His Master's Voice (21 page)

Those were awful days, and the nights were perhaps worse, because it was then that I turned the whole matter over and over in my head. Donald needed a bit more time to set up the apparatus. McHill went to work on that, while Donald and I tackled the theoretical analysis of the data, though of course this meant only their phenomenological formulation. We had not arranged to work together—the collaboration seemed to happen by itself. For the first time in my life I was obliged to apply to my calculations a certain "conspiratorial minimum"; that is, I destroyed all notes, always cleared the memory in the computer, and refrained from telephoning Donald even in neutral matters, since the sudden increase in our contacts could also attract unwanted attention. I was a little afraid of the perceptiveness of Baloyne and Rappaport, but we were seeing each other less often. Yvor had a multitude of things to do in connection with the approaching visit of the influential Senator McMahon, a man of great merit and a friend of Rush; and Rappaport at that time had got himself conscripted by the information theorists.

As a member of the Council—one of the Big Five, though "without portfolio"—I did not belong, not even formally, to any group, and so I was master of my time. The long nights I spent at the main computer, therefore, did not draw notice; besides, I had done much the same previously, though for other reasons. It turned out that McMahon would be coming before Donald could finish assembling the apparatus. Not wanting to place any specifying orders through the Project administration, Donald simply borrowed the devices he needed from other groups—which also was not an uncommon practice. But he had to think of something for the rest of his people to do, some task that would not seem unreasonable and raise questions.

Exactly why we felt we had to hurry with the experiment, it is hard for me to say. We hardly ever spoke about the consequences that would follow a positive (really, a negative) result of any large-scale test; but I confess that in the wanderings of my mind before sleep, seeking a way out, I considered even the possibility of declaring myself dictator of the planet, or seizing that power in a duumvirate with Donald—for the common good, of course, though we know that practically everyone in history has striven for the common good, and we know what such striving has become. A man standing at Donald's apparatus could in fact threaten all armies and countries with annihilation. However, I did not treat the idea seriously. It was not that I lacked the courage of desperation—in my opinion there was nothing now to lose—but I was quite sure that such an attempt would end, inevitably, in a cataclysm. Any such step could not bring peace to Earth—and I only mention this fantasy to show my state of mind then.

These events—and their sequel—have been described innumerable times, all in distorted versions. The scientists who understood our qualms or even personally sympathized with us—Baloyne, for one—presented the matter as if we had acted in accordance with the dictates of proper Project methodology, or at least as if we had no intention whatever of hiding our results. On the other hand, the tabloids (e.g., the well-known serial exposé by Jack Slezar, "The HMV Conspiracy"), using materials provided by our old friend Eugene Albert Nye, painted Donald and me as traitors, enemy agents. That this hue and cry did not bring us, the authors of the vile plot, before the avenging tribunal of some Congressional hearing, we owed to the favorable official versions, to the behind-the-scenes support of Rush, and, finally, to the fact that the business was, by the time it reached the public, rather stale.

True, I did not escape some unpleasant conversations with certain political figures. To them I repeated the same thing: all contemporary conflicts I considered to be
temporary
phenomena, as the reigns of Alexander the Great and Napoleon were temporary. Every world crisis could be viewed in strategic terms, as long as the consequence of that approach was not our potential destruction as a biological species. But when the fate of the species became one of the members of the equation, the choice had to be automatic, a foregone conclusion, and appeals to the American way, the patriotic spirit, to democracy, or anything else lost all meaning. Whoever was of a different opinion was, as far as I was concerned, a candidate for executioner of humanity. The crisis in the Project had passed, but there would be others. The march of technology would disturb the balance of our world, and nothing would save us if we failed to draw practical lessons from this crisis.

The promised Senator finally arrived with his entourage and was received with all due honors; he turned out to be a man of tact, because he did not enter into little chats with us, the usual "palavering" between white man and savage. With the new fiscal year and the budget much in mind, Baloyne wanted the Senator to be as well disposed as possible toward the work and achievements of the Project, so, trusting most in his own powers of diplomacy, he tried to monopolize McMahon. McMahon, however, cleverly slipped out of his grasp and invited me to have a talk. As I found out later, among the initiated in Washington I passed for the "leader of the opposition," and the Senator wished to hear my
votum separatum
. But I had no idea of this at dinner. Baloyne, cannier in this area of affairs and games, kept trying to give me the right cues, but since the Senator sat between us, Baloyne was confined to making faces that were supposed to be, at one and the same time, eloquent of meaning, discreet, and reprimanding. He had omitted previously to give me instructions, but now itched to amend that, and as we rose from the table he prepared to leap over to my side; but McMahon cordially put an arm around me and led me to his suite.

He offered me a very good Martell, which he had probably brought with him, because I did not recall seeing it in our hotel restaurant. He conveyed greetings from mutual acquaintances, jokingly expressed his regret that he could not personally benefit from the works that had brought me fame; then suddenly, but as if carelessly, he asked whether the code had or had not been solved. I had him now.

Our conversation took place in private; the Senator's entire contingent was being conducted through those laboratories we called "the tour."

"Yes and no," I replied. "Are you able to establish contact with a two-year-old child? Certainly, if you intentionally address it. But what will the child comprehend of your speech about the budget on the Senate floor?"

"Nothing," he said. "But, then, why do you say yes and no, if it is only no?"

"Because we do know something. You have seen our 'exhibits'…"

"I heard about your proof. You showed that the letter is a description of some kind of object, right? This Frog Eggs of yours therefore is a part of that object—am I correct?"

