His Masters Voice

13

The problem, stripped of its integument of professional terms, was simple. If Donald Prothero was not mistaken and further experiments bore out what the earlier experiments indicated, it would be possible to produce a nuclear explosion that, transmitted with the speed of light, would release its destructive energy not where it was detonated, but at any location one chose on the globe. At our next meeting Donald showed me a sketch of the apparatus, as well as his initial calculations, from which it followed that if the effect remained linear with an increase in power and distance, there would exist no limit to either. One might even blow the moon apart, by accumulating a sufficient amount of fissionable material on Earth and aiming the reaction, as at a target, moonward.

Those were awful days, and the nights were perhaps worse, because it was then that I turned the whole matter over and over in my head. Donald needed a bit more time to set up the apparatus. McHill went to work on that, while Donald and I tackled the theoretical analysis of the data, though of course this meant only their phenomenological formulation. We had not arranged to work together — the collaboration seemed to happen by itself. For the first time in my life I was obliged to apply to my calculations a certain “conspiratorial minimum”; that is, I destroyed all notes, always cleared the memory in the computer, and refrained from telephoning Donald even in neutral matters, since the sudden increase in our contacts could also attract unwanted attention. I was a little afraid of the perceptiveness of Baloyne and Rappaport, but we were seeing each other less often. Yvor had a multitude of things to do in connection with the approaching visit of the influential Senator McMahon, a man of great merit and a friend of Rush; and Rappaport at that time had got himself conscripted by the information theorists.

As a member of the Council — one of the Big Five, though “without portfolio” — I did not belong, not even formally, to any group, and so I was master of my time. The long nights I spent at the main computer, therefore, did not draw notice; besides, I had done much the same previously, though for other reasons. It turned out that McMahon would be coming before Donald could finish assembling the apparatus. Not wanting to place any specifying orders through the Project administration, Donald simply borrowed the devices he needed from other groups — which also was not an uncommon practice. But he had to think of something for the rest of his people to do, some task that would not seem unreasonable and raise questions.

Exactly why we felt we had to hurry with the experiment, it is hard for me to say. We hardly ever spoke about the consequences that would follow a positive (really, a negative) result of any large-scale test; but I confess that in the wanderings of my mind before sleep, seeking a way out, I considered even the possibility of declaring myself dictator of the planet, or seizing that power in a duumvirate with Donald — for the common good, of course, though we know that practically everyone in history has striven for the common good, and we know what such striving has become. A man standing at Donald’s apparatus could in fact threaten all armies and countries with annihilation. However, I did not treat the idea seriously. It was not that I lacked the courage of desperation — in my opinion there was nothing now to lose — but I was quite sure that such an attempt would end, inevitably, in a cataclysm. Any such step could not bring peace to Earth — and I only mention this fantasy to show my state of mind then.

These events — and their sequel — have been described innumerable times, all in distorted versions. The scientists who understood our qualms or even personally sympathized with us — Baloyne, for one — presented the matter as if we had acted in accordance with the dictates of proper Project methodology, or at least as if we had no intention whatever of hiding our results. On the other hand, the tabloids (e.g., the well-known serial exposé by Jack Slezar, “The HMV Conspiracy”), using materials provided by our old friend Eugene Albert Nye, painted Donald and me as traitors, enemy agents. That this hue and cry did not bring us, the authors of the vile plot, before the avenging tribunal of some Congressional hearing, we owed to the favorable official versions, to the behind-the-scenes support of Rush, and, finally, to the fact that the business was, by the time it reached the public, rather stale.

True, I did not escape some unpleasant conversations with certain political figures. To them I repeated the same thing: all contemporary conflicts I considered to be temporary phenomena, as the reigns of Alexander the Great and Napoleon were temporary. Every world crisis could be viewed in strategic terms, as long as the consequence of that approach was not our potential destruction as a biological species. But when the fate of the species became one of the members of the equation, the choice had to be automatic, a foregone conclusion, and appeals to the American way, the patriotic spirit, to democracy, or anything else lost all meaning. Whoever was of a different opinion was, as far as I was concerned, a candidate for executioner of humanity. The crisis in the Project had passed, but there would be others. The march of technology would disturb the balance of our world, and nothing would save us if we failed to draw practical lessons from this crisis.

The promised Senator finally arrived with his entourage and was received with all due honors; he turned out to be a man of tact, because he did not enter into little chats with us, the usual “palavering” between white man and savage. With the new fiscal year and the budget much in mind, Baloyne wanted the Senator to be as well disposed as possible toward the work and achievements of the Project, so, trusting most in his own powers of diplomacy, he tried to monopolize McMahon. McMahon, however, cleverly slipped out of his grasp and invited me to have a talk. As I found out later, among the initiated in Washington I passed for the “leader of the opposition,” and the Senator wished to hear my votum separatum. But I had no idea of this at dinner. Baloyne, cannier in this area of affairs and games, kept trying to give me the right cues, but since the Senator sat between us, Baloyne was confined to making faces that were supposed to be, at one and the same time, eloquent of meaning, discreet, and reprimanding. He had omitted previously to give me instructions, but now itched to amend that, and as we rose from the table he prepared to leap over to my side; but McMahon cordially put an arm around me and led me to his suite.

He offered me a very good Martell, which he had probably brought with him, because I did not recall seeing it in our hotel restaurant. He conveyed greetings from mutual acquaintances, jokingly expressed his regret that he could not personally benefit from the works that had brought me fame; then suddenly, but as if carelessly, he asked whether the code had or had not been solved. I had him now.

Our conversation took place in private; the Senator’s entire contingent was being conducted through those laboratories we called “the tour.”

