Visitors from the outside were called by us not VIPs but “Feebs,” for “feeble-minded.” The pejorative was coined not so much to express the general opinion regarding the mental prowess of our illustrious guests, but simply because we had no end of trouble when problems typical of the Project needed to be explained to people who did not know the professional language of science. In order to give them some idea of the relation between the “life-causing form” of the stellar message and its “content” — from which at that time we had extracted only Lord of the Flies — I came up with the following analogy.
Let us suppose that a typesetter, on a linotype, composes a poem. The poem has a certain linguistic meaning. But in addition it may happen that if a sufficiently elastic stylus, one able to vibrate, is run across the metal letters, a sound will result, which by accident may have the value of a harmonic chord. It would be altogether improbable for sounds, arising thus, to combine to form — by sheerest chance — the first measures of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Were such a thing to occur, we would naturally think that the music was no product of chance but that someone had intentionally set the type in that way, selecting the right sizes of the letters as well as the spaces between them. What was, as an “incidental harmony,” highly improbable for the cast printing type, was for the communication, the letter from the stars, an improbability equal to an impossibility.
In other words, the life-producing property of that communication could not be the work of chance. The Sender must have deliberately imparted to the neutrino beam such modulated vibrations as brought about the phenomenon of the supporting of biogenesis. Now, this coexistence of “form” and “content” seemed to demand, inexorably, some specific explanation, and the simplest assumption said that if the “form” favored life, then the content, too, ought somehow to be similarly “beneficial.” If, on the other hand, one rejected the theory of a “universal good will” that to the letter’s direct life-giving action added some corresponding message that benefited the addressee, then one was more or less condemned to accept the diametrically opposite formula, according to which the Sender of the benevolent, life-favoring message was enclosing (diabolically) a content that could lead the receivers to destruction.
If I say that one was condemned to the diabolical interpretation, it is not because such was my personal opinion; I simply note the actual train of thought within the Project. The stubbornness that manifested itself in the theorizing is evident throughout the published reports that tell the story of HMV. This stubbornness was always bipolar: either the letter was supposed to represent an act of “benevolent patronage,” the giving of technological knowledge, which our civilization considers the highest good; or else it was an act of cunningly camouflaged aggression — whereby that which would arise from the materialization of the letter would strive to rule Earth, humanity, or even to annihilate it. I always stood in opposition to this paralysis of imagination. The Senders could have been, for example, rational beings who took advantage of an “energy opportunity”: having earlier set in motion a “biophilic emission,” and afterward desiring to enter into communication with the intelligent inhabitants of planets, they could have made use, out of simple economy, of the energy source already in operation instead of constructing special transmitters for the purpose; they could have superimposed on the neutrino stream a particular text that did not necessarily have anything to do with the stream’s “life-causing” character. By the same token, the meaning of a telegram that we send does not stand in any one-to-one relation with the properties of the electromagnetic waves of the wireless telegraph.
Although such a thing was conceivable, ideas like this had no following among us. Some of the hypotheses were even highly ingenious — that, for example, the letter worked “on two levels.” It effected life as a gardener casts seed upon the ground; but later it came around again, to see if the emergent crop was “right.” And then the letter was to act, on its “second” level — that is, through its content — as the gardener’s pruning shears: an agent that would remove “degenerated psychozoic enclaves.” This meant that the Senders, summarily and without pity, sought to destroy those civilizations, evolutionarily arisen, which had not developed “properly,” the sort, for example, that produced classes that were “self-devouring,” “warlike,” etc. Thus the Senders tended, as it were, the beginning and the conclusion of biogenesis, both the roots and the crown of the evolutionary tree. The content part of the letter was designed to provide a certain type of undersirable addressee with a razor, so that it could cut its own throat.
This fantasy, too, I rejected. The image of a civilization that was supposed to annihilate, in so unusual a way, the “degenerated” or “retarded,” I dismissed as yet another projection — onto the unknown of the letter as an “association test” — of the fears characteristic of our age, and as nothing more. The Romney-Moller Effect appeared to indicate that the Sender held existence — in the form of life — to be a good thing. But I was not prepared to take the next step: either to attribute intentional kindness to the informational “layer” of the code as well, or to set a negative sign upon it. The “black” conceptions came to their creators automatically, because what had been given us by the letter they considered a Trojan horse, deserving only suspicion: an instrument, but one that would subjugate Earth; a being, but one who would rule us.
All these ideas beat between the diabolical and the angelic like flies between the panes of a double window. I tried putting myself in the place of the Sender. I would send nothing that could be used contrary to my intentions. To provide any kind of tool without knowing to whom would be like handing out grenades to children. What, then, had been sent? A plan for an ideal society, complete with “illustrations” presenting the energy sources for that society (in the form of Lord of the Flies)? But such a plan was a system dependent upon its own elements, that is, on the individual beings. There could exist no one plan optimal for all places and times. It would also have to take into account the particular biology — and I did not believe that mankind represented, in this respect, any sort of cosmic constant.
It seemed unlikely, at first glance, that the letter could be a communication that was a fragment of an interplanetary dialogue which we happened by pure accident to overhear, because that did not jibe with the constant repetition of the emission. A conversation, surely, did not consist in one of the partners’ repeating, in circles, year after year, the same thing from the beginning. But, again, the time scale entered into play here. The communication had streamed to Earth, unchanging, for at least two years — that much was certain. Perhaps the “conversing” was being done by automatic devices, and the equipment of one side would keep sending its statement until it got the signal that the statement had been received. In which case, the repetitions could continue a thousand years, if the civilizations involved were sufficiently distant from each other. We did not know whether or not the “life-causing emission” could be the carrier of various contents — which was, a priori, quite possible.
Nevertheless, the “overheard conversation” version seemed very unlikely. When “questions” were separated from the “answers” they received by a time that was on the order of centuries, it was hard to call such an exchange a “dialogue.” One ought to expect, instead, each of the parties to transmit to the other important facts about itself. Therefore, we should have been receiving not one emission but at the very least two. That, however, was not the case. The neutrino “ether,” to the extent that the astrophysicists’ instruments could tell, was completely empty — except for that one transmission band. This was perhaps the hardest nut of all to crack in the mystery. The simplest explanation was that there was no dialogue, no second civilization, but only the one, sending out an isotropic signal. After such a statement, you went back to racking your brains over the double nature of the signal. . . da capo al fine.
Yes, the letter could contain something relatively simple. It could, for example, be merely the diagram of a machine for us to use to establish communication with the Senders. It would be, then, the “blueprint of a transmitter,” with the “components” the stuff of Frog Eggs. And we, like a small child puzzling over the plan of a radio kit, could manage to assemble nothing more than a couple of the most primitive screws. Or the letter could be an “incarnated” psychocosmological theory, showing how intelligent life in the Metagalaxy came to be, how it was distributed, and how it functioned. When one cast off one’s “Manichean” prejudices, those sotto voce suggestions that the Sender had to wish us either good or evil (or good and evil at the same time, if, say, by his criteria his intentions toward us were “good,” but by ours “evil”), the guessing spawned ideas more freely, ideas similar to the above, and became a morass no less immobilizing than the professional inertia that had caught the empiricists of the Project in the golden cages of their sensational discoveries. They believed — some of them, at any rate — that by studying Lord of the Flies one eventually could get to the bottom of the mystery of the Senders — like untangling a thread. I felt that this was a rationalization after the fact: since they had nothing except Lord of the Flies, they clung to it in their investigation. I would have allowed that they were right if the problem had belonged to the natural sciences — but it did not. From a chemical analysis of the ink with which a letter is written to us, we will never deduce the intellectual attributes of the writer.