lead as to the course I should follow.
The next time they appear, I shall try to be more passive in my communications. I shall try not to lead them on to any particular subject. Not only is this good interviewing technique, it is essential in this case if I am to gain their full co-operation.
May 20. After a fruitless wait yesterday, today there was one lone prott. In accordance with my recent decision, 1 adopted a highly passive attitude toward it. I sent out signals of willingness and receptivity, and I waited, watching the prott.
For five or ten minutes there was “silence.” The prott moved about in the viewers with an effect of restlessness, though it might have been any other emotion, of course. Suddenly, with great haste and urgency, it began to send. I had again that image of the cork blowing out of the champagne bottle.
Its sending was remarkably difficult for me to follow. At the end of the first three minutes or so, I was wringing wet with sweat. Its communications were repetitive, urgent, and, I believe, pleasurable. I simply had no terms into which to translate them. They seemed to involve many verbs.
I “listened” passively, trying to preserve my mental equilibrium. My bewilderment increased as the prott continued to send. Finally I had to recognize that I was getting to a point where intellectual frustration would interfere with my telepathy. I ventured to put a question, a simple “Please classify” to the prott.
Its sending slackened and then ceased abruptly. It disappeared.
What did I learn from the interview? That the passive approach is the correct one, and that a prott will send freely (and most confusingly, as far as I am concerned) if it is not harassed with questions or directed to a particular topic. What I didn’t learn was what the prott was sending about.
Whatever it was, I have the impression that it was highly agreeable to the prott.
Later— I have been re-reading the notes I made on my sessions with the prott. What has been the matter with me? I wonder at my blindness. For the topic about which the prott was sending—the pleasurable, repetitive, embarrassing topic, the one about which it could not bear to be questioned, the subject which involved so many verbs—that topic could be nothing other than its sex life.
When put thus baldly, it sounds ridiculous. I make haste to qualify it. We don’t as yet—and what a triumph it is to be able to say “as yet”—know anything about the manner in which prott reproduce themselves. They may, for example, increase by a sort of fission. They may be dioecious, as so much highly organized life is. Or their reproductive cycle may involve the co-operative activity of two, three or even more different sorts of prott.
So far, I have seen only the two sorts, those with the solid nucleus, and those with the intricate network of light. That does not mean there may not be other kinds.
But what I am driving at is this: The topic about which the prott communicated with me today is one which, to the prott, has the same emotional and psychic value that sex has to protoplasmic life.
(Somehow, at this point, I am reminded of a little anecdote of my grandmother’s. She used to say that there are four things in a dog’s life which it is important for it to keep in mind, one for each foot. The things are food, food, sex, and food. She bred dachshunds and she knew. Question: does my coming up with this recollection at this time mean that I suspect the prott’s copulatory activity is also nutritive, like the way in which amoeba conjugate? Their exchange of nuclei seems to have a beneficial effect on their metabolism.) Be that as it may, I now have a thesis to test in my dealings with the prott!
May 21. There were seven prott in the viewer when the signal rang. While I watched, more and more arrived. It was impossible to count them accurately, but I think there must have been at least fifteen.
They started communicating almost immediately. Not wanting to disturb them with directives, I attempted to “listen” passively, but the effect on me was that of being caught in a crowd of people all talking at once. After a few minutes, I was compelled to ask them to send one at a time.
From then on, the sending was entirely orderly.
Orderly, but incomprehensible. So much so that, at the end of some two hours, I was forced to break off the interview.
It is the first time I have ever done such a thing.
Why did I do it? My motives are not entirely clear even to myself. I was trying to receive passively, keeping in mind the theory I had formed about the protts’ communication. (And let me say at this point that I have found nothing to contradict it. Nothing whatever.) Yet, as time passed, my bewilderment increased almost painfully. Out of the mass of chaotic, repetitive material presented to me, I was able to form not one single clear idea.
I would not have believed that a merely intellectual frustration could be so difficult to take.
The communication itself was less difficult than yesterday. I must think.
I have begun to lose weight.
June 12th. I have not made an entry in my diary for a long time. In the interval, I have had thirty-six interviews with prott.
What emerges from these sessions, which are so painful and frustrating to me, so highly enjoyed by the prott?
First, communication with them has become very much easier. It has become, in fact, too easy. I continually find their thoughts intruding on me at times when I cannot welcome them—when I am eating, writing up my notes, or trying to sleep. But the strain of communication is much less and I suppose that does constitute an advance.
Second, out of the welter of material presented to me, I have at last succeeded in forming one fairly clear idea. That is that the main topic of the protts’ communication is a process that could be re presented verbally as— ing the—. I add at once that the blanks do not necessarily represent an obscenity. I have, in fact, no idea what they do represent.
(The phrases that come into my mind in this connection are “kicking the bucket” and “belling the cat.” It may not be without significance that one of these phrases relates to death and the other to danger. Communication with prott is so unsatisfactory that one cannot afford to neglect any intimations that might clarify it. It is possible that— ing the—is something which is potentially dangerous to prott, but that’s only a guess. I could have it all wrong, and I probably do.) At any rate, my future course has become clear. From now on I will attempt, by every mental means at my disposal, to get the prott to specify what—ing the—is. There is no longer any fear of losing their co-operation. Even as I dictate these words to the playback, they are sending more material about—ing the—to me.
June 30. The time has gone very quickly, and yet ea ch individual moment has dragged. I have had fifty-two formal interviews with prott—they appear in crowds ranging from fifteen to forty or so—and countless informal ones. My photographic record shows that more than ninety per cent of those that have appeared have been of the luminous network kind.
In all this communications, what have I learned? It gives me a sort of bitter satisfaction to say: “Nothing at all.”
I am too chagrined to go on.
July 1. I don’t mean that I haven’t explored avenue after avenue. For instance, at one time it appeared that— ing the—had something to do with the intersections of the luminous network in prott of that sort. When I attempted to pursue this idea, I met with a cegative that seemed amused as well as indignant.
They indicated that—ing the—was concerned with the whitish body surfaces, but when I picked up the theme, I got another negative signal. And so on. I must have attacked the problem from fifty different angles, but I had to give up on all of them.—ing the—, it would appear, is electrical, nonelectrical, solitary, dual, triple, communal, constant, never done at all. At one time I thought that it might apply to any pleasurable activity, but the prott signalled that I was all wrong. I broke that session off short.
Outside of their baffling communications on the subject of—ing the—, I have learned almost nothing from the prott.
(How sick I am of them and their inane, vacuous babbling! The phrases of our communication ring in my mind for hours afterward. They haunt me like a clinging odor or stubbornly lingering taste.) During one session, a prott