“Yes and no,” I replied. “Are you able to establish contact with a two-year-old child? Certainly, if you intentionally address it. But what will the child comprehend of your speech about the budget on the Senate floor?”

“Nothing,” he said. “But, then, why do you say yes and no, if it is only no?”

“Because we do know something. You have seen our ’exhibits’. .”

“I heard about your proof. You showed that the letter is a description of some kind of object, right? This Frog Eggs of yours therefore is a part of that object — am I correct?”

“Senator,” I said, “please do not take offense if what I say is insufficiently clear. I can do no better. What seems, to the layman, the most incomprehensible thing in our work — or, rather, in our lack of success so far — boils down to this, that we supposedly ’cracked’ a part of the ’code,’ but then came up against a wall, while specialists in cryptanalysis insist that if a code is cracked in part, then the rest of the work has to be smooth sailing. True?”

He only nodded; I saw that he was listening carefully.

“There exist, speaking in the most general way, two kinds of language known to us. There are ordinary languages, which man makes use of — and the languages not made by man. In such a language organisms speak to organisms. I have in mind the so-called genetic code. This code is not a variety of natural language, because it not only contains information about the structure of the organism, but also is able, by itself, to transform that information into the very organism. The code, then, is acultural. In order to understand the natural language of people, one must ultimately become acquainted, at least a little, with their culture. Whereas, in order to know a genetic code, one need not have an acquaintance with any sort of cultural factor. For that purpose it suffices to have pertinent knowledge from the realm of physics, chemistry, and so on.”

“Then the fact that you nevertheless succeeded, in part, shows that the letter is written in a language similar to the language of genetics.”

“If that were all there was to it, we would be home free. The reality is worse, because it is, as usual, more complex. The difference between a ’cultural language’ and an ’acultural language’ is not an absolute thing, unfortunately. Our faith in the absoluteness of that difference belongs to a whole series of illusions that we find extremely difficult to give up. The fact that I was able to work out the mathematical proof that you referred to shows only that the letter was written in a language that does not belong to the category of the language we are now using. We do not know of languages beyond the genetic code and natural languages, but that does not mean there are none. I believe such ’other languages’ exist and that the letter was composed in one of them.”

“And what is this ’other language’ like?”

“I can convey that to you only in a general way. Let me simplify. Organisms, in evolution, ’communicate’ by ’uttering’ certain sentences, which are genotypes, and the ’words’ in them correspond to the chromosomes. But when a scientist presents to you the structural model of a genotype, you are no longer dealing with an ’acultural code,’ because the scientist has translated the code of genetics into the language of symbols — chemical symbols, let us say. Now, to go straight to the heart of the matter, we begin to suspect that an ’acultural language’ is something more or less like Kant’s ’thing-in-itself.’ One can fully grasp neither the code nor the thing. What comes from the culture and what comes from ’nature’ — or from ’the world itself’ —appear, when we examine any utterance whatsoever, as a two-component ’mixture.’ In the language of the Merovingians, or in the political slogans of the Republican Party, the percentage of the ’culture’ ingredient is very high, and what does not depend on culture — the ingredient ’straight from the world’ — is present only in small quantities. In the language used by physics, we have, you could say, the opposite: there is much of ’what is natural,’ of what comes from ’nature itself,’ and little of what has been shaped by culture. But a state of complete ’acultural’ purity in principle cannot be achieved. The idea that, in sending to another civilization an envelope containing models of atoms, it would be possible to eradicate from such a letter all traces of culture — that idea is based on an illusion. The trace can be greatly reduced, but no one, not in the entire Cosmos, is or ever will be able to reduce it to zero.”

“The letter is written in an ’acultural’ language, but still possesses an element of the culture of the Senders. Is that right? Is this where the difficulty lies?”

“Where one of the difficulties lies. The Senders differ from us both in culture and in knowledge, and let us call that knowledge scientific. For this reason the difficulty is at least two-level. We cannot divine their culture — not now, and not, I believe, in a thousand years. They must know this perfectly well. Therefore they have sent the sort of information for whose deciphering no knowledge of their culture is required. That is almost definite.”

“And so the cultural factor should present no obstacle?”

“Senator, we do not even know what is presenting the obstacle to us. We have evaluated the entire letter with respect to its complexity. The complexity is such that it corresponds roughly to a class of systems known to us — social and biological. We have no theory of social systems, thus we were forced to use, as models ’placed against’ the letter, genotypes — or, rather, not the genotypes themselves, but the mathematical apparatus employed in the study of them. We learned that an object even more similar to the code is a living cell — or a whole living organism. From which it does not follow that the letter is actually a kind of genotype, but only that out of all the things known to us which, for comparison, we ’set against’ the code, the genotype is the most helpful. Do you see the tremendous risk this carries with it?”

“Not exactly. It would seem that the only risk is that if the code is not, after all, a genotype, then your deciphering will not succeed. There is more?”

“We are proceeding like a man who looks for a lost thing not everywhere, but only beneath a lighted street lamp, because there it is bright. Have you ever seen a tape for an automatic piano — a player piano?”

“Of course. It comes in a roll, with perforations.”

“By chance, a program tape for a digital computer might also fit into a player piano, and although the program has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with music — it might refer to some fifth-order equation — nevertheless, when it is put in the machine, it produces notes. And it might also happen that not all the notes thus produced will be in total chaos, but that here and there one will hear some musical phrase. Can you guess why I use this example?”

“I think I can. You believe that Frog Eggs is a ’musical phrase’ caused by inserting in a player piano a tape that really belongs in a digital machine?”

