TRANSCRIPTION OF DEVICE COVERAGE - WS PRINCIPAL OFFICE
TRANSCRIPTION OF DEVICE COVERAGE
BUILDING
PRINCIPAL OFFICE OF THE DIVISION CHIEF, WESTERN EUROPE
COVERAGE PERIOD: 11 AUGUST 1955, 1408 HOURS TO 1531 HOURS
PREPARED BY:
DISTRIBUTION: W. SEATON ONLY
SOURCE: STANDING COVERAGE PER AUTHORIZATION OF , DIVISION CHIEF, WESTERN EUROPE, DATED
The following transcription is prepared from the recording made by the device installed at the location and during the period above set forth. The transcription is prepared in accordance with the standing instruction that no copy be retained at the transcribing station and that the master recording be forwarded under separate cover to the Division Chief. Annotations of tone, inflection, and incidental sound, where audible upon the recording, are set in brackets. Passages of recording in which the speech of one or more parties is not clearly audible are indicated by ellipsis with the explanatory note.
- The device records the arrival of a visitor at the principal office. The secretary, , audible at the outer door: “Doctor, he is expecting you. Please go in.” The door opens and closes. A single set of footsteps crosses the office. SEATON: Doctor.
DR. : Mr. Seaton. Thank you for seeing me at short notice.
SEATON: Your note said the matter was urgent. Sit down.
DR. : Thank you.
SEATON: Coffee?
DR. : No, thank you.
SEATON: Well. You have brought something for me, I see.
DR. : I have. It is the revised technical note. I have been working on it since June. I should prefer that you read it now, in my presence, so that we may discuss it directly. It is not long.
SEATON: As you wish. Hand it across.
[A pause. The recording captures the sounds of paper, and of Mr. Seaton reading. The interval is approximately eleven minutes. During this period the doctor is heard to shift in his chair on two occasions and to clear his throat once. Mr. Seaton is heard to turn pages, to set the document down once at what the recording suggests is a midway point, and to draw a long breath before resuming. Otherwise the office is silent.]
SEATON: Hm.
DR. : Take your time.
[A further interval, approximately three minutes.]
SEATON: Doctor.
DR. : Yes.
SEATON: This is — well. Give me a moment.
[A pause.]
SEATON: This is extraordinary.
DR. : I am glad you find it so.
SEATON: I do find it so. I have read it twice. I shall read it again before the week is out but I have it now well enough to discuss. Doctor, do you know what you have given me?
DR. : I believe so.
SEATON: I am not sure that you do. Let me try it on you. The apparatus does not move things back in time. The apparatus moves things into — what did you call it — a manifold. A space we are not in. A space that has — beings in it, things in it. Something that returns what we send, or doesn’t. The shadow on the plate at — at the August trial last year — that was one of them. Yes?
DR. : That is the position I have arrived at, yes.
SEATON: And the ships in Livy. The men we lost.
DR. : Yes.
SEATON: They are not in the past. They are — where, exactly.
DR. : I do not know. They may have been placed by the agency at the coordinates we set, and observed by the Romans there. They may have been retained by the agency. The Roman record is consistent with the former but does not exclude the latter.
SEATON: Hm.
[A silence of some seconds.]
SEATON: Doctor, I want to ask you a question and I want you to answer it as a technical man and not as a — not as anything else. Forget the Division. Forget the program. Speak as a physicist.
DR. : I shall try.
SEATON: If we sent something nasty into the manifold. Something with — heat, gas, whatever you like. Could we hurt these things?
DR. : [A silence of several seconds.] What are you asking me, Mr. Seaton.
SEATON: I am asking you what I asked you. If we sent something hostile, could we hurt them.
DR. : I — that is not a question I am prepared to answer.
SEATON: You said as a physicist.
DR. : As a physicist I would say I do not know. I do not know if they have bodies in any sense we would recognize. I do not know if heat in our manifold is heat in theirs. The shadow at the trial — that was not a body, that was a projection of a body. The body itself was in their space, not ours. We saw the cross-section. Whether the body can be acted upon by what we send, I cannot say.
SEATON: But it might.
DR. : It might. It might equally not. It might do something we have not foreseen. You are proposing — what, exactly.
[A pause.]
SEATON: I am thinking out loud, Doctor.
DR. : You are not thinking out loud. You are testing a proposal on me. Tell me the proposal.
SEATON: Doctor —
DR. : Tell me the proposal, Mr. Seaton.
[A silence. The recording suggests Mr. Seaton has risen from his chair.]
SEATON: The second trial. We rig the vessel. Explosives, gas, the lot. We set it to detonate just after translation. We see what happens.
DR. : [A long silence. Approximately fifteen seconds upon the recording.]
DR. : You cannot mean it.
SEATON: I mean it.
DR. : You — Christ, Seaton. Christ.
SEATON: Doctor.
DR. : You have lost your mind. You have actually lost your mind. Have you been thinking about this. Has this been in your head while we have been working. While I have been writing this — this — while I have been writing the bloody note —
SEATON: Doctor, calm yourself.
DR. : Do not tell me to calm myself.
SEATON: Calm yourself or leave the office.
DR. : I will not leave. You will hear me out and then I will leave when I please. You sit there and you read what I have given you — the most considered piece of work I have done in this country, perhaps the most considered I have ever done — and the first thought in your head, the first thought, is how to use it to attack something you do not understand. Something that — that may not even know we are there. Or may know perfectly well and may be tolerating us. We do not know. You do not know. You read my note and what you take from it is — is a target list. Christ.
