Contact

by Carl Sagan

• • •

He was in mid-oration: “ . . . and others say there’s been a pact with the Devil, that the scientists have sold their souls. There are precious stones in every one of these telescopes.” He waved his hand toward Telescope 101. “Even the scientists admit that. Some people say it’s the Devil’s part of the bargain.” “Religious hooliganism,” Lunacharsky muttered darkly, his eyes yearning for the open road before them. “No, no. Let’s stay,” she said. A half smile of wonderment was playing on her lips. “There are some people—religious people, God-fearing people—who believe this Message comes from beings in space, entities, hostile creatures, aliens who want to harm us, enemies of Man.” He fairly shouted this last phrase, and then paused for effect. “But all of you are wearied and disgusted by the corruption, the decay in this society, a decay brought on by unthinking, unbridled, ungodly technology. I don’t know which of you is right. I can’t tell you what the Message means, or who it’s from. I have my suspicions. We’ll know soon enough. But I do know the scientists and the politicians and the bureaucrats are holding out on us. They haven’t told us all they know. They’re deceiving us, like they always do. For too long, O God, we have swallowed the lies they feed us, the corruption they bring.” To Ellie’s astonishment a deep rumbling chorus of assent rose from the crowd. He had tapped some well of resentment she had only vaguely apprehended. “These scientists don’t believe we’re th...

As they pulled away, over the sound of squealing tires and the murmur of the crowd, Ellie could hear the orator, his voice ringing clearly. ‘The evil in this place will be stopped. I swear it.”

CHAPTER 8

Random Access

She had come around to TABS, the Turner-American Broadcasting System, the only survivor of the large commercial networks that had dominated television broadcasting in the United States until the advent of widespread direct satellite broadcasting and 180-channel cable. On this station, Palmer Joss was making one of his rare television appearances. Like most Americans, Ellie instantly recognized his resonant voice, his slightly unkempt good looks, and the discoloration beneath his eyes that made you think he never slept for worrying about the rest of us.

Here was a man, she thought, who was hankering for a simpler age, a man who has spent his life attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable. He has condemned the most flagrant excesses of pop religion and thinks that justifies attacks on evolution and relativity. Why not attack the existence of the electron? Palmer Joss never saw one, and the Bible is innocent of electromagnetism. Why believe in electrons? Although she had never before listened to him speak, she was sure that sooner or later he would come around to the Message, and he did:

“Remember, the scientists don’t always get it right. They want to take away our faith, our beliefs, and they offer us nothing of spiritual value in return. I do not intend to abandon God because the scientists write a book and say it is a message from Vega. I will not worship science. I will not defy the First Commandment. I will not bow down before a Golden Calf.”

• • •

Billy Jo Rankin left for Odessa, Texas, in answer to a call from God. Soon Joss found a preaching style that was his own, not so much exhortatory as explanatory. In simple language and homely metaphors, he would explain baptism and the afterlife, the connection of Christian Revelation with the myths of classical Greece and Rome, the idea of God’s plan for the world, and the conformity of science and religion when both were properly understood. This was not the conventional preaching, and it was too ecumenical for many tastes. But it proved unaccountably popular.

What Billy Jo Rankin brandished was the actual amniotic fluid that surrounded and protected our Lord. The liquid had been carefully preserved in an ancient earthenware vessel that once belonged, so it was said, to Saint Ann. The tiniest drop of it would cure what ails you, he promised, through a special act of Divine Grace. This holiest of holy waters was with us tonight. Joss was appalled, not so much that Rankin would attempt so transparent a scam but that any of the parishioners were so credulous as to accept it. In his previous life he had witnessed many attempts to bamboozle the public. But that was entertainment. This was different. This was religion. Religion was too important to gloss the truth, much less to manufacture miracles. He took to denouncing this imposture from the pulpit.

Joss argued that in every religion there was a doctrinal line beyond which it insulted the intelligence of its practitioners. Reasonable people might disagree as to where that line should be drawn, but religions trespassed well beyond it at their peril. People were not fools, he said. The day before his death, as he was putting his affairs in order, the elder Rankin sent word to Joss that he never wanted to lay eyes on him again.

There were excesses in science and there were excesses in religion. A reasonable man wouldn’t be stampeded by either one. There were many interpretations of Scripture and many interpretations of the natural world. Both were created by God, so both must be mutually consistent. Wherever a discrepancy seems to exist, either a scientist or a theologian—maybe both—hasn’t been doing his job.

