His Master's Voice

  Challenged, I took up the defense of this thesis. It was no accident that physics had arisen in the West as the "queen of empiricism." Western culture was, thanks to Christianity, a culture of sin. The Fall—and the first one had been sexual!—engaged the whole personality of man in melioristic pursuits, which provided various types of sublimation, with the acquiring of knowledge at the head.

  In this sense Christianity favored empiricism, though, of course, unwittingly: it opened the possibility for it and gave it the chance to grow. Characteristic of the East and its cultures, on the other hand, was the category of shame—quite central—because a man's inappropriate action there was not "sinful" in any Christian sense, but at most disgraceful, and mainly in the external sense: having to do with the forms of behavior. Therefore, the category of shame transferred man, as it were, "outside" the soul, into the realm of ceremonial practices. For empiricism, then, there was simply no place; the chance for it disappeared with the deprecation of substantive action, and instead of the sublimation of drives, their "ceremonialization" was provided for. Vice, no longer the "fall of man," became detached from the personality and was, so to speak, legally channeled into a separate repertoire of forms. Sin and grace were replaced by shame and the tactics of avoiding it. There was no penetration into the depths of the psyche: the sense of "what is proper," "what ought to be," took the place of the conscience, and the finest minds were directed toward the renunciation of the senses. A good Christian could be a good physicist, but one could not become a physicist if one was a good Buddhist, Confucianist, or follower of the Zen doctrine, because then one would be occupying oneself with the very thing those faiths deprecated in toto. With this as a point of departure, social selection gathered the entire "intellectual cream" of the population and allowed it to spend itself only in mystical exercises—yoga, for instance. Such a culture acted like a centrifuge; it cast the talented away from the places in society where they could initiate empiricism, and stoppered their minds with an etiquette that excluded instrumental pursuits as "lower" and "less worthy." But the potential of egalitarianism inherent in Christianity—though it came into conflict with class structures, though for periods it yielded to them—never altogether disappeared, and indirectly from it sprang physics, with all its consequences.

  "Physics—a kind of asceticism?"

  "Oh, it is not that simple. Christianity was a mutation of Judaism, which was a 'closed' religion in that it was intended only for the chosen. Thus Judaism was, as a discovery, something like Euclidean geometry; one had only to reflect on the initial axioms to arrive, by extrapolation, at a more general doctrine, one that under the heading 'chosen' would put all people."

  "Christianity corresponds to a generalized geometry?"

  "Yes, in a sense, on a purely formal level—through the changing of signs in a system that is the same with regard to values and meanings. The operation led, among other things, to the acceptance of the validity of a theology of Reason. This was an attempt not to renounce any of the qualities of man; since man was a creature of Reason, he had the right to exercise that faculty—and this finally produced, after a due amount of hybridization and transformation, physics. I am, of course, oversimplifying enormously.

  "Christianity is a generalized mutation of Judaism, an adaption of a systematic structure to all possible human existences. This was a property of Judaism, purely structural to begin with. One could not carry out an analogous operation on Buddhism or Brahmanism, let alone the teachings of Confucius. So, then, the sentence was passed back when Judaism arose—several thousand years ago. And there is another possibility. The main problem of this world which every religion must confront is sex. It is possible to worship it—that is, to make it positive and central to the doctrine; it is possible to cut it off, to shut it out—neutrally; but it is also possible to see it as the Enemy. This last solution is the most uncompromising, and it is the one Christianity chose.

  "Now, if sex had been a phenomenon of less importance biologically, if it had remained a periodic, cyclic thing only, as it is with some mammals, it could not have possessed central significance, being a transient, rhythmic occurrence. But all this was determined some one and a half million years ago. From then on, sex became the punctum saliens of really every culture, because it could not simply be denied. It had to be made 'civilized.' The man of the West always felt it an injury to his self-esteem that inter faeces et urinam nascimur … a reflection that, by the laws of Mystery, put Original Sin in Genesis. That is how it was. Another kind of sexual periodicity, or—again—another kind of religion, might have set us on a different road."

  "To stagnation?"

  "No—just to a delay in the development of physics."

  Rappaport accused me of "unconscious Freudianism." Having been brought up in a puritanical family, he said, I was projecting onto the world my own prejudices. I had not freed myself, in fact, from the vision of everything in the colors of Damnation and Salvation. Since I considered Earthlings to be damned root and branch, I transferred Salvation to the Galaxy. My curse cast mankind into Hell—but did not touch the Senders, who remained completely good and without blemish. That was my mistake. In thinking of them, one first had to introduce the notion of a "fellowship threshold." All intelligence moved in the direction of more and more universal generalization, which was only proper, because the Universe itself approved that course. He who generalized correctly could control phenomena of increasing scope.

