His Master's Voice (23 page)

Donald harbored the vague hope that on the large scale the effect might manifest a kind of "recoil"—the initial theory had pointed to that. But, first of all, the initial theory turned out to be useless, and, second, it opened a door to the acceptance of certain assumptions, which further down the road led to undesirable probabilities.

Baloyne I avoided during this period as much as possible, because my conscience was not clean regarding him. But he had other problems. Besides Lerner, we now were expecting a second "outsider"; both were to enlighten us with their presentations at the end of the month. This clear admission by Washington that it possessed its own experts on His Master's Voice, and men, moreover, who had been working without any connection with us, put Baloyne in an extremely unpleasant and difficult position before all the research groups. Dill, Donald, and Rappaport (and I as well) felt, however, that he ought to carry his cross (that was the sort of language he used) to the end. Anyway, both of these visitors announced to us were minds of the first order.

There was no talk, now, of budget cuts for the Project. It appeared that if our uninvited consultants could not give the work a forward shove with their ideas (which seemed to me unlikely), the Project would go on by sheer inertia, because no one on high would dare to change the least thing in it—let alone talk of liquidating it.

Personal tensions developed in the Council: between Baloyne and Nye, first, since the latter must have known, we were convinced, of this spectral, second Project—His Master's Ghost—yet, for all the man's volubility, he had not once mentioned it. (But to Baloyne Nye was still the soul of politeness.) And there was tension between our "conspiracy of two" and, again, Baloyne, for he had got wind of something after all: sometimes I saw him following me with his eyes, as if waiting for an explanation or at least some hint. But I dodged the best I could—not too skillfully, I am sure, because playing such games had never been my strong point. Meanwhile, Rappaport held it against Rush that even he, the first discoverer, had not been informed of His Master's Ghost. Thus the sessions of the Council became more than unpleasant, in an atmosphere of short tempers, suspicions, and low spirits. I slaved away at the programs for the machine, a waste of my time and strength since any programmer could have done them, but consideration for the "conspiracy" won out.

At last, I finished the calculations that Donald needed, but still he was not ready with the apparatus. Finding myself idle, for the first time since my arrival at the Project I tried watching television, but everything on it seemed to me unutterably phony and devoid of sense, the news programs included. I went to the bar, but could not stay there, either. Nervous, unable to sit still, I finally went to the computer center, shut myself up carefully, and began doing calculations that no one, this time, had required of me.

I employed, once more, the defiled (so to speak) formula of Einstein for the equivalence of mass and energy. I worked out the power available to the inverters and transmitters of the explosions at a distance equal to Earth's diameter; some minor technical difficulties that cropped up with this occupied me—but not for long. An attack carried out with the TX effect made advance warning impossible. What would happen was simply that the ground under people's feet would turn to solar lava. One also could produce an explosion not on Earth's surface but beneath it, and at any depth, whereby shields of steel plate as well as the whole massif of the Rocky Mountains, which was supposed to protect the chiefs of staff in their great underground bunkers, would become meaningless. There could no longer be even the hope that the generals—those most valuable members of our society, if personal worth was to be measured according to the means invested in the preservation of one's life and limb—would emerge, the only people left, on the radioactive, scorched surface of the planet, in order to begin the work (after removing their momentarily unnecessary uniforms) of rebuilding civilization from the bottom up. The most wretched denizen of the slums would be exposed equally now with the supreme commander of the nuclear forces.

I had brought about a truly democratic leveling of all who lived on Earth. The machine warmed my feet with a gentle flow of heated air that came from the slits in its metal register, and it tapped out rows of digits on the tapes, because it did not care whether they referred to megatons and body counts or to the number of grains of sand on the beaches of the Atlantic. The despair of the last weeks, which had gradually turned into a kind of stifling weight, suddenly lifted. I worked quickly and with satisfaction, no longer acting contrary to myself. No, now I was doing what was expected of me. I was a patriot. Now I put myself in the position of the attacker, and now of the defender, with perfect loyalty.

