Oh, yes there were questions.
Herr Omnes
was stunned a little, took a moment to overcome the spell of the simple and beautiful truths he had heard, but then first one piped up, then another, then two or three shouting at once. There were questions, to be sure. Questions beyond answering. Questions Knefhausen did not have time to hear, much less answer, before the next question was on him. Questions to which he did not know the answers. Questions, worst of all, to which the answers were like pepper in the eyes, enraging, blinding the people to sense. But he had to face them, and he tried to answer them. Even when they shouted so that, outside the thick double doors, the Marine guards looked at each other uneasily and wondered what made the dull rumble that penetrated the very good soundproofing of the room. “What I want to know, who put you up to this?” “Mr. Chairman, nobody; it is as I have said.” “But see now, Knefhausen, do you mean to tell us you’re murderin’ these good people for the sake of some Goldbach’s theory?” “No, Senator, not for Goldbach’s Conjecture, but for what great advances in science will mean in the struggle to keep the free world free.” “You’re confessing you’ve dragged the United States into a palpable fraud?” “A legitimate ruse of war, Mr. Secretary, because there was no other way.” “The photographs, Knefhausen?” “Faked, General, as I have told you. I accept full responsibility.” And on and on, the words “murder” and “fraud” and even “treason” coming faster and faster.
Until at last the president stood up and raised his hand. Order was a long time coming, .but at last they quietened down.
“Whether we like it or not, we’re in it,” he said simply. “There is nothing else to say. You have come to me, many of you, with rumors and asked for the truth. Now you have the truth, and it is classified Top Secret and must not be divulged. You all know what this means. I will only add that I personally propose to see that any breach of this security is investigated with all the resources of the government, and punished with the full penalty of the law. I declare this a matter of national emergency, and remind you that the penalty includes the death sentence when appropriate—and I say that in this case it is appropriate.” He looked very much older than his years, and he moved his lips as though something tasted bad in his mouth. He allowed no further discussion, and dismissed the meeting.
Half an hour later, in his private office, it was just Knefhausen and the president.
“All right,” said the president, “it’s all hit the fan. The next thing is: The world will know it. I can postpone that a few weeks, maybe even months. I can’t prevent it.”
“I am grateful to you, Mr. President, for—”
“Shut up, Knefhausen. I don’t want any speeches. There is one thing I want from you, and that is an explanation. What the hell is this about mixing up narcotics and free love and so on?”
“Ah,” said Knefhausen, “you refer to the most recent communication from the
Constitution.
Yes. I have already dispatched, Mr. President, a strongly worded order. Because of the communications lag it will not be received for some months, but I assure you the matter will be corrected.”
The president said bitterly, “I don’t want any assurances, either. Do you watch television? I don’t mean
I Love Lucy
and ball games, I mean news. Do you know what sort of shape this country is in? The bonus marches in 1932, the race riots in 1967—they were nothing. Time was when we could call out the National Guard to put down disorder.
Last week I had to call out the Army to use against three companies of the Guard. One more scandal and we’re finished, Knefhausen, and this is a big one.”
“The purposes are beyond reproach—”
“Your purposes may be. Mine may be, or I try to tell myself it is for the good of science I did this, and not so I will be in the history books as the president who contributed a major breakthrough. But what are the purposes of your friends on the
Constitution
? I agreed to eight martyrs, Knefhausen. I didn’t agree to forty billion dollars out of the nation’s pockets to give your eight young friends ten years of gang-bangs and dope.”
“Mr. President. I assure you this is only a temporary phase. I have instructed them to straighten out.”
“And if they don’t, what are you going to do about it?” The president, who never smoked, stripped a cigar, bit off the end and lit it. He said, “It’s too late for me to say I shouldn’t have let you talk me into this. So all I will say is you have to show results from this flim-flam before the lid blows off, or I won’t be president anymore, and I doubt that you will be alive.”
This is Shef again and it’s, oh, let me see, about Day 250. 300? No, I don’t think so. Look, I’m sorry about the ship date, but I honestly don’t think much in those terms any more. I’ve been thinking about other things. Also I’m a little upset. When I tossed the rouble the hexagram was K’an, which is danger, over Li, the Sun. That’s a bad mood to be communicating with you in. We aren’t vengeful types, but the fact is that some of us were pretty sore when we found out what you’d done. I don’t
think
you need to worry, but I wish I’d got a better hexagram.
