His Masters Voice

17

Despite the differences of opinion that separated us in the affairs of the Project, we represented — and by “we” I do not mean only the Science Council — a sufficiently close-knit team so that the new arrivals, here and there already called “the Pentagon puppets,” could be certain that their theses would be received by us with daggers drawn. Although I, too, was rather unfavorably disposed toward them, I had to admit that Lerner and the young biologist accompanying him (or astrobiologist, as he styled himself), pulled off an impressive thing; because it was difficult for us to believe that, after our year of tribulation, after the wringer to which we had collectively surrendered our brains, it was still possible to set forth, on the subject of His Master’s Voice, hypotheses that were totally new, never even touched upon by us, and, moreover, different from each other and supported by a well-constructed mathematical apparatus (though not so strong regarding data). Yet this is precisely what happened. What is more, these new ideas, mutually exclusive to a degree, allowed for the establishing of a kind of golden mean, a novel compromise that brought them together not at all badly.

Baloyne, perhaps because he felt that it was not suitable, in a meeting with the people of the Alter-Project, to stick to our old “aristocratic” structure — the division between the all-knowing elite and the poorly informed pawns of the collective — or perhaps just because he believed that what we were to hear would be revelational — organized a lecture meeting for more than a thousand of our workers. If Lerner and Sylvester were aware of the hostility of those assembled, they gave no indication of it. In any case, their behavior was impeccable.

Their research — Lerner emphasized in his introduction — was purely theoretical in nature; they had not been given, except for the stellar code itself and general information about Frog Eggs, any details, and their purpose had not at all been to set up some “parallel experiment,” or to compete with us, but only to approach His Master’s Voice differently, having in mind exactly the sort of confrontation of views which was taking place now.

He did not stop for applause — just as well, since there would have been none — but went straight to the matter, and proceeded quite lucidly; he won me over with both his talk and his person — and won others, too, judging by the reaction in the auditorium.

Being a cosmogonist, he had worked on cosmogony — in its Hubblian variant and Hayakawan modification (Hayakawan, and mine, too, if I might say so, though I had merely done the mathematical wickerwork for the bottles into which Hayakawa poured new wine). I will try to give a sketch of his thesis and convey, if I am able, something of the tone of the lecture, which more than once was interrupted by remarks from the audience, because a dry summary would lack all the charm of the conception. The mathematics, of course, I omit — although it played its part.

“I see it this way,” he said. “The Universe is a thing that pulses, that contracts and dilates in alternation, every thirty billion years. . When it contracts, it eventually reaches a state of collapse in which space itself disintegrates, becoming folded up and locked not only around stars, as in the case of the Schwarzschild sphere, but around all particles, the elementary included! Since the ’joint’ space between the atoms ceases to exist, obviously the physics known to us also disappears, its laws undergo transformation. . This null-space cluster contracts further, and then — speaking figuratively — the whole turns inside out, into the realm of forbidden energy states, into ’negative space,’ so that it is not nothingness, but less than nothingness — mathematically, at least!

“Our actual world does not have antiworlds — that is, it has them periodically, once in thirty billion years. ’Antiparticles’ are, in our world, only the trace of those catastrophes, an ancient relic, and also, of course, an arrow pointing to the next catastrophe. But there remains — to continue the metaphor — a kind of ’umbilicus,’ in which still pounds the remnant of the unextinguished matter, the embers of that dying Universe; it is a fissure between the vanishing ’positive’ space, this space that is ours, and the other, the negative. . The fissure remains open; it neither grows nor closes, because it is continually forced apart by radiation — by neutrino radiation! Which is like the last sparks of the bonfire, and from which begins the next phase, because, when ’what was reversed’ has come to the limit of its ’inside-out’ expansion and created an ’antiworld,’ and extended it, it begins to contract again and break back through the fissure, first in neutrino radiation, which is the hardest and most stable, because at that point there is no light yet, only, besides the neutrino radiation, ultrahigh gamma! What begins again to swell spherically and form the expanding Universe is a spreading, globe-shaped neutrino wave, and that wave is at the same time the matrix of creation for all the particles that will occupy the soon-to-be-born Universe; it carries them with it, but only potentially, in that it possesses sufficient energy for their materialization!

