by Don DeLillo
“They’re sending, they’re sending.”
“Who is sending and what is being sent?” D’Arco said.
Knobloch looked at Billy.
“I hate you,” he said.
“Why?”
“You saw me fall.”
D’Arco clapped his hands a single time.
“Who and what?”
“Radio signals. Extraterrestrials. They’re sending again.”
“What’s the nature of these signals?”
“Fourteen pulses, a gap. Twenty-eight pulses, a gap. Fifty-seven pulses.”
D’Arco sagged visibly. Slightly lopsided, Knobloch merely sweated and tried to catch his breath. Billy stepped back into the hobby room, certain this was the end of all menace run amuck.
“I think we learned something here today,” he said.
In the doorway the two men conferred. Billy wandered over to a small window in a far corner of the room. He looked down to one of the lawns and saw what appeared to be an impromptu parade. Two ragged lines of people. Some of them apparently carrying instruments. He was too far away, however, to hear any music. What he did hear, behind him, was Tree Man II padding down the corridor. When he turned he saw that D’Arco had also gone. This left Knobloch, stocky with pustules, to lead him to his canister, not before retrieving the lost shoe and putting it back on. In the canister he tucked Billy into the twofold and departed. In a matter of minutes his voice filled the room.
“Say ‘I read’ if you read what I’m saying.”
“I read.”
“Who discovered zero and where was it discovered?”
“Hindu, India.”
“That concludes our voice check,” Knobloch said. “Preparing to record stage-four functions. Preparing to record, preparing to record. Is subject ready?”
“No reply.”
“Preparing to count down. Subject is counting down. Subject is closing his eyes and counting down from zero. Subject’s eyelids are terribly heavy. Subject is drowsy as he begins to enter stage one. We have low voltage activity at this time. Decreased amplitude, increased frequency. We are recording at a paper speed of fifteen millimeters per second. Preparing to receive stage-one tracings. Preparing to receive, preparing to receive.”
It was at this point that Softly entered the room. There was a second of brilliant stillness. Sensational, Billy thought. Colossal, tremendous, stupendous. The special presence of the man, his ascendancy, the seeming contradiction of painful quaintness, were never more evident. He put down his jacket and briefcase. Then, as Knobloch’s voice continued to deliver technical data, he approached the limited input module, stepped on a chair, reached into a small compartment high above the videophone and turned a silver dial. Knobloch’s voice went dead and the room was totally silent. He stepped down from the chair, picked a loose thread off his shirt cuff and then put on his jacket. Billy climbed out of the twofold, moving at once to his side. It was over, over, over.
They walked together on the grounds. Billy carried Softly’s briefcase, as he’d often done at the Center. It was a mild and windless day, sky high and bright, a day modeled on the rhythmic symmetry of a period of light before nightfall. When they entered the topiary garden they heard the ample blare of the parade as it steadily developed, then saw the marchers, dozens of men and women strutting in and out of the monkey hedges, most of them in costumes of various sorts, all wearing masks, men in one rank, women in the other, moving in twos, their masks improvised from newspapers, napkins, towels and sacks. One of the marchers shouldered a tuba, his paper mask fitted with a mouth-hole, and other people played banjos, trombones, drums, clarinets and flutes. The noise produced was sufficiently dissonant to confirm the spontaneous nature of the event. In opera hats, bedgowns, bonnets, yellow slickers, periwigs, knickers and snoods they paraded under the sun, some of the “women,” seen now at closer range, appearing to be men in women’s clothing, as though to correct a deficiency and even up the pairings. A ten-foot muffler connected several necks.
“I’m willing to believe this is International Children’s Day,” Softly said. “There really is such a thing, you know.”
“I didn’t.”
“They’ve kept it from the children.”
“I didn’t know you were expected, Rob. You never told me a thing. What do you think of this place?”
“Needs a fluted column or two. But don’t get depressed, we won’t be here much longer.”
