PLATINUM POHL

by Frederik Pohl

  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 23×31×52, or 600. (= 8x3x25.) The name ‘Abe’ would be represented by the number 56,250, or 21×32×55. (=2x9x3125.) A sentence like ‘John lives.’ would be represented by the product of the following terms: 210×315×58×714×110×1312×179×1922×235×2919×3127 (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 bea
utiful 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.

  Constitution Five

  Old reliable peed-off Shef here. Look, we got your message. I don’t want to discuss it. You’ve got a nerve. You’re in a bad mood, aren’t you? If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. We do the best we can, and that’s not bad, and if we don’t do exactly what you want us to, maybe it’s because we know quite a lot more than you did when you fired us off at that blob of moonshine you call Alpha-Aleph. Well, thanks a lot for nothing.

  On the other hand, thanks a little for what little you did do, which at least worked out to get us where we are, and I don’t mean spatially. So I’m not going to yell at you. I just don’t want to talk to you at all. I’ll let the others talk for themselves.

  Dot Letski speaking. This is important. Pass it on. I have three things to tell you that I do not want you to forget. One: Most problems have grammatical solutions. The problem of transporting people from the Earth to another planet does not get solved by putting pieces of steel together one at a time at random, and happening to find out you’ve built the Constitution by accident. It gets solved by constructing a model (= equation (= grammar)) which describes the necessary circumstances under which the transportation occurs. Once you have the grammatical model, you just put the metal around it and it goes like gangbusters.

  When you have understood this you will be ready for: Two: There is no such thing as causality. What a waste of time it has been, trying to assign “causes” to “events”! You say things like, “Striking a match causes it to burn.” True statement? No, false statement. You find yourself in a whole waffle about whether the “act” of “striking” is “necessary” and/or “sufficient” and you get lost in words. Pragmatically useful grammars are without tenses. In a decent grammar (which this English-language one, of course, is not, but I’ll do the best I can) you can make a statement like “There exists a conjunction of forms of matter (specified) which combine with the release of energy at a certain temperature (specified) (which may be the temperature associated with heat of friction).” Where’s the causality? “Cause” and “effect” are in the same timeless statement. So, Three: There are no such things as empirical laws. When Ski came to understand that, he was able to contain the plasma in our jet indefinitely, not by pushing particles around in brute-force magnetic squeezes but by encouraging them to want to stay together. There are other ways of saying what he does (= “creates an environment in which centripetal exceed centrifugal forces”), but the way I said it is better because it tells something about your characters. Bullies, all of you. Why can’t you be nice to things if you want them to be nice to you? Be sure to pass this on to T’in Fa at Tiantsin, Professor Morris at All Soul’s, and whoever holds the Carnap chair at UCLA.

  Flo’s turn. My mother would have loved my garden. I have drumsticks and daffodils growing side by side in the sludgy sand. They do so please us, and we them: I will probably transmit a full horticultural handbook at a future date, but meanwhile it is shameful to eat a radish. Carrots, on the other hand, enjoy it.

  A statement of William Becklund, deceased. I emerged into the world between feces and urine, learned, grew, ate, worked, moved and died. Alternatively, I emerged from the hydrogen flare, shrank, disgorged, and reentered the womb one misses so. You may approach it from either end, it makes no difference at all which way you look at it.

  Observational datum, Letski. At time t, a Dirac number incommensurable with GMT, the following phenomenon is observed:

  The radio source Centaurus A is identified as a positionally stable single collective object rather than two intersecting gas clouds and is observed to contract radially toward a center. Analysis and observation reveal it to be a Black Hole of which the fine detail is not detectable as yet. One infers all galaxies develop such central vortices, with implications of interest to astronomers and eschatologists. I, Seymour Letski, propose to take a closer look but the others prefer to continue programmed flight first. Harvard-Smithsonian notification service, please copy.

  “Starbow,” a preliminary study for a rendering into English of a poem by fames Barstow:

  Gaggle of goslings but pick of our race

  We waddle through relativistic space.

  Dilated, discounted, despondent we scan:

  But vacant the Sign of the Horse and the
Man.

  Vacant the Sign of the Man and the Horse,

  And now we conjecture the goal of our course.

  Tricked, trapped and cozened, we ruefully run

  After the child of the bachelor sun.

  The trick is revealed and the trap is confessed

  And we are the butts of the dimwitted jest.

  O Gander who made us, O Goose who laid us,

  How lewdly and twistedly you betrayed us!

  We owe you a debt. We won’t forget.

  With fortune and firmness we ll pay you yet.

  Give us some luck and we’ll timely send

  Your pot of gold from the starbow’s end.

  Ann Becklund:

  I think it was Stanley Weinbaum who said that from three facts a truly superior mind should be able to deduce the whole universe (Ski thinks it is possible with a finite number, but considerably larger than that). We are so very far from being truly superior minds by those standards, or even by our own. Yet we have a much larger number of facts to work with than three, or even three thousand, and so we have deduced a good deal.

  This is not as valuable to you as you might have hoped, dear old bastardly Kneffie and all you bastardly others, because one of the things that we have deduced is that we can’t tell you everything, because you wouldn’t understand. We would help you along, some of you, if you were here, and in time you would be able to do what we do easily enough, but not at remote control.