At the meetings of the Science Council he was conspicuously bored, but proved particularly allergic to the utterances — seldom made, however, and generally tactful — of Dr. Eugene Albert Nye. If one did not want to listen to Nye, one could watch the mimicking accompaniment to the speech on Rappaport’s face. Rappaport would scowl, as if suddenly aware of something vile on his tongue, would pull his nose, scratch behind his ear, squint at the speaker with an expression that seemed to say, “You can’t be serious.” But when Nye once, finally losing patience, asked him outright if he wished to take issue with some point, Rappaport, innocent and surprised, shook his head several times, held up his hands, and said that he had nothing, absolutely nothing to say.
I dwell on these descriptions to show the reader the central figures of the Project from a less official angle, and also to introduce him to the special atmosphere of a community sealed off from the world. Indeed, it was curious, that creatures as different from each other as Baloyne, Nye, Rappaport, and myself should have come together in a single place, with the mission of “establishing Contact,” an ersatz diplomatic corps representing mankind vis-à-vis the Universe.
Although different, we joined to become an organism that studied the “letter from the stars”; we formed a group that had its own customs, tempo, and social patterns, with subtle variations on the official, semiofficial, and private levels. All this, taken together, created the “spirit” of the institution, but more than that, too — what a sociologist would take pleasure in calling a “local subculture.” This aura within the Project — and the Project, after all, numbered nearly three thousand people in its most dynamic phase — was distinct and unique, and, in the long run, for me at least, wearisome.
One of the oldest members of the Project, Lee Reinhorn, who as a very young physicist had worked, once upon a time, on the Manhattan Project, told me that the atmospheres of the two undertakings were in no way comparable: the Manhattan Project had sent its people on an exploration typically natural — scientific, physical in character; while ours somehow remained implanted in human civilization and was unable to free itself from that dependency. Reinhorn called HMV a test of our culture’s cosmic invariance — and thereby annoyed our humanist colleagues (in particular), because he was preening himself, with naïve good nature, for discoveries from their bailiwick. He studied, irrespective of the research of his own group (physics), material from all over the world, and from the preceding few decades — material primarily linguistic, devoted to the problem of cosmic communication, and especially to the aspect of it called the “cracking of languages of closed semantics.”
Now, the uselessness of this pyramid of learned material — and the bibliography, with which I, too, acquainted myself, contained, if memory serves me right, about five and a half thousand titles — was obvious to every man in the Project. And the amusing thing was that such books and articles continued to appear in considerable numbers in the world, which, except for a small circle of chosen people, knew nothing of the existence of the “letter from the stars.” Consequently the professional pride and sense of loyalty of the linguists who worked in the Project were put through the wringer when Reinhorn — receiving in the mail yet another bundle of relevant articles — filled us in, at the semiofficial research colloquia, on the latest from the field of “interstellar semantics.” The worthlessness, the sterility of all those lines of reasoning, laced lovingly with mathematics, was really comical, though at the same time depressing.
Tempers flared; the linguists accused Reinhorn of maliciously mocking them. But friction between the humanists and the natural scientists of the Project was the order of the day. The former we called “elves,” the latter “dwarfs.” The internal jargon of the Project had a rich vocabulary; it could serve, along with the forms that the coexistence of both “parties” took, as a worthy subject for some future sociologist.
Fairly complicated factors inclined Baloyne to include within the frame of the HMV group a whole slew of humanistic fields: not least of which was the fact that he himself was, after all, by training and predilection, a humanist. But this rivalry could not very well take any productive form if our anthropologists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts, as well as the philosophers, refused to make use of the data as raw material for their research. Thus, whenever there was a seminar given in one of the “elf” sections, someone would write on the bulletin-board announcement, next to the title of the topic, the letters SF, for “science fiction.” Unfortunately, this childish graffiti humor had justification in the barrenness of those sessions.
The general meetings almost always ended in open quarrels. The most petulant, I would say, were the psychoanalysts; they were especially aggressive in their demands — they wanted the appropriate experts to decipher the “literal layer” of the stellar message so that they could then set to work determining the entire system of symbols employed by the civilization of the Senders. Here, of course, came the inevitable rejoinder, in the form of a bold hypothesis, as, for example, that the civilization might reproduce asexually, which perforce would desexualize its “symbolic lexicon” and thereby in advance doom to failure any attempt at psychoanalytic penetration. The one who spoke thus would immediately be labeled an ignoramus, because modern-day psychoanalysis was no longer a primitive Freudian pansexualism. And if, at such a meeting, a phenomenologist also spoke up, there would be no end to the objections raised and countered.
For we had a veritable embarras de richesses, a quite unnecessary excess of “elfin” specialists — representing even such esoteric fields as psychoanalytic history and pleiography (for the life of me I cannot remember exactly what it is pleiographers do, though I am certain it was explained to me once).
It would appear that Baloyne was nevertheless wrong to have acceded, in this regard, to the Pentagon’s wishes. Those advisers had mastered only one maxim, but that they mastered for all time: if one man dug a hole with a volume of one cubic meter in ten hours, then a hundred thousand diggers of holes could do the job in a fraction of a second. And likewise, just as such a multitude would crack one another’s heads open with their shovels before they broke the first clod of earth, so our poor “elves” tussled and scuffled — mainly with themselves, but with us as well — instead of “producing.”
But if the Pentagon believed results were directly proportional to the investment, that was that. The thought that our guardians were people who held that a problem that five experts were unable to solve could surely be taken care of by five thousand, was hair-raising. Our unfortunate “elves” suffered frustrations and complexes, because the truth of the matter was that they were condemned to complete idleness, albeit an idleness decked up in various appearances. When I arrived at the Project, Baloyne admitted to me, in private, that his dream — impossible — was to jettison all that academic ballast. But one could not even consider such a thing, for a very mundane reason: whoever entered the Project, once in, could not simply get up and leave; that would threaten us with the “breaking of the seal,” i.e., the escape of the Secret into the wide, as yet unsuspecting world.
So Baloyne had to be a genius of diplomacy, tact. Now and then he even came up with things to do — or, rather, pretenses of things — for the “elves,” and would be furious, not amused, at gibes directed at them, because that only opened up old wounds — as, for example, when in the suggestion box there appeared the proposal that the psychologists and psychoanalysts be transferred from their positions as researchers on the star letter to positions as doctors treating those who were unable to decipher the letter and consequently suffered “stress.”
The advisers from Washington got in Baloyne’s hair also. Every so often they would hit on a new idea — as when they kept insisting, for the longest time, on the organization of large, mixed sessions operating on the popular principle of “brainstorming,” which replaces the mind of a solitary thinker, concentrating on a problem, by a large team that collectively, chorally, “thinks out loud,” as it were, on a given topic. Baloyne, on his part, tried different tactics — passive, active, retaliatory — to resist this sort of good advice.
As one who gravitated naturally toward the “dwarfs,” I will be regarded as partisan, but I must say that at the outset I was innocent of any bias. Immediately on my arrival at the Project I began studying linguistics, because that seemed imperative to me. I was soon amazed to learn that, when it came to the primary, most fundamental concepts in this field — a field supposedly precise, quantified, mathematized — there was absolutely no agreement. Why, the authorities could not come together on so basic and preliminary a question as what exactly morphemes and phonemes were.