But when I asked the appropriate people, in all sincerity, how in the world they could accomplish anything, given this state of affairs, my naïve 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, without 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.