“Where are we going?”
“I’m working out the details.”
“Somewhere together?”
“Sure, together, absolutely. This whole operation needs to be drastically altered. When I agreed with U.F.O. Schwarz that you were uniquely suited to unravel the transmission, I didn’t know things would be handled so casually. There hasn’t been enough systematic thought put in on this.”
“But I’m a lot closer than anyone else got to a solution. The number they’re transmitting is what we would call fifty-two thousand one hundred and thirty-seven. I’m sure of that and all I have to do is go on from there.”
“From there to where?” Softly said.
They walked slowly across a level expanse of grass. Softly, forced to move in mechanical tick-tock fashion because of permanently dislocated hips, lifted a tin of small cigars out of his side pocket and lit one up. He seemed to haul himself over the ground, hitching with every step, his stomach working as hard as his legs to produce some locomotion. Fields. Number fields. Algebraic number fields. Star fields. Electrical fields. Metrical fields. Field equations. Unified field theory. The grass had recently been cut and possessed that nearly toxic freshness of nature in recuperation, a savor of arrow poison more seductive than the wildest lime. The two moving figures were about a hundred yards from the building, which was hard to look at in this midpoint hour, having been designed to play with light, to magnify and angle it in veering octaves so that the whole structure resembled a burst of solar art.
“They mixed up my tracings with an ape’s.”
“What kind of ape?”
“Chimpanzee.”
“They’re the most intelligent,” Softly said.
They sat on the grass to rest. Billy stretched back, face lifted to the sun. After a moment he became aware that Softly had taken off his jacket and placed it over his head so that his face was in shadow beneath the upturned collar. Always doing things like that, the boy recalled. Usually these things were funny, dumb and strange and it was only after some time had passed that he would realize there was an element of intelligence at work. In this case, he decided, it was Softly’s pale coloring that provided the motivation, his susceptibility to sunburn.
“I think we have to attack the code in a radically different way. However we look at it, this is one of the most important events in the history of mankind. It has to be dealt with in the purest way possible. Do you see what I’m getting at? We have to be absolutely lucid. We have to be exact to a degree never before attained. The slightest intuitive content has to be eliminated from our finished work. See what I’m leading up to?”
“Let’s have the gory details.”
“One way of viewing mathematics is in terms of number. I guess you know what the other way is. I’ll say the word in a more expressive language just so there’ll be no doubt exactly what it is we’re talking about.”
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Logik,” Softly said.
That distinctive quality of parade music, a summons to come running, to gather together in public and allow whatever loyalty imbues marchers and band members to quicken likewise the communal spirit and reduce all colors to one; that special emotion, as the music drops into time and distance, is swept pathetically away, to be replaced by a faint wonder at the depths of regret that often follow such fleeting revelry.
“I think I feel sick.”
“Logic is the scrub brush the mathematician uses to keep his work free of impurity. Logic says yes or no to the forms constructed through intu
ition. So-called intuitive truths have to be subjected to the rigors of logic before we can take them seriously, much less use them in our work. Remember, we’re dealing with beings of extraordinary capacity. How can we expect to communicate without a ruthlessly precise system of symbolic notation? Now I know your accomplishments. I understand your feelings—don’t think I don’t. But you have to admit that much of what you’ve done as a mathematician has been devoid of true depth. Brilliant instinctive skimming, to be sure. Unprecedented, in fact. But skimming nonetheless. We have to eliminate contradiction and go beyond all those lax attitudes that make true scientists want to crumple up whimpering.”
“I don’t like the sound of it.”
“Neo-logistic, it’s called, technically.”
“I definitely feel sick.”
“Don’t get your balls in an uproar,” Softly said.
Cigar smoke drifted out of the gabardine tent, not quite concealing Softly’s faint smile. In slow motion his left arm emerged from the jacket to give the boy a chummy cuff on the shoulder.
