His Master's Voice (6 page)

I have been accused of being "counterproductive" because I constantly had my two cents' worth to stick in, and did so in the course of other people's reasonings, causing those to grind to a halt; whereas I introduced little of my own of any use, few ideas that "someone could do something with." Baloyne, though, speaks highly of me in the Congressional Report (not only out of the friendship that unites us, I hope), which may in part have stemmed from his position (administrative as well as scientific). In each particular research group different views, after a period of oscillation, converged to some collectively held opinion, but anyone who sat (as Baloyne did) on the Science Council saw clearly that the opinions of the various groups were often diametrically opposed. The organizational structure of the Project, with its mutual isolation of the different groups, I considered wise, because it prevented any kind of "epidemic of error." This informational quarantine, however, did have its negative aspects. But here I am entering into details—prematurely. It is time we went on to an account of the events.

WHEN BLADERGROEN, NORRIS
, and Shigubov's team discovered the inversion of the neutrino, a new chapter in astronomy was opened up, in the form of neutrino astrophysics. Overnight it became extremely fashionable; throughout the world people began to study the cosmic emission of these particles. The observatory on Mount Palomar installed one of the first apparatuses, a thing highly automated and with a resolution, for those days, of exceptional power. At this apparatus—more precisely, at the so-called neutrino inverter—there formed a line of eager scientists, and the director of the Observatory, who at that time was Professor Ryan, had his hands full with astrophysicists, young ones in particular, each of whom felt that
his
research project should be given priority.

Among the fortunate few was a duo of such youngsters, Halsey and Mahoun, both ambitious and quite capable (I knew them, though only briefly); they recorded the maxima of the neutrino emission from certain selected patches of the sky, looking for traces of the so-called Stöglitz Effect (Stöglitz was a German astronomer of the previous generation).

This effect, supposed to be the neutrino equivalent of the "red shift" in photons, somehow never was found; and indeed, it turned out several years later that Stöglitz's theory was wrong. But the young men had no way of knowing this, so they fought like lions to hold on to the apparatus; thanks to their initiative, they had the use of it for almost two years—only to leave, in the end, empty-handed. Miles of their recording tape went into the Observatory archives at that time. Several months later a considerable portion of those tapes found their way into the hands of a shrewd but not particularly talented physicist—actually, the man had been dismissed from a little-known institution in the South, in connection with the commission of certain immoral acts; the matter was not taken to court, because it involved several highly respected persons. This physicist
manqué
, by the name of Swanson, obtained the tapes in circumstances that remain unclear. He was questioned afterward, but nothing was ever learned, since he kept changing his testimony.

An interesting individual, nevertheless. He made his living as a supplier, and banker, and even spiritual comforter for the kind of maniacs who in earlier times confined themselves to building perpetual-motion machines and squaring the circle, but who nowadays discover various forms of health-giving energy, think up theories of cosmogenesis, and devise ways of commercially utilizing telepathic phenomena. Such people need more than pencil and paper; to construct "orgonotrons," detectors of "supersensitive" fluids, or electronic dowsing rods that locate water, petroleum, and buried treasure (dowsing rods of ordinary willow are an anachronism now, worthless antiques), one needs numerous raw materials, which are often expensive and difficult to obtain. Swanson was able, for an appropriate amount of cash, to move heaven and earth to get them. His bureau was frequented by paraphysicists and ectoplasmologists, builders of teleportation stations and of pneumatographs that made possible the opening of communications with the spirit world. Circulating in this way in the lower regions of the kingdom of science, where it merges imperceptibly with the realm of psychiatry, he acquired an amount of quite useful information; he knew, with surprising accuracy, where lay the greatest demand among his crippled titans of intellect.

Not that he turned up his nose at more mundane sources of revenue; for example, he supplied small chemistry laboratories with reagents of unknown origin. There was no period in his life in which he was not involved in legal difficulties, although he was never jailed, managing to balance at the very brink of criminality. The psychology of people like Swanson has always fascinated me. As far as I can tell, he was neither a "simple crook" nor a cynic who preyed on the aberrations of others, though he must have had intelligence enough to know that the great majority of his clients would never carry out their ideas. Some he took under his wing and gave equipment on credit, even when that credit was worn awfully thin. Apparently, he had a weakness for his protégés, just as I have for individuals of his type. His aim was to serve his client well, so if someone absolutely had to have horn of rhinoceros, because the instrument assembled with any other horn would remain deaf to the voice of the departed, Swanson did not deliver bull or ram—or so, at least, I have been told.

