“Holy Toledo, I forgot.”
As the years had passed, Drumlin's brilliance had remained undiminished, but there were a number of additional personal idiosyncrasies that had not been in evidence when she had served briefly as his graduate student at Cal Tech. For example, he had the disconcerting habit now of checking, when he though himself unobserved, whether his fly was open. He had over the years become increasingly convinced that extraterrestrials did not exist, or at least that they were too rare, too distant to be detected. He had come to Argus to give the weekly scientific colloquium. But, she found, he had come for another purpose as well. He had written a letter to the National Science Foundation urging that Argus terminate its search for extraterrestrial intelligence and devote itself full-time to more conventional radio astronomy. He produced it from an inside pocket and insisted that she read it.
“But we've only been at it four and a half years. We've looked at less than a third of the northern sky. This is the first survey that can do the entire radio noise minimum at optimum bandpasses. Why would you want to stop now?”
“No, Ellie, this is endless. After a dozen years you'll find no sign of anything. You'll argue that another Argus facility has to be built at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars in Australia or Argentina to observe the southern sky. And when that fails, you'll talk about building some paraboloid with a free-flying feed in Earth orbit so you can get millimeter waves. You'll always be able to think of some kind of observation that hasn't been done. You'll always invent some explanation about why the extraterrestrials like to broadcast where we haven't looked.”
“Oh, Dave, we've been through this a hundred times. If we fail, we learn something of the rarity of intelligent life—or at least intelligent life that thinks like we do and wants to communicate with backward civilizations like us. And if we succeed, we hit the cosmic jackpot. There's no greater discovery you can imagine.”
“There are first-rate projects that aren't finding telescope time. There's work on quasar evolution, binary pulsars, the chromospheres of nearby stars, even those crazy interstellar proteins. These projects are waiting in line because this facility—by fat the best phased array in the world—is being used almost entirely for SETI.”
“Seventy-five percent for SETI, Dave, twenty-five percent for routine radio astronomy.”
“Don't call it routine. We've got the opportunity to look back to the time that the galaxies were being formed, or maybe even earlier than that. We can examine the cores of giant molecular clouds and the black holes at the centers of galaxies. There's a revolution in astronomy about to happen, and you're standing in the way.”
“Dave, try not to personalize this. Argus would never have been built if there wasn't public support for SETI. The idea for Argus isn't mine. You know they picked me as director when the last forty dishes were still under construction. The NSF is entirely behind—”
“Not entirely, and not if I have anything to say about it. This is grandstanding. This is pandering to UFO kooks and comic strips and weak-minded adolescents.”
By now Drumlin was fairly shouting, and Ellie felt an irresistible temptation to tune him out.
Because of the nature of her work an her comparative eminence, she was constantly thrown into situations where she was the only woman present, except for those serving coffee or making a stenotypic transcript.
Despite what seemed like a lifetime of effort on her part, there was still a host of male scientists who only talked to each other, insisted on interrupting her, and ignored, when they could, what she had to say.
Occasionally there were those like Drumlin who showed a positive antipathy. But at least he was treating her as he did many men. He was evenhanded in his outbursts, visiting them equally on scientists of both sexes.
There were a rare few of her male colleagues who did not exhibit awkward personality changes in her presence. She ought to spend more time with them, she thought. People like Kenneth der Heer, the molecular biologist from the Salk Institute who had recently been appointed Presidential Science Adviser.
And Peter Valerian, of course.
Drumlin's impatience with Argus, she knew, was shared by many astronomers. After the first two years a kind of melancholy had pervaded the facility. There were passionate debates in the commissary or during the long and undemanding watches about the intentions of the putative extraterrestrials. We could not guess how different from us they might be. It was hard enough to guess the intentions of our elected representatives in Washington. What would the intentions be of fundamentally different kinds of beings on physically different worlds hundreds or thousands of light-years away? Some believed that the signal would not be transmitted in the radio spectrum at all but in the infrared or the visible or somewhere among the gamma rays. Or perhaps the extraterrestrials were signaling avidly but with a technology we would not invent for a thousand years.
Astronomers at other institutions were making extraordinary discoveries among the stars and galaxies, picking out hose objects which, by whatever mechanism, generated intense radio waves. Other radio astronomers published scientific papers, attended meetings, were uplifted by a sense of progress and purpose. The Argus astronomers tended not to publish and were usually ignored when the call went out for invited papers at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society or the triennial symposia and plenary sessions of the International Astronomical Union. So in consultation with the National Science Foundation, the leadership at Argus had reserved 25 percent of the observing time for projects unconnected with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Some important discoveries had been made—on the extragalactic objects that seemed, paradoxically, to be moving faster than light; on the surface temperature of Neptune's big moon, Triton; and on the dark matter in the outer reaches of nearby galaxies where no stars could be seen. Morale began to improve. The Argus staff felt they were making a contribution at the cutting edge of astronomical discovery. The time to complete a full search of the sky had been lengthened, it was true. But now their professional careers had some safety net. They might not succeed in finding signs of other intelligent beings, but they might pluck other secrets from the treasury of nature.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence—everywhere abbreviated SETI, except by those who talked somewhat more optimistically about communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI)—was essentially an observing routine, the dull staple for which most of the facility had been built. But a quarter of the time you could be assured of using the most powerful array of radio telescopes on Earth for other projects. You had only to get through the boring part. A small amount of time had also been reserved for astronomers from other institutions. While the morale had improved noticeably, there were many who agreed with Drumlin; they glanced longingly at the technological miracle that Argus” 131 radio telescopes represented and imagined using them for their own, doubtless meritorious, programs. She was alternately conciliatory and argumentative with Dave, but none of it did any good. He was not in an amiable mood.
Drumlin's colloquium was in part an attempt to demonstrate that there were no extraterrestrials anywhere. If we had accomplished so much in only a few thousand years of high technology, what must a truly advanced species, he asked, be capable of? They should be able to move stars about, to reconfigure galaxies. And yet, in all of astronomy there was no sign of a phenomenon that could not be understood by natural processes, for which an appeal to extraterrestrial intelligence had to be made. Why hadn't Argus detected a radio signal by now? Did they imagine just one radio transmitter in all of the sky? Did they realize how many billions of stars they had examined already? The experiment was a worthy one, but now it was over. They didn't have to examine the rest of the sky. The answer was in. Neither in deepest space not near the Earth was there any sign of extraterrestrials. They did not exist.
In the question period, one of the Argus astronomers asked about the Zoo Hypothesis, the contention that the extraterrestrials were out there all right but chose not to make their presence known, in order to conceal from humans the fact that there were other intelligent beings in the cosmos—in the same sense that a specialist in primate behavior might wish to observe a troop of chimpanzees in the bush but not interfere with their activities. In reply, Drumlin asked a different question: Is it likely that with a million civilizations in the Galaxy—the sort of number he said was “bandied about” at Argus—there would not be a single poacher? How does it come about that every civilization in the Galaxy abides by an ethic of noninterference? Is it probable that not one of them would be poking around on the Earth?
“But on Earth,” Ellie replied, “poachers and game wardens have roughly equal levels of technology. If the game warden is a major step ahead—with radar and helicopters, say—then the poachers are out of business.”
The remark was greeted warmly by some of the Argus staff, but Drumlin only said, “You're reaching, Ellie. You're reaching.”
