“There is one other. And that is if it involved some basically innocuous substance that began developing psychotropic properties the moment it started distributing itself in the blood or tissue. In the liver, for instance. To expel this substance the liver might convert it into a toxic agent. The result would be an interesting biochemical trap, though a completely hypothetical one, since nothing like that has ever been known to happen and I doubt whether it ever could.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because pharmacology has no record of such a toxin, of such a ‘Trojan horse.’ And if something has never been known to happen, the chances are slim that it ever will.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is
I was being impolite, but the man was beginning to get on my nerves. Even so, he didn’t seem to take offense.
“No, that’s not all. The effect could be the result of something else.”
“A combination of different substances? Of different toxins?”
“Yes.”
“But that would definitely make it a case of premeditated murder, wouldn’t it?”
The answer came unexpectedly from Saussure.
“A girl from Lombardy was working as a housemaid for a certain Parisian lawyer living at 48 Rue St-Pierre, on the third floor. One day her sister came to visit her but forgot the name of the street, confusing it with St-Michel. When she came to 48 Boulevard St-Michel, she went upstairs, found a doctor’s nameplate, rang the doorbell, and asked for her sister, Maria Duval. By sheer coincidence it turned out that a woman with the exact same name— Maria Duval—was working for another doctor, on another street, but was in fact somebody else entirely. Now in trying to determine the a priori probability of such a coincidence, we find it impossible to offer a rational, that is to say, mathematically valid explanation. The example may appear trivial, but, believe me, it opens up an endless void. The only model for the theory of probability is Gibbs’s world of recurrent events. When it comes to unique and statistically unclassifiable events, the theory of probability is inapplicable.”
“There are no such things as unique events,” said Mayer, who all this time had been standing there in amusement, grinning wryly.
“Of course there are,” countered Saussure.
“At least not as a set.”
“You happen to be a unique set of events yourself. Everyone is.”
“Distributively or collectively speaking?”
Just when it looked as if we were in for a duel of abstractions, Lapidus placed a hand on each man’s knee and said:
“Gentlemen!”
Both men smiled. Mayer went on smirking with tongue in cheek while Saussure tried to pick up where he had left off.
“One can easily run a frequency analysis on the name Duval or the residences of Parisian doctors. But what’s the ratio between confusing Rue St-Pierre with Boulevard St-Michel, and the frequency of these names as street names throughout France? And what numerical value do you assign to a situation in which the woman finds a house with an occupant named Duval but on the fourth, rather than the third floor? In short, the set of possibilities is limitless.”
“But not infinite,” interjected Mayer.
“I can prove it’s infinite in both the classical and the transfinite sense.”
“Excuse me,” I interrupted, wishing to pick up the thread. “Dr. Saussure, I’m sure your story had a moral to it. What exactly was the moral?”
Mayer gave me a sympathetic glance and strode out onto the patio. Saussure seemed somewhat startled by my lack of perspicacity.
“Have you been out in the garden behind the summerhouse, out where the strawberry patch is?”
“Why, yes.”
“Did you happen to notice the round wooden table standing there, the one trimmed with copper nails?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think it would be possible to take an eyedropper and squeeze out as many drops as there are nails so that each drop hits a nail head?”
“Well… if a person were to take careful aim, why not?”
“But not if a person just started firing away at random?”
“Then obviously not.”
“But five minutes of a steady downpour and each nail would be
“You mean to say…” I was beginning to see his point.
“Yes, yes! My position is an extreme one: there’s no such thing as a mysterious event. It all depends on the magnitude of the set. The greater the set, the greater the chance of improbable events occurring within it.”
“Then the victims do not really form a set…?”
“The victims were the result of a random causality. Out of that realm of infinite possibilities I mentioned earlier, you chose a certain fraction of cases that exhibited a multifactorial similarity. You then treated these as an entire set, and that’s why they seem mysterious.”
“So you would agree with Mr. Lapidus that we should investigate the abortive cases?”
“No. For the simple reason that they would be impossible to find. The class of soldiers stationed at the front includes the subclass of both killed and wounded. While these two groups can be differentiated easily, you’ll never be able to differentiate those soldiers who came within an inch of being hit from those who missed being hit by a kilometer. That’s why you’ll never find out anything except by sheer accident. An adversary who relies on a strategy of chance can only be defeated by the same strategy.”
“Are you at it again, Dr. Saussure?” came a voice from behind us. It was Barth, accompanied by a lean, grizzly-haired man whose name I failed to catch when we were introduced. Barth treated Saussure not as a member of his team but more as a curiosity. I later found out that until a year ago Saussure had been working for Futuribles before joining up with the French CETI investigating the possibility of extraterrestrial civilizations, but that he had always been something of a drifter. I asked him whether he believed such civilizations existed.
“That’s not so simple,” he said, rising to his feet. “Other civilizations exist and at the same time do not exist.”
“Meaning?”
“They do not exist as projections of our own concept of civilization, from which it follows that man is incapable of defining what makes these civilizations be civilizations.”
“Perhaps,” I conceded. “Still, it must be possible to define our place in the cosmos, don’t you think? Either we’re nothing but a drab mediocrity, or we’re an exception, and a glaring one at that.”
Our listeners broke out laughing, and I was surprised to learn that it was precisely this line of reasoning that had persuaded Saussure to quit the CETI. At the moment he was the only one not laughing; he just stood there, fingering his calculator as if it were a pendant. After luring him away from the others and maneuvering him over to the table, I offered him a glass of wine, poured myself one, and, while drinking to his version of civilization, asked him to share his views with me.
This was a shrewd tactic, one I’d learned from Fitzpatrick: affecting an air of seriousness bordering on parody. Saussure began by explaining that the progress of human knowledge was a gradual renunciation of the