Receiving—perhaps purchasing—the tapes from an unknown person, Swanson showed good business sense. He had enough of an acquaintance with physics to know that what had been recorded on them represented what is called "pure noise," and he hit upon the idea of producing—with the aid of the tapes—tables of random numbers. Such tables, also known as random series, are used in many areas of research; they are produced either by specially programmed digital computers or with the help of rotating disks marked with numbers on the rims and illuminated by an irregularly flashing beam of light. And there are other ways to produce them, but anyone who undertakes this frequently runs into problems, because the series obtained rarely are "sufficiently" random. Upon closer examination they display, more or less plainly, regularities in the appearance of particular numbers, because—in long series, especially—certain numbers "somehow" tend to show up more often than others, which is enough to disqualify such a table. No, deliberately creating "complete chaos," and in a "pure state" at that, is not easy. At the same time, the demand for random tables is constant. Therefore Swanson counted on turning a nice profit, all the more so since his brother-in-law was a linotype operator in a university print shop. The tables were printed up there, and Swanson sold them by mail, avoiding the middleman of a bookseller.

One of the copies of this publication ended up in the hands of Dr. Sam Laserowitz, another very dubious individual. Like Swanson, he was a man of uncommon enterprise, possessing also, in his own way, a touch of idealism; not everything that he did was for money. He belonged to—and occasionally had also founded—numerous organizations, on the order of the Flying Saucer Society, and was in and out of financial hot water, since the budgets of those associations often showed unaccountable losses; embezzlement, however, was never proved. It is possible that the man was simply careless.

Despite the "Dr." before his name, he had completed no course of study and received no degree. When people tried to pin him down about this, he would say that the letters were merely an abbreviation of his first name—Drummond—which he did not use. But it was as "Dr." Sam Laserowitz that he appeared in a number of science-fiction magazines; he was also known, in the circles of the fans of that genre, as a lecturer, and spoke on "cosmic" themes at their many conferences and conventions. Laserowitz's specialty was earthshaking discoveries, which he happened upon two or three times a year. Among other things, he established a museum in which the exhibits were items allegedly left by passengers of flying saucers at various locations in the United States. One of these was a shaved, dyed-green monkey fetus floating in alcohol—I saw a photograph of it. We really have no idea what a multitude of con men and crackpots inhabit the domain that lies halfway between contemporary science and the insane asylum.

Laserowitz was, in addition, the coauthor of a book about the "conspiracy" of the governments of the Great Powers to suppress all information on saucer landings, not to mention contacts between our high-placed political figures and emissaries from other planets. Collecting all possible (more or less ridiculous) "evidence" of the activity of "Others in the Universe," he finally hit on the trail of the recordings from Mount Palomar and sought out their present possessor, who was Swanson. Swanson did not wish to lend them to him at first, but Laserowitz presented him with a powerful argument in the form of six hundred dollars—one of Laserowitz's "cosmic foundations" was backed by a generous eccentric.

Before long, Laserowitz was publishing a series of articles with screaming headlines, declaring that on the Mount Palomar tapes certain areas of noise were interspersed with sections of silence, so that together they formed the dots and dashes of Morse code. Then, in increasingly sensational pronouncements, he cited Halsey and Mahoun, authorities in astrophysics, as proof of the authenticity of his revelation. When this news was reprinted in a few local papers, an angered Dr. Halsey sent them a correction. He advised them, with an economy of words, that Laserowitz was a complete ignoramus (how would the "Others" know Morse code?), that his society for communicating with the Universe was imbecilic, and that the "sections of silence" on the tapes were blanks that occurred because from time to time the recording machine would shut off. Laserowitz would not have been himself had he borne meekly such a dressing-down; unfazed, he added Halsey to his blacklist of the foes of "cosmic contact," which already contained quite a number of enlightened people who had unwisely stood in opposition to Laserowitz's past triumphs.

