COSMIC HERETICS:
by Alfred de Grazia
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Surely, said Deg over the telephone, there must be a better way to write personal histories. He had just read my manuscript. If there is, said I, I don't know it.
It irritated me that he was dissatisfied, perhaps because I am dissatisfied myself. I tried. But there is no easy way of presenting the whole truth about people's lives. The threats of self-censorship and distortion must continuously be warded off, and, if not these, then there may come charging in crying "foul" the police, the torts attorneys, the anti-heretics, and some of the cosmic heretics as well.
I've used many letters of yours, I told Deg, don't you think I should have a piece of paper from you giving me permission, but he said, no, you have them in hand rightfully and it's quite apparent that you are carrying on a public debate in the public interest on a matter of public concern. How can you do your job without reporting what people say, even if they don't like being quoted? If
anything, you've been a softy; you haven't used a hundred items I've given to you about myself and others... Wait now, I said, that's just because they would be redundant... O. K..., he agreed, but bear in mind how important are the freedom of science and freedom of expression -- and truth, and proof of the truth: you couldn't do anything else; ideally you might have printed the whole file and let the documents just march out with fife and drums.
I don't intend to hurt anyone, I said, and he saw I was anxious. Buck up, man, dammit, you're doing a public service. And you've got the First Amendment to the Constitution of the U. S. of A. for shield. Nowhere else is the letter of the law so close to the spirit of the law.
But weren't you badgering the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist with a suit for slander? Well, he excused himself, yes, but I wanted to open up their pages to discussion, I wanted a chance to reply, and their refusal was damaging to science. It made their scientist readers believe in a phony history and misrepresentations; it was a nasty cover-up. You'd better go back and read what you've said -- read the chapter in The Burning of Troy on the matter, too. The conduct and progress of science is public business and wrapping it in a cloak of privacy -- well, I won't go on, just look at Nixon in the White House and, all that he tried to do in the guise of privacy to make off with his papers and tapes. I didn't file suit; I tried to bulldoze them, but they were too smart; it didn't work nor did an appeal to fair play. Now thanks to you we've had a marriage between Miss Liberty of Expression and the scientists -- granted it's a shotgun wedding.
You've gotten me way off the subject, I said. I called to tell you the book is ended. "La commedia é finita." All that it needs is a final word from you. Please try to make it positive. I like happy endings.
There was a long pause; then his voice came back on the line, carefully stringing out the words:
If quantavolution is untrue, it will stand like a monument to edify all who pass on the road of science... Everyone who seeks a new truth in science must become a party to concerns of civil liberty... Science is half psychosociology... Of all movements, scientific movements are the most rewarding to their adherents, win or lose, and of all these the most adventurous is cosmic heresy... He who knows how to tell time will decide the fate of the heretics.
"O. K." said I "that's enough." "Is it?" he asked. "You have not remarked in your book that Velikovsky wrote his works on catastrophe and quantavolution in the years 1940 to 1960, aged forty-five to sixty-five, which was precisely my experience between 1963 and 1983 when I was of the same age, a curious coincidence -- or a signal perhaps that my time is up." "Where are they, Sovereign Virgin, But where are the snows of yester-year?"
To which I felt the urge to add "Yes where is the Queen Who ordered the scholar Buridan Cast in the Seine in a sack? But where are the snows of yester-year ?"
End of Cosmic Heretics