Contact

by Carl Sagan

Racing across the screens was a paired sequence of zeros and ones, a real-time comparison of the data just being received and the data from an early page of text received at Argus a year before. The program would have culled out any differences. So far, there were none. It reassured them that they had not mistranscribed, that there were no apparent transmission errors, and that if some small dense interstellar cloud between Vega and the Earth was able to eat the occasional zero or one, this was an infrequent occurrence. Argus was by now in real-time communication with dozens of other telescopes that were part of the World Message Consortium, and the news of recycling was passed on to the next observing stations westward, to California, Hawaii, the Marshal Nedelin now in the South Pacific, and to Sydney. Had the discovery been made when Vega was over one of the other telescopes in the network, Argus would have been informed instantly.