The Thing Itself (3 page)

When I went back to the main door it was locked. This was unprecedented. For a while I banged on the door, and yelled, and my heart began blackly to suspect that Roy was playing some kind of prank on me – or worse.

I was just about to give up and make my way round to try the side entrance when Roy’s gurning face appeared in the door’s porthole, with the graph-paper pattern woven into the glass. He opened it. ‘What the hell were you playing at?’ I demanded crossly. ‘Why did you lock the door?’

‘It occurred to me that the lights might have been sabotaged,’ he said, not looking me in the eye. ‘I thought: security is valour’s better part. Obviously I was going to let you back in, once I was sure it
was
you.’

‘Have you had a nervous breakdown?’ I yelled. ‘Are you
high
? Who else could possibly be out there? We’re three hundred miles from the nearest human settlement. Did you think it was a ghost?’

‘Calm down,’ Roy advised, grinning his simpering grin and still not looking me in the eye. ‘Did you get the package?’

I sat down with a thump. ‘Couldn’t find it,’ I said, pulling off my overboots. ‘It may still be on the roof. Seriously, though, man! Locking the door?’

‘We need to retrieve it,’ said Roy. ‘It has my medication in it. My supplies are running low.’

This was the first I had heard of any medication. ‘Seriously? They posted you down here, even though you have medical problems?’

‘Just some insomnia problems. And some allergic reaction problems. But I need my sleeping pills and my antihistamines.’

‘You’re kidding,’ I said. ‘What is there to be allergic
to
, down here?’

He gave me a pointed look. But then he said: ‘Come and have a drink,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some whisky.’

Now, I knew the base was not supplied with whisky. Beer was the most they allowed us. I should, perhaps, have been suspicious of Roy’s abrupt hospitality, doubly so since I knew he hardly ever drank. But I was cold, and cross, and a whisky actually sounded like a bloody good idea. ‘How have you got any of that?’

‘I brought it with me. My old tutor at Cambridge gave it me. Break it out when you’ve solved the SETI problem, he said.
He
never doubted me, you see. And solved it, I have.’

And then a second thought occurred to me. It came to me like a flash. I could
get Roy drunk
. Surely then he would be more amenable to telling me what was in the letter he’d snaffled from me. I couldn’t think that I’d ever seen him drunk; and my judgement was that he would hold his liquor badly. He’d be a splurger. OK, I thought, butter him up, some, and get some booze in him.

‘I’ll have a dram,’ I told him. Then: ‘Kind of you to offer. Thanks. I didn’t mean to … you know. Yell at you.’

He ignored this overture. ‘You didn’t go to Cambridge, I think?’ he asked, as we went through to the common room. ‘Reading University, isn’t it?’

‘Reading born and bred,’ I replied, absently. I half-leant, half-sat on one of the heaters to get warmth back into my marrow whilst Roy went off to his room to get the whisky. He was gone a while. Finally he came back with a bottle of Loch Lomond in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. He handed me the former.

I retrieved two tumblers from the cupboard, but Roy said: ‘I’ll not have the whisky, thank you anyway. I don’t like the taste.’

This was about par, I thought, for the weirdo that he was – bringing a bottle of Scotch all the way to the end of the world, to not even drink it. On the other hand the seal was broken, and about an inch was missing, so perhaps he had tried a taster and so discovered his aversion. I honestly didn’t care. I poured three fingers, and settled myself in one of the chairs.

‘Cheers!’ I said, raising a glass.

‘Good health,’ he returned, propping his bum on the arm of the sofa.

‘So,’ I said, smacking my lips. ‘The fact that we’re drinking this means you’ve solved the Fermi Paradox?’

‘We’re not drinking it,’ he said, with a little snorty laugh of self-satisfaction. ‘You are.’

‘You’re such a pedant, Roy,’ I told him.

‘Take that as a compliment,’ he said, smirking and making odd little snorty-sniffy noises with his nostrils.

‘So? Does the fact that I’m drinking this mean you’ve solved it?’

