His Masters Voice

4

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.

How it was exactly, what means of persuasion, what compliments, promises, and arguments were enlisted, I do not know, because that side of things the official record passes over with absolute silence; nor were the people of the Science Council quick to come forward later on, now as my fellow workers, with admissions touching that preliminary phase of research in His Master’s Voice. If one or another turned out to be a bit uncooperative, if appeals to patriotism and the national interest were insufficient, resort was made to conversations “at the highest level.” At the same time — and this perhaps was the most important factor contributing to the psychological accommodation — the hermetic nature of the Project, its severance from the world, was seen purely as a stopgap, a temporary, transitional arrangement that would be changed. Psychologically effective: for despite the misgivings felt by this or that scientist about the administration’s representatives, the attention given the Project now by the Secretary of State and now by the President himself, the warm words of encouragement, expressive of the hope placed in “such minds” — all this created an atmosphere in which the posing of a plain question as to the time limit, the deadline for lifting the secrecy on the work, would have sounded discordant, impolite, positively boorish.

I can also imagine, though in my presence no one ever breathed a word on that delicate subject, how the noble Baloyne gave instruction in the principles of diplomacy (coexistence, that is, with politicians) to his less worldly colleagues, and how with his characteristic tact he kept putting off inviting and qualifying me to join the Council. He must have explained to the more impatient that first the Project had to win the trust of powerful patrons; only then would it be possible to follow what in all conscience the scientific helmsmen of HMV considered the most appropriate course. And I do not say this with irony, for I can put myself in Baloyne’s shoes: he wished to avoid friction on both sides, and was well aware that in those high circles I had the reputation of being unreliable. So I did not take part in the launching of the enterprise; this, however — as I was told a hundred times — was all to my advantage, because the living conditions in that ghost town situated a hundred miles east of the Monte Rosa mountains were at first quite primitive.

I think it best to present what happened in chronological order, and therefore will begin with what I was doing just before the arrival at New Hampshire, where I was teaching, of the emissary from the Project. Best, because I entered its course when many of the general concepts had already been formed; as a “greenhorn” I needed to be introduced to — to acquaint myself with — everything, before I could be harnessed, like a new draft horse, to that huge machine (numbering twenty-five hundred people).

I had only recently come to New Hampshire, invited there by the chairman of the Mathematics Department, my old classmate Stewart Compton, to conduct a summer seminar for doctoral candidates. I accepted the offer; with a load of only three hours a week, I could spend whole days roaming the woods and fields in the area. Even though I had a full vacation coming to me, having completed, that June, a year-and-a-half collaboration with Professor Hayakawa, I knew — knowing myself — that I would not be able to relax unless I had at least some intermittent contact with mathematics. Rest gives me, immediately, the guilty feeling that I am wasting valuable time. Besides, I have always enjoyed meeting new practitioners of my esoteric discipline, about which prevail more false notions than about any other field.

I cannot call myself a “pure” mathematician; too often have I been tempted by outside problems. Such temptation led to my work with young Thorpe (his contribution to anthropology remains unappreciated, because he died young: in science, too, one’s biological presence is required, because, despite appearances, a discovery needs credentials louder than its own merit) — and, later on, with Donald Prothero (whom I found at the Project, to my great surprise), and with James Fenniman (who subsequently received the Nobel Prize), and, finally, with Hayakawa. Hayakawa and I had built a mathematical backbone for his cosmic-origin theory, which was, unexpectedly, to make its way — thanks to one of his rebellious students — into the very center of the Project.

Some of my colleagues looked down their noses at these guerrilla raids of mine into the preserves of the natural sciences. But the benefit usually was reciprocal: the empiricists not only received my aid, but I, too, in learning their problems, began to see which directions of our Platonic Kingdom’s development lay along the lines of the main strategic assault on the future.

One frequently encounters the sentiment that in mathematics all that is needed is “naked ability,” because the lack of it there cannot be hidden; while in other disciplines connections, favoritism, fashion, and — most of all — the absence of that indisputability of proof which is supposed to characterize mathematics, cause a career to be the resultant vector of talents and conditions that are nonscientific. In vain have I tried to explain to such enviers that, alas, in our mathematical paradise things are not ideal. Cantor’s beautifully classical theory of plurality was for many years ignored, and for quite unmathematical reasons.

But every man, it seems, must envy another. I regretted that I was weak in information theory, because in that sphere, and especially in the realm of algorithms governed by recursive functions, phenomenal discoveries were in the air. Classical logic, along with Boole’s algebra, the midwives of information theory, were from the beginning burdened with a combinatorial inflexibility. Thus the mathematical tools borrowed from those domains never worked well. They are, to my taste, unwieldy, ugly, awkward; though they yield results, they do it in a graceless way. I thought that I would be better able to study the subject by accepting Compton’s offer. Because it was precisely about this region of the mathematical front line that I would be speaking at New Hampshire. It sounds odd, perhaps, that I intended to learn through lecturing, but this had happened to me more than once before. My thinking always goes best when a link forms between me and an active and critical audience. Also, one can sit and read esoteric works, but for lectures it is imperative to prepare oneself, and this I did, so I cannot say who profited more from them, I or my students.

The weather that summer was good, but too hot, even out in the fields, which became dreadfully parched. I am particularly fond of grass. It is thanks to grass that we exist; only after that vegetation revolution that covered the continents with green could life establish itself on them in its zoological varieties. But I do not claim that this fondness of mine derives only from evolutionary considerations.

August was at its height when one day there appeared a herald of change — in the person of Dr. Michael Grotius, who brought me a letter from Yvor Baloyne as well us a secret communication delivered orally.