“But when this Universe is in full swing, with its nebulae flung wide, as ours is now, there are still stray echoes in it of the neutrino wave that brought it into being, AND THIS IS HIS MASTER’S VOICE! From the gust that forced its way through the ’fissure,’ from that neutrino wave arose the atoms, the stars and planets, the nebulae and the metagalaxies; and this eliminates the ’problem of the letter.’. . Nothing was sent to us by ’neutrino telegraph’ from another civilization; at the other ’end’ there is No One, and no transmitter, nothing but the cosmic pulse from that ’rupture.’ It is only an emission produced by processes that are purely physical, natural, and totally uninhabited, therefore devoid of any linguistic character, of content, of meaning. . This emission provides a permanent link between the successive worlds, the expiring and the newly created; it connects them energetically and informationally; thanks to it, a continuity is preserved, there are nonaccidental, regular repetitions; therefore one can say that this neutrino stream is the ’seed’ of the next Universe, that this is a kind of metagenesis or alternation of generations, separated by macrocosmic time, but in the analogy there is, of course, no biological content. Neutrinos are the seeds from disintegration only because, of all the particles, they are the most stable. Their indestructibility guarantees the cyclic return of genesis, its repetitions. .”

He put all this much more exactly, of course, supporting it, when possible, with calculations. During the lecture it grew very quiet in the hall; when he finished, the attacks began.

Questions were thrown at him: How did he explain the “life-causing” property of the signal? How did it originate? Was it, according to him, a “pure accident”? And, most of all — where did we get Frog Eggs from?

“Yes, I’ve thought about this,” Lerner replied. “You ask me who planned it, composed it, and sent it. If not for that life-causing side of the emission, life in the Galaxy would have been an extraordinarily rare phanomenon! But now I ask in turn: What about the physical properties of water? Had water at a temperature of four degrees Celsius been lighter than water at zero, and had ice not floated, all bodies of water on Earth would have frozen bottom-to-top, and no aquatic creatures would have been able to survive outside the equatorial zone. And had water had a different dielectric constant, not as high, protein molecules would not have been able to form in it, and therefore there could not have been protein-based life. Yet does anyone ask, in science, whose helping hand intervened here, and who gave water its dielectric constant or provided for the relative lightness of its ice? No one asks, because we consider such questions to be meaningless. Had water had other properties, either a nonprotein form of life would have arisen or else no life at all. By the same token, one cannot ask who sent the biophilic emission. It increases the probability of survival for macromolecular bodies, and this is either the same sort of accident, if you like, or the same sort of inevitability that has made water a substance ’favoring life.’ The whole problem should be turned around, set right side up, and then it will read as follows: Thanks to the fact that water possesses these properties, and thanks to the fact that in the Universe there exists a radiation that stabilizes biogenesis, life can arise and oppose the growth of entropy more effectively than it would otherwise. .”

“Frog Eggs!” came shouts. “Frog Eggs!”

I was afraid that at any minute a chant would start. The auditorium already had reached the heat of a boxing match.

“Frog Eggs? You know better than I that there was no success in reading the so-called letter as a whole, but only its ’fragments’ — from which Frog Eggs came into being. This shows that as a meaningful whole the letter does not exist outside your imagination, and that Frog Eggs was simply the result of an extraction of information inherent in the neutrino stream, information that something could be done with. Through the ’fissure between the worlds,’ between the one dying and the one being born, burst a ball of neutrino radiation, expanding like a soap bubble; this wave had sufficient energy to ’inflate’ the next Universe, and the front of the wave is impregnated with information inherited, as it were, from the phase that has ended. Now, in this wave lies the information that created the atoms, as I already said, and the information that ’favors’ biogenesis, and in addition it has segments that from our standpoint ’serve no purpose,’ that are ’worthless.’ Water possesses properties like those I mentioned, that ’favor’ life, and properties that are indifferent to life, as for example transparency; water could have been nontransparent, and this would have had no significance for the emergence of life. Just as one cannot ask, ’And who made water transparent?’ one cannot ask, ’Who wrote the program for Frog Eggs?’ It is one of the properties of the given Universe, a property that we may study — like the transparency of water — but that has no ’extraphysical’ meaning.”

There was an uproar in the hall. Finally Baloyne asked how, then, Lerner explained the circular repetition of the signal, and the fact that all the rest of the emission spectrum for neutrino radiation in the sky was ordinary noise, while in that single, solitary band lay so much information.

“But that is simple,” replied the cosmogonist, who seemed to be deriving pleasure from the general stir. “Initially the entire emission was concentrated precisely in that band, since it was precisely at that point on the spectrum that it was ’sharpened’ by the ’fissure between the worlds,’ and compressed, and modulated, like a stream of water in a narrow opening. At the beginning there was a needle-band, nothing more! Then, as a result of dispersion, scattering, desynchronization, diffraction, deflection, interference — a greater and greater amount became diffused, blurred, until finally, after billions of years of the existence of our Universe, from that primal information there resulted noise; and from the sharp focus there resulted a broad energy spectrum, because in the meantime the ’secondary’ noise generators of neutrinos — the stars — had become activated. What we are receiving, as the letter, is the remainder of the ’umbilicus,’ the remnant that has not yet undergone dissolution, that has not altogether merged with the countless reflections and currents that go from corner to corner of the Metagalaxy. The present (and omnipresent) norm is noise — not information. But at the moment of the creation of our Universe, at its violent birth, the neutrino bubble contained within it full information about all that physically was to arise from it; and precisely because it represents a relic of an epoch that has left no discernible trace of itself other than this, it seems to us astoundingly different from the phenomena of ’ordinary’ matter and radiation.”

