The Voice of the Dolphins and Other Stories
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Contents
NIGHTMARE FOR FUTURE REFERENCE
THE VOICE OF THE DOLPHINS
MY TRIAL AS A WAR CRIMINAL
THE MARK GABLE FOUNDATION
CALLING ALL STARS
REPORT ON “GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL”
THE VOICE OF THE DOLPHINS and OTHER STORIES
by Leo Szilard
SIMON AND SCHUSTER - NEW YORK - 1961 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM COPYRIGHT (c) 1961 BY LEO SZILARD PUBLISHED BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER, INC. ROCKEFELLER CENTER, 630 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK 20, N.Y.
Third Printing
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 61-7014.‘MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY H. WOLFF BOOK MANUFACTURING CO., INC. “REPORT ON ‘GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL,’ ” REPRINTED FROM “THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MAGAZINE,” JUNE 1952. “MY TRIAL AS A WAR CRIMINAL,” REPRINTED FROM “THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LAW RE-VIEW,” VOL. 17, NO. 1, AUTUMN, 1949.“NIGHTMARE FOR FUTURE REFERENCE” FROM “SELECTED WORKS OF STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT,” COPYRIGHT (c) 1938 BY STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF HOLT, RINEHART & WINSTON, INC.
Nightmare for Future Reference
BY STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT
That was the second year of the Third World War,
The one between Us and Them.
Well, we’ve gotten used.
We don’t talk much about it, queerly enough.
There was all sorts of talk the first years after the Peace,
A million theories, a million wild suppositions,
A million hopeful explanations and plans,
But we don’t talk about it now. We don’t even ask.
We might do the wrong thing. I don’t guess you’d understand that.
But you’re eighteen now. You can take it. You’d better know.
You see, you were born just before the war broke out.
Who started it? Oh, they said it was Us or Them
and it looked like it at the time. You don’t know What that’s like.
But anyhow, it started and there it was,
lust a little worse, of course, than the one before,
But mankind was used to that. We didn’t take notice.
They bombed our capital and we bombed theirs.
You’ve been to the Broken Towns? Yes, they take you there.
They show you the look of the tormented earth.
But they can’t show the smell or the gas or the death
Or how it felt to be there, and a part of it.
But we didn’t know. I swear that we didn’t know.
I remember the first faint hint there was something wrong,
Something beyond all wars and bigger and strange,
Something you couldn’t explain.
I was back on leave-
Strange, as you felt on leave, as you always felt-
But I went to see the Chief at the hospital,
And there he was, in the same old laboratory,
A little older, with some white in his hair,
But the same eyes that went through you and the same tongue.
They hadn’t been able to touch him-not the bombs
Nor the ruin of his life’s work nor anything.
He blinked at me from behind his spectacles
And said, “Huh. It’s you. They won’t let me have guinea pigs Except for the war work, but I steal a few.
And they’ve made me a colonel-expect me to salute.
Damn fools. A damn-fool business. I don’t know how.
Have you heard what Erickson’s done with the ductless glands?
The journals are four months late. Sit down and smoke.”
And I did and it was like home.
He was a great man.
You might remember that-and I’d worked with him.
Well, finally he said to me, “How’s your boy?”
“Oh-healthy,” I said. “We’re lucky.”
“Yes,” he said,
And a frown went over his face. “He might even grow up,
Though the intervals between wars are getting shorter.
I wonder if it wouldn’t simplify things
To declare mankind in a permanent state of siege.
It might knock some sense in their heads.”
“You’re cheerful,” I said.
“Oh, I’m always cheerful,” he said. “Seen these, by the way?”
He tapped some charts on a table.
“Seen what?” I said.
“Oh,” he said, with that devilish, sidelong grin of his,
“just the normal city statistics-death and birth.
You’re a soldier now. You wouldn’t be interested.
But the birth rate’s dropping.”
“Well, really, sir,” I said,
“We know that it’s always dropped, in every war.”
“Not like this,” he said. “I can show you the curve.
It looks like the side of a mountain, going down.
And faster, the last three months-yes, a good deal faster.
I showed it to Lobenheim and he was puzzled.
It makes a neat problem-yes?” He looked at me.
“They’d better make peace,” be said. “They’d better make peace.”
“Well, sir,” I said, “if we break through, in the spring …”
“Break through?” he said. “What’s that? They’d better make peace.
The stars may be tired of us. No, I’m not a mystic.
I leave that to the big scientists in bad novels.
But I never saw such a queer maternity curve.
I wish I could get to Ehrens, on their side.
He’d tell me the truth. But the fools won’t let me do it.”
His eyes looked tired as he stared at the careful charts.
