I was afraid that if I went to the hotel, the sight of the menu or of the waiter’s face would cause me to burst into laughter. And I could not return to my own apartment. Yet I had to go somewhere. Donald, wrapped up in his work, was in a better position, at least for the time being. I went out into the street as if half asphyxiated. Night had fallen. The compound, bathed in the light of the mercury lamps, jutted its white outline against the darkness of the desert, and it was only high above the illuminated areas that one could make out, in the black sky, the stars. One more betrayal did not matter now, so I broke the promise made to Donald and proceeded to my hotel neighbor, Rappaport. He was in. I set the crumpled tapes before him and succinctly told him everything. He proved to be the right man. He asked three or four questions, no more, questions that showed that he had grasped immediately the gravity, the implications of the discovery. Our conspiracy did not surprise him in the least. He paid no attention to it.
I do not recall what he said to me when he put aside the tapes, but I understood from his words that he had expected something of the sort practically from the beginning. The anxiety had been with him constantly, and now that his premonition had come true, an intellectual satisfaction — or perhaps it was simply an awareness of the end — let him feel a certain sense of relief. I must have been more shaken than I thought, because he attended first not to Armageddon but to me. From his European wanderings he preserved a certain habit that I found amusing: he operated on the principle of omnia mea mecum porto, as if instinctively prepared for the necessity of another flight at short notice. That was how I explained the fact that in his suitcase he had a kind of “survival kit,” complete with coffeepot, sugar, and crackers. There was also a small bottle of cognac — both the coffee and the cognac were much to the purpose. What began then had no name, but afterward we would refer to it as a funeral banquet or, more precisely, its Anglo-Saxon or Irish variant: a wake — a ritual watch held over a corpse. Granted, the deceased in question was still among the living, and had no knowledge, even, of his inevitable interment.
We sipped our coffee and cognac, surrounded by such silence, it was as if we were in a place of great desolation, as if the thing that was soon to happen had already come to pass. Quick to understand each other, exchanging fragments of sentences, we first plotted out the course of upcoming events. As scenario writers, we agreed. Everything would be thrown into the construction of TX devices. People like us would not see the light of day.
For their imminent demise the chiefs of staff would revenge themselves first on us — unconsciously, no doubt. They would not roll over and play dead; rational action becoming impossible, they would resort to irrational action. If neither the mountains nor a kilometer of steel sufficed to shield them from attack, they would declare the ultimate armor to be secrecy. There would follow a multiplication, a dispersion, and a burrowing into the earth of command posts, while headquarters would be moved — for certain — on board some giant atomic submarine or specially designed bathysphere, which would keep watch, snuggled on the ocean floor.
And the last shell of democratic forms would crumble, forms whose substance had already been mostly gnawed away by the global strategy of the sixties. And this would show in the attitude toward scientists. There would be no desire, no time or place, to keep up appearances and treat them like clever but capricious children whom it was better not to frustrate.
When we had prophesied, roughly, our fate and the fate of others — in accordance with Pascal’s maxim about the thinking reed that thirsts to know the mechanisms of its own annihilation — Rappaport told me of his efforts the previous spring. Before I came to the Project, he had presented to General Oster — the chief, at that time, of HMV — a plan for joining forces with the Russians. He proposed that we supply a group equal in number and expertise to a group that would be provided by the Russians, to work together on the translation of the letter. Oster explained to him good-naturedly how very naïve such a thing would be. The Russians would provide a group for show, but meanwhile work on the letter themselves.
We looked at each other and laughed, because the same thought occurred to both of us. Oster had simply told him a thing that we learned of only in the last few days. Even then, the Pentagon itself had adopted the principle of “doubling.” We constituted the group that was “for show,” and had been wholly unaware of it; the generals all the while had had another team at their disposal, one they apparently trusted more.
For a moment we paused to consider the mentality of the strategists. They never took people seriously, insisting that the important thing was the biological preservation of the species. The famous ceterum censeo speciem preservandam esse became a slogan like all other slogans: words to utter but not a value to be included in the strategic equations. By now we had imbibed enough cognac to amuse ourselves with the vision of generals who, as they were cooked alive, would issue their final orders into a silent microphone — because the ocean floor, like every other nook and cranny on the planet, would no longer offer shelter. The only safe place for the Pentagon and its people, we concluded, would be beneath the bottom of the Moscow River; but it was not too likely that even our daring eagles could manage to get there.
After midnight, we finally put such mundane subjects behind us, and the conversation grew interesting. We took up the Mystery of the Species. I dwell on this, because that dialogue-requiem in honor of Man the Wise, delivered by two representatives of the race who were woozy with caffeine and alcohol, and certain that the end was nigh, seems to me significant.
That the Senders were well informed about the state of things in the whole Galaxy, I opined, was beyond question. Our catastrophe was a consequence of their not having taken into account the specific situation on Earth, and they had not, because Earth was, in the whole Galaxy, an exception.
“These are old Manichean ideas, a dime a dozen,” declared Rappaport.
But I was not at all claiming that the apocalypse was the result of any exceptional human “wickedness.” It was simply that every planetary psychozoic enclave passed from a state of global division to one of integration. From bands, tribes, and clans arose nations, kingdoms, empires, world powers, and finally came the social unification of the species. This process almost never led to the emergence of two antagonists of equal strength, at least not immediately prior to the final joining; there would be, rather, a Majority in opposition to a weak Minority. Such a confrontation had much greater probability, even if only from a strictly thermodynamic point of view; one could demonstrate this by stochastic calculation. A perfect equilibrium of forces, an exact equals-sign between them, was a state so improbable as to be virtually impossible. One could arrive at such a balance only by coincidence. Social fusion was one series of processes, and the acquiring of instrumental knowledge was another series.
Integration on the scale of a planet could become “frozen” at a stage along the way if the discovery of nucleonics arose prematurely. Only in that case would the weaker side become equal to the stronger — inasmuch as each of them, wielding atomic weapons, could wipe out the entire species. Certainly social integration always occurred on a foundation of technology and science, but the discovery of atomic energy would ordinarily take place in the post-unification period — and then it would have no dire consequences. The self-imperilment of the species, or its tendency to commit involuntary suicide, was no doubt a function of the number of primitive societies that possessed the “ultimate weapon.”
If on some globe there were a thousand hostile governments, and each had a thousand nuclear warheads, the chance of a purely local conflict’s snowballing into an apocalypse would be many times greater than if there existed only a few antagonists. Therefore, the relation between the two calendars — one calendar showing the sequence of scientific discoveries, and the other recording the progress of the amalgamation of the separate societies — determined the fate, in the Galaxy, of each individual Psychozoic. We on Earth definitely had bad luck: our passage from preatomic civilization to atomic took place atypically, too early, and it was this that had caused the “freezing” of the status quo, until the advent of the neutrino emission. For a planet united, the cracking of the letter would be something positive, a step toward entering the “club of cosmic civilizations.” But for us, in our situation, it was a knell.