His Master's Voice (16 page)

It seemed unlikely, at first glance, that the letter could be a communication that was a fragment of an interplanetary dialogue which we happened by pure accident to overhear, because that did not jibe with the constant repetition of the emission. A conversation, surely, did not consist in one of the partners' repeating, in circles, year after year, the same thing from the beginning. But, again, the time scale entered into play here. The communication had streamed to Earth, unchanging, for at least two years—that much was certain. Perhaps the "conversing" was being done by automatic devices, and the equipment of one side would keep sending its statement until it got the signal that the statement had been received. In which case, the repetitions could continue a thousand years, if the civilizations involved were sufficiently distant from each other. We did not know whether or not the "life-causing emission" could be the carrier of various contents—which was,
a priori
, quite possible.

Nevertheless, the "overheard conversation" version seemed very unlikely. When "questions" were separated from the "answers" they received by a time that was on the order of centuries, it was hard to call such an exchange a "dialogue." One ought to expect, instead, each of the parties to transmit to the other important facts about itself. Therefore, we should have been receiving not one emission but at the very least two. That, however, was not the case. The neutrino "ether," to the extent that the astrophysicists' instruments could tell, was completely empty—except for that one transmission band. This was perhaps the hardest nut of all to crack in the mystery. The simplest explanation was that there was no dialogue, no second civilization, but only the one, sending out an isotropic signal. After such a statement, you went back to racking your brains over the double nature of the signal …
da capo al fine
.

Yes, the letter could contain something relatively simple. It could, for example, be merely the diagram of a machine for us to use to establish communication with the Senders. It would be, then, the "blueprint of a transmitter," with the "components" the stuff of Frog Eggs. And we, like a small child puzzling over the plan of a radio kit, could manage to assemble nothing more than a couple of the most primitive screws. Or the letter could be an "incarnated" psychocosmological theory, showing how intelligent life in the Metagalaxy came to be, how it was distributed, and how it functioned. When one cast off one's "Manichean" prejudices, those
sotto voce
suggestions that the Sender had to wish us either good or evil (or good and evil at the same time, if, say, by his criteria his intentions toward us were "good," but by ours "evil"), the guessing spawned ideas more freely, ideas similar to the above, and became a morass no less immobilizing than the professional inertia that had caught the empiricists of the Project in the golden cages of their sensational discoveries. They believed—some of them, at any rate—that by studying Lord of the Flies one eventually could get to the bottom of the mystery of the Senders—like untangling a thread. I felt that this was a rationalization after the fact: since they had nothing except Lord of the Flies, they clung to it in their investigation. I would have allowed that they were right if the problem had belonged to the natural sciences—but it did not. From a chemical analysis of the ink with which a letter is written to us, we will never deduce the intellectual attributes of the writer.

Perhaps it was necessary to put a rein on ambitions and approach the intention of the Senders by gradual approximations. But here again came the burning question: Why had they combined, in one thing, a message meant for intelligent receivers
and
a biophilic effect?

It seemed strange—eerie, even. In the first place, general considerations indicated that the civilization of the Senders had to be incredibly old. The emission of the signal—by our best estimate—required a consumption of power on the order of at least a sun. An expenditure like that could not be a matter of indifference even to a society wielding a highly developed astroengineering technology. The Senders therefore must have acted in the conviction that such an "investment" paid—though not for them—paid in the sense of having real effectiveness in causing life. But at present there were relatively few planets in the entire Metagalaxy on which prevailed conditions that corresponded to Earth's of four billion years ago. Very few, actually. The Metagalaxy was a stellar-nebular organism well past its prime; in another billion years or so it would begin its decline toward old age. The youthful period of exuberant and violent planetary formation, from which had emerged, among others, our own Earth, was over. The Senders must have known this. It was not a matter of thousands of years, then, or even millions, that they had been sending the signal. I feared—how else to name the feeling that accompanied such a thought?—that they had been doing so for
billions
of years! But if such was the case, then—leaving aside the problem of our total inability to imagine what form a society would assume after the passage of such awesome geologic time—the reason for the "two-sidedness" of the signal turned out to be rather simple, if not trivial. They could have been sending, from the earliest times, the "life-causing factor"—and then, when they decided to take up interplanetary communication, instead of building special transmitters and technologies for that purpose, found it was sufficient to make use of the emission stream already pulsing through the Universe. All that was needed was the right modulation added to that carrier wave. Was it, then, for simple, engineering economy that they saddled us with this riddle? But surely the problems presented by the modulation program must have been technically and informationally monstrous—yes, for us they were, but for them? Here, once more, I lost the ground beneath my feet. Meanwhile the research went on: attempts were made, in endless ways, to separate the "informational component" of the signal from the "biophilic." None of them worked. We were baffled, but still unwilling to admit defeat.

