Starburst

8

AS KNEFHAUSEN WAS LEAVING HIS OFFICE, MRS. AMBROSE came running after him. Telephone? At this time? But it was urgent and from Goldstone; he took it, listened for a moment, slammed the phone down, and left, scowling. So! The telemetry had stopped! Really, those young people were almost no longer excusable! He barked at the driver of the scout car and scowled at the machine gunner until he moved over to make room in the back seat. At least now they gave him a driver again, and an armored helicopter even for the actual entry to the White House. But that was not really courtesy; it was simply the only way one could get there.

So. This new aggravation, should he tell the President about it? He thought not. There was no need to trouble the President with extraneous details. Perhaps even there was some simple explanation, perhaps technical, and by the time he got back to his office it would have been analyzed and corrected—a relay failure, some sort of radio interference from the solar wind, who could know?

He knew this was untrue. The telemetry did not matter for its overt purposes, for there was no need to go on reporting the same densities of H+ ions and the same blue-shift measurements, and if anything changed the young people would surely observe and report. That at least one could count on! But what the young people might not tell was the measurements of pheromones in the air, the scraps of their pillow talk, the hundred other little sampling snoops he had seen to. They had discovered this. Yes, that was the case. They had closed off his eyes and ears and nose in their ship. He now could know only what they chose to tell him of their states of sexual arousement, their private confidences, their developing interests and discoveries. And it did not matter if he liked this or loathed it, there was no help, it was done!

Well, other matters pressed. He throttled his indignation and entered the helicopter.

Under other circumstances it might have been a pleasant ride. Spring was well advanced, and along the Potomac the cherry blossoms were beginning to bud, and Rock Creek Park was all the pale green of new leaves. There were darker prospects. Even over the whup, whup of the helicopter rotor Knefhausen could hear an occasional rattle of small-arms fire from around Georgetown, and the Molotov cocktails and tear gas from the siege at the Kennedy Center were steaming the sky with smoke and fumes. They never stopped! For what reason should one try to help people like this?

And his children in the Constitution, were they any better? Such reports they were sending, hints where there should be only facts. He had had to get expert help in translating what the latest one was all about. He didn't like the need, and even less liked the results. What had gone wrong? They were his kids, handpicked! How had he missed the signs of this, this hippiness, this moral decay? There had been no suggestion of such a thing in any of their records, at least not past the age of twenty or so when one might forgive it, and even then only for Ann Becklund and Eve Barstow. So then! How had they got into this I Ching foolishness, and the stupid business with the Achillea millefolium, better known as the common yarrow? What "experiments" were these they spoke of? Who among them started this disgustingly unscientific thing of acupuncture? How dared they depart from their programmed power budget for "research purposes," and what were these purposes, then? Above all, what was the "damage to the ship"?

He pulled a pad out of his briefcase and scribbled a note:

With immediate effect, cut out the nonsense. I have the impression you are all acting like irresponsible children. You are letting down the whole ideals of the program.

Knefhausen

As soon as he had run the short distance from the chopper pad to the sandbagged White House entrance, he gave the slip to a page from the Message Center for immediate encoding and transmission to the Constitution via Goldstone, Lunar Orbiter, and Farside Base. All they needed was a reminder, he persuaded himself. Then they would settle down. But he was still worried as he allowed himself to be strip-searched and his crevices investigated, and worried as he dressed himself again under the eye of the guards. Still. What could one do? He peered into a mirror as he adjusted his tie, patted his hair down, smoothed his mustache with the tip of a finger, and presented himself to be led away.

This time they went down, not up. Knefhausen was going to the basement chamber that had been successively Franklin D. Roosevelt's swimming pool, the White House press lounge, a TV studio for taping jolly little two-shots of the President with Congressmen and Senators for the folks back home to see, and, now, the heavily armored bunker in which anyone trapped in the White House in the event of a successful attack from the city outside could hold out, could at least have some real hope of holding out, for several weeks, during which time the Fourth Armored would surely be able to retake the grounds from its bases in Maryland. It was not a comfortable room, but it was a safe one. Besides being armored against attack, it was as thoroughly soundproof, spyproof, and ieakproof as any structure in the world, not excepting the Under-Kremlin or the Colorado NOROM base.