“Yes. That is exactly what I believe. One who puts a digital tape in a player piano is making a mistake, and it is entirely possible that we have taken precisely such a mistake for success.”

“Yes, but your two research teams, wholly independently of each other, produced Frog Eggs and Lord of the Flies — one and the same substance!”

“If you have a player piano in your house, and are unaware of the existence of digital computers, and the same is true of your neighbor, then, if you find some tape from a digital computer, it is very probable that both of you will do the same — you will conclude that the tape is meant for the player piano, because you possess no knowledge of other possibilities.”

“I understand. This is, then, your hypothesis?”

“This is my hypothesis.”

“You spoke of a tremendous risk. Where is it?”

“Substituting a computer tape for a player piano tape does not, obviously, involve risk; it is a harmless misunderstanding. But in our case it could be otherwise, and the consequences of a mistake could prove incalculable.”

“How so?”

“I do not know. What I have in mind is the kind of error whereby someone reads, in a kitchen recipe, the word ’amanita’ instead of ’amandine,’ and concocts a dish that sends all his guests to their graves. Please keep in mind that we have done what lay within our power to do, and so imposed our knowledge — our perhaps simplified or erroneous notions — on the code.”

McMahon asked how this was possible if it was so very like the breaking of a cipher. He had seen Lord of the Flies. Could one decipher a code incorrectly and still obtain such astounding results? Could the fragment of the translation that was Lord of the Flies be completely false?

“It is possible,” I replied. “If we were to send, telegraphically, the genotype of a man, and the receiver were able to synthesize, on the basis of that, only white blood cells, he would end up with amoebalike things as well as an enormous amount of unused information. One cannot say that he who produces corpuscles, having before him the human genotype, has read the message correctly.”

“The difference is on that order?”

“Yes. We made use of two to four percent of the entire code; but that is not all, because within that small percent there could be a full third that is guesswork: i.e., all that we ourselves put into the translation, from our knowledge of stereochemistry, physics, and so on. If the genotype of man were read to a similarly low degree, one could not even construct white blood cells. At the most, something in the nature of a lifeless protein suspension — nothing more. I think, incidentally, that conducting precisely such experiments with the human genotype — which already has been deciphered to about seventy percent — would be extremely instructive for us; but we cannot do this, because we have neither the time nor the resources.”

When he asked me what I thought was the difference in development that separated us from the Senders, I said that although the statistics of von Hoerner and Brace indicated that the highest probability was for a first encounter to be with a civilization having an age of about twelve thousand years, I believed that there was a real possibility that the Senders were as much as a billion years old. Otherwise, the transmitting of a “life-causing” signal would not have any rational justification, since it could produce no effect in the course of a mere millennium.

“They must have governments with rather lengthy terms of office,” observed McMahon. He also wanted to know my opinion as to the value of continuing the research, if matters stood as they did.

“Suppose a young thief robs you,” I said, “of your checkbook and six hundred dollars in cash. Although he can do nothing with the checks and cannot touch the millions in your account, he will not consider that he has done badly, because for him six hundred dollars is a lot of money.”

“And we are the young thief?”

“Yes. The crumbs from the table of the higher civilization can feed us for centuries. . provided we behave sensibly.”

I could have added something to this, but bit my tongue.

He wished to know my private view of the letter and the Senders.

“They are not practical — at least not in a way that we can understand,” I said. “Do you have any idea, Senator, of what their ’personal expenses’ must be? Let us say that they have at their disposal energy on the order of 10⁴⁹ ergs. The power of a single star — and that is the power needed to send the signal — is for them what for us, in this country, would be the power of one large hydroelectric plant. Would our government agree to expend — for hundreds, for thousands of years — the power of a facility like Boulder Dam in order to make possible the emergence of life on the planets of other stars, assuming such a thing, given so microscopic a supply of energy, were possible?”

“We are too poor. .”

“Yes, but the percentage of energy to be consumed in this deed of altruism would be the same in both cases.”

“A dime out of a dollar is not the same, financially, as a million dollars out of ten million.”

“And we have those millions, don’t we. The physical space separating us from that civilization is less than the moral distance, because we on Earth have starving masses of people, while their concern is that life should arise on the planets of Centaurus, Cygnus, and Cassiopeia. I do not know what the letter contains, but — from this standpoint — it cannot contain anything that would bring harm to us. The one would be at too great a variance with the other. Yes, of course, it is possible to choke even on bread. This is the way I see it: if we, with our political systems and our history, represent a cosmic average, then nothing threatens us from the ’letter.’ That is what you asked about, I believe? Because they must be well aware of this ’psychozoic constant’ of the Universe. If we constitute a slight aberration, a minority, then that, too, they will take — must have taken, that is — into account. But if we are an extraordinary exception to the rule, a deviant form, a monstrous abnormality that occurs in one galaxy per thousand, once in ten billion years — such a possibility they would be right, in their calculations and in their intentions, not to take into account. In other words, one way or the other they will not be to blame.”

“Spoken like Cassandra,” McMahon said, and I saw that he was dead serious. But, then, so was I. We talked some more, but I told him nothing that might arouse the least suspicion, nothing that might indicate that the Project had entered a new phase. Still, I felt uncomfortable when we parted, having the impression that I had said too much — particularly toward the end. I must have been Cassandra-like in pantomime, in expression more than in words, because I had kept a tight rein on the words.

The Senator had not yet left when I returned to my calculations. I did not see Baloyne until after the Senator’s departure. Yvor was morose.

“McMahon?” he said. “He came anxious, but left content. Do you know why? You don’t? The Administration fears success — too much success. It fears a discovery that will have military application.”

This astonished me.

“He told you this?” I asked. Baloyne threw up his hands at my naïveté.