“Suppose there are no more babies?” he said. “What then?
It’s one way of solving the problem.”
“But, sir-”I said.
“But, sir!” he said. “Will you tell me, please, what is life?
Why it’s given, why it’s taken away?
Oh, I know-we make a jelly inside a test tube,
We keep a cock’s heart living inside a far.
We know a great many things, and what do we know?
We think we know what finished the dinosaurs,
But do we? Maybe they were given a chance
And then it was taken back. There are other beasts
That only kill for their food. No, I’m not a mystic,
But there’s a certain pattern in nature, you know,
And we’re upsetting it daily. Eat and mate
And go back to the earth after that, and that’s all right.
But now we’re blasting and sickening earth itself.
She’s been very patient with us. I wonder how long.”
Well, I thought the Chief had gone crazy, just at first,
And then I remembered the look of no man’s land,
That bitter landscape, pockmarked like the moon,
Lifeless as the moon’s face and horrible,
The thing we’d made with the guns.
If it were earth,
It looked as though it hated.
“Well?” I said,
And my voice was a little thin. He looked hard at me.
“Oh-ask the women,” he grunted. “Don’t ask me.
Ask them what they think about it.
“I didn’t ask them,
Not even your mother-she was strange, those days-
But, two weeks later, I was back in the lines
And somebody sent me a paper-
&nbs
p; Encouragement for the troops and all of that-
All about the fall of Their birth rate on Their side.
I guess you know now. There was still a day when we fought,
And the next day the women knew. I don’t know how they knew,
But they smashed every government in the world
Like a heap of broken china, within two days,
And we’d stopped firing by then. And we looked at each other.
We didn’t talk much, those first weeks. You couldn’t talk.
We started in rebuilding and that was all,
And at first nobody would even touch the guns,
Not even to melt them up. They just stood there, silent,
Pointing the way they had and nobody there.
And there was a kind of madness in the air,
A quiet, bewildered madness, strange and shy.
You’d pass a man who was muttering to himself
And you’d know what he was muttering, and why.
I remember coming home and your mother there.
She looked at me, at first didn’t speak at all,
And then she said, “Burn those clothes. Take them off and burn them
Or I’ll never touch you or speak to you again.”
And then I knew I was still in my uniform.
Well, I’ve told you now. They tell you now at eighteen.
There’s no use telling before. Do you understand?
That’s why we have the Ritual of the Earth,
The Day of Sorrow, the other ceremonies.
Oh, yes, at first people hated the animals
Because they still bred, but we’ve gotten over that.
Perhaps they can work it better, when it’s their turn,
If it’s their turn-I don’t know. I don’t know at all.
You can call it a virus, of course, if you like the word,
But we haven’t been able to find it. Not yet. No.
It isn’t as if it had happened all at once.
There were a few children born in the last six months
Before the end of the war, so there’s still some hope.
But they’re almost grown. That’s the trouble. They’re almost grown.
Well, we had a long run. That’s something. At first they thought
There might be a nation somewhere-a savage tribe.
But we were all in it, even the Eskimos,
And we keep the toys in the stores, and the colored books,
And people marry and plan and the rest of it,
But, you see, there aren’t any children. They aren’t born.
[1938]
The Voice of the Dolphins
On several occasions between 1960 and 1985, the world narrowly escaped an all-out atomic war. In each case, the escape was due more to fortuitous circumstances than to the wisdom of the policies pursued by statesmen.
That the bomb would pose a novel problem to the world was clear as early as 1946. It was not clearly recognized, however, that the solution of this problem would involve political and technical considerations in an inseparable fashion. In America, few statesmen were aware of the technical considerations, and, prior to Sputnik, only few scientists were aware
of the political considerations. After Sputnik, Dr. James R. Killian was appointed by President Eisenhower,on a full-time basis, as chairman of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, and, thereafter, a number of distinguished scientists were drawn into the work of the Committee and became aware of all aspects of the problem posed by the bomb.
Why, then, one may ask, did scientists in general, and the President’s Science Advisory Committee in particular, fail to advance a solution of this problem during the Eisenhower administration? The slogan that “scientists should be on tap but not on top,” which gained currency in Washington, may have had something to do with this failure. Of course, scientists could not possibly be on top in Washington, where policy, if it is made at all, is made by those who operate, rather than by those who are engaged in policy planning. But what those who coined this slogan, and those who parroted it, apparently meant was that scientists must not concern themselves with devising and proposing policies; they ought to limit themselves to answering such technical questions as they may be asked. Thus, it may well be that the scientists gave the wrong answers because they were asked the wrong questions.
