by Don DeLillo
What she’d completed thus far, since abandoning the idea of a non-fiction book on Logicon, amounted to no more than a thin scattering of pages. Some of these pages even had words on them. A few, yes, a very few had words scribbled and typed here and there, starting from the top. The others, which she considered no less a part of the thin scattering of first-draft material, were lacking in formal content, although clearly numbered and therefore distinguishable from each other. The very page she was on the floor searching for happened to be numbered but otherwise blank and yet distinguishable from the other pages not only by number but in the nature and quality of the words she had not yet set down on this page. To overcome one’s tonic block; to master words; to live without the inner will to stammer. Her own speech had never been hesitant, spasmodic or in any way labored. What satisfaction was there (if any) in the foreknowledge (if any) that one was on the verge of a stammer? Is there a special kind of mind (scientist, fabulist, poet) that believes in the necessity of continual psychic testing, that needs to see confirmed its own logical picture of living hell? Her childhood had been relatively free of stress. She had walked, talked and played without serious complication. “Gigg” (it had been reported to her by those who called themselves her parents) was the first word she spoke. A giddy girl, a thing that whirls. The page she’d been looking for was under some clothes that were under the bed. She studied it, easily perceiving that the certain kind of writing that would eventually fill this page was different in look, in sound, in touch from the writing she would entrust to any of the other blank pages, as indeed these remaining blanks would differ from each other. Of course, from this clear and easy perception it was just a short step to the visionary insight that it was not necessary to fill in the blank pages, to entrust any kind of writing at all to these pages. These pages were already complete. She knew what they would look like with words on them. It was not necessary to think of these words and set them down on these pages. From her knees she studied the room itself. Everywhere she looked in the room were these pages, almost all of them numbered and blank, dispersed over the various surfaces of her strewn clothes. Immense bedraggled dishevelment. She stayed awake to prolong that state of near sleep that represented the most treacherous level of helplessness. It was like spending one’s life stupefied in the worst of ways, permanent hesperian depression, the mind able to comprehend nothing but its own fear, the unlikelihood of its escape from self-awareness. So these pages then, these numbered pages would one day contain a fiction of her making. It would be complete when the pages were complete, hundreds of them, or thousands, blank nearly every one, easy to imagine with certain kinds of words on them. Jean decided she needed air, night air, she needed out of here, if only for the briefest time. She could not open the door, however. The door was apparently locked from the outside.
The first Latin word she’d ever spoken (according to those who claimed to be her teachers) was pupilla, which has the roundabout charm of meaning “little orphan girl” while it refers to the pupil of the eye, a connection based on the fact that when a child looks at her own miniature reflection in another person’s eye, she sees a female figure locked inside concentric rings, a lone doll in a coiled room, a little orphan girl, herself, confined in the pupil of someone else’s eye. Whose eye is this, Jean thought, that I am looking at so closely? What do I expect to find mingled with my own reflection in the center of that frigid iris? She took off her clothes, reclined on the bed and waited for her child-sized lover to open the door and, as he did, to enter the room and the woman in the room in nearly simultaneous strokes of motion.
Softly feeling better about things was in his quarters in his bed in his pajamas, a dynast in the lounging bliss of a culminating vision. What did it matter that divergence from type had long been identified as the inescapable trait of those maladapted to their surroundings? Size, what was size? Pigmentation, what was that in the light of the passionate science of the mind? The antrum was a cave, in effect. In caves, remember, there is no need for special size, for skin color, even for eyesight itself. The unpigmented thrive here. Microscopic mossy life. Degenerate optical apparatus. To be unfit elsewhere is to count oneself among the naturally select in this inverse austral curve. Eek what a break—is that a nose or a hose?
“Lester.”
“I come in?”
“All means.”
“Rob, I’ve been meaning to ask.”
“Find yourself a chair.”
“What did Dent say?”
“Dent, Dent?”
“You went to see old Dent.”
“The submarine,” Softly said.