Meanwhile, independently of this business, which in the press had acquired a circulation of sorts, a truly curious incident came about. It began when Dr. Ralph Loomis, a statistician by education, who had his own agency, doing, mainly, market research for smaller companies, wrote to Swanson with a complaint. It seemed that nearly a third of volume two of Swanson's random tables was a perfect duplication of a previous series found in volume one. Loomis suggested that perhaps Swanson, not wanting to labor over the systematic transcription of "noise" into columns of figures, had done it only once, and then, instead of providing further random sequences, mechanically copied the first series, bothering only to shuffle a couple of pages. Swanson, at least in this particular case, had a clear conscience; he rejected Loomis's demand for reimbursement and in indignation wrote him a few choice words. Loomis, in turn indignant, and considering himself swindled, took the matter to court. Swanson was fined for personal abuse; moreover, the court agreed with the plaintiff that the second installment of the series tables was a fraudulent repetition of the first. Swanson appealed, but five weeks later withdrew his appeal and, paying the fine, disappeared without a trace.

The Topeka
Morning Star
several times gave coverage of the litigation of Loomis versus Swanson, because it was the silly season then and there were no better stories. One of these articles was read by Dr. Saul Rappaport of the Institute for Advanced Study on his way to work (as he told me, he found the paper on a seat in the train—he never would have purchased it).

It was Saturday, and the
Morning Star
, having additional column space to fill that day, included, besides the court proceedings, Laserowitz's "Brothers in Reason" declaration, along with an irate rebuttal from Dr. Halsey. Rappaport therefore was able to see the whole of this strange if insignificant affair. As he put down the paper, a thought came to him, a thought so queer that it was comical: Laserowitz, taking the "sections of silence" on the tapes for signals, was without question raving. And yet it was conceivable that at the same time the man could be right, seeing in the tapes a "communication"—if that communication was the very noise!

An insane idea, but Rappaport could not rid himself of it. A stream of information—human speech, for example—does not always tell us that it is information and not a chaos of sounds. Often we receive a foreign language as complete babble. Individual words can be distinguished only by someone who understands the language. For someone who does not, there exists but one way to make possible that all-important recognition. In the case where we receive true noise, individual signals never repeat themselves in the same order. In this sense a "noise series" would be, say, a thousand numbers that show on a roulette wheel. It would be quite impossible for the next thousand turns of the wheel to repeat, in the same sequence, the results of the preceding series. This is precisely the essence of "noise," that the order of appearance of its elements—be they sounds or other signals—is unforeseeable. If, however, the series repeats itself, it proves that the "noise" quality of the phenomenon is superficial, that in fact we have before us a transmitter acting as a channel of information.

Dr. Rappaport thought to himself that, just possibly, Swanson had not lied to the judge and had not copied, in a circle, one single tape, but had used sequentially the tapes that resulted from those many months of recording cosmic radiation. If the radiation was an intentional signaling, and if, in that period of time, one series of emissions of the "communication" concluded and then the transmission of the communication was resumed from the beginning, the result would be what Swanson swore to. The subsequent tapes would record the exact same series of impulses, which by their
repetition
would reveal that their noise aspect was only an illusion!

It was in the highest degree unlikely, but nevertheless possible. Whenever he experienced brainstorms like this, Rappaport, usually an easygoing sort of person, showed unusual initiative and energy. The paper gave the address of Dr. Halsey, so it was simple to get in touch with him. The main thing Rappaport needed was to get his hands on one of the tapes. He wrote to Halsey, but without revealing his idea—it would have sounded too fantastic—and asked only whether Halsey would mind lending him the tapes that remained in the archives of Mount Palomar. Halsey, put out by having got involved in the Laserowitz business, refused. It was then that Rappaport took up the matter in earnest; he wrote directly to the Observatory. His name was well enough known in scientific circles, and in no time he acquired a good kilometer of tape, which he handed over to his friend Dr. Hense, so that he could run a computer analysis of the frequency distribution of its elements.