His Master's Voice (25 page)

I was not aware of the state that I was in until I found that I could not identify the symbols, though I was perfectly familiar with them—I stared stupidly at the columns of figures, trying to collect my thoughts. When finally the significance of the coordinates of the four runs of the experiment sank in, I felt a weakness in my knees.

By the wall was a stool. I sat on it and once again, carefully and slowly, went over the results. The paper suddenly went gray; something obscured my vision. This weakness lasted only a few seconds. When it passed, I was covered with a clammy sweat. Donald at last noticed that something strange was happening to me, but I said that I was better now.

He started to take back the notes, but I did not let him. I still needed them. The greater the energy was, the less accurate the localization of the explosion. Although four trials did not allow statistical analysis, the relation hit one in the face. Probably for charges over a microton (we cheerfully worked in units of nuclear ballistics) the error factor would equal half the distance between the point of detonation and the target. Three, at most four, more tests would be enough now to determine this exactly, and enough to make the uselessness of TX as a weapon a certainty. But I was already certain, because suddenly, with extraordinary clarity, I recalled all the preceding results as well as my wrestling to come up with a model for a phenomenological formula. The relation appeared before me, the true formula for the whole thing, incredibly simple; it was nothing but the transposition, to the TX effect, of the uncertainty principle: the greater the energy, the less the accuracy of the focus, and the less the energy, the more sharply one could focus the effect. At distances on the order of a kilometer, it would be possible to focus the effect to a target area the size of a square meter, exploding only a handful of atoms. No powerful blow, no destroying force, nothing.

When I lifted my eyes, I saw that Donald knew also. A few words sufficed. There was only one problem: further experimentation, at energies increased by an order of magnitude—necessary to put an end, once and for all, to the career of TX—would have to be dangerous, because the indeterminacy of the place where the energy would be released, its shifting—completely unpredictable—would imperil the experimenters. What we needed was some special proving ground, a desert … and an apparatus on far remote control. This, too, Donald had thought of. We said little; over us hung a naked, dusty light bulb. McHill, all this time, did not utter a word. It seemed to me that the man was not so much shocked as—almost—disappointed; but perhaps I am doing him an injustice.

We went through everything again, with extreme care; my thinking was so clear, I was able on the spot to trace out the dependence, extrapolating for even greater charges, those in the kiloton range, and then going in the opposite direction—for our previous results. The agreement was to three decimal places. At one point, Donald looked at his watch. It was already five. He threw the main switch to cut off the power from all the units, and together we left the laboratory. Outside there was daylight. The air was cold as crystal. McHill walked away, but we stood awhile in front of the hotel, in an unreal stillness and an isolation so complete, it was as if no one but us was left alive. The thought made me shudder—but now only in retrospect, a reflex of memory. I wanted to say something to Donald, something that would wrap it all up, that would express my relief, my joy, but suddenly I realized that I felt no joy. I was only empty, terribly exhausted, indifferent, as though nothing would or could happen now. I do not know whether he felt the same way. We shook hands, a thing we usually did not do, and went our separate ways. If someone lunges with a knife and the blade is deflected by hidden armor, he who struck the ineffective blow can take no credit.

WE DECIDED TO
present the story of the TX effect at the Science Council, but after three days; a little time was needed to organize the results properly, put together more detailed observational records, and make enlargements of selected photographs. But the very next day, at noon, I went to Yvor. He took the news remarkably calmly; I had underestimated his self-control. Most of all he was offended that we had not let him in on the secret until the end. I said many things to him on this score, finding myself in a position opposite the one I had been in upon my arrival at the compound: that time, he had done his best to "explain" my prior exclusion. But this matter was of incomparably greater importance.