The problem, however, was without a winning strategy. If the focal point of the explosion could be moved to any place one chose on the globe—and from any equally arbitrary location—then it was possible to destroy life in an area of absolutely any size. The classical atomic blast was, from the standpoint of energy efficiency, a waste of resources, because at "ground zero" you had extreme "overkill." The molecules of buildings and bodies underwent a demolition that exceeded a thousandfold what was militarily necessary; while the force of the blow, attenuated over distance, permitted survival in fairly simple shelters a few or even several dozen miles away.

This uneconomical state of affairs became—under my fingers, as I programmed—a prehistoric mummy. TX was a totally efficient device. The fireballs of the classical explosions could be flattened, rolled out, as it were, into a death-dealing tinfoil, and one could spread that foil under human feet over all of Asia or the United States. The three-dimensionally fixed layer, chosen out of the continental shelf, in a fraction of a second could turn into a bog of flame. There would be released, for each man, just the energy required to kill him. But the command posts, perishing, would have ten seconds to send a signal to the submarines that carried the missiles. The dying side still could slay its enemy. And if it could, it would have to do so. And thus, finally, the technological trap snapped shut on us.

I kept looking for a way out, putting myself in the position of global strategist, but computation defeated each search in turn. I worked skillfully, but felt my hands shaking, and when I bent over the tapes that snaked slowly out of the machine, to read the results, my heart started pounding, and at the same time I felt a burning dryness in my mouth and bowels, as if someone had wrapped a cutting wire around my intestines. I observed these symptoms of visceral panic with a strangely cold irony, as if the terror affected only my muscles and gut, while a voiceless giggle quivered inside me, the same as half a century ago, unchanged and unaged. I felt no hunger or thirst, as if fed by the columns of numbers, for nearly five hours, programming the computer over and over again. The tapes I tore from their cassettes and stuffed into my pocket. But all this labor, ultimately, turned out to be unnecessary.

I was afraid that if I went to the hotel, the sight of the menu or of the waiter's face would cause me to burst into laughter. And I could not return to my own apartment. Yet I had to go somewhere. Donald, wrapped up in his work, was in a better position, at least for the time being. I went out into the street as if half asphyxiated. Night had fallen. The compound, bathed in the light of the mercury lamps, jutted its white outline against the darkness of the desert, and it was only high above the illuminated areas that one could make out, in the black sky, the stars. One more betrayal did not matter now, so I broke the promise made to Donald and proceeded to my hotel neighbor, Rappaport. He was in. I set the crumpled tapes before him and succinctly told him everything. He proved to be the right man. He asked three or four questions, no more, questions that showed that he had grasped immediately the gravity, the implications of the discovery. Our conspiracy did not surprise him in the least. He paid no attention to it.

I do not recall what he said to me when he put aside the tapes, but I understood from his words that he had expected something of the sort practically from the beginning. The anxiety had been with him constantly, and now that his premonition had come true, an intellectual satisfaction—or perhaps it was simply an awareness of the end—let him feel a certain sense of relief. I must have been more shaken than I thought, because he attended first not to Armageddon but to me. From his European wanderings he preserved a certain habit that I found amusing: he operated on the principle of
omnia mea mecum porto
, as if instinctively prepared for the necessity of another flight at short notice. That was how I explained the fact that in his suitcase he had a kind of "survival kit," complete with coffeepot, sugar, and crackers. There was also a small bottle of cognac—both the coffee and the cognac were much to the purpose. What began then had no name, but afterward we would refer to it as a funeral banquet or, more precisely, its Anglo-Saxon or Irish variant: a wake—a ritual watch held over a corpse. Granted, the deceased in question was still among the living, and had no knowledge, even, of his inevitable interment.

