Finally, Rush requested his presence at a conference in which a total of nine people participated, among whom were the shining lights of American science-Donald Prothero the physicist, Yvor Baloyne the linguist and philologist, Tihamer Dill the astrophysicist, and John Baer the mathematician and information theorist. At that conference it was decided, informally, to set up a special commission to study the “neutrino letter from the stars,” which was given then the code name — Baloyne’s half-joking suggestion — His Master’s Voice. Rush urged discretion on the participants of the conference, for the time being, because he feared that the media’s giving the matter a sensational cast could only harm its chances of gaining the necessary funding; the thing would immediately become a political football in Congress, where Rush’s position, as he represented a much-criticized administration, was shaky.
It appeared that the matter had been put on as sensible a course as possible, when, without warning, who should become mixed up in it but Dr. Sam Laserowitz. From the whole account of Swanson’s trial, the one thing Laserowitz noted was that the court expert had said nothing in his testimony to the effect that the “sections of silence” on the tapes were “blanks” brought about by the periodic shutting-off of the apparatus. He drove, then, to Melville, where the trial was in process, and sat in the hotel lobby laying siege to Swanson’s lawyer; Laserowitz wanted the tapes, feeling that they should be placed in his museum of “cosmic curiosities.” The lawyer, however, refused to give them to Laserowitz, a person of no importance. Laserowitz, who smelled “anticosmic conspiracy” everywhere, hired a private detective to tail the lawyer; he thereby learned that some man from out of town, who had arrived on the morning train, was closeted with the lawyer at the hotel, received the tapes from the lawyer, and subsequently took them away with him, to Massachusetts.
The man was Dr. Rappaport. Laserowitz dispatched his detective on the trail of the unsuspecting Rappaport, and when the latter turned up in Washington and paid several visits to Rush, Laserowitz decided it was time to act. And a most unpleasant surprise it was, too, for Rush and the HMV candidates, that article from the Morning Star reprinted by one of the Washington tabloids, in which, under a suitably shrill headline, Laserowitz revealed how the administration was using every dirty trick at its disposal to hush up a tremendous discovery — exactly as, more than ten years earlier, it had buried beneath the official statements of the Department of Aviation the so-called unidentified flying objects, the famous saucers.
Only now did Rush realize that the matter could take on an ugly aspect in the international arena if the thought occurred to anyone that the United States was attempting to conceal from the world the fact that it had established contact with a cosmic civilization. He was not greatly concerned about the article itself, since its ludicrous tone discredited not only the author but the information as well; he calculated, therefore, relying on his considerable experience in the field of publicity, that if silence was maintained, the commotion would soon die down of itself.
But Baloyne decided to go see Laserowitz, in a purely personal capacity, because — he told me this himself — he felt sorry for the cosmic-contact maniac. He thought that if he offered him, in private, some minor position in the Project, everything would be set to rights. A foolish step, as it turned out, though dictated by the best intentions. Baloyne, who did not know Laserowitz, was taken in by the “Dr.,” and believed that, though the man he had to deal with might be somewhat touched in the head, publicity-hungry, and not overly fastidious about how he made a buck, he was nevertheless a colleague, a scientist, a physicist. Instead he found himself face to face with a feverish little man who, upon hearing that the “letter from the stars” was genuine, informed him with a kind of hysterical nonchalance that the tapes, and consequently the “letter,” too, were his property, of which he had been robbed. As the conversation progressed, he drove Baloyne into a rage. Laserowitz, seeing that he would gain nothing from Baloyne by words, ran out into the hall shouting that he would turn the matter over to the United Nations, to the Tribunal of Human Rights, then got into an elevator and left Baloyne to his unpleasant reflections.
Baloyne, seeing the mischief he had done, went immediately to Rush and told him everything. Rush feared for the future of the Project. However unlikely it was that someone somewhere would listen seriously to Laserowitz, the possibility could not be ruled out, and if the affair ever made its way into a major metropolitan newspaper, it would for certain assume a political character.
