His Master's Voice (20 page)

These states, I think now, were a delusion. Today, of course, it is easier for me to see that not only was I incapable, impotent, but that the task was beyond the strength of any man. Then as now, I felt that the problem was not the type that would yield to a team assault; some one man would have to open that lock, casting off established habits of thought, some one man or no one. The apprehension of one's own powerlessness is certainly a sorry thing, and perhaps egoistic, too. It appears that I am seeking excuses. But if anywhere one ought to abandon his
amour propre
and forget the devil in his heart which worships success, I should think it would be in this matter. The feeling of isolation was at that time keen. The oddest thing is that that defeat, unequivocal as it was, left in my memory a taste of nobility, and that those hours, those weeks, are, when I think of them today, precious to me. I never imagined that this sort of thing could happen to me.

IN THE PUBLISHED
records and the books there is very little or no mention at all of what was my most "constructive" contribution to the Project, because it was decided, in order to avoid all kinds of trouble, to hush up my role in the "antigovernment conspiracy"—a conspiracy that, or so I read somewhere, could have become the "greatest crime," and it was no thanks to me that it did not. I proceed now to the account of my offense.

Through the early part of October, the heat did not let up—during the day, that is, for at night the temperature in the desert fell below freezing. I would stay inside all day, and in the evening, before it grew too chilly, I would go out for short walks, always careful to keep in sight the towers of the compound, because among the high dunes of the desert, as I was warned, one could easily get lost. This actually happened once to some technician, but he returned around midnight; the glow of the lights had shown him the way. I was new to the desert. It was not at all like what I had imagined from films or books. It was, at one and the same time, totally monotonous and remarkably varied. What attracted me the most was the sight of the moving dunes, those great slow-motion waves that with their sharp, splendid geometry gave shape to the perfect solutions realized by Nature in those places where the clinging force of the biosphere, sometimes impertinent, sometimes furiously stubborn, did not impinge upon the realm of the inanimate world.

Returning one evening from such a walk, I encountered—not by accident, as it turned out—Donald Prothero. A second-generation descendant of an old Cornish family, he was the most English of the Americans I knew.

Seated, at the Council, between the enormous Baloyne and the beanpole Dill, in front of a fidgeting Rappaport and our fashion plate, Eugene Albert Nye, he was a figure curious in that there was nothing curious about him. The personification of averageness: an ordinary face, slightly sallow, long in the English way, with pronounced eye sockets and a strong jaw, and a pipe permanently fixed in his mouth; a passionless voice, an unaffected placidity, an absence of any emphatic gesturing—only in this way, by negatives, can I present him. And yet a mind of the first order.

I confess that he made me uneasy, because I do not believe in human perfection, and people who have no quirks, tics, obsessions, the touch of some minor mania, or points on which they turn rabid—I suspect such people of systematic imposture (we judge others by ourselves) or of totally lacking character. Certainly, much depends on the side from which we get to know a man. If, as usually happened to me, I first became acquainted with someone through his work—which in my profession is extremely abstract—and therefore, as it were, from the most spiritual side, the impact of meeting that entirely physical organism, which I had pictured instinctively as a kind of Platonic emanation, was always a shock.

To observe how pure thought or lofty detachment sweats, blinks, digs in its ear, how it manages, with varying success, its own machinery, which, supporting the soul, so often gets in the soul's way—this has always been for me an iconoclastic treat, malicious through and through. I remember how once I was being driven by a famous philosopher who admitted to solipsism, and he got a flat tire. Interrupting his discourse on the phantasmagoria of illusion which is all existence, he set about—in the most ordinary way, even with grunts—jacking up the car and hauling out the spare. I looked on with childish delight, as if seeing Jesus Christ with a stuffed nose. Using the illusion of a wrench, he removed, one by one, the nonexistent nuts, then looked with despair at his hands covered with grease; the grease had no more substance than a dream, according to his doctrine—but somehow that did not enter his head.

As a child I honestly believed that there existed a category of perfect men; scientists, first and foremost, belonged in it, and among them the holiest had to be the university professors. Reality compelled me to part with such idealistic convictions.

Although I had known Donald for twenty years, there still seemed no getting around it: he really was the sort of scientist that only the most anachronistically enthusiastic individuals tended to believe in. Baloyne, also a great intellect, but a sinner as well, once pleaded with Donald—I recall—to come down to our level, at least on occasion (even once would do), by revealing some ugly secret about himself; and if that was impossible, to do something despicable that would make him more human in our eyes. But Donald only smiled from behind his pipe!

That evening, as we walked along a little valley between two rows of dunes, in the red light of the setting sun, and I was observing the projection of our shadows on the sand, whose grains—as in the paintings of the Impressionists—seemed to give off a lilac glow, like microscopic gas flames, Prothero began to tell me of his work on the "cold" nuclear reactions in Frog Eggs. I listened, out of politeness, and was surprised when he said that our situation reminded him of the Manhattan Project.

"Even if a chain reaction can be released in Frog Eggs on a large scale," I remarked, "the power of a hydrogen bomb, all the same, is technologically uncontrollable, so nothing, I think, threatens us from that quarter."

He then put away his pipe—an important sign. He reached in his pocket for a roll of film and handed it to me, open; the swollen red disk of the sun served as our light source. I knew enough of microphysics to recognize a series of pictures of ion tracks in a bubble chamber. Unhurriedly, standing next to me, he showed me several curious places. In the very center of the chamber was a tiny, pinhead-sized lump of Frog Eggs, and the star of a scattered nucleus, the trajectories of its fragments radiating outward, could be seen nearby—a millimeter or so away from the droplet of slime. I saw nothing peculiar in this—but explanations followed, and more photographs. Something impossible had taken place: even when the droplet was enclosed on all sides by a lead shell, the tiny stars of splitting atoms appeared in the chamber—outside that armor!

