October the First Is Too Late

Chapter Five: Allegro Assai

The mood was gone the following morning. The trip from Honolulu to the big island of Hawaii was, I suppose, about one hundred and fifty miles. I was met at Waimea by a car. The country hereabouts was surprisingly flat, considering the fourteen-­thousand-foot high Mauna Kea was only some fifteen miles to the south. The journey to the field-station was a short one and soon I was dumping my bags into a room in the sleeping quarters. Although the buildings had a prefabricated look about them they were, nevertheless, very well appointed inside. I had barely finished unpacking when John arrived.

‘Just in time,’ he said. ‘We’re beginning to get results. It’s already clear the signal is genuinely modulated.’

‘You mean the beam really is being used for conveying information?’

‘That’s what it looks like.’

About midday a party of five army and navy officers arrived. Over lunch everybody started to talk. For a while it was all much the things I knew already, apart from some technical interpolations which didn’t interest me. John explained his ideas. Clementi quickly went over the general experimental set-up. The officers got the drift, more or less as I did. They asked questions about the interference fringes, questions I was too shy to ask. Clementi drew a series of loops, by way of answer, looking somewhat like a bunch of bananas. There was a lot of talk about near-fields and far-fields but this was beyond me.

The essential idea seemed to be one of phase. If you have something that oscillates up and down the precise position where it happens to be at a given moment is the phase. What it came down to was this: if you chose a particular moment of time, and then considered the phases over a very big area, they all had to be the same, in order to explain the observations. When he was asked how big the area had to be, John replied:

‘According to my calculations about ten times the radius of the Sun.’

‘But how can you get a phase correlation over such an enormous area?’

‘That’s what we all want to know,’ muttered Clementi.

The big man padded around and stated sententiously, ‘Control phase, and you control the universe.’

‘But that’s what we do with our radar, isn’t it?’ asked an elderly, blue-eyed naval officer.

John nodded. ‘That’s exactly the right way to put it. It’s just as if there was a big antenna, measuring ten times the radius of the Sun. Apparently it’s beaming a message out into space.’

There was silence for a while.

‘What would be the directivity, with an antenna as large as that?’ asked another of the officers.

‘At a big distance, quite fantastic. The beam would go out into space as an extremely fine pencil.’

Someone had a bright idea.

‘What’s the chance of our being in the direct beam?’

‘Remembering that we are in the near-field, it works out at somewhere between one in ten and one in a hundred, provided the beam is directed more or less along the ecliptic. Less than that if it’s directed at random.’

‘Isn’t it a bit surprising that we just happen to lie in it?’

‘We’re not necessarily lying in the main lobe. I’ve thought quite a lot about this point. From a climatic point of view, I mean.’

John had their attention now.

‘There must be something like a ten per cent difference in the solar radiation according to whether we’re in the main beam or not. Of course we can’t know anything directly about this infra-red stuff down here on the surface of the Earth. The infra-red never gets through the atmosphere. But it would have the effect of increasing the boundary temperature of the Earth.’

‘By how much?’

‘Anything up to ten degrees I would say. What I’ve been wondering is whether all the mysterious climatic fluctuations the Earth seems to suffer—the ice-ages for instance—could be caused by our relation to this beam. You know, it may not always point in the same direction. Sometimes the Earth could pass through it, during the year I mean. At other times we might miss it entirely.’

Clementi made a kind of humming sound. He wasn’t winking. ‘A few degrees up, or a few degrees down, is really all that might be needed to make quite big changes of climate. It could be at that. But look here, John, old chap, old fellow, old scoundrel more like, are you hinting that this deal up there might have been going on for thousands of years?’

‘I should have thought it extremely likely. If it was something that had just started up right now, well, wouldn’t it be ridiculously improbable?’

‘Yeah, I suppose so.’

Several of the men were pacing like caged beasts up and down the lounge floor.

There was a silence which everybody seemed reluctant to break. At last, the naval officer with the blue eyes spoke:

‘Gentlemen, it’s time we came to the real issues. I don’t know whether my colleagues and I can be described as having anything more than a watching brief here. But the questions that stand out in my mind are, first, how’s it being done, second, what’s it for? I must admit I’m personally in a smoke screen but maybe Dr Sinclair has something he’d like to add.’

This was quite a formal speech. I wondered how John would react to it. He shrugged his shoulders and began:

‘I think anybody’s guesses are as good as anybody else’s at this stage. For myself I can’t remotely conceive how this phasing trick is being worked. But being worked it surely is, so for the moment we’d better accept that, and go on from there—if we can. We’ve tested the deduction that the beam is being used to convey information.’

‘What information? What the hell is there to send, where and to whom?’

One of the army officers grinned and suggested, ‘Maybe it’s a TV relay.’

