From the first, what I feared the most was a misunderstanding. I was sure that we were not being sent an instrument of murder; but everything indicated that what we had received was the description of some instrument — and it is well known what use we put instruments to. Even man is a tool for man. Familiar with the history of science, I did not imagine that there was any perfect safeguard against abuse. All technologies were, after all, completely neutral, and we could assign to any one of them the goal of death. During that unimportant but desperate conspiracy — stupid, no doubt, yet by impulse inevitable — I believed that we could no longer count on Them, because They apparently had not been able to foresee what we might do with the information mistakenly. The safeguarding against what was planned and deliberate — that I could believe; but not against what constituted our error or our filling in the gaps with faulty substitutions. Even Nature herself, who for four billion years had instructed biological evolution in how to avoid “errors,” how to operate under the protection of all possible safety measures, could not keep an eye on life’s molecular slips and twists, its side streets, dead ends, and wrong turns, its “misunderstandings” — proof of which was the innumerable degenerations in the development of organisms, such as cancer. But if They succeeded, that meant that They had gone far beyond the perfection, unattainable for us, of biological systems. I did not know, however — how, indeed, was I to have known? — that Their systems, more effective than the biological, were so universally certain, so airtight: against trespass by the unqualified.
That night in the huge hall of the inverter, bending over the sheets of scrawled paper, I had felt a sudden weakness, a moment of dizziness, and it had grown dark before my eyes, not only because the dread hanging over my head for all those weeks unexpectedly melted away; but also because in that instant I experienced, palpably, Their greatness. I understood what a civilization could be based on, and what a civilization could be. We think of an ideal equilibrium, of ethical values, of rising above one’s own weakness, when we hear the word “civilization,” and we associate it with what is best in us. But it is, above all, knowledge, a knowledge that from the sphere of possible situations eliminates precisely those (common, for us) like this one: where the finest brains out of a billion beings address themselves to the task of sowing universal death, doing what they would rather not do and what they stand in opposition to, because there is no alternative for them. Suicide is no alternative. Would we have changed one bit the course of further research, the invasion of metal locusts from the sky, had the two of us killed ourselves? If They foresaw such situations, the only way that I can understand it is if at one time They were — or, who knows, perhaps still are — like us.
Did I not say at the beginning of this book that only a fundamentally evil creature knows what freedom it attains when it does good? There was a letter, it was sent, it fell to Earth, at our feet, and had been falling in a neutrino rain while the lizards of the Mesozoic plowed the mud of the Carboniferous forests with their bellies, while the paleopithecus, called Promethean, gnawed a bone and saw in it the first club. And Frog Eggs? In Frog Eggs I see fragments — distorted, caricatured by our ineptness and ignorance, but also by our knowledge, which is skewed toward destruction — fragments of what the letter provided for by its very delivery. I am convinced that it was not hurled into the darkness as a stone is into water. It was conceived as a voice whose echo would return — once it was heard and understood.
The by-product, so to speak, of a proper reception was to be a return signal, informing the Senders that contact had been established, and at the same time telling Them the place where this occurred. I can make only a vague guess as to the mechanism that was to do this. The energy autonomy of Frog Eggs, its ability to direct nuclear reactions upon itself, which served no purpose other than to continue the state that made this possible — is evidence, proof, of an error on our part, because in our further incursion we came upon an effect as mysterious as it was dramatic, able under completely different circumstances to liberate, focus, and hurl back into space an impulse of tremendous power. Yes, if the code had been read correctly, the TX effect, discovered by Donald Prothero, would have been revealed as a return signal, an answer directed at the Senders. What convinces me of this is its fundamental mechanism: an action traveling at the greatest cosmic speed, carrying energy of any magnitude across a distance of any magnitude. The energy, of course, is to serve the transmittal of information, and not destruction. The form in which TX made itself known to us was the result of a distortion that the knowledge recorded in the neutrino stream underwent during our synthesis. Error bred error — it could not be otherwise. This is only logical, yet I am still amazed by Their versatility, that could thwart even the potentially fatal consequence of mistakes — of more than mistakes, because ours was a premeditated effort to turn a ruined instrument into a deadly blade.
The Metagalaxy is a limitless throng of psychozoic enclaves. Civilizations deviating from ours by a certain number of degrees, but, like ours, divided, mired in internal quarrels, burning their resources in fratricidal struggles, have for millennia been making — and still are making, again and again — readings of the code, readings as unsuccessful as our own. Just like us, they attempt to fashion the strange fragments that emerge from their efforts into a weapon — and, just like us, they fail. When did the conviction take root in me that this was the case? It is hard to say.
I told only those closest to me — Yvor, Donald — and before my final departure from the compound I shared this private property of mine with the acrimonious Dr. Rappaport. They all — a curious thing — at first nodded with the growing satisfaction of comprehension, but then, after some thought, said that for the world as it was given to us, my idea made too pretty and complete a picture. Perhaps. What do we know of civilizations “better” than ours? Nothing. So perhaps it is not suitable to paint such a panorama, in which we figure somewhere in the frame as a blot on the Galaxy, or as one of the embryos stuck fast in labor contractions that go on for centuries; or, finally, to use Rappaport’s metaphor, as a fetus, quite handsome at birth, but strangling on its own umbilical cord, the cord being that arm of culture which draws the vital fluids of knowledge up from the placenta of the natural world.
I can present no incontrovertible proof in support of my conviction. I have none. No evidence in the stellar code, in its information, nothing to indicate that it was produced for beings somehow better than us. Can it simply be that, stung for so long by humiliations, forced to work under the command of the Osters and the Nyes, I spun for myself — in the image and likeness of my own hopes — the only equivalent available to me of holiness: the myth of the Annunciation and Revelation, which I then — also to blame — rejected as much out of ignorance as ill will?
If a man no longer worries about the movement of the atoms and planets, the world becomes defenseless with regard to him, since he can then interpret it as he pleases. He who wields the imagination shall perish in the imagination. And yet imagination is supposed to be an open window on the world. For two years we examined a thing — at its destination, from the final results that streamed to Earth. I propose that we consider it from the opposite end. Is it possible, without falling into madness, to believe that we were sent puzzles, intelligence tests of a sort, charades of galactic descent? Such a point of view, in my opinion, is ridiculous: the difficulty of the text was not a shell that had to be pierced. The message is not for everyone: that is how I see it, and I cannot see it otherwise. First of all, the message is not for a civilization low on the ladder of purely instrumental progress, because it is obvious, surely, that the Sumerians or Carolingians would not have been able even to notice the signal. But is the limitation of the circle of receivers determined solely by the criterion of technological ability?