I spent three days setting up a program for the computer, and the computer carried out the task on the fourth. The result said that “something, in some way, closes.” The “something” was the letter — in the totality of the interrelations of its signs; but as for the “how” of that closing, I could only make certain guesses, because my proof was indirect. The proof showed only that the “described object” was NOT “topologically open.” But to reveal the “means of closure” with the aid of current mathematical methods was impossible for me; such a task was several orders of difficulty greater than the one I had managed to surmount. The proof, then, was very general — one could even say vague. On the other hand, not every text would have displayed this property. The score of a symphony, for example, or a linear coding of a television image, or an ordinary linguistic text (a story, a philosophical treatise) does not close in that fashion. But the description of a geometric solid closes, as does that of something as complex as a genotype or a living organism. The genotype, true, closes differently from the solid. But by going into such distinctions and details I fear that I will be confusing the reader rather than explaining to him what I did with the “letter.”
Let me just emphasize that from penetrating to the “sense” — or, to put it even more colloquially, to “what the letter was about” — I remained as distant as I had been before starting this work. Out of the innumerable features of the “letter,” I recognized, and recognized only indirectly, one, one that had to do with a certain general property of the structure as a whole. Because I had succeeded so well, I later tried to attack that “second problem” — the resolution of the structure in its “closure” — but during my tenure at the Project I came up with nothing. Three years later, no longer with the Project, I renewed my efforts, because the problem had been pursuing me like a stubborn ghost. I achieved only this: I proved that using the apparatus of the topological and transformational algebras would NOT enable one to solve the problem. Which, of course, I had no way of knowing when I first sat down to the task. In any case, I provided a powerful argument in support of the contention that we had indeed received from the Cosmos the sort of thing to which could be attributed — considering the degree of concentration and cohesion that produced “closure” — the qualities of an “object” (that is, of the description of an object — I am abbreviating here).
I presented my work not without apprehension. It turned out, however, that I had done something that no one else had thought of — for the reason that during the preliminary discussions the idea had won out that the letter must be an algorithm (in the mathematical sense) and therefore a general-recursive function, and the search for the values of that function had swamped all the computers. This made sense to the extent that, if the problem were solved, the solution would carry with it information pointing, like a road sign, to further stages of translational work. But the order of complexity of the letter-as-algorithm was such that the problem was not solved. Meanwhile, the “circularity” of the letter had indeed been noticed, but it was considered of no great importance, not promising — in that initial period of great hopes — any quick or appreciable success. Then, later on, everyone became so mired in the algorithm approach that they could not free themselves from it.
One might think that I had achieved no little triumph at the very beginning. I proved that the letter was the description of a phenomenon, and inasmuch as all the empirical research was going in precisely that direction, I gave it, so to speak, the blessing of a mathematical proof, guaranteeing that this was the right track. I thereby brought together those who were divided, because between the information theorists and the information engineers a breach had grown. The antagonists, finally, were referred to me. The future was to show how little I had accomplished — emerging well from an encounter with only my terrestrial rivals.
7
If you ask a scientist what he associates with the concept of a circular process, most likely he will reply: life. The suggestion that we had been sent the description of something living, and which we would be able to reconstruct, was both unsettling and intriguing. For two months after the events described above, I passed my time in the Project as a student, learning what in the prior year all the “applied” groups had done. The applied groups were also called “shock troops.” We had a great many of these — in biochemistry, biophysics, solid-state physics — which later were to some extent combined in the laboratory, for syntheses. (The Project’s organizational structure, in the course of its existence, grew more and more complicated, until some said that it had become more complex even than the “letter” itself.)
The theoretical section, comprising the informationists, linguists, mathematicians, and theoretical physicists, operated independently of the applied. All the findings of all the research were assessed and collated on the highest level — in the Science Council, where the group coordinators sat, along with the “Big Four,” which became five upon my arrival.
The Project, when I made my appearance, had two concrete achievements to show for itself; they were actually one and the same, repeated independently in the biochemistry and biophysics departments. In both places there was produced — first on paper, or, rather, in the memory banks — a substance that had been “read off” from the letter, though named, by that principle of autonomy, twice: “Frog Eggs” and “Lord of the Flies.”
The duplication of effort might appear wasteful, but it had its good side. If two people not communicating with each other analogously translate an unknown text, one tends to think that they have truly got to its “invariants,” that what they have obtained is objectively inherent in the text and does not merely reflect their personal preconceptions. Granted, this statement, too, can be debated. For two Mohammedans, the same small “fragments” of the Gospel are “true” — as opposed to all the rest of it. If people’s preprogramming is identical, the results of their investigations may coincide, even though they have not consulted each other. Since limits are placed on what may be accomplished, in any given historical period, by the general level of knowledge. It is for this reason that the atomistic and independent conclusions arrived at by the physicists of East and West, for example, have been so similar, and that one side could not discover the principle of the laser and have that principle remain unknown to the other. Therefore we should not exaggerate the cognitive importance of such coincidence.
Frog Eggs — its name among the biochemists — was a semiliquid substance under some conditions, a gelatinous mass under others; at room temperature and normal pressure, and in not too great a quantity, it appeared as a shiny, sticky fluid, quite similar to the mucus-coated granules of the amphibian’s spawn — hence the name. The biophysicists immediately manufactured about a hectoliter of the pseudo plasm, but it behaved — in an evacuated vessel — differently from Frog Eggs, and they christened it, alluding to a certain strange effect, with a more diabolical name.
Carbon played an important role in the composition of this artifact, but so did silicon, and heavy elements practically nonexistent in earthly organisms. The thing reacted to certain stimuli; it produced energy, which it dispersed in the form of heat, but had no metabolism — not in any biological sense. At first it appeared to be — a materialization of an impossibility — a perpetuum mobile, albeit in the form of a colloid and not a “machine.” Standing in flagrant violation of the sacred laws of thermodynamics, it was subjected to very rigorous study. At last the nucleonics people found that the energy supporting it — supporting what was a kind of “circus trick,” an acrobatic juggling of gigantic molecules that were unstable in isolation — was being drawn from nuclear reactions of the “cold” type. The colloid initiated them when it reached a certain critical mass. Important, in this, was not only the quantity of the substance, but also its configuration.
These reactions were difficult to detect, because the energy liberated through them — the radiant energy as well as the kinetic energy of the freed subatomic particles — was absorbed completely by the substance and used “for its own needs.” To the experts this revelation was staggering. Basically, atomic nuclei are, within every terrestrial organism, “foreign bodies,” or at least neutral. The life process never touches the energy potentials contained in them; it is unable to make use of that enormous, stored-up force. Atoms, in living tissue, are in effect only electron shells, because the shells alone participate in biological (chemical) reactions. Consequently, radioactive atoms that get into the system, carried there by water, food, or air, play the role of intruders “disguised” by their outer similarity (i.e., in their electron shells) to ordinary, normal — nonradioactive — elements, and the living tissue is not capable of telling the difference. Their every “explosion,” any kind of nuclear decay of such an uninvited guest, constitutes for the cell a microscopic catastrophe — always damaging, though to a very small degree.