In retrospect, it would appear that among the various recommendations made by the President’s Science Advisory Committee there was only one which has borne fruit. At some point or other, the Committee had recommended that there be set up, at the opportune time, a major joint Russian-American research project having no relevance to the national defense, or to any politically controversial issues. The setting up in 1963 of the Biological Research Institute in Vienna under a contract between the Russian and American governments was in line with this general recommendation of the Committee.
When the Vienna Institute came to be established, both the American and the Russian molecular biologists manifested a curious predilection for it. Because most of those who applied for a staff position were distinguished scientists, even though comparatively young, practically all of those who applied were accepted.
This was generally regarded at that time as a major setback for this young branch of science, in Russia as well as in America, and there were those who accused Sergei Dressler of having played the role of the Pied Piper. There may have been a grain of truth in this accusation, inasmuch as a conference on molecular biology held in Leningrad in 1962 was due to his initiative. Dressler spent a few months in America in 1960 surveying the advances in molecular biology. He was so impressed by what he saw that he decided to do something to stimulate this new branch of science in his native Russia. The Leningrad Conference was attended by many Americans; it was the first time that American and Russian molecular biologists came into contact with each other, and the friend-ships formed on this occasion were to last a lifetime.
When the first scientific communications came out of the Vienna Institute, it came as a surprise to everyone that they were not in the field of molecular biology, but concerned themselves with the intellectual capacity of the dolphins.
That the organization of the brain of the dolphin has a complexity comparable to that of man had been known for a long time. In 1960, Dr. John C. Lilly reported that the dolphins might have a language of their own, that they were capable of imitating human speech and that the intelligence of the dolphins might be equal to that of humans, or possibly even superior to it. This report made enough of a stir, at that time, to hit the front pages of the newspapers. Subsequent attempts to learn the language of the dolphins, to communicate with them and to teach them, appeared to be discouraging, however, and it was generally assumed that Dr. Lilly had overrated their intelligence.
In contrast to this view, the very first bulletin from the Vienna Institute took the position that previous failures to communicate with the dolphins might not have been due to the dolphins’ lack of intellectual capacity but rather to their lack of motivation. In a second communique the Vienna Institute disclosed that the dolphins proved to be extraordinarily fond of Sell’s liver paste, that they became quickly addicted to it and that the expectation of being rewarded by being fed this particular brand of liver paste could motivate them to perform intellectually strenuous tasks.
A number of subsequent communiques from the Institute concerned themselves with objectively determining the exact limit of the intellectual capacity of the dolphins. These communiques gradually revealed that their intelligence far surpassed that of man. However, on account of their submerged mode of life, the dolphins were ignorant of facts, and thus they had not been able to put their intelligence to good use in the past.
Having learned the language of the dolphins and established communication with them, the staff of the Institute began to teach them first mathematics, next chemistry and physics, and subsequently biology. The dolphins acquired knowledge in all of these fields with
extraordinary rapidity. Because of their lack of manual dexterity the dolphins were not able to perform experiments. In time, however, they began to suggest to the staff experiments in the biological field, and soon thereafter it became apparent that the staff of the Institute might be relegated to performing experiments thought up by the dolphins.
During the first three years of the operation of the Institute all of its publications related to the intellectual capacity of the dolphins. The communiqués issued in the fourth year, five in number, were, however, all in the field of molecular biology. Each one of these communiqués reported a major advance in this field and was issued not in the name of the staff members who had actually performed the experiment, but in the name of the dolphins who had suggested it. (At the time when they were brought into the Institute the dolphins were each designated by a Greek syllable, and they retained these designations for life.)
Each of the next five Nobel Prizes for physiology and medicine was awarded for one or another of these advances. Since it was legally impossible, however, to award the Nobel Prize to a dolphin, all the awards were made to the Institute as a whole. Still, the credit went, of course, to the dolphins, who derived much prestige from these awards, and their prestige was to increase further in the years to come, until it reached almost fabulous proportions.
In the fifth year of its operation, the Institute isolated a mutant form of a strain of commonly occurring algae, which excreted a broad-spectrum antibiotic and was able to fix nitrogen. Because of these two characteristics, these algae could be grown in the Open, in improvised ditches filled with water, and they did not require the addition of any nitrates as fertilizer. The protein extracted from them had excellent nutritive qualities and a very pleasant taste.
The algae, the process of growing them and the process of extracting their protein content, as well as the protein product itself, were patented by the Institute, and when the product was marketed-under the trade name Amruss-the Institute collected royalties. If taken as a protein substitute in adequate quantities, Amruss markedly depresses the fertility of women, but it has no effect on the fertility of men. Amruss seemed to be the answer to the prayer of countries like India. India had a severe immediate problem of food shortage; and she had an equally severe long-term problem, because her population had been increasing at the rate of five million a year.