Fortunately, another man volunteered he was ordered to move cadavers but that was all. Rappaport couldn’t bring himself to, even though he sensed that, if no one did, everyone in line would be shot. Then a young Nazi officer asked for a volunteer to step forward. Before his turn came, however, a German film crew arrived, and the killing was halted. He was pulled off the street and put in a line of Jews waiting to be shot in a prison courtyard. Late one night, a philosopher on the team named Saul Rappaport, who emigrated from Europe in the last year of the Second World War, tells the mathematician about a time-“the year was 1942, I think”-when he nearly died in a mass execution. The intention behind the message remains elusive, but why would an advanced life-form have broadcast instructions that could be so dangerous? They manage to translate a fragment of the signal’s information, and a couple of the scientists use it to construct a powerful weapon, which the project’s senior mathematician fears could wipe out humanity. In “ His Master’s Voice,” a 1968 sci-fi novel by the Polish writer Stanisław Lem, a team of scientists and scholars convened by the American government try to decipher a neutrino signal from outer space.
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