His Master's Voice (7 page)

But the problem, even in this phase, was much more complex than I have presented it here. Information resembles pure noise to a greater degree the more thoroughly (economically) the transmitter makes use of the channel of the transmission. If the channel is made use of totally—if, in other words, there is no redundancy—the signal, for one uninformed, in no respect differs from utter chaos. As I have said, it is only possible to reveal such noise as information if the emissions of the message repeat themselves in a circle and one can set them side by side for comparison. That was exactly Rappaport's intention. He was to be assisted in this by equipment at the computer center where Hense worked. Rappaport did not tell Hense at first what he was about, preferring to keep it quiet; this way, if his idea fizzled, no one would ever know. This amusing beginning of what later became a most unamusing affair was related by Rappaport many times; he even kept, like a sacred relic, a copy of the newspaper that had led him to his famous revelation.

Hense, burdened with work, was not particularly eager to take on an arduous analysis without even knowing the purpose; so Rappaport finally decided to let him in on the secret. Hense's first reaction was to laugh at Rappaport; but, impressed by the latter's arguments, he at length agreed to the request.

When Rappaport returned, several days later, to Massachusetts, Hense greeted him with news of negative results, which, in Hense's opinion, refuted the fantastic hypothesis. Rappaport—I know this from him—was ready to abandon the whole thing, but, nettled by the gibes of his friend, began to argue with him. After all, he told him, the entire neutrino emission of one quadrant of the firmament is a veritable ocean covering an enormous spectrum of frequencies, and even if Halsey and Mahoun, combing that spectrum once, had by sheer luck pulled out from it a "piece" of emission that was artificial, coming from an intelligent sender, it would be a miracle indeed for them to accomplish the same thing—again by luck—a second time.

Therefore they should try to get the tapes that were in Swanson's possession. Hense went along with this reasoning, but observed (he, too, wanted to be right) that, given the alternative of "message from the stars" versus "Swanson's fraud," the second proposition had a probability a few billion times greater than the first. He added that obtaining the tapes would do Rappaport little good: Swanson, when he received the court summons, and no doubt wanting to build himself a good defense, could simply have copied the tape he had and then presented that copy as another original neutrino recording.

Rappaport had no answer to that, but he knew someone in the field of long-sequence semiautomatic recording devices. He telephoned the man and asked if it was in any way possible to distinguish a tape on which certain natural processes were registered from tapes onto which similar impressions had been transferred secondhand. (In other words, what was the difference—if any existed—between an original recording and a copy of it?) It turned out that such a distinction could sometimes be made. Rappaport then went to Swanson's lawyer and in a week had the full set of tapes at his disposal. As it turned out, all were pronounced original by the expert; thus Swanson had committed no fraud, and thus the emission had in fact repeated itself periodically.

Rappaport informed neither Hense nor Swanson's lawyer of this finding, but that very same day—or, rather, that very night—he flew to Washington. Well aware of the hopelessness of trying to force his way through the bureaucracy's obstacle course, he went straight to Mortimer Rush, the President's science adviser and the former director of NASA, whom he knew personally. Rush, a physicist by education, a man with a first-rate head on his shoulders, received Rappaport despite the lateness of the hour. For three weeks Rappaport waited in Washington while the tapes were examined by specialists of increasing importance.

Finally, Rush requested his presence at a conference in which a total of nine people participated, among whom were the shining lights of American science—Donald Prothero the physicist, Yvor Baloyne the linguist and philologist, Tihamer Dill the astrophysicist, and John Baer the mathematician and information theorist. At that conference it was decided, informally, to set up a special commission to study the "neutrino letter from the stars," which was given then the code name—Baloyne's half-joking suggestion—His Master's Voice. Rush urged discretion on the participants of the conference, for the time being, because he feared that the media's giving the matter a sensational cast could only harm its chances of gaining the necessary funding; the thing would immediately become a political football in Congress, where Rush's position, as he represented a much-criticized administration, was shaky.