“How could he tell me any such thing? But it is obvious. They are hoping and praying that we will fail completely, or at least that in the end it will turn out that all we have received is a postcard with greetings and best wishes. Yes, then they will announce this with great fanfare and furor and exaltation. McMahon went very far — you don’t know him, he’s an extremely cautious man. And yet he took Romney aside and grilled him on the long-range technological implications of Frog Eggs. Long-range, yet! And with Donald, too, the same thing.”

“And what did they say?” I asked. About Donald I did not need to worry. He was like an armored safe.

“Nothing, really. I don’t know what Donald told him, and Romney only said to the Senator that he could confess his bad dreams but that was all, because, awake, he saw nothing.”

“That’s good.”

I did not hide my satisfaction. Baloyne, however, showed every symptom of depression: he ran a hand through his hair, shook his head, and sighed.

“Lerner is supposed to come here,” he said. “With some theory for us, some idea of his own. What exactly, I don’t know, because McMahon mentioned it literally at the last moment, as he was getting in the chopper.”

I knew Lerner — a cosmogonist, one of Hayakawa’s former students. Former because, some said, he had outgrown his preceptor. What I did not understand was what connection his field could have with the Project — and how, anyway, had he learned of the Project?

“And where have you been? Don’t you realize the Administration is duplicating our work? It’s not enough that they keep looking over our shoulder — now this!”

I did not want to believe it. I asked him how he knew this. Was it possible that they had some Alter-Project, a kind of parallel verification of our activities? Baloyne, it seemed, knew nothing specific, and, because he hated to admit to ignorance, he worked himself up to the point that, in the presence of Dill and Donald, who came in, he exclaimed that really his duty, in the situation, was to tender his resignation!

Such threats fell from time to time, to the accompaniment of thunder — for Baloyne cannot live on a small scale, and a certain operatic panache is indispensable to his vital energy — but this time we joined in persuading him, until, acknowledging our arguments, he quieted down, and was about to leave when suddenly he remembered my meeting with McMahon and started questioning me about what I had said to the man. I repeated more or less everything, but left out the Cassandra part. And such was the epilogue to the Senator’s visit.

Shortly thereafter, it became evident that the preparation would take Donald more time than he had thought. Things were not going that well for me, either — the theory became tangled; I set various little tricks in motion; the personal calculator console (that was what they called it) was insufficient; I had to keep going to the computer center, which was not the most pleasant thing, because the winds were hurricane-force then, and merely crossing a street — a hundred feet — was enough to get sand in your ears, mouth, nose, and down your collar.

The mechanism by which Frog Eggs absorbed the nuclear energy it produced was still unclear; equally unclear were its means of ridding itself of the residues of those microexplosions, and these were all isotopes emitting hard gamma rays — rare-earth isotopes, mainly. Donald and I put together a phenomenological theory that did not do too bad a job of predicting the results of the experiments — but only retrospectively, as it were, within the compass of what we knew already. As soon as the scale of the experiment was increased, the predictions parted company with the results. Donald’s effect, named by him “TX” (tele + explosion), was remarkably easy to produce. He flattened a small blob of Frog Eggs between two panes of glass, and when the layer became monomolecular, the decay reaction moved across the entire surface; at greater “doses” the apparatus (the older, previous model) underwent destruction. But people, somehow, paid no attention: there was such a racket in the laboratory, there was so much shooting, it was like an arsenal testing out munitions. When I asked him, Donald explained — without cracking a smile — that his people were studying the ballistic wave propagation in Frog Eggs. That was the topic he had thought up for them, and with the cannonade effectively camouflaged his own endeavors!

Meanwhile the theory slipped through my fingers; I saw that actually it had been eluding me for quite some time, but I had not admitted this to myself. The work on it was extremely demanding — all the more difficult in that I had little stomach for it. As sometimes happens, the words I had spoken in my meeting with McMahon came back to haunt me. Often our fears are not altogether present, not dangerous, you could almost say, until we give them clear expression. This is exactly what happened to me. Frog Eggs without question now appeared to me to be a human artifact, the result of a false reading of the code. This was how I saw it: the Senders definitely had had no intention of sending us a Pandora’s box; but we, like burglars, forced the lock, and stamped upon the plundered contents everything that in Earth’s science was mercenary, predatory. And did not success in atomic physics (I thought) take place precisely in that area where the opportunity opened up for us to obtain the most destructive possible energy?

Nuclear reactors always limped behind the production of bombs; we had hydrogen warheads but still no hydrogen piles; the entire microworld revealed to man its interior — distorted by that one-sided approach — and therefore we knew far more about the strong interactions than about the weak. I discussed these topics with Donald; he did not agree with me, being of the opinion that if anyone should “shoulder the blame” for the “one-sidedness of physics” (though he did not believe in that one-sidedness, either), it was not we, but the world, by virtue of its structure. The simple fact was that it was easier, from any objective standpoint — easier if only by the law of least resistance — to destroy than it was to create. Destruction was a gradient consistent with the main direction of processes in the Universe, whereas creation always had to go against the current.

I reminded him of the Promethean myth. In his picture of things, the marches of science, worthy of respect and even reverence, should all converge, as at a source; but the myth praised not disinterestedly comprehending but seizing hold, not knowledge of but mastery over. This was the foundation of all empiricism. He said to me that with such suppositions I would delight a Freudian, seeing as I reduced the thirst for knowledge to aggression and sadism. I can see now that I had indeed lost a little of my common sense, my circumspection, and the coolness that comes from the directive of proceeding sine ira et studio — and that I had, with my speculations, shifted the “blame” from the unknown Senders onto humanity, incurable misanthrope that I was.