  An evolutionary awareness—understanding that mind was the result of a homeostatic "mountain climbing" against the current of entropy—made one embrace, in fellowship, the evolutionary tree that gave rise to sentient beings. But one could not encompass with fellowship the entire tree of evolution, because ultimately a "higher" being was obliged to feed on "lower" ones. The line of fellowship had to be drawn somewhere. On Earth, no one had ever placed that line below the fork where the plants parted company with the animals. And in practice, in the technological world, one could not include, for example, the insects. If we learned that for some reason exchanging signals with the Cosmos required the annihilation of Earth's ants, we would certainly think that it was "worth" sacrificing the ants. Now, we, on our rung of development, may be—to Someone—ants. The level of fellowship may not necessarily extend, from the standpoint of those beings, to such planetary vermin as ourselves. Or perhaps they had rationalizations for this. Perhaps they knew that according to the galactic statistics, the Earth type of psychozoic was doomed to techno-evolutionary failure, so that it would not be so horrendous to add to the threat hanging over us, since in any case "we most likely would not amount to anything."

  I present here the gist of that vigil on the eve of the experiment, not a chronological record of the conversation, which I do not recall that precisely. I do not know when Rappaport told me of his European experience—the one I described earlier. It was, I think, when we had finished with the generals but had not begun to seek the cause of the impending denouement. Now I said to him more or less the following:

  "Dr. Rappaport, you are even worse than me. You have made of the Senders a 'higher race' that identifies only with the 'higher forms' of the Galaxy. Why, then, do they endeavor to spread biogenesis? Why should they sow life if they are able to carry out a policy of expansion and colonization? Neither of us can go, in our reasoning, beyond the concepts accessible to us. You may be right that I localize to Earth the reasons for our defeat because of the way I was raised as a child. Except that instead of 'human sin' I see a stochastic process that has driven us into a dead end. You, a refugee from a country of victims, have always felt too strongly your own innocence in the face of extermination, and therefore you situate the source of the catastrophe someplace else: in the domain of the Senders. We did not choose this ourselves—they did it for us. Thus concludes every attempt at transcendence. We need time, but we will not have time now.

  "I have always said that if only there were a government wise enough to want to pull all
humanity out of that hole and not just its own, we might eventually climb out. But funding from the federal budget has been readily available only to the seeker of 'new weapons.' When I told the politicians that we ought to launch a crash program in anthropology, build machines for the simulation of socio-evolutionary processes, using the kind of money they put into their missile and antimissile research, they smiled at me and shrugged. No one took it seriously, and at least now I have the bitter satisfaction of being right. We should have studied man first—that was our proper ordering of priorities. But we did not, and now what we know of man is not enough. Let us finally admit that this is the case. Ignoramus et ignorabimus, because now we do not have the time."

  The good-hearted Rappaport did not try to argue with me. He led me—I was drunk—to my room.

  Before we parted, he said, "Don't take it so much to heart, Mr. Hogarth. Without you things would have turned out just as badly."

  14

  DONALD WOULD PLAN the experiments as much as a week in advance, four runs a day. This was the maximum of which the improvised apparatus was capable. After each experiment it would suffer partial destruction, and repairs would be necessary. The repairs went slowly, because the work had to be done in protective suits—on material radioactively contaminated. We got under way after the "wake"—or, rather, he did; I was only a spectator. We knew now that the people from His Master's Ghost or the Alter-Project were coming in eight days. Donald originally intended to start first thing in the morning, because he wanted his people, still engaged in the bogus research that he had assigned them, to cover with their cannonade the unavoidable roar of the explosions, but, having everything ready late the evening before (in other words, while I was working out endless variations of global Armageddon at the computer center), he did not wait.

  Actually, by now it did not matter when Nye—and, after him, our mighty protectors—found out. Fallen into a troubled sleep after Rappaport left me, I awoke several times and jumped up with the impression that I had heard the boom of a detonation, but it was a dream. The concrete of the buildings had been designed, way back when, for more than such explosions. At four in the morning, feeling like Lazarus, I dragged my aching bones out of bed and decided—since I was unable to stay in my room any longer—to dispense with the rest of our "conspiratorial" cautions and go to the laboratory. We had not planned it this way, but I simply could not believe that Donald Prothero, having everything ready, would quietly turn in for the night. And I was not mistaken: his nerves, too, had their limit.

  I washed my face in cold water and went out. As I passed Nye's door at the end of the corridor, I noticed that his light was on, and involuntarily softened my footsteps. Conscious of the absurdity of this action, I smiled a crooked smile, which stretched the skin of my face—making it feel stiff and leathery, as if not my own—and ran down the stairs instead of summoning the elevator.

  Never before had I left the hotel at that hour. The lobby was dark; I bumped into chairs set about; there was a full moon, but the concrete block at the entrance shut out its light. The street, on the other hand, looked uncanny, but perhaps it only seemed so to me. On the administration building shone the ruby lights that warned airplanes; other than that, there were only a few lamps at the intersections. The physics building was dark and appeared deserted, but, going the way I knew by heart through the half-open door, I made it to the main hall. Immediately I knew that the thing was over, because the signals that flashed red while the inverters were in operation were all dark. In the dimness of the hall the giant ring of the inverter made the place seem like the, engine room of a factory or ship; the tiny indicator lights at the consoles were still blinking on and off, but I found no one by the chamber. I knew where Donald would be; the narrow passageway between the coils of the multi-ton electromagnets led to a small interior area in which there was a kind of cubicle, where Donald kept all his records, films, notebooks. And, in fact, I saw a light on. He jumped up when he saw me. McHill was with him. Without a word of explanation he handed me the scrawled sheets of paper.