Knefhausen was not kept waiting at all. Once this would have been a good sign. Now it could only be bad. But all signs were bad when one knew what was coming.

There were no leather armchairs here. The room was set up as for a meeting of some social club or P.T.A., folding metal chairs arranged in rows. Most of them were occupied, no less than thirty-five people, perhaps more, many of them mere Congressmen or military officers. Several, Knefhausen noticed as they left off their whispering to each other to stare at him, wore bandages, one even a great cast on his upper arm and chest; a Congressman, perhaps, who had had the ill judgment to return to his district in Newark or Cleveland or San Francisco? It was distressing that Knefhausen did not even recognize some of these people! Internally he fumed. But he maintained his benign expression of polite dignity as he was seated in a chair by the door, with of course one of the Marine guards posted just behind him.

The President was standing in a corner, whispering with Murray Amos and someone with three-star general's stars. At length he broke off and made his way to the little cinder-block platform at the front of the room. (Cinder blocks, like steel chairs, could not be made to burn.) He drank from a crystal goblet of water on the table by his chair, looking wizened and weary, and disappointed at the way a boyhood dream had turned out: the Presidency was not what it had seemed to be from the farm outside Muncie, Indiana.

He raised his head and looked out over the room. "All right," he said. "We all know why we're here. The government of the United States has given out information which was untrue. It did so knowingly and wittingly, and we've been caught at it. Now we want you to know the background, so that you will all support us in maintaining this pretense for a time longer, and so Dr. Knefhausen is going to explain the Alpha-Aleph project. Go ahead, Knefhausen."

Even counting the teeth, the man had a certain dignity. Knefhausen rose and gave him a nod of respect before he walked unhurryingly to the little lectern set up for him, off to one side of the President. He opened his papers on the lectern, studied them thoughtfully for a moment with his lips pursed, and said:

"As the President has said, the Alpha-Aleph project is in fact a camouflage. A few of you learned this some months ago, and then you referred to it with other words. 'Fraud.' 'Fake.' Words like that. But if I may say it in French, it is not any of those words, it is a legitimate ruse de guerre. Not the guerre against our political enemies in other nations, or even against those crazy persons in the streets with their Molotov cocktails and bricks. I do not mean those wars, I mean the war against ignorance. For, you see, there were certain sings—certain things we had to know, for the sake of science and progress. Alpha-Aleph was designed to find some of them out for us, and for no other purpose at all. Especially not for the purposes for which we said it was intended, this is true.

"I will tell you the worst parts first," he said. "Number one, there is no such planet as Alpha-Aleph. The Russians were right. Number two, we knew this all along. Even the photographs we produced were fakes, and in the long run the world will find this out and they will know of our ruse de guerre. I can only hope that they will not find out too soon, for if we are lucky and keep the secret for a while, then I hope we will be able to produce good results to justify what we have done. As I believe," he went on, "you gentlemen and ladies who are present have had some suspicions that these things may be true, and so the President has authorized me to tell you all of this, so that you can see the importance.

"Number three," he said, "when the Constitution reaches its destination in the vicinity of the star Alpha Centauri there will be no place for them to land, no way to leave their spacecraft, no sources of raw materials which they might be able to use to make fuel to return, no nothing but the star and empty space. This fact has certain consequences. The Constitution was designed with enough hydrogen fuel reserve for a one-way flight, plus maneuvering reserve. There will not be enough for them to come back, and the source they had hoped to tap, namely the planet Alpha- Aleph, does not exist. So they will not come back. Consequently they will die there. Those are the bad things to which I must admit."