‘The answer to your question is yes.’

‘Really?’

‘Absolutely.’

I took another sip. ‘Congratulations!’

‘Thank you.’

‘And?’

He peered blankly at me. ‘What?’

‘And? In the sense of: what’s your solution?’

‘Oh. The Fermi Paradox.’ He sounded almost bored. ‘Well, I’ll tell you if you like.’ He seemed to ponder this. ‘Yeah,’ he added. ‘Why not? It’s Kant.’

‘Of course it is,’ I said, laughing. ‘You complete nutter.’

He looked hurt at this. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean – the best part of a year of our lives, millions of pounds sunk into this base, probably billions spent worldwide on SETI, and all we needed to do was open a seventeenth-century book of philosophy!’

‘Eighteenth-century,’ he corrected me. ‘And the kit, here, certainly has its uses.’

‘Glad to hear it! But – Kant? Really?’

Roy took the smallest sip from his beer bottle, and then rubbed his chin with his thumb. ‘Hard to summarise,’ he said. ‘Start here: how do we know there’s anything out there?’

‘What – in space?’

‘No: outside our own brains. Sense data, yes? Eyes, ears, nerve-endings. We see things, and think we’re seeing things out there. We hear things, likewise. And so on. But maybe all that is a lie. Maybe we’re hallucinating. Dreaming. How can we be sure there’s anything really
there
?’

‘Isn’t this I think therefore I am?’

‘The cogito, yes,’ said Roy, with that uniquely irritating prissy inflection he used when he wanted to convey his own intellectual superiority. ‘Though Kant didn’t have much time for Descartes, actually. He says I think therefore I am is an empty statement. We never just think, after all. We always think
about something
.’

‘You’re losing me, Roy,’ I said, draining my whisky, and reaching for the bottle. Roy’s eyes flashed, and I stopped. ‘Do you mind if I have another?’

‘No, no,’ he urged me, bobbing forward and back in an oddly birdlike way. ‘Go right ahead.’

‘So,’ I said. ‘You’re saying we can’t be sure if the cosmos is a kind of hallucination. Maybe I’m a brain in a vat. So what? I’ve got to act as if the universe is real, or,’ I directed a quick look at Roy, ‘they’d lock me in the loony bin. So? Does this hallucination also include ET, or not?’

‘Quite right. Well, Kant says there
is
a real world – he calls it the Ding an sich, the thing as it really is. There is such a reality. But our only access to that real world is through our perceptions, our senses and therefore through the way our thoughts are structured. So, says Kant, some of the things we assume are part of the world out there are actually part of the structure of our consciousness.’

‘Such as?’

‘Quite basic things. Time and space. Causality.’

‘Kant is saying that time, space and causality aren’t “really” out there? They’re just part of our minds?’

Roy nodded. ‘It’s like if we always wore pink-tinted contact lenses. Like we’d always worn them, ever since birth. Everything we saw would have a pink tint. We might very well assume the world was just – you know, pink. But it wouldn’t be the world that was pink, it would be our perception of the world.’

‘Pink,’ I repeated, and took another slug. I was starting to feel drowsy.

‘We’re all like that, all the time, except that instead of pink contact lenses on our eyes, we’re wearing
space-and-time
contacts on our minds.
Causality
contacts.’

‘Space and time are the way the universe is. Just is.’

‘That’s not what Kant says. He says we don’t really know the way the universe
just is
. All we know is how our perceptions and thoughts structure our understanding.’

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Kant says that cause and effect are just in our heads?’

‘That’s right.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ I said. ‘If space and time and causality are just inside my head, then what’s my head in? It takes up space, my brain. It takes time to think these thoughts.’

‘There’s
something
out there,’ Roy agreed. ‘But we don’t know what it is. Here’s a thought-experiment, Kant’s thought-experiment. You can imagine an object in space, can’t you?’

I grunted.

‘OK,’ said Roy. ‘And you can imagine the object being taken away. Yes? Then you have empty space. But you can’t imagine
space and time
being taken away. You can’t imagine no space, no time.’

