But there was no way to base far-reaching forecasts on so primitive a faith. If not on “puritanical” and “ascetic” grounds, people sometimes voiced these sentiments out of a fear of change. That fear sat at the bottom of all scientific arguments that ruled out, to begin with, the possibility of building “intelligent machines.” Humankind always felt most at home — though never comfortable — in situations that were slightly desperate: that spice did not bring solace to the body, but did appease the soul. But the call of “all forces and reserves to the front of science” was stirring as long as “intelligent machines” were not able to replace the scientists effectively.
Of the real nature of both directions — the expansive-“ascetic” and the “encysting”-hedonistic — we could say nothing sensible. A civilization could take either path: storming the Cosmos or cutting itself off from it. The neutrino signal seemed to prove, at least, that certain civilizations did not shut themselves away from the world.
A civilization as “spread out” techno-economically as ours, with the front lines swimming in wealth and the rear guard dying of hunger, had by that very spread already been given a direction of future development. First, the troops behind would attempt to catch up with the leaders in material wealth, which, only because it had not yet been attained, would appear to justify the effort of that pursuit; and, in turn, the prosperous vanguard, being an object of envy and competition, would thereby be confirmed in its own value. If others imitated it, then obviously what it did must be not only good, but positively wonderful! The process thus became circular, since a positive feedback loop of motivation resulted, increasing the motion forward, which was spurred on, in addition, by the jabs of political antagonisms.
And further: a circle would result because it was difficult to come up with new solutions when the given problem already possessed some solutions. The United States, regardless of the bad that could be said of it, undoubtedly existed — with its highways, heated swimming pools, supermarkets, and everything else that gleamed. Even if one could think up an entirely different kind of felicity and prosperity, this could still only be, surely, in the context of a civilization that was both heterogeneous and — overall — not poor. But a civilization that reached a state of such equality and thereby became homogeneous was something completely unknown to us. It would be a civilization that had managed to satisfy the basic biological needs of all its members; only then, in its national sectors, would it be possible to take up the search for further, more varied roads to the future, a future now liberated from economic constraints. And yet we knew, for a certainty, that when the first emissaries of Earth went walking among the planets, Earth’s other sons would be dreaming not about such expeditions but about a piece of bread.
17
Despite the differences of opinion that separated us in the affairs of the Project, we represented — and by “we” I do not mean only the Science Council — a sufficiently close-knit team so that the new arrivals, here and there already called “the Pentagon puppets,” could be certain that their theses would be received by us with daggers drawn. Although I, too, was rather unfavorably disposed toward them, I had to admit that Lerner and the young biologist accompanying him (or astrobiologist, as he styled himself), pulled off an impressive thing; because it was difficult for us to believe that, after our year of tribulation, after the wringer to which we had collectively surrendered our brains, it was still possible to set forth, on the subject of His Master’s Voice, hypotheses that were totally new, never even touched upon by us, and, moreover, different from each other and supported by a well-constructed mathematical apparatus (though not so strong regarding data). Yet this is precisely what happened. What is more, these new ideas, mutually exclusive to a degree, allowed for the establishing of a kind of golden mean, a novel compromise that brought them together not at all badly.
Baloyne, perhaps because he felt that it was not suitable, in a meeting with the people of the Alter-Project, to stick to our old “aristocratic” structure — the division between the all-knowing elite and the poorly informed pawns of the collective — or perhaps just because he believed that what we were to hear would be revelational — organized a lecture meeting for more than a thousand of our workers. If Lerner and Sylvester were aware of the hostility of those assembled, they gave no indication of it. In any case, their behavior was impeccable.
Their research — Lerner emphasized in his introduction — was purely theoretical in nature; they had not been given, except for the stellar code itself and general information about Frog Eggs, any details, and their purpose had not at all been to set up some “parallel experiment,” or to compete with us, but only to approach His Master’s Voice differently, having in mind exactly the sort of confrontation of views which was taking place now.
He did not stop for applause — just as well, since there would have been none — but went straight to the matter, and proceeded quite lucidly; he won me over with both his talk and his person — and won others, too, judging by the reaction in the auditorium.
Being a cosmogonist, he had worked on cosmogony — in its Hubblian variant and Hayakawan modification (Hayakawan, and mine, too, if I might say so, though I had merely done the mathematical wickerwork for the bottles into which Hayakawa poured new wine). I will try to give a sketch of his thesis and convey, if I am able, something of the tone of the lecture, which more than once was interrupted by remarks from the audience, because a dry summary would lack all the charm of the conception. The mathematics, of course, I omit — although it played its part.
“I see it this way,” he said. “The Universe is a thing that pulses, that contracts and dilates in alternation, every thirty billion years. . . When it contracts, it eventually reaches a state of collapse in which space itself disintegrates, becoming folded up and locked not only around stars, as in the case of the Schwarzschild sphere, but around all particles, the elementary included! Since the ‘joint’ space between the atoms ceases to exist, obviously the physics known to us also disappears, its laws undergo transformation. . . This null-space cluster contracts further, and then — speaking figuratively — the whole turns inside out, into the realm of forbidden energy states, into ‘negative space,’ so that it is not nothingness, but less than nothingness — mathematically, at least!
“Our actual world does not have antiworlds — that is, it has them periodically, once in thirty billion years. ‘Antiparticles’ are, in our world, only the trace of those catastrophes, an ancient relic, and also, of course, an arrow pointing to the next catastrophe. But there remains — to continue the metaphor — a kind of ‘umbilicus,’ in which still pounds the remnant of the unextinguished matter, the embers of that dying Universe; it is a fissure between the vanishing ‘positive’ space, this space that is ours, and the other, the negative. . . The fissure remains open; it neither grows nor closes, because it is continually forced apart by radiation — by neutrino radiation! Which is like the last sparks of the bonfire, and from which begins the next phase, because, when ‘what was reversed’ has come to the limit of its ‘inside-out’ expansion and created an ‘antiworld,’ and extended it, it begins to contract again and break back through the fissure, first in neutrino radiation, which is the hardest and most stable, because at that point there is no light yet, only, besides the neutrino radiation, ultrahigh gamma! What begins again to swell spherically and form the expanding Universe is a spreading, globe-shaped neutrino wave, and that wave is at the same time the matrix of creation for all the particles that will occupy the soon-to-be-born Universe; it carries them with it, but only potentially, in that it possesses sufficient energy for their materialization!
“But when this Universe is in full swing, with its nebulae flung wide, as ours is now, there are still stray echoes in it of the neutrino wave that brought it into being, AND THIS IS HIS MASTER’S VOICE! From the gust that forced its way through the ‘fissure,’ from that neutrino wave arose the atoms, the stars and planets, the nebulae and the metagalaxies; and this eliminates the ‘problem of the letter.’. . . Nothing was sent to us by ‘neutrino telegraph’ from another civilization; at the other ‘end’ there is No One, and no transmitter, nothing but the cosmic pulse from that ‘rupture.’ It is only an emission produced by processes that are purely physical, natural, and totally uninhabited, therefore devoid of any linguistic character, of content, of meaning. . . This emission provides a permanent link between the successive worlds, the expiring and the newly created; it connects them energetically and informationally; thanks to it, a continuity is preserved, there are nonaccidental, regular repetitions; therefore one can say that this neutrino stream is the ‘seed’ of the next Universe, that this is a kind of metagenesis or alternation of generations, separated by macrocosmic time, but in the analogy there is, of course, no biological content. Neutrinos are the seeds from disintegration only because, of all the particles, they are the most stable. Their indestructibility guarantees the cyclic return of genesis, its repetitions. . .”