In the first week of November the apparatus began working, but the preliminary experiments, undertaken on a small scale, were unsuccessful: several times the detonation went so far out of control that it reached beyond the main shielding wall, and though it was minute, the leap in radiation hit 60 roentgens. It became necessary to put up around the shielding another, outer, barrier. Too massive a structure, now, to be concealed — and somehow Eugene Albert Nye, who never before had visited the physics labs, showed up several times at Donald’s. The fact that he asked no questions, but merely looked on and poked around, did not bode well. Finally Donald asked him to leave, telling him he was in the way. When I rebuked Donald for this step, he replied, calmer than I was, that one way or another things would be decided soon, and until then he would not let Nye in the door.

When I look back now, I see how foolishly we both behaved — how mindlessly, even. I still do not know what ought to have been done, but that conspiratorial activity — there is no other way to say it — served only to preserve the illusion that our hands were clean. We got in deeper and deeper. We could neither hide our progress nor — in the face of the pointlessness of keeping the secret — suddenly one day announce it. The announcing had to be done either immediately after the discovery of TX — or never. Both of these ways out, logical though they were, were closed to us. The awareness that the biophysicists, in another quarter, would be moving onto that “hot” ground made us hurry. Our fear for the fate of the world — because nothing less, after all, was at stake — caused, truly by reflex, our concealment of the research. To come out of hiding now would be to invite such shocked questions as “Well, fine, but why do you come to us with this now!” “You have, of course, the final results?” and “But what was your reason for not telling us at the beginning?” I would not have known what to reply.

Donald harbored the vague hope that on the large scale the effect might manifest a kind of “recoil” — the initial theory had pointed to that. But, first of all, the initial theory turned out to be useless, and, second, it opened a door to the acceptance of certain assumptions, which further down the road led to undesirable probabilities.

Baloyne I avoided during this period as much as possible, because my conscience was not clean regarding him. But he had other problems. Besides Lerner, we now were expecting a second “outsider”; both were to enlighten us with their presentations at the end of the month. This clear admission by Washington that it possessed its own experts on His Master’s Voice, and men, moreover, who had been working without any connection with us, put Baloyne in an extremely unpleasant and difficult position before all the research groups. Dill, Donald, and Rappaport (and I as well) felt, however, that he ought to carry his cross (that was the sort of language he used) to the end. Anyway, both of these visitors announced to us were minds of the first order.

There was no talk, now, of budget cuts for the Project. It appeared that if our uninvited consultants could not give the work a forward shove with their ideas (which seemed to me unlikely), the Project would go on by sheer inertia, because no one on high would dare to change the least thing in it — let alone talk of liquidating it.

Personal tensions developed in the Council: between Baloyne and Nye, first, since the latter must have known, we were convinced, of this spectral, second Project — His Master’s Ghost — yet, for all the man’s volubility, he had not once mentioned it. (But to Baloyne Nye was still the soul of politeness.) And there was tension between our “conspiracy of two” and, again, Baloyne, for he had got wind of something after all: sometimes I saw him following me with his eyes, as if waiting for an explanation or at least some hint. But I dodged the best I could — not too skillfully, I am sure, because playing such games had never been my strong point. Meanwhile, Rappaport held it against Rush that even he, the first discoverer, had not been informed of His Master’s Ghost. Thus the sessions of the Council became more than unpleasant, in an atmosphere of short tempers, suspicions, and low spirits. I slaved away at the programs for the machine, a waste of my time and strength since any programmer could have done them, but consideration for the “conspiracy” won out.

At last, I finished the calculations that Donald needed, but still he was not ready with the apparatus. Finding myself idle, for the first time since my arrival at the Project I tried watching television, but everything on it seemed to me unutterably phony and devoid of sense, the news programs included. I went to the bar, but could not stay there, either. Nervous, unable to sit still, I finally went to the computer center, shut myself up carefully, and began doing calculations that no one, this time, had required of me.

I employed, once more, the defiled (so to speak) formula of Einstein for the equivalence of mass and energy. I worked out the power available to the inverters and transmitters of the explosions at a distance equal to Earth’s diameter; some minor technical difficulties that cropped up with this occupied me — but not for long. An attack carried out with the TX effect made advance warning impossible. What would happen was simply that the ground under people’s feet would turn to solar lava. One also could produce an explosion not on Earth’s surface but beneath it, and at any depth, whereby shields of steel plate as well as the whole massif of the Rocky Mountains, which was supposed to protect the chiefs of staff in their great underground bunkers, would become meaningless. There could no longer be even the hope that the generals — those most valuable members of our society, if personal worth was to be measured according to the means invested in the preservation of one’s life and limb — would emerge, the only people left, on the radioactive, scorched surface of the planet, in order to begin the work (after removing their momentarily unnecessary uniforms) of rebuilding civilization from the bottom up. The most wretched denizen of the slums would be exposed equally now with the supreme commander of the nuclear forces.

I had brought about a truly democratic leveling of all who lived on Earth. The machine warmed my feet with a gentle flow of heated air that came from the slits in its metal register, and it tapped out rows of digits on the tapes, because it did not care whether they referred to megatons and body counts or to the number of grains of sand on the beaches of the Atlantic. The despair of the last weeks, which had gradually turned into a kind of stifling weight, suddenly lifted. I worked quickly and with satisfaction, no longer acting contrary to myself. No, now I was doing what was expected of me. I was a patriot. Now I put myself in the position of the attacker, and now of the defender, with perfect loyalty.

