Beth said, "As time goes by, they try stronger and stronger methods. Eventually they try to blow it open with a small nuclear device. And still nothing. Finally, nobody has any more ideas. The sphere sits there. Decades go by. The sphere is never opened." She shook her head. "One great frustration for mankind ..."
Norman said to Harry, "Do you really think that'd happen? That we'd never get it open?"
Harry said, "Never is a long time."
"No, sir," Barnes was saying, "given this new development, we'll stay down to the last minute. Weather topside is holding - at least six more hours, yes, sir, from the Metsat reports - well, I have to rely on that judgment. Yes, sir. Hourly; yes, sir."
He hung up, turned to the group. "Okay. We have authorization to stay down six to twelve hours more, as long as the weather holds. Let's try to open that sphere in the time remaining."
"Ted's working on it now," Harry said.
On the video monitor, they saw Ted Fielding slap the polished sphere with his hand and shout, "Open! Open Sesame! Open up, you son of a bitch!"
The sphere did not respond.
"THE ANTHROPOMORPHIC PROBLEM"
"Seriously," Norman said, "I think somebody has to ask the question: should we consider not opening it up?"
"Why?" Barnes said. "Listen, I just got off the phone - "
" - I know," Norman said. "But maybe we should think twice about this." Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tina nodding vigorously. Harry looked skeptical. Beth rubbed her eyes, sleepy.
"Are you afraid, or do you have a substantive argument?" Barnes said.
"I have the feeling," Harry said, "that Norman's about to quote from his own work."
"Well, yes," Norman admitted. "I did put this in my report."
In his report, he had called it "the Anthropomorphic Problem." Basically, the problem was that everybody who had ever thought or written about extraterrestrial life imagined that life as essentially human. Even if the extraterrestrial life didn't look human - if it was a reptile, or a big insect, or an intelligent crystal - it still acted in a human way. "You're talking about the movies," Barnes said.
"I'm talking about research papers, too. Every conception of extraterrestrial life, whether by a movie maker or a university professor, has been basically human - assuming human values, human understanding, human ways of approaching a humanly understandable universe. And generally a human appearance - two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and so on."
"So?"
"So," Norman said, "that's obviously nonsense. For one thing, there's enough variation in human behavior to make understanding just within our own species very troublesome. The differences between, say, Americans and Japanese are very great. Americans and Japanese don't really look at the world the same way at all."
"Yes, yes," Barnes said impatiently. "We all know the Japanese are different - "
" - And when you come to a new life form, the differences may be literally incomprehensible. The values and ethics of this new form of life may be utterly different."
"You mean it may not believe in the sanctity of life, or 'Thou shalt not kill,' " Barnes said, still impatient.
"No," Norman said. "I mean that this creature may not be able to be killed, and so it may have no concept of killing in the first place."
Barnes stopped. "This creature may not be able to be killed?"
Norman nodded. "As someone once said, you can't break the arms of a creature that has no arms."
"It can't be killed? You mean it's immortal?"
"I don't know," Norman said. "That's the point."
"I mean, Jesus, a thing that couldn't be killed," Barnes said. "How would we kill it?" He bit his lip. "I wouldn't like to open that sphere and release a thing that couldn't be killed."
Harry laughed. "No promotions for that one, Hal." Barnes looked at the monitors, showing several views of the polished sphere. Finally he said, "No, that's ridiculous. No living thing is immortal. Am I right, Beth?"
"Actually, no," Beth said. "You could argue that certain living creatures on our own planet are immortal. For example, single-celled organisms like bacteria and yeasts are apparently capable of living indefinitely."
"Yeasts." Barnes snorted. "We're not talking about yeasts."
"And to all intents and purposes a virus could be considered immortal."
"A virus?" Barnes sat down in a chair. He hadn't considered a virus. "But how likely is it, really? Harry?"
"I think," Harry said, "that the possibilities go far beyond what we've mentioned so far. We've only considered threedimensional creatures, of the kind that exist in our threedimensional universe - or, to be more precise, the universe that we perceive as having three dimensions. Some people think our universe has nine or eleven dimensions."
Barnes looked tired.
"Except the other six dimensions are very small, so we don't notice them."
Barnes rubbed his eyes.
"Therefore this creature," Harry continued, "may be multidimensional, so that it literally does not exist - at least not entirely - in our usual three dimensions. To take the simplest case, if it were a four-dimensional creature, we would only see part of it at any time, because most of the creature would exist in the fourth dimension. That would obviously make it difficult to kill. And if it were a five-dimensional creature - "
" - Just a minute. Why haven't any of you mentioned this before?"