“You never told me what he said.”
“What did I ask?”
“You asked about the metalogical aspects of the problem.”
“He said arithmetize. I remember now. He said replace every assertion with a number-theoretic statement. He was sitting in a deck chair.”
“Sure, arithmetize,” Bolin said. “Obvious enough. But how does that help me with the machine? In concrete terms, what do I do? How do I wire? What goes where?”
“He said something about the relay system. It sounded vague to me. I wouldn’t worry about it, Les. The important thing is the language, not the machine. I don’t even know why I made that trip. There was a eunuch aboard. Dent had a stone. What’s that on my desk?”
“It’s a bronze something. Mirror. Encased in plaster and burlap with just enough showing. Genuine artifact, my guess.”
“Maurice Wu must have left it. A gift from Maury, I’ll wager. He’s just come down from the slopes. Cover it up, will you? Put that robe over it.”
“The glass isn’t much use anyway, Rob.”
“Cover it up,” Softly said.
Bolin thought it might be interesting to match the logical symbolism of the characters on his typewriter with a highly distinctive metalogical notation—a sort of Nazi typeface (super-Hollywood-gothic) with broad counters and thick slurping serifs. It would set off a strict contrast, command attention, forcefully highlight the existence of logical rigor. At this stage, however, he didn’t know how serious he was about the idea.
For the machine itself he planned to use logically coded values rather than numbers except in the metamathematical sphere, where the need to arithmetize required numbering of the formal expressions (if he could figure out how to do it), the natural number series in this case beginning neither with zero (Peano, Hilbert) nor with one (Dedekind) but, for technical reasons involving logical constants and their negations, with minus-one (Lown, Bolin).
Logicon Project Minus-One.
The machine’s metallic luster delighted Bolin. The coin slot was nearly completed. Lester loved the coin slot. He’d long considered the possibility of using lipstick or paint or crayon to make formal markings on the “head” and “torso.” Abstract ritualistic figures. Protogeometry of some kind. Imagine Rob and Edna when they saw it. Imagine them putting coins in the slot and hearing the thing speak Logicon. Old-fashioned ingenuity, Bolin thought, recalling without apparent reason the faultless professionalism the young woman had shown, the reporter, when he’d made that indelicate request in the midst of their interview; the peerless near hesitation she’d utilized between his request and her reply-in-question-form. (“Is it important to you, seeing it?”) He’d revealed his sex organ to her for the most innocent of reasons. Although he couldn’t identify this reason specifically, he was convinced of its innocence. He’d shown his and asked to see hers. It was what people did. Usually people did this in more socially complex ways. In his momentary innocence he had done it directly. This by most standards made him either a menace or an object of pity. He knew he was neither. What he’d done was in its own way a case of enigmatic tenderness, performed and articulated in the sheen of recent waking, an act made defenseless by this very circumstance, the bewitchment of the intellect by sleep. Revealing his genitals was a form of dreamy speech. This was the thing he’d done, the exchange he’d attempted, but he didn’t kn
ow why any of it had happened. Probably his motive could not be known. His motive most likely would have to be traced to one of those impulses so close to the electrochemical essence of things that microwires in bundles would have to be sunk into the skull and the basis for his action reduced to an investigation of neural events, or oscillating shapes on graph paper. But ritualistic markings, he thought. They were bound to be amused by that. This primitive android control system. This synthetic talking primate. His wife was in the converted barn and he was in the antrum, joined now in Softly’s quarters by Walter Mainwaring with an armful of documents.
“News,” he said.
Softly issued a general call and in moments Edna Lown and Maurice Wu entered the large cubicle. Everyone’s attention was directed toward Mainwaring, who, as he sorted the documents on his lap, working with his customary brisk efficiency, manifesting his usual confidence, looking trim, fit, ready and fresh, was wondering exactly what the ingredients were in that synthetic intensifier Softly had convinced him to take a little while ago, claiming on its behalf (Rob’s actual words) “a tendency to produce insights unattainable by other means” and there was no doubt he was feeling fine at the moment, possibly at a mental peak, although he didn’t know whether this justified the anxiety of having to undergo an initial period of strangely spaced breathing and rambling speech. Softly’s whitest smile. They were eager to hear him begin.