It was on the second floor of an old, pseudo-Gothic building of dark brick, with a pointed roof half-concealed by reddening vines, in my rather poorly ventilated room (the old walls contained no ducts for air conditioning), that I received the news — from a small, quiet young man as delicate as Chinese porcelain and wearing a little black crescent beard — that an announcement had reached Earth, but whether good or not, no one yet knew, for despite more than twelve months of effort, they had not succeeded in deciphering it.

Though Grotius did not say so, and though in the letter of my friend I found no mention of it, I understood that here was research under very high protection — or, if you prefer, supervision. How else could a thing of such importance not have been leaked to the press or other media channels? It was obvious that experts of the first order were engaged in keeping the lid on tight.

Grotius, his youth notwithstanding, showed himself to be an accomplished fox. Since it was not certain that I would agree to participate in the Project, he could tell me nothing concrete. He had to appeal to my vanity, to emphasize that twenty-five hundred people had chosen — out of all the remaining four billion — me as their potential savior; but even here Grotius knew moderation and did not lay it on too thick.

Most believe that there is no flattery that the object of the flattery will not swallow. If that is a rule, I am an exception to it, because I have never valued praise. One can praise — to put it this way — only from the top down, not from the bottom up. And I know well my own worth. Grotius either had been warned by Baloyne or simply possessed a good nose. He spoke at length, seemed to answer my questions fully, but at the end of the conversation all that I had got out of him could be written on two index cards.

The main scruple was the secrecy of the work. Baloyne realized that that would be the sore point, so in his letter he wrote of his personal meeting with the President, who had assured him that all the research of the Project would be published, except information that might be detrimental to the national interest of the United States. It appeared that in the opinion of the Pentagon, or at least of that section of the Pentagon which had taken the Project under its wing, the message from the stars was a kind of blueprint for a superbomb or some other ultimate weapon — a peculiar idea, at first glance, and saying more about the general political atmosphere than about galactic civilizations.

I sent Grotius away for three hours and went, without hurrying, to my fields. There, in the strong sun, I lay on the grass and deliberated. Neither Grotius nor Baloyne in his letter had said a word about the necessity of binding myself by oath to preserve the secret, but that there was some such “initiation” into the Project was self-evident.

It was one of those typical situations of the scientist of our time — zeroed in on and magnified, a prime specimen. The easiest way to keep one’s hands clean is the ostrich-Pilate method of not involving oneself with anything that — even remotely — could contribute to increasing the means of annihilation. But what we do not wish to do, there will always be others to do in our place. Yet this, as they say, is no moral argument, and I agree. One might reply, then, with the premise that he who consents to participate in such work, being full of scruples, will be able to bring them to bear at the critical moment, but even should he be unable, no such possibility would exist if in his place stood a man who was devoid of scruples.

But I have no intention of defending myself in that way. Other reasons prompted me. If I know that something is happening that is extremely important but at the same time a potential menace, I will always prefer to be at that spot than to await the outcome with a clear conscience and folded hands. In addition, I could not believe that a civilization incommensurably above us would send out into the Cosmos information convertible to weaponry. If the people of the Project thought otherwise, that did not matter. And, finally, this chance that had suddenly opened up before me was totally beyond anything I could still expect from life.

The next day Grotius and I flew to Nevada, where a military helicopter stood waiting. I had got myself into the gears of an efficient and unerring machine. This second flight lasted about two hours, practically all of it over desert. Grotius, to keep me from feeling like a man roped into joining a criminal gang, was deliberately low-key; he refrained from giving me any feverish briefing on the dark secrets that waited at our destination.

From the sky, the compound presented itself as an irregular star half sunken in sand. Yellow bulldozers crept about the dunes like beetles. We landed on the flat roof of the highest building there, whose architecture made no pleasant impression. It was a cluster of massive concrete blocks, erected back in the fifties as the operation center and living quarters for a new atomic testing ground, the old testing grounds having become obsolete with the increase in explosive charge. Even as far as Las Vegas, windows would be knocked out after every major detonation. The new testing ground was to be situated in the heart of the desert, about thirty miles from the compound, which was fortified against possible shock waves and fallout.

The entire complex of buildings was surrounded by a system of slanted shields that faced the desert; their function was to break up the shock waves. All the structures were windowless and double-walled, the space between filled, probably, with water. Communications were put below the ground. As for staff housing and the buildings designated for operations, they were oval and placed so that no dangerous resonance would result in the event of repeated reflections and deflections of a wave front.

But that was the prehistory of the site, because before construction was completed a nuclear moratorium was signed. The steel doors of the buildings were then bolted shut, the air shafts capped, and the machines and shop equipment packed carefully in lubricant-filled containers and taken below ground (beneath the streets was a level of storage areas and magazines, and beneath that, another level, for a high-speed subway). The place guaranteed complete isolation for research, and therefore someone in the Pentagon assigned it to the Project — perhaps also because, in this way, some use could be made of the many hundreds of millions of dollars that had gone into all that concrete and steel.

The desert had not gained access to the compound, but had buried it in sand, so at the beginning there was a great deal of sweeping and cleaning to do. It also turned out that the plumbing did not work, because the water table had changed, and it was necessary to drill new artesian wells. Meanwhile, water was carried in by helicopter. All this was told me in great detail, so that I should appreciate my good fortune in having been invited late.