BY THE END
of August, I was mentally drained, more drained, I think, than I had ever been. The creative potential, the capacity to solve problems, changes in a man in ebbs and flows, and over this he has little control. I had learned to apply a kind of test. I would read my own articles, those I considered the best. If I noticed in them lapses, gaps, if I saw that the thing could have been done better, my experiment was successful. If, however,

I found myself reading with admiration, that meant I was in trouble. Which is exactly what happened at the end of the summer. What I needed—and I knew this also from years of experience—was distraction, not a rest.

I began dropping in more often on Dr. Rappaport, my neighbor, and we talked sometimes for hours. About the stellar code itself we spoke rarely and said little. One day I found him amid large packages from which spilled attractive, glossy paperbacks with mythical covers. He had tried to use, as a "generator of ideas"—for we were running out of them—those works of fantastic literature, that popular genre (especially in the States), called, by a persistent misconception, "science fiction." He had not read such books before; he was annoyed—indignant, even—expecting variety, finding monotony. "They have everything
except
fantasy," he said. Indeed, a mistake. The authors of these pseudo-scientific fairy tales supply the public with what it wants: truisms, clichés, stereotypes, all sufficiently costumed and made "wonderful" so that the reader may sink into a safe state of surprise and at the same time not be jostled out of his philosophy of life. If there is progress in a culture, the progress is above all conceptual, but literature, the science-fiction variety in particular, has nothing to do with that.

My conversations with Dr. Rappaport were of value to me. Characteristic of him was a predatory and unceremonious manner of formulation, which I would have liked to make my own. The topics of our discussions were schoolboyish: we held forth on Man. Rappaport was a bit of a "thermodynamic psychoanalyst"; he declared, for instance, that really all the basic drives providing the motive force for human action could be derived directly from physics—but physics in the broadest sense of the word.

The urge to destruction is deducible from thermodynamics. Life is a fraud, an attempt at embezzlement, seeking to circumvent laws otherwise inevitable and implacable; insulated from the rest of the world, it immediately enters the path of decay, and that inclined plane leads to the normal state of matter, to the permanent equilibrium that is death. In order to continue living, life must feed on order, but because there is no order—none highly organized—other than life, it is condemned to consume itself. It must destroy to live, must take its nourishment from systems that are nourishment only to the extent that they can be ruined. Not ethics but physics determines this law.

Schrödinger was probably the first to observe this; but he, enamored of his Greeks, failed to consider what could be called, to quote Rappaport, the shame of life, the immanent stain rooted in the very structure of existence. I took issue, citing the photosynthesis of plants: they did not destroy, or at least did not need to destroy, other living organisms, thanks to their utilization of solar quanta. Rappaport replied that the entire Animal Kingdom parasitized the Plant Kingdom.

The second quality of man, and one he shared with nearly all organisms, sexuality, could also be derived—Rappaport went on—from statistical thermodynamics, in its informational aspect. Entropy, which lurked behind every ordered system, always caused information, whenever transmitted, to undergo loss. To counteract this fatal noise, to perpetuate this temporarily secured order, it was necessary to compare oneself constantly with a "hereditary text." Such collating, or "proofreading," whose purpose was to remove "errors," became the reason and justification for the rise of bisexuality. And therefore sex had its origins in the informational physics of transmission, in communication theory. The collation of the genetic material in each and every generation was imperative, a
sine qua non
, if life was to maintain itself; all the rest—the biological, algedonic, psychological, cultural—was the derivative, the forest of consequences that grew from that single hard kernel formed by the laws of physics.

