that the Machine had been activated, it would be twenty-six years before the signal stops arriving on Earth.
Your Vegans couldn't have known twenty-six years ago when the Machine was going to be activated. And to the minute. You would have to send a message back in time to twenty-six years ago, for the Message to stop on December thirty-first, 1999. You do follow, don't you?”
“Yes, I follow. This is wholly unexplored territory. You know, it's not called a space-time continuum for nothing. If they can make tunnels through space, I suppose they can make some kind of tunnels through time. The fact that we got back a day early shows that they have at least a limited kind of time travel. So maybe as soon as we left the Station, they sent a message twenty-six years back into time to turn the transmission off. I don't know.”
“You see how convenient it is for you that the Message stops just now. If it was still broadcasting, we could find your little satellite, capture it, and bring back the transmission tape. That would be definitive evidence of a hoax. Unambiguous. But you couldn't risk that. So you're reduced to black hole mumbojumbo. Probably embarrassing for you.” He looked concerned.
It was like some paranoid fantasy in which a patchwork of innocent facts are reassembled into an intricate conspiracy. The facts in this case were hardly commonplace, and it made sense for the authorities to test other possible explanations. But Kitz's rendition of events was so malign that it revealed, she thought, someone truly wounded, afraid, in pain. In her mind, the likelihood that all this was a collective delusion diminished a little. But the cessation of the Message transmission—if it had happened as Kitz had said—was worrisome.
“Now, I tell myself, Dr. Arroway, you scientists had the brains to figure all this out, and the motivation.
But by yourselves you didn't have the means. If it wasn't the Russians who put up this satellite for you, it could have been any one of half a dozen other national launch authorities. But we've looked into all that.
Nobody launched a free-flying satellite in the appropriate orbits. That leaves private launch capability. And the most interesting possibility that's come to our notice is a Mr. S. R. Hadden. Know him?”
“Don't be ridiculous, Michael. I talked to you about Hadden before I went up to Methuselah.”
“Just wanted to be sure we agree on the basics. Try this on for size: You and the Russian concoct this scheme. You get Hadden to bankroll the early stages—the satellite design, the invention of the Machine, the encrypting of the Message, faking the radiation damage, all that. In return, after the Machine Project gets going, he gets to play with gome of that two trillion dollars. He likes the idea. There might be enormous profit in it, and from his history, he'd love to embarrass the government. When you get stuck in decrypting the Message, when you can't find the primer, you even go to him. He tells you where to look for it. That was also careless. It would have been better if you figured it out yourself.”
“It's too careless,” offered der Heer. “Wouldn't someone who was really perpetrating a hoax…”
“Ken, I'm surprised at you. You've been very credulous, you know? You're demonstrating exactly why Arrowayand the others thought it would be clever to ask Hadden's advice. And to make sure we knew she'd gone to see him.”
He returned his attention to her. “Dr. Arroway, try to look at it from the standpoint of a neutral observer…”
Kitz pressed on, making sparkling new patterns of facts assemble themselves in the air before her, rewriting whole years of her life. She hadn't thought Kitz dumb, but she hadn't imagined him this inventive either. Perhaps he had received help. But the emotional propulsion for this fantasy came from Kitz.
He was full of expansive gestures and rhetorical flourishes. This was not merely part of his job. This interrogation, this alternative interpretation of events, had roused something passionate in him. After a moment she thought she saw what it was. The Five had come back with no immediate military applications, no political liquid capital, but only a story that was surpassing strange. And that story bad certain implications. Kitz was now master of the most devastating arsenal on Earth, while the Caretakers were building galaxies. He was a lineal descendant of a progression of leaders, American and Soviet, who had devised the strategy of nuclear confrontation, while the Caretakers were an amalgam of diverse species from separate worlds working together in concert. Their very existence was an unspoken rebuke. Then consider the possibility that the tunnel could be activated from the other end, that there might be nothing he could do to prevent it. They could be here in an instant. How could Kitz defend the United States under such circumstances? His role in the decision to build the Machine—the history of which he seemed to be actively rewriting—could be interpreted by an unfriendly tribunal as dereliction of duty. And what account could Kitz give the extraterrestrials of his stewardship of the planet, he and his predecessors? Even if no avenging angels came storming out of the tunnel, if the truth of the journey got out the world would change. It was already changing. It would change much more.