“We have not, repeat, have not yet detected evidence of an actual mohole anywhere in the galaxy or beyond. However, we feel we are making progress. At Cosmic Techniques, my home base in Toronto, we have sylphing teams working around the clock. It’s important for us to find a mohole because analysis of the sylphing compounds may help us confirm the latest findings, which you’ll agree, I think, are rather startling, however tentative. Using information gathered by satellites, balloon-borne instruments and, most of all, by a device of recent concoction called an echolocation quantifier, we believe we have traced the radio signals to their source.”
“Tell us,” Softly said.
“The source of the message is planet Earth.”
“Fascinating,” Lown said, drawing out the word in tentative awe.
“The signals originated from somewhere on this planet. Were absorbed in some component of the mohole totality. Were eventually reflected back this way, where they were picked up by the synthesis telescope at Field Experiment Number One.”
“That is something,” Bolin said.
“Our analysis indicates that the missing matter in the universe is probably contained in moholes, as was theorized by Mohole himself. That the radio signals were definitely artificial rather than some kind of natural emission. That these signals almost surely originated in a solar system x number of light-years from the center of the Milky Way and located in a spiral arm on the galactic plane and furthermore on a planet relatively close to the solar hub of this system, a planet having a sidereal period of revolution about its sun of x days at a mean distance of x point x million miles and an axial rotation period of x hours and x minutes, the precise figures in this bottom folder, and an average radius of x miles and a mass of x times x to the x number of pounds.”
“Marvelous,” Softly said. “That is absolutely marvelous.”
“Sylphing is an entirely new process. Once we penetrate the secrets of moholes, the lawlessness, if you will, of the mohole phenomenon, we think we’ll really make some wonderful progress in understanding the structure and constituent dynamics of the universe.”
“Walter, you’re a marvel. I knew you’d come through.”
“We still have to confirm, Rob.”
“Just as I said back then, Walter’s the last one I need to fit all the elements together. The final one-of-a-kind mind. Maury, speak to us. Your turn. Tell us what you’ve come up with.”
Maurice Wu sat slumped forward, nodding slowly, elbows resting just above his knees, palms joined and fingers pointing down. He took off his glasses, held them up, gazed into the lenses, slipped the glasses back on. Once more he leaned forward, nodding.
“Okay, cranial capacity as well as noncranial parts. This is way down past stunted pebble-tool hominids. We get modern posture, modern brain capacity, modern locomotion. Work at the strata is proceeding very slowly. Everyone is determined to be exceedingly cautious. Analysis of whatever is found has to be painstaking almost beyond belief. Removal of encrusted debris. Reconstruction of shattered bones. Microscopic examination. Okay, so what’s the next level going to yield? How far back will the strata take us? To what sort of living thinking entity? Right now all I can report, aside from whatever I’ve already told you, is that part of a jawbone has been found. I’ve just been notified. It includes a fixed replacement for several teeth. Bridgework, in other words. As yet, nobody knows quite what the material is that was used to make the bridge.”
“Lovely,” Bolin said.
“In my own mind I’ve been convinced for quite some time that what the dig seemed to indicate was in fact the case. In the very distant past on this planet, there was a species of life that resembled modern man both outwardly and otherwise. Intellectually I’ve managed to accept this without reservation. Now, thanks to Walter, we know precisely what these people were capable of doing, technologically. They were capable of beaming radio signals into space. In time we may learn much more about them. You know, while Walter was talking, I was prompted to recall that some time back some experts in reactor engineering were having trouble explaining the details of what they believed to be a spontaneous nuclear reaction in a uranium deposit over a billion years ago. Not everything fit in. There was a chain reaction all right. The unique composition of the uranium told them that. But the conditions that would invite such an event to take place spontaneously were not likely to have been present under the circumstances that prevailed in that time and place. So.”
