I was able to show that the “smearing,” the “desynchronization,” the “diffusion” of the signal lay wholly in the imagination of my adversaries. The accuracy of the repetitions reached the very limit of the resolution of the recording instrument used by the astrophysicists — and, because it was ridiculous to assume that the text had been transmitted with a setting for an instrument of precisely that calibration, this meant that the accuracy was greater than our ability to test it. So we could not know the maximum performance of the transmitter.
This caused something of a commotion. From then on I was called “the prophet of the Lord” or “the crier in the wilderness.” Thus I worked, toward the end of September, in increasing solitude. There were moments, particularly at night, when between my wordless meditating and the text a bond of kinship was established, as if I had already grasped, almost, its totality, and in a sudden breathlessness, as before a bodiless leap, I sensed the other shore, but my utmost efforts were always insufficient.
These states, I think now, were a delusion. Today, of course, it is easier for me to see that not only was I incapable, impotent, but that the task was beyond the strength of any man. Then as now, I felt that the problem was not the type that would yield to a team assault; some one man would have to open that lock, casting off established habits of thought, some one man or no one. The apprehension of one’s own powerlessness is certainly a sorry thing, and perhaps egoistic, too. It appears that I am seeking excuses. But if anywhere one ought to abandon his amour propre and forget the devil in his heart which worships success, I should think it would be in this matter. The feeling of isolation was at that time keen. The oddest thing is that that defeat, unequivocal as it was, left in my memory a taste of nobility, and that those hours, those weeks, are, when I think of them today, precious to me. I never imagined that this sort of thing could happen to me.
12
In the published records and the books there is very little or no mention at all of what was my most “constructive” contribution to the Project, because it was decided, in order to avoid all kinds of trouble, to hush up my role in the “antigovernment conspiracy” — a conspiracy that, or so I read somewhere, could have become the “greatest crime,” and it was no thanks to me that it did not. I proceed now to the account of my offense.
Through the early part of October, the heat did not let up — during the day, that is, for at night the temperature in the desert fell below freezing. I would stay inside all day, and in the evening, before it grew too chilly, I would go out for short walks, always careful to keep in sight the towers of the compound, because among the high dunes of the desert, as I was warned, one could easily get lost. This actually happened once to some technician, but he returned around midnight; the glow of the lights had shown him the way. I was new to the desert. It was not at all like what I had imagined from films or books. It was, at one and the same time, totally monotonous and remarkably varied. What attracted me the most was the sight of the moving dunes, those great slow-motion waves that with their sharp, splendid geometry gave shape to the perfect solutions realized by Nature in those places where the clinging force of the biosphere, sometimes impertinent, sometimes furiously stubborn, did not impinge upon the realm of the inanimate world.
Returning one evening from such a walk, I encountered — not by accident, as it turned out — Donald Prothero. A second-generation descendant of an old Cornish family, he was the most English of the Americans I knew.
Seated, at the Council, between the enormous Baloyne and the beanpole Dill, in front of a fidgeting Rappaport and our fashion plate, Eugene Albert Nye, he was a figure curious in that there was nothing curious about him. The personification of averageness: an ordinary face, slightly sallow, long in the English way, with pronounced eye sockets and a strong jaw, and a pipe permanently fixed in his mouth; a passionless voice, an unaffected placidity, an absence of any emphatic gesturing — only in this way, by negatives, can I present him. And yet a mind of the first order.
I confess that he made me uneasy, because I do not believe in human perfection, and people who have no quirks, tics, obsessions, the touch of some minor mania, or points on which they turn rabid — I suspect such people of systematic imposture (we judge others by ourselves) or of totally lacking character. Certainly, much depends on the side from which we get to know a man. If, as usually happened to me, I first became acquainted with someone through his work — which in my profession is extremely abstract — and therefore, as it were, from the most spiritual side, the impact of meeting that entirely physical organism, which I had pictured instinctively as a kind of Platonic emanation, was always a shock.
To observe how pure thought or lofty detachment sweats, blinks, digs in its ear, how it manages, with varying success, its own machinery, which, supporting the soul, so often gets in the soul’s way — this has always been for me an iconoclastic treat, malicious through and through. I remember how once I was being driven by a famous philosopher who admitted to solipsism, and he got a flat tire. Interrupting his discourse on the phantasmagoria of illusion which is all existence, he set about — in the most ordinary way, even with grunts — jacking up the car and hauling out the spare. I looked on with childish delight, as if seeing Jesus Christ with a stuffed nose. Using the illusion of a wrench, he removed, one by one, the nonexistent nuts, then looked with despair at his hands covered with grease; the grease had no more substance than a dream, according to his doctrine — but somehow that did not enter his head.
As a child I honestly believed that there existed a category of perfect men; scientists, first and foremost, belonged in it, and among them the holiest had to be the university professors. Reality compelled me to part with such idealistic convictions.
Although I had known Donald for twenty years, there still seemed no getting around it: he really was the sort of scientist that only the most anachronistically enthusiastic individuals tended to believe in. Baloyne, also a great intellect, but a sinner as well, once pleaded with Donald — I recall — to come down to our level, at least on occasion (even once would do), by revealing some ugly secret about himself; and if that was impossible, to do something despicable that would make him more human in our eyes. But Donald only smiled from behind his pipe!
That evening, as we walked along a little valley between two rows of dunes, in the red light of the setting sun, and I was observing the projection of our shadows on the sand, whose grains — as in the paintings of the Impressionists — seemed to give off a lilac glow, like microscopic gas flames, Prothero began to tell me of his work on the “cold” nuclear reactions in Frog Eggs. I listened, out of politeness, and was surprised when he said that our situation reminded him of the Manhattan Project.
“Even if a chain reaction can be released in Frog Eggs on a large scale,” I remarked, “the power of a hydrogen bomb, all the same, is technologically uncontrollable, so nothing, I think, threatens us from that quarter.”
He then put away his pipe — an important sign. He reached in his pocket for a roll of film and handed it to me, open; the swollen red disk of the sun served as our light source. I knew enough of microphysics to recognize a series of pictures of ion tracks in a bubble chamber. Unhurriedly, standing next to me, he showed me several curious places. In the very center of the chamber was a tiny, pinhead-sized lump of Frog Eggs, and the star of a scattered nucleus, the trajectories of its fragments radiating outward, could be seen nearby — a millimeter or so away from the droplet of slime.
I saw nothing peculiar in this — but explanations followed, and more photographs. Something impossible had taken place: even when the droplet was enclosed on all sides by a lead shell, the tiny stars of splitting atoms appeared in the chamber — outside that armor!
“The reaction is remote,” Prothero concluded. “Energy disappears in one place, along with the smashed atom, which reappears in another place. Have you ever seen a magician put an egg in his pocket and produce it from his mouth? This is the same thing.”