Again she regarded him with sympathy. For a hundred generations, at least, the world had been run by peoplemuch worse than he. It was his misfortune to come to bat just as the rules of the game were being rewritten.
“…even if you believed every detail of your story,” he was saying, “don't you think the extraterrestrials treated you badly? They take advantage of your tenderest feelings by dressing themselves up as dear old Dad. They don't tell you what they're doing, they expose all your film, destroy all your data, and don't even let you leave that stupid palm frond up there. Nothing on the manifest is missing, except for a little food, and nothing that isn't on the manifest is returned, except for a little sand. So in twenty minutes you gobbled some food and dumped a little sand out of your pockets. You come back one nanosecond or something after you leave, so to any neutral observer you never left at all.
“Now, if the extraterrestrials wanted to make it unam-biguously clear you'd really gone somewhere, they would've brought you back a day later, or a week. Right? If there was nothing inside the benzels for a while, we'd be dead certain that you'd gone somewhere. If they wanted to make it easy for you, they wouldn't have turned off the Message. Right? That makes it look bad, you know. They could've figured that out. Why would they want to make it bad for you? And there's other ways they could've supported your story. They could've given you something to remember them by. They could've let you bring back your movies. Then nobody could claim all this is just a clever fake. So how come they didn't do that? How come the extraterrestrials don't confirm your story? You spent years of your life trying to find them. Don't they appreciate what you've done?' Ellie, how can you be so sure your story really happened? If, as you claim, all this isn't a hoax, couldn't it be a… delusion? It's painful to consider, I know. Nobody wants to think they've gone a little crazy. Considering the strain you've been under, though, it's no big deal. And if the only alternative is criminal conspiracy… Maybe you want to carefully think this one through.” She had already done so.
Later that day she met with Kitz alone. A bargain had in effect been proposed. She had no intention of going along with it. But Kitz was prepared for that possibility as well.
“You never liked me from the first,” he said. “But I'm going to rise above that. We're going to do something really fair.
“We've already issued a news release saying that the Machine just didn't work when we tried to activate it. Naturally, we're trying to understand what went wrong. With all the other failures, in Wyoming and Uzbekistan, nobody is doubting this one.
“Then in a few weeks we'll announce that we're still not getting anywhere. We've done the best we could. The Machine is too expensive to keep working on. Probably we're just not smart enough to figure it out yet. Also, there's still some danger, after all. We always knew that. The Machine might blow up or something. So all in all, it's best to put the Machine Project on ice—at least for a while. It's not that we didn't try.
“Hadden and his friends would oppose it, of course, but as he's been taken from us…”
“He's only three hundred kilometers overhead,” she pointed out.
“Oh, haven't you heard? Sol died just around the time the Machine was activated. Funny how it happened. Sorry, I should have told you. I forgot you were… close to him.”
She did not know whether to believe Kitz. Hadden was in his fifties and had certainly seemed in good physical health. She would pursue this topic later. “And what, in your fantasy, becomes of us?” she asked.
“Us? Who's “us'?”
“Us. The five of us. The ones who went aboard the Machine that you claim never worked.”
“Oh. After a little more debriefing you'll be free to leave. I don't think any of you will be foolish enough to tell this cock-and-bull story on the outside. But just to be safe, we're preparing some psychiatric dossiers on the five ofyou. Profiles. Low-key. You've always been a little rebellious, mad at the system—whichever system you grew up in. It's okay. It's good for people to be independent. We encourage that, especially in scientists. But the strain of