It was clever, all right, the pretty, logically coherent construction that he put before us. Then followed the mathematical portion; he showed what features the “fissure between the worlds” would need to have in order to correspond exactly, as a “matrix,” to the place in the neutrino spectrum where the emission, or what we called the “stellar code,” was situated. It was a nice piece of work; he brought in resonance theory, and was even able to provide an explanation in his lecture for the constant repetition of the signal, and for the location — that radiant of Canis Minor — from which the alleged letter came.

I took the floor then and said that actually it was he who had stood the matter on its head, because he refashioned the whole Universe to fit the letter, simply making the “dimensions” of this fissure of his such that they would correspond to the given energetics of the signal, and he even altered the geometry of his made-to-order, ad hoc cosmos so that the direction from which the “signal” came would turn out to be a thing of chance.

Lerner, smiling, admitted that to a certain extent I was right. But, he added, if not for his “fissure” the successive worlds would come and go with no connection between them; each would be different — that is, might be different; or the Universe might remain permanently in the “antiworld,” null-energy phase, and that would be the end of all creation, of all possible worlds — we would not exist, nor the stars above us, and there would be no one to rack his brains over what did not take place. . But it had, after all, taken place. The monstrous complexity of the letter was explained in this way: the unimaginable concentration of the “death throes” caused the dying world, just as a man gave up the ghost, to “give up” its information; this information did not suffer destruction; instead — owing to laws unknown to us, because physics must have ceased in that compression, that discontinuity — dissociation of space — it fused with what still existed: with the neutrino node within the very “fissure.”

Baloyne, who chaired the meeting, asked us if we wished to begin a discussion then and there, or first hear Sylvester. We voted for the second, out of curiosity, of course. Lerner I knew a little, having met him once or twice at Hayakawa’s, but Sylvester I had never even heard of. He was a small young man with a pasty face — which is of absolutely no importance.

He began in a vein surprisingly similar to Lerner’s. The Universe was a pulsing entity, with alternating phases of blue contractions and red expansions. Each phase took around thirty billion years. In the red phase, that of the retreating nebulae, after a sufficient dispersal of matter and the cooling of planetary bodies, life formed on them and sometimes gave rise to intelligent species. When the dilation ended and the Universe began to converge centripetally, gradually, in that blue phase, there resulted enormous temperatures and increasingly hard radiation, which destroyed all the living matter that in the course of the preceding two billion-years had succeeded in covering the planets. Obviously, in the red phase — as in this one in which we have come into being — there existed civilizations at varying levels of development. And there must have existed those that excelled technologically; those that, with their advanced sciences, including cosmogony, were cognizant of their own future — and the future of the Universe. Such civilizations — or, for convenience, let us say such a civilization — situated in some particular nebula, therefore knew that the process of organization would pass its peak and the process of universal destruction would commence, in growing heat. If the civilization possessed far more knowledge than we, it would also be able, to some extent, to foresee the continuation of events after the “blue end of the world,” and if it enriched its knowledge even more, then it would be able to affect that future state. .

Again there was a buzz of voices. Sylvester was offering nothing more or less than a theory of the control of the cosmogonic process!

The astrobiologist assumed, along with Lerner, that a “two-cycle cosmic engine” was totally indeterminate — because, particularly in the compression phase, major indeterminacies would result from the changes, basically random, in the distribution of mass, and from the variable process of annihilation. Thus, what “type” of Universe would emerge from the next contraction could not be accurately predicted. We were acquainted with this difficulty on a miniature scale, because we could not predict, or calculate, the course of turbulence phenomena, the sort that gave rise to whirling (as, for example, in water breaking on a reef). Thus the particular “red Universes,” that resulted, each in turn, from the blue, could differ so much among themselves that the type realized at present, in which life was possible, might constitute an ephemeral, never-to-be-repeated state, or one that would be followed by a long series of nothing but lifeless pulsations.

Such a horoscope might not suit that high civilization, and so it would undertake to change the vision of eternity as an everlasting graveyard, now heated, now cooling — to change it through appropriate astroengineering manipulations. Preparing itself for the extermination that awaited it, the civilization could “program” a star or a system of stars, modifying in a fundamental way the energetics of that system, turning it into a kind of neutrino laser ready to fire — or, rather, arranging that it would become such a laser only at the moment when the tensors of gravitation, the parameters of temperature, the pressure, and so forth exceeded certain maximum values — when physics itself, the physics of that given Universe, began to crumble! Then this dying constellation would be converted entirely, “triggered” by phenomena that would release its accumulated energy, into a single, black neutrino flash — programmed with the utmost precision and care! Being the hardest and most inertial of the radiations, this monotonic neutrino wave would serve not only as the death knell of the extinguished Universe but at the same time would become the seed of the next phase, because it would participate in the formation of the new elementary particles. Moreover, the directive “stamped in the star” would include biophilia — the increasing of the chance of the birth of life.

