The Black Cloud

Why shouldn’t there be lots of little beasts in the Cloud?”

“I have a reason for that, but it’ll take quite a while to explain.”

“Well, it looks as if we’re not going to get much sleep tonight, so you’d better carry on.”

“Then let’s start by supposing that the Cloud contains lots of little beasts instead of one big beast. I think you’ll grant me that communication must have developed between the different individuals.”

“Certainly.”

“Then what form will the communication take?”

“You’re supposed to be telling us, Chris.”

“My question was purely rhetorical. I suggest that communication would be impossible by our methods. We communicate acoustically.”

“You mean by talking. That’s certainly your method all right, Chris,” said Ann Halsey.

But the point was lost on Kingsley. He went on:

“Any attempt to use sound would be drowned by the enormous amount of background noise that must exist inside the Cloud. It would be far worse than trying to talk in a roaring gale. I think we can be pretty sure that communication would have to take place electrically.”

“That seems fair enough.”

“Good. Well, the next point is that by our standards the distances between the individuals would be very large, since the Cloud by our standards is enormously large. It would obviously be intolerable to rely on essentially D.C. methods over such distances.”

“D.C. methods? Chris, will you please try to avoid jargon?”

“Direct current.”

“That explains it, I suppose!”

“Oh, the sort of thing we get on the telephone. Roughly speaking, the difference between D.C. communication and A.C. communication is the difference between the telephone and radio.”

Marlowe grinned at Ann Halsey.

“What Chris is trying to say in his inimitable manner is that communication must occur by radiative propagation.”

“If you think that makes it clearer …”

“Of course it’s clear. Stop being obstructive, Ann. Radiative propagation occurs when we emit a light signal or a radio signal. It travels across space through a vacuum at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Even at this speed it would still take about ten minutes for a signal to travel across the Cloud.

“My next point is that the volume of information that can be transmitted radiatively is enormously greater than the amount that we can communicate by ordinary sound. We’ve seen that with our pulsed radio transmitters. So if this Cloud contains separate individuals, the individuals must be able to communicate on a vastly more detailed scale than we can. What we can get across in an hour of talk they might get across in a hundredth of a second.”

“Ah, I begin to see light,” broke in McNeil. “If communication occurs on such a scale then it becomes somewhat doubtful whether we should talk any more of separate individuals!”

“You’re home, John!”

“But I’m not home,” said Parkinson.

“In vulgar parlance,” said McNeil amiably, “what Chris is saying is that individuals in the Cloud, if there are any, must be highly telepathic, so telepathic that it becomes rather meaningless to regard them as being really separate from each other.”

“Then why didn’t he say so in the first place?’ — from Ann Halsey.

“Because like most vulgar parlance, the word “telepathy” doesn’t really mean very much.”

“Well, it certainly means a great deal more to me.”

“And what does it mean to you, Ann?”

“It means conveying one’s thoughts without talking, or of course without writing or winking or anything like that.”

“In other words it means — if it means anything at all — communication by a non-acoustic medium.”

“And that means using radiative propagation,” chipped in Leicester.

“And radiative propagation means the use of alternating currents, not the direct currents and voltages we use in our brains.”

“But I thought we were capable of some degree of telepathy,” suggested Parkinson.

“Rubbish. Our brains simply don’t work the right way for telepathy. Everything is based on D.C. voltages, and radiative transmission is impossible that way.”

“I know this is rather a red herring, but I thought these extra-sensory people had established some rather remarkable correlations,” Parkinson persisted.

“Bloody bad science,” growled Alexandrov. “Correlations obtained after experiments done is bloody bad. Only prediction in science.”

“I don’t follow.”

“What Alexis means is that only predictions really count in science,” explained Weichart. “That’s the way Kingsley downed me an hour or two ago. It’s no good doing a lot of experiments first and then discovering a lot of correlations afterwards, not unless the correlations can be used for making new predictions. Otherwise it’s like betting on a race after it’s been run.”

“Kingsley’s ideas have many very interesting neurological implications,” McNeil remarked. “Communication for us is a matter of extreme difficulty. We ourselves have to make a translation of the electrical activity — essentially D.C. activity — in our brains. To do this, quite a bit of the brain is given over to the control of the lip muscles and of the vocal chords. Even so our translation is very incomplete. We don’t do too badly perhaps in conveying simple ideas, but the conveying of emotions is very difficult. Kingsley’s little beasts could, I suppose, convey emotions too, and that’s another reason why it’s rather meaningless to talk of separate individuals. It’s rather terrifying to realize that everything we’ve been talking about tonight and conveying so inadequately from one to another could be communicated with vastly greater precision and understanding among Kingsley’s little beasts in about a hundredth of a second.”

“I’d like to follow the idea of separate individuals a little further,” said Barnett, turning to Kingsley. “Would you think of each individual in the Cloud as building a radiative transmitter of some sort?”

“Not as building a transmitter. Let me describe how I see biological evolution taking place within the Cloud. At an early stage I think there would be a whole lot of more or less separate disconnected individuals. Then communication would develop, not by a deliberate inorganic building of a means of radiative transmission, but through a slow biological development. The individuals would develop a means of radiative transmission as a biological organ, rather as we have developed a mouth, tongue, lips, and vocal chords. Communication would improve to a degree that we can scarcely contemplate. A thought would no sooner be thought than it would be communicated. An emotion would no sooner be experienced than it would be shared. With this would come a submergence of the individual and an evolution into a coherent whole. The beast, as I visualize it, need not be located in a particular place in the Cloud. Its different parts may be spread through the Cloud, but I regard it as a neurological unity, interlocked by a communication system in which signals are transmitted back and forth at a speed of 186,000 miles a second.”

“We ought to get down to considering those signals more closely. I suppose they’d have to have a longish wave-length. Ordinary light presumably would be useless since the Cloud is opaque to it,” said Leicester.

“My guess is that the signals are radio waves,” went on Kingsley. “There’s a good reason why it should be so. To be really efficient one must have complete phase control in a communication system. This can be done with radio waves, but not, so far as we know, with shorter wave-lengths.”

McNeil was excited.

“Our radio transmissions!’ he exclaimed. “They’d have interfered with the beast’s neurological control.”

“They would if they’d been allowed to.”

“What d’you mean, Chris?”

“Well, the beast hasn’t only to contend with our transmissions, but with the whole welter of cosmic radio waves. From all quarters of the Universe there’d be radio waves interfering with its neurological activity unless it had developed some form of protection.”