he liked, but he could not enter into negotiations, because for negotiation you must have a party in at least some respect equal to the party who initiates it, and in that yard there were only he and his men. A logical contradiction, yes, but he acted exactly according to that contradiction, and scrupulously. The simpler ones among his men did not possess this higher knowledge; the appearance of humanity given by our bodies, our two legs, faces, hands, eyes, that appearance deterred them a little from their duty; thus they had to butcher those bodies, to make them unlike people's. But for him such primitive proceedings were no longer necessary. This sort of explanation is usually received metaphorically, as a kind of fable, but it is completely literal."
About this fragment of his past we never spoke again, nor did we touch on any others. But some time had to pass before I could stop remembering, whenever I saw Rappaport, the scene he had drawn so vividly for me, of the prison yard with bomb craters, the people with faces veined in red and black from blows to the head, and the officer whose body he wanted—fraudulently—to move into. I cannot say to what extent there remained in him a mindfulness of the annihilation he escaped. Rappaport was, in any case, a very sensible man—yet at the same time quite comical. I will incur his displeasure the most when I tell the way he left his room each day (though I did not mean to spy). In the hotel corridor, by the elevator, there was a large mirror. Rappaport, who had a bad stomach and stuffed his pockets with bottles of multicolored pills, when he left each morning always stuck out his tongue in front of the mirror, to see if it was coated. He did this so regularly that I would have thought it extraordinary had he omitted the practice.
At the meetings of the Science Council he was conspicuously bored, but proved particularly allergic to the utterances—seldom made, however, and generally tactful—of Dr. Eugene Albert Nye. If one did not want to listen to Nye, one could watch the mimicking accompaniment to the speech on Rappaport's face. Rappaport would scowl, as if suddenly aware of something vile on his tongue, would pull his nose, scratch behind his ear, squint at the speaker with an expression that seemed to say, "You can't be serious." But when Nye once, finally losing patience, asked him outright if he wished to take issue with some point, Rappaport, innocent and surprised, shook his head several times, held up his hands, and said that he had nothing, absolutely nothing to say.
I dwell on these descriptions to show the reader the central figures of the Project from a less official angle, and also to introduce him to the special atmosphere of a community sealed off from the world. Indeed, it was curious, that creatures as different from each other as Baloyne, Nye, Rappaport, and myself should have come together in a single place, with the mission of "establishing Contact," an ersatz diplomatic corps representing mankind vis-à-vis the Universe.
Although different, we joined to become an organism that studied the "letter from the stars"; we formed a group that had its own customs, tempo, and social patterns, with subtle variations on the official, semiofficial, and private levels. All this, taken together, created the "spirit" of the institution, but more than that, too—what a sociologist would take pleasure in calling a "local subculture." This aura within the Project—and the Project, after all, numbered nearly three thousand people in its most dynamic phase—was distinct and unique, and, in the long run, for me at least, wearisome.
One of the oldest members of the Project, Lee Reinhorn, who as a very young physicist had worked, once upon a time, on the Manhattan Project, told me that the atmospheres of the two undertakings were in no way comparable: the Manhattan Project had sent its people on an exploration typically natural-scientific, physical in character; while
About this fragment of his past we never spoke again, nor did we touch on any others. But some time had to pass before I could stop remembering, whenever I saw Rappaport, the scene he had drawn so vividly for me, of the prison yard with bomb craters, the people with faces veined in red and black from blows to the head, and the officer whose body he wanted—fraudulently—to move into. I cannot say to what extent there remained in him a mindfulness of the annihilation he escaped. Rappaport was, in any case, a very sensible man—yet at the same time quite comical. I will incur his displeasure the most when I tell the way he left his room each day (though I did not mean to spy). In the hotel corridor, by the elevator, there was a large mirror. Rappaport, who had a bad stomach and stuffed his pockets with bottles of multicolored pills, when he left each morning always stuck out his tongue in front of the mirror, to see if it was coated. He did this so regularly that I would have thought it extraordinary had he omitted the practice.
At the meetings of the Science Council he was conspicuously bored, but proved particularly allergic to the utterances—seldom made, however, and generally tactful—of Dr. Eugene Albert Nye. If one did not want to listen to Nye, one could watch the mimicking accompaniment to the speech on Rappaport's face. Rappaport would scowl, as if suddenly aware of something vile on his tongue, would pull his nose, scratch behind his ear, squint at the speaker with an expression that seemed to say, "You can't be serious." But when Nye once, finally losing patience, asked him outright if he wished to take issue with some point, Rappaport, innocent and surprised, shook his head several times, held up his hands, and said that he had nothing, absolutely nothing to say.
I dwell on these descriptions to show the reader the central figures of the Project from a less official angle, and also to introduce him to the special atmosphere of a community sealed off from the world. Indeed, it was curious, that creatures as different from each other as Baloyne, Nye, Rappaport, and myself should have come together in a single place, with the mission of "establishing Contact," an ersatz diplomatic corps representing mankind vis-à-vis the Universe.
Although different, we joined to become an organism that studied the "letter from the stars"; we formed a group that had its own customs, tempo, and social patterns, with subtle variations on the official, semiofficial, and private levels. All this, taken together, created the "spirit" of the institution, but more than that, too—what a sociologist would take pleasure in calling a "local subculture." This aura within the Project—and the Project, after all, numbered nearly three thousand people in its most dynamic phase—was distinct and unique, and, in the long run, for me at least, wearisome.
One of the oldest members of the Project, Lee Reinhorn, who as a very young physicist had worked, once upon a time, on the Manhattan Project, told me that the atmospheres of the two undertakings were in no way comparable: the Manhattan Project had sent its people on an exploration typically natural-scientific, physical in character; while
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