No grey-out but a white-out. An instant flash, spreading like lightning through the network. Followed by black-out, and from the animal a cry of pain. The pain was momentary, and he told us so. But the network was now blank, neither greying nor seething, the whole circuit dead.
This was catastrophic. We had no idea what to do. The harmonic was a safe one — our specialist had selected a band of ten — and this band we had used on the rats.
We watched the screen for one hour, two. We tested the crystals, remeasured the harmonic, checked all the instruments. Nothing was wrong. But something was wrong. We returned to our records, and there found what was wrong.
The selected band had been used on the rats, but not this harmonic. (The harmonics that we generate, I should explain, do not exist in nature. They are modulations, calculated mathematically.)
Our specialist had selected from the lower end of the band; these harmonics were the ghosts of ghosts. And the one just used was the lowest, the most remote from its original frequency. With the rats we had started from the top; it had been unnecessary to try so far down the scale.
Needless to say we tried then. We tried twelve rats — normal rats, with normal vision — and blinded each one. Then we tried the other harmonics in the band. No ill effects. Just this one, a freak, we had used on the ape, and had blinded it.
Blinded rats, of course, are destroyed. But we could not destroy an ape; the trained animals are still of use. In this case, after a few days, we simply removed the bandages and put the animal (his name was Anton) on an instructional course. He was in no discomfort but needed eye patches, for the muscles controlling blinking had also been damaged.
And now a very strange incident occurred.
At that time the animals were engaged in a simulated post-nuclear exercise. They were required to enter a maze, perform a number of actions, return by a different route and then report what they had done. Anton was participating in this (for blind animals could be useful after such accidents). He emerged from the maze and reported, and it took his trainer some moments to observe that he had taken off his eye patches. He asked why he had done this and Anton replied that he saw better without.
‘But Anton, you are not able to see.’
‘Yes, I see,’ Anton said.
It seemed that he took off the patches to shower in the morning, and that morning he had found that he could see. He had put the patches back on again because he had been instructed to keep them on. But in the maze he had taken them off.
I was told at once and we rushed to test him. Through instruments we saw that every part of his visual system had regenerated. This happened ten days after the boost.
To understand what happened now I must explain something of our organisation here. We come under the aegis of a Moscow body called the Scientific Directorate, and this Directorate I keep informed of our work.
Every few weeks a member of the Directorate visits me: a security official but a well-informed scientist, a friendly fellow. This man now called me up and asked me to repeat the experiment with the rogue harmonic. He wished to see for himself how the circuit regenerated — the last couple of days of it, that is, for we had only Anton’s account of the timing.
I set up the experiment, my friend arrived, we started up a machine to record the events, and in the 230th hour (after the boost) it began. First the ‘seething’ and then the emerging outline. In four hours we had full function; the same timing, within good limits, as Anton had reported.
My friend took copies of this recording, and he left me some papers I had asked for. These were the latest studies in another field of optics; for in the days when Anton was blinded I had brooded on other possibilities.
The network we had blasted out was a chemical network — enormously complex but one we had been able to follow (at least to clone in part). I wondered now if we could back it up in some way, as a safeguard against other accidents.
Science had long backed up hearts, kidneys, many other systems, by copying the action of the systems. With the visual system our only sure knowledge was how it began, which was electro-optically. Perhaps it could be backed up electrooptically; with fibre optics.
Our experts studied the latest papers on fibre optics. Extra filaments were required, many grafting techniques learned — all this work quite new. But we mastered it, standardised a procedure, and presently moved from bench work to rats.
Here we had first to try to get a signal through the fibre. In the laboratory we had got one — nothing ‘visual’, but a measured change in a bit of brain material. With a real rat, a functioning brain, this would be very different. We stripped the rat’s network, grafted in our own, allowed it to heal and delivered the boost (still a necessity after any intervention).
What followed was a moment of history.
It was something, I should say, almost beyond belief.
On the screen a blank network. Which within minutes began to seethe and then to grey. In fifteen minutes we had a full outline! The brain understood the fibre, had accepted it.
This stunning success — we had looked only for an instrumental blip — held us at the screen for hours. A whole day passed before we dared expose the rat’s eyes and allow it to see. But there was no doubt it did see. It saw not well for we had been unable to tune fibre to a real eye. But it saw! For the first time a blind creature saw — through fibre!
From Moscow, my friend made three urgent visits.
His first was to watch us do the whole thing again. And then again — this time with the rogue harmonic. (The bureaucrats still had our harmonics programme on their agenda!) We did it — and with the expected result. The rogue harmonic ‘blinded’ optical fibre too, although again, as with Anton, only temporarily; as a re-test some days later showed.
This work interested us not at all, but once it was over my friend’s visits became serious. We had found an answer to blindness! A synthetic channel had connected to a brain. To complete the circuit we needed only a synthetic eye, and a framework in which to use it.
The framework was obvious, for it already existed — the familiar spectacle frame. And the eye posed no great problem.
At that time rapid advance was going on with superfast self-focusing lenses, both commercially and militarily (they are used in the nose cones of missiles). We asked for and got whatever we wanted. And very soon had made extraordinary progress. For a start, we found it unnecessary to strip a whole network: it could remain in place, with just a ‘patch’ inserted.
We moved rapidly to apes. (All this data you will be taking with you; here I give the sequence.) We make the incision above the ear and the patches — for stereo vision — auto-graft to a junction. With a protein gel this takes a week to unite.
A patch goes in with extra fibre already attached, and its terminal is set behind the ear for the spectacle arm to make contact. Inside the arm matching filaments lead to the regulator chip for the lenses. The lenses, though cased in glass, consist of thin-film layers, a few microns each. (This last is a later refinement: I will shortly tell you how it came about.)
We now had something of a problem. A scientific advance of great magnitude had been made and the question of publication arose. Nobody doubted that it had to be published, or that a Nobel and other prizes must follow. Just as obviously I could not be the one to take them. But who then could? No respected academic could take credit for work he had not done — which his colleagues knew he had not done!
To this, after a time, my friend thought up an answer.