His Master's Voice (19 page)

One has only to look through the history of science to reach the most probable conclusion: that the shape of things to come is determined by things we do not know today, and by what is unforeseeable. The situation has been complicated in a new way by a "mirror
pas de deux
," since one side of the world has been obliged to copy, as accurately and as rapidly as possible, everything that has been done by the other in the field of armaments. And often it is impossible to tell who takes a certain step first, and who merely imitates it faithfully. The imagination of humanity has become, in a sense, frozen in place, transfixed by the vision of atomic annihilation—which, however, has been sufficiently evident to both sides for them to abort its materialization. The fascination with scenarios of the thermonuclear apocalypse, written by strategists and scientific advisory councils, has paralyzed minds to such an extent that no attention is paid to other—and who knows if ultimately not more dangerous—possibilities hidden in progress. Because the state of equilibrium is continually being undermined by new discoveries and inventions.

In the seventies, for a while, the ruling doctrine was the "indirect economic attrition" of all potential enemies; Secretary of Defense Kayser expressed this with the maxim "The thin starve before the fat lose weight." The competition-duel in nuclear payloads gave way to a missile race, and that in turn led to the building of more and more expensive "antimissile missiles." The next step in the escalation was the possibility of constructing "laser shields," a stockade of gamma lasers which would line the perimeter of the country with destroyer rays; the cost of installing such a system was set at four hundred to five hundred billion dollars. After this move in the game, one could next expect the putting into orbit of giant satellites equipped with gamma lasers, whose swarm, passing over the territory of the enemy, could consume it utterly with ultraviolet radiation in a fraction of a second. The cost of that belt of death would exceed, it was estimated, seven trillion dollars. This war of economic attrition—through the production of increasingly expensive weaponry that thereby placed a severe strain on the whole organism of government—although seriously planned, could not be carried out, because the building of super- and hyperlasers turned out to be insurmountably difficult for the current technology. This time merciful Nature, her own inherent mechanisms, saved us from ourselves; but this was, after all, only a fortunate accident.

Such was the global thinking of the politicians and the strategy of science dictated by it. Meanwhile, the entire historical tradition of civilization had begun to come apart on us, like the cargo of a ship rocked too violently. The great historico-philosophical concepts impaired at their foundations, the great syntheses based upon values inherited from the past, were turning into brontosaurs doomed to extinction; they would be shattered on the unknown shore of the next discoveries to come into view. There was now no longer any power, or any monstrousness, hidden in the bowels of the material world that would not be dragged out onto the scene as a weapon the moment it showed itself. So in reality we were playing not with Russia, but with Nature herself, because it was Nature and not the Russians that determined what discovery would next be bestowed upon us; and it would have been madness indeed to think that we were the apple of Nature's eye and that she would provide us only with those things which would promote the survival of the species. Any chance of the appearance, on the scientific horizon, of a discovery that would guarantee our total supremacy on the planetary scale would spur efforts and investments, because whoever reached that goal first would become the undisputed leader of the globe. People commonly spoke of this. But how could one believe that the weakened opponent would submit passively to the yoke imposed on him? No, this entire doctrine was self-contradictory, amounting to, at one and the same time, the destruction of the existing balance of forces—and its constant renewal.

We found ourselves, as a civilization, in a technological trap, where our fate was now to be decided entirely by the arrangement of certain relationships, not yet known to us, between levels of energy and matter. When I said such things, I was usually called a defeatist, especially among the scientists who were renting their consciences out to the State Department. Humanity, in a mutual clutching at hair and throats, as long as it went from camels and mules to chariots, carts, coaches, and to airplanes, steam engines, tanks, could still count on surviving—by breaking the fetters of this race. In the middle of the century a total fear paralyzed politics, but did not change it; the strategy remained the same. Days were put before months, years over centuries, but the reverse should have been done; the idea of seeing to the welfare of the species should have been written on the standards; the technological ascent should have been bridled, to keep it from becoming a fall.

In the meantime, the material gap widened between the Superpowers and the Third World—a gap called by the economists an "expanding harmony." Responsible personages, holding in their hands the fates of others, said that they realized that such a state could not go on indefinitely; but they did nothing, as if waiting for a miracle. It was necessary to coordinate progress but not to trust in it as in a machine, an accelerating automatic process. Surely it was madness, this faith that to do everything that was technologically possible was to act wisely and safely; surely we could not rely on a miraculous helping hand from Nature, more and more portions of which, turned into fuel for bodies and machines, we had incorporated in our civilization. And yet this incorporation may turn out to be a Trojan horse, a sugar-coated poison that poisons not because the world wishes us ill, but because we have proceeded blindly.

I could not ignore this background in my work. I had to keep it in mind as I pondered the two-sidedness of the message. The diplomats in their stiff tuxedos awaited, with a pleasant trembling in the knees, the Moment when at last we would be done with our unofficial, less important, preliminary labor, and when they, all in medals and stars, could fly off to the stars to proffer their letters of authorization and to exchange notes of protocol with a billion-year-old civilization. We were only to build the bridge for them. They would cut its ribbon.

But what really was the situation? In some corner of the Galaxy there appeared beings who, realizing the phenomenal rarity of life, decided to intervene in the Cosmogony—and correct it. The heirs of that ancient civilization possessed a Moloch of knowledge, beyond our conception, if they were able so precisely to combine a life-causing impulse with the utmost noninterference in every local path of evolution. The causal signal was not a Word turned to Flesh, because it gave absolutely no designation for what was to arise. The operation was, in its principle, very simple, but repeated over a time that was like an eternity; it represented two permanent riverbanks widely separated, between which the process of speciation was to proceed under its own power. The support was given with the greatest caution possible. No specifications, no concrete directives, no instructions of a physical or chemical nature—nothing other than the reinforcement of thermodynamically improbable states.