I grunted again.

‘That shows that space, time, causality and some other things – they’re part of the way the mind perceives. There’s no getting behind them. Is the Ding an sich itself structured according to that logic? The eyeball cannot see itself. We cannot know. Maybe, maybe not.’

‘Ding,’ I said, my eyelids slipping down my eyeballs, ‘like a microwave oven?’

‘We’re looking for aliens with visual telescopes and radio telescopes,’ said Roy, standing up and putting his beer bottle down. ‘But whatever tools we use, we’re looking for aliens in space and time, aliens that understand causality and number. But maybe those things are not alien. Those things are the way
our
minds are built. And that means we’re looking in the wrong place. We should not be looking in space, or time. We should be looking in the Ding an sich.’

‘Sick,’ I said, My eyes were shut now. I didn’t seem to be able to open them. Such muscular operation was beyond my volitional control. ‘I feel a bit sick, actually.’

‘Ding,’ I heard him say, at the far end of a very long corridor. ‘You’re done. Let’s open the microwave door, now, shall we?’

I suppose I was asleep. I tried to shift position in bed, but my arms were numb. Sometimes you lie on an arm and it goes dead. But this was both my arms. They were up over my head. A scraping sound. Distantly. I tried to pull my arms down but they were already down. I tried to process this, failed.
This is the chance
, somebody was saying, or muttering, I don’t know. Perhaps I was imagining it.
We’ve never had this chance before. Because although human consciousness is structured by the Kantian categories of apperception, there’s nothing to say that
computer
perception needs to suffer from the same limitations. It’s all a question of programming! A programme to sift the Centauri data so as to get behind the limitations of consciousness.

I was moving. Everything was dark, dark, dark. My arms were trailing behind me, I thought; and something was pulling my legs, I thought; and I was sliding along on my back. Was that right? Could that be right?

We look out from our planet and see a universe of space, and time, of substance and causality, of plurality and totality, of possibility and probability – and we forget that what we’re actually seeing are the ways
our minds structure
the Ding an sich according to the categories of space, and time, of substance and causality, of plurality and totality, of possibility and probability. We look out and we see no aliens, and are surprised. But the real surprise would be to see aliens in such a vista, because that would mean the aliens are in our structures of thought. Surely there
are
aliens. Of course there are! But they don’t live in our minds. They live in the Ding an sich.

The motion stopped, but I was still too sluggish to move, or speak, or even open my eyes. The next thing I knew, somebody was kissing me on the lips.
Goodbye
, was a word, and it floated around. Then nothing.

O dark, dark, dark, they all go into the—

Or.

Or something. It came upon me slowly. It, as it were, crept up on me. I couldn’t as yet put a name to it.
Let me think through the necessary and contingent possibilities
, I thought to myself.
It could have been a letter from my mum, in which case it was full of family trivia and Roy’s just yanking my chain for the hell of it. He’s certainly capable of that
. The thing, whatever it was, was closer now, or larger somehow, or in some sense more present, although I still couldn’t put a name to it.
It could have been a letter from a friend, or from Leicester Lenny, but if so it would only say Q-B4 ch! or Kn-R7 or something, and that could mean nothing at all to Roy. Or it could have been a letter from Professor Addlestone of Reading University, blathering on about something. Or it could have been
, the thing was all around me now, or all within me, or otherwise pressing very imminently upon my consciousness.
Or it could have been from Lezlie. But then, what? It was full of the usual blandishments? In which case Roy’s hoarding of it is creepy but, in the larger scheme of things, unimportant. That’s not what I’m afraid of though, is it?
I felt sick and I was sick and it froze on my chin.
I’m afraid the letter says: I’m leaving you, I’ve found someone else. But but but, if it is, then I’ll find out eventually – won’t I. I just need to be patient. I’ll find out in time. Assuming I have time
—

Cold.

That was the thing.

That was what had crept up on me. That’s what’s behind the veil. Endless, implacable, killing cold. Even the most cursory examination of the cosmos confirms this.