“Well, first of all, are you planning to marry Helen Perdita?”
I started. “I was just thinking that. Yes, I had already decided that if I were offered the position, I would certainly think about proposing to Helen. I would think about it strongly, and probably decide to go ahead. May I ask why you want to know?”
“Dr. Perdita is also on our list of prospective employees,” Iphwin explained. “Second question: when was the last time that you talked by phone with anyone living in the American Reich?”
He might just as well have spoken to me in Chinese; I understood every word, I could have diagrammed the sentence, and I didn’t have the foggiest idea of what it might mean. I also felt a horrible, overpowering fear of asking for the question to be repeated, as if the question itself were so frightening that I could not risk hearing it again.
I sat staring, not sure what to do, until Iphwin said, “I don’t want an answer to that question.”
Instantly, I felt better and peculiarly relieved. “I don’t understand why or how I drew a blank like that.”
Iphwin shrugged; he appeared to care as little as if I had sneezed, or noticed that my shoe was untied. “It happens. Next question, then: what picture have you most recently seen of events in the former United States?”
“Oh, that’s easy, the surrender anniversary events, in 2046. Lots of footage of people in the old uniforms standing around on battlefields, shots of ruins, people saluting the swastika and stripes, the big ceremony at the Surrender Arch in St. Louis, that kind of thing. Funny to realize how long ago that was, though— sixteen years. I can’t think of a thing since then.”
“Good. How many pictures do you remember seeing during the 2050s?”
“Not many, if any.”
“Good. And anything very recently?”
“Nothing.”
“All right, then. Name a few important Americans in your field who are still living.”
Once again I had the terrifying feeling that he had ceased to speak my language, or more likely that I had ceased to understand it; I could understand every word, parse the sentence with ease, and yet it meant nothing to me, less than any cat meowing or wind rustling in a tree. I couldn’t ask him to repeat or clarify, I couldn’t focus on what he had said, and I couldn’t even begin to comprehend what answer I might be able to give.
After a very long time, Iphwin said, “I release you from that question, as well. You don’t have to answer it.”
I slumped back into the chair, breathing hard. I was drenched in sweat. “Why does that happen?” I asked.
“That’s the problem you start working on next Tuesday,” Iphwin said. “And your possible proposal to Helen Peripart is not part of the issue, but perhaps you should start working on that also. Meanwhile, don’t worry and enjoy your weekend.”
“I can’t even really remember what the questions were.”
“When you start studying on Tuesday, we’ll make sure you have a recording system in the room so that you have a way to get back to them. Now let me ask you just one technical question, Lyle. But I want you to try to explain it to me in English, rather than in math, and I know that means you’ll be waving your hands but do the best you can. What does your comprehensibility theorem—the one you published last year—imply for our communication with extraterrestrials?”
I sat and stared at him for a long time, not having any problem understanding the question, but startled by how much of an answer was leaping into my mind. “I had never thought that it might have anything to do with that problem,” I said. “You aren’t telling me—you can’t possibly mean that ConTech truly is having problems communicating with a group of extraterrestrials? They haven’t already been found?”
“Alas, no.” Iphwin chuckled. “And I have to say, I’ve never seen one of my technical experts look more surprised. Although”—the corners of his mouth curled in pure mischief—”if they had been found, and somehow or other ConTech was the organization that had made the contact, the exact thing that we would be doing is to recruit you secretly under some pretext or other, and to get you working on some associated problems, until we could surround you with enough security so that we could safely let you in on it. Because, as you might guess, my technical staff is convinced that the comprehensibility theorem has a lot to do with this problem. All the same, it is really just a hypothetical problem. Now what can you come up with?”
“Well.” I scratched my head. “Am I to assume that you understand the comprehensibility theorem?”
“Include your layman’s-terms explanation in your answer, and stop stalling, Lyle. I really do think you probably have an answer and you’re just reluctant to risk giving it to me.” He was still smiling but it was slightly less friendly than it had been, as if he were not sure whether I was stalling him deliberately or merely inadvertently wasting his time.
I had no idea why I had so suddenly and completely become resistant to answering, but I had. With a shrug, since the impulse made no sense, I plunged into my answer, and said, “Well, yeah, as soon as you point out that it’s a possible application, all of a sudden I see the whole problem of talking to extraterrestrials in terms of the comprehensibility theorem. Isn’t that odd? But it’s simple: if you use the statistics of structural relations—the business about the topologies of priority—Lemma Four Dot Two— then our ability to communicate with them would depend on the similarity of what they were saying to things that we had said to each other in the past, the similarity of form between their language structures and ours, and the similarity of the differences and distinctions that the grammars of the two languages constructed. If their way of talking was a matrix presented by smells, we might not be able to talk to them at all, or only be able to discuss simple statements about the physical universe. If, on the other hand, they make the noun-verb distinction in a linear stream of signs, and spend substantial amounts of their time talking about sex, violence, and prestige, well, then, we’d be home free, because that’s morphologically so much like our own speech.
“The theorem itself deals with what happens when a person who is working with an abstract system of ideas happens to arrive at a solution which is meaningful in the real world but has never been thought of before, and whether that person will be able to see it as anything other than a purely abstract result. It has all sorts of things to do with why and how the quantum physicists achieved what they did and failed in other things, or with the old problem of continental drift, so that in effect when a message is purely an abstraction from an existing system that we think corresponds to the truth, then our comprehension of its significance depends mainly on its similarity to other statements from the same system. Like the example I gave, the way you could analyze Great Expectations so that the lengths of paragraphs might be set up to be expressions of the Pythagorean theorem, and furthermore since the problem of understanding—so common in that novel—can be expressed as orthogonality, there’s a neat harmonization. But readers could read it for generations without getting any such message, and Dickens surely didn’t put it in there for that. The ability to find it doesn’t mean it was put there, nor does it even mean that finding it has to do with comprehending.
“Originally I came up with the theorem to try to get a handle on the possibility that every so often people think of things that are true, but which they don’t understand. It happens in the high end of physics, in music, sometimes in literature. The theoretical guys have been alert to that possibility ever since the Copenhagen Interpretation and all that stuff 140 years ago; the observational and experimental group tends not to think it applies to them, but very often it matters even more in their case because so many of the great ideas come from the great failed experiments. They thought they had one little ad hoc explanation or one little anomaly, and all of a sudden the tiny little idea opens doors and doors and doors as it proliferates through the whole space of ideas.