Baloyne was waiting for me on the roof of the building that housed the Project administration. This was the main heliport. The last time we had seen each other was two years before, in Washington. He is a person that physically you could make two of, and intellectually — four, at least. Baloyne is and, I think, will always remain greater than his achievements, because it very rarely happens that in so gifted a man all the psychical horses pull in the same direction. A little like Saint Thomas, who, as we know, did not fit through every door, and a little like young Ashurbanipal (but without the beard), he constantly wanted to do more than he was able. This is pure supposition, but I suspect that he — albeit on a different principle and possibly a larger scale — performed upon himself, over the course of the years, the kind of psycho-cosmetic operations that I spoke of, in reference to my own person, in the Preface. Secretly grieved (but this, I repeat, is my hypothesis) at his physical appearance as well as personality — he was a butterball and painfully timid — he assumed a manner that could be called circular irony. Everything he said, he said in quotes, with an artificial, exaggerated emphasis, and with the elocution of someone playing a succession of improvised, ad hoc roles. Therefore, whoever did not know him long and well was confounded, for it seemed impossible ever to tell what the man thought true and what false, and when he was speaking seriously and when he was merely amusing himself with words.

This ironic quote-unquote became at last a part of him, and enabled him to utter things that no one else would have been forgiven. He could even ridicule himself at any length, since this trick, in principle very simple, through consistent application rendered him quite impossible to pin down or catch.

With humor, with self-irony, he built up around his person such a system of invisible fortifications that even those — like me — who had known him for years could not predict how he would react. I think that he strove particularly for this, and that the things he did, which sometimes indeed bordered on the clownish, he did with secret design, though they seemed perfectly spontaneous.

Our friendship resulted from the fact that Baloyne first looked down on me and later envied me. Both the one and the other I found amusing. At the beginning he believed that as a philologist and humanist he would never in his life need mathematics; concerned with things of the spirit, he placed knowledge of man over knowledge of nature. But then he became involved in linguistics as in an illicit love affair; he began to wrestle with the currently reigning fashions of structuralism and developed a taste, however reluctantly, for mathematics. And thus arrived, unwillingly, on my territory. Realizing that there he was weaker than I, he was able to admit this in such a way that it was I, with my mathematics, that was the butt of the joke. Did I say that Baloyne was a Renaissance figure? I loved his exasperating home, where there were always so many people that you could not talk to the host in private earlier than midnight.

What I have so far said touches the fortifications Baloyne raised about his personality but not the personality itself. A special hypothesis is needed to divine what lives intra muros. It was, I think, fear. I do not know what he feared. Himself, perhaps. He must have had a great deal to hide, surrounding himself as he did with such a labored din; he always had so many ideas, plans, projects, and got himself into so many unnecessary things, was a member of all sorts of societies, conservatories, a professional respondent to academic questionnaires and polls of scientists; he overburdened himself intentionally, because in that way he would not have to be alone with himself — there would never be time. He dealt with the problems of others, and understood people so well, one naturally assumed he understood himself well, too. A mistaken assumption, I believe.

Over the years he imposed upon himself various constraints, until they hardened into his external, publicly visible nature — that of the universal activist of reason. He was, then, a Sisyphus by choice; the magnitude of his efforts disguised any failure, because if he himself established the rules and laws of his activity, no one could know with any certainty whether he was accomplishing all that he set out to do, or sometimes stumbled, particularly since he boasted of his defeats and made much of the littleness of his intellect, but in quotes of ostentation. He had the special penetration of the richly endowed, who are able to take hold of any problem, even one foreign to them, immediately from the proper angle, as if instinctively. He was so haughty that he was forever bending himself — as in a game — to humility, and so anxious that over and over again he had to prove himself, to assert his merit — while at the same time denying it.

His study was like a projection of his soul. Everything in it was gargantuan: the chest of drawers, the desk; you could have drowned a calf in his cocktail pitcher. From the huge window to the opposite wall was one battlefield of books. Apparently he required this chaos pressing from all sides — and in his correspondence, too.

I speak this way of my friend and risk his displeasure, though before I spoke no differently of myself. I do not know what it was among the people of the Project that determined finally the Project’s fate. Therefore, just in case, thinking of the future, I am also presenting here those bits and pieces that I have not been able to put into any coherent whole. Perhaps someone else, someday, will manage that.

In love with history, rapt in history, Baloyne drove backward, as it were, into the time coming. For him modernity was a destroyer of values, and technology an instrument of the Devil. If I exaggerate, it is not by much. He was convinced that the culmination of humanity had already taken place, long ago, possibly in the Renaissance, and that a long, accelerating downhill career had begun. Although he was a Renaissance homo animatus and homo sciens, he took pleasure in contacts with people whom I would rank among the least interesting, though they present the greatest threat to our species; I mean politicians. He had no political ambitions himself; or, if he did, he kept them even from me. But various and sundry gubernatorial candidates, their spouses, Congressional hopefuls or “in” Congressmen, and gray-haired, doddering Senators, as well as those hybrid types only half politico, or a quarter, who occupy positions veiled in mist (but mist of the best quality), were all to be found, all the time, at his house.

My attempts to keep up a conversation with such people (like holding up the head of a corpse, but I did it for Baloyne) collapsed after five minutes, whereas he was able to jabber with them for hours on end — God only knows for what reason! Somehow I never asked him point-blank about this, but now it turned out that those contacts bore fruit, because during the screening of candidates for the post of science director of the Project it came to light that they all — all the advisers, experts, board members, committee chairmen, and five-star generals — wanted only Baloyne, trusted only Baloyne. He, however, and I know this, was not at all eager to assume the post, smart enough to realize that sooner or later there would be conflict, and ugly conflict, between the two groups that it would be his job to keep united.

