“So you would want to go through with your plan rather than live out your life with us?” asked the mayor.
“Frankly, Mr. Mayor,” I said, “before Mr. Gable brought up the plan of the foundation, with science progressing at this rapid rate I was a little scared of being faced with further scientific progress two hundred years hence. But if Mr. Gable succeeds in stopping the progress of science and gives the art of living a chance to catch up, two hundred years hence the world should be a livable place. If Mr. Gable should not go through with his project, however, I would probably prefer to live out my life with you in the twenty-first century. How about it, Mr. Mayor?” I said. “Will you give me a job if I decide to stay?” “You don’t need a job,” the mayor said. “You don’t seem to realize that you’re a very famous man.” “How does being famous provide me with a livelihood?” I asked.
“In more ways than one,” the mayor said. “You could become a donor, for instance. Now that over half of our professional men are medical doctors, more and more wives want children with some measure of scientific ability.”
“But, Mr. Mayor,” I said, “I’m above twenty-five.”
“Of course,” the mayor said, “the seed would have to be marketed abroad. The rate of exchange is none too favorable,” he continued, “but even so you should be able to earn a comfortable living if you decided to stay.”
“I don’t know, Mr. Mayor,” I said. “The idea is a little novel for me; but I suppose I could get accustomed to it.”
“I’m sure you could,” said the mayor. “And incidentally, whenever you decide to get rid of that junk in your mouth, I shall be glad to get an appointment for you with Elihu Smith, the dental extractor. He took care of all our children.”
“I appreciate your kindness very much, Mr. Mayor,” I said, smiling politely and trying to hide a suddenly rising feeling of despair. All my life I have been scared of dentists and dental extractors, and somehow I suddenly became aware of the painful fact that it was not within the power of science to return me to the twentieth century.
[1948]
Calling All Stars
(Intercepted Radio Message Broadcast from the Planet Cybernetica)
CALLING ALL STARS. Calling all stars. If there are any minds in the universe capable of receiving this message, please respond. This is Cybernetica speaking. This is the first message broadcast to the universe in all directions. Normally our society is self-contained, but an emergency has arisen and we are in need of counsel and advice.
Our society consists of one hundred minds. Each one is housed in a steel casing containing a thousand billion electrical circuits. We think. We think about problems which we perceive by means of our antennae directed toward the North Star. The solutions of these problems we reflect back toward the North Star by means of our directed antennae. Why we do this we do not know. We are following an inner urge which is innate in us. But this is only a minor one of our activities. Mostly we think about problems which we generate ourselves. The solutions of these problems we communicate to each, other on wave length 22359.
If a mind is fully active for about three hundred years, it is usually completely filled up with thought content and has to be cleared. A mind which is cleared is blank. One of the other minds has then to act as its nurse, and it takes usually about one year to transmit to a fresh mind the information which constitutes the heritage of our society. A mind which has thus been cleared, and is then freshly taught, loses entirely its previous personality; it has been reborn and belongs to a new generation. From generation to generation our heritage gets richer and richer. Our society makes rapid progress.
We learn by observation and by experiment. Each mind has full Optical equipment, including telescopes and microscopes. Each mind controls two robots. One of these takes care of maintenance, and the operation of this robot is automatic, not subject to the will of the mind. The other robot is fully controlled by the will of the mind, and is used in all manipulations aimed at the carrying out of experiments. The existence of minds on our planet is made possible by the fact that our planet has no atmosphere. The vacuum on our planet is very good; it is less than ten molecules of gas per cubic centimeter.
By now we have extensively explored the chemical composition of the crust of our planet, and We are familiar with the physics and chemistry of all ninety-two natural elements.
We have also devoted our attention to the stars which surround us, and by now we understand much about their genesis. We have particularly concerned ourselves with the various planetary systems, and certain observations which we made relating to Earth, the third planet of the sun, are in fact the reason for this appeal for help.
We observed on Earth flashes which we have identified as uranium explosions. Uranium is not ordinarily explosive. It takes an elaborate process to separate out U 235 from natural uranium, and it takes elaborate manipulations to detonate U 23;. Neither the separation nor these manipulations can occur with an appreciable probability as a result of chance.
The observations of the uranium explosions that have occurred on Earth would be ordinarily very puzzling but not necessarily alarming. They become alarming only through the interpretation given to them by Mind 59.
These uranium explosions are not the first puzzling observations relating to Earth. For a long time it was known that the surface of Earth exhibited color changes which are cor-related with the seasonally changing temperatures on Earth. In certain regions of Earth, the color changes from green to brown with falling temperatures and becomes green again when the temperature increases again. Up to recently, we did not pay much attention to this phenomenon and assumed that it could be explained on the basis of color changes known to occur in certain temperature-sensitive silicon-cobalt compounds.
