Contact

by Carl Sagan

CONTACT

Contents

PART I

THE MESSAGE

CHAPTER 1

Transcendental Numbers

By human standards it could not possibly have been artificial:

Gliding in polar orbit about the great blue-white star, it resembled some immense, imperfect polyhedron, encrusted with millions of bowl-shaped barnacles. Every bowl was aimed at a particular part of the sky. Every constellation was being attended to. The polyhedral world had been performing its enigmatic function for eons. It was very patient. It could afford to wait forever.

“Their necks are so long, the talk can’t get out,” her father said. She felt sorry for the poor creature, condemned to silence. But she also felt a joy in its existence, a delight that such wonders might be.

Her mother’s sister had not believed that Ellie, age three, could read. The nursery stories, the aunt was convinced, had been memorized.

Glancing toward the closed door with a start, she lowered the volume. She turned the dial marked “frequency,” and came upon a voice talking excitedly—as far as she could understand, about a Russian machine that was in the sky, endlessly circling the Earth. Endlessly, she thought. She turned the dial again, seeking other stations. After a while, fearful of being discovered, she unplugged the set, screwed the back on loosely, and with still more difficulty lifted the radio and placed it back on the shelf.

Are all those tubes really necessary? What would happen if you removed them one at a time? Her father had once called them vacuum tubes. What was happening inside a vacuum tube? Was there really no air in there? How did the music of the orchestras and the voices of the announcers get in the radio?

In her tenth summer, she was taken on vacation to visit two cousins she detested at a cluster of cabins along a lake in the Northern Peninsula of Michigan.

Without looking down, with only her outstretched hand to guide her, she found a soft patch of grass and laid herself down. The sky was blazing with stars. There were thousands of them, most twinkling, a few bright and steady. If you looked carefully you could see faint differences in color. That bright one there, wasn’t it bluish?

Could you teach the alphabet to the ants? And would you want to?

What could ants know, anyway?

From a saddlebag she produced The Radio Amateur’s Handbook and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. After a moment’s consideration, she decided on the latter. Twain’s hero had been conked on the head and awakened in Arthurian England. Maybe it was all a dream or a delusion. But maybe it was real. Was it possible to travel backwards in time? Her chin on her knees, she scouted for a favorite passage. It was when Twain’s hero is first collected by a man dressed in armor who he takes to be an escapee from a local booby hatch. As they reach the crest of the hill they see a city laid out before them: “ ‘Bridgeport?’ said I . . . “ ‘Camelot,’ said he.”

“I’ve looked for you everywhere. Why aren’t you where I can find you? Oh, Ellie,” she whispered, “something awful’s happened.”

In the seventh grade they were studying “pi.”

“How could anybody know that the decimals go on and on forever?” “That’s just the way it is,” said the teacher with some asperity. “But why? How do you know? How can you count decimals forever?”

After school she bicycled to the library at the nearby college to look through books on mathematics. As nearly as she could figure out from what she read, her question wasn’t all that stupid. According to the Bible, the ancient Hebrews had apparently thought that π was exactly equal to three.

It was a fact that had been discovered only about 250 years ago.

She was determined to learn calculus.

She had caught a glimpse of something majestic. Hiding between all the ordinary numbers was an infinity of transcendental numbers whose presence you would never have guessed unless you looked deeply into mathematics.

When anyone assumed that she was Staughton’s daughter, she would be outraged. Her mother and stepfather never suggested that she change her name to Staughton; they knew what her response would be.

Ellie vowed she would never accept a position of dependence. Ellie’s father had died, her mother had grown distant, and Ellie felt herself exiled to the house of a tyrant. There was no one to call her Presh anymore. She longed to escape.

‘Bridgeport?’ said I. “ ‘Camelot,’ said he.”

CHAPTER 2

Coherent Light

But now, carried along its trajectory toward a point above the opposite pole of the star, the sunlight gleamed off its millions of bowl-shaped appendages. If you looked very carefully you might have seen one of them make a slight pointing adjustment. You would not have seen the burst of radio waves washing out from it into the depths of space.

Without even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that ended only with the dawn of space exploration.

There were lathes, drill presses, and other machine tools which she was forbidden to approach, because no matter how capable she might be, she was still “a girl.” Reluctantly, they granted her permission to pursue her own projects in the electronics area of the “shop.” She built radios more or less from scratch, and then went on to something more interesting.

