scientists by the Divine Grace.
But despite these clear warnings of God's will, Rankin continued, humans had for a third time tried to build the Machine. God let them. Then, gently, subtly, He caused the Machine to fail, deflected the demonic intent, and once more demonstrated His care and concern for His wayward and sinful—if truth be told. His unworthy-children onEarth. It was time to learn the lessons of our sinfulness, our abominations, and, before the coming Millennium, the real Millennium that would begin on January 1, 2001, rededicate our planet and ourselves to God.
The Machines should be destroyed. Every last one of them, and all their parts. The pretense that by building a machine rather than by purifying their hearts humans could stand at the right hand of God must be expunged, root and branch, before it was too late.
la her little apartment Ellie heard Rankin out, turned off the television set and resumed her programming.
The only outside calls she was permitted were to the rest home in Janesville, Wisconsin. All incoming calls except from Janesville were screened out. Polite apologies were provided. Letters from der Heer, Valerian, from her old college friend Becky Ellenbogen, she filed unopened. There were a number of messages delivered by express mail services, and then by courier, from South Carolina, from Palmer Joss.
She was much more tempted to read these, but did not. She wrote him a note that read only, “Dear Palmer, Not yet. Ellie,” and posted it with no return address. She had no way to know if it would be delivered.
A television special on her life, made without her consent, described her as more reclusive now than Neil Arm-strong, or even Greta Garbo. Ellie took it all with cheerful equanimity. She was otherwise occupied. Indeed, she was working night and day.
The prohibitions on communication with the outside world did not extend to purely scientific collaboration, and through open-channel asynchronous telenetting she and Vaygay organized a long-term research program. Among the objects to be examined were the vicinity of Sagittarius A at the center of the Galaxy, and the great extragalactic radio source, Cygnus A. The Argus telescopes were employed as part of a phased array, linked with the Soviet telescopes in Samarkand. Together, the American-Soviet array acted as if they were part of a single radio telescope the size of the Earth. Operating at a wavelength of a fewcentimeters, they could resolve sources of radio emission as small as the inner solar system if they were as faraway as the center of the Galaxy.
She worried that this was not good enough, that the two orbiting black holes were considerably smaller than that. Still, a continuous monitoring program might turn up something. What they really needed, she thought, was a radio telescope launched by space vehicle to the other side of the Sun, and working in tandem with radio telescopes on Earth. Humans could thereby create a telescope effectively the size of the Earth's orbit. With it, she calculated, they could resolve something the size of the Earth at the center of the Galaxy. Or maybe the size of the Station.
She spent most of her time writing, modifying existing programs for the Cray 21, and setting down an account—as detailed as she possibly could make it—of the salient events that had been squeezed into the twenty minutes of Earth-time after they activated the Machine. Halfway through, she realized she was writing samizdat. Typewriter and carbon paper technology. She locked the original and two copies in her safe—beside a yellowing copy of the Hadden Decision—secreted the third copy behind a loose plank in the electronics bay of Telescope 49, and burned the carbon paper. It generated a black acrid smoke. In six weeks she had finished reprogramming and just as her thoughts returned to Palmer Joss, he presented himself at the Argus front gate.
His way had been cleared by a few phone calls from a special assistant to the President, with whom, of coarse, Joss had been acquainted for years. Even here in the Southwest with its casual sartorial codes, he wore, as always, a jacket, a white shirt, and a tie. She gave him the palm frond, thanked him for the pendant, and despite all of Kite's admonitions to keep her delusional experience quiet, immediately told him everything.
They adopted the practice of her Soviet colleagues, who whenever anything politically unorthodox needed to be said, discovered the urgent necessity for a brisk walk. Everynow and then he would stop and, a distant observer would see, lean toward her. Each time she would take bis arm and they would walk on.
He listened sympathetically, intelligently, indeed generously—especially for someone whose doctrines must, she thought, be challenged at their fundaments by her account… if he gave them any credence at all.
After all his reluctance at the time the Message had first been received, at last she was showing Argus to him. He was companionable, and she found herself happy to see him. She wished she had been less preoccupied when she had seen him last, in Washington.
Apparently at random, they climbed up the narrow metal exterior stairways that straddled the base of Tele-scope 49. The vista of 130 radio telescopes—most of them rolling stock on their own set of railway tracks— was like nothing else on Earth. In the electronics bay she slid back the plank and retrieved a bulky envelope with Joss's name upon it. He put it in his inside breast pocket, where it made a discernible bulge.
She told him about the Sag A and Cyg A observing protocols. She told him about her computer program.
“It's very time-consuming, even with the Cray, to calculate pi out to something like ten to the twentieth place. And we don't know that what we're looking for is in pi. They sort of said it wasn't. It might be e. It might be one of the family of transcendental numbers they told Vaygay about It might be some altogether different number. So a simple-minded brute-force approach—just calculating fashionable transcendental numbers forever—is a waste of time. But here at Argus we have very sophisticated decryption algorithms, designed to find patterns in a signal, designed to pull out and display anything that looks nonrandom. So I rewrote the programs… ”
From the expression on his face, she was afraid she had not been clear. She made a small swerve in the monologue. “…but not to calculate the digits in a number like pi, print than out, and present them for inspection. There isn't enough time for that. Instead, the program races throughthe digits in pi and pauses even to think about it only when there's some anomalous sequence of zeros and ones. You know what I'm saying? Something nonrandom. By chance, there'll be some zeros and ones, of course. Ten percent of the digits will be zeros, and another ten percent will be ones. On average. The more digits we race through, the longer the sequences of pure zeros and ones that we should get by accident. The program knows what's expected statistically and only pays attention to unexpectedly long sequences of zeros and ones. And it doesn't only look in base ten.”
“I don't understand. If you look at enough random numbers, won't you get any pattern you want simply by chance?”
“Sure. But you can calculate how likely that is. If you get a very complex message very early on, you know it can't be by chance. So, every day in the early hours of the morning the computer works on this problem. No data from the outside world goes in. And so far no data from the inside world comes out. It just runs through the optimum series expansion for pi and watches the digits fly. It minds its own business.
Unless it finds something, it doesn't speak unless it's spoken to. It's sort of contemplating its navel.”
“I'm no mathematician, God knows. But could you give me a f'r instance?”
“Sure.” She searched in the pockets of her jump suit for a piece of paper and could find none. She thought about reaching into his inside breast pocket, retrieving the envelope she had just given him and writing on it, but decided that was too risky out here in the open. After a moment, he understood and produced a small spiral notebook.
“Thanks. Pi starts out 3. 1415926… You can see that the digits vary pretty randomly. Okay, a one appears twice in the first four digits, but after yon keep on going for a while it averages out. Each digit — 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9—appears almost exactly ten percent of the time when you've accumulated enough digits. Occasionally you'll get a few consecutive digits that are the same—4444, for example— but not more than you'd expect statistically. Now, supposeyou're running merrily through these digits and suddenly you find nothing but fours. Hundreds of fours all in a row. That couldn't carry any information, but it also couldn't be a statistical fluke. You could calculate the digits in pi for the age of the universe and, if the digits are random, you'd never go deep enough to get a hundred consecutive fours.”
“It's like the search you did for the Message. With these radio telescopes.”
“Yes; in both cases we were looking for a signal that's well out of the noise, something that can't be just a statistical fluke.”
“But it doesn't have to be a hundred fours—is that right? It could speak to us?”
“Sure. Imagine after a while we get a long sequence of just zeros and ones. Then, just as we did with the Message, we could pull a picture out, if there's one in there. You understand, it could be anything.”
“You mean you could decode a picture hiding in pi and it would be a mess of Hebrew letters?”