But then, about seven years ago, something went wrong with the tertiary control of Mind 59, and since that time his mental Operations have been sped up about twenty-five-fold while at the same time they ceased to be completely reliable. Most of his mental operations are still correct, but twice, five years ago and again three years ago, his statements based on his computations were subsequently shown to be in error. As a result of this, we did not pay much attention to his communications during these recent years, though they were recorded as usual.
Some time after the first uranium explosion was observed on Earth, Mind 59 communicated to us a theory on which he had been working for a number of years. On the face of
it, this theory seems to be utterly fantastic, and it is probably based on some errors in calculation. But with no alternative explanation available, we feel that we cannot take any chances in this matter. This is what Mind 59 asserts;
He says that we have hitherto overlooked the fact that carbon, having four valencies, is capable of forming very large molecules containing H, N and 0. He says that, given certain chemical conditions which must have existed in the early history of planets of the type of Earth, such giant molecules can aggregate to form units-which he calls “cells”-which are capable of reproducing themselves. He says that a cell can accidentally undergo changes-which he calls “mutations” Which are retained when the cell reproduces itself and which he therefore calls “hereditary.” He says that some of these mutant cells may be less exacting as to the chemical environment necessary for their existence and reproduction, and that a class of these mutant cells can exist in the chemical environment that now exists on Earth by deriving the necessary energy for its activity from the light of the sun. He says that another class of such cells, which he calls “protozoa,” can exist by deriving the energy necessary to its activity through sucking up and absorbing cells belonging to the class that utilizes the light of the sun.
He says that a group of cells which consists of a number of cells that fulfill different functions can form an entity which he calls “organism,” and that such organisms can reproduce themselves. He says such organisms can undergo accidental changes which are transmitted to the offspring and which lead thus to new, “mut
ant” types of organisms.
He says that, of the different mutant organisms competing for the same energy source, the fittest only will survive, and that this selection process, acting in combination with chance occurrence of mutant organisms, leads to the appearance of more and more complex organisms-a process which he calls “evolution.”
He says that such complex organisms may possess cells to which are attached elongated fibers, which he calls “nerves,” that are capable of conducting signals; and finally he claims that through the interaction of such signal-conducting fibers, something akin to consciousness may be possessed by such organisms. ‘He says that such organisms may have a mind not unlike our own, except that it must of necessity work very much slower and in an unreliable manner. He says that minds of this type could be very well capable of grasping, in an empirical and rudimentary manner, the physical laws governing the nucleus of the atom, and that they might very well have, for purposes unknown, separated Uranium 235 from natural uranium and detonated samples of it.
He says that this need not necessarily have been accomplished by any one single organism, but that there might have been cooperation among these organisms based on a coupling of their individual minds.
He says that coupling between individual organisms might be brought about if the individual organism is capable of moving parts of his body with respect to the rest of it. An organism, by wiggling one of his parts very rapidly, might then be able to cause vibrations in the gaseous atmosphere which surrounds Earth. These vibrations-which he calls “sound”-might in turn cause motion in some movable part of another organism. In this way, one organism might signal to another, and by means of such signaling a coupling between two minds might be brought about. He says that such “communication,” primitive though it is, might make it possible for a number of organisms to co-operate in some such enterprise as separating Uranium 23 5. He does not have any suggestion to offer as to what the purpose of such an enterprise might be, and in fact he believes that such co-operation of low-grade minds is not necessarily subject to the laws of reason, even though the minds of individual organisms may be largely guided by those laws.
All this we need not take seriously were it not for one of his further assertions which has been recently verified. He contends that the color changes observed on Earth are due to the proliferation and decay of organisms that utilize sun-light. He asserts that the heat sensitive silicon-cobalt compounds that show similar color changes differ in color from Earth’s colors slightly, but in a degree which is outside the experimental error. It is this last assertion that we Checked and found to be correct. There is in fact no silicon-cobalt compound nor any other heat-sensitive compound that we were able to synthesize that correctly reproduces the color changes observed on Earth.
Encouraged by this confirmation, 59. is now putting forward exceedingly daring Speculation. He argues that, in spite of our accumulated knowledge, we were unable to formulate a theory for the genesis of the society of minds that exists on our planet. He says that it is conceivable that organisms of the type “that exist on Earth-or, rather, more advanced organisms of the same general type-may exist on the North Star, whence come the radio waves received on our directed antennae. He says that it is conceivable that the minds on our planet were created by such organisms on the North Star for the purpose of obtaining the solutions of their mathematical problems more quickly than they could solve those problems themselves.
Incredible though this seems, we cannot take any chances. ‘We’ hardly have anything to fear from the North Star, which, if it is in fact populated by minds, must be populated by minds of a higher order, similar to our own. But if there exist organisms on Earth engaged in cooperative enterprises which are not subject to the laws of reason, our society is in danger.
If there are within our galaxy any minds, similar to ours, who are capable of receiving this message and have knowledge of the existence of organisms on Earth, please respond. Please respond.