There was a murmurous sigh from the audience. The President was frowning to himself, his upper teeth nibbling his lower lip. Knefhausen waited patiently for the medicine to be swallowed, then went on.

"You ask, then, why we have done this thing? Condemning eight intelligent and courageous young people to their death? The answer is simple: knowledge. To put it with other words, we must have the basic scientific knowledge we need to protect the free world. You are all familiar, I si—I believe, with the known fact that basic scientific advances have been very few these past ten years and more. Much development of applications. But of basic knowledge? Not so much. There have been many peculiar discoveries and strange suggestions. Particles you cannot count within the atom, astronomical peculiarities which one can only catalogue, without comprehension. The grand, simplifying intuitive leaps, where are they? Very few, in the years since Einstein, or better still since Weizsacker. Our science is drowning in quasars and quarks.

"But without these new basic understandings, the new technology must soon stop developing. It will run out of steam, you see. A Newton or a Kant discovers a new island, and then the R&D people can build on it; but unless someone is always discovering new islands, soon they have no place to build."

Knefhausen stepped back and laced his fingers across his chest. "Now I must tell you a story," he said. "It is a true scientific story, not a joke. I know you do not want jokes from me at this time. There was a man named de Bono, a Maltese, who wished to investigate the process of creative thinking. There is not much known about this process, but he had an idea how he could find something out. So he prepared for an experiment a room that was stripped of all furniture, with two doors, one across from the other. You go into one door, you walk through the room, you go out the other. He put at the door that was the entrance some materials for his experiment. Two flat boards. Some ropes. And he got as his subjects some young children. Now he said to the children, 'Now, this is a game we will play. You must go through this room and out the other door, that is all. If you do that, you win. But there is one rule. You must not touch the floor with your feet or your knees or with any part of your body or your clothing. We had here a boy,' he said, 'who was very athletic and walked across on his hands, but he was disqualified. You must not do that. Now go, and whoever does it fastest will win some chocolates.'

"So he took away all of the children but the first one and, one by one, they tried. There were ten or fifteen of them, and each of them did the same thing. Some it took longer to figure out, some figured it out right away, but it always was the same trick. They sat down on the floor, they took the boards and the ropes, and they tied one board to each foot and they walked across the room like on snowshoes. The fastest one thought of the trick right away and was across in a few seconds. The slowest took many minutes. But it was the same trick for all of them, and that was the first part of the experiment.

"Now this Maltese man, de Bono, performed the second part of the experiment. It was exactly like the first, with one difference. He did not give them two boards. He only gave them one board.

"And in the second part every child worked out the same trick, too, but it was of course a different trick. They tied the rope to the end of the single board. Then they stood on the board, and jumped up, tugging the rope to pull the board forward, hopping and tugging, moving a little bit at a time, and every one of them succeeded. But in the first experiment the average time to cross was maybe forty-five seconds. And in the second experiment the average time was maybe twenty seconds. With one board they did their job faster than with two.

"Perhaps now some of you see the point. Why did not any of the children in the first group think of this faster method of going across the room? It is simple. They looked at what they were given to use for materials and, they are like all of us, they wanted to use everything. But they did not need everything. They could do better with less, in a different way."

Knefhausen paused and looked around the room, savoring the moment. He had them now, he knew; even the Marine guards were hanging on his words. It was just as it had been with the President himself, three years before. They were beginning to comprehend the vastness and the necessity of the plan Dieter von Knefhausen had devised, and the pale, upturned faces were no longer as hostile, only perplexed and quite afraid.

He went on:

"So now you know what Project Alpha-Aleph is about, gentlemen and ladies. We have selected eight of the most intelligent human beings we could find—healthy, young, very adventurous. We played on them a nasty trick, to be sure. But we gave them in exchange an opportunity no one has ever had. The opportunity to think. To think for ten years. To think about basic questions. Out there they do not have the extra board to distract them. If they want to know some­thing they cannot run to the library and look it up and find that somebody has said that what they were thinking could not work. They must think it out for themselves.