He continued to live simply, and rarely—except for presidential invitations and ecumenical congresses—left the rural South. Beyond a conventional patriotism, he made it a rule not to meddle in politics. In a field filled with competing entries, many of dubious probity, Palmer Joss became, in erudition and moral authority, the preeminent Christian fundamentalist preacher of his day.

• • •

“Compared to the Doomsday Chiliasts and the Earth-Firsters, Palmer Joss is the soul of moderation,” der Heer replied. “Maybe we haven’t explained the methods of science as well as we should have. I worry about that a lot these days. And Ellie, can you really be sure that it isn’t a message from—” “From God or the Devil? Ken, you can’t be serious.” “Well, how about advanced beings committed to what we might call good or evil, who somebody like Joss would consider indistinguishable from God or the Devil?” “Ken, whoever those beings are in the Vega system, I guarantee they didn’t create the universe. And they’re nothing like the Old Testament God. Remember, Vega, the Sun, and all the other stars in the solar neighborhood are in some backwater of an absolutely humdrum galaxy. Why should I Am That I Am hang out around here? There must be more pressing things for him to do.” “Ellie, we’re in a bind. You know Joss is very influential. He’s been close to three presidents, including the present incumbent. The President is inclined to make some concession to Joss, although I don’t think she wants to put him and a bunch of other preachers on the Preliminary Decryption Committee with you, Valerian, and Drumlin—to say nothing of Vaygay and his colleagues. It’s hard to imagine the Russians going along with fundamentalist clergy on the Committee. The whole thing could unravel over this. So why don’t we go and talk to him? The President says that Joss is really fascinated by science. Supp...

• • •

“The Ten Billion Commandments.” Der Heer laughed. “Maybe,” said Lunacharsky, staring through a cloud of cigarette smoke out the window at the telescopes. They seemed to be staring longingly at the sky. “But when you look at the patterns of cross-references, I think you’ll agree it looks more like the instruction manual for building a machine. God knows what the machine is supposed to do.”

CHAPTER 9

The Numinous

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• • •

“So, I think the bureaucratic religions try to institutionalize your perception of the numinous instead of providing the means so you can perceive the numinous directly—like looking through a six-inch telescope. If sensing the numinous is at the heart of religion, who’s more religious would you say—the people who follow the bureaucratic religions or the people who teach themselves science?” “Let’s see if I’ve got this straight,” he returned. It was a phrase of hers that he had adopted. “It’s a lazy Saturday afternoon, and there’s this couple lying naked in bed reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more ‘numinous’ than the Resurrection. Do they know how to have a good time, or don’t they?”

PART II

THE M...

CHAPTER 10

Precession of the Equinoxes

“You scientists are so shy,” Rankin was saying. “You love to hide your light under a bushel basket. You’d never guess what’s in those articles from the titles. Einstein’s first work on the Theory of Relativity was called ‘The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.’ No E=mc2 up front. No sir. ‘The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.’ I suppose if God appeared to a whole gaggle of scientists, maybe at one of those big Association meetings, they’d write something all about it and call it, maybe, ‘On Spontaneous Dendritoform Combustion in Air.’ They’d have lots of equations; they’d talk about ‘economy of hypothesis’; but they’d never say a word about God. “Y’see, you scientists are too skeptical.” From the sidewise motion of his head, Ellie deduced that der Heer was also included in this assessment. “You question everything, or try to. You never heard about ‘Leave well enough alone,’ or ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ You always want to check out if a thing is what you call ‘true.’ And ‘true’ means only empirical, sense data, things you can see and touch. There’s no room for inspiration or revelation in your world. Right from the beginning you rule out of court almost everything religion is about. I mistrust the scientists because the scientists mistrust everything.”

“You’re uncomfortable with scientific skepticism. But the reason it developed is that the world is complicated. It’s subtle. Everybody’s first idea isn’t necessarily right. Also, people are capable of self-deception. Scientists, too. All sorts of socially abhorrent doctrines have at one time or another been supported by scientists, well-known scientists, famous brand-name scientists. And, of course, politicians. And respected religious leaders. Slavery, for instance, or the Nazi brand of racism. Scientists make mistakes, theologians make mistakes, everybody makes mistakes. It’s part of being human. You say it yourselves: ‘To err is.’ “So the way you avoid the mistakes, or at least reduce the chance that you’ll make one, is to be skeptical. You test the ideas. You check them out by rigorous standards of evidence. I don’t think there is such a thing as a received truth. But when you let the different opinions debate, when any skeptic can perform his or her own experiment to check some contention out, then the truth tends to emerge. That’s the experience of the whole history of science. It isn’t a perfect approach, but it’s the only one that seems to work. “Now, when I look at religion, I see lots of contending opinions. For example, the Christians think the universe is a finite number of years old. From the exhibits out there, it’s clear that some Christians (and Jews, and Muslims) think that the universe is only six thousand years old. The Hindus, on the other hand—and ther...

