His Master's Voice (29 page)

From the first, what I feared the most was a misunderstanding. I was sure that we were not being sent an instrument of murder; but everything indicated that what we had received was the description of some instrument—and it is well known what use we put instruments to. Even man is a tool for man. Familiar with the history of science, I did not imagine that there was any perfect safeguard against abuse. All technologies were, after all, completely neutral, and we could assign to any one of them the goal of death. During that unimportant but desperate conspiracy—stupid, no doubt, yet by impulse inevitable—I believed that we could no longer count on Them, because They apparently had not been able to foresee what we might do with the information
mistakenly
. The safeguarding against what was planned and deliberate—that I could believe; but not against what constituted
our
error or our filling in the gaps with faulty substitutions. Even Nature herself, who for four billion years had instructed biological evolution in how to avoid "errors," how to operate under the protection of all possible safety measures, could not keep an eye on life's molecular slips and twists, its side streets, dead ends, and wrong turns, its "misunderstandings"—proof of which was the innumerable degenerations in the development of organisms, such as cancer. But if They succeeded, that meant that They had gone far beyond the perfection, unattainable for us, of biological systems. I did not know, however—how, indeed, was I to have known?—that Their systems, more effective than the biological, were so universally certain, so airtight: against trespass by the unqualified.

That night in the huge hall of the inverter, bending over the sheets of scrawled paper, I had felt a sudden weakness, a moment of dizziness, and it had grown dark before my eyes, not only because the dread hanging over my head for all those weeks unexpectedly melted away; but also because in that instant I experienced, palpably, Their greatness. I understood what a civilization could be based on, and what a civilization could be. We think of an ideal equilibrium, of ethical values, of rising above one's own weakness, when we hear the word "civilization," and we associate it with what is best in us. But it is, above all, knowledge, a knowledge that from the sphere of possible situations eliminates precisely those (common, for us) like this one: where the finest brains out of a billion beings address themselves to the task of sowing universal death, doing what they would rather not do and what they stand in opposition to, because there is no alternative for them. Suicide is no alternative. Would we have changed one bit the course of further research, the invasion of metal locusts from the sky, had the two of us killed ourselves? If They foresaw such situations, the only way that I can understand it is if at one time They were—or, who knows, perhaps still are—like us.

Did I not say at the beginning of this book that only a fundamentally evil creature knows what freedom it attains when it does good? There was a letter, it was sent, it fell to Earth, at our feet, and had been falling in a neutrino rain while the lizards of the Mesozoic plowed the mud of the Carboniferous forests with their bellies, while the paleopithecus, called Promethean, gnawed a bone and saw in it the first club. And Frog Eggs? In Frog Eggs I see fragments—distorted, caricatured by our ineptness and ignorance, but also by our knowledge, which is skewed toward destruction—fragments of what the letter provided for by its very delivery. I am convinced that it was not hurled into the darkness as a stone is into water. It was conceived as a voice whose echo would return—once it was heard and understood.

The by-product, so to speak, of a proper reception was to be a return signal, informing the Senders that contact had been established, and at the same time telling Them the place where this occurred. I can make only a vague guess as to the mechanism that was to do this. The energy autonomy of Frog Eggs, its ability to direct nuclear reactions upon itself, which served no purpose other than to continue the state that made this possible—is evidence, proof, of an error on our part, because in our further incursion we came upon an effect as mysterious as it was dramatic, able under completely different circumstances to liberate, focus, and hurl back into space an impulse of tremendous power. Yes, if the code had been read
correctly
, the TX effect, discovered by Donald Prothero, would have been revealed as a return signal, an answer directed at the Senders. What convinces me of this is its fundamental mechanism: an action traveling at the greatest cosmic speed, carrying energy of any magnitude across a distance of any magnitude. The energy, of course, is to serve the transmittal of information, and not destruction. The form in which TX made itself known to us was the result of a distortion that the knowledge recorded in the neutrino stream underwent during our synthesis. Error bred error—it could not be otherwise. This is only logical, yet I am still amazed by Their versatility, that could thwart even the potentially fatal consequence of mistakes—of more than mistakes, because ours was a premeditated effort to turn a ruined instrument into a deadly blade.

The Metagalaxy is a limitless throng of psychozoic enclaves. Civilizations deviating from ours by a certain number of degrees, but, like ours, divided, mired in internal quarrels, burning their resources in fratricidal struggles, have for millennia been making—and still are making, again and again—readings of the code, readings as unsuccessful as our own. Just like us, they attempt to fashion the strange fragments that emerge from their efforts into a weapon—and, just like us, they fail. When did the conviction take root in me that this was the case? It is hard to say.

I told only those closest to me—Yvor, Donald—and before my final departure from the compound I shared this private property of mine with the acrimonious Dr. Rappaport. They all—a curious thing—at first nodded with the growing satisfaction of comprehension, but then, after some thought, said that for the world as it was given to us, my idea made too pretty and complete a picture. Perhaps. What do we know of civilizations "better" than ours? Nothing. So perhaps it is not suitable to paint such a panorama, in which we figure somewhere in the frame as a blot on the Galaxy, or as one of the embryos stuck fast in labor contractions that go on for centuries; or, finally, to use Rappaport's metaphor, as a fetus, quite handsome at birth, but strangling on its own umbilical cord, the cord being that arm of culture which draws the vital fluids of knowledge up from the placenta of the natural world.

