Contact by Carl Sagan;
Author:Carl Sagan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
CHAPTER 14
Harmonic Oscillator
Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and
it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to
the first comer: there is nobility in preserving
it coolly and proudly through long youth,
until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and
discretion, it can be safely exchanged for
fidelity and happiness.
âGEORGE SANTAYANA Scepticism and Animal Faith, IX
IT WAS on a mission of insurgency and subversion. The enemy was vastly larger and more powerful. But it knew the enemyâs weakness. It could take over the alien government, turning the resources of the adversary to its own purpose. Now, with millions of dedicated agents in place . . .
She sneezed and tried to find a clean paper tissue in the bulging pocket of the terry-cloth presidential bathrobe. She had no makeup on, although her chapped lips revealed patches of mentholated balm.
âMy doctor tells me I have to stay in bed or Iâll get viral pneumonia. I ask him for an antibiotic, and he tells me thereâs no antibiotic for viruses. So how does he know I have a virus?â
Der Heer opened his mouth to answer, a gesture in the making, when the President cut him short.
âNo, never mind. Youâll start telling me about DNA and host recognition and Iâll need what resources Iâve got left to listen to your story. If youâre not afraid of my virus, pull up a chair.â
âThank you, Ms. President. This is about the primer. I have the report here. Thereâs a long technical section thatâs included as an appendix. I thought you might be interested in it also. Briefly, weâre reading and actually understanding the thing with almost no difficulty. Itâs a fiendishly clever learning program. I donât mean âfiendishlyâ in any literal sense, of course. We must have a vocabulary of three thousand words by now.â
âI donât understand how itâs possible. I could see how they could teach you the names of their numbers. You make one dot and write the letters ONE underneath, and so on. I could see how you could have a picture of a star and then write STAR under it. But I donât see how you could do verbs or the past tense or conditionals.â
âThey do some of it with movies. Movies are perfect for verbs. And a lot of it they do with numbers. Even abstractions; they can communicate abstractions with numbers. It goes something like this: First they count out the numbers for us, and then they introduce some new wordsâwords we donât understand. Here, Iâll indicate their words by letters. We read something like this (the letters stand for symbols the Vegans introduce).â He wrote:
1A1B2Z
1A2B3Z
1A7B8Z
âWhat do you think it is?â
âMy high school report card? You mean thereâs a combination of dots and dashes that A stands for, and a different combination of dots and dashes that B stands for, and so on?â
âExactly. You know what one and two mean, but you donât know what A and B mean. What does a sequence like this tell you?â
âA means âplusâ and B means âequals.
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