“The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can’t all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It’s a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I’m not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they’re called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation.”

“Look at how clearly authentic the Message is. It’s being picked up all over the world. Radio telescopes are humming away in countries with different histories, different languages, different politics, different religions. Everybody’s getting the same kind of data from the same place in the sky, at the same frequencies with the same polarization modulation. The Muslims, the Hindus, the Christians, and the atheists are all getting the same message. Any skeptic can hook up a radio telescope—it doesn’t have to be very big—and get the identical data.”

“But beyond its being one of the brightest stars in the sky, is there anything special about it?” Joss wanted to know. “Or anything that connects it up with the Earth?” “Well, in terms of stellar properties, anything like that, I can’t think of a thing. But there is one incidental fact: Vega was the Pole Star about twelve thousand years ago, and it will be again about fourteen thousand years from now.” “I thought the polestar was the Pole Star.” Rankin, still doodling, said this to the pad of paper. “It is, for a few thousand years. But not forever. The Earth is like a spinning top. Its axis is slowly precessing in a circle.” She demonstrated, using her pencil as the Earth’s axis. “It’s called the precession of the equinoxes.” “Discovered by Hipparchus of Rhodes,” added Joss. “Second century B.C.” This seemed a surprising piece of information for him to have at his fingertips. “Exactly. So right now,” she continued, “an arrow from the center of the Earth to the North Pole points to the star we call Polaris, in the constellation of the Little Dipper, or the Little Bear. I believe you were referring to this constellation just before lunch, Mr. Rankin. As the Earth’s axis slowly precesses, it points in some different direction in the sky, not toward Polaris, and over 26,000 years the place in the sky to which the North Pole points makes a complete circle. The North Pole points right now very near Polaris, close enough to be useful in navigation. Twelve thousand years ago, by ...

She whispered to der Heer, “I’m sorry if I made your job more difficult.” “Oh no, Ellie. You were fine.” “That Palmer Joss is a very attractive man. I don’t think I did much to convert him. But I’ll tell you, he almost converted me.” She was joking, of course.

CHAPTER 11

The World Message Consortium

They had spent the morning in a last-minute comparison of notes and interpretations of the new data. The continuing Message transmission had reached an important new stage. Diagrams were being transmitted from Vega the way newspaper wirephotos are transmitted. Each picture was an array raster. The number of tiny black and white dots that made up the picture was the product of two prime numbers. Again prime numbers were part of the transmission. There was a large set of such diagrams, one following the other, and not at all interleaved with the text. It was like a section of glossy illustrations inserted in the back of a book. Following transmission of the long sequence of diagrams, the unintelligible text continued. From at least some of the diagrams it seemed obvious that Vaygay and Arkhangelsky had been right, that the Message was in part at least the instructions, the blueprints, for building a machine. Its purpose was unknown.

“What’s worrying you, Vaygay?” He took a long time before answering, and began with a slight but uncharacteristic hesitation. “Perhaps not worries. Maybe only concerns. . . . What if the Message really is the design drawings of a machine? Do we build the machine? Who builds it? Everybody together? The Consortium? The United Nations? A few nations in competition? What if it’s enormously expensive to build? Who pays? Why should they want to? What if it doesn’t work? Could building the machine injure some nations economically? Could it injure them in some other way?”

By now, the news of the Message from Vega had reached every nook and cranny of the planet Earth. People who knew nothing of radio telescopes and had never heard of a prime number had been told a peculiar story about a voice from the stars, about strange beings—not exactly men, but not exactly gods either—who had been discovered living in the night sky. They did not come from Earth. Their home star could easily be seen, even with a full moon. Amidst the continuing frenzy of sectarian commentary, there was also—all over the world, it was now apparent—a sense of wonder, even of awe. Something transforming, something almost miraculous was happening. The air was full of possibility, a sense of new beginning.

“Dr. Lunacharsky and I are convinced that these are different projections of the same three-dimensional configuration. We showed the entire configuration in computer-simulated rotation yesterday. We think, though we can’t be sure, that this is what the interior of the machine will look like. There is as yet no clear indication of scale. Maybe it’s a kilometer across, maybe it’s submicroscopic. But notice these five objects evenly spaced around the periphery of the main interior chamber, inside the dodecahedron. Here’s a closeup of one of them. They’re the only things in the chamber that look at all recognizable. “This appears to be an ordinary overstuffed armchair, perfectly configured for a human being. It’s very unlikely that extraterrestrial beings, evolved on another quite different world, would resemble us sufficiently to share our preferences in living-room furniture. Here, look at this close-up. It looks like something from my mother’s spare room when I was growing up.”