She began attending meetings and rallies at the college nearby. The people she met there seemed much brighter, friendlier, more alive than her awkward and lusterless high school companions.

John Staughton first cautioned her and then forbade her to spend time with college students. They would not respect her, he said. They would take advantage of her. She was pretending to a sophistication she did not have and never would. Her style of dress was deteriorating.

Beyond pious exhortations to Ellie and Staughton not to “fight,” her mother participated little in these discussions. Privately she would plead with Ellie to obey her stepfather, to be “nice.” Ellie now suspected Staughton of marrying her mother for her father’s life insurance—why else? He certainly showed no signs of loving her—and he was not predisposed to be “nice.”

Out of love and pity for her mother, she acquiesced. So every Sunday for most of one school year Ellie went to a regular discussion group at a nearby church. It was one of the respectable Protestant denominations, untainted by disorderly evangelism.

Ellie had never seriously read the Bible before and had been inclined to accept her father’s perhaps ungenerous judgment that it was “half barbarian history, half fairy tales.”

The minister’s wife blandly temporized. Somehow these stories never surfaced in subsequent discussion. When Ellie inquired how it was possible for the maidservants of the daughter of Pharaoh to tell just by looking that the baby in the bullrushes was Hebrew, the teacher blushed deeply and asked Ellie not to raise unseemly questions. (The answer dawned on Ellie at that moment.)

The contradictory genealogies seemed to Ellie a transparent attempt to fit the Isaianic prophecy after the event—cooking the data, it was called in chemistry lab.

She told her despairing mother that she had done her best, but wild horses wouldn’t drag her to another Bible class.

She had half expected not to attend college, although she was determined to leave home. Staughton would not pay for her to go elsewhere, and her mother’s meek intercessions were unavailing. But Ellie had done spectacularly well on the standardized college entrance examinations and found to her surprise her teachers telling her that she was likely to be offered scholarships by well-known universities.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, seemed far enough away to elude John Staughton’s influence, but close enough to return from on vacation to visit her mother—who viewed the arrangement as a difficult compromise between abandoning her daughter and incrementally irritating her husband. Ellie surprised herself by choosing Harvard over the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Every time she found herself in a new group she would have to fight her way through again, just to dip her oar into the discussion. The boys were uniformly unaware even that there was a problem.

She cultivated a few close friends and made a number of casual enemies, who disliked her for her dress, for her political and religious views, or for the vigor with which she defended her opinions. Her competence and delight in science were taken as rebukes by many otherwise capable young women. But a few looked on her as what mathematicians call an existence theorem—a demonstration that a woman could, sure enough, excel in science—or even as a role model.

Her relationships tended to last a few months or less. The alternative seemed to be to disguise her interests and stifle her opinions, something she had resolutely refused to do in high school.

Her date had taken her to a cellar bar off Kenmore Square. Jesse was singing rhythm and blues and playing lead guitar. The way he sang and the way he moved made clear what she had been missing. The next night she returned alone. She seated herself at the nearest table and locked eyes with him through both his sets. Two months later they were living together.

At night there was Jesse, leaping and wailing, a kind of force of nature that had taken over her life. In the year they spent together, she could not recall a single night when he proposed they go to sleep. He knew nothing of physics or mathematics, but he was wide awake inside the universe, and for a time so was she.

One day he told her he wanted a baby. He would be serious, he’d settle down, he’d get a regular job. He might even consider marriage. “A baby?” she asked him. “But I’d have to leave school. I have years more before I’m done. If I had a baby, I might never go back to school.” “Yeah,” he said, “but we’d have a baby. You wouldn’t have school, but you’d have something else.” “Jesse, I need school,” she told him. He shrugged, and she could feel their lives together slip off his shoulders and away. It lasted another few months, but it all had really been settled in that brief exchange. They kissed each other goodbye and he went off to California. She never heard his voice again.

In the late 1960s, the Soviet Union succeeded in landing space vehicles on the surface of Venus.

But at the same time she had to admire how powerful radio astronomy was. The astronomers had sat home, pointed their radio telescopes at Venus, and measured the surface temperature just about as accurately as the Venera probes did thirteen years later.