The problem, however, was without a winning strategy. If the focal point of the explosion could be moved to any place one chose on the globe — and from any equally arbitrary location — then it was possible to destroy life in an area of absolutely any size. The classical atomic blast was, from the standpoint of energy efficiency, a waste of resources, because at “ground zero” you had extreme “overkill.” The molecules of buildings and bodies underwent a demolition that exceeded a thousandfold what was militarily necessary; while the force of the blow, attenuated over distance, permitted survival in fairly simple shelters a few or even several dozen miles away.

This uneconomical state of affairs became — under my fingers, as I programmed — a prehistoric mummy. TX was a totally efficient device. The fireballs of the classical explosions could be flattened, rolled out, as it were, into a death-dealing tinfoil, and one could spread that foil under human feet over all of Asia or the United States. The three-dimensionally fixed layer, chosen out of the continental shelf, in a fraction of a second could turn into a bog of flame. There would be released, for each man, just the energy required to kill him. But the command posts, perishing, would have ten seconds to send a signal to the submarines that carried the missiles. The dying side still could slay its enemy. And if it could, it would have to do so. And thus, finally, the technological trap snapped shut on us.

I kept looking for a way out, putting myself in the position of global strategist, but computation defeated each search in turn. I worked skillfully, but felt my hands shaking, and when I bent over the tapes that snaked slowly out of the machine, to read the results, my heart started pounding, and at the same time I felt a burning dryness in my mouth and bowels, as if someone had wrapped a cutting wire around my intestines. I observed these symptoms of visceral panic with a strangely cold irony, as if the terror affected only my muscles and gut, while a voiceless giggle quivered inside me, the same as half a century ago, unchanged and unaged. I felt no hunger or thirst, as if fed by the columns of numbers, for nearly five hours, programming the computer over and over again. The tapes I tore from their cassettes and stuffed into my pocket. But all this labor, ultimately, turned out to be unnecessary.

I was afraid that if I went to the hotel, the sight of the menu or of the waiter’s face would cause me to burst into laughter. And I could not return to my own apartment. Yet I had to go somewhere. Donald, wrapped up in his work, was in a better position, at least for the time being. I went out into the street as if half asphyxiated. Night had fallen. The compound, bathed in the light of the mercury lamps, jutted its white outline against the darkness of the desert, and it was only high above the illuminated areas that one could make out, in the black sky, the stars. One more betrayal did not matter now, so I broke the promise made to Donald and proceeded to my hotel neighbor, Rappaport. He was in. I set the crumpled tapes before him and succinctly told him everything. He proved to be the right man. He asked three or four questions, no more, questions that showed that he had grasped immediately the gravity, the implications of the discovery. Our conspiracy did not surprise him in the least. He paid no attention to it.

I do not recall what he said to me when he put aside the tapes, but I understood from his words that he had expected something of the sort practically from the beginning. The anxiety had been with him constantly, and now that his premonition had come true, an intellectual satisfaction — or perhaps it was simply an awareness of the end — let him feel a certain sense of relief. I must have been more shaken than I thought, because he attended first not to Armageddon but to me. From his European wanderings he preserved a certain habit that I found amusing: he operated on the principle of omnia mea mecum porto, as if instinctively prepared for the necessity of another flight at short notice. That was how I explained the fact that in his suitcase he had a kind of “survival kit,” complete with coffeepot, sugar, and crackers. There was also a small bottle of cognac — both the coffee and the cognac were much to the purpose. What began then had no name, but afterward we would refer to it as a funeral banquet or, more precisely, its Anglo-Saxon or Irish variant: a wake — a ritual watch held over a corpse. Granted, the deceased in question was still among the living, and had no knowledge, even, of his inevitable interment.

We sipped our coffee and cognac, surrounded by such silence, it was as if we were in a place of great desolation, as if the thing that was soon to happen had already come to pass. Quick to understand each other, exchanging fragments of sentences, we first plotted out the course of upcoming events. As scenario writers, we agreed. Everything would be thrown into the construction of TX devices. People like us would not see the light of day.

For their imminent demise the chiefs of staff would revenge themselves first on us — unconsciously, no doubt. They would not roll over and play dead; rational action becoming impossible, they would resort to irrational action. If neither the mountains nor a kilometer of steel sufficed to shield them from attack, they would declare the ultimate armor to be secrecy. There would follow a multiplication, a dispersion, and a burrowing into the earth of command posts, while headquarters would be moved — for certain — on board some giant atomic submarine or specially designed bathysphere, which would keep watch, snuggled on the ocean floor.

And the last shell of democratic forms would crumble, forms whose substance had already been mostly gnawed away by the global strategy of the sixties. And this would show in the attitude toward scientists. There would be no desire, no time or place, to keep up appearances and treat them like clever but capricious children whom it was better not to frustrate.

When we had prophesied, roughly, our fate and the fate of others — in accordance with Pascal’s maxim about the thinking reed that thirsts to know the mechanisms of its own annihilation — Rappaport told me of his efforts the previous spring. Before I came to the Project, he had presented to General Oster — the chief, at that time, of HMV — a plan for joining forces with the Russians. He proposed that we supply a group equal in number and expertise to a group that would be provided by the Russians, to work together on the translation of the letter. Oster explained to him good-naturedly how very naïve such a thing would be. The Russians would provide a group for show, but meanwhile work on the letter themselves.

We looked at each other and laughed, because the same thought occurred to both of us. Oster had simply told him a thing that we learned of only in the last few days. Even then, the Pentagon itself had adopted the principle of “doubling.” We constituted the group that was “for show,” and had been wholly unaware of it; the generals all the while had had another team at their disposal, one they apparently trusted more.