It appeared that the matter had been put on as sensible a course as possible, when, without warning, who should become mixed up in it but Dr. Sam Laserowitz. From the whole account of Swanson's trial, the one thing Laserowitz noted was that the court expert had said nothing in his testimony to the effect that the "sections of silence" on the tapes were "blanks" brought about by the periodic shutting-off of the apparatus. He drove, then, to Melville, where the trial was in process, and sat in the hotel lobby laying siege to Swanson's lawyer; Laserowitz wanted the tapes, feeling that they should be placed in his museum of "cosmic curiosities." The lawyer, however, refused to give them to Laserowitz, a person of no importance. Laserowitz, who smelled "anticosmic conspiracy" everywhere, hired a private detective to tail the lawyer; he thereby learned that some man from out of town, who had arrived on the morning train, was closeted with the lawyer at the hotel, received the tapes from the lawyer, and subsequently took them away with him, to Massachusetts.

The man was Dr. Rappaport. Laserowitz dispatched his detective on the trail of the unsuspecting Rappaport, and when the latter turned up in Washington and paid several visits to Rush, Laserowitz decided it was time to act. And a most unpleasant surprise it was, too, for Rush and the HMV candidates, that article from the
Morning Star
reprinted by one of the Washington tabloids, in which, under a suitably shrill headline, Laserowitz revealed how the administration was using every dirty trick at its disposal to hush up a tremendous discovery—exactly as, more than ten years earlier, it had buried beneath the official statements of the Department of Aviation the so-called unidentified flying objects, the famous saucers.

Only now did Rush realize that the matter could take on an ugly aspect in the international arena if the thought occurred to anyone that the United States was attempting to conceal from the world the fact that it had established contact with a cosmic civilization. He was not greatly concerned about the article itself, since its ludicrous tone discredited not only the author but the information as well; he calculated, therefore, relying on his considerable experience in the field of publicity, that if silence was maintained, the commotion would soon die down of itself.

But Baloyne decided to go see Laserowitz, in a purely personal capacity, because—he told me this himself—he felt sorry for the cosmic-contact maniac. He thought that if he offered him, in private, some minor position in the Project, everything would be set to rights. A foolish step, as it turned out, though dictated by the best intentions. Baloyne, who did not know Laserowitz, was taken in by the "Dr.," and believed that, though the man he had to deal with might be somewhat touched in the head, publicity-hungry, and not overly fastidious about how he made a buck, he was nevertheless a colleague, a scientist, a physicist. Instead he found himself face to face with a feverish little man who, upon hearing that the "letter from the stars" was genuine, informed him with a kind of hysterical nonchalance that the tapes, and consequently the "letter," too, were his property, of which he had been robbed. As the conversation progressed, he drove Baloyne into a rage. Laserowitz, seeing that he would gain nothing from Baloyne by words, ran out into the hall shouting that he would turn the matter over to the United Nations, to the Tribunal of Human Rights, then got into an elevator and left Baloyne to his unpleasant reflections.

Baloyne, seeing the mischief he had done, went immediately to Rush and told him everything. Rush feared for the future of the Project. However unlikely it was that someone somewhere would listen seriously to Laserowitz, the possibility could not be ruled out, and if the affair ever made its way into a major metropolitan newspaper, it would for certain assume a political character.

The initiates could well imagine the hue and cry that would be raised: that the United States was seeking to appropriate for itself what by rights belonged to all humanity. Baloyne suggested that this might be forestalled by a brief, at least semiofficial press release; but Rush did not have the authorization to issue one, nor did he intend to request it, because—he explained—the thing still was not absolutely certain. Even if the government wished to back the undertaking with the full weight of its influence before the forum of nations, it could not do so until preliminary work had proved the truth of what so far were assumptions. However, since the matter was of a highly sensitive nature, Rush
nolens volens
had to turn to his friend Barnett, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, who, in turn, after consulting with his people, turned to the FBI; who, however, referred him to the CIA. A top FBI legal adviser told him that the Universe, lying mainly outside the nation's borders, did not fall under the jurisdiction of the Bureau; it was the CIA that concerned itself with foreign problems.

The unfortunate consequences of this step did not show themselves at once, but the process, once begun, was irreversible. Rush, as an individual at the interface of science and politics, well knew the undesirable ramifications of placing the Project under such protection; therefore, asking the Senator to wait twenty-four hours, he sent two trusted men to Laserowitz in an effort to talk some sense into the man. Laserowitz not only refused to listen, he caused such a scene with his visitors that fisticuffs ensued and the hotel manager had to call the police.