The initiates could well imagine the hue and cry that would be raised: that the United States was seeking to appropriate for itself what by rights belonged to all humanity. Baloyne suggested that this might be forestalled by a brief, at least semiofficial press release; but Rush did not have the authorization to issue one, nor did he intend to request it, because — he explained — the thing still was not absolutely certain. Even if the government wished to back the undertaking with the full weight of its influence before the forum of nations, it could not do so until preliminary work had proved the truth of what so far were assumptions. However, since the matter was of a highly sensitive nature, Rush nolens volens had to turn to his friend Barnett, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, who, in turn, after consulting with his people, turned to the FBI; who, however, referred him to the CIA. A top FBI legal adviser told him that the Universe, lying mainly outside the nation’s borders, did not fall under the jurisdiction of the Bureau; it was the CIA that concerned itself with foreign problems.
The unfortunate consequences of this step did not show themselves at once, but the process, once begun, was irreversible. Rush, as an individual at the interface of science and politics, well knew the undesirable ramifications of placing the Project under such protection; therefore, asking the Senator to wait twenty-four hours, he sent two trusted men to Laserowitz in an effort to talk some sense into the man. Laserowitz not only refused to listen, he caused such a scene with his visitors that fisticuffs ensued and the hotel manager had to call the police.
The following days saw a flood of articles that were altogether fantastic — ridiculous accounts of various “dyads” and “triads” of silence sent to Earth by the Universe, of lights in the sky, of the landing of little green men wearing “neutrino clothes,” and similar nonsense, in which reference was made, over and over, to Laserowitz, now promoted to Professor. But shortly thereafter, in less than a month, the “renowned scientist” turned out to be a paranoiac and was placed in a psychiatric hospital. Nor was this, unfortunately, the conclusion to his story. The syndicated press and the national magazines carried echoes of Laserowitz’s phantasmagorical struggle (twice he escaped from the hospital, the second time in a radical manner, leaving via a window eight floors up) to defend his discovery, a discovery so insane-according to the versions published later-and yet so near the truth. I confess I get the shivers when I recall that fragment of the prehistory of our Project.
It is not hard to guess that filling the newspaper columns with items one more nonsensical than the next was nothing more or less than a diversionary tactic engineered by the skilled professionals of the CIA. Because to deny the business, and in the pages of the major publications at that, would have meant focusing attention on it in absolutely the most undesirable way. But to show that the thing was all delirium, to bury the grain of truth under an avalanche of imbecilic fictions — all attributed to “Professor” Laserowitz — was a clever move, particularly when the operation could be crowned with the insertion of a brief paragraph about the suicide of the madman, which, with its simple eloquence, completely laid to rest all rumors.
The fate of that fanatic was truly horrible. I did not at first believe that either his insanity or his last step from the window into an emptiness of eight stories was genuine, but people whom I have to trust convinced me of that version of events. Yet the sign of the times had been stamped at the head of our great undertaking — times that mix, perhaps as no other, the seamy and the sublime. The zigzag of coincidences, before it threw into our hands that colossal opportunity, crushed like a flea a man who, albeit in blindness, was still the first to approach the threshold of the discovery.
If I am not mistaken, Rush’s emissaries had thought Laserowitz crazy at the point when he refused to accept a considerable sum of money in exchange for giving up his claims. But in that case he and I were of the same faith, with this one difference, that we practiced it in different monasteries. Had it not been for that great wave in which he became caught, Laserowitz would undoubtedly have prospered, a low-grade maniac devoting himself, undisturbed, to his flying saucers and all the rest of it, for there is surely no shortage of such people. But the knowledge that he was being relieved of his most sacred possession, a discovery that divided the history of mankind into two parts, tore his hardiness like an explosion and drove him to his death. In my opinion we owe more than a sneer to the man’s memory. Every great matter has, among its circumstances, some that are ludicrous or pitifully banal, which does not mean that they do not play an integral role. Ludicrousness, anyway, is a relative thing. I, too, cut a ludicrous figure every time I spoke of Laserowitz in this vein.