Brad showed the Senator to a smaller projection room. Most of the scientists and personnel dispersed, satisfied that the situation was coming under control. Afra appeared in blouse and skirt, making even plain clothing look elegant. Ivo tagged along, forgotten for the moment.
“This is where we set it up,” Brad explained tersely. “It amounts to a computer output, with the main signal processed at the receiver. There are electronic safeguards to guarantee that none of the effects penetrate beyond this room. This device is dangerous.”
“A program,” Borland said musingly. “A mousetrap in a harem. But why make up a show like that, instead of simply lobbing a detonator into the sun?”
“Evidently the originator isn’t against all life,” Brad said. “This is selective. It only hits the space-traveling, macroscope-building species like ourselves. The snoopers. So long as we keep our development below a certain level, we’re safe.”
“My sentiments too. That the kind of safety you care for?”
“No.”
“Let’s run it through again. I put out a theory, just to show you how it could be, but I’m not putting my money on it yet. GIGO, you know. Garbage In, Garbage Out. Maybe my notion is the right one, but let’s eliminate the others first. Like that song: ‘Oh why don’t I work like other men do? How the hell can I work when the skies are so blue? Hallelujah, I’m a bum!’ Feed that to a minister and he’ll tell you it’s profane. Should be ‘how the heck,’ the church-approved euphemism. Try it on a professor and he’ll tell you it’s agrammaticaclass="underline" should be ‘as other men do.’ But a worker will tell you the whole thing’s been censored. Should be ‘how the hell can I work when there’s no work to do!’ Us lowbrows get to the root, sometimes. Not always. You figure they’re afraid of the competition from some smart-aleck new species?”
“Fifteen thousand years late? And if we had a light-speed drive, which we never will, it would still take us another fifteen millennia to reach them. We can’t even reply to their ‘message’ sooner than that. So it’s really a delay of thirty thousand years. And I don’t see how they could be sure we’d be ready to receive or reply in that time.”
“Could be a long-term broadcast. For all we know, it’s been going on a million years,” Borland said. “Just waiting for us to catch up. Maybe time is slower for them? Like fifteen thousand years being a week or so, their way?”
“Not when the broadcast is on our time scheme. We haven’t had to adjust to it at all. If they lived that slowly, we’d have a cycle running a thousand years, instead of a few minutes.”
“Maybe. You figure they’re crazy with hate for any intelligent race, any time?”
“Xenophobia? It’s possible. But again, that time-delay makes it doubtful. How can you hate something that won’t exist for tens of millennia?”
“An alien might. His mind — if he has one — might work in a different way than mine.”
“Still, there are conceded to be certain criteria for intelligence. It isn’t reasonable—”
“Stop being reasonable. That’s a mistake. Try being philosophical.”
Brad looked at him. “What philosophy do you have in mind, Senator?”
“I mean philosophy in its practical sense, of course. You can be reasonable as hell and still be a damned fool, and that’s your problem. You figure your Scientific Method is the best technique you have for working things out, right? I tell you no.”
“Observe the facts, set up a hypothesis that accounts for them all, use it to predict other facts, check them out, and revise or scrap the original hypothesis if the new evidence doesn’t fit properly. I find it workable. Do Aristotle, Kant or Marx have a better overall system?”
“Yes. The primary concern of philosophy is not truth. It is meaning. The destroyer is not a truth-crisis, it is a meaning-crisis. You don’t begin with assumptions and piece them together according to the rules of mathematics; you question their implications, and you question your questions, until nothing at all is certain. Then, maybe, you are getting close to meaning.”
Brad frowned. “That make sense to you two?”
“No,” Afra said.
“Yes,” Ivo said.
“It doesn’t have to make sense to you, so long as it opens your mind. This isn’t any game of chess we’re playing; we don’t even know the rules. All we know for sure is that we’re losing — and maybe we’d better start by questioning that. So this thing wipes out intelligence. Is that bad?”
“Cosmologically speaking, perhaps not,” Brad said. “But the local effect is uncomfortable. It would be easier to live with it if it erased our least intelligent, rather than—”
Borland frowned. “You’re talking about IQ type brains? ‘Intelligence Quotient defined as Mental Age divided by Chronological Age times 100’?”
“We think so. Of course we can’t be certain that a numerical IQ score reflects anything more than the subject’s ability to score on IQ tests, so we may be misinterpreting the nature of the destroyer’s thrust. A numerical score omits what may be the more important factors of personality, originality and character, and even when detail scores are identical—”
“It is no sure sign that the capabilities or performance of the people are identical,” Borland finished. “I know the book, and I am aware of the shortcomings of the system. I remember the flap fifteen or twenty years ago about ‘creativity,’ and I remember the vogue for joining high-IQ clubs. When I want a good man, I stay well clear of the self-professed egghead. I can tell just by looking at faces who’s a sucker for the club syndrome.”
Borland peered at faces. He pointed a gnarled finger at Afra. “You!”
She jumped guiltily. “You belong, right?” he said. Without waiting for her startled nod of agreement he moved on. “You — no,” he said to Brad. “That big Russky who just left — no.” He looked at Ivo. “They wouldn’t let you in.” He returned to Brad. “But IQ is the only practical guide we have to the generalized potential of large numbers of people, so we have to use it until we have something better. Let’s just define it as the ability to learn, and say that a person with IQ one twenty is probably smarter overall than his brother with IQ one hundred. It’s only a convenience so we can get down to the important stuff. OK?”
Brad laughed. “Oll Korrect, Senator. Apply your philosophy.”
“Now you tell me this signal is nonlinguistic, so anybody can follow it, but it has a cutoff point. You have to be pretty smart, by one definition or another, for it to hit you. Does it hit the smarty sooner than the marginal one, or is it like the macrons: you get it or you don’t?”
“It seems to hit the brighter minds sooner. Intelligence is such an elusive quality that we can’t be sure, but—”
“Right. So let’s run this through in some kind of order. You have an IQ of two fifteen—”
“What?” Afra demanded, shocked.
“That isn’t—”
“I know. I know, I know,” Borland said. “Figures don’t mean anything, but if they did they still wouldn’t apply to you, because you’re smarter than the Joe who tries to test you. But remember we’re talking convenience, not fact. No, I haven’t seen your data-sheet; I do my own interpolation. If the figures did register for you, that’s about the way it would read, right?”
Brad did not deny it, and Afra did not look at him. Ivo knew what she was thinking. She had supposed he might be 175 or 180, still somewhere within range of her own score. Scores would be very important to her. Suddenly she knew he was as far above her as she was above the average person — and the average, to her, was almost unbearably dull.