Memoirs Found in a Bathtub Part 1

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub.

by Stanislaw Lem.

Introduction.

"Notes from the Neogene" is unquestionably one of the most precious relics of Earth's ancient past, dating from the very close of the Prechaotic, that period of decline which directly preceded the Great Collapse. It is indeed a paradox that we know much more of the civilizations of the Early Neogene, the protocultures of a.s.syria, Egypt and Greece, than we do of the days of paleoatomics and rudimentary astrogation. While those archaic cultures left behind permanent monuments in bone, stone, slate and bronze, almost the only means of recording and preserving knowledge during the Middle and Late Neogene was a substance called papyr.

Papyr was whitish, flaccid, a derivative of cellulose, rolled out on cylinders and cut into rectangular sheets. Information of all kinds was impressed on it with a dark tint, after which the sheets were collated and sewn in a special way.

In order to understand what brought about the Great Collapse, that catastrophic event which in a matter of weeks totally demolished the cultural achievement of centuries, we must go back three thousand years. Metamnestics and data crystallization did not exist in those days. Papyr performed all the functions now served by our mnemonitrons and gnostors. True, there were the beginnings of artificial memory; but these were large, bulky machines, troublesome to operate and maintain, and used only in the most limited, narrow way. They were called "electronic brains," an exaggeration comprehensible only in the historical perspective, much like the boast of the builders of Asia Minor, that their sacred temple Baa-Bel was "sky-reaching."

No one knows exactly when and where the papyralysis epidemic broke out. Most likely, it happened in the desert regions of a land called Ammer-Ka, where the first s.p.a.ceport was built. The people of that time did not immediately realize the scope of the impending danger. And yet we cannot accept the harsh judgment delivered by so many subsequent historians, that these were a frivolous people. To be sure, papyr was not distinguished by its durability; but one should not hold a Prechaotic civilization responsible for failing to foresee the existence of the RV catalyst, also known as the Hartian Agent. The true properties of this agent, after all, were discovered only in the Galactic Period by one Prodoctor Six Folses, who established RV's origin as the third moon of Ura.n.u.s. Unwittingly brought back to Earth by an early expedition (the eighth Malaldic, according to Prognostor Phaa-Vaak), the Hartian Agent set off a chain reaction and papyr disintegrated around the globe.

The details of the cataclysm are not known. According to verbal reports crystallized only in the Fourth Galactium, the focal points of the epidemic were enormous data storage centers called li-brees. The reaction was practically instantaneous. In place of those great treasuries, those reservoirs of society's memory, lay mounds of gray, powdery ash.

The Prechaotic scientists thought they were dealing with some papyrophagous microbe, and wasted valuable time in the attempt to isolate it. One can hardly deny the justice of Histognostor Four Tauridus's bitter remark, that humanity would have been better served had that time been spent engraving the disintegrating words onto stone.

Gravitronics, cybereconomics and synthephysics were all unknown in the Late Neogene, when the catastrophe occurred. The economic systems of various ethnic groups called nashens were relatively autonomous, and wholly dependent upon the circulation of papyr, as was the flow of supplies to the Syrtic Tiberis colony on Mars.

Papyralysis ruined a great deal more than the economy. That entire period is rightly named the Era of Papyrocracy, for not only did papyr regulate and coordinate all group activities, but it determined, in some obscure way, the fate of individuals (for example, the "ident.i.ty papyrs"). The functional and ritual roles of papyr in the folklore of that time (the catastrophe took place when Prechaotic Neogene was at its height) have yet to be fully catalogued. While we do know the meaning of some expressions, others remain empty phrases (cheks, dok-ments, ree-seets, etc.) In that era one could not be born, grow up, obtain an education, work, travel, marry or die except through the aid and mediation of papyr.

Only in the light of these facts can one appreciate the full extent of the disaster which struck Earth. The quarantine of whole cities and continents, the construction of hermetically sealed shelters -- all such measures failed. The science of the day was helpless against the catalyst's subatomic structure, the product of a most unusual anabiotic evolution. For the first time in history society was threatened with total dissolution. To quote an inscription carved upon the wall of a urinal in the Fris-Ko excavations by an anonymous bard of the cataclysm: "And the heavens above the cities grew dark with clouds of blighted papyr and it rained for forty days and forty nights a dirty rain, and thus with wind and streams of mud was the tale of man washed from the face of the earth forever."