One had only to remember the Manhattan Project and the fate of people among those who directed it but were scientists, not generals. While the latter were all promoted and could tranquilly set about writing their memoirs, the former, with surprising regularity, met with “ostracism from both worlds,” i.e., the worlds of politics and science. Baloyne changed his mind only after a meeting with the President. I do not believe that he allowed himself to be taken in by any kind of argument. It was simply that the situation in which the President made the request — a request Baloyne was able to fulfill — possessed for him sufficient justification to risk the most he had to risk: his whole future.

But here I am falling into journalese, because, besides everything else, he must have been driven by a genuine curiosity. A part of it, too, was that a refusal would have seemed like cowardice, and only a man to whom fear, day by day, is a stranger can be cowardly with the full knowledge that he is being cowardly. One who is timorous and unsure will lack the courage to expose himself so horribly, confirming, as it were — to himself as well — the ruling feature of his character. But even if this sort of desperation played a role in Baloyne’s decision, he undoubtedly proved to be the right man to occupy what was the most uncomfortable office in the entire Project.

I have been told that General Oster, the chief administrator of HMV, was so unable to deal with Baloyne that he voluntarily stepped down from his post; Baloyne meanwhile fostered the image of a man desiring above all else to quit the Project, and made so much noise lamenting the fact that Washington would not accept his resignation that Osier’s successors, anxious to avoid unpleasant exchanges at the top, deferred to him as much as possible. When he felt himself more secure in the saddle, he proposed that I be included in the Science Council; the threat of resignation was no longer needed.

Our meeting took place without reporters and flash bulbs; but, of course, any sort of publicity was quite out of the question. As I stepped from the helicopter onto the roof, I saw that he was truly moved. He even attempted to embrace me (which I cannot stand). His retinue stood at a respectful distance; I was being received like a sovereign lord, but had the feeling that we were both aware of the ineradicable ridiculousness of the situation. On the roof there was not a single man in uniform; the thought occurred to me that Baloyne had carefully kept them out of sight so that I would not be antagonized. But I was mistaken — mistaken, however, only regarding the extent of his influence, because, as I discovered later, he had removed uniforms from the entire area under his jurisdiction.

On the door of his office someone had written in lipstick, in giant letters, COELUM. Baloyne spoke to me, of course, nonstop, but lit up expectantly when the retinue, as if cut off with a knife, remained outside the door and we could look each other in the eye — alone.

As long as we regarded each other with what I might call a purely animal sympathy, nothing marred the harmony of our reunion. But, though curious about the secret, I first questioned him on the Project’s position with respect to the Pentagon and the Administration, and, specifically, about the extent of freedom allowed in using the possible results of the research. He tried, though halfheartedly, to avail himself of that ponderous dialect employed by the State Department; I became, therefore, more acerbic with him than I intended, as a result of which a tension arose between us, and it was washed away only by the red wine (Baloyne must have wine) at dinner. I learned later that he had not at all contracted the infection of officialdom, but had spoken so as to invest the maximum amount of sound with the minimum of meaning — because his office was riddled with bugging devices. Practically all the buildings, and the labs, too, were packed with that electronic upholstery.

It was only after several days that I learned this, from the physicists, who were not in the least perturbed by the fact; they considered it a natural phenomenon, much like the sand in the desert. But none of them went anywhere without a little scrambling apparatus; they took a childish delight in foiling the ubiquitous protection placed over them. Out of humanitarian considerations, so that those occult minions (I never saw one in the flesh) who had to sit and listen through all that was recorded would not be too bored, the antibugging units were turned off — such was the custom — during the telling of jokes, particularly those off-color. But the telephones, I was advised, were not to be used for matters other than making dates with the girls that worked in administration. There were no people in uniform, as I said, not even the type who brought uniforms to mind, in the entire community.

The only nonscientist who took part in the sessions of the Science Council was Dr. (but of Law) Eugene Albert Nye, the best-dressed man in the Project. He represented Dr. Marsland (who, by strange coincidence, also was a four-star general). Nye was well aware that the younger scientists in particular liked to play jokes on him, passing index cards with cryptic diagrams and numbers, or secretly confiding to one another — ostensibly failing to notice him — outlandishly radical views.

The jokes he bore with saintly composure, and was able to conduct himself admirably when someone at the hotel canteen showed him a tiny transmitter with a microphone, not bigger than a safety match, which had been dug out from behind an outlet in one of the rooms. All this did not amuse me in the least, though I have a fairly active sense of humor.

Nye represented a very real power, and neither his manners nor his love of Husserl made him likable. He knew, of course, that the jokes, digs, and little incivilities shown him by his associates were compensatory, because in fact it was he who was the quietly smiling spiritus movens of the Project — or, rather, its velvet-gloved ruler. He was like a diplomat among natives. The natives, being helpless, seek to vent their resentment on the venerable personage, and sometimes, when their anger drives them, they may even tear something, or handle it roughly; but the diplomat easily tolerates such demonstrations, for that is the reason he is there, and he knows that even if he is insulted, the insult is not addressed to him personally but to the power he represents. Thus he can identify himself with that power — a convenient arrangement, since such impersonalization provides him with a sense of constant, safe superiority.