I used every conceivable argument to sweeten the pill—to the accompaniment of his grumbling. For a while he held a grudge, understandably, though in the end he came to appreciate our reasons, I think. In the meantime, Donald, in the same private way, informed Dill, so that the only one who found out about everything at the meeting was Eugene Albert Nye. As much as I detested the man, I had to admire him: he did not bat an eye during Donald's presentation, and I watched him the entire time. The man was a born politician, though not a diplomat—because a diplomat should not be vindictive, whereas Nye, almost a year after that meeting, when the Project had concluded its existence, with the help of a third party, a certain journalist, gave to the press a truckload of material in which the action Donald and I had taken, put in a certain light with typical commentary, occupied the place of honor. But for Nye, the matter never would have taken on the sensational aspect that obliged various high-placed people, among them Rush and McMahon, to come to our rescue.

As the reader can see, if Donald and I were guilty of anything, it was of illogic, because in one way or another our secret research eventually had to be grist for the Project's official mill. But the whole thing was depicted as an extremely harmful piece of bungling, as a heinous attempt to sabotage the Project: instead of going immediately to the qualified experts (which meant the Army's ballistic-missile people), we had puttered about like do-it-yourself handymen, on a small scale, thereby giving the "other side" an opportunity to overtake us—and get the jump on us, fatally.

I have skipped ahead like this to show that Nye was not so innocent as he appeared. The only thing that he allowed himself, during that notorious meeting, was to look several times over his glasses at Baloyne, whom without question he suspected of having a hand in our conspiracy. We tried to word our report in such a way that the secrecy of the work would seem dictated by the exigencies of methodology as well as by the uncertainty regarding success (by "success," of course, we meant the thing we most dreaded); but Nye was not taken in, not for a minute, by these justifications.

Then a discussion got under way. Dill observed, rather unexpectedly, that had TX worked out, it might have brought peace to the world and not annihilation, because it would have put an end to the doctrine of DEW ("distant early warning"), which was based on the interval of time between the firing of the offender's intercontinental rockets and their appearance on the defender's radar screens at the apogees of suborbital flight. A weapon that destroyed at a distance of the Earth's diameter and with the speed of light ruled out any early warning; it would place both sides in the situation of two men holding guns to each other's temples. And that could lead to global disarmament. But such shock treatment could just as well end altogether differently, Donald pointed out in reply.

Baloyne meanwhile felt himself the object of Nye's suspicion—and then began the conclusive collapse of the Council, which could not be healed or patched for the remainder of the Project's existence. Nye, from that point on, dropped the pose that he was some sort of neutral ambassador or observer from the Pentagon; this showed itself in various ways, none of them pleasant. For example, the invasion of Army specialists in the nuclear and ballistic fields, which commenced twenty-four hours after this meeting, was already in progress—like an occupation of enemy territory, with helicopters descending like locusts—when Nye telephoned Baloyne to inform him of the fact. At the same time, the visit of the notables from the Alter-Project was postponed. I was absolutely certain that the Army's nucleonics people, whom I did not consider scientists in any sense of the word, would only confirm our findings with tests on the proving-ground scale. But the way the data were grabbed out of our hands, along with the apparatus, film, and lab notebooks—whatever illusions I had left, that laid them to rest.

Donald, barely tolerated in his own laboratory, bore this philosophically, and even explained to me that it could hardly be otherwise, because if it
were
otherwise, the only appearances that would be kept up would be those that did not really matter … since such actions were the logical consequence of the world situation. And so on. In a sense he was right. But an individual came to me in the morning (I was still in bed) and asked for the sets of calculations. I inquired if he had a search warrant, and if he had come to arrest me. This restrained him somewhat, and I was able at least to brush my teeth, shave, and dress while he waited out in the hall. I had spoken, of course, from a sense of complete helplessness. But I repeated to myself that actually I ought to be glad, for what would have been the state of my soul if I had had to hand over calculations that promised
finis terrarum
?