For a moment we paused to consider the mentality of the strategists. They never took people seriously, insisting that the important thing was the biological preservation of the species. The famous ceterum censeo speciem preservandam esse became a slogan like all other slogans: words to utter but not a value to be included in the strategic equations. By now we had imbibed enough cognac to amuse ourselves with the vision of generals who, as they were cooked alive, would issue their final orders into a silent microphone — because the ocean floor, like every other nook and cranny on the planet, would no longer offer shelter. The only safe place for the Pentagon and its people, we concluded, would be beneath the bottom of the Moscow River; but it was not too likely that even our daring eagles could manage to get there.

After midnight, we finally put such mundane subjects behind us, and the conversation grew interesting. We took up the Mystery of the Species. I dwell on this, because that dialogue-requiem in honor of Man the Wise, delivered by two representatives of the race who were woozy with caffeine and alcohol, and certain that the end was nigh, seems to me significant.

That the Senders were well informed about the state of things in the whole Galaxy, I opined, was beyond question. Our catastrophe was a consequence of their not having taken into account the specific situation on Earth, and they had not, because Earth was, in the whole Galaxy, an exception.

“These are old Manichean ideas, a dime a dozen,” declared Rappaport.

But I was not at all claiming that the apocalypse was the result of any exceptional human “wickedness.” It was simply that every planetary psychozoic enclave passed from a state of global division to one of integration. From bands, tribes, and clans arose nations, kingdoms, empires, world powers, and finally came the social unification of the species. This process almost never led to the emergence of two antagonists of equal strength, at least not immediately prior to the final joining; there would be, rather, a Majority in opposition to a weak Minority. Such a confrontation had much greater probability, even if only from a strictly thermodynamic point of view; one could demonstrate this by stochastic calculation. A perfect equilibrium of forces, an exact equals-sign between them, was a state so improbable as to be virtually impossible. One could arrive at such a balance only by coincidence. Social fusion was one series of processes, and the acquiring of instrumental knowledge was another series.

Integration on the scale of a planet could become “frozen” at a stage along the way if the discovery of nucleonics arose prematurely. Only in that case would the weaker side become equal to the stronger — inasmuch as each of them, wielding atomic weapons, could wipe out the entire species. Certainly social integration always occurred on a foundation of technology and science, but the discovery of atomic energy would ordinarily take place in the post-unification period — and then it would have no dire consequences. The self-imperilment of the species, or its tendency to commit involuntary suicide, was no doubt a function of the number of primitive societies that possessed the “ultimate weapon.”

If on some globe there were a thousand hostile governments, and each had a thousand nuclear warheads, the chance of a purely local conflict’s snowballing into an apocalypse would be many times greater than if there existed only a few antagonists. Therefore, the relation between the two calendars — one calendar showing the sequence of scientific discoveries, and the other recording the progress of the amalgamation of the separate societies — determined the fate, in the Galaxy, of each individual Psychozoic. We on Earth definitely had bad luck: our passage from preatomic civilization to atomic took place atypically, too early, and it was this that had caused the “freezing” of the status quo, until the advent of the neutrino emission. For a planet united, the cracking of the letter would be something positive, a step toward entering the “club of cosmic civilizations.” But for us, in our situation, it was a knell.

“Maybe,” I said, “if Galileo and Newton had died of whooping cough in childhood, physics would have been delayed enough so that the splitting of the atom would not have come about until the twenty-first century. That whooping cough that never was might have saved us.”

Rappaport accused me of falling into journalism: physics was ergodic in its development, and the death of one or two people could not have influenced its course.

“All right,” I said, “then we might have been saved by the emergence, in the West, of some other dominant religion than Christianity — or, millions of years earlier, by a different formation of man’s sexual nature.”

Challenged, I took up the defense of this thesis. It was no accident that physics had arisen in the West as the “queen of empiricism.” Western culture was, thanks to Christianity, a culture of sin. The Fall — and the first one had been sexual! — engaged the whole personality of man in melioristic pursuits, which provided various types of sublimation, with the acquiring of knowledge at the head.

In this sense Christianity favored empiricism, though, of course, unwittingly: it opened the possibility for it and gave it the chance to grow. Characteristic of the East and its cultures, on the other hand, was the category of shame — quite central — because a man’s inappropriate action there was not “sinful” in any Christian sense, but at most disgraceful, and mainly in the external sense: having to do with the forms of behavior. Therefore, the category of shame transferred man, as it were, “outside” the soul, into the realm of ceremonial practices. For empiricism, then, there was simply no place; the chance for it disappeared with the deprecation of substantive action, and instead of the sublimation of drives, their “ceremonialization” was provided for. Vice, no longer the “fall of man,” became detached from the personality and was, so to speak, legally channeled into a separate repertoire of forms. Sin and grace were replaced by shame and the tactics of avoiding it. There was no penetration into the depths of the psyche: the sense of “what is proper,” “what ought to be,” took the place of the conscience, and the finest minds were directed toward the renunciation of the senses. A good Christian could be a good physicist, but one could not become a physicist if one was a good Buddhist, Confucianist, or follower of the Zen doctrine, because then one would be occupying oneself with the very thing those faiths deprecated in toto. With this as a point of departure, social selection gathered the entire “intellectual cream” of the population and allowed it to spend itself only in mystical exercises — yoga, for instance. Such a culture acted like a centrifuge; it cast the talented away from the places in society where they could initiate empiricism, and stoppered their minds with an etiquette that excluded instrumental pursuits as “lower” and “less worthy.” But the potential of egalitarianism inherent in Christianity — though it came into conflict with class structures, though for periods it yielded to them — never altogether disappeared, and indirectly from it sprang physics, with all its consequences.

“Physics — a kind of asceticism?”