She looked again at the computer graphics. The fivefold symmetry of the dodecahedron was reflected in the five interior chairs, each facing a pentagonal surface. “So it’s our contention—Dr. Lunacharsky and I—that the five chairs are meant for us. For people. That would mean that the interior chamber of the machine is only a few meters across, the exterior, perhaps ten or twenty meters across. The technology is undoubtedly formidable, but we don’t think we’re talking about building something the size of a city. Or as complex as an aircraft carrier. We might very well be able to build this, whatever it is, if we all work together. “What I’m trying to say is that you don’t put chairs inside a bomb. I don’t think this is a Doomsday Machine, or a Trojan Horse. I agree with what Dr. Sukhavati said, or maybe only implied; the idea that this is a Trojan Horse is itself an indication of how far we have to go.”

CHAPTER 12

The One-Delta Isomer

“Look, Vaygay, they know from our television transmissions that the Earth rotates, and that there are many different nations. The Olympic broadcast alone might have told them that. Subsequent transmissions from other nations would have nailed it down. So if they’re as good as we think, they could have phased the transmission with the Earth’s rotation, so only one nation got the Message. They chose not to do that. They want the Message to be received by everybody on the planet. They’re expecting the Machine to be built by the whole planet. This can't be an all-American or an all-Russian project. It’s not what our . . . client wants.”

CHAPTER 13

Babylon

Vega had been low in the sky an hour or so before dawn when the computer triggered an understated alarm. With some annoyance, Willie put down what he was reading—it was a new textbook on Fast Fourier Transform Spectroscopy—and noticed these words being printed out on the screen: RPT. TEXT PP. 41617-41619: BIT MISMATCH 0/2271. CORRELATION COEFFICIENT 0.99+ As he watched, 41619 became 41620 and then 41621. The digits after the slash were increasing in a continuous blur. Both the number of pages and the correlation coefficient, a measure of the improbability that the correlation was by chance, increased as he watched. He gave it another two pages before picking up the direct line to Ellie’s apartment.

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.

The Message repeated exactly, the gaps were all filled in and nobody could read a word of it. It seemed unlikely that the transmitting civilization, meticulous in all else, had simply overlooked the need for a primer. At least the Olympic broadcast and the interior design of the Machine seemed to be tailored specifically for humans. They would hardly go to all this trouble to devise and transmit the Message without making some provision for humans to read it. So humans must have overlooked something. It soon became generally agreed that somewhere was a fourth layer to the palimpsest. But where?

“We’re asking for help from a few key people who might have some insight. We thought with your record of invention—and since your context-recognition chip was involved in the recycling discovery—that you might put yourself in the place of the Vegans and think of where you’d put the primer. We recognize you’re very busy, and I’m sorry to—” “Oh, no. It’s all right. It’s true I’m busy. I’m trying to regularize my affairs, because I’m gonna make a big change in my life . . .” “For the Millennium?” She tried to imagine him giving away S. R. Hadden and Company, the Wall Street brokerage house; Genetic Engineering, Inc.; Hadden Cybernetics; and Babylon to the poor. “Not exactly. No. It was fun to think about. It made me feel good to be asked. I looked at the diagrams.” He waved at the commercial set of eight volumes spread in disarray on a worktable. “There are wonderful things in there, but I don’t think that’s where the primer is hiding. Not in the diagrams. I don’t know why you think the primer has to be in the Message. Maybe they left it on Mars or Pluto or in the Oort Comet Cloud, and we’ll discover it in a few centuries. Right now, we know there’s this wonderful Machine, with design drawings and thirty thousand pages of explanatory text. But we don’t know whether we’d be able to build the thing if we could read it. So we wait a few centuries, improving our technology, knowing that sooner or later we’ll have to be ready to build it. Not having the primer binds us up with fut...

He filled a tumbler with diet cola and clicked it against her glass. “Confusion to your enemies,” he toasted genially. “I’ll have them take you out by the Ishtar Gate. The procession’s gonna make things too crowded toward the Enlil Gate.” Both escorts magically appeared, and it was evident she was being dismissed. She had little desire to linger. “Don’t forget about the phase modulation, and looking in the oxygen lines. But even if I’m wrong about where the primer is, don’t forget: I’m the only one to build the Machine.” Floodlights brilliantly illuminated the Ishtar Gate. It was covered with representations in glazed tile of some blue animal. The archeologists had called them dragons.