His Master's Voice (17 page)

Myers followed in his footsteps, and I have to admit that he was not bad at combinatorial analysis—a branch, however, that even then I considered to be dried up. The student developed the idea of the mentor, so the mentor placed his faith in the student—and yet it was not that simple. Could it have been that Dill felt an instinctive, animal antipathy toward me? Was I too forward, too sure of myself and of my future? Obtuse I most certainly was; I understood nothing. On the other hand, I bore absolutely no grudge against him. Myers, it is true, I detested. I can still remember the silent delight I experienced when, many years later, I happened to run into him. He was working as a statistician in some automobile company—General Motors, I think.

But the fact that Dill had failed so completely in his choice of protégé was not enough for me. It was not that I wanted him vanquished; I wanted him converted to a belief in me. I do not think I ever finished any larger paper in all my younger work without imagining Dill's eyes on the manuscript. What effort it cost me to prove that the Dill variable combinatorics was only a rough approximation of an ergodic theorem! Not before or since, I daresay, did I polish a thing so carefully; and it is even possible that the whole concept of groups later called Hogarth groups came out of that quiet, constant passion with which I plowed Dill's axioms under. And then, as if wanting to do something in addition, though now there was nothing really left to do, I played the metamathematician—in order to survey that entire anachronistic idea from above, as it were, in a kind of Olympian footnote. More than one of those who had already predicted a soaring flight for me were surprised at this marginal interest of mine.

Of course I did not reveal to anyone the real motive, the hidden reason behind that work. What did I actually expect? Not, certainly, that Dill would come to appreciate my worth, would apologize about Myers, would admit how greatly he had been mistaken. The thought of that hawklike, hale, seemingly ageless old man going to Canossa was too absurd for me to entertain it even for a moment. So I had nothing specific in mind as a dream to come true: the thing was too embarrassing and petty for that. Sometimes a person who is valued, respected, even loved by all, cares most, in the innermost recess of his soul, about the opinion of someone who stands uninterested outside the circle of admirers, and who may be, in the eyes of the world, of no particular importance, a mediocrity.

What was Dill Senior, in the final analysis? A rank-and-file professor of mathematics. There were dozens like him in the States. But such rational arguments would not have helped me, especially since at that time I had not acknowledged even to myself the meaning and aim of the idiosyncrasies in my ambition. And yet, when I received from the publisher the fresh, stiff copies of my articles, bright as if bathed in new glory, I would have lucid moments; before me would appear Dill, dry, thin as a beanpole, inflexible, his face like a portrait of Hegel—and I hated Hegel, I could not read him, because he was so sure of himself, as if the Absolute Itself spoke through his lips for the greater glory of the Prussian state. Hegel, I realize now, had nothing to do with it; I had put him in the place of another person.

A few times I saw Dill at conferences, from a distance; I steered clear, pretending not to recognize him. Once he himself began talking to me, politely, vaguely, but I excused myself, said that I was just leaving. There was really nothing I wanted from him now; it was as if he were necessary to me only in the world of the imagination. The publication of my major opus was followed by a shower of praise, by a first biography; I felt close to an unexpressed goal, and that was when our paths crossed. Rumors of his illness had reached me, yes, but I had not thought that it could alter the man so much. I saw him in a supermarket. He was pushing a cart filled with cans, directly in front of me. I followed. There was a crowd all around us. In a quick, furtive glance I noticed his pouchlike, swollen cheeks, and with the diagnosis came a feeling akin to despair. Here was a shrunken, pot-bellied old man with dull eyes and a slack jaw, dragging his feet in large galoshes. Snow melting on his collar. He pushed his cart, was pushed by the crowd, and I hurriedly stepped back and away, as though in fear; I wanted only to leave as quickly as possible—to flee. In an instant I had lost an enemy, who probably had no idea, ever, that he was an enemy. For some time afterward, I felt an emptiness, as if after the loss of someone very close. That kind of stimulating challenge, demanding the concentration of all one's mental power, was suddenly gone. Probably the Dill that followed me constantly and looked over my shoulder at the marked-up manuscripts never existed. When I read, years later, of his death, I felt nothing. But there long remained in me the wound of that vacated place.

I knew that he had a son, but I first met Dill Junior only in the Project. The mother, it seems, was Hungarian; hence that peculiar name, which brought to my mind Tamerlane. Though a junior, he was no longer young. He was one of those aging youths. There are people who are as if destined to be one age only. Baloyne, for example, is headed for a great patriarch; that appears to be his proper form, and he hastens to achieve it, knowing that not only will he not lose his vigor then, but in addition will wax Biblical and thus stand outside any suspicion of weakness. Then there are those who preserve the features of irresponsible adolescence. Dill Junior was that way. From his father he inherited an aspect of solemnity, a laboriousness of gesture: he certainly did not belong to the category of people who do not worry what their hands or face are doing at a given moment. He was what is called a "restless physicist," in somewhat the same way as I was a restless mathematician, because he repeatedly shifted from field to field. For a while he worked in Anderson's biophysics group. We struck up a friendship at Rappaport's place; this cost me a little effort, because I did not really like Dill, but I overcame my feelings for the sake of his father's memory. If this does not quite make sense to the reader, I can only say that it does not quite make sense to me, either, but that is the way it was.

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.

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.