Fred Hoyle - The Black Cloud

“Impossible is too strong,” insisted Kingsley. “And I’m sure that Weichart couldn’t really defend his use of the word. What we’re faced with is a choice between two improbabilities — I said that my hypothesis seemed improbable when I first trotted it out. Moreover I agree with what Alexis said earlier on, that the only way to test a hypothesis is by its predictions. It’s about three-quarters of an hour since Harry Leicester did his last transmission. I’m going to suggest that he goes right now and does another ten-centimetre transmission.”

Leicester groaned. “Not again!”

“I predict,” went on Kingsley, “that my pattern A will be repeated. What I’d like to know is what Weichart predicts.”

Weichart didn’t quite like the turn of the argument, and he attempted to hedge. Marlowe laughed.

“He’s pinching you, Dave! You’ve got to stand up and take it. If you’re right about it being coincidence before, you’ve got to agree that Kingsley’s present prediction is very unlikely to be right.”

“Of course it’s unlikely, but it might happen that way all the same.”

“Come off it, Dave! What do you predict? Where d’you put your money?”

And Weichart was forced to admit that he put his money on Kingsley’s prediction being wrong.

“All right. Let’s go and see,” said Leicester.

While the company were filing out, Ann Halsey said to Parkinson:

“Will you help me to make more coffee, Mr Parkinson? They’ll be wanting some when they get back.”

As they busied themselves, she went on:

“Did you ever hear such a lot of talk? I used to think that scientists were of the strong silent type, but never did I hear such a gibble-gabble. What is it that Omar Khayyám says about the doctors and saints?”

“I believe it goes something like this,” answered Parkinson:

“Myself when young did eagerly frequent

Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument

About it and about, but evermore

Came out by the same door as in I went.”

“It isn’t so much the volume of talk that surprises me,” he laughed. “We get plenty of that in politics. It’s the number of mistakes they’ve made, how often things have turned out differently to what they’ve expected.”

When the party reassembled it was obvious at a glance how things had gone. Marlowe took a cup of coffee from Parkinson.

“Thanks. Well, that’s that. Chris was right and Dave was wrong. Now I suppose we must get down to trying to decide what it means.”

“Your move, Chris,” said Leicester.

“Let’s suppose then that my hypothesis is right, that our own transmissions are producing a marked effect on the atmospheric ionization.”

Ann Halsey handed Kingsley a mug of coffee.

“I’d be a lot happier if I knew what ionization meant. Here, drink this.”

“Oh, it means that the outer parts of the atoms are stripped away from the inner parts.”

“And how does this happen?”

“It can happen in many ways, by an electrical discharge, as in a flash of lightning, or in a neon tube — the sort of strip lighting we’ve got here. The gas in these tubes is being partially ionized.”

“I suppose energy is the real difficulty? That your transmissions have far too little power to produce this rise of ionization?’ said McNeil.

“That’s right,” answered Marlowe. “It’s completely impossible that our transmissions should be the primary cause of the fluctuations in the atmosphere. My God, they’d need a fantastic amount of power.”

“Then how can Kingsley’s hypothesis be right?”

“Our transmissions are not the primary cause, as Geoff says. That’s wholly impossible. I agree with Weichart there. My hypothesis is that our transmissions are acting as a trigger, whereby some very large source of power is released.”

“And where, Chris, do you suppose this source of power is to be located?’ asked Marlowe.

“In the Cloud, of course.”

“But surely it’s quite fantastic to imagine that we can cause the Cloud to react in such a fashion, and to do it with such reproducibility? You’d have to suppose that the Cloud was equipped with a sort of feedback mechanism,” argued Leicester.

“On the basis of my hypothesis that’s certainly a correct inference.”

“But don’t you see, Kingsley, that it’s utterly mad?’ Weichart exclaimed.

Kingsley looked at his watch.

“It’s almost time to go and try again, if anyone wants to. Does anyone want to?”

“In heaven’s name, no!’said Leicester.

“Either we go or we stay. And if we stay it means that we accept Kingsley’s hypothesis. Well, boys, do we go or do we stay?’ remarked Marlowe.

“We stay,” said Barnett. “And we see how the argument goes. We’ve got as far as some sort of a feedback mechanism in the Cloud, a mechanism set to churn out an enormous amount of power as soon as it receives a trickle of radio emission from outside itself. The next step, I suppose, is to speculate on how the feedback mechanism works, and why it works as it does. Anybody got any ideas?”

Alexandrov cleared his throat. Everybody waited to catch one of his rare remarks.

“Bastard in Cloud. Said so before.”

There were wide grins and a giggle from Yvette Hedelfort. Kingsley, however, remarked quite seriously:

“I remember you did. Were you serious about it, Alexis?”

“Always serious, damn it,” said the Russian.

“Without frills, what exactly do you mean, Chris?’ someone asked.

“I mean that the Cloud contains an intelligence. Before anybody starts criticizing, let me say that I know it’s a preposterous idea and I wouldn’t suggest it for a moment if the alternative weren’t even more outrageously preposterous. Doesn’t it strike you how often we’ve been wrong about the behaviour of the Cloud?”

Parkinson and Ann Halsey exchanged an amused glance.

“All our mistakes have a certain hallmark about them. They’re just the sort of mistake that it’d be natural to make if, instead of the Cloud being inanimate, it were alive.”

It is curious in how great a degree human progress depends on the individual. Humans, numbered in thousands of millions, seem organized into an ant-like society. Yet this is not so. New ideas, the impetus of all development, come from individual people, not from corporations or states. New ideas, fragile as spring flowers, easily bruised by the tread of the multitude, may yet be cherished by the solitary wanderer.

Among the vast host that experienced the coming of the Cloud, none except Kingsley arrived at a coherent understanding of its real nature, none except Kingsley gave the reason for the visit of the Cloud to the solar system. His first bald statement was greeted with outright disbelief even by his fellow scientists — Alexandrov excepted.

Weichart was frank in his opinion.

“The whole idea is quite ridiculous,” he said.

Marlowe shook his head.

“This comes of reading science fiction.”

“No bloody fiction about Cloud coming straight for dam’ Sun. No bloody fiction about Cloud stopping. No bloody fiction about ionization,” growled Alexandrov.

McNeil, the physician, was intrigued. The new development was more in his line than transmitters and aerials.

“I’d like to know, Chris, what you mean in this context by the word “alive”.”

“Well, John, you know better than I do that the distinction between animate and inanimate is more a matter of verbal convenience than anything else. By and large, inanimate matter has a simple structure and comparatively simple properties. Animate or living matter on the other hand has a highly complicated structure and is capable of very involved behaviour. When I said the Cloud may be alive I meant that the material inside it may be organized in an intricate fashion, so that its behaviour and consequently the behaviour of the whole Cloud is far more complex than we previously supposed.”