"So in order to make this possible we have practiced a deception on them, and it will cost them their lives. All right, that is tragic, yes. But if we take their lives we give them in exchange immortality.

"How do we do this? This is again trickery, gentlemen and ladies. I do not say to them, 'Here, your task is to achieve new basic organizing understandings and report them to us.' I camouflage the purpose of the experiment, so that the subjects will not be distracted even by that. We have told them that all of this is recreational, a way to help them pass the time. This too is a ruse de guerre. The 'recreation' is not an expedient to make the long trip tolerable. It is the central fact of the experiment, without which the trip would not have been undertaken.

"So we start them with the basic tools of science. With numbers, that is with magnitudes and quantification, with all that scientific observations are about. With 'grammar.' This is not the grammar you learned from Miss Mulholland in your composition class when you were thirteen years old, it is a technical term. It means with the calculus of statement and the basic rules of communication, and this is so that they can learn to think clearly by communicating fully and without fuzzy ambiguities. We give them very little else, only the opportunity to mix these two basic ingredients and come up with new forms of knowledge.

"What will come of these things? That is a fair question. Unfortunately there is no answer. Not yet. If we knew the answer in advance we would not have to perform the experiment. So we do not know what will be the end result of this, but already they have accomplished very much. Old questions that have puzzled the wisest of scientists for hundreds of years they have solved already! I will give you one example. You will say, 'Yes, but what does it mean?' I will answer, 'I do not know'; I only know that it is so hard a question that no one else has been able to answer it since it was first asked, for hundreds of years. It is a proof of a thing which is called Goldbach's Conjecture. Only a conjecture; you could call it a guess. A guess by an eminent mathematician some many years ago, that every even number can be written as the sum of two prime numbers. This is one of those simple problems in mathematics that everyone can understand and no one can solve. You can say 'Certainly, sixteen is the sum of eleven and five, both of which are prime numbers, and thirty is the sum of twenty-three and seven, which also are both prime, and I can give you such numbers for any even number you care to name.' Yes, you can do this; but can you prove that for every even number it will always be possible to do this? No. You cannot. No one has been able to, but our friends on the Constitution have done it, and this was in the first few months. They have yet more than nine years. I cannot say what they will do in that time, but it is foolish to imagine that it will be anything less than very much indeed. A new relativity, a new universal gravitation—I don't know, I am only saying words. But much."

He paused again. No one was making a sound. Even the President was no longer staring straight ahead without expression but was looking directly at him—one could not say with kindness, certainly, but without loathing at least.

"It is not too late to spoil the experiment. It therefore follows that it is necessary to keep the secret a bit longer, as long as possible in fact. But there you have it, gentlemen and ladies. That is the true protocol for the Alpha-Aleph experiment." He dreaded what would come next, postponed it for a second by consulting his papers, shrugged, faced them, and said: "Now, are there any questions?"

Oh, yes, there were certainly questions! Herr Omnes was dazzled for a moment, stunned a little, took a few breaths to overcome the spell of the simple and beautiful truths he had heard. But then first one piped up, then another, then two or three shouting at once. There were questions of all sorts. Questions beyond answering. Questions Knefhausen did not have time to hear, much less answer, before the next question was on him. Questions to which he did not know the answers. Questions, worst of all, to which the answers were like pepper in the eyes, enraging, blinding the people to sense. But he had to face them, and he tried to answer them. Even when they shouted so that, outside the thick double doors, the Marines in the machine-gun post looked at each other uneasily and wondered what made the dull rumble that penetrated the very good soundproofing of the room. "What I want to know, who put you up to this?" "Mr. Chairman, nobody; it is as I have said." "But see now, Knefhausen, do you mean to tell us you're murderin' these good people for the sake of some Goldberg's theory?" "No, Senator, not for Goldbach's Conjecture, but for all that great advances in science will mean in the struggle to keep the Free World free." "You're confessing that you've dragged the United States of America into committing a palpable fraud?" "A legitimate ruse of war, Mr. Secretary, because there was no other way." "The photographs, Knefhausen?" "Faked, General, as I have told you. I accept full responsibility." And so on and so on, the words "murder" and "fraud" and even "treason" coming faster and faster.