SEATON: Doctor —
DR. : Don’t “Doctor” me. Don’t.
SEATON: You forget where you are.
DR. : I know exactly where I am. I am in the office of a man who has just told me he wishes to bomb something that returned our men to a Roman book and that may, for all we know, be the reason there is a Roman book. You think — what — you think you can put a payload of TNT into a manifold whose geometry we have not characterized, against an inhabitant whose extension we cannot render, and you think you will hurt them. You think you will hurt them. You will hurt us. You will hurt the apparatus. You will hurt the men who carry the apparatus. You may hurt the city the apparatus is in. You do not know where the payload goes after it leaves us, Seaton, that is the whole bloody point of the note —
SEATON: Lower your voice.
DR. : I will not.
SEATON: Lower your voice, Doctor, there are people in the building who do not have clearance for this conversation.
DR. : Then perhaps they should hear it. Perhaps someone in this building should hear it.
SEATON: [A pause.] Now you listen to me. You listen carefully. You wrote your note. The note is a fine note. The note is, as you say, the most considered piece of work you have done in this country. The note is also a document that exists in the world, and the world the note exists in is the world in which we are at present situated, which is not the world of the lecture hall, Doctor, much as you might wish it. In this world, my world, there are people to whom commitments have been made. There are persons of whom you are not aware, with whom this Division has spoken, who are expecting something from this program. They are not going to be told that we have changed our minds because the technical officer has had a — a fit of conscience.
DR. : A fit of —
SEATON: I will speak. The trial will go forward. It will go forward in such a form as the Division determines. I shall be glad of your participation in it, on terms we may agree, and I shall be sorry to lose you if you are not prepared to participate, but I shall not be deflected from it by a note, however considered.
DR. : A fit of conscience.
SEATON: A —
DR. : You called it a fit of conscience.
SEATON: I withdraw the phrase.
DR. : No, you don’t. You said it. You said it because you meant it. Conscience is a thing you can have a fit of, in your Division, in the building where there are people to whom commitments have been made. Christ alive.
SEATON: Doctor, I will say this once. You are an employee of a Government agency under contract. You came to this country under arrangements which obtain at the pleasure of this Government. You are not in a position to —
DR. : [The recording captures a sharp sound, possibly the doctor striking the desk.] Don’t.
SEATON: Don’t what.
DR. : Don’t you dare. Don’t you fucking dare, Seaton.
SEATON: Doctor.
DR. : You finish that sentence in this office and we are done. We are done. I will walk out of this building and I will not come back and the program will not have me and what I know I will keep, and you can explain to your persons of whom I am not aware why the principal technical officer of the program has gone home and is not answering his telephone. You finish that sentence and that is what happens. So. Do you wish to finish it.
[A silence. The recording suggests neither man is moving.]
SEATON: I withdraw it.
DR. : Say so.
SEATON: I withdraw it. It was said in anger.
DR. : It was said because you meant it. You can withdraw it but it stays withdrawn, Seaton. You do not get to put it back.
SEATON: It stays withdrawn.
DR. : Good.
[A pause. The recording captures Mr. Seaton seating himself. The doctor remains standing.]
SEATON: Sit down, Doctor.
DR. : I prefer to stand.
SEATON: Sit down. Please.
DR. : I will stand. Mr. Seaton, I am going to leave shortly. I am going to leave because if I stay in this office for another quarter of an hour, one of us will say something neither of us can withdraw, and I prefer it not to be me. Before I go, hear this. The note is the note. I will not retract it. I will not soften it. If you wish to forward it to OSI without your endorsement, you may. If you wish to bury it, I will know that you have buried it and the burial will become its own document, in time. I will not participate in the second trial as you have described it. I will not participate in any trial designed as the second trial has been designed. If you persist in the design, I shall have to consider what my position permits me to do. I should prefer not to be put in a position where I must consider it.
SEATON: Doctor —
DR. : Let me finish. You have a fortnight. In a fortnight I will come back to this office and we will speak again, and you will tell me what disposition has been made of the note. If the disposition is one I can live with, I will continue. If it is not, I will not. That is all I have to say.
SEATON: That is — Doctor, that is not how this works.
DR. : It is how it works today. Good afternoon.
[The doctor is heard crossing the office. The door opens.]
SEATON: Doctor. One more thing.
DR. : [At the door.] Yes.
SEATON: I should ask you to think, in the fortnight, about the position in which a precipitate action on your part would place certain persons. I shall say no more. I should ask you to think about it.
DR. : [A silence of some seconds.] I will think about it. I will think about it carefully. Good afternoon.
The door closes. Footsteps depart along the outer corridor.
- Mr. Seaton alone in the principal office. The recording captures a sound consistent with a chair being struck or kicked, and a single word uttered by Mr. Seaton which the transcribing officer declines to render. Footsteps cross the office twice. The recording captures Mr. Seaton at his desk, breathing audibly, for an interval of approximately four minutes.
- Mr. Seaton lifts the telephone and speaks. The conversation is conducted in tones not clearly audible upon the recording, the device being situated at a distance from the telephone unfavorable to the recording of the called party’s voice and Mr. Seaton’s own speech being conducted at lowered volume. The transcribing officer is not in a position to render the conversation. The call concludes at 1517. 1517 to 1531. Mr. Seaton seated at the desk. The recording captures no further conversation. At 1521 Mr. Seaton is heard to say, aloud and to himself, three words which the transcribing officer renders with reservation as: “He will not.” The words are repeated twice.
The transcription is closed at 1531.
Transcription Officer