It must have been a cruel blow indeed to the pride of Late Neogene man, who saw himself already reaching the stars. The papyralysis nightmare pervaded all walks of life. Panic hit the cities; people, deprived of their ident.i.ty, lost their reason; the supply of goods broke down; there were incidents of violence; technology, research and development, schools -- all crumbled into nonexistence; power plants could not be repaired for lack of blueprints. The lights went out, and the ensuing darkness was illumined only by the glow of bonfires.

And so the Neogene entered into the Chaotic, which was to last over two hundred years. Obviously, the first quarter-century of the Great Collapse left no written records. We can only guess under what conditions government was maintained and anarchy avoided until the establishment, around mid-century, of the Earth Federation.

The more complex a civilization, the more vital to its existence is the maintenance of the flow of information; hence the more vulnerable it becomes to any disturbance in that flow. Now that flow, the lifeblood of the society, had come to a halt. The last storehouse of information lay in the minds of living experts; to record and preserve that information had priority over all else. But this seemingly simple problem proved insoluble. In the Late Neogene, knowledge was so compartmentalized that no one specialist could possibly a.s.similate the entirety of his field. Reconstruction consequently demanded tedious, long-term collaboration of different groups of experts. Had the task been undertaken at once -- so Polygnostor Laa Baar Eight of our Bermand Historical School tells us -- Neogene civilization could have been speedily restored. In answer to the distinguished founder of Neogene Chronologistics, we must point out the activity he postulates could indeed have led to the acc.u.mulation of veritable mountains of knowledge -- but who would there have been to derive benefit from this? Certainly not the hordes of nomads who left their devastated cities; nor their children, who grew up wild and illiterate. No, civilization could have been saved only at the very moment when industry began to fall apart, construction ceased and transportation ground to a halt, when the starving ma.s.ses of whole continents first cried out for help, including the colony on Mars, deprived of supplies and threatened with extinction. Clearly the experts could not shut themselves up in ivory towers and take the time to develop new techniques of transcription.

Desperate measures were employed. Certain branches of the amus.e.m.e.nt industry (such as feelms) mobilized their entire production to record incoming information on the positions of s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps and satellites, for collisions were multiplying rapidly. Circuit diagrams were printed, from memory, on fabrics. All available plastic writing materials were distributed among the schools. Physics professors personally had to tend atomic piles. Emergency teams of scientists flitted from one point of the globe to another. But these were merely tiny particles of order, atoms of organization that quickly dissolved in an ocean of spreading chaos. Shaken as it was by endless upheavals, engaged in a constant struggle against the tide of superst.i.tion, illiteracy and ignorance, the stagnant culture of the Chaotic should be judged not by what it lost of the heritage of centuries, but by what it was able to salvage, against all odds.

To check the first fury of the Great Collapse necessitated tremendous sacrifices. Earth's first footholds on Mars had been saved, and technology, that backbone of all civilization, was reconstructed. Microphones and tape banks replaced the storage centers of demolished papyr. Unfortunately, cruel losses were sustained in other areas.

Because the supply of new writing materials failed to meet even the most urgent needs, anything that did not directly serve to save the bare framework of society had to be jettisoned. The humanities suffered the worst. Knowledge was disseminated orally, through lectures; the audiences became the educators of the next generation. This was one of those astonis.h.i.+ng primitivisms of Chaotic civilization that rescued Earth from total disaster, though losses in the areas of history, historiography, paleology and paleoesthetics were quite irreparable. Only the smallest fragment of a rich literary legacy was preserved. Millions of volumes of chronicles, priceless relics of the Middle and Late Neogene, turned to dust forever.

At the end of the Chaotic we find a most paradoxical situation: there was a relatively high level of technology, including the active initiation of gravitronics and techn.o.biotics, not to mention the success of cisgalactic ma.s.s transport; yet the human race knew next to nothing of its own past. All that survives today of the enormous achievements of the Neogene are a few