People who do not represent themselves but serve, instead, as a tangible, materialized symbol, a symbol fundamentally abstract though it may wear suspenders and a bow tie; who are a local, concrete instance of an organization that disposes individuals like objects — I detest such people, and am unable to transform the feeling into its comical or ironic equivalent. From the very beginning, sensing this, Nye gave me a wide berth, as one does with a vicious dog; otherwise the man would not have been able to fulfill his function. I showed him my contempt, and he definitely paid me back with interest, in his impersonal way, though he was always extremely polite. Which, of course, only irritated me the more. My human form was, in the eyes of people like him, a mere casing that contained an instrument needed for higher goals — goals known to them, inaccessible to me. What surprised me the most in him was that he apparently held actual views of some sort. But possibly they were only a good imitation.

Even more un-American and unsporting was Rappaport’s attitude toward Nye — Dr. Saul Rappaport, that first discoverer of the message from the stars. He once read me an excerpt from a nineteenth-century volume describing the raising of pigs trained to find truffles. It was a nice passage, telling, in an elevated style typical of that age, how man’s reason made use — in keeping with its mission — of the avid gluttony of the swine, to whom acorns were tossed each time they unearthed a truffle.

This kind of rational husbandry, in Rappaport’s opinion, was what awaited the scientists; it was in fact already being put into practice in our own case. He made me this prediction in all seriousness. The wholesale dealer takes no interest in the inner life of the trained pig that runs about for the truffles; all that exists for him are the results of the pig’s activity, and it is no different between us and our authorities.

The rational husbandry of scientists admittedly has been hindered by relics of tradition, those unthinking sentiments that came out of the French Revolution, but there is reason to hope that this is a passing phase. Besides the well-equipped sties — that is to say, the shining laboratories — other installations should be provided, to deliver us from any possible feeling of frustration. For example, a science worker might satisfy his instincts of aggression in a hall filled with mannequins of generals and other high officials specially designed for beating; or he could go to specific spots for release of sexual energy, etc. Availing himself appropriately of outlets here and there, the scientist-pig — explained Rappaport — can then, without further distraction, devote himself to the hunting of truffles, for the benefit of the rulers but to the undoing of humanity, as indeed the new stage in history will demand of him.

Rappaport made no attempt to hide these views. It was amusing to observe the reactions of our colleagues to his pronouncements (not made at the official meetings, of course). The younger ones simply laughed, which angered Rappaport, because the truth was that he thought and spoke entirely in earnest. But there was no help for it: one’s personal experience in life is fundamentally unconveyable. Nontransmittable. Rappaport came from Europe, which is equated by the “military-senatorial mind” (as he liked to put it) with the Red Menace. Thus he never would have got into the Project had he not accidentally become its coauthor. Only the fear of possible “leaks” landed him in our team.

He had emigrated to the States in 1945. His name was known to a handful of experts before the war. There are few philosophers with a genuinely thorough schooling in mathematics and the natural sciences; he belonged in that rare category, and consequently turned out to be extremely useful in the work of the Project. Rappaport and I lived next door to each other in the hotel at the compound, and it was not long before we became more closely acquainted. He left his native country as a man of thirty, alone, the Holocaust having claimed his entire family. He never spoke about it, except one evening, after I had let him in on — and he was the only one — my and Prothero’s secret. True, I am anticipating events in telling the story here, but I think this is indicated. Whether it was, oddly, to reciprocate my confidence with another, or for some unknown reason, Rappaport then told me how, before his eyes, a certain mass execution had taken place — the year was 1942, I think — in his hometown.

He was pulled off the street, a random pedestrian. They were shooting people in groups, in the yard of a prison recently shelled and with one wing still burning. Rappaport gave me the details of the operation very calmly. The executing itself could not be seen by those herded against the building, which heated their backs like a giant oven; the shooting was done behind a broken wall. Some of those waiting, like him, in his turn, fell into a kind of stupor; others tried to save themselves — in mad ways.

He remembered a young man who, rushing up to a German gendarme, howled that he was not a Jew — but howled it in Yiddish, probably because he knew no German. Rappaport felt the insane comedy of the situation, and suddenly the most precious thing to him was to preserve to the end the integrity of his mind, which would enable him to maintain an intellectual distance from the scene around him. However, he had to find — he explained this to me objectively and slowly, as to a man from “the other side” who could not be expected to understand anything of such experiences — some value external to himself, a prop of some sort for his mind. Since that was altogether impossible, he decided to believe in reincarnation. Maintaining the belief for fifteen or twenty minutes would be sufficient. Yet he could not accomplish that, not even in an abstract way, so he picked out from among a group of officers situated some distance from the place of execution one who, by his appearance, stood apart.

He described him to me, as though from a photograph. This was a young deity of war: tall, handsome, in battle dress, of which the silver borders seemed to have turned slightly ash-gray from the heat; he had on his full outfit, the iron cross under the collar, field glasses in a case on his chest, a deep helmet, a revolver with the holster conveniently moved toward the buckle of the belt, and in his gloved hand a handkerchief, clean and neatly folded, which he pressed to his nose now and then, because the executions had lasted so long — since that morning — that the flames had reached some of those cut down earlier in the corner of the yard, and from that place now belched the stench of burning flesh. But — and this, too, Rappaport did not forget — he grew aware of the presence of the sweetish corpse-smoke only when he observed the handkerchief in the hand of the officer he had singled out. He told himself that the moment he was shot, he would become that German.

He knew perfectly well that the idea was complete nonsense, even from the point of view of any metaphysical doctrine, reincarnation included, because the “place in the body” was already occupied. But somehow this did not bother him; in fact, the longer and more greedily he stared at the chosen man, the better he was able to cling to this thought that was to sustain him until the final moment. Already it was as if he were being given support — by the man. The man would help him.