"Senator," I said, "please do not take offense if what I say is insufficiently clear. I can do no better. What seems, to the layman, the most incomprehensible thing in our work—or, rather, in our lack of success so far—boils down to this, that we supposedly 'cracked' a part of the 'code,' but then came up against a wall, while specialists in cryptanalysis insist that if a code is cracked in part, then the rest of the work has to be smooth sailing. True?"

He only nodded; I saw that he was listening carefully.

"There exist, speaking in the most general way, two kinds of language known to us. There are ordinary languages, which man makes use of—and the languages not made by man. In such a language organisms speak to organisms. I have in mind the so-called genetic code. This code is not a variety of natural language, because it not only contains information about the structure of the organism, but also is able, by itself, to transform that information into the very organism. The code, then, is acultural. In order to understand the natural language of people, one must ultimately become acquainted, at least a little, with their culture. Whereas, in order to know a genetic code, one need not have an acquaintance with any sort of cultural factor. For that purpose it suffices to have pertinent knowledge from the realm of physics, chemistry, and so on."

"Then the fact that you nevertheless succeeded, in part, shows that the letter is written in a language similar to the language of genetics."

"If that were all there was to it, we would be home free. The reality is worse, because it is, as usual, more complex. The difference between a 'cultural language' and an 'acultural language' is not an absolute thing, unfortunately. Our faith in the absoluteness of that difference belongs to a whole series of illusions that we find extremely difficult to give up. The fact that I was able to work out the mathematical proof that you referred to shows only that the letter was written in a language that does not belong to the category of the language we are now using. We do not know of languages beyond the genetic code and natural languages, but that does not mean there are none. I believe such 'other languages' exist and that the letter was composed in one of them."

"And what is this 'other language' like?"

"I can convey that to you only in a general way. Let me simplify. Organisms, in evolution, 'communicate' by 'uttering' certain sentences, which are genotypes, and the 'words' in them correspond to the chromosomes. But when a scientist presents to you the structural model of a genotype, you are no longer dealing with an 'acultural code,' because the scientist has translated the code of genetics into the language of symbols—chemical symbols, let us say. Now, to go straight to the heart of the matter, we begin to suspect that an 'acultural language' is something more or less like Kant's 'thing-in-itself.' One can fully grasp neither the code nor the thing. What comes from the culture and what comes from 'nature'—or from 'the world itself'—appear, when we examine any utterance whatsoever, as a two-component 'mixture.' In the language of the Merovingians, or in the political slogans of the Republican Party, the percentage of the 'culture' ingredient is very high, and what does not depend on culture—the ingredient 'straight from the world'—is present only in small quantities. In the language used by physics, we have, you could say, the opposite: there is much of 'what is natural,' of what comes from 'nature itself,' and little of what has been shaped by culture. But a state of complete 'acultural' purity in principle cannot be achieved. The idea that, in sending to another civilization an envelope containing models of atoms, it would be possible to eradicate from such a letter all traces of culture—that idea is based on an illusion. The trace can be greatly reduced, but no one, not in the entire Cosmos, is or ever will be able to reduce it to zero."

"The letter is written in an 'acultural' language, but still possesses an element of the culture of the Senders. Is that right? Is this where the difficulty lies?"

"Where one of the difficulties lies. The Senders differ from us both in culture and in knowledge, and let us call that knowledge scientific. For this reason the difficulty is at least two-level. We cannot divine their culture—not now, and not, I believe, in a thousand years. They must know this perfectly well. Therefore they have sent the sort of information for whose deciphering no knowledge of their culture is required. That is almost definite."

"And so the cultural factor should present no obstacle?"

"Senator, we do not even know
what
is presenting the obstacle to us. We have evaluated the entire letter with respect to its complexity. The complexity is such that it corresponds roughly to a class of systems known to us—social and biological. We have no theory of social systems, thus we were forced to use, as models 'placed against' the letter, genotypes—or, rather, not the genotypes themselves, but the mathematical apparatus employed in the study of them. We learned that an object even more similar to the code is a living cell—or a whole living organism. From which it does not follow that the letter is actually a kind of genotype, but only that out of all the things known to us which, for comparison, we 'set against' the code, the genotype is the most helpful. Do you see the tremendous risk this carries with it?"

"Not exactly. It would seem that the only risk is that if the code is not, after all, a genotype, then your deciphering will not succeed. There is more?"

"We are proceeding like a man who looks for a lost thing not everywhere, but only beneath a lighted street lamp, because there it is bright. Have you ever seen a tape for an automatic piano—a player piano?"

"Of course. It comes in a roll, with perforations."

"By chance, a program tape for a digital computer might also fit into a player piano, and although the program has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with music—it might refer to some fifth-order equation—nevertheless, when it is put in the machine, it produces notes. And it might also happen that not all the notes thus produced will be in total chaos, but that here and there one will hear some musical phrase. Can you guess why I use this example?"

"I think I can. You believe that Frog Eggs is a 'musical phrase' caused by inserting in a player piano a tape that really belongs in a digital machine?"

"Yes. That is exactly what I believe. One who puts a digital tape in a player piano is making a mistake, and it is entirely possible that we have taken precisely such a mistake for success."

"Yes, but your two research teams, wholly independently of each other, produced Frog Eggs and Lord of the Flies—one and the same substance!"

"If you have a player piano in your house, and are unaware of the existence of digital computers, and the same is true of your neighbor, then, if you find some tape from a digital computer, it is very probable that both of you will do the same—you will conclude that the tape is meant for the player piano, because you possess no knowledge of other possibilities."

"I understand. This is, then, your hypothesis?"

"This is my hypothesis."

"You spoke of a tremendous risk. Where is it?"

"Substituting a computer tape for a player piano tape does not, obviously, involve risk; it is a harmless misunderstanding. But in our case it could be otherwise, and the consequences of a mistake could prove incalculable."