Until at last the President stood up and raised his hand. Order was a long time coming, but at last they quieted down.

"Whether we like it or not, we're in it," he said simply. "There is nothing else to say. You have come to me, many of you, with rumors you have heard, and asked for the truth. Now you have the truth, and it's classified Top Secret and must not be divulged. You all know what this means. I will only add that in this matter there are to be no leaks whatsoever. I personally propose to see that any breach of this security is investigated with all the resources of the government and punished with the full penalty of the law. I declare this a matter of national emergency, and remind you that the penalty includes the death sentence when appropriate—and I say that in this case it is appropriate." He nibbled at his lower lip as though something tasted bad in his mouth, looking older than his years. He allowed no further discussion, and dismissed the meeting.

Half an hour later, in his private office, it was just Knefhausen and the President. Although presumably it was still broad daylight outside, all the Oval Office's lights were on; the steel plates on the windows kept out the sun, if not the distant sounds of the troubled city. "All right," said the President, "it's hit the fan. The next thing is the world will know it. I can postpone that a few weeks, maybe even a few months. I can't prevent it."

"I am grateful to you, Mr. President, for—"

"Shut up, Knefhausen. When I agreed to do this I took the risk of impeachment knowingly. Now I think the stakes are higher than that."

"Mr. Presidentl I must point out that at that time only three people knew the secret. It was not my decision that there should be more."

"I don't want speeches from you, and I won't accept recriminations. There is one thing I want from you, and that is an explanation. What the hell is this about mixing up narcotics and free love and so on?"

"Ah," said Knefhausen, "yes, you refer to the most recent communication from the Constitution. I agree completely. I have already dispatched, Mr. President, a strongly worded order. Because of the communications lag it will not be received for some months, but I assure you the matter will be corrected."

The President said bitterly, "I don't want any assurances, either. Do you watch television? I don't mean 'I Love Lucy' and ball games, I mean news. Do you know what sort of shape this country is in? The bonus marches in 1932, the race riots in 1967—they were nothing. Time was when we could call out the National Guard to put down disorder. Last week I had to call out the Army to use against three companies of the Guard. One more scandal and we're finished, Knefhausen, and this is a big one."

"The purposes are beyond reproach—"

"Your purposes may be. Mine are, I hope, or at least I try to tell myself that it was for the good of science and humanity I did this, and not so I would be in the history books as the President who contributed a major breakthrough. But what are the purposes of your friends on the Constitution? I agreed to eight martyrs, Knefhausen. I didn't agree to forty billion dollars out of the nation's pockets to give your eight young friends ten years of gang bangs and dope."

"Mr. President, I assure you this is only a temporary phase. I have instructed them to behave responsibly."

"And if they don't, what are you going to do about it?" The President, who never smoked, stripped a cigar, bit off the end and lit it. "My God," he said, shaking his head, "it's politicians who are supposed to be the manipulators, not scientists. You're acting like a tinpot Jehovah! You use human beings like laboratory rats, tricking them and in the end killing them."

It is not an easy thing to challenge a President in his Oval Office, but Knefhausen faced him stoutly. "All of that, yes," he agreed. "For a good end. You yourself, Mr. President, agreed that the end in this case justifies the, I will admit, not pleasant means, and in any case for such questions as this it is too late for you and me. Our ruse must be continued as long as possible."

"And when the people on the Constitution find out?"

"That is impossible," Knefhausen declared. "I give you my word on that. Not for a long time."

"And when they do?"

Knefhausen shrugged. "Then the experiment passes beyond our control," he said.