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.