Let me tell you the good parts first. Our velocity is pushing point four oh C now. The scenery is beginning to get interesting. For several weeks now the stars fore and aft have been drifting out of sight as the ones in front get up into the ultraviolet and the ones behind sink into the infrared. You’d think that as the spectrum shifts the other parts of the EMF bands would come into the visible range. I guess they do, but stars peak in certain frequencies, and most of them seem to do it in the visible frequencies, so the effect is that they disappear. The first thing was that there was a sort of round black spot ahead of us where we couldn’t see anything at all, not Alpha Centauri, not Beta Centauri, not even the bright Circini stars. Then we lost the Sun behind us, and a little later we saw the blackout spread to a growing circle of stars there. Then the circle began to widen.
Of course, we know that the stars are really there. We can detect them with phase-shift equipment, just as we can transmit and receive your messages by shifting the frequencies. But we just can’t see them anymore. The ones in direct line of flight, where we have a vector velocity of .34c or .37c (depending on whether they are in front of us or behind us) simply aren’t radiating in the visible band anymore. The ones farther out to the side have been displaced visually because of the relativistic effects of our speed. But what it looks like is that we’re running the hell out of Nothing, in the direction of Nothing, and it is frankly a little scary.
Even the stars off to one side are showing relativistic color shifts. It’s almost like a rainbow, one of those full-circle rainbows that you see on the clouds beneath you from an airplane
sometimes. Only this circle is all around us. Nearest the black hole in front the stars have frequency-shifted to a dull reddish color. They go through orange and yellow and a sort of leaf green to the band nearest the black hole in back, which are bright blue shading to purple. Jim Barstow has been practicing his farsight on them, and he can relate them to the actual sky map. But I can’t. He sees something in the black hole in front of us that I can’t see, either. He says he thinks it’s a bright radio source, probably Centaurus A, and he claims it is radiating strongly in the whole visible band now. He means strongly for him, with his eyes. I’m not sure I can see it at all. There
may
be a sort of very faint, diffuse glow there, like the
gegenschein,
but I’m not sure. Neither is anyone else.
But the starbow itself is beautiful. It’s worth the trip. Flo has been learning oil painting so she can make a picture of it to send you for your wall, although when she found out what you’d been up to she got so sore she was thinking of boobytrapping it with a fusion bomb or something. (But she’s over that now. I think.)
So we’re not so mad at you anymore, although there was a time when, if I’d been communicating with you at exactly that moment, I would have said some bad things.
… I just played this back, and it sounds pretty jumbled and confused. I’m sorry about that. It’s hard for me to do this. I don’t mean hard like intellectually difficult (the way chess problems and tensor analysis used to be), but hard like shoveling sand with a teaspoon. I’m just not used to constricting my thoughts in this straitjacket anymore. I tried to get one of the others to communicate this time instead of me, but there were no takers. I did get a lot of free advice. Dot says I shouldn’t waste my time remembering how we used to talk. She wanted to write an eidetic account in simplified notation for you, which she estimated a crash program could translate for you in reasonable time, a decade or two, and would give you an absolutely full account of everything. I objected that that involved practical difficulties. Not in preparing the account, I don’t mean. Shucks, we can all do that now. I don’t forget anything, except irrelevant things like the standard-reckoning day that I don’t want to remember in the first place, and neither does anyone else. But the length of transmission would be too much. We don’t have the power to transmit the necessary number of groups, especially since the accident. Dot said we could Gödelize it. I said you were too dumb to de-Gödelize it. She said it would be good practice for you.
Well, she’s right about that, and it’s time you all learned how to communicate in a sensible way, so if the power holds out I’ll include Dot’s eidetic account at the end. In Gödelized form. Lots of luck. I won’t honestly be surprised if you miss a digit or something and it all turns into
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
or some missing books of apocrypha or, more likely of course, gibberish. Ski says it won’t do you any good in any case, because Henle was right. I pass that on without comment.