The following days saw a flood of articles that were altogether fantastic—ridiculous accounts of various "dyads" and "triads" of silence sent to Earth by the Universe, of lights in the sky, of the landing of little green men wearing "neutrino clothes," and similar nonsense, in which reference was made, over and over, to Laserowitz, now promoted to Professor. But shortly thereafter, in less than a month, the "renowned scientist" turned out to be a paranoiac and was placed in a psychiatric hospital. Nor was this, unfortunately, the conclusion to his story. The syndicated press and the national magazines carried echoes of Laserowitz's phantasmagorical struggle (twice he escaped from the hospital, the second time in a radical manner, leaving via a window eight floors up) to defend his discovery, a discovery so insane—according to the versions published later—and yet so near the truth. I confess I get the shivers when I recall that fragment of the prehistory of our Project.

It is not hard to guess that filling the newspaper columns with items one more nonsensical than the next was nothing more or less than a diversionary tactic engineered by the skilled professionals of the CIA. Because to deny the business, and in the pages of the major publications at that, would have meant focusing attention on it in absolutely the most undesirable way. But to show that the thing was all delirium, to bury the grain of truth under an avalanche of imbecilic fictions—all attributed to "Professor" Laserowitz—was a clever move, particularly when the operation could be crowned with the insertion of a brief paragraph about the suicide of the madman, which, with its simple eloquence, completely laid to rest all rumors.

The fate of that fanatic was truly horrible. I did not at first believe that either his insanity or his last step from the window into an emptiness of eight stories was genuine, but people whom I have to trust convinced me of that version of events. Yet the sign of the times had been stamped at the head of our great undertaking—times that mix, perhaps as no other, the seamy and the sublime. The zigzag of coincidences, before it threw into our hands that colossal opportunity, crushed like a flea a man who, albeit in blindness, was still the first to approach the threshold of the discovery.

If I am not mistaken, Rush's emissaries had thought Laserowitz crazy at the point when he refused to accept a considerable sum of money in exchange for giving up his claims. But in that case he and I were of the same faith, with this one difference, that we practiced it in different monasteries. Had it not been for that great wave in which he became caught, Laserowitz would undoubtedly have prospered, a low-grade maniac devoting himself, undisturbed, to his flying saucers and all the rest of it, for there is surely no shortage of such people. But the knowledge that he was being relieved of his most sacred possession, a discovery that divided the history of mankind into two parts, tore his hardiness like an explosion and drove him to his death. In my opinion we owe more than a sneer to the man's memory. Every great matter has, among its circumstances, some that are ludicrous or pitifully banal, which does not mean that they do not play an integral role. Ludicrousness, anyway, is a relative thing. I, too, cut a ludicrous figure every time I spoke of Laserowitz in this vein.

Of all the dramatis personae of this prologue, Swanson probably came out the best, because he was satisfied with money. His fine was paid (whether by the CIA or the Project administration, I do not know), and, with a generous sum as compensation for the mental anguish he had suffered in being falsely accused of fraud, he was dissuaded from filing an appeal. All this so that the Project could begin its work in peace and quiet, in the complete isolation finally allotted it.

NOT ONLY THESE
events, whose description here in general—though not in every respect—agrees with the official version, but the whole first year of the Project as well, passed without my participation. As to why I was approached only after the Science Council had become convinced of the necessity of acquiring academic reinforcements, I was told so many different things so often, and given such weighty reasons, that probably none of it was the truth. My exclusion, however, I did not hold against my colleagues, particularly not against Yvor Baloyne. Though they were for quite some time unaware of it, their organizational activity was not entirely free. Not that there was any open interference then, any obvious pressure. But the whole thing was of course managed by specialists in stagecraft. In my exclusion, I believe, High Places had a hand. The Project, practically from the beginning, was classified—an operation, that is, whose secrecy was a
sine qua non
of government policy, vital to the national security. The scientific directors of the Project, it should be emphasized, learned of this gradually, and as a rule separately, one by one, at special meetings during which discreet appeal was made to their political wisdom and patriotic feelings.