Multispecialists, sometimes called by us “universalists,” were greatly valued; Dill had been one of the creators of the Frog Eggs synthesis. But topics directly connected with the Project were, at Rappaport’s evening colloquia, usually avoided. Before working with Anderson, Dill had been — under the auspices of UNESCO, I think — a member of a research team that was supposed to come up with proposals for counteracting the population explosion. He talked of this with satisfaction. There were a few biologists there, sociologists, and geneticists, besides the anthropologists. And, of course, celebrities in the form of Nobelists.
One of the last considered nuclear war to be the only salvation from a sea of bodies. His logic was flawless. Neither pills nor propaganda slowed the birthrate. Imperative was “management intervention” on the family level. The problem was not that every scheme sounded either gruesome or grotesque — as, for example, the proposition that a “child license” be granted only upon a citizen’s accumulation of a certain number of points, points given for psycho-physical assets, for skills in rearing, and so on.
It was possible to devise various more or less rational programs, but it was not possible to put them into operation. In the end the thing always led to an infringement on those freedoms that no social order since the birth of civilization had dared to touch. Not one of the modern governments had sufficient power, or sufficient authority, for that. It would have meant doing battle with the mightiest of human drives, and with the majority of churches, and with the very foundation of the rights of man, hallowed by tradition. On the other hand, after an atomic cataclysm the strict state control of marriage and childbearing would be an immediate and vital necessity, for otherwise the genetic plasm damaged by the radiation would give rise to an endless number of monsters. This emergency control could then be replaced gradually by a legal system administering the propagation of the species, beneficially guiding its evolution and numerical force.
Nuclear war was, granted, a dreadful and heinous thing, but its long-term consequences could turn out to be salutary. It was in this spirit that one portion of the scientists spoke out; others objected, and no recommendation could be agreed upon between them.
This story upset Rappaport; and the more coolly Dill responded, with his faint smile, the more heated Rappaport became.
“Placing Reason on the throne as ruler,” said Rappaport, “is equivalent to putting oneself in the hands of a logical madness. The joy of a father occasioned by the fact that his child resembles him has no rational basis, especially not if the father is an untalented, run-of-the-mill individual; ergo, we should establish sperm banks, whose donors will be the most useful to society, and will by artificial insemination breed children who are similar to such sires and therefore of value. The uncertainty connected with setting up a family can be seen, socially, as much wasted effort; ergo, we should pair up people according to selection criteria that provide for a positive correlation of the physical and psychological traits of the partners. Desires not satisfied give rise to frustrations, which disturb the smooth running of social processes; ergo, we should satisfy all desires, either naturally or by means of technological equivalents, or else, enfin, we should remove through chemistry or surgery the centers that produce those desires.
“Until twenty years ago, a trip from Europe to the States took seven hours; at a cost of eighteen billion dollars, that time was reduced to fifty minutes. It is known, now, that, given the expenditure of further billions, this flight time can be cut in half. A passenger, sterilized in body and mind (lest he bring into our great land either Asian flu or Asian ideas), pumped full of vitamins and videotapes, will be able to move from city to city, from continent to continent, and from planet to planet — with ever-increasing speed and security. And the vision of all this phenomenally efficient, solicitous machinery is supposed to take our breath away, so that we never get around to asking what exactly is gained by these lightning-fast peregrinations. Such speeds used to be too much for our old, animal body; travel from hemisphere to hemisphere, when too sudden, would disrupt its circadian rhythm. But, fortunately, a drug has been found to nullify that disruption. True, the drug sometimes causes depression, but there are other drugs to raise your spirits. They do cause heart disease. But, then, one can insert polyethylene tubes into the coronary arteries to prevent them from clogging.
“A scientist, in this sort of situation, behaves like a trained elephant made to face an obstacle. He uses the strength of his intellect the way the elephant uses its muscle — on command — which is most convenient, because the scientist can agree to anything if he is responsible for nothing. Science is turning into a monastery for the Order of Capitulant Friars. Logical calculus is supposed to supersede man as a moralist. We submit to the blackmail of the ‘superior knowledge’ that has the temerity to assert that nuclear war can be, by derivation, a good thing, because this follows from simple arithmetic. Today’s evil turns out to be tomorrow’s good; ergo, the evil is also, to some extent, good. Our reason no longer heeds the intuitive promptings of emotion; the ideal is the harmony of a perfectly constructed mechanism, an ideal that civilization as a whole, and its every member taken separately, must meet.
“Thus the means of civilization replace its ends, and human conveniences substitute for human values. The rule whereby corks in bottles give way to metal caps, and metal caps to little plastic lids that snap on and off, is innocent enough; it is a series of improvements to make it easier for us to open containers of liquid. But the same rule, when applied to the perfecting of the human brain, becomes sheer madness; every conflict, every difficult problem is compared to a stubborn cork that one should discard and replace with an appropriate labor-saving device. Baloyne named the Project ‘His Master’s Voice,’ because the motto is ambiguous: to which master are we to listen, the one from the stars or the one in Washington? The truth is, this is Operation Squeeze — the squeeze being not on our poor brains but on the cosmic message, and God help the powerful and their servants if it succeeds.”
With such evening conversations we amused ourselves during the second year of labor at HMV, in a growing atmosphere of foreboding, which was to be borne out shortly by a thing that gave Operation Squeeze a sense that was no longer ironic, but menacing.
10
Although Frog Eggs and Lord of the Flies were the same substance, only preserved in different ways by the biophysicists and biologists, in each territory it was de rigueur to use the local name exclusively. This, I thought, illustrated a certain small but characteristic feature of the history of science, because neither the fortuitous bends in the road of research nor the accidental circumstances assisting at the birth of a discovery ever completely detach themselves from its final form. Indeed, it is not easy to recognize these relics, for the reason that, fossilized, they become embedded in the heart of all later theories and formulations, like a print of a coincidence which turns to stone, to an iron rule of thought.
Before I could see Frog Eggs for the first time at Romney’s lab, I was given the now standard initiation required for all arrivals from the outside world. First I listened to the brief, taped lecture for VIPs, which I quoted earlier; then a two-minute ride on the subway took me to the chemical-synthesis building, where I was shown a thing towering in a separate hall beneath a three-story glass dome, resembling the skeleton of a dragonfly larva blown up to the size of a brontosaurus; it was a three-dimensional model of one molecule of Frog Eggs. The individual atomic groups were represented by grapelike spheres of black, purple, violet, and white, connected by clear polyethylene tubes. Marsh, a stereo-chemist, pointed out to me the ammonia radicals, the alkyl groups, and, looking like strange flowers, the “molecular dishes” that absorbed the energy from nuclear reactions. These reactions were demonstrated by a machine that lit up, in turn, the fluorescent tubes and bulbs hidden inside the model, which gave the effect of a cross between a futuristic billboard and a Christmas tree. Because it was expected of me, I showed admiration, and then continued on.
The actual processes of the synthesis took place in the lower levels of the building, under the supervision of programming computers, in cylinders insulated with heavy shielding, because at certain stages fairly penetrating radiation was given off, though the radiation would subside when the synthesis reached its conclusion. The main synthesis hall occupied an area of four thousand square meters. From there the path led to the so-called silver vault, where — as in a treasury — lay the substance dictated by the stars. There was a round, windowless chamber there, with silver walls polished like mirrors; I once knew why this was necessary, but have forgotten. Bathed in the cold light of fluorescent tubes, atop a massive pedestal, stood a glass tank, like a large aquarium, empty — except that on the bottom of it rested a layer of a highly opalescent, motionless, bluish fluid.