Thus, in this spirited picture, the stellar code was revealed to be a transmission sent into the sphere of our Universe — from the Universe that came before it. The Senders, therefore, had not existed for at least thirty billion years. They fashioned the “message” so well that it survived the annihilation of their Cosmos; and their message, joining the processes of the succeeding creation, set in motion the evolution of life on the planets. We, too, were Their children. .

An ingenious notion! The “signal” was no letter at all; its “life-giving” virtue did not represent one “aspect” as opposed to the “content.” It was only that we, according to our custom, had sought to separate what could not be separated. The signal — or, rather, the causal pulse — began first with a “tuning” of the cosmic material, newly resurrected, in order that there would arise particles with the desired properties (desired from the point of view of that civilization, of course), and when astrogenesis had got under way, and with it planetogenesis, other structural features became “activated,” features present at the beginning within the pulse but till now having no “addressee”; only then did they begin to manifest their ability to assist the birth of life. And since it was “easier” to increase the overall chance of survival for large molecules than to direct and govern the formation of the most elementary building blocks of matter, we discovered the first effect as separate and “nonsemantic,” while giving to the second, the atom-creative part, the name of “letter.”

We had failed to read it because for us, with our knowledge, with our physics and chemistry, to read it completely was impossible. Yet from pieces of the knowledge recorded in the pulse we made ourselves a recipe — for Frog Eggs! And therefore the signal directed and did not inform; it was addressed to the Universe and not to any beings. All we could do was try to deepen our knowledge by studying the signal itself — as we studied Frog Eggs.

When Sylvester finished, there was much consternation. Here was an embarras de richesses! The signal either was a natural phenomenon, a “last chord” of a dying Universe, hammered out by a “fissure” between world and antiworld onto a neutrino wave; a deathbed kiss planted upon the front of the wave — or else it was the last will and testament of a civilization that no longer lived. An impressive choice!

And both views found adherents among us. It was pointed out that in ordinary — that is, natural — hard radiation there were fractions that increased the tempo of mutation and thereby could speed up the rate of evolution, while other fractions did not do this, from which it did not follow that the first fractions meant something and the second did not. For a while everyone attempted to talk at once. I had the feeling that I was standing at the cradle of a new mythology. A last will and testament. . we as the posthumous heirs of Them. .

Because it was expected of me, I took the floor. I began with the observation that through any number of points on a plane one could draw any number of curved lines. I had never considered it my objective to produce the greatest possible number of different theories, because one could come up with an endless amount of those. Rather than tailor our Universe and its antecedents to the signal, it sufficed to admit, for example, that our receiving apparatus was primitive in the sense that a radio of low selectivity was primitive. Such a radio would pick up several stations at a time, and the result would be a mishmash; but someone who did not know any of the languages in which the programs were being broadcast might simply record everything as it came out, and rack his brains over that. We might have fallen victim to just such a technological mistake.

Perhaps the so-called letter was a recording of several emissions at once. If one assumed that in the Galaxy automatic transmitters were operating on precisely that “frequency,” in that band, which we were treating as a single channel of communication, then even the constant repetition of the signals could be explained. They could be signals used by societies in some “civilizational collective” to keep in systematic synchronization certain technological devices of theirs, possibly astroengineering devices.

This would account for the “circularity” of the signals. But it fit poorly with Frog Eggs; although, stretching things a little, one could put its synthesis also into this scheme. In any case, the scheme was more modest and therefore more sensible than the giant visions that had been unfolded before us. There existed a mystery outside the signal, namely, the fact that it was alone. There should have been a great many of them. But to refashion the whole Universe to “explain” this mystery was a luxury we could ill afford. Why, the “signal” could be declared to be a “music of the spheres,” a kind of hymn, a neutrino fanfare with which the High Civilization would greet, say, the ascension of a supernova. The letter also could be apostolic: we had, here, a Word that became Flesh. And we had, in opposition to it, Frog Eggs, which as Lord of the Flies — the work, therefore, of darkness — indicated the Manichean nature of the signal, and of the world. To pursue any further this sort of exegesis should not be allowed. Basically, both ideas were conservative, and Lerner’s in particular, because it boiled down to a defense, a desperate defense, even, of the empirical position. Lerner did not want to leave the traditional points of view of the exact sciences, which from their inception had dealt with the phenomena of Nature and not of Culture, for there does not exist a physics or chemistry of Culture, but only of the “stuff of the Universe.” Not willing to give up treating the Universe as a purely physical object, devoid of “meanings,” Lerner acted like a man prepared to study a handwritten letter as if it were a seismogram. In the final analysis, handwriting, like a seismogram, was a lot of complicated curved lines.

