Knefhausen was not kept waiting at all. Once this would have been a good sign. Now it could only be bad. But all signs were bad when one knew what was coming.
There were no leather armchairs here. The room was set up as for a meeting of some social club or P.T.A., folding metal chairs arranged in rows. Most of them were occupied, no less than thirty-five people, perhaps more, many of them mere Congressmen or military officers. Several, Knefhausen noticed as they left off their whispering to each other to stare at him, wore bandages, one even a great cast on his upper arm and chest; a Congressman, perhaps, who had had the ill judgment to return to his district in Newark or Cleveland or San Francisco? It was distressing that Knefhausen did not even recognize some of these people! Internally he fumed. But he maintained his benign expression of polite dignity as he was seated in a chair by the door, with of course one of the Marine guards posted just behind him.
The President was standing in a corner, whispering with Murray Amos and someone with three-star general's stars. At length he broke off and made his way to the little cinder-block platform at the front of the room. (Cinder blocks, like steel chairs, could not be made to burn.) He drank from a crystal goblet of water on the table by his chair, looking wizened and weary, and disappointed at the way a boyhood dream had turned out: the Presidency was not what it had seemed to be from the farm outside Muncie, Indiana.
He raised his head and looked out over the room. "All right," he said. "We all know why we're here. The government of the United States has given out information which was untrue. It did so knowingly and wittingly, and we've been caught at it. Now we want you to know the background, so that you will all support us in maintaining this pretense for a time longer, and so Dr. Knefhausen is going to explain the Alpha-Aleph project. Go ahead, Knefhausen."
Even counting the teeth, the man had a certain dignity. Knefhausen rose and gave him a nod of respect before he walked unhurryingly to the little lectern set up for him, off to one side of the President. He opened his papers on the lectern, studied them thoughtfully for a moment with his lips pursed, and said:
"As the President has said, the Alpha-Aleph project is in fact a camouflage. A few of you learned this some months ago, and then you referred to it with other words. 'Fraud.' 'Fake.' Words like that. But if I may say it in French, it is not any of those words, it is a legitimate ruse de guerre. Not the guerre against our political enemies in other nations, or even against those crazy persons in the streets with their Molotov cocktails and bricks. I do not mean those wars, I mean the war against ignorance. For, you see, there were certain sings—certain things we had to know, for the sake of science and progress. Alpha-Aleph was designed to find some of them out for us, and for no other purpose at all. Especially not for the purposes for which we said it was intended, this is true.
"I will tell you the worst parts first," he said. "Number one, there is no such planet as Alpha-Aleph. The Russians were right. Number two, we knew this all along. Even the photographs we produced were fakes, and in the long run the world will find this out and they will know of our ruse de guerre. I can only hope that they will not find out too soon, for if we are lucky and keep the secret for a while, then I hope we will be able to produce good results to justify what we have done. As I believe," he went on, "you gentlemen and ladies who are present have had some suspicions that these things may be true, and so the President has authorized me to tell you all of this, so that you can see the importance.
"Number three," he said, "when the Constitution reaches its destination in the vicinity of the star Alpha Centauri there will be no place for them to land, no way to leave their spacecraft, no sources of raw materials which they might be able to use to make fuel to return, no nothing but the star and empty space. This fact has certain consequences. The Constitution was designed with enough hydrogen fuel reserve for a one-way flight, plus maneuvering reserve. There will not be enough for them to come back, and the source they had hoped to tap, namely the planet Alpha- Aleph, does not exist. So they will not come back. Consequently they will die there. Those are the bad things to which I must admit."
There was a murmurous sigh from the audience. The President was frowning to himself, his upper teeth nibbling his lower lip. Knefhausen waited patiently for the medicine to be swallowed, then went on.
"You ask, then, why we have done this thing? Condemning eight intelligent and courageous young people to their death? The answer is simple: knowledge. To put it with other words, we must have the basic scientific knowledge we need to protect the free world. You are all familiar, I si—I believe, with the known fact that basic scientific advances have been very few these past ten years and more. Much development of applications. But of basic knowledge? Not so much. There have been many peculiar discoveries and strange suggestions. Particles you cannot count within the atom, astronomical peculiarities which one can only catalogue, without comprehension. The grand, simplifying intuitive leaps, where are they? Very few, in the years since Einstein, or better still since Weizsacker. Our science is drowning in quasars and quarks.
"But without these new basic understandings, the new technology must soon stop developing. It will run out of steam, you see. A Newton or a Kant discovers a new island, and then the R&D people can build on it; but unless someone is always discovering new islands, soon they have no place to build."
Knefhausen stepped back and laced his fingers across his chest. "Now I must tell you a story," he said. "It is a true scientific story, not a joke. I know you do not want jokes from me at this time. There was a man named de Bono, a Maltese, who wished to investigate the process of creative thinking. There is not much known about this process, but he had an idea how he could find something out. So he prepared for an experiment a room that was stripped of all furniture, with two doors, one across from the other. You go into one door, you walk through the room, you go out the other. He put at the door that was the entrance some materials for his experiment. Two flat boards. Some ropes. And he got as his subjects some young children. Now he said to the children, 'Now, this is a game we will play. You must go through this room and out the other door, that is all. If you do that, you win. But there is one rule. You must not touch the floor with your feet or your knees or with any part of your body or your clothing. We had here a boy,' he said, 'who was very athletic and walked across on his hands, but he was disqualified. You must not do that. Now go, and whoever does it fastest will win some chocolates.'
"So he took away all of the children but the first one and, one by one, they tried. There were ten or fifteen of them, and each of them did the same thing. Some it took longer to figure out, some figured it out right away, but it always was the same trick. They sat down on the floor, they took the boards and the ropes, and they tied one board to each foot and they walked across the room like on snowshoes. The fastest one thought of the trick right away and was across in a few seconds. The slowest took many minutes. But it was the same trick for all of them, and that was the first part of the experiment.
"Now this Maltese man, de Bono, performed the second part of the experiment. It was exactly like the first, with one difference. He did not give them two boards. He only gave them one board.
"And in the second part every child worked out the same trick, too, but it was of course a different trick. They tied the rope to the end of the single board. Then they stood on the board, and jumped up, tugging the rope to pull the board forward, hopping and tugging, moving a little bit at a time, and every one of them succeeded. But in the first experiment the average time to cross was maybe forty-five seconds. And in the second experiment the average time was maybe twenty seconds. With one board they did their job faster than with two.