"The reaction is remote," Prothero concluded. "Energy disappears in one place, along with the smashed atom, which reappears in another place. Have you ever seen a magician put an egg in his pocket and produce it from his mouth? This is the same thing."

"Yes, but that is a trick!" I still did not, and did not want to, understand. "The atoms, in the course of their disintegration, jump through the shield?" I asked.

"No. They simply disappear in one place and reappear in another."

"But that violates the principle of conservation!"

"Not necessarily, because they do this very quickly—something flies in here, something flies out there, you see. The balance remains unchanged. And do you know what transports them in this miraculous fashion? A neutrino field. And one modulated, moreover, by the original emission—a kind of 'divine wind.'"

I knew that such an effect was impossible, but I trusted Donald. If anyone in our hemisphere knew nuclear reactions, he did. I asked about the range of the effect. Yes, already, even before I was aware of it, came evil thoughts.

"I do not know what the range
might
be. It is, in any case, not less than the diameter of the chamber I used—six centimeters. I did this also at Wilson—twenty-five centimeters."

"You can control the reaction? Determine the endpoints of these 'changes of location'?"

"With the greatest precision. The terminus is a function of the phase—of where the field reaches a maximum."

I tried to understand what sort of process this was. The nuclei decayed within Frog Eggs, but the tracks of the decay simultaneously burst into view outside it. Donald said that the phenomenon lay beyond the frontiers of our physics; from the standpoint of physics, it violated all the laws. Quantum effects on such a macroscopic scale are not permitted—not within the pale of our theories. Gradually he spoke more freely. He had hit upon it by accident, while trying with his partner, McHill—blindly, really—to repeat Romney's experiment, but in a physical variation. He subjected Frog Eggs to the radiation of the emission, not knowing whether this would yield any result. It did. This happened right before he had to leave for Washington. In his one-week absence McHill constructed, according to their joint plan, a larger apparatus, one that would allow them to extend and focus the reaction to a radius of several meters.

Several meters. I thought that I had not heard him right. Donald, with the face of a man who has been told that he has cancer but is controlling himself phenomenally, said that nothing in principle stood in the way of their building an apparatus that would permit the effect to be increased millions of times—in strength and in range.

I asked who knew of this. He had told no one, not even the Science Council. He explained his motives. He had complete confidence in Baloyne, but did not want to place him in a difficult position, because Yvor was, among us, the one directly responsible to the Administration for all the research. And, that being the case, Donald could not then tell anyone else on the Council. He could vouch for McHill. To what extent, I asked. He looked at me, then shrugged. He was too intelligent not to see that a game was beginning, with the stakes so high that no man now could be vouched for. Although it had grown fairly cold, I was covered with sweat as the conversation continued. Donald told me why he had gone to Washington. He had written a memorandum-petition having to do with the Project and, without informing anyone of this, submitted it to Rush, and afterward took off to hear the answer; Rush had summoned him. There Donald explained to the Administration how harmful the secrecy of our research was. He argued that even if we acquired knowledge that increased our military potential, this would only augment the global threat. The present state was based on a fluid equilibrium, and regardless of in whose favor the scales tipped, if that tipping was too violent it could make the opposing side resort to desperate measures. The balance was preserved by the fact that every step taken by one side was parried by the other. So proceeded the arms race, and the global maneuvering. Although I was a little put out that Donald had not consulted even with me, I kept this to myself and asked him only what sort of answer he had received. But I could easily guess.

"I spoke with a general. He told me that they were perfectly aware of the truth of what I had written, but that we had to continue to act as before, because we did not know whether or not the other side was conducting the exact same research as web … so that our eventual discoveries would not be disturbing the balance, but, on the contrary, restoring it. I got myself into a nice mess!" he concluded.

I assured him, though I knew better, that they would simply file his petition away. But this did not put him at ease.

"I wrote it," he said, "when I had nothing up my sleeve, absolutely nothing. In the meantime, while the petition already lay on Rush's desk, I hit on this effect. I even thought of withdrawing the miserable document, but that really would have looked suspicious to them! Well, you can imagine now how they will be keeping an eye on me!"

He meant our friend Nye. And I did not doubt that Nye had received appropriate instructions. I asked Donald what he thought about discontinuing the experiment, and disassembling the apparatus or simply destroying it. I knew, alas, what his reply would be.

"One cannot unmake discoveries. And, then, there is McHill. He will follow my lead while he is in this with me and we are working together, but I cannot say what he would do if I were to take the course you mention. And even if I could be sure of him, all that would be gained is a certain delay. The biophysicists have already set up their research plan for the coming year. I saw a rough draft of it. They want to do something similar to what I did. They have chambers, they have good nucleonics people—like Pickering—they have an inverter; they want to analyze the effects of microdetonations in the monomolecular layers of Frog Eggs, in the second quarter of the year. The equipment is all automatic. They will take a few thousand photographs a day, and the effect will stand out like a sore thumb."

"Next quarter," I said.

"Next quarter," he repeated.

What was there to add? We returned in silence across the dunes; barely any light was given by the rim of the red sun sinking below the horizon. I remember that as I walked I saw the surrounding scene with such clarity, and it seemed to me so beautiful, it was as if I would be dying soon. Before we went our separate ways I wanted to ask Donald why he had chosen
me
. But I did not. There was really nothing that remained to be said.

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