Sylvester’s hypothesis I characterized as an attempt to answer the question “Do successive Universes inherit from one another?” He supplied an answer in which our “code,” though remaining an artifact, ceased to be a letter. I concluded by showing the incredible number of assumptions that both had pulled out of the air: the negative umbilicus of matter compressed into information at the bottom of the contraction — well; the branding of the wave front with the “atom-generating” stigmata — it would never be possible to verify any of this, ex definitione, because presumably these things would occur where there would no longer be beings of any kind, or physics. This was a discussion about life after death, decked up in the terminology of science. Or it was a sort of “philosophy fiction” — by analogy to science fiction. The mathematical robe concealed a mythology. In this I could see the signum temporis, but nothing more.

Naturally, the discussion then took off like wildfire. Toward the end of it, Rappaport suddenly rose with “one more hypothesis.” It was so original that I present it here. He defended the thesis that the difference between “artificial” and “natural” was not entirely objective, not an absolute given, but a relative thing and dependent on the cognitive frame of reference. Substances excreted by living organisms in the course of their metabolism we considered to be natural products. If I ate a great quantity of sugar, its excess would be eliminated by my kidneys. Whether the sugar in the urine was “artificial” or “natural” depended on my purpose. If I ate so much sugar intentionally, in order to eliminate it, knowing the mechanism involved and able to predict the effects of my action, the sugar would be “artificially” present; but if I ate it because I had a craving for it, and for no other reason, its presence would be “natural.” One could demonstrate this. If someone examined my urine and if I had arranged this with him accordingly, the presence of sugar which he would discover could acquire the meaning of an informational signal. The sugar might signify, for instance, “yes,” and the lack of sugar “no.” This process of symbolic signaling would be as artificial as could be, but only between the two of us. Whoever did not know of our arrangement would learn nothing of it from an examination of the urine. So, then, in Culture as well as in Nature only the “natural” phenomena existed “really and truly”; the “artificial” were artificial only insofar as we related them, by agreement or action, in a definite way. Only miracles were “absolutely artificial,” and they were impossible.

After this introduction Rappaport delivered the main blow. Let us suppose that biological evolution could take a double path: it could create separate organisms, and then, from them, intelligent beings; or it could create, on the other branch, biospheres that were “nonintelligent” but at the same time highly organized — and let us call these “forests of living flesh,” or vegetation of still another type, one that in the course of a very long development would master even nuclear energy. The vegetation’s evolution would master it, however, not in the way that we mastered bomb or reactor technology, but in the way that our bodies “mastered” metabolism. In this case the products of the metabolism would be phenomena of a radioactive type — and, at a later stage, even streams of neutrinos, which would be nothing but the “excretion” from such globes, of the organisms on them, excretion which we would receive precisely in the form of a “stellar code.” In this case we would have a completely natural process, because beings would not be intending to send anything to anyone, or to communicate, and the streams in question would be only the inevitable result of their metabolic activity, an “excretory emission.” But it could also be that other planetary organisms would learn of their presence by this “spoor” left in space. Then it would constitute a kind of signal between them.

Rappaport added that his hypothesis fit into the class of things native to science, because science did not divide phenomena into “artificial” and “natural,” and therefore he had entered into the spirit of its rules. The hypothesis, in principle at least, could be tested (by detecting the presence, or merely proving the theoretical possibility, of “neutrino organisms”), because it did not refer us to “other Universes.”

Not everyone grasped that this was more than just an exhibition of wit. It was possible, in principle, to predict and calculate any type of organic metabolism when one began with physics and chemistry, whereas it was not possible, beginning with the same physics and chemistry, to predict or calculate a culture in which certain beings would write and send “neutrino letters.” This second phenomenon was of another, nonphysical, order. If civilizations spoke to one another in different languages, and their differences in development were considerable, at best those who were less knowledgeable would extract from the received communication only (or nearly only) what was physical in it (or natural, the same thing). They would understand nothing more. And in fact, with a sufficiently large gap between civilizations, the same concept-symbols, even if they functioned in both cultures, would have totally different referents.