“There we are,” Softly said.
“I don’t know what it means,” Wu said. “But there we are. Possibly the reaction was intense enough to cause a series of rather sizeable explosions.”
“Why speculate?” Softly said. “We have what we need.”
“Exactly,” Bolin said. “A lovely, lovely model.”
“Good to excellent,” Lown said.
“I mention the uranium business,” Wu said, “only to suggest the possibility that our original evolutionary thrust was followed by a period of degeneration that might have been connected to radiation diseases and such. Then, at a crude toolmaking level, things swung upward once again, taking us to the point we now occupy. The answer we’ve arrived at here is probably the answer we’ve known, at some dim level of awareness, since the beginning. We’ve used a prescribed form, a rite of science it could almost be called, and it’s included more thrills and chills than even the strata probably contains.”
Mainwaring looked up from his notes.
“To summarize,” he said.
They all looked at Mainwaring.
“In the untold past on this planet a group of humans transmitted a radio message into space. We don’t know whether these people were directing their signals toward a particular solar system, toward a huge cluster of nearby stars, toward the center of our galaxy, toward another galaxy; or whether they knew of the existence and nature of the mohole totality and were perfectly aware that their message would return to planet Earth at a specific time in the future—a message, moreover, that was more likely to be preserved and detected, when we consider earthquakes, erosion and continental drift, in the form of a radio transmission than in a time capsule or other kind of sealed device.”
“Applause,” Bolin said.
“Now all we need to finish up the exercise,” Softly said, “is Logicon on a platter, served up by Edna and Les. It’s important we know how to reply to the message, regardless of content either way.”
“We get back only what we ourselves give,” Mainwaring said. “We’ve reconstructed the ARS extant and it turns out to be us.”
Edna felt she could
have done without that last wad of self-important discourse. She and Bolin went into the latter’s cubicle and set immediately to work. On the typewriter stand was the old Royal portable. A sheet of paper stuck up out of the roller. Set on the ground between the legs of the typewriter stand was the short-wave radio. Next to the stand and the radio was the small plastic desk. On the desk was the framed photograph of Lown and Bolin formally posed on a small lawn on some campus somewhere, each half turned toward the camera and half facing the other, hands behind backs, Edna’s left leg extended a bit, Lester’s right leg likewise set forward, a large and not very interesting jug positioned evenly between the standing figures (solely for compositional effect, it was clear), the artificial dignity of the picture enhanced by the fading gray tones and the shopworn frame. Above the radio, the stand, the typewriter, the desk, the photograph, draped across the full length of one partition, was Lester’s antic banner. The narrow bed consisted of canvas stretched on a collapsible frame. The chair lacked one arm. Bedclothes were scattered over most of the desk. Everything, she thought, looking into the dirt between her feet. Everything is here.
AN UNUSUAL SOUVENIR
Billy dialed INFO.
“Speaking,” a male voice said.
“Is this tape I’m talking to?”
“Far from it.”
“Good, I want this person’s location. She’s a visitor. Her name is Venable.”
“Last name first.”
“Venable.”
“Male or female.”
“She.”
“Guest sector twenty-one.”
“What direction is that?”
“Depends, doesn’t it?”
“Depends on where I am, I guess.”
“I would think so,” the voice said.
“Faggot.”
It took him a while to find the area. The doors were not only closed but unmarked. There was no one around, leading him to think it must be night or very early morning. One door, however, had a bolt lock on the outside. He knocked and heard Jean’s voice, far away, a dim mutter of unrest. He unlocked the door and went inside. She was in bed under several layers of clothing, blankets and sheets. The room was littered with typing paper, all of it seemingly blank. Jean looked desperately weary, her face empty of all animating force. Nothing there but features, the shape, the extent, the proportions of distinct parts in a sand of white silence. He stood nearer the door than the bed.