Most of them laughed at this. I noticed John didn’t. When the laughter had died down he simply said, ‘Could be.’ Everybody looked at him, so he went on:

‘It may sound crazy but what else can it be? Oh, I don’t mean a TV relay strictly. Think of the colossal amount of information that’s probably being sent out, of the order of a hundred million bits a second. In a year, that’s several thousand trillion bits. Something like a hundred million textbooks a year. What sort of traffic would you need to fill a channel like that?’

‘You mean there’d be no point in sending out such a lot of stuff unless there was really something to send?’ Everybody laughed at this.

After a further short pause John went on:

‘There are two speculative possibilities. This might be an interstellar, or even an intergalactic, relay station. Granted the enormous directionality of the system, the fineness of the pencil beam, these signals could be received at an enormous distance away from us.’

Clementi had obviously been thinking along the same lines. ‘The details really aren’t as fantastic as the thing itself. But as John says, we know the thing exists, so there’s no getting away from it. It’s easy enough to do an intensity calculation. If this really is a relay station, if some guy at the other end has even a moderately sensitive detecting device, say only a millionth part as sensitive as our big radio telescopes—as this thing out on the hillside here—then these signals can be picked up—where? Come on, freshman physics! Not just in our own galaxy, but anywhere, out and beyond anything we can see with the biggest telescopes.’

‘You mean this is just about the most…’ The naval officer broke off whatever it was he was going to say. It was clear to him, as to me, that the wonders of science had gone beyond all reasonable bounds.

I was back in my room that night, jotting down one or two musical ideas, when John tapped on my door. ‘Would you like to go for a stroll?’

We slipped out of a side door.

‘I don’t want any of the others to join us just for the moment.’

We had walked along for two or three hundred yards before he came to the point:

‘I’ve been thinking it would be a good idea if you were to write everything down. I mean from the beginning. I think it would be a good idea to have an account from an unbiased person.’

‘You mean a non-scientist?’

‘If you like to put it that way, yes.’

My story is built from notes as I made them following this incident. Unfortunately my diary wasn’t remotely detailed enough as it has turned out. So perforce I have often had to fill in as best I can from memory—this will explain how it comes about that sharp accounts of what took place are sometimes juxtaposed with obvious lapses of memory—my failure to recollect odd names for instance.

I began to see now why John had more or less press-ganged me into coming along with him. I also felt freer to ask questions with a clear conscience.

‘It’s all very well to avoid the problem of how this incredible thing is being done but do you have any idea at all about what’s really happening?’

We walked on for a little way.

‘Not with any precision. The obvious inference is that someone is doing it. I suppose the most straightforward explanation would be to say that it’s some creature, some intelligence, on one of the other planets.’

‘A major boost to the space programme—eh?’

‘As you say, a major boost to the space programme.’

I guessed that John really didn’t believe this. When I asked him point blank he replied:

‘It’s an outrageous explanation fitted to a fantastic situation. Yet anything else seems worse. It’s all a question of the way you look at it. When something really new happens most scientists take the line of least resistance. They accept the explanation that involves the least change from their preconceived notions. Which is what I’m doing now.’

‘But you don’t believe it?’ I pressed.

‘With me, believing or not believing a particular explanation is more a matter of method than of emotion. If I were emotional I’d be almost certain to plump for what I’ve just told you. The way I always work is like this. If I find things turning out much as I expect then I follow the line of least resistance, exactly the same as everyone else. But if I find my deductions going wildly wrong it’s my instinct to explain my shortcomings by saying that I just haven’t got hold of the right idea at all. I don’t try to do a patchwork job, to choose the explanation that requires the least possible change from my previous position. I throw the net wide, just as wide as I can.’

By now my eyes were accommodated to the dark. We were able to pick our way across the open grassland with more precision.­

‘I suppose it’s really not fair to twist your arm any further but what does this wide net look like? My own imagination just boggles at the idea of there being something still more strange and unusual than creatures on another planet.’

‘I’ve got nothing definite to go on, except the day on the moor after we came off Mickle Fell.’

‘You still think that amnesia business might have had something to do with it?’

‘I don’t know. What I do know, is that every explanation I can conceive of for that gap of thirteen hours, and for the mark that used to be on my back, is much more weird than this planet business. It suggests to my mind there’s a real danger of our concepts going wildly astray.’

‘In what sense?’