I can present no incontrovertible proof in support of my conviction. I have none. No evidence in the stellar code, in its information, nothing to indicate that it was produced for beings somehow better than us. Can it simply be that, stung for so long by humiliations, forced to work under the command of the Osters and the Nyes, I spun for myself—in the image and likeness of my own hopes—the only equivalent available to me of holiness: the myth of the Annunciation and Revelation, which I then—also to blame—rejected as much out of ignorance as ill will?

If a man no longer worries about the movement of the atoms and planets, the world becomes defenseless with regard to him, since he can then interpret it as he pleases. He who wields the imagination shall perish in the imagination. And yet imagination is supposed to be an open window on the world. For two years we examined a thing—at its destination, from the final results that streamed to Earth. I propose that we consider it from the opposite end. Is it possible, without falling into madness, to believe that we were sent puzzles, intelligence tests of a sort, charades of galactic descent? Such a point of view, in my opinion, is ridiculous: the difficulty of the text was not a shell that had to be pierced. The message is not for everyone: that is how I see it, and I cannot see it otherwise. First of all, the message is not for a civilization low on the ladder of purely instrumental progress, because it is obvious, surely, that the Sumerians or Carolingians would not have been able even to notice the signal. But is the limitation of the circle of receivers determined solely by the criterion of technological ability?

Let us look beyond ourselves. Enclosed in the windowless room of the former atomic test site, I could not help thinking about the great desert outside the walls, and the black canopy hanging above it, and that the whole Earth was being penetrated constantly, hour after hour, century after century, and eon after eon, by an immense river of invisible particles, whose current carried a communication that hit equally the other planets of the solar system, and other such systems, and other galaxies, and that this current had been sent from an unknown time past and across an unknown gulf—and that this was actually true.

I did not accept this knowledge without a fight; it was too much at odds with all that I had grown accustomed to. I saw, at the same time, our undertaking: the throng of scientists overseen discreetly by the government of which I was a citizen. Wrapped in a network of bugs and taps, we were supposed to establish contact with an intelligence that inhabited the Cosmos. In reality this was a stake in an ongoing global game; it became part of the pot, entered the pleiad of countless cryptonym-acronyms that filled the concrete bowels of the Pentagon; it was placed in some vault, on some shelf, in some file, with the stamp of
TOP SECRET
on the folder; yet another Operation, with the letters HMV, doomed in the bud, as it were, to insanity—this attempt to hide and imprison a thing that had been filling the abyss of the Universe for millions of years, in order to extract, as from lemon pits, information packed with fatal power.

If this was not madness, there is not and never will be madness. And so: the Senders had in mind certain beings, certain civilizations, but not all, not even all those of the technological circle. What sort of civilizations are the proper addressees? I do not know. I will say only this: if, in the opinion of the Senders, that information is not fitting for us to learn, then we will not learn it. I place great confidence in Them—because They did not let me down.

And yet, could not the whole thing have been only a series of coincidences? Absolutely. Was not the neutrino code itself discovered by accident? And could not the code in turn have arisen by accident, and by accident impeded the decomposition of large organic molecules, and by accident repeated itself, and, finally, by sheer chance produced Lord of the Flies?

That is all possible. Accident can also cause such a swirling of waves at high tide that when the water recedes there will appear, on the smooth sand, the deep print of a foot.

Skepticism is like a microscope whose magnification is constantly increased: the sharp image that one begins with finally dissolves, because it is not possible to see ultimate things: their existence is only to be inferred. In any case, the world, after the closing of the Project, continued on its merry way. The popularity of statements made by scientists, political figures, and celebrities of the hour on the subject of cosmic intelligence has passed. Frog Eggs has been put to good use, so the millions from the budget did not go to waste. Over the code, now published, anyone from the legion of loose screws can rack his brains—those who used to invent perpetual-motion machines and trisect angles—and, in general, anyone can believe what he wants to believe. Particularly if his belief, like mine, has no practical consequence. Because it did not, after all, reduce me to dust and ashes. I am as I was before entering the Project. Nothing has changed.

I would like to conclude with a few words about the people of the Project. I already mentioned that my friend Donald is not alive. He suffered a statistical deviation in the stream of cellular divisions: cancer. Yvor Baloyne is not simply a professor and a dean, but a man so overworked that he does not even know how happy he is. About Dr. Rappaport I know nothing. The letter that I sent several years ago to the Institute for Advanced Study was returned. Dill is in Canada—neither of us has time to correspond.

But what, really, do these remarks signify? What do I know of the secret fears, ideas, and hopes of those who were my colleagues for a time? I was never able to conquer the distance between persons. An animal is fixed to its here-and-now by the senses, but man manages to detach himself, to remember, to sympathize with others, to visualize their states of mind and feelings: this, fortunately, is not true. In such attempts at pseudo merging and transferral we are only able, imperfectly, darkly, to visualize ourselves. What would happen to us if we could truly sympathize with others, feel with them, suffer for them? The fact that human anguish, fear, and suffering melt away with the death of the individual, that nothing remains of the ascents, the declines, the orgasms, and the agonies, is a praiseworthy gift of evolution, which made us like the animals. If from every unfortunate, from every victim, there remained even a single atom of his feelings, if thus grew the inheritance of the generations, if even a spark could pass from man to man, the world would be full of raw, bowel-torn howling.

We are like snails, each stuck to his own leaf. I retreat behind the shield of my mathematics, and recite, when that does not suffice, these final lines from Swinburne's poem:

Zakopane, June 1967
Kraków, December 1967