“I find it interesting that Gottlob Frege produced his first landmark work on the logical foundations of mathematics exactly one hundred years ago. Almost as interesting is the fact that Einstein was born that same year. And that Dodgson published a book on non-Euclidean geometry—organized in dream form. Of further interest is the coincidence that a critical split in mathematics resulted from work being done on infinite sets about that time.”
“Why is this interesting?”
“Because I find it so.”
He dug a little hole for the cigar and gently buried it. Funny, dumb and strange.
“As we redefine and strengthen, I think we’ll get closer and closer to the prospect of a genuine exchange with the extraterrestrials. We have to seek a level deeper than pure number. That much I’m absolutely convinced of. So let’s not drag it out.”
“I got halfway there, Rob. I found out they use a system based on sixty. I know it didn’t take any complicated work to figure this out but that’s exactly the reason we don’t need this big change in our thinking.”
“Even if you sit down and solve the code later this afternoon and solve it in a manner convincing to one and all, this still wouldn’t mean we’ve found an effective way of exchanging information with the extraterrestrials. What we need and what I’m trying to get the groundwork started on is a logistic cosmic language based on mathematical principles.”
“It’ll take years and years until long after we’re kaput to even reach them out there with an answer. So what’s the difference?”
“That’s not the point, mister. Field Experiment Number One may smell like a brand-new shower curtain but its aims are important ones. If we’re going to behave as a single people, as rational human beings who inhabit the same planet, we desperately need goals and pursuits that can unite us. Finding a way to speak to intelligent beings on another planet is one such pursuit. This place wasn’t called Number One accidentally. Others are being planned. Beacons in the shit-filled night. If we succeed here, we’ll be providing impetus for similar projects throughout the world. One, two, three, four, five.”
“I need this speech?”
“You can make it work,” Softly said. “You with your one-of-a-kind touch, your fantastic grasp of connective patterns, of relationships and form, of hypothetical states, of the ways in which an isolated concept ties into the whole body of mathematics. Think of it. A transgalactic language. Pure and perfect mathematical logic. A means of speaking to the universe. Whatever small forays have been made in this direction in the past are about to be completely overshadowed by our efforts at Number One.”
“I thought we weren’t staying.”
“It depends on events,” Softly said. “We’ll be here in general but elsewhere in particular, I suspect.”
They began to walk again. It was still possible to hear an occasional parade sound, very faint at this distance, tiny rips in the air, the brief repeated pop of tearing seams. Softly kept the jacket over his head.
“I think we’re free to break off, split away, to follow a new course. In line with the rigorous approach I’d like everyone to stop using expressions like ‘Ratnerians,’ ‘superbeings,’ ‘extraterrestrials’ and so forth. It’s a radio source we’re in touch with. If Moholean relativity is the real thing, the source isn’t even where it seems to be. So why assume it’s a planet orbiting a star? Remember the homely old adage: ‘Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.’ So let’s from now on be sure to use the term ‘artificial radio source.’ And let’s find a more precise name for the so-called beings who are presumed to have initiated the transmission. How about ‘artificial radio source extants’? ARS extants. Just so we know what’s what.”
“Getting tired?”
“From talking more than walking. Hard to adjust to the fact I’m walking with someone who doesn’t tower over me. The size we share makes it easier for me to imagine you in the palsied grip of middle age, hee hee, which in turn makes my own years fall away like dry leaves. The fate of man, recto verso, is to go to his grave in a rented hearse-o.”
In time they returned to the vicinity of the cycloid structure. A woman opened the gate that led from a small enclosure known as the abstract garden. She walked toward them, carrying a small piece of luggage and some books.
“Look at the ass on that.”
“What ass?” Billy said. “She’s coming toward us.”
“I like to anticipate.”
Softly put his jacket back on and they settled into adjacent chairs in the abstract garden. The paraders had evidently passed this way, leaving tokens of their frolic. A man with a pointed stick jabbed daintily at pieces of paper and stray fragments of costume.
