Markov tried to pull himself together. Too much was happening, too quickly.
“Do you still believe,” Maria asked, “that the signals are not a language?”
He took a deep breath, then, “They are not a language. At least, they are not any kind of language that I can understand.”
She reached out and took the letter from his limp hand. Placing it carefully back in her bag, she said, “A few moments ago you expressed a desire to see Academician Bulacheff. Well, he wants to see you, too. Immediately. We go back to Moscow tonight.”
Chapter 12
…at the end of November ’67 I got it [a pulsating radio source] on the fast recording. As the chart flowed under the pen I could see that the signal was a series of pulses…They were 11/3 seconds apart…
Then Scott and Collins observed the pulsations with another [radio] telescope…which eliminated instrumental effects. John Pilkington measured the dispersion of the signal which established that the source was well outside the solar system but inside the galaxy. So were these pulsations man-made, but made by men from another civilization?…
We did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization, but obviously the idea had crossed our minds and we had no proof that it was an entirely natural radio emission. It is an interesting problem—if one thinks one may have detected life elsewhere in the universe how does one announce the results responsibly?
“It’s just too fantastic to be believed!”
“I assure you, Mr. President, it’s quite true.”
The President got up from the polished mahogany table and walked toward the fireplace. The regular Cabinet meeting had ended in its usual bitter wrangling, and he had gladly left the cold formality of the Cabinet Room for the smaller intimacy of the Roosevelt Room.
Standing by the small bronze bust of Teddy Roosevelt on the mantel above the fireplace, the President looked haggard: tie loosened, collar opened, hair tousled, fists jammed into the pockets of his jacket.
The press secretary watched him worriedly. An old friend and adviser, he knew that the pressures were inexorably grinding the President into despair.
The President looked wistfully at the painting of Teddy the Rough Rider that hung above the sofa. “Things were a lot simpler in his day, weren’t they?”
The Defense Secretary shook his gray-maned head. “It only seems so from this distance in time, sir.”
“You work so hard to get this job,” the President murmured, more to himself than to the others in the room, “and once you’ve got it, you wonder why you ever tried.”
“Somebody’s got to do it,” the press secretary joked. “They hold an election every four years.”
The President smiled weakly at him. Turning to his science adviser, he asked again, “Intelligent life on Jupiter? You’re sure of that?”
“No, sir,” she answered firmly. “Not totally sure. But it’s a strong enough possibility that we should be prepared to face up to it.”
With a sigh, the President muttered, “Why does everything have to happen during my Administration?”
The Secretary of Defense, a former industrialist, cleared his throat as he always did before delivering an opinion. “Mr. President,” he said in his flat Oklahoma twang, “Sally and I don’t always see eye to eye on things…”
The science adviser glared at him from her seat across the small room. “You can say that again! Joey.”
He grinned at her. “All right, I’m a male chauvinist pig…Ms. Ellington.”
“Dr. Ellington.” She did not grin back.
The President looked pained, but said nothing. So his press secretary chided, “Hey look, there’s only the four of us in here, so let’s drop the squabbling for a while, huh? This is too important for cheap shots.”
“I totally agree,” said Defense. “The point I was going to make is that Dr. Ellington and I are convinced that we must turn over the Arecibo radio telescope facility to studying these radio signals.”
“Why Arecibo?”
“It’s the biggest and most powerful radio facility we have,” the science adviser explained. “The biggest radio telescope in the world, as a matter of fact.”
“What about the telescope up in orbit?” asked the press secretary.
“That’s an optical telescope, like Mount Palomar.”
“We need Big Eye, too,” Defense added. “In fact, that’s how we got the photographs of this thing in orbit around Jupiter.”
“If it really is in orbit,” muttered the science adviser.
“You think it’s artificial?”
She nodded, grim-faced. “Yes, I do. But we don’t have enough numbers on its trajectory yet to tell if it’s truly in orbit around the planet or merely making an extended flyby. It could be a flyby…from beyond the solar system.”
The President sank into the chair next to his Defense Secretary. “It’s hard to believe, either way.” He looked across the table at the press secretary. “Intelligent creatures from another world. Scary, isn’t it?”
“Scares hell out of me,” Defense said.
“We’ve got to be absolutely sure about this,” said the press secretary. “If word about this leaks out before we’re ready to absolutely confirm or deny it…there’ll be pandemonium.”
“I realize that,” Defense said. “We’re taking every security precaution, I assure you.”
But the science adviser said, “We’re going to have a peck of trouble with the Arecibo regulars. We can’t just walk in there and tell them to pack up and leave for an indefinite period of time. They’d raise the roof.”
“Suppose we explained the situation to them and asked for their co-operation…”
Defense shook his head. “You’ve got a lot of academic superstars down there who believe that their freedom of expression comes first and everything else—including the national security—comes afterward. Try to get their co-operation and they’ll go running to the Post.”
“The Pentagon Papers, all over again,” said the press secretary.
But the President persisted. “Carl Sagan’s one of the people in that group, isn’t he? I know Carl. He worked on my election committee. I could explain it to him. He’d want to help us, I know he would.”
“Sure! He’d want to run the show,” the science adviser said.
“And we can’t let that happen,” said Defense.
“Why not?”
“He’s much too well known. He’d be a terrible security risk. Pulitzer Prize—winning author. Television star. We couldn’t let him wander around free if he’s going to work on this, and we can’t lock him up inside a security compound—his absence would tip off the Russians that we’re on to something.”
“He’s damned friendly with Russian scientists, too, isn’t he?” the press secretary asked.
“Don’t you think the Russians already know about this?” the President asked. “I mean, they have radio telescopes too, don’t they?”
“I don’t know if they have anything operating down below six hundred megahertz right now,” answered the science adviser. “After all, we stumbled onto the signals only because one of our older facilities was working out at the end of the spectrum.”
“And we’ve got Big Eye,” said Defense. “The Reds don’t have a comparable telescope in orbit. Ground-based telescopes, no matter how big they are, just can’t pick up this thing near Jupiter. We’ve checked that. You can’t see it from the ground, it’s too faint to be picked up.”