“Spoken like Cassandra,” McMahon said, and I saw that he was dead serious. But, then, so was I. We talked some more, but I told him nothing that might arouse the least suspicion, nothing that might indicate that the Project had entered a new phase. Still, I felt uncomfortable when we parted, having the impression that I had said too much — particularly toward the end. I must have been Cassandra-like in pantomime, in expression more than in words, because I had kept a tight rein on the words.
The Senator had not yet left when I returned to my calculations. I did not see Baloyne until after the Senator’s departure. Yvor was morose.
“McMahon?” he said. “He came anxious, but left content. Do you know why? You don’t? The Administration fears success — too much success. It fears a discovery that will have military application.”
This astonished me.
“He told you this?” I asked. Baloyne threw up his hands at my naïveté.
“How could he tell me any such thing? But it is obvious. They are hoping and praying that we will fail completely, or at least that in the end it will turn out that all we have received is a postcard with greetings and best wishes. Yes, then they will announce this with great fanfare and furor and exaltation. McMahon went very far — you don’t know him, he’s an extremely cautious man. And yet he took Romney aside and grilled him on the long-range technological implications of Frog Eggs. Long-range, yet! And with Donald, too, the same thing.”
“And what did they say?” I asked. About Donald I did not need to worry. He was like an armored safe.
“Nothing, really. I don’t know what Donald told him, and Romney only said to the Senator that he could confess his bad dreams but that was all, because, awake, he saw nothing.”
“That’s good.”
I did not hide my satisfaction. Baloyne, however, showed every symptom of depression: he ran a hand through his hair, shook his head, and sighed.
“Lerner is supposed to come here,” he said. “With some theory for us, some idea of his own. What exactly, I don’t know, because McMahon mentioned it literally at the last moment, as he was getting in the chopper.”
I knew Lerner — a cosmogonist, one of Hayakawa’s former students. Former because, some said, he had outgrown his preceptor. What I did not understand was what connection his field could have with the Project — and how, anyway, had he learned of the Project?
“And where have you been? Don’t you realize the Administration is duplicating our work? It’s not enough that they keep looking over our shoulder — now this!”
I did not want to believe it. I asked him how he knew this. Was it possible that they had some Alter-Project, a kind of parallel verification of our activities? Baloyne, it seemed, knew nothing specific, and, because he hated to admit to ignorance, he worked himself up to the point that, in the presence of Dill and Donald, who came in, he exclaimed that really his duty, in the situation, was to tender his resignation!
Such threats fell from time to time, to the accompaniment of thunder — for Baloyne cannot live on a small scale, and a certain operatic panache is indispensable to his vital energy — but this time we joined in persuading him, until, acknowledging our arguments, he quieted down, and was about to leave when suddenly he remembered my meeting with McMahon and started questioning me about what I had said to the man. I repeated more or less everything, but left out the Cassandra part. And such was the epilogue to the Senator’s visit.
Shortly thereafter, it became evident that the preparation would take Donald more time than he had thought. Things were not going that well for me, either — the theory became tangled; I set various little tricks in motion; the personal calculator console (that was what they called it) was insufficient; I had to keep going to the computer center, which was not the most pleasant thing, because the winds were hurricane-force then, and merely crossing a street — a hundred feet — was enough to get sand in your ears, mouth, nose, and down your collar.
The mechanism by which Frog Eggs absorbed the nuclear energy it produced was still unclear; equally unclear were its means of ridding itself of the residues of those microexplosions, and these were all isotopes emitting hard gamma rays — rare-earth isotopes, mainly. Donald and I put together a phenomenological theory that did not do too bad a job of predicting the results of the experiments — but only retrospectively, as it were, within the compass of what we knew already. As soon as the scale of the experiment was increased, the predictions parted company with the results. Donald’s effect, named by him “TX” (tele + explosion), was remarkably easy to produce. He flattened a small blob of Frog Eggs between two panes of glass, and when the layer became monomolecular, the decay reaction moved across the entire surface; at greater “doses” the apparatus (the older, previous model) underwent destruction. But people, somehow, paid no attention: there was such a racket in the laboratory, there was so much shooting, it was like an arsenal testing out munitions. When I asked him, Donald explained — without cracking a smile — that his people were studying the ballistic wave propagation in Frog Eggs. That was the topic he had thought up for them, and with the cannonade effectively camouflaged his own endeavors!
Meanwhile the theory slipped through my fingers; I saw that actually it had been eluding me for quite some time, but I had not admitted this to myself. The work on it was extremely demanding — all the more difficult in that I had little stomach for it. As sometimes happens, the words I had spoken in my meeting with McMahon came back to haunt me. Often our fears are not altogether present, not dangerous, you could almost say, until we give them clear expression. This is exactly what happened to me. Frog Eggs without question now appeared to me to be a human artifact, the result of a false reading of the code. This was how I saw it: the Senders definitely had had no intention of sending us a Pandora’s box; but we, like burglars, forced the lock, and stamped upon the plundered contents everything that in Earth’s science was mercenary, predatory. And did not success in atomic physics (I thought) take place precisely in that area where the opportunity opened up for us to obtain the most destructive possible energy?
Nuclear reactors always limped behind the production of bombs; we had hydrogen warheads but still no hydrogen piles; the entire microworld revealed to man its interior — distorted by that one-sided approach — and therefore we knew far more about the strong interactions than about the weak. I discussed these topics with Donald; he did not agree with me, being of the opinion that if anyone should “shoulder the blame” for the “one-sidedness of physics” (though he did not believe in that one-sidedness, either), it was not we, but the world, by virtue of its structure. The simple fact was that it was easier, from any objective standpoint — easier if only by the law of least resistance — to destroy than it was to create. Destruction was a gradient consistent with the main direction of processes in the Universe, whereas creation always had to go against the current.
I reminded him of the Promethean myth. In his picture of things, the marches of science, worthy of respect and even reverence, should all converge, as at a source; but the myth praised not disinterestedly comprehending but seizing hold, not knowledge of but mastery over. This was the foundation of all empiricism. He said to me that with such suppositions I would delight a Freudian, seeing as I reduced the thirst for knowledge to aggression and sadism. I can see now that I had indeed lost a little of my common sense, my circumspection, and the coolness that comes from the directive of proceeding sine ira et studio — and that I had, with my speculations, shifted the “blame” from the unknown Senders onto humanity, incurable misanthrope that I was.
In the first week of November the apparatus began working, but the preliminary experiments, undertaken on a small scale, were unsuccessful: several times the detonation went so far out of control that it reached beyond the main shielding wall, and though it was minute, the leap in radiation hit 60 roentgens. It became necessary to put up around the shielding another, outer, barrier. Too massive a structure, now, to be concealed — and somehow Eugene Albert Nye, who never before had visited the physics labs, showed up several times at Donald’s. The fact that he asked no questions, but merely looked on and poked around, did not bode well. Finally Donald asked him to leave, telling him he was in the way. When I rebuked Donald for this step, he replied, calmer than I was, that one way or another things would be decided soon, and until then he would not let Nye in the door.