There was discussed, among other things, the question of whether or not the probable “civilization of the Senders,” either existing or (according to Sylvester) no longer among the living, was rational. And how could we say that a civilization that concerned itself about what would be “in the next Universe,” thirty billion years away, was rational? Even for a fantastically wealthy civilization, what had to be the cost, the price paid in the fates of living beings, for it to become the helmsman of the Great Cosmogony? This also, analogously, held for the “life-causing effect.” One might say that for them this was rational — or that there was no intercivilizationally constant sense of “rationality.” A dozen of us gathered at Baloyne’s after the closing of the meeting, and talked long into the night. If Sylvester and Lerner failed to convince us, they definitely poured oil on the troubled waters of the past. There was discussion about what Rappaport had presented. He added to it and made clarifications, and from this emerged a strange picture indeed — of leviathan biospheres that “sent” into the Universe, unaware of what they were doing; of an advanced stage of homeostasis, unknown to us; of amalgamations of vital processes which, drawing upon the sources of nuclear energy, began to equal, in their metabolic conversions, the power of suns. The biophilia of their “neutrino excretion” represented an effect exactly like that of the plants, whose activity had filled the atmosphere of Earth with oxygen, thus making life possible for other organisms, organisms that did not know of photosynthesis. And surely it was unintentional on the part of the grass to give us the opportunity to exist! Frog Eggs and the whole “informational” side of the letter became the products of an incredibly complex metabolism. Frog Eggs was a kind of waste, a cinder whose structure derived from planetary metabolisms.

When Donald and I returned to the hotel, he said at one point that he felt basically cheated: the leash on which we ran in circles had been lengthened, but that changed nothing in our situation of confinement. We were spectators at a nice display of intellectual fireworks, but when the show was over, we were left empty-handed. Perhaps — he went on — something had even been taken away from us. Before, the consensus omnium had stood behind the concept of a “letter” in whose envelope was found a little sand (meaning Frog Eggs). As long as we believed that we had received a letter, however incomprehensible it was, however mysterious, the knowledge of the existence of a Sender had value in itself. But now, when it turned out that perhaps the thing was not a letter but a meaningless scrawl, nothing remained to us except the sand. . and even if the sand was gold dust, we felt reduced to poverty — more, we felt robbed.

I thought this over when I was alone. I tried to figure out where the certainty in me came from which allowed me to dispose of other views, no matter how well buttressed by arguments they were. I was convinced that we had received a letter. It is very important to me to convey to the reader not just this belief of mine — the belief does not matter so much — but the reasoning behind it. If I fail here, I should not have written this book. For that was its goal. A man who, like myself, has grappled long and often, on many changing fronts of science, with the problems of solving “Nature’s ciphers,” truly knows more about them than you will find in his mathematically tidy publications.

On the authority of this unconveyable knowledge, I maintain that Frog Eggs, with its reservoir of nuclear energy, with its “tele-explosion” effect, should have been turned into a weapon under our hands, because we strove so very hard, and desperately, to do this. That we were unsuccessful can be no accident. We had succeeded — in other situations, which were “natural” — all too often. I have no difficulty imagining the beings who sent the signal. They said to themselves: We will make it undecipherable for all who are not yet ready; but we must go further in our caution — so that even a false reading will not be able to supply them with any of the things that they seek but that should be denied them.

Not atoms, not galaxies, and neither planets nor our own bodies has Anyone cordoned off with such a system of safeguards, and we bear all the dismal consequences of that Neglect. Science is the part of culture that rubs against the world. We scrabble out pieces from the world and consume them — not in the order that would be best for us, because No One was so kind as to arrange this, but in an order that is regulated only by the resistance that matter itself presents. The atoms and stars have no reasons; they cannot defy us when we fashion models in their image; they will not bar our way to knowledge that may possibly be lethal. Whatever exists outside man is like a corpse: it can possess no intention. But the moment the forces not of Nature but of Reason direct a message at us, the situation changes completely. The One who sent out the letter was motivated by a purpose that was definitely not indifferent to life.

From the first, what I feared the most was a misunderstanding. I was sure that we were not being sent an instrument of murder; but everything indicated that what we had received was the description of some instrument — and it is well known what use we put instruments to. Even man is a tool for man. Familiar with the history of science, I did not imagine that there was any perfect safeguard against abuse. All technologies were, after all, completely neutral, and we could assign to any one of them the goal of death. During that unimportant but desperate conspiracy — stupid, no doubt, yet by impulse inevitable — I believed that we could no longer count on Them, because They apparently had not been able to foresee what we might do with the information mistakenly. The safeguarding against what was planned and deliberate — that I could believe; but not against what constituted our error or our filling in the gaps with faulty substitutions. Even Nature herself, who for four billion years had instructed biological evolution in how to avoid “errors,” how to operate under the protection of all possible safety measures, could not keep an eye on life’s molecular slips and twists, its side streets, dead ends, and wrong turns, its “misunderstandings” — proof of which was the innumerable degenerations in the development of organisms, such as cancer. But if They succeeded, that meant that They had gone far beyond the perfection, unattainable for us, of biological systems. I did not know, however — how, indeed, was I to have known? — that Their systems, more effective than the biological, were so universally certain, so airtight: against trespass by the unqualified.