This, too, Rappaport said calmly, but in his voice there was, I thought, a catch of admiration for the “young deity” who directed the entire operation so expertly, without moving from his place, without shouting or falling into the half-drunk trance of striking and kicking in which his subordinates worked, iron-chested. In that moment Rappaport understood even this: the subordinates had to behave that way; they were hiding from the victims in the hatred of them, but the hatred could not be produced in themselves except through acts of brutality. They had to batter the Jews with their rifle butts; blood had to flow from lacerated heads and crust upon faces, because it made the faces hideous, inhuman, and in this way — I am quoting Rappaport — there did not appear, in what was done, a gap through which horror might peer, or compassion.

But the young deity in the silver-braided uniform required neither these nor any other contrivances to act perfectly. He stood in a slightly elevated place, the white handkerchief applied to his nose with a movement that had something in it of the refined duelist. He was the master of the house and the commander, in one person. In the air floated flakes of ash, driven by the heat that pulsed from the fire; behind the thick walls, through the grated windows without panes, flames roared, but not a single ash fell on the officer or on his white handkerchief.

In the presence of such perfection, Rappaport managed to forget about himself, when suddenly the gate opened and in drove a film crew. Various orders were giren in German, and the gunshots immediately ceased. Rappaport did not know then — or later, when he told me this — what had happened. Perhaps the Germans intended to film a pile of corpses, to use the footage in a newsreel depicting the enemy’s actions (this took place near the Eastern Front). The slain Jews would be shown as the victims of the Bolsheviks. That may have been the case; Rappaport, however, offered no interpretation; he only related what he saw.

Immediately afterward came his failure. Those still alive were put in a row and filmed, whereupon the officer with the handkerchief asked for one volunteer. Rappaport understood at once that he should step forward. He did not know exactly why he should, but felt that if he did not, it would be terrible for him. The moment arrived in which the whole force of his will was exerted to make that one step — but he did not budge. The officer then gave them fifteen seconds to think and, turning his back on them, spoke quietly, casually, to some younger soldier.

Rappaport, as a doctor of philosophy, having earned his university degree with a brilliant dissertation on logic, hardly needed the entire apparatus of syllogisms to realize that if no one stepped forward, all would die: hence whoever now came forth from the line really would be risking nothing. It was simple, clear, and certain. He renewed his effort — this time, true, without conviction — and again did not budge. A few seconds before the time was up, someone presented himself, however, and disappeared with two soldiers behind a broken wall. Several revolver shots rang out. The young volunteer, smeared with blood, his own or not his own, then returned to the group.

It was dusk when the large gate was set ajar and, staggering in the cold evening air, the group of those left alive ran out into the empty street.

They dared not flee at first, but no one showed any interest in them. Why, Rappaport could not say. He did not attempt to analyze what the Germans did; they were like fate, which one did not have to explain.

The volunteer — need it be said? — had moved the bodies of the executed, and those still alive were finished off with the revolver. As if to see whether he was right that I really had not understood a thing about his story, Rappaport then asked me why the officer requested a volunteer and had been prepared, in the absence of one, to kill the lot of them, though that would have been “unnecessary” — on that particular day, at any rate — and why, moreover, he did not even consider announcing that nothing would happen to the volunteer. I did not, I confess, pass this test: I replied that perhaps the German had acted thus from contempt, scorning to enter into conversation with the victims. Rappaport shook his birdlike head.

“I understood it later,” he said, “thanks to other things. Although he spoke to us, you see, we were not people. He knew that we comprehended human speech but that nevertheless we were not human; he knew this quite well. Therefore, even if he had wanted to explain things to us, he could not have. The man could do with us what he liked, but he could not enter into negotiations, because for negotiation you must have a party in at least some respect equal to the party who initiates it, and in that yard there were only he and his men. A logical contradiction, yes, but he acted exactly according to that contradiction, and scrupulously. The simpler ones among his men did not possess this higher knowledge; the appearance of humanity given by our bodies, our two legs, faces, hands, eyes, that appearance deterred them a little from their duty; thus they had to butcher those bodies, to make them unlike people’s. But for him such primitive proceedings were no longer necessary. This sort of explanation is usually received metaphorically, as a kind of fable, but it is completely literal.”

About this fragment of his past we never spoke again, nor did we touch on any others. But some time had to pass before I could stop remembering, whenever I saw Rappaport, the scene he had drawn so vividly for me, of the prison yard with bomb craters, the people with faces veined in red and black from blows to the head, and the officer whose body he wanted — fraudulently — to move into. I cannot say to what extent there remained in him a mindfulness of the annihilation he escaped. Rappaport was, in any case, a very sensible man — yet at the same time quite comical. I will incur his displeasure the most when I tell the way he left his room each day (though I did not mean to spy). In the hotel corridor, by the elevator, there was a large mirror. Rappaport, who had a bad stomach and stuffed his pockets with bottles of multicolored pills, when he left each morning always stuck out his tongue in front of the mirror, to see if it was coated. He did this so regularly that I would have thought it extraordinary had he omitted the practice.

At the meetings of the Science Council he was conspicuously bored, but proved particularly allergic to the utterances — seldom made, however, and generally tactful — of Dr. Eugene Albert Nye. If one did not want to listen to Nye, one could watch the mimicking accompaniment to the speech on Rappaport’s face. Rappaport would scowl, as if suddenly aware of something vile on his tongue, would pull his nose, scratch behind his ear, squint at the speaker with an expression that seemed to say, “You can’t be serious.” But when Nye once, finally losing patience, asked him outright if he wished to take issue with some point, Rappaport, innocent and surprised, shook his head several times, held up his hands, and said that he had nothing, absolutely nothing to say.

