One evening Baloyne came to my hotel room; that day he had had a private tête-à-tête with Rush, and he told me the reason for the constant persuasion. The advisers had come to the conclusion that TX was only a misfire in a beginning series, that actually it pointed clearly to the fruitfulness of further research, and such research was now our be-all and end-all, a matter of life and death. Though I considered this reasoning to be nonsense, I realized, after a little reflection, that we could actually return, provided the Administration met our conditions, which then and there we began, Baloyne and I, to draw up. I knew that if the work went on without me, I would have no peace with myself and could not go back to my pure — that is, unsullied — mathematics, because my belief in a safety mechanism that the Senders had placed upon the stellar code was really only a belief and not certain knowledge. I put this more succinctly to Baloyne: Let us go by Pascal’s aphorism about the frail reed. If we cannot oppose, we will at least know.
The four of us, putting our heads together, figured out why the Project had not been handed over to the Army. The Army had been raising its own special breed of scientist — under the table — the type that would carry out basic assignments and be capable of limited autonomy. When he knew where to start and where to finish, the Army scientist did excellent work. But cosmic civilizations, their motives, the life-causing effects of the signal, the relation between these effects and the signal’s content — all this, for him, was black magic. “Yes, and for us as well,” remarked the ever-caustic Rappaport. We agreed, finally, to continue with the work. We got our way: Eugene Albert Nye, L.L.D., vanished from the Project (that was one of our conditions). He was immediately replaced, however, by another civilian, a Mr. Hugh Fenton. In this way we exchanged an evil for an evil. The budget was increased, the people from the Alter-Project (the existence of which we also brandished in the faces of the slightly abashed men in command) were incorporated into our research teams, and the Alter-Project itself presumably ceased to exist — but that was not true, either, because according to the official version, it never had existed. So, then, having vented our spleen, having deliberated together, having set conditions that were to be followed to the letter, we returned “home” — back to the desert; and thus began, with the New Year already past, the next and final chapter of His Master’s Voice.
16
And so everything went back to the way it was before — except that one new face appeared at the sessions of the Council, that of Hugh Fenton. Fenton the Phantom, he was called, or the Invisible Man, because he somehow existed microscopically — not that he was small, but he kept himself in the shadows. Winter meant frequent storms, but of sand, not rain. Rain hardly ever fell. It was not difficult for us to jump back into our former routine of work — of existence, rather. Again I went to Rappaport’s to chat, and again I sometimes met Dill there; it seemed to me that the Project was my life, that the one would end with the other.
The only new thing were the weekly seminars, quite unofficial, during which various topics would be discussed in turn — such topics as the prospects for the auto-evolution (that is, controlled evolution) of intelligent beings.
What did that hold for us? Supposedly it would put us on the track of the anatomy, physiology, and thereby the civilization of the Senders. But in a society that had reached a level of development similar to ours, there appeared antithetical long-range trends whose distant outcome could not be foreseen. On the one hand, the technologies already formed exerted pressure on the existing culture and, to some extent, inclined people to subordinate themselves adaptively to the needs of the instrumentalities set in motion. Thus you had indications of competition between intellectual man and the machine, and also of various forms of symbiosis between the two — and both psychology and physio-anatomical engineering discovered “weak links,” shoddy parameters in the human organism, and from there the path led to the planning of necessary “improvements.” Out of this same trend came the idea of manufacturing “cyborgs,” partly artificial people, designed specially for work in space and the exploration of planets whose conditions were drastically different from Earth’s; and the idea of connecting a human brain directly to reservoirs of machine memory, of making devices in which an unprecedented marriage of man and instrument would take place, on the mechanical and/or intellectual level.
This whole stream of technological pressures threatened to cleave the biological homogeneity of the species, hitherto intact. It was not just a single civilization for all men that such changes could render a fossil from the dead past, but even the single, universal physical shape of man. Man might in effect transform his society into a psychozoic type of ant colony.
On the other hand, the sphere of instrumental technologies might be made subordinate to cultural influences, to social mores. This could result in the biotechnological extension of the factors that determined — for example — fashion. The technologies of fashion as yet did not go beyond the boundary of the human skin. Some claimed, true, that their influence went further, but this was only because at various periods different physical variations of man have been promoted as especially valuable, as models. One need only think of the difference between Rubens’s ideal of feminine beauty and the woman of today. It might appear, to an outside observer of human affairs, that in women (who more obviously conformed to the dictates of fashion), in accordance with the requirements of the passing seasons, now the shoulders would widen, and now the hips, now the breasts would grow large, and now diminish, now the legs would fill out, and now they would again be thin and long, and so on. But such waxings and wanings of the flesh were an illusion only, produced by the selection, out of the variety of the entire set, of those physical types that gained the approval of the day. Such a state might be subjected to biotechnological correction. Genetic control would then shift the range of racial variety in the direction desired.
Of course, genetic selection for purely anatomical traits seemed a frivolous thing in comparison with a multitude of culture-creating transformations, yet at the same time a desirable thing for aesthetic reasons (the opportunity to make physical beauty universal). But we were speaking of the first steps along a path to which one could affix the sign: REASON IN THE SERVICE OF THE URGES. This, because the overwhelming majority of the material products of the mind were channeled into sybaritic pursuits. An ingeniously constructed television set dispersed intellectual garbage; sophisticated transportation technologies made it possible for a degenerate, instead of getting soused in his own backyard, to dress up as a tourist and do the same in the vicinity of Saint Peter’s basilica. If this tendency were to lead to the invasion of the human body by technological contrivances, undoubtedly the idea would be to expand the gamut of pleasurable sensations to the maximum, and perhaps even to bring into being — besides sex, narcotics, culinary happiness — other, as yet unknown, kinds of sensual stimulation and gratification.
If we had, in the brain, a “pleasure center,” then what prevented us from connecting to it synthetic sense organs that would allow the reaching of orgasms mystical and nonmystical, through actions specially designed and devised as triggers of multiphase ecstasy? The carrying out of such an auto-evolution would constitute a definitive closure in the culture and mores; it would entail a withdrawal from all things extraterrestrial. It would be an exceptionally pleasant form of intellectual suicide.
Science and technology without question would be able to come up with devices that would meet equally the requirements of both the first and the second paths of development. The fact that both seemed to us rather monstrous, each in a different way, as yet meant nothing.
Negative assessments of such transformations were quite groundless. The directive that one should not “overly indulge” oneself could be rationalized only as long as the satisfaction of one individual meant, at the same time, the detriment of another (or the detriment of one’s own body or soul, which happened, say, in the case of drug addiction). This directive could be the expression of plain necessity, and then one had better submit to it without argument; but the whole thrust of technology was precisely to eliminate, one by one, all necessities that limited possible action. Those who said that civilization would always face certain necessities, in the form of limits to personal freedom, were in fact adherents of the naïve faith that the Cosmos was arranged not without thought to the “duties befitting” intelligent beings. This was a common extension of the Biblical injunction about working for one’s daily bread in the sweat of one’s brow. It was not, as such naïve people often thought, an ethical judgment, but one clearly ontological. Existence, as a habitat for us, was furnished in such a way that one could not, not by any discoveries, attain the situation of “dizziness with success.”