“Oh, it is not that simple. Christianity was a mutation of Judaism, which was a ’closed’ religion in that it was intended only for the chosen. Thus Judaism was, as a discovery, something like Euclidean geometry; one had only to reflect on the initial axioms to arrive, by extrapolation, at a more general doctrine, one that under the heading ’chosen’ would put all people.”

“Christianity corresponds to a generalized geometry?”

“Yes, in a sense, on a purely formal level — through the changing of signs in a system that is the same with regard to values and meanings. The operation led, among other things, to the acceptance of the validity of a theology of Reason. This was an attempt not to renounce any of the qualities of man; since man was a creature of Reason, he had the right to exercise that faculty — and this finally produced, after a due amount of hybridization and transformation, physics. I am, of course, oversimplifying enormously.

“Christianity is a generalized mutation of Judaism, an adaption of a systematic structure to all possible human existences. This was a property of Judaism, purely structural to begin with. One could not carry out an analogous operation on Buddhism or Brahmanism, let alone the teachings of Confucius. So, then, the sentence was passed back when Judaism arose — several thousand years ago. And there is another possibility. The main problem of this world which every religion must confront is sex. It is possible to worship it — that is, to make it positive and central to the doctrine; it is possible to cut it off, to shut it out — neutrally; but it is also possible to see it as the Enemy. This last solution is the most uncompromising, and it is the one Christianity chose.

“Now, if sex had been a phenomenon of less importance biologically, if it had remained a periodic, cyclic thing only, as it is with some mammals, it could not have possessed central significance, being a transient, rhythmic occurrence. But all this was determined some one and a half million years ago. From then on, sex became the punctum saliens of really every culture, because it could not simply be denied. It had to be made ’civilized.’ The man of the West always felt it an injury to his self-esteem that inter faeces et urinam nascimur. . a reflection that, by the laws of Mystery, put Original Sin in Genesis. That is how it was. Another kind of sexual periodicity, or — again — another kind of religion, might have set us on a different road.”

“To stagnation?”

“No — just to a delay in the development of physics.”

Rappaport accused me of “unconscious Freudianism.” Having been brought up in a puritanical family, he said, I was projecting onto the world my own prejudices. I had not freed myself, in fact, from the vision of everything in the colors of Damnation and Salvation. Since I considered Earthlings to be damned root and branch, I transferred Salvation to the Galaxy. My curse cast mankind into Hell — but did not touch the Senders, who remained completely good and without blemish. That was my mistake. In thinking of them, one first had to introduce the notion of a “fellowship threshold.” All intelligence moved in the direction of more and more universal generalization, which was only proper, because the Universe itself approved that course. He who generalized correctly could control phenomena of increasing scope.

An evolutionary awareness — understanding that mind was the result of a homeostatic “mountain climbing” against the current of entropy — made one embrace, in fellowship, the evolutionary tree that gave rise to sentient beings. But one could not encompass with fellowship the entire tree of evolution, because ultimately a “higher” being was obliged to feed on “lower” ones. The line of fellowship had to be drawn somewhere. On Earth, no one had ever placed that line below the fork where the plants parted company with the animals. And in practice, in the technological world, one could not include, for example, the insects. If we learned that for some reason exchanging signals with the Cosmos required the annihilation of Earth’s ants, we would certainly think that it was “worth” sacrificing the ants. Now, we, on our rung of development, may be — to Someone — ants. The level of fellowship may not necessarily extend, from the standpoint of those beings, to such planetary vermin as ourselves. Or perhaps they had rationalizations for this. Perhaps they knew that according to the galactic statistics, the Earth type of psychozoic was doomed to techno-evolutionary failure, so that it would not be so horrendous to add to the threat hanging over us, since in any case “we most likely would not amount to anything.”

I present here the gist of that vigil on the eve of the experiment, not a chronological record of the conversation, which I do not recall that precisely. I do not know when Rappaport told me of his European experience — the one I described earlier. It was, I think, when we had finished with the generals but had not begun to seek the cause of the impending denouement. Now I said to him more or less the following:

“Dr. Rappaport, you are even worse than me. You have made of the Senders a ’higher race’ that identifies only with the ’higher forms’ of the Galaxy. Why, then, do they endeavor to spread biogenesis? Why should they sow life if they are able to carry out a policy of expansion and colonization? Neither of us can go, in our reasoning, beyond the concepts accessible to us. You may be right that I localize to Earth the reasons for our defeat because of the way I was raised as a child. Except that instead of ’human sin’ I see a stochastic process that has driven us into a dead end. You, a refugee from a country of victims, have always felt too strongly your own innocence in the face of extermination, and therefore you situate the source of the catastrophe someplace else: in the domain of the Senders. We did not choose this ourselves — they did it for us. Thus concludes every attempt at transcendence. We need time, but we will not have time now.

“I have always said that if only there were a government wise enough to want to pull all humanity out of that hole and not just its own, we might eventually climb out. But funding from the federal budget has been readily available only to the seeker of ’new weapons.’ When I told the politicians that we ought to launch a crash program in anthropology, build machines for the simulation of socio-evolutionary processes, using the kind of money they put into their missile and antimissile research, they smiled at me and shrugged. No one took it seriously, and at least now I have the bitter satisfaction of being right. We should have studied man first — that was our proper ordering of priorities. But we did not, and now what we know of man is not enough. Let us finally admit that this is the case. Ignoramus et ignorabimus, because now we do not have the time.”

The good-hearted Rappaport did not try to argue with me. He led me — I was drunk — to my room.

Before we parted, he said, “Don’t take it so much to heart, Mr. Hogarth. Without you things would have turned out just as badly.”