His Master's Voice Read online

  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 naive 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.

  5

  THE WELL-KNOWN silence of the Universe—silentium universi—effectively drowned out by the din of local wars for half a century, was recognized by many astrophysicists as an inarguable fact, since persistent radio monitoring yielded nothing—from the Ozma Project to the many years of effort by the Australians.

  And meanwhile, all that time, other specialists besides astrophysicists were at work: those who devised LOGLAN, LINCOS, and a whole series of other artificial languages as tools for the establishment of interstellar communication. Many discoveries were made, such as that of the economy of transmitting television images instead of words. The theory and methodology of Contact grew slowly into a library. It was known, now, exactly how a civilization would need to proceed if it wished to communicate with others. The preliminary step was to send call signals in a wide band, signals that were rhythmic, showing first of all their artificial nature, and then—by frequencies—where and in which kilo- or megacycle range to look for the true emission. And that would begin with a systematic presentation of grammar, syntax, vocabulary. It would be a guidebook composed for the entire Universe and valid even to the remotest nebula.

  But it happened instead that the unknown Sender committed a dreadful faux pas, because his letter was without introductions, without a grammar, withou
t a dictionary—an enormous letter, recorded on almost a kilometer of magnetic tape. When I learned of this, my first thought was that either the letter was not meant for us, that by pure chance we lay in the path of its transmission between two "conversing" civilizations; or else the letter was intended only for those civilizations that, having passed a certain "knowledge threshold," were able both to detect the cleverly concealed signal and to decode its meaning. According to the first possibility—that of accidental reception—the problem of "not following the rules" did not exist. According to the second, the letter took on a new, peculiarly enriched aspect: the information had been in some way (this was how I imagined it) made proof against the "unqualified."

  To the best of our knowledge, without possessing the code units, or the syntax, or the vocabulary, the only way to decipher a message was by using the trial-and-error method, by sifting frequencies, whereby one might have to wait two hundred years for success, or two million, or a full eternity. When I found out that among the mathematicians in the Project were Baird and Sharon, and that the chief programmer was Radcliffe, I felt uncomfortable, and made no secret of it. It seemed strange—given their august presence—that I had been approached at all. But at the same time this gave me a little courage, because in mathematics there do exist insoluble problems, and they are insoluble for third-rate whizzes and first-order geniuses alike. And therefore there seemed to be a chance—because otherwise Baloyne would have stuck with Sharon and Baird. Apparently Sharon and Baird had concluded that if they could not carry the day in this extraordinary encounter, then someone else might.

  The view of many notwithstanding, the conceptual convergence of all the languages of Earth's cultures, however varied they may be, is striking. The telegram GRANDMOTHER DEAD FUNERAL WEDNESDAY can be translated into any language you like—from Latin and Hindustani to the dialects of the Apaches, Eskimos, or the tribe of Dobu. We could even do this, no doubt, with the language of the Mousterian period, if we knew it. The reason is that everyone has a mother, who has a mother; that everyone must die; that the ritualization of the disposing of a corpse is a cultural constant; as is, also, the principle of reckoning time. But beings that are unisexual would not know the distinction between mother and father, and those that divide like amoebas would be unable to form the idea even of a unisexual parent. The meanings of "grandmother" thus could not be conveyed. Beings that do not die (amoebas, dividing, do not die) would be unacquainted with the notion of death and of funerals. They would therefore have to learn about human anatomy, physiology, evolution, history, and customs before they could begin the translation of this telegram that is so clear to us.

  The example is primitive, because it assumes that the one who receives the message will know which signs in it carry information and which constitute their unessential background. With the letter from the stars our position was different. The recorded rhythm could have represented, for example, only marks of punctuation, while the actual "letters" or ideograms could have failed completely to affect the surface of the tape's magnetic coating, being impulses to which the machine was not sensitive.

  A separate problem is the disparity between the levels of civilization. From the gold death mask of Amenhotep the art historian will read the epoch and its style. From the mask's ornamentation the student of religions will deduce the beliefs of that time. The chemist will be able to show what method was used then to work the gold. The anthropologist will tell whether the specimen of the species from six thousand years ago differs from modern man; and the physician will offer the diagnosis that Amenhotep suffered from a hormonal imbalance, acromegaly, that gave him his deformed jaw. In this way an object sixty centuries old provides us, in modern times, with far more information than its creators possessed—for what did they know of the chemistry of gold, of acromegaly, of cultural styles? If we turn the procedure around in time and send to an Egyptian of the era of Amenhotep a letter written today, he will not understand it, not only because he does not know our language, but also because he has neither the words nor the concepts to set alongside ours.