We sipped our coffee and cognac, surrounded by such silence, it was as if we were in a place of great desolation, as if the thing that was soon to happen had already come to pass. Quick to understand each other, exchanging fragments of sentences, we first plotted out the course of upcoming events. As scenario writers, we agreed. Everything would be thrown into the construction of TX devices. People like us would not see the light of day.

For their imminent demise the chiefs of staff would revenge themselves first on us—unconsciously, no doubt. They would not roll over and play dead; rational action becoming impossible, they would resort to irrational action. If neither the mountains nor a kilometer of steel sufficed to shield them from attack, they would declare the ultimate armor to be secrecy. There would follow a multiplication, a dispersion, and a burrowing into the earth of command posts, while headquarters would be moved—for certain—on board some giant atomic submarine or specially designed bathysphere, which would keep watch, snuggled on the ocean floor.

And the last shell of democratic forms would crumble, forms whose substance had already been mostly gnawed away by the global strategy of the sixties. And this would show in the attitude toward scientists. There would be no desire, no time or place, to keep up appearances and treat them like clever but capricious children whom it was better not to frustrate.

When we had prophesied, roughly, our fate and the fate of others—in accordance with Pascal's maxim about the thinking reed that thirsts to know the mechanisms of its own annihilation—Rappaport told me of his efforts the previous spring. Before I came to the Project, he had presented to General Oster—the chief, at that time, of HMV—a plan for joining forces with the Russians. He proposed that we supply a group equal in number and expertise to a group that would be provided by the Russians, to work together on the translation of the letter. Oster explained to him good-naturedly how very naïve such a thing would be. The Russians would provide a group for show, but meanwhile work on the letter themselves.

We looked at each other and laughed, because the same thought occurred to both of us. Oster had simply told him a thing that we learned of only in the last few days. Even then, the Pentagon itself had adopted the principle of "doubling." We constituted the group that was "for show," and had been wholly unaware of it; the generals all the while had had another team at their disposal, one they apparently trusted more.

For a moment we paused to consider the mentality of the strategists. They never took people seriously, insisting that the important thing was the biological preservation of the species. The famous
ceterum censeo speciem preservandam esse
became a slogan like all other slogans: words to utter but not a value to be included in the strategic equations. By now we had imbibed enough cognac to amuse ourselves with the vision of generals who, as they were cooked alive, would issue their final orders into a silent microphone—because the ocean floor, like every other nook and cranny on the planet, would no longer offer shelter. The only safe place for the Pentagon and its people, we concluded, would be beneath the bottom of the Moscow River; but it was not too likely that even our daring eagles could manage to get there.

After midnight, we finally put such mundane subjects behind us, and the conversation grew interesting. We took up the Mystery of the Species. I dwell on this, because that dialogue-requiem in honor of Man the Wise, delivered by two representatives of the race who were woozy with caffeine and alcohol, and certain that the end was nigh, seems to me significant.

That the Senders were well informed about the state of things in the whole Galaxy, I opined, was beyond question. Our catastrophe was a consequence of their not having taken into account the specific situation on Earth, and they had not, because Earth was, in the whole Galaxy, an exception.

"These are old Manichean ideas, a dime a dozen," declared Rappaport.

But I was not at all claiming that the apocalypse was the result of any exceptional human "wickedness." It was simply that every planetary psychozoic enclave passed from a state of global division to one of integration. From bands, tribes, and clans arose nations, kingdoms, empires, world powers, and finally came the social unification of the species. This process almost never led to the emergence of two antagonists of equal strength, at least not immediately prior to the final joining; there would be, rather, a Majority in opposition to a weak Minority. Such a confrontation had much greater probability, even if only from a strictly thermodynamic point of view; one could demonstrate this by stochastic calculation. A perfect equilibrium of forces, an exact equals-sign between them, was a state so improbable as to be virtually impossible. One could arrive at such a balance only by coincidence. Social fusion was one series of processes, and the acquiring of instrumental knowledge was another series.