Sex. You always want to hear about sex. It’s great. Now that we don’t have to fool with the pills anymore we’ve been having some marvelous times. Flo and Jim Barstow began making it as part of a multiplexed communications system that you have to see to believe. Sometimes when they’re going to do it we all knock off and just sit around and watch them, cracking jokes and singing and helping with the auxiliary computations. When we had that little bit of minor surgery the other day (now we’ve got the bones seasoning), Ann and Ski decided to ball instead of using anaesthesia, and they said it was better than acupuncture. It didn’t block the sensation. They were aware of their little toes being lopped off, but they didn’t perceive it as pain. So then Jim, when it was his turn, tried going through the amputation without anything at all in the expectation that
he and Flo would go to bed together a little later, and that worked well too. He was all het up about it; claimed it showed a reverse causality that his theories predicted but that had not been demonstrated before. Said at last he was over the cause-preceding-the-effect hangup. It’s like the Red Queen and the White Queen, and quite puzzling until you get the hang of it. (I’m not sure I’ve got the hang of it yet.) Suppose he hadn’t balled Flo? Would his toe have hurt retroactively? I’m a little mixed up on this, Dot says because I simply don’t understand phenomenology in general, and I think I’ll have to take Ann’s advice and work my way through Carnap, although the linguistics are so poor that it’s hard to stay with it. Come to think of it, I don’t have to. It’s all in the Gödelized eidetic statement, after all. So I’ll transmit the statement to you, and while I’m doing that it will be a sort of review for me and maybe I’ll get my head right on causality.
Listen, let me give you a tip. The statement will also include Ski’s trick of containing plasma for up to 500K milliseconds, so when you figure it out you’ll know how to build those fusion power reactors you were talking about when we left. That’s the carrot before your nose, so get busy on de-Gödelizing. The plasma dodge works fine, although of course we were sorry about what happened when we converted the drive. The explosion killed Will Becklund outright, and it looked hairy for all of us.
Well, anyway. I have to cut this short because the power’s running a little low and I don’t want to chance messing up the statement. It follows herewith:
1973
354
+ 331
852
+ 17
2008
+ 5
47
+ 3
9606
+ 2
88
take away 78. Lots of luck, fellows!
Knefhausen lifted his head from the litter of papers on his desk. He rubbed his eyes, sighing. He had given up smoking the same time as the president, but, like the president, he was thinking of taking it up again. It could kill you, yes. But it was a tension-reducer, and he needed that. And what was wrong with something killing you. There were worse things than being killed, he thought dismally.
Looking at it any way you could, he thought objectively, the past two or three years had been hard on him. They had started so well and had gone so bad. Not as bad as those distant memories of childhood when everybody was so poor and Berlin was so cold and what warm clothes he had came from the
Winterhilfe.
By no means as hard as the end of the war. Nothing like as bad as those first years in South America and then in the Middle East, when even the lucky and famous ones, the Von Brauns and the Ehrickes, were having trouble getting what was due them and a young calf like Knefhausen had to peel potatoes and run elevators to live. But harder and worse than a man at the summit of his career had any reason to expect.
The Alpha-Aleph project, fundamentally, was sound! He ground his teeth, thinking about it. It would work—no, by God, it
was
working, and it would make the world a different place. Future generations would see.
But the future generations were not here yet, and in the present things were going badly.
Reminded, he picked up the phone and buzzed his secretary. “Have you got through to the president yet?” he demanded.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Knefhausen. I’ve tried every ten minutes, just as you said.”
“Ah,” he grunted. “No, wait. Let me see. What calls are there?”
Rustle of paper. “The news services, of course, asking about the rumors again. Jack Anderson’s office. The man from CBS.”
“No, no. I will not talk to the press. Anyone else?”
“Senator Copley called, asking when you were going to answer the list of questions his committee sent you.”
“I will give him an answer. I will give him the answer Götz von Berlichingen gave to the Bishop of Bamberg.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Knefhausen, I didn’t quite catch—”
“No matter. Anything else?”
“Just a long-distance call, from a Mr. Hauptmann. I have his number.”
“Hauptmann?” The name was puzzlingly familiar. After a moment Knefhausen placed it: to be sure, the photo technician who had cooperated in the faked pictures from Briareus Twelve. Well, he had his orders to stay out of sight and shut up. “No, that’s not important. None of them are, and I do not wish to be disturbed with such nonsense. Continue as you were, Mrs. Ambrose. If the president is reached you are to put me on at once, but no other calls.”
He hung up and returned to his desk.
He looked sadly and fondly at the papers. He had them all out: the reports from the
Constitution
, his own drafts of interpretation and comment, and more than a hundred footnoted items compiled by his staff, to help untangle the meanings and implications of those, ah, so cryptic sometimes, reports from space:
“Henle.
