His Master's Voice, Page 7

  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 exagg
erate, 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, a
s 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.