I dwell on these descriptions to show the reader the central figures of the Project from a less official angle, and also to introduce him to the special atmosphere of a community sealed off from the world. Indeed, it was curious, that creatures as different from each other as Baloyne, Nye, Rappaport, and myself should have come together in a single place, with the mission of “establishing Contact,” an ersatz diplomatic corps representing mankind vis-à-vis the Universe.

Although different, we joined to become an organism that studied the “letter from the stars”; we formed a group that had its own customs, tempo, and social patterns, with subtle variations on the official, semiofficial, and private levels. All this, taken together, created the “spirit” of the institution, but more than that, too — what a sociologist would take pleasure in calling a “local subculture.” This aura within the Project — and the Project, after all, numbered nearly three thousand people in its most dynamic phase — was distinct and unique, and, in the long run, for me at least, wearisome.

One of the oldest members of the Project, Lee Reinhorn, who as a very young physicist had worked, once upon a time, on the Manhattan Project, told me that the atmospheres of the two undertakings were in no way comparable: the Manhattan Project had sent its people on an exploration typically natural — scientific, physical in character; while ours somehow remained implanted in human civilization and was unable to free itself from that dependency. Reinhorn called HMV a test of our culture’s cosmic invariance — and thereby annoyed our humanist colleagues (in particular), because he was preening himself, with naïve good nature, for discoveries from their bailiwick. He studied, irrespective of the research of his own group (physics), material from all over the world, and from the preceding few decades — material primarily linguistic, devoted to the problem of cosmic communication, and especially to the aspect of it called the “cracking of languages of closed semantics.”

Now, the uselessness of this pyramid of learned material — and the bibliography, with which I, too, acquainted myself, contained, if memory serves me right, about five and a half thousand titles — was obvious to every man in the Project. And the amusing thing was that such books and articles continued to appear in considerable numbers in the world, which, except for a small circle of chosen people, knew nothing of the existence of the “letter from the stars.” Consequently the professional pride and sense of loyalty of the linguists who worked in the Project were put through the wringer when Reinhorn — receiving in the mail yet another bundle of relevant articles — filled us in, at the semiofficial research colloquia, on the latest from the field of “interstellar semantics.” The worthlessness, the sterility of all those lines of reasoning, laced lovingly with mathematics, was really comical, though at the same time depressing.

Tempers flared; the linguists accused Reinhorn of maliciously mocking them. But friction between the humanists and the natural scientists of the Project was the order of the day. The former we called “elves,” the latter “dwarfs.” The internal jargon of the Project had a rich vocabulary; it could serve, along with the forms that the coexistence of both “parties” took, as a worthy subject for some future sociologist.

Fairly complicated factors inclined Baloyne to include within the frame of the HMV group a whole slew of humanistic fields: not least of which was the fact that he himself was, after all, by training and predilection, a humanist. But this rivalry could not very well take any productive form if our anthropologists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts, as well as the philosophers, refused to make use of the data as raw material for their research. Thus, whenever there was a seminar given in one of the “elf” sections, someone would write on the bulletin-board announcement, next to the title of the topic, the letters SF, for “science fiction.” Unfortunately, this childish graffiti humor had justification in the barrenness of those sessions.

The general meetings almost always ended in open quarrels. The most petulant, I would say, were the psychoanalysts; they were especially aggressive in their demands — they wanted the appropriate experts to decipher the “literal layer” of the stellar message so that they could then set to work determining the entire system of symbols employed by the civilization of the Senders. Here, of course, came the inevitable rejoinder, in the form of a bold hypothesis, as, for example, that the civilization might reproduce asexually, which perforce would desexualize its “symbolic lexicon” and thereby in advance doom to failure any attempt at psychoanalytic penetration. The one who spoke thus would immediately be labeled an ignoramus, because modern-day psychoanalysis was no longer a primitive Freudian pansexualism. And if, at such a meeting, a phenomenologist also spoke up, there would be no end to the objections raised and countered.

For we had a veritable embarras de richesses, a quite unnecessary excess of “elfin” specialists — representing even such esoteric fields as psychoanalytic history and pleiography (for the life of me I cannot remember exactly what it is pleiographers do, though I am certain it was explained to me once).

It would appear that Baloyne was nevertheless wrong to have acceded, in this regard, to the Pentagon’s wishes. Those advisers had mastered only one maxim, but that they mastered for all time: if one man dug a hole with a volume of one cubic meter in ten hours, then a hundred thousand diggers of holes could do the job in a fraction of a second. And likewise, just as such a multitude would crack one another’s heads open with their shovels before they broke the first clod of earth, so our poor “elves” tussled and scuffled — mainly with themselves, but with us as well — instead of “producing.”

But if the Pentagon believed results were directly proportional to the investment, that was that. The thought that our guardians were people who held that a problem that five experts were unable to solve could surely be taken care of by five thousand, was hair-raising. Our unfortunate “elves” suffered frustrations and complexes, because the truth of the matter was that they were condemned to complete idleness, albeit an idleness decked up in various appearances. When I arrived at the Project, Baloyne admitted to me, in private, that his dream — impossible — was to jettison all that academic ballast. But one could not even consider such a thing, for a very mundane reason: whoever entered the Project, once in, could not simply get up and leave; that would threaten us with the “breaking of the seal,” i.e., the escape of the Secret into the wide, as yet unsuspecting world.