Apparently refers to Paul Henle (note appended); probably the citation intended is his statement, ‘There are certain symbolisms in which certain things cannot be said.’ Conjecture that English language is one of those symbolisms.”
“Orange sherbet sundae.
A classified experimental study was made of the material in Document Ref. No. CON-130, Para. 4. Chemical analysis and experimental testing have indicated that the recommended mixture of pharmaceuticals and other ingredients produce a hallucinogen-related substance of considerable strength and not wholly known qualities. One hundred subjects ingested the product or a placebo in a double-blind controlled test. Subjects receiving the actual substance report reactions significantly different from the placebo. Effects reported include feelings of immense competence and deepened understanding. However, data is entirely subjective. Attempts were made to verify claims by standard I.Q., manipulative, and other tests, but the subjects did not cooperate well, and several have since absented themselves without leave from the testing establishment.”
“Gödelized language.
A system of encoding any message of any kind as a single very large number. The message is first written out in clear language and then encoded as bases and exponents. Each letter of the message is represented in order by the natural order of primes—that is, the first letter is represented by the base 2, the second by the base 3, the third by the base 5, then 7, 11, 13, 17, etc. The identity of the letter occupying that position in the message is given by the exponent: simply, the exponent 1 meaning that the letter in that position is an A, the exponent 2 meaning that it is a B, 3 a C, etc. The message as a whole is then rendered as the product of all the bases and exponents.
Example.
The word ‘cab’ can thus be represented as 2
3
×3
1
×5
2
, or 600. (= 8x3x25.) The name ‘Abe’ would be represented by the number 56,250, or 2
1
×3
2
×5
5
. (=2x9x3125.) A sentence like
‘John lives.’ would be represented by the product of the following terms: 2
10
×3
15
×5
8
×7
14
×11
0
×13
12
×17
9
×19
22
×23
5
×29
19
×31
27
(in which the exponent ‘0’ has been reserved for a space and the exponent ‘27’ has been arbitrarily assigned to indicate a full stop). As can be seen, the Gödelized form for even a short message involves a very large number, although such numbers may be transmitted quite compactly in the form of a sum of bases and exponents. The example transmitted by the
Constitution
is estimated to equal the contents of a standard unabridged dictionary.”
“
Farsight.
The subject James Madison Barstow is known to have suffered from some nearsightedness in his early school years, apparently brought on by excessive reading, which he attempted to cure through eye exercises similar to the ‘Bates method’ (note appended). His vision at time of testing for Alpha-Aleph project was optimal. Interviews with former associates indicate his continuing interest in increasing visual acuity.
Alternate explanation.
There is some indication that he was also interested in paranormal phenomena such as clairvoyance or prevision, and it is possible, though at present deemed unlikely, that his use of the term refers to ‘looking ahead’ in time.”
And so on, and on.
Knefhausen gazed at the litter of papers lovingly and hopelessly, and passed his hand over his forehead. The kids! They were so marvelous … but so unruly … and so hard to understand. How unruly of them to have concealed their true accomplishments. The secret of hydrogen fusion! That alone would justify, more than justify, the entire project. But where was it? Locked in that number-jumber gibberish. Knefhausen was not without appreciation of the elegance of the method. He, too, was capable of taking seriously a device of such luminous simplicity. Once the number was written out you had only to start by dividing it by two as many times as possible, and the number of times would give you the first letter. Then divide by the next prime, three, and that number of times would give you the second letter. But the practical difficulties! You could not get even the first letter until you had the whole number, and IBM had refused even to bid on constructing a bank of computers to write that number out unless the development time was stretched to twenty-five years.
Twenty-five years.
And meanwhile in that number was hidden probably the secret of hydrogen fusion, possibly many greater secrets, most certainly the key to Knefhausen’s own well-being over the next few weeks … .
His phone rang.
He grabbed it and shouted into it at once: “Yes, Mr. President!”
He had been too quick. It was only his secretary. Her voice was shaking but determined.
