He could hear the smile in her voice, "just listen, okay? Are you awake?"
"No—oh, my God." He had just discovered what time it was. "Rainy, believe me, I would listen better if I had i some coffee. Let me call you back in a few minutes."
"Just listen!" she cried. There was a scraping noise on I the telephone, a wait, another scraping noise. Then silence.
Tib said tentatively, "Rainy, are you there?"
Her voice came from off the microphone, and impatient. "Hang in there, will you? . . . Ah, there it goes."
There was a second of tape hiss and then a blast of sound. Tib yelped and pulled the phone away from his ear, half deafened; even at arm's length he could hear perfectly what was coming out of it. What it sounded like, more than anything else, was some sort of motion-picture sound effects, the cry of a computer about to decide to wipe out the human race, or a mad scientist's laboratory. It clicked and beeped and rattled, and it went on for a full thirty seconds.
Then there was a click as it was switched off, and Rainy came back on the phone. "Did I get it too loud for you? I'm sorry; 1 guess I'm kind of fatigued. Do you know what you were listening to?"
"No, should I? Or wait—" Tib pursued a vagrant memory, then pounced on it. "Your spaceship? The noise it made when it blew up?"
She said with satisfaction, "You're very quick, old Tib. Exactly. The noise my spaceship made when it blew up, although I've slowed it down by, let's see, I guess this one's about eight hundred times. And do you know what it has, Tib? It has structure!"
"Structure?"
"Oh, wake up, man!" she cried. "Don't you understand what I'm saying? I've been up all night playing it, slowing it down, playing it again, and I'm sure. I put it on an oscilloscope and measured it, and it's regular ... and it doesn't repeat."
He stood up and switched on the wall lights; this was not an occasion for shadows. He was wide awake now. "If I understand what you are saying, Rainy, it is—it is that you believe this to be a—message?"
"A communication," she corrected.
"I do not see the difference."
"A message would be directed at us. I doubt it was. The focusing focused everything, light, heat, X rays—and radio; and so we heard a broadcast that otherwise would not have been detectable in any way. I doubt very much that it was intended for us, and I don't know what it was. A love letter, a warning, a weather report, a navigation beacon—I don't know. But it's definitely an artifact, and it comes from another star. I've even located the star. It's a K-6, not visible to the naked eye; it doesn't even have a name, but it was in line with Jupiter and the satellite and the sun . . . and it was where the communication came from. Tib? The human race isn't alone any more."
They were both silent for a moment, and then Rainy finished, "So come on up here, Tib! I want you to help me announce it."
"Me? What would I have to say, Rainy? I'm not an astronomer."
"No. But you're a person who was saying just a little while ago that you saw no way of being heard, and now there's a way."
Tuesday, December 29th. 11:25 AM.
The noise in the Von Karman Auditorium was extreme; people were still coming in, summoned at the last minute, and for each new batch of TV and press, of scientists from JPL itself and all the surrounding schools and laboratories, the tapes had to be repeated, and Rainy had to answer the same questions again: "How can you tell?" and "Is this really proof?" and, over and over, "Are you sure?"
But of course no one was sure! In science one was not sure, one merely made an assumption and then contrived tests to see how nearly it was true. And of course Rainy was trying to explain that, as politicians and press, scientists and scholars whispered to each other and wondered.
Sonderman gazed at the list he had been doodling before him. It was headed "Childish vices", and it said:
Nuclear war.
Waste of irreplaceable resources.
Lack of prudence.
Failure to learn.
And that summed them up, he thought, and the last was the worst of the four.
The tape came to its hissing, moaning end for the tenth time and Rainy, eyes blinking against the lights, tired but still on her feet, held up her hand. "That's enough of that," she said. "Now I would like to introduce my collaborator in this work, Dr. Tibor Sonderman."
Tib rose and walked slowly to the podium, giving the audience a chance to sort themselves out. The press conference had been arranged on short notice; there had not even been time to set up chairs, and the people staring at him were moving around in knots and clusters. Strobes flashed, TV lights burned his tired eyes, and the buzz of talk did not die down. He cleared his throat and said:
"I have nothing to add to Ms. Keating's report as to the receipt, for the first time in human history, of a communication from an intelligent race other than our own. I wish only to comment on an implication of this fact.
"To discover that intelligence can arise is not in itself surprising, for we already knew that this is possible. It has happened here on Earth. What is surprising is to discover that an intelligent race can survive its technology. We now know that at least one other race has. It has passed the point of being able to destroy itself, as we are able now, and has gone on to some further stage; and that is new. This fact gives us hope. And it also gives us a purpose, and certain obligations. For what we know now that we did not know before is that the human race is not necessarily under sentence of death, and so certain childish and dangerous follies can be abandoned."
They were looking at him in perplexity and surprise, but not, at least, in hostility. And the TV cameras, those remarkable amplifiers of the voice, were rolling. What he said would be heard. "So we may now set behind us the kamikaze society," he said, gaining confidence with every word, "and now, with your permission, I will tell you what it appears to me we must do, in order to survive and take our place in this congeries of cultures that we now know to exist among the stars."