“So in conclusion,” Softly said, “what we’ve got to do is restate and strengthen our method of reasoning. Make it exact and supremely taut. Introduce distinctions and fresh relationships. Argue our propositions in terms of precise ideographic symbols. Submit our mathematics, in short, to a searching self-examination. In the process we’ll discover what’s true and what’s false not only in the work before us but in the very structure of our reasoning. There’s been no concerted attempt to eliminate slackness and ambiguity from the work you’ve done up to now. I’ve got news for you, mister. The goddamn fun is over.”
They were alone in the small garden. The afternoon had lost some of its rabid glare. A smell of mown clover rose from the earth. It summoned a special presentness, that particular time-sense in which animal faculties conspire to rouse the spirit, the ordering force of memory, and Billy was stirred to relive some elemental moments separately blessed within the flow of past events. They could be counted, the times in which he’d guided a length of string through the hole he’d nail-scraped in a chestnut, the lumps of clay he’d thumbed and gouged into some amorphous model, the cherry pits he’d buried and people he’d learned to believe. They could be counted, the times in which he’d flexed his toes in dense wet sand, the bites of ice cream he’d chunked out of dixie cups with a flat wooden spoon, the caves he’d made in his mashed potatoes, the pages he’d detached from his composition notebook, tearing down along the row of wire rings, and the white flakes that bounced down out of the air as a result, also distinct and countable. They could be named and listed, the places he’d hidden from danger, the nights he thought would never end.
Softly got up, stretched and headed abruptly toward a remote rear entrance of the building. The boy followed, carrying the briefcase. It wasn’t until he walked toward the reflecting surface of an electronic door, now sliding open, that he realized he was still wearing the false mustache.
REFLECTIONS
Logicon Project Minus-One
Everywhere dense the space between them seemed a series of incremental frames that defined their passion’s dark encompassment, man ostensibly engrossed in dressing, woman nude and on her side (a horizontal dune anagrammatized), neither failing to be aware of the sediment of recent links and
distances, that variable material suspended in the air, living instants of their time within each other, sweat and re-echoing flesh serving to confirm the urgent nature of their act, the industry involved, the reconnoitering for fit and placement, the fundamental motion, the pursuit of equable rhythm, the readjustment of original position, the effort of returning to oneself, of departing the aggregate, and in the slightly pasty daze in which they now remembered their fatigue, their sense of well-merited weariness, it was possible for each to examine even further the substance of that space between them, so reflective of their labor, the odors transposed, the strand of hair in the mouth, the experience of whole body breathing, the failure (or instinctive disinclination) to produce coherent speech, the bright cries, the settling, the eventual descent to slackness, the momentary near sleep in milkiness and cling, the recapturing of normal breathing tempo, the monosyllables and blocks of words, the raw awareness of the dangers of exchange, the oddly apologetic uncoupling, mutual recognition of the human demonology of love. She rose from the bed, not without a glib tickle of the springs, this done with a bounce of her amazing buttock, the left, notable for its star-shaped birthmark. He sat atop a footstool, engaged in double-lacing his shoes, taking time between knots to watch her dress, an operation that seemed to portray the correspondence between position and time, one action generating the next, step-in, shake-into, hoist-on, her limbs and torso covered now, fluidly moving woman, her eyes appearing to follow the delicate pebbling sound of Softly’s voice. She sat back on the bed as he spoke, the bottoms of her feet identically smudged with dust, arms enfolding her raised knees to form a body-hut that wobbled. Softly rubbing his pale stubble took time to glance inside the folder she’d left propped against the footstool. He spoke a moment longer (about terms, formulas, sentences and proofs), then got up and hurried out of the room, moving with his customary lurch. Had he happened to turn, a step beyond the doorway, for a final word or sweet and simple farewell nod he might have found himself a trifle mystified by the wry smile on his lover’s face.