“It’s not the president, Dr. Knefhausen, but Senator Copley is on the wire and he says it is urgent. He says—”
“No!” shouted Knefhausen and banged down the phone. He regretted it even as he was doing it. Copley was very high, chairman of the Armed Forces Committee; he was not a man Knefhausen wished to have as an enemy, and he had been very careful to make him a friend over years of patient fence-building. But he could not speak to him, or to anyone, while the President was not answering his calls. Copley’s rank was high, but he was not in the direct hierarchical line over Knefhausen. When the top of that line refused to talk to him, Knefhausen was cut off from the world.
He attempted to calm himself by examining the situation objectively. The pressures on the president just now: They were enormous. There was the continuing trouble in the cities, all the cities. There were the political conventions coming up. There was the need to get elected for a third term, and the need to get the law amended to make that possible. And yes, Knefhausen admitted to himself, the worst pressure of all was the rumors that were floating around about the
Constitution.
He had warned the President. It was unfortunate the President had not listened. He had said that a secret known to two people is compromised and a secret known to more than two is no secret. But the president had insisted on the disclosure to that ever-widening circle of high officials—sworn, of course to secrecy, but what good was that?—and, of course, in spite of everything, there had been leaks. Fewer than one might have feared. More than one could stand.
He touched the reports from
Constitution
caressingly. Those beautiful kids, they could still make everything right, so wonderful … .
Because it was he who had made them wonderful, he confessed to himself. He had invented the idea. He had selected them. He had done things which he did not quite even yet reconcile himself to to make sure that it was they and not some others who were on the crew. He had, above all, made assurance doubly sure by insuring their loyalty in every way possible. Training. Discipline. Ties of affection and friendship. More reliable ties: loading their food supplies, their entertainment tapes, their programmed activities with every sort of advertising inducement, M/R compulsion, psychological reinforcement he could invent or find, so that whatever else they did they did not fail to report faithfully back to Earth. Whatever else happened, there was that. The data might be hard to untangle, but it would be there. They could not help themselves; his commandments were stronger than God’s: like Martin Luther, they must say
Ich kann nicht anders,
and come Pope or inquisition, they must stand by it. They would learn, and tell what they learned, and thus the investment would be repaid … .
The telephone!
He was talking before he had it even to his mouth. “Yes, yes! This is Dr. Knefhausen, yes!” he gabbled. Surely it must be the president now—
It was not.
“Knefhausen!” shouted the man on the other end. “Now, listen, I’ll tell you what I told that bitch pig girl of yours, if I don’t talk to you on the phone
right now
I’ll have Fourth Armored in there to arrest you and bring you to me in twenty minutes. So listen!”
Knefhausen recognized both voice and style. He drew a deep voice and forced himself to be calm. “Very well, Senator Copley,” he said, “what is it?”
“The game is blown, boy! That’s what it is. That boy of yours in Huntsville, what’s his name, the photo technician—”
“
Hauptmann
?”
“That’s him! Would you like to know where he is, you dumb Kraut bastard?”
“Why, I suppose—I should think in Huntsville—”
“Wrong, boy! Your Kraut bastard friend claimed he didn’t feel good and took some accrued sick time. Intelligence kept an eye on him up to a point, didn’t stop him, wanted to see what he’d do. Well, they saw. They saw him leaving Orly Airport an hour ago in an Aeroflot plane. Put your big Kraut brain to work on that one, Knefhausen! He’s defected. Now start figuring out what you’re going to do about it, and it better be good!”
Knefhausen said something, he did not know what, and hung up the phone, he did not remember when. He stared glassily into space for a time.
Then he flicked the switch for his secretary and said, not listening to her stammering apologies, “That long-distance call that came from Hauptmann before, Mrs. Ambrose. You didn’t say where it was from.”
“It was an overseas call, Dr. Knefhausen. From Paris. You didn’t give me a chance to—”
“Yes, yes. I understand. Thank you. Never mind.” He hung up and sat back. He felt almost relieved. If Hauptmann had gone to Russia it could only be to tell them that the picture was faked and not only was there no planet for the astronauts to land on but it was not a mistake, even, actually a total fraud. So now it was all out of his hands. History would judge him now. The die was cast. The Rubicon was crossed.
So many literary allusions, he thought deprecatingly. Actually it was not the judgment of history that was immediately important but the judgment of certain real people now alive and likely to respond badly. And they would judge him not so much by what might be or what should have been, as by what was. He shivered in the cold of that judgment and reached for the telephone to try once more to call the president. But he was quite sure the president would not answer, then or ever again.