That night in the huge hall of the inverter, bending over the sheets of scrawled paper, I had felt a sudden weakness, a moment of dizziness, and it had grown dark before my eyes, not only because the dread hanging over my head for all those weeks unexpectedly melted away; but also because in that instant I experienced, palpably, Their greatness. I understood what a civilization could be based on, and what a civilization could be. We think of an ideal equilibrium, of ethical values, of rising above one’s own weakness, when we hear the word “civilization,” and we associate it with what is best in us. But it is, above all, knowledge, a knowledge that from the sphere of possible situations eliminates precisely those (common, for us) like this one: where the finest brains out of a billion beings address themselves to the task of sowing universal death, doing what they would rather not do and what they stand in opposition to, because there is no alternative for them. Suicide is no alternative. Would we have changed one bit the course of further research, the invasion of metal locusts from the sky, had the two of us killed ourselves? If They foresaw such situations, the only way that I can understand it is if at one time They were — or, who knows, perhaps still are — like us.

Did I not say at the beginning of this book that only a fundamentally evil creature knows what freedom it attains when it does good? There was a letter, it was sent, it fell to Earth, at our feet, and had been falling in a neutrino rain while the lizards of the Mesozoic plowed the mud of the Carboniferous forests with their bellies, while the paleopithecus, called Promethean, gnawed a bone and saw in it the first club. And Frog Eggs? In Frog Eggs I see fragments — distorted, caricatured by our ineptness and ignorance, but also by our knowledge, which is skewed toward destruction — fragments of what the letter provided for by its very delivery. I am convinced that it was not hurled into the darkness as a stone is into water. It was conceived as a voice whose echo would return — once it was heard and understood.

The by-product, so to speak, of a proper reception was to be a return signal, informing the Senders that contact had been established, and at the same time telling Them the place where this occurred. I can make only a vague guess as to the mechanism that was to do this. The energy autonomy of Frog Eggs, its ability to direct nuclear reactions upon itself, which served no purpose other than to continue the state that made this possible — is evidence, proof, of an error on our part, because in our further incursion we came upon an effect as mysterious as it was dramatic, able under completely different circumstances to liberate, focus, and hurl back into space an impulse of tremendous power. Yes, if the code had been read correctly, the TX effect, discovered by Donald Prothero, would have been revealed as a return signal, an answer directed at the Senders. What convinces me of this is its fundamental mechanism: an action traveling at the greatest cosmic speed, carrying energy of any magnitude across a distance of any magnitude. The energy, of course, is to serve the transmittal of information, and not destruction. The form in which TX made itself known to us was the result of a distortion that the knowledge recorded in the neutrino stream underwent during our synthesis. Error bred error — it could not be otherwise. This is only logical, yet I am still amazed by Their versatility, that could thwart even the potentially fatal consequence of mistakes — of more than mistakes, because ours was a premeditated effort to turn a ruined instrument into a deadly blade.

The Metagalaxy is a limitless throng of psychozoic enclaves. Civilizations deviating from ours by a certain number of degrees, but, like ours, divided, mired in internal quarrels, burning their resources in fratricidal struggles, have for millennia been making — and still are making, again and again — readings of the code, readings as unsuccessful as our own. Just like us, they attempt to fashion the strange fragments that emerge from their efforts into a weapon — and, just like us, they fail. When did the conviction take root in me that this was the case? It is hard to say.

I told only those closest to me — Yvor, Donald — and before my final departure from the compound I shared this private property of mine with the acrimonious Dr. Rappaport. They all — a curious thing — at first nodded with the growing satisfaction of comprehension, but then, after some thought, said that for the world as it was given to us, my idea made too pretty and complete a picture. Perhaps. What do we know of civilizations “better” than ours? Nothing. So perhaps it is not suitable to paint such a panorama, in which we figure somewhere in the frame as a blot on the Galaxy, or as one of the embryos stuck fast in labor contractions that go on for centuries; or, finally, to use Rappaport’s metaphor, as a fetus, quite handsome at birth, but strangling on its own umbilical cord, the cord being that arm of culture which draws the vital fluids of knowledge up from the placenta of the natural world.

I can present no incontrovertible proof in support of my conviction. I have none. No evidence in the stellar code, in its information, nothing to indicate that it was produced for beings somehow better than us. Can it simply be that, stung for so long by humiliations, forced to work under the command of the Osters and the Nyes, I spun for myself — in the image and likeness of my own hopes — the only equivalent available to me of holiness: the myth of the Annunciation and Revelation, which I then — also to blame — rejected as much out of ignorance as ill will?

