Meanwhile Frog Eggs could not do without such processes, which were its sustenance, the air it breathed, for it required no other source of energy, and indeed could make use of no other. Frog Eggs became the foundation for an edifice of hypotheses — a veritable Tower of Babel of hypotheses, unfortunately, because of the disparity between them.
According to the simplest, Frog Eggs was the protoplasm of which the Senders of the stellar code were composed. To manufacture it, as I indicated, only a small portion of the code was utilized — certainly no more than 3 or 4 percent — the portion that allowed itself to be “translated” into synthesis operations. The proponents of this first view believed that the entire code was the description of one Sender and that, if we succeeded in materializing him in toto, he would stand before us as a live and intelligent being from another civilization in the galaxy, telegraphed to Earth’s receivers via a stream of neutrino emissions.
According to other, related, conjectures, what had been sent was not so much an “atomic blueprint” of an adult organism, as a kind of spore or egg capable of development, or even an embryo. The embryo would be suitably programmed genetically and, if materialized on Earth, could turn out to be as competent a partner for mankind as the adult specimen from the first possibility.
And there was no dearth of radically different approaches. According to another group, or family, of hypotheses (because the ideas of each circle were connected by their own consanguinity), the code described not an “individual” of any sort, but an “informational machine” — a type of tool rather than a representative of the race that transmitted it. Some conceived of such a machine as being a kind of library made of the stuff of Frog Eggs, i.e., a “plasmic container of memory,” able to communicate the data stored in it or possibly even to carry on a “conversation” about the data. Others posited a “plasmic brain” — an analog, digital, or hybrid type — which would not be able to provide answers to questions concerning the Senders, but which would represent a sort of technological gift. The code, then, was the act of handing across space, to one civilization by another, the latter’s finest instrument for the processing of information.
These hypotheses all had, in turn, their black or demonic variations, which arose — some said — from the reading of too much science fiction. Whatever had been sent, whether “individual,” “embryo,” or “machine,” upon materialization would — according to these variations — attempt to take over the world. And, again, within this segment of beliefs was division — because some of the followers of the conquest-of-Earth theory held that this was a galactically planned “act of invasion,” while others said no, an act of “cosmic friendship,” this being the way in which advanced civilizations undertook to perform, with respect to others, an “obstetric intervention,” facilitating the birth of a more nearly perfect social structure — for the local benefit, and not in the interest of the Senders.
All these hypotheses (and there were more) I considered not just wrong but ridiculous. In my opinion, the stellar code denoted neither a plasmic brain nor an informational machine nor an organism nor a spore, because the object it designated simply did not figure in the categories of our conceptualizations. It was the plan of a cathedral sent to australopithecines, a library opened to Neanderthals. In my opinion, the code was not intended for a civilization as low on the ladder of development as ours, and consequently we would not succeed in doing anything meaningful with it.
I was called a nihilist on account of this, and Eugene Albert Nye complained to his superiors that I was sabotaging the Project — of which I learned even without possessing my own network of hidden microphones.
I had been working almost a month on His Master’s Voice when the matter took on a completely new light, thanks to the efforts of a team of biologists. We had at the Project what was called the Book of Canis Minor; in it anyone could enter his postulates, his criticisms of the theories of others, his own proposals or ideas, or the results of his research. The contribution of the biologists occupied a prominent if not central place there. It was Romney who came up with the notion of conducting experiments of a sort totally different from those that were absorbing his colleagues. Romney was (like Reinhorn) one of the few scientists in the Project of the older generation. Anyone who has not read his Rise of Man knows nothing of evolution. Romney searched for the causes of intelligence — and found them in combinations of accidents which, though neutral when they occurred, later took on a sardonic significance: cannibalism turned out to be a spur to mental development; the threat of glaciers, a prerequisite for civilization; the gnawing of bones, the inspiration for the origin of tools. And the junction of the organs of generation with those of elimination, taken from the fish and reptiles, became the topographic map not only for eroticism but for metaphysics, too, which oscillates between defilement and divinity. He drew from the zigzag course of evolution all its magnificence and wretchedness, and demonstrated how random series, in their deviations, turn into laws of nature. But the book is surprising most of all for the spirit of compassion that pervades it — though never given explicit expression.
I do not know how Romney hit upon his great idea. When asked, he would only mutter. His team directed its attention not to the letter recorded on the tapes but to the “original” — that is, the neutrino emission itself, streaming unceasingly from the sky. My guess is that Romney addressed the question of why it was neutrino waves that had been chosen by the Senders as the carrier of information. As I have said, there exists a natural neutrino emission in space, originating from the stars. The emission that, by means of the appropriate modulation, conveys the letter is a very narrow band in that totality. Romney must have wondered whether the band (corresponding to the notion of “wavelength” in radiotechnology) had been selected by the Senders randomly, or whether some special reason lay behind that decision. So he set up a series of experiments in which a great number of substances were exposed first to the ordinary neutrino radiation from the stars, and then to the stream of the letter. He could do this because the provident Baloyne, reaching deep into government coffers, had supplied the Project with a battery of high-resolution neutrino inverters. In addition, the radiation from the heavens was amplified several hundred million times — the physicists built the necessary equipment.
Neutrinos are the most penetrating of the elementary particles. They all, and particularly those at low energies, pass through galactic space and — with no greater difficulty — material objects, planets, stars; because matter is far more transparent to them than glass is to sunlight. The experiments really should not have produced any result worth mentioning. But they did.
In chambers placed at a depth of forty meters (quite shallow for an experiment with neutrinos) stood mammoth amplifiers connected to inverters. The increasingly concentrated neutrino beam, issuing from a metal cylinder the size of a pencil, hit various solids, liquids, and gases that were put in its path. The first series of tests, in which a great variety of substances was irradiated in this fashion by the natural emission from the sky, yielded nothing of interest — as was expected.
But the neutrino beam that carried the letter revealed an astounding property. Of two groups of macromolecular solutions, the more stable chemically turned out to be the one that had been subjected to the ray. The ordinary neutrino “noise,” I should emphasize, did not possess such an effect. Only the stream that was modulated by information possessed it. It was as if its neutrinos, penetrating everything in an invisible rain, nevertheless entered into some interaction — for us imperceptible and unknown — with the molecules of the colloid and, in so doing, rendered the colloid less vulnerable to the factors that normally caused its decomposition, the unraveling and tearing of the seams of its chemical bonds. It was as if that neutrino emission “favored” large molecules of a certain type; as if it assisted the rise — in aqueous solutions saturated with particular substances — of those atomic configurations that constituted the chemical backbone of life.
The neutrino stream by which the letter reached us was too attenuated for the effect to have been discovered directly. Only its concentration by many hundreds of millions of times allowed the effect to be observed — in solutions, moreover, that had been irradiated for weeks on end. Even so, this suggested strongly that the emission, when not intensified, still had the same “life-favoring” property, except that the property would manifest itself in periods measured not in weeks but in hundreds of thousands — no, in millions — of years. Back in the prehistoric past, that all-penetrating precipitation increased the chances, in however fractional a way, of life forming in the oceans, because it wrapped certain types of organic molecules, as it were, in an invisible armor that made them resistant to the chaotic bombardment of Brownian motion. The stellar signal did not itself create life, but assisted in life’s earliest, most elementary stage, hindering the dissolution of what had become combined.