Please do not tell me I contradict myself — the self who saw in the Stone Age a time of dreams come true. Knowledge is irreversible; one cannot go back into the darkness of sweet ignorance. In that time I would have had no knowledge and would have been unable to obtain it. One must make use of the knowledge one possesses. I know that Chance fashioned us, put us together as we are — and what, am I to follow submissively all the directives drawn blindly in that endless lottery?
My principium humanitatis is curious in that if someone basically good wished to apply it to himself, he would be obliged — in keeping with the policy of “conquering one’s own nature” — to do evil in order to affirm his human freedom. My doctrine therefore is not suited for general application; but I do not see why I have to provide humanity with an ethical panacea. Diversity, heterogeneity, is a given in mankind; thus Kant’s declaration that the basis of individual actions could be made a general law means a varying violence done to people; in sacrificing the individual for a superior value — the culture — Kant dispenses injustice. But I am not saying that one is a man only to the extent that he is a self-chained monster. I have presented a purely private argument, my own strategy, which, however, has changed nothing in me. To this day my first reaction, upon hearing of someone’s misfortune, is a spark of pleasure, and I no longer even attempt to stifle such twitches, because I know that I cannot reach the place where that mindless chuckle lives. But I respond with resistance and act contrary to myself, for the reason that I am able to do so.
Had I truly intended to write my own biography — which would have turned out to be, in comparison with the volumes on my shelf, an antibiography — there would have been no need for me to justify these confessions. But my object is different. The adventure I am to relate boils down to this: humanity came upon a thing that beings belonging to another race had sent out into the darkness of the stars. A situation, the first of its kind in history, important enough, one would think, to merit the divulging, in greater detail than convention allows, of who it was, exactly, who represented our side in that encounter. All the more since neither my genius nor my mathematics alone sufficed to prevent it from bearing poison fruit.
1
The Master’s Voice Project has an enormous literature, more extensive and diverse than ever had the Manhattan Project. Upon its public disclosure, America and the world were inundated with articles, treatises, and essays, so numerous that the bibliography alone is a tremendous tome, as thick as an encyclopedia. The official version is the Baloyne Report, which the American Library later published in ten million copies; but the essence of it appears in the eighth volume of the Encyclopedia Americana. And there have been books about the Project by others who held high positions in it, such as Rappaport’s The First Interstellar Communication, Dill’s Inside His Master’s Voice, or Prothero’s HMV: The Implications for Physics. This last work, authored by my late friend, is among the most accurate, though it really belongs more to the professional literature — professional meaning that the thing studied is clearly separated from the one who studies it.
There are too many historical treatises even to mention. The four-volume work of the historian of science William Angers, 749 Days: A Chronicle, is monumental. It amazed me with its meticulousness; Angers had got hold of all the former workers of the Project and done a compilation of their views. But I did not read his opus to the end — that seemed to me as impossible as reading a telephone book.
In a separate category are books not factual but interpretive, ranging from the philosophical and theological even to the psychiatric. The reading of such publications never fails to weary and annoy me. It is no coincidence, I am sure, that those who have the most to say about the Project are the ones who have had no direct contact with it.
Which is similar to the attitude physicists have regarding gravitation or electrons — as opposed to that of the “well-informed” who read popular science. The “well-informed” think they know something about matters that the experts are reluctant even to speak of. Information at second hand always gives an impression of tidiness, in contrast with the data at the scientist’s disposal, full of gaps and uncertainties. The writers on HMV who come under the interpretive heading as a rule crammed the information they acquired into the corsets of their convictions; what did not fit they lopped off without ceremony or hesitation. A few such books one can at least admire for the authors’ inventiveness. But this type imperceptibly turns into a characteristic form that one might term the graphomania of the Project. Science, from its very beginning, has been surrounded by a halo of pseudo science, which rises like steam from various half-educated heads; it is not surprising, then, that HMV, as a phenomenon completely unprecedented, evoked so violent a ferment among addled minds, a ferment crowned by the appearance of a series of religious sects.
The amount of information that is necessary for even a general grasp of the questions dealt with in the Project exceeds, to tell the truth, the brain capacity of a single individual. But ignorance, while it checks the enthusiasm of the sensible, in no way restrains the fools; thus in the ocean of published papers that His Master’s Voice has called into existence, a man can find whatever suits him, as long as he is not overly concerned about the truth. And even the most venerable personages have tried their hand at literature devoted to the Project. The New Revelation, by the respected Patrick Gordiner, is at least logical and lucid, which I cannot say of The Epistle of the Antichrist by Father Bernard Pignani. The pious priest reduces HMV to demonology (using for the purpose the nihil obstat of his church superiors), and its concluding failure he attributes to Divine Intervention. This resulted, I guess, from Lord of the Flies, that name jokingly made up at the Project, which Father Pignani took seriously, acting like a child who thinks the names of the stars and planets are written on them, and that the astronomers read these off through their telescopes.
To say nothing of the swarm of sensational versions — which are like those frozen meals one heats and serves, practically pre-chewed, which look a great deal better under the cellophane than they taste. The ingredients are seasoned with an ever-novel but always fabulously colored sauce. Look used the spy-political to season its series of articles (putting into my mouth words I never said); The New Yorker served up a dish more refined, adding certain essences of philosophy; and, again, in HMV: Between the Lines, Dr. Shapiro provided a psychoanalytic interpretation, from which I learned that the people of the Project were driven by a libido made unnatural by the projections of the newest — cosmic — mythology of sex. Dr. Shapiro is also in possession of precise information concerning the sex life of cosmic civilizations.
I cannot for the life of me understand why, while people without driver’s licenses are not allowed on public roads, in bookstores one can find any number of books by persons without decency — let alone knowledge. The inflation of the printed word has been caused, no doubt, by the exponential increase in the number of those writing, but in equal degree by editorial policies. In the childhood of our civilization only select, well-educated individuals were able to read and write, and much the same criterion held after the invention of printing; and even if the works of imbeciles were published (which, I suppose, is impossible to avoid completely), their total number was not astronomical, as it is today. Today, in the flood of garbage, valuable publications must go under, because it is easier to find one worthwhile book among ten worthless than a thousand among a million. Moreover, the phenomenon of pseudo plagiarism becomes inevitable — the unintentional repetition of the ideas of others who are unknown.
I can have no certainty that what I write is not similar to what already has been written. This is one hazard of an age of population explosion. If I have decided to present my reminiscences in connection with the work of the Project, it is because nothing I have read on the subject so far has satisfied me. I do not promise to “tell the truth and nothing but the truth.” Had our labor been crowned with success, that might have been possible, but success at the same time would have made such an undertaking unnecessary, for then the concluding truth would have eclipsed the circumstances of its attainment; it would have become a material fact nailed in the center of our civilization. But the failure somehow has cast all our efforts back to their sources. Since we do not understand the mystery, nothing really remains to us but those circumstances that were to have been the scaffolding — and not the edifice itself — or the process of translating — and not the content of the work. And yet the former turned out to be all that we returned with from our quest for the Golden Fleece of the Stars. It is here that I part company as well with the versions that I called objective, beginning with the Baloyne Report, because the word “failure” does not appear in them. Did we not leave the Project incomparably richer than when we entered it? New chapters opened up in the physics of colloids, in the physics of strong interactions, in neutrino astronomy, in nucleonics, biology, and, above all, the new knowledge of the Universe — this represents but the first interest that has accrued to us from the informational principal, which, according to the experts, promises huge profits to come.