We loitered about the compound like flies while the Army dumped from the sky its seemingly endless personnel and provisions. This operation most certainly had not been improvised at the last minute; they must have had it in readiness for a while, in some outlined form, not knowing, after all, what would pop out of the Project. Three weeks were enough for them to begin the appropriate series of microton blasts. I was not at all surprised that we learned of the results only thanks to leaks from the lower-echelon technicians who were in contact with our people. When the wind was right, the explosions could be heard all over the compound. Their negligible strength, on the payload range, meant there was practically no fallout. No special safety measures were taken. No one approached us, about anything; we were ignored, as if we did not exist. Rappaport said that this was because Donald and I had violated the rules of the game. Perhaps. Nye disappeared for days on end, commuting at supersonic speed between Washington, the compound, and the test site.

In the beginning of December, when the storms came, the installations in the desert were dismantled and packed away; the fourteen-ton helicopter-cranes, the passenger helicopters, and all the other hovercraft one day lifted off, and as suddenly and efficiently as it had arrived, the Army left us, taking with it—so I heard—a few dozen of the scientific-technical staff who were exposed to high levels of radiation in the last of the experiments, during which had been detonated—according to the rumors—a charge equivalent to a kiloton of TNT.

And then, as if an enchantment had been lifted from us—more or less as in "Sleeping Beauty"—we all grew active, and in a short time a great many things took place. Baloyne submitted his resignation; Donald Prothero and I demanded to be released from the Project; Rappaport, although very reluctantly, I believe, nevertheless followed suit, out of a feeling of loyalty. Only Dill did not resort to any demonstration; he advised us, in fact, to march around the compound waving appropriate signs and chanting. He did not take our action seriously, and I cannot deny that he had a point.

Our rebellious quadrumvirate was immediately whisked to Washington. We were spoken to individually and together; besides Rush and McMahon, and our general (whom I personally met for the first time), the President's science advisers also put in an appearance, and it turned out that our continued presence in the Project was absolutely vital. Baloyne—that diplomat, that politician—said at one of these meetings that, seeing as they had placed full confidence in Nye and less in him, they could let Nye now recruit better people and run the Project himself. They treated us, when such dicta fell thick and fast, like ill-tempered, spoiled, but beloved children. I do not know about the others, but I genuinely had my fill of the Project.

One evening Baloyne came to my hotel room; that day he had had a private
tête-à-tête
with Rush, and he told me the reason for the constant persuasion. The advisers had come to the conclusion that TX was only a misfire in a beginning series, that actually it pointed clearly to the fruitfulness of further research, and such research was now our be-all and end-all, a matter of life and death. Though I considered this reasoning to be nonsense, I realized, after a little reflection, that we could actually return, provided the Administration met our conditions, which then and there we began, Baloyne and I, to draw up. I knew that if the work went on without me, I would have no peace with myself and could not go back to my pure—that is, unsullied—mathematics, because my belief in a safety mechanism that the Senders had placed upon the stellar code was really only a belief and not certain knowledge. I put this more succinctly to Baloyne: Let us go by Pascal's aphorism about the frail reed. If we cannot oppose, we will at least know.

The four of us, putting our heads together, figured out why the Project had not been handed over to the Army. The Army had been raising its own special breed of scientist—under the table—the type that would carry out basic assignments and be capable of limited autonomy. When he knew where to start and where to finish, the Army scientist did excellent work. But cosmic civilizations, their motives, the life-causing effects of the signal, the relation between these effects and the signal's content—all this, for him, was black magic. "Yes, and for us as well," remarked the ever-caustic Rappaport. We agreed, finally, to continue with the work. We got our way: Eugene Albert Nye, L.L.D., vanished from the Project (that was one of our conditions). He was immediately replaced, however, by another civilian, a Mr. Hugh Fenton. In this way we exchanged an evil for an evil. The budget was increased, the people from the Alter-Project (the existence of which we also brandished in the faces of the slightly abashed men in command) were incorporated into our research teams, and the Alter-Project itself presumably ceased to exist—but that was not true, either, because according to the official version, it never had existed. So, then, having vented our spleen, having deliberated together, having set conditions that were to be followed to the letter, we returned "home"—back to the desert; and thus began, with the New Year already past, the next and final chapter of His Master's Voice.