was obliged to delay a meeting of the Special Contingency Task Group because of the Tyrone Free crisis. After an overnight flight from New Mexico, Ellie and der Heer found themselves with an unscheduled few hours, and decided to visit the Vietnam Memorial, designed by Maya Ying Lin when she was still an undergraduate architectural student at Yale. Amidst the somber and doleful reminders of a foolish war, der Heer seemed inappropriately cheerful, and Ellie began again to speculate about flaws in his character. A pair of General Service administration plainclothes security people, their custom-molded, flesh-colored earpieces in place, followed discreetly.
He had coaxed an exquisite blue caterpillar to climb aboard a twig. It briskly padded along, its iridescent body rippling with the motion of fourteen pairs of feet. At the end of the twig, it held on with its last five segments and failed the air in a plucky attempt to find a new perch. Unsuccessful, it turned itself around smartly and retraced its many steps. Der Heer then changed his clutch on the twig so that when the caterpillar returned to its starting point, there was again nowhere to go. Like some caged mammalian carnivore, it paced back and forth many times, but in the last few passages, it seemed to her, with increasing resignation. She was beginning to feel pity for the poor creature, even if it proved to be, say, the larva responsible for the barley blight.
"What a wonderful program in this little guy's head!" he exclaimed. "It works every time- optimum escape software. And he knows not to fall off. I mean the twig is effectively suspended in air. The caterpillar never experiences that in nature, because the twig is always connected to something. Ellie, did you ever wonder what the program would feel like if it was in your head? I mean, would it just seem obvious to you what you had to do when you came to the end of a twig? Would you have the impression you were thinking it through? Would you wonder how you knew to shake your front ten feet in the air but hold on tight with the other eighteen?"
She inclined her head slightly and examined him rather than the caterpillar. He seemed to have little difficulty imagining her as an insect. She tried to reply noncommittally, reminding herself that for him this would be a matter of professional interest.
"What'll you do with it now?"
"I'll put it back