  I was not aware of the state that I was in until I found that I could not identify the symbols, though I was perfectly familiar with them—I stared stupidly at the columns of figures, trying to collect my thoughts. When finally the significance of the coordinates of the four runs of the experiment sank in, I felt a weakness in my knees.

  By the wall was a stool. I sat on it and once again, carefully and slowly, went over the results. The paper suddenly went gray; something obscured my vision. This weakness lasted only a few seconds. When it passed, I was covered with a clammy sweat. Donald at last noticed that something strange was happening to me, but I said that I was better now.

  He started to take back the notes, but I did not let him. I still needed them. The greater the energy was, the less accurate the localization of the explosion. Although four trials did not allow statistical analysis, the relation hit one in the face. Probably for charges over a microton (we cheerfully worked in units of nuclear ballistics) the error factor would equal half the distance between the point of detonation and the target. Three, at most four, more tests would be enough now to determine this exactly, and enough to make the uselessness of TX as a weapon a certainty. But I was already certain, because suddenly, with extraordinary clarity, I recalled all the preceding results as well as my wrestling to come up with a model for a phenomenological formula. The relation appeared before me, the true formula for the whole thing, incredibly simple; it was nothing but the transposition, to the TX effect, of the uncertainty principle: the greater the energy, the less the accuracy of the focus, and the less the energy, the more sharply one could focus the effect. At distances on the order of a kilometer, it would be possible to focus the effect to a target area the size of a square meter, exploding only a handful of atoms. No powerful blow, no destroying force, nothing.

  When I lifted my eyes, I saw that Donald knew also. A few words sufficed. There was only one problem: further experimentation, at energies increased by an order of magnitude—necessary to put an end, once and for all, to the career of TX—would have to be dangerous, because the indeterminacy of the place where the energy would be released, its shifting—completely unpredictable—would imperil the experimenters. What we needed was some special proving ground, a desert … and an apparatus on far remote control. This, too, Donald had thought of. We said little; over us hung a naked, dusty light bulb. McHill, all this time, did not utter a word. It seemed to me that the man was not so much shocked as—almost—disappointed; but perhaps I am doing him an injustice.

  We went through everything again, with extreme care; my thinking was so clear, I was able on the spot to trace out the dependence, extrapolating for even greater charges, those in the kiloton range, and then going in the opposite direction—for our previous results. The agreement was to three decimal places. At one point, Donald looked at his watch. It was already five. He threw the main switch to cut off the power from all the units, and together we left the laboratory. Outside there was daylight. The air was cold as crystal. McHill walked away, but we stood awhile in front of the hotel, in an unreal stillness and an isolation so complete, it was as if no one but us was left alive. The thought made me shudder—but now only in retrospect, a reflex of memory. I wanted to say something to Donald, something that would wrap it all up, that would express my relief, my joy, but suddenly I realized that I felt no joy. I was only empty, terribly exhausted, indifferent, as though nothing would or could happen now. I do not know whether he felt the same way. We shook hands, a thing we usually did not do, and went our separate ways. If someone lunges with a knife and the blade is deflected by hidden armor, he who struck the ineffective blow can take no credit.

  15

  WE DECIDED TO present the story of the TX effect at the Science Council, but after three days; a little time was needed to organize the results properly, put together more detailed observational records, and make enlargements of selected photographs. But the very nex
t day, at noon, I went to Yvor. He took the news remarkably calmly; I had underestimated his self-control. Most of all he was offended that we had not let him in on the secret until the end. I said many things to him on this score, finding myself in a position opposite the one I had been in upon my arrival at the compound: that time, he had done his best to "explain" my prior exclusion. But this matter was of incomparably greater importance.

  I used every conceivable argument to sweeten the pill—to the accompaniment of his grumbling. For a while he held a grudge, understandably, though in the end he came to appreciate our reasons, I think. In the meantime, Donald, in the same private way, informed Dill, so that the only one who found out about everything at the meeting was Eugene Albert Nye. As much as I detested the man, I had to admire him: he did not bat an eye during Donald's presentation, and I watched him the entire time. The man was a born politician, though not a diplomat—because a diplomat should not be vindictive, whereas Nye, almost a year after that meeting, when the Project had concluded its existence, with the help of a third party, a certain journalist, gave to the press a truckload of material in which the action Donald and I had taken, put in a certain light with typical commentary, occupied the place of honor. But for Nye, the matter never would have taken on the sensational aspect that obliged various high-placed people, among them Rush and McMahon, to come to our rescue.

  As the reader can see, if Donald and I were guilty of anything, it was of illogic, because in one way or another our secret research eventually had to be grist for the Project's official mill. But the whole thing was depicted as an extremely harmful piece of bungling, as a heinous attempt to sabotage the Project: instead of going immediately to the qualified experts (which meant the Army's ballistic-missile people), we had puttered about like do-it-yourself handymen, on a small scale, thereby giving the "other side" an opportunity to overtake us—and get the jump on us, fatally.