‘Consider the usual science-fiction story. Let me anatomize the situation for you. Science-fiction is a medium that concerns, above all else, life forms other than ourselves. The real life forms of our own planet belong of course to natural history, to zoology, so science-fiction purports to deal with life forms of the imagination. Yet what do we find when we read science-fiction? Nothing really but human beings. The brains of a creature of science-fiction are essentially human. You put such a brain inside a big lizard, and bang-wallop, you have a science-fiction story. Or if you can’t be bothered with the lizard-like aspect of the story, you simply put the human brain in a human creature, and call it a humanoid. To make the story go, the humanoid is usually set up as more intelligent than ourselves, with a better technology. Then the story turns on how the dear old magnificent human species manages to deal with the alien threat. It boils down to a new version of Indians and cowboys.

‘Let me be a bit more serious. If these rather simple-minded notions stopped at science-fiction it wouldn’t be so bad. But as soon as we try to think quite seriously about intelligence outside the Earth that’s exactly the way our concepts go.’

‘So when you talked about a creature on one of the other planets you were really inventing a science-fiction story?’

‘That’s the way it seems to me.’

‘Yet what else could there be?’

‘Very hard to say, isn’t it? If your brain doesn’t have the right concepts you can’t really force it to develop them. I’m quite willing to agree there may be lots of creatures more or less similar to us distributed up and down the universe, or even among the stars up there. What I doubt is whether there are any such creatures on Mars or Venus. Even if there were, I don’t think they could perform this trick with the Sun.’

‘You think it’s too big? The Sun I mean. That a creature stuck down on a planet could hardly do anything to a star?’

‘I’m more or less sure of it.’

After a short pause, John went off on a new tack. ‘In physics, we accept a lot of mysterious things.’

‘Such as what?’

‘Well, it’s very mysterious that our consciousness enables us to take decisions which turn out to improve our description of the world—in circumstances, mark you, when improvement ought to be impossible according to our basic physics.’

‘Sounds the sort of thing our religious friends would be glad to hear.’

‘They can read it in any textbook if they like. Let me give an example. You take a number of radioactive nuclei of a particular kind, the number being chosen so that there’s an even chance of one of them going off in a certain period of time, say ten seconds. Then for ten seconds you surround them with counters, or any other detecting device you might like to use. At the end of the time the question is, has one of them decayed or not. To decide this you take a look at your counters. The conventional notion is that the state of the counters decides whether a nucleus has gone off or not.’

‘What you’re saying is that if you did this experiment a lot of times your calculations require that in half of the cases a nucleus will have decayed and in the other half there will have been no decay?’

‘Right. But my problem now concerns an individual case. Has there been a decay or hasn’t there? How do you decide?’

‘I would suppose by looking, which is what you said a moment ago.’

‘Of course. But here comes the rub. It is perfectly possible to put your counters, or your bubble chamber, your camera, all your gobbledegook in fact, into your calculations—and we know quite definitely that any attempt to get a definite answer out of calculation will prove completely fruitless. The thing that gives the answer isn’t the camera or the counter, it’s the actual operation of looking yourself at your equipment. It seems that only when we ourselves take a subjective decision can we improve our description of the world, over and above the uncertainty of our theories. I’m talking about quantum theories now.’

‘So you’ve got a real contradiction?’

I waited as John paused again. He lifted his hand in a gesture. ‘There’s one possible loophole. We could be wrong in comparing ourselves as physical systems with a camera or a counter or anything like that. The essential thing about a camera is that it’s local. Its operation can be described by a strictly finite number of variables, its activities are restricted to a limited volume of space-time. It could be that when we make subjective judgements we’re using connections that are non-local. If this is right the logical ramifications are enormous. It means we can have connections ranging all over the universe.’

‘What’s the relation to this business?’

‘This affair could have nothing at all to do with our own local planets. It could be on a vastly bigger scale. It needn’t have anything to do with human brains in lizard heads.’

‘You’ve one or two fairly definite ideas?’

From long experience I knew that John would not have got himself into this conversation unless there was more than general guesswork behind it.

‘There’s one thing. You remember we talked about the purpose of this phased infra-red stuff. For God’s sake don’t tell anyone I don’t really go along with that relay station idea. There’s another more remarkable possibility. I’ve got a feeling the more remarkable possibility has a better chance of being right. Think of the enormous volume of communication that must be involved here, the incredibly detailed information. What kind of thing do we know about that would need such a capacity? This is the question I keep asking myself. What was it, a hundred million major textbooks a year? The sort of physics we study needs nothing like that. If you know how, you can put all our basic physics into one book. I suppose you could put most aspects of our technology into a hundred books. The only things I can see around me needing anything like this volume of information are biological organisms, our brain processes for instance, or the information needed to construct a human being.’

The following day I went for a drive round the island. I went to Volcano House and took a look at the active Kilauea crater. I saw sugar plantations, pineapple fields, rain forests, the sea and the mountains. When I got back to the experimental station I found the place in a wild panic. Somebody told me war had started and that Los Angeles had been destroyed.