  Thus were the general deliberations on the subject of the "letter from the stars." The information about it was compressed—in keeping with custom—into a sort of standard text and recorded on tape, and was played for the Very Important Persons who came to visit us. Rather than render it in my own words, I quote verbatim:

  "The task of His Master's Voice is to study every aspect of and attempt to translate the so-called message from outer space, which is, in all likelihood, a series of signals sent intentionally and with the aid of an artificial-technological device, by a being or beings that belong to some undetermined extraterrestrial civilization. The medium carrying the specific communication is a stream of particles called neutrinos that have zero rest mass and a magnetic moment 1600 times less than the magnetic moment of an electron. Neutrinos are the most penetrating of the elementary particles known to us. Such particles reach Earth from every direction of the sky. Among them one can distinguish particles generated in stars (therefore in the sun as well) through natural processes such as beta decay and other nuclear reactions, and particles produced from collisions between neutrinos and the nuclei of atoms in Earth's atmosphere or in the crust of the globe. The energy of these particles varies from tens of thousands to many billions of electron volts. Shigubov's work has shown the theoretical possibility of building a so-called neutrino laser, or 'naser,' which could emit a monochromatic corpuscular beam. It is possible that the transmitter that sends the signals received on Earth operates on such a principle. Thanks to the work of Hughes, Lascaglia, and Jeffreys, there has been constructed, for the purpose of recording the separate energy levels in a neutrino emission, a device called an inverter or a neutrino transformer, based on the Einschoff Principle ('the pseudo-particle exchange'), which, making use of the Moessbauer-Tong Effect, is able to filter quanta of radiation to an accuracy of 30,000 eV.

  "During the lengthy recordings of the low-energy quanta there was discovered, in the band of 57 million eV, a signal of artificial origin, made up of more than two billion units when converted into binary code. The signal is transmitted continuously, without breaks. It has a comparatively broad radiant, covering the entire region of α

  "For this artificial signal to be discovered and recorded, the following conditions have to be met: First, the corpuscular stream of neutrinos must be received by an instrument that has a resolution of at least 30,000 eV and is aimed at a radiant in the Canis Minor, with a possible deviation of 1.5 degrees in any direction from the α of that constellation. Second, one must filter out, from the entire neutrino emission of that sector of the sky, the band lying between 56.8 and 57.2 million eV. And third, the reception of the signal must be of a duration greater than 416 hours and 12 minutes, and then the beginning of the next emission must be compared with the beginning of the one preceding. If this is not done, the received signal will give no indication that it is anything other than a normal (natural) noise phenomenon. For a number of reasons, the constellation Canis Minor is a region interesting to neutrino astronomers. The first condition therefore may be met fairly commonly wherever there are such specialists who have at their disposal the right equipment. The selecting of the necessary band, however, has a lower probability, since the emission in that sector possesses 34 maxima in other energies (the number discovered at the present time). The maximum of the 57-million eV band in the spectrum of the entire emission does in fact display a sawtooth peak; that is, it is energetically sharper or better focused than the others, which are created by natural processes, but still it is not that noticeable; the singularity, in practice, will be found only ex post facto, i.e., when someone already knows that the signal at band 57 million eV is artificial and consequently directs his attention there.

  "Let us assume that out of the world's forty observatories that have the Lascaglia-Jeffreys machine, at least ten are keeping the Canis Minor radiant under constant observation. The chance that one of thes
e will filter for the signal works out to about 1:3 (10:34)—ceteris paribus. But a recording time on the order of 416 hours is considered rather long. One does not come across such recordings more often than once in every nine or ten research projects. Thus one can reasonably make the approximation that the discovery's chance of coming about was roughly 1:30-40, and that it could be repeated, with much the same probability, outside the United States."

  I have quoted the whole text because its second part is also of interest. The probabilistic calculation is not offered very seriously; its inclusion was dictated by the policy, a bit cynical, of the directors of the Project. Their idea was to alarm the Very Important Persons, since a 1:30 chance is not what one could call astronomically small, and the Persons, alarmed, could use their influence to support an increase in the funding of the Project. (The greatest expense, apart from the large computers, were the machines for the automated chemical syntheses.)

  To begin work on the "letter," one had to take a first step, and that was the worst thing. The tautology of the above sentence is superficial only. In history there have appeared, innumerable times, thinkers who believed that one could actually progress, in knowledge, from zero; they made of the mind a blank page and held that it could be filled with one and only one necessary order. This fiction has been the basis of awesome efforts. Yet such an operation cannot be carried out. It is impossible to commence anything without first making assumptions, and our awareness of this fact in no way diminishes its reality. Those assumptions inhere in the very biology of man, and in the amalgam of civilization which serves as the interface between the organisms and the environment; and this amalgam is permitted because the actions that must be taken in order to survive are not rendered unequivocal by the environment. The environment, rather, leaves the organisms a chink for freedom of choice, a chink spacious enough to include thousands of possible cultures.