I pointed out to him that by that argument he was universalizing bisexuality, making it a constant in the Cosmos. He only smiled; he never answered directly. In another age, another era, he would have been, I am certain, a stern mystic, a builder of systems; in our era made sober by an overabundance of discoveries, which tore apart like shrapnel every systemic coherence, an era which both accelerated progress as never before and was sick to death of progress, he was only a commentator and an analyst.

He told me once, I remember, that he had considered the possibility of creating something in the nature of a metatheory of philosophical systems, or for that matter a general program that would facilitate the automation of such a creation: an appropriately set machine would produce, first, the systems already in existence, and then, in the gaps left by oversight or insufficient rigor on the part of the great ontologists, it would create new ones—with the ease of a machine producing screws or slippers. And he even began work on this—put together a dictionary, a syntax, set up rules of transposition, categories, hierarchies, a sort of metatheory of types semantically extended—but then he saw that the task was an empty game not worth the effort, for nothing resulted from it but the possibility of generating those networks, checkerboards, edifices—those crystal palaces, if you like—built of words. He was a misanthrope, and I was not surprised to see by his bed—as by mine was the Bible—a book of Schopenhauer. The notion of substituting the concept of Will for the concept of matter seemed amusing to him.

"You might just as well call Will the mystery," he said, "and quantize, beam, diffract with crystals, and dilute and concentrate that. And if one should find that Will can be totally separated out from the interior of sentient beings, and in addition have attributed to it some kind of 'self-motion'—that predilection for eternal bustling about which is so exasperating in atoms, since it makes for nothing but problems, and I do not mean only mathematical—what, then, would keep us from agreeing with Schopenhauer?" He claimed that the time for a renaissance of the Schopenhauerian vision was coming. However, he was far from being an apologist for that small, rabid German.

"His aesthetic is inconsistent. But, then, perhaps he was unable to express this; the
genius temporis
, perhaps, did not allow it. In the 1950s I once had occasion to witness an atomic test. Did you know, Mr. Hogarth"—that was what he always called me—"that there is nothing more beautiful than the colors of a mushroom cloud? No description, no color photograph can do justice to that wonder, which lasts ten, twenty seconds. The dirt rises, pulled up by the suction when the fireball expands. Then the sphere of flame, like a runaway balloon, disappears in the clouds, and the whole world, for a moment, is a sculpture in pink—Eos Pterodaktylos… The nineteenth century firmly believed that what was murderous must be hideous. Today we know that it may be more beautiful than cherry orchards. Afterward, all flowers seem faded, dull—and this happens in a place where radiation kills in a fraction of a second!"

I listened, ensconced in an armchair, and now and then, I confess, I lost the thread of what he was saying. My brain, like an old horse pulling a milk truck, stubbornly returned to the same route, the code; I had to force myself not to go back to that ground, because it seemed to me that if I left it fallow, something might germinate there by itself. Such things happen sometimes.

I also had talks with Tihamer Dill—that is, with Dill Junior, the physicist. I knew his father, but that is a story in itself. Dill Senior taught mathematics at Berkeley. He was, in those days, a fairly well known mathematician of the older generation and had a reputation as an excellent teacher—even-tempered, patient, though demanding. Why I did not find favor in his eyes, I do not know. It is true that we differed in our style of thinking; I was fascinated by ergodic processes, a field that Dill made light of. Still, I always had the feeling that the problem had to do with more than mathematics. I went to him with my ideas—to whom else was I to go?—and he snuffed me out like a candle, brushing aside what I wished to present, distinguishing in the meantime my colleague Myers. He hovered over Myers as over a new rosebud.