Contact - Carl Sagan [76]
Over lunch, she had summarized her encounter with Rankin and Joss. Vaygay had been attentive, but asked no questions. It was as if she had been confessing some unseemly personal predilection and perhaps that had triggered his train of association.
"You have a friend named Meera who's a striptease artist? With international venue?"
"Since Wolfgang Pauli discovered the Exclusion Principle while watching the Folies-Bergиre, I have felt it my professional duty as a physicist to visit Paris as much as possible. I think of it as my homage to Pauli. But somehow I can never persuade the officials in my country to approve trips solely for this purpose. Usually I must do some pedestrian physics as well. But in such establishments-that's where I met Meera-I am a student of nature, waiting for insight to strike."
Abruptly his tone of voice shifted from expansive to matter-of-face. "Meera says American professional men are sexually repressed and have gnawing doubts and guilt."
"Really. And what does Meera say about Russian professional men?"
"Ah, in that category she knows only me. So, of course, she has a good opinion. I think I'd rather be with Meera tomorrow."
"But all your friends will be at the Consortium meeting," she said lightly.
"Yes, I'm glad you'll be there," he replied morosely.
"What's worrying you, Vaygay?"
He took a long time before answering, and began with a slight but uncharacteristic hesitation.
"Perhaps not worries. Maybe only concerns…What if the Message really is the design drawings of a machine? Do we build the machine? Who builds it? Everybody together? The Consortium? The United Nations? A few nations in competition? What if it's enormously expensive to build? Who pays? Why should they want to? What if it doesn't work? Could building the machine injure some nations economically? Could it injure them in some other way?"
Without interrupting the torrent of questions, Lunacharsky emptied the last of the wine into their glasses. "Even if the message cycles back and even if we completely decrypt it, how good could the translation be? You know the opinion of Cervantes? He said that reading a translation is like examining the back of a piece of tapestry. Maybe it's not possible to translate the Message perfectly. Then we wouldn't build the machine perfectly. Also, are we really confident we have all the data? Maybe there's essential information at some other frequency that we haven't discovered yet.
"You know, Ellie, I though people would be very cautious about building this machine. But there may be some coming tomorrow who will urge immediate construction-I mean, immediately after we receive the primer and decrypt the Message, assuming that we do. What is the American delegation going to propose?"
"I don't know," she said slowly. But she remembered that soon after the diagrammatic material had been received der Heer began asking whether it was likely that the machine was within reach of the Earth's economy and technology. She could offer him little reassurance on either score. She recalled again how preoccupied Ken had seemed in the last few weeks, sometimes even jittery. His responsibilities in this matter were, of course-
"And Dr. der Heer and Mr. Kitz