The probability intensifier was inexpressibly weak and worked only by virtue of the fact that, omnipresent, it penetrated every obstacle throughout an undetermined portion of the Galaxy. (Or perhaps the whole Galaxy? We did not know how many others of these invisible beams they were sending out.) This was not a single act but a presence whose permanence rivaled the stars themselves; yet, at the same time, it ceased the instant the desired process got under way. It ceased because the radiation's influence on formed organisms was virtually nil.

The duration of the emission frightened me. Yes, and it was possible, too, that the Senders were no longer among the living; that the process set in motion by their astroengineers within a star or group of stars would continue to run as long as the energy of the solar transmitters held out. The sneaking secrecy of our research seemed to me—by comparison—criminal. What mattered was not a discovery, not a mountain of discoveries, but the opening of our eyes to the world. So far we had been blind puppies. In the darkness of the Galaxy shined an intelligence, an intelligence that did not attempt to impose its presence on us; on the contrary, it concealed itself with great care.

The hypotheses popular before the existence of the Project seemed to me incredibly shallow; they ricocheted back and forth between the pole of pessimism, which called the
silentium universi
a natural state, and the pole of the mindless optimism that expected announcements clearly and slowly spelled out, as if civilizations scattered among the stars would communicate with one another like children in kindergarten. Yet another myth has bitten the dust, I thought, and yet another truth has ascended overhead—and, as is usually the case with truths, it is too much for us.

There remained the second, semantic, side of the signal. A child may understand separate sentences taken from a work of philosophy, but the whole he will not grasp. Our situation was similar. A child may be enchanted by the content of a sentence here, a sentence there—and we, too, marveled at small fragments that had been deciphered. Having pored long over the stellar text, communing with it through repeated efforts, renewed attempts, I grew at home with it in a curious way, and more than once I saw—although this was purely intuitive, with the feeling that the thing towered above me like a mountain—I saw, always obscurely, the magnificence of its structure. Thus I had exchanged, as it were, a mathematical perception for an aesthetic sense; but perhaps what took place was a merging of the two.

Every sentence in a book means something, even when pulled out of context; but within that context it mingles with the meanings of other sentences, of those that precede it and of those that follow. From such permeation, accretion, and focal fusion emerges finally the idea, frozen in time, that is the work. In the stellar code what mattered was not so much the meaning of the elements, of the "pseudo sentences," as their
purpose
, which I was unable to divine. But the code possessed an internal harmony, a purely mathematical harmony, the sort that is revealed in a great cathedral even to one who does not understand the cathedral's purpose, or know the laws of statics and the canons of architecture, and is ignorant even of the styles embodied, harnessed in the stone. I was that ignorant, open-mouthed spectator. The text was unusual in that it had no "purely local" properties. A keystone without an arch and a weight above is not a keystone; here is nonlocalness in architecture. The synthesis of Frog Eggs was preceded by the tearing, from the code, of its elements, which were then assigned atomic and stereochemical "meanings."

There was a sort of vandalism in this, as if on the basis of
Moby Dick
one were to begin slaughtering whales and rendering their blubber. It is possible to do this; the slaughtering is described in
Moby Dick
, although in a completely reversed, diametric way. But one can disregard that, and cut into pieces and rearrange as one pleases. And so, for all the wisdom behind it, was the code
that
defenseless? I was soon to learn that the situation could be worse; my fears would receive new fuel. Therefore, I do not disown in retrospect the sentimentality of these remarks.

Certain portions of the code, as frequency analysis indicated, appeared to repeat themselves like words in sentences, but each different neighborhood produced minute discrepancies in the shape of the impulses, discrepancies that were not taken into account by our
binary
informational version. The impatient empiricists, who could (after all) point to the treasures locked in their "silver vaults," insisted that these had to be distortions caused by the journey of the neutrino streams through many parsecs of space, a phenomenon—negligible, at that, considering—of the signal's desynchronization, its smearing. I decided to check this. I requested that a new recording be made of the signal—or at least of a large piece of it—and I compared the new text, received from the astrophysicists, with the corresponding segments from the five successive and independent results of the past reception.

It was strange that no one yet had done this precisely. If, in examining someone's signature for authenticity, increasingly powerful magnifying glasses are used, eventually the enlarged lines that are the ink marks on the paper begin to disintegrate—into elements spread out along the separate fibers, thick as rope, of cellulose; and it is impossible to determine just where, in the spectrum of magnification, the influence of the person writing ceases, the shape given to the letters by his "character," and where begins the realm of the action of statistical movements, the slight tremors of the hand, of the pen, the unevenness in the flow of ink, factors over which the person writing has no control. Still, one can make a determination, by comparing a series of signatures—a series, and not merely two, because then what is a constant, a regularity, will stand out and be distinguished from what represents the effect of completely variable fluctuations.

I was able to show that the "smearing," the "desynchronization," the "diffusion" of the signal lay wholly in the imagination of my adversaries. The accuracy of the repetitions reached the very limit of the resolution of the recording instrument used by the astrophysicists—and, because it was ridiculous to assume that the text had been transmitted with a setting for an instrument of precisely that calibration, this meant that the accuracy was greater than our ability to test it. So we could not know the maximum performance of the transmitter.

This caused something of a commotion. From then on I was called "the prophet of the Lord" or "the crier in the wilderness." Thus I worked, toward the end of September, in increasing solitude. There were moments, particularly at night, when between my wordless meditating and the text a bond of kinship was established, as if I had already grasped, almost, its totality, and in a sudden breathlessness, as before a bodiless leap, I sensed the other shore, but my utmost efforts were always insufficient.