So Baloyne had to be a genius of diplomacy, tact. Now and then he even came up with things to do — or, rather, pretenses of things — for the “elves,” and would be furious, not amused, at gibes directed at them, because that only opened up old wounds — as, for example, when in the suggestion box there appeared the proposal that the psychologists and psychoanalysts be transferred from their positions as researchers on the star letter to positions as doctors treating those who were unable to decipher the letter and consequently suffered “stress.”

The advisers from Washington got in Baloyne’s hair also. Every so often they would hit on a new idea — as when they kept insisting, for the longest time, on the organization of large, mixed sessions operating on the popular principle of “brainstorming,” which replaces the mind of a solitary thinker, concentrating on a problem, by a large team that collectively, chorally, “thinks out loud,” as it were, on a given topic. Baloyne, on his part, tried different tactics — passive, active, retaliatory — to resist this sort of good advice.

As one who gravitated naturally toward the “dwarfs,” I will be regarded as partisan, but I must say that at the outset I was innocent of any bias. Immediately on my arrival at the Project I began studying linguistics, because that seemed imperative to me. I was soon amazed to learn that, when it came to the primary, most fundamental concepts in this field — a field supposedly precise, quantified, mathematized — there was absolutely no agreement. Why, the authorities could not come together on so basic and preliminary a question as what exactly morphemes and phonemes were.

But when I asked the appropriate people, in all sincerity, how in the world they could accomplish anything, given this state of affairs, my naïve question was taken as a sneering insinuation. I had got myself — not realizing it in those first days — in the middle of a cross fire; I had assumed that it was necessary to chop wood and let the chips fall where they might; and it was only the kindest, like Rappaport or Dill, who took me aside and filled me in on the complex psychosociology of the elf-dwarf coexistence, also called, at times, the “cold war.”

Not everything that the elves did, I must say, was without value. The theoretical work of the interdisciplinary team of Wayne and Traxler, for instance, turned out to be very interesting; it was devoted to “finite automata deprived of an unconscious,” that is, systems capable of “total self-description.” A good many worthwhile studies came out of the elf milieu — except that the connection between those studies and the letter from the stars was either tenuous or altogether nonexistent. I say all this not to ride the elves — truly, that is not my intention — but only to show what an oversize and complicated piece of machinery was set in motion on Earth in the face of the First Contact, and how much trouble it had with itself, with its own workings, which certainly did nothing to further the attainment of its proper goal.

Inauspicious, also, as regards physical comfort, were the conditions of our day-to-day existence. At the compound we had no cars to speak of, because the roads that had once been built there were covered with dunes. In the housing area itself ran a miniature subway, constructed back when they needed it for the atomic testing ground. All the buildings stood on gigantic concrete legs — gray, heavy boxes with oblong sides — and beneath them, across the concrete of the empty parking lots, blew only the hot wind, powerful, as from a blast furnace, in such a closed-in space, driving that awful, reddish, unusually fine sand, which got into everything the minute you left your airtight quarters. Even the pool we had was underground; swimming would otherwise have been impossible.

But a lot of people preferred to go from building to building by the streets, in the unbearable heat, rather than use the underground means, because, as if it was not bad enough living like a mole, at almost every step one found grim reminders of the compound’s past. Those giant orange double S’s, for example — Rappaport, I recall, complained of them to me — which shone even in the day, indicated the way to shelter, standing for “shelter station,” I think, but I am not sure now. And not only below ground, but also in our work areas glowed the signs EMERGENCY EXIT, ABSORPTION SHIELD. On the concrete disks at the entrances to the buildings was printed, here and there, BLAST CAPACITY, with numbers showing what force of impact from a wave front the given structure could withstand. At turns in the corridors and on stairway landings stood large, scarlet decontamination cylinders, and there were plenty of hand-held Geiger counters to choose from.

In the hotel, too, all the flimsier partitions, walls, or panes serving as dividers in the lobby were accordingly marked with large, flaming cautions that during the tests it was not safe to remain in that area, which had not been designed to withstand shock. And, finally, on the streets there were still a few enormous arrows that showed in which direction the propagation of a wave would be the strongest, and what would be the vector components, in the given spot, of its reflection. The general impression you received was that you were standing at the notorious “ground zero” and that any minute the sky would open up above your head in a thermonuclear explosion. Only a few of these signs were, with time, painted over. I asked why all of them were not removed. The people smiled and said that a great many signs had been removed, and sirens, and Geiger counters, and cylinders of oxygen, but the administration of the compound had asked that what was left not be touched.

As a new arrival I had heightened perceptions, and these souvenirs of the compound’s atomic prehistory grated on me considerably at first. Later, when I became absorbed in the problem of the “letter,” I ceased to notice them, like everyone else.

In the beginning these conditions seemed to me intolerable — and I am talking not only about climate and geography. Had Grotius told me, in New Hampshire, that I would fly to a place in which every bathroom was bugged and every telephone tapped, had I been able to observe Eugene Albert Nye from that distance, I would not only have understood theoretically, but also sensed, felt, how all our freedoms could vanish the moment we produced what was expected of us. And then, who knows, I might not have been so quick to agree. But even the College of Cardinals can be led to cannibalism, provided only that one proceeds patiently and by small degrees. The mechanism of psychological adaptation is inexorable.

If someone had told Madame Curie that, in fifty years, out of her radioactivity would come megaton payloads and “overkill,” she might have been afraid to continue — she certainly would not have returned to her former tranquillity after hearing so dire a prophecy. Yet we have grown accustomed to this, and people who calculate corpses times ten to the eighth, to the ninth, to the tenth — no one considers them insane. Our ability to adapt and therefore to accept everything is one of our greatest dangers. Creatures that are completely flexible, changeable, can have no fixed morality.