If a man no longer worries about the movement of the atoms and planets, the world becomes defenseless with regard to him, since he can then interpret it as he pleases. He who wields the imagination shall perish in the imagination. And yet imagination is supposed to be an open window on the world. For two years we examined a thing — at its destination, from the final results that streamed to Earth. I propose that we consider it from the opposite end. Is it possible, without falling into madness, to believe that we were sent puzzles, intelligence tests of a sort, charades of galactic descent? Such a point of view, in my opinion, is ridiculous: the difficulty of the text was not a shell that had to be pierced. The message is not for everyone: that is how I see it, and I cannot see it otherwise. First of all, the message is not for a civilization low on the ladder of purely instrumental progress, because it is obvious, surely, that the Sumerians or Carolingians would not have been able even to notice the signal. But is the limitation of the circle of receivers determined solely by the criterion of technological ability?

Let us look beyond ourselves. Enclosed in the windowless room of the former atomic test site, I could not help thinking about the great desert outside the walls, and the black canopy hanging above it, and that the whole Earth was being penetrated constantly, hour after hour, century after century, and eon after eon, by an immense river of invisible particles, whose current carried a communication that hit equally the other planets of the solar system, and other such systems, and other galaxies, and that this current had been sent from an unknown time past and across an unknown gulf — and that this was actually true.

I did not accept this knowledge without a fight; it was too much at odds with all that I had grown accustomed to. I saw, at the same time, our undertaking: the throng of scientists overseen discreetly by the government of which I was a citizen. Wrapped in a network of bugs and taps, we were supposed to establish contact with an intelligence that inhabited the Cosmos. In reality this was a stake in an ongoing global game; it became part of the pot, entered the pleiad of countless cryptonym-acronyms that filled the concrete bowels of the Pentagon; it was placed in some vault, on some shelf, in some file, with the stamp of top secret on the folder; yet another Operation, with the letters HMV, doomed in the bud, as it were, to insanity — this attempt to hide and imprison a thing that had been filling the abyss of the Universe for millions of years, in order to extract, as from lemon pits, information packed with fatal power.

If this was not madness, there is not and never will be madness. And so: the Senders had in mind certain beings, certain civilizations, but not all, not even all those of the technological circle. What sort of civilizations are the proper addressees? I do not know. I will say only this: if, in the opinion of the Senders, that information is not fitting for us to learn, then we will not learn it. I place great confidence in Them — because They did not let me down.

And yet, could not the whole thing have been only a series of coincidences? Absolutely. Was not the neutrino code itself discovered by accident? And could not the code in turn have arisen by accident, and by accident impeded the decomposition of large organic molecules, and by accident repeated itself, and, finally, by sheer chance produced Lord of the Flies? That is all possible. Accident can also cause such a swirling of waves at high tide that when the water recedes there will appear, on the smooth sand, the deep print of a foot.

Skepticism is like a microscope whose magnification is constantly increased: the sharp image that one begins with finally dissolves, because it is not possible to see ultimate things: their existence is only to be inferred. In any case, the world, after the closing of the Project, continued on its merry way. The popularity of statements made by scientists, political figures, and celebrities of the hour on the subject of cosmic intelligence has passed. Frog Eggs has been put to good use, so the millions from the budget did not go to waste. Over the code, now published, anyone from the legion of loose screws can rack his brains — those who used to invent perpetual-motion machines and trisect angles — and, in general, anyone can believe what he wants to believe. Particularly if his belief, like mine, has no practical consequence. Because it did not, after all, reduce me to dust and ashes. I am as I was before entering the Project. Nothing has changed.

I would like to conclude with a few words about the people of the Project. I already mentioned that my friend Donald is not alive. He suffered a statistical deviation in the stream of cellular divisions: cancer. Yvor Baloyne is not simply a professor and a dean, but a man so overworked that he does not even know how happy he is. About Dr. Rappaport I know nothing. The letter that I sent several years ago to the Institute for Advanced Study was returned. Dill is in Canada — neither of us has time to correspond.

But what, really, do these remarks signify? What do I know of the secret fears, ideas, and hopes of those who were my colleagues for a time? I was never able to conquer the distance between persons. An animal is fixed to its here-and-now by the senses, but man manages to detach himself, to remember, to sympathize with others, to visualize their states of mind and feelings: this, fortunately, is not true. In such attempts at pseudo merging and transferral we are only able, imperfectly, darkly, to visualize ourselves. What would happen to us if we could truly sympathize with others, feel with them, suffer for them? The fact that human anguish, fear, and suffering melt away with the death of the individual, that nothing remains of the ascents, the declines, the orgasms, and the agonies, is a praiseworthy gift of evolution, which made us like the animals. If from every unfortunate, from every victim, there remained even a single atom of his feelings, if thus grew the inheritance of the generations, if even a spark could pass from man to man, the world would be full of raw, bowel-torn howling.

We are like snails, each stuck to his own leaf. I retreat behind the shield of my mathematics, and recite, when that does not suffice, these final lines from Swinburne’s poem:

Zakopane, June 1967

Kraków, December 1967

END