message, still to come. Dr. der Heer here”—he paused to listen to the unexpected assonance—”Dr. der Heer says you think these prime numbers are an announcement, something to make us pay attention. If there is a message and it's subtle—something those other countries wouldn't pick up right away—I want it kept quiet until we can talk about it.”
“Many of us have wants, Mr. Kitz, she found herself saying sweetly, ignoring der Heer's raised eyebrows. There was something irritating, almost provocative, about Kitz's manner. And probably hers as well. “I, for example, have a want to understand what the meaning of this signal is, and what's happening on Vega, and what it means for the Earth. It's possible that scientists in other nations are the key to that understanding. Maybe we'll need their data. Maybe we'll need their brains. I could imagine this might be a problem too big for one country to handle all by itself.”
Der Heer now appeared faintly alarmed. “Uh, Dr. Arroway. Secretary Kitz's suggestion isn't all that unreasonable. It's very possible we'd bring other nations in. All he's asking is to talk about it with us first. And that's only if there's a new message.”
His tone was calming but not unctuous. She looked at him closely again. Der Heer was not a patently handsome man, but he had a kind and intelligent face. He was wearing a blue suit and a crisp oxford shirt. His seriousness and air of self-possession were moderated by the warmth of his smile. Why, then, was he shilling for this jerk? Part of his job? Could it be that Kitz was talking sense?
“It's a remote contingency anyway.” Kitz sighed as he got to his feet. “The Secretary of Defense would appreciate your cooperation.” He was trying to be winning. “Agreed?”
“Let me think about it,” she replied, taking his proffered hand as if it were a dead fish.
“I'll be along in a few minutes, Mike,” der Heer said cheerfully.
His hand on the lintel of the door, Kitz had an apparent afterthought, removed a document from his inside breast pocket, returned, and placed it gingerly on the corner of her desk. “Oh yes, I forgot. Here's a copy of the Hadden Decision. You probably know it. It's about the government's right to classify material vital to the security of the United States. Even if it didn't originate in a classified facility.”
“You want to classify the prime numbers?” she asked, her eyes wide in mock incredulity.
“See you outside, Ken.”
She began talking the moment Kitz left her office. “What's he after? Vegan death rays? World blower- uppers? What's this really about?”
“He's just being prudent, Ellie. I can see you don't think that's the whole story. Okay. Suppose there's some message—you know, with real content—and in it there's something offensive to Muslims, say, or to Methodists. Shouldn't we release it carefully, so the United States doesn't get a black eye?”
“Ken, don't bullshit me. That man is an Assistant Secretary of Defense. If they're worried about Muslims and Methodists, they would have sent me an Assistant Secretary of State, or—I don't know—one of those religious fanatics who preside at presidential prayer breakfasts. You're the President's Science Adviser. What did you advise her?”
“I haven't advised her anything. Since I've been here, I've only talked to her once, briefly, on the phone. And I'll be frank with you, she didn't give me any instructions about classification. I thought what Kitz said was way off base. I think he's acting on his own.”
“Who is he?”
“As far as I know, he's a lawyer. He was a top executive in the electronics industry before joining the Administration. He really knows C3I, but that doesn't make him knowledgeable about anything else.”
“Ken, I trust you. I believe you didn't set me up for this Hadden Decision threat.” She waved the document in front of her and paused, seeking his eyes. “Do you know that Drumlin thinks there's another message in the polarization?”
“I don't understand.”
“Just a few hours ago, Dave finished a rough statistical study of the polarization. He's represented the Stokes parameters by Poin-care spheres; there's a nice movie of them varying in time.”
Der Heer looked at her blankly. Don't biologists use polarized light in their microscopes? she asked herself.
“When a wave of light comes at you—visible light, radio light, any kind of light—it's vibrating at right angles to your line of sight. If that vibration rotates, the wave is said to be elliptically polarized. If it rotates clockwise, the polarization is called right-handed; counterclockwise, it's left-handed. I know it's a dumb designation. Anyway, by varying between the two kinds of polarization, you could transmit information. A little right polarization and that's a zero; a little left and it's a one. Follow? It's perfectly possible. We have amplitude modulation and frequency modulation, but our civilization, by convention, ordinarily just doesn't do polarization modulation.
“Well, the Vega signal looks as if it has polarization modulating. We're busy checking it out right now. But Dave found that there wasn't an equal amount of the two sorts of polarization. It wasn't left polarized as much as it was right polarized. It's just possible that there's another message in the polarization that we've missed so far. That's why I'm suspicious about your friend. Kitz isn't just giving me general gratuitous advice. He knows we may be onto something else.”
“Ellie, take it easy. You've hardly slept for four days. You've been juggling the science, the administration, and the press. You've already made one of the major discoveries of the century, and if I understand you right, you might be on the verge of something even more important. You've got every right to be a little on edge. And threatening to militarize the project was clumsy of Kitz. I don't have any trouble understanding why you're suspicious of him. But there's some sense to what he says.”
“Do you know the man?”
“I've been in a few meetings with him. I can hardly say I know him. Ellie, if there's a possibility of a real message coming in, wouldn't it be a good idea to thin out the crowd a little?”
“Sure. Give me a hand with some of the Washington deadwood.”
“Okay. And if you leave that document on your desk, someone'll be in here and draw the wrong conclusion. Why don't you put it away somewhere?”
“You're going to help?”
“If the situation stays anything like what it is now, I'll help. We're not going to make our best effort if this thing gets classified.”
Smiling, Ellie knelt before her small office safe, and punched in the six-digit combination, 314159.
She took one last glance at the document that was titled in large black letters THE UNITED STATES VS. HADDEN CYBERNETICS, and locked it away.
It was a group of about thirty people—technicians and scientists associated with Project Argus, a few senior government officials, including the Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in civilian clothes.
Among them were Valerian, Drumlin, Kitz, and der Heer. Ellie was the only woman. They had set up a large television projection system, focused on a two-meter-by-two-meter screen set flush against the far wall. Ellie was simultaneously addressing the group and the decryption program, her fingers on the keyboard before her.
“Over the years we've prepared for the computer decryption of many kinds of possible messages.
We've just learned from Dr. Drumlin's analysis that there's information in the polarization modulation. All that frenetic switching between left and right means something. It's not random noise. It's as if you're flipping a coin. Of course, you expect as many heads as tails, but instead you get twice as many heads as tails. so you conclude that the coin is loaded or, in our case, that the polarization modulation isn't random; it has content…. Oh, look at this. What the computer has just now told us is even more interesting. The precise sequence of heads and tails repeats. It's a long sequence, so it's a pretty complex message, and the transmitting civilization must want us to be sure to get it right.
“Here, you see? This is the repeating message. We're now into the first repetition. Every bit of information, every dot and dash—if you want to think of them that way—is identical to what it was in the last block of data. Now we analyze the total number of buts. It's a number in the tens of billions. Okay, bingo! It's the product of three prime numbers.”
Although Drumlin and Valerian were both beaming, it seemed to Ellie they were experiencing quite different emotions.
“So what? What do some more prime numbers mean?” a visitor from Washington asked.
