The station contains a surreal Earth-like beach where the five are split up.
No contact book series#
Once activated, the dodecahedron transports the group through a series of wormholes to a massive station near the center of the Milky Way.
While in Japan, Ellie receives a medallion from Joss, which she carries aboard the Machine as it is activated. The other two are given to Abonnema Eda, a Nigerian physicist credited with discovering the theory of everything and Xi Qiaomu, a Chinese archaeologist and expert on the Qin dynasty. The activation date is set for Decemand Ellie, Vaygay and Devi are given three of the seats. While on board, he reveals that his company has been covertly building a third copy of the machine in Hokkaido, Japan. Hadden has taken up residence aboard a private space station. John Staughton accuses Ellie of ignoring her own mother for years.Įllie learns that S. R. Ellie's family also suffers when her mother has a stroke, which causes paralysis. During a visit by three astronomers, the bomb explodes, killing Drumlin and postponing completion of the machine indefinitely. Despite heavy security, a group of extremists is able to get a bomb into one of the fabrication plants in Wyoming. Ellie applies to be one of the five passengers, but her spot is given to David Drumlin instead. As errors in the Soviet project are discovered, the American machine becomes the only option. The American and Soviet governments enter a race to construct identical copies of the machine. This reveals the primer, thus allowing construction of the machine to begin. Hadden, a billionaire in multiple high-tech industries with an obsessive personal interest in the concept of immortality, suggests that Ellie check for phase modulation. The final piece of the message is discovered when S. R. At the conference, Ellie meets Devi Sukhavati, a doctor who left India to marry the man she loved, only to lose him to illness a year later. The participants reach a consensus that the machine is a dodecahedron-shaped vehicle with five seats. Shortly after, Ellie travels to Paris to discuss the machine with a newly formed consortium. Although dismissing Rankin's outbursts, Ellie is intrigued by Joss' worldview. A lifelong religious skeptic, Ellie tries to convince Joss of her faith in science by standing near a heavy Foucault pendulum and trusting that its amplitude will not increase. With no way of decoding the 30,000 pages, SETI scientists surmise that there must be a primer that they have missed.Īt the President's insistence, Ellie agrees to meet with two religious leaders, Billy Jo Rankin and Palmer Joss. A third message is discovered describing plans for an advanced machine. With the help of her Soviet colleague Vaygay Lunacharsky, Ellie is able to set up redundant monitoring of the signal so that a telescope remains pointed at Vega at all times. Ellie begins a relationship with Presidential Science Advisor Ken der Heer. The President of the United States meets with Ellie to discuss the implications of the first confirmed communication from extraterrestrial beings.
Further analysis reveals information in the polarization modulation of the signal: a retransmission of Adolf Hitler's opening speech at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, the first television signal powerful enough to escape Earth's ionosphere. To his surprise, the project discovers a signal containing a series of prime numbers coming from the Vega system 26 light years away. This puts her at odds with most of the scientific community, including Drumlin, who tries to have the funding to SETI cut off. She eventually becomes the director of "Project Argus", a radiotelescope array in New Mexico dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Ellie refuses to accept him as a family member and concludes that her mother only remarried out of weakness.Īfter graduating from Harvard University, Ellie receives a doctorate from Caltech supervised by David Drumlin, a well-known radio astronomer. A man named John Staughton becomes her stepfather and does not show as much support for her interests. In sixth grade, her father and role-model Theodore ("Ted") dies. Dissatisfied with a school lesson, she goes to the library to convince herself that π is transcendental. As a child, Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway displays a strong aptitude for science and mathematics.