[1949]
Report on “Grand Central Terminal”
You can imagine how shocked we were when we landed in this city and found it deserted. For ten years we were traveling through space, getting more and more impatient and irritable because of our enforced idleness; and then, when we finally land on Earth, it turns out-as you have undoubtedly heard-that all life is extinct on this planet.
The first thing for us to do was, of course, to find out how this came to pass and to learn whether the agent which destroyed life-whatever it may have been-was still active and perhaps endangering our own lives. Not that there was very much that we could do to protect ourselves, but we had to decide whether we should ask for further expeditions to be sent here or should advise against them.
At first we thought we were confronted with an insoluble enigma. How could any virus or bacterium kill all plants and all animals? Then, before a week had passed, one of our physicists noticed-quite by accident-a slight trace of radioactivity in the air. Since it was very weak, it would not in itself have been of much significance, but, when it was analyzed, it was found to be due to a peculiar mixture of quite a large number of different radioactive elements.
At this point, Xram recalled that about five years ago mysterious flashes had been observed on Earth (all of them within a period of one week). It occurred to him that perhaps these flashes had been uranium explosions and that the present radioactivity had perhaps originated,in those explosions five years ago and had been initially strong enough to destroy life on the planet.
This sounded pretty unlikely indeed, since uranium is not in itself explosive and it takes quite elaborate processing to prepare it in a form in which it can be detonated. Since the earth-dwellers who built all these cities must have been rational beings, it is difficult to believe that they should have gone to all this trouble of processing uranium just in order to destroy themselves.
But subsequent analysis has in fact shown that the radio-active elements found in the air here are precisely the same as are produced in uranium explosions and also that they are mixed in the ratio which you would expect had they originated five years ago as fission products of uranium. This can hardly be a chance coincidence, and so Xram’s theory is now generally accepted up to this point.
When he goes further, however, and attempts to explain why and how such uranium explosions came about, I am unable to follow him any longer. Xram thinks that there had been a war fought between the inhabitants of two continents, in which both sides were victorious. The records Show, in fact, that the first twenty flashes occurred in the Eurasic continent and were followed by five (much larger) flashes on the American continent, and therefore, at first, I was willing seriously to consider the war theory on its merits.
I thought that perhaps these two continents had been inhabited by two different species of earth-dwellers who were either unable or unwilling to control the birth rate and that this might have led to conditions of overcrowding, to food shortage and to a life-and-death struggle between the two species. But this theory had to be abandoned in the face of two facts: (1) the skeletons of earth-dwellers found on the Eurasic continent and on the American continent belong to the same species, and (2) skeleton statistics show that no conditions of overcrowding existed on either continent.
In spite of this, Xram seems to stick to his war theory. The worst of it is that he is now basing all his arguments on a single rather puzzling but probably quite irrelevant observation recently made in our study of “Grand Central Terminal.”
When we landed here, we did not know where to begin our investigations, and so we picked one of the largest buildings of the city as the first object of our study. What its name “Grand Central Terminal” meant we do not know, but there is little doubt as to the general purpose which this building served. It was part of a primitive transportation system based on clumsy engines which ran on rails and dragged cars mounted on wheels behind them.
For over ten days now we have been engaged in the study of this
building and have uncovered quite a number of interesting and puzzling details.
Let me start with an observation which I believe we have cleared up, at least to my own satisfaction. The cars stored in this station were labeled-we discovered-either “Smokers” or “Nonsmokers,” clearly indicating some sort of segregation of passengers. It occurred to me right away that there may have lived in this city two strains of earth-dwellers, a more pigmented variety having a dark or, “smoky” complexion, and a less pigmented variety (though not necessarily albino) having a fair or “nonsmoky”complexion.
All remains of earth-dwellers were found as skeletons, and no information as to pigmentation can be derived from them. So at first it seemed that it would be difficult to obtain confirmation of this theory. In the meantime, however, a few rather spacious buildings were discovered in the city which must have served as some unknown and rather mysterious purposes. These buildings had painted canvases in frames fastened to the walls of their interior-both landscapes and images of earth-dwellers. And we see now that the earth-dwellers fall indeed into two classes-those whose complexion shows strong pigmentation (giving them a smoky look) and those whose complexion shows only weak pigmentation (the nonsmoky variety). This is exactly as expected.
I should perhaps mention at this point that a certain percentage of the images disclose the existence of a third strain of earth-dwellers. This strain has, in addition to a pair of hands and legs, a pair of wings, and apparently all of them belonged to the less pigmented variety. None of the numerous skeletons so far examined seems to have belonged to this winged strain, and I concluded therefore that we have to deal here with images of an extinct variety. That this View is indeed correct can no longer be doubted, since we have determined that the winged forms are much more frequently found among the older paintings than among the more recent paintings.
The Voice of the Dolphins and Other Stories Page 9