Contact - Carl Sagan [96]
He beamed at her owlishly and offered a drink, which again she refused. "So you want to talk to me about the Machine, and I want to talk to you about the Machine. You first. You want to know where the primer is?"
"We're asking for help from a few key people who might have some insight. We thought with your record of invention-and since your context recognition chip was involved in the recycling discovery-that you might put yourself in the place of the Vegans and think of where you'd put the primer. We recognize you're very busy, and I'm sorry to-"
"Oh, no. It's all right. It's true I'm busy. I'm trying to regularize my affairs, because I'm gonna make a big change in my life…"
"For the Millennium?" She tried to imagine him giving away S. R. Hadden and Company, the Wall Street brokerage house; Genetic Engineering, Inc.; Hadden Cybernetics; and Babylon to the poor.
"Not exactly. No. It was fun to think about. It made me feel good to be asked. I looked at the diagrams." He waved at the commercial set of eight volumes spread in disarray on a worktable. "There are wonderful things in there, but I don't think that's where the primer is hiding. Not in the diagrams. I don't know why you think the primer has to be in the Message. Maybe they left it on Mars or Pluto or in the Oort Comet Cloud, and well discover it in a few centuries. Right now, we know there's this wonderful Machine, with design drawings and thirty thousand pages of explanatory text. But we don't know whether we'd be able to build the thing if we could read it. So we wait a few centuries, improving our technology, knowing that sooner or later we'll have to be ready to build it. Not having the primer binds us up with future generations.
Human beings are sent a problem that takes generations to solve. I don't think that's such a bad thing. Might be very healthy. Maybe you're making a mistake looking for a primer. Maybe it's better not to find it."
"No, I want to find the primer right away. We don't know it'll be waiting for us forever. If they hang up because there was no answer, it would be much worse than if they'd never called at all."
"Well, maybe you have a point. Anyway, I thought of as many possibilities as I could. I'll give you a couple of trivial possibilities, and then a nontrivial possibility. Trivial first: The primer's in the Message but at a very different data rate. Suppose there was another message in there at a bit an hour-could you detect that?"
"Absolutely. We routinely check for long term receiver drift in any case. But also a bit an hour only buys you-let me see-ten, twenty thousand bits tops before the Message recycles."
"So that makes sense only if the primer is much easier than the Message. You think it isn't. Now, what about much faster bit rates? How do you know that under every bit of your Machine Message there aren't a million bits of primer message?"
"Because it would produce monster bandwidths. We'd know in an instant."
"Okay, so there's a fast data dump every now and then. Think of it as microfilm. There's a tiny dot of microfilm that's sitting in repetitious-I mean in repetitive-parts of the Message. I'm imagining a little box that says in your regular language, `I am the primer.' Then right after that there's a dot. And in that dot is a hundred million bits, very fast. You might see if you've got any boxes."
"Believe me, we would have seen it."
"Okay, how about phase modulation? We use it in radar and spacecraft telemetry, and it hardly messes up the spectrum at all. Have you hooked up a phase correlator?"
"No. That's a useful idea. I'll look into it."
"Now, the nontrivial idea is this: If the Machine ever gets made, if our people are gonna sit in it, somebody's gonna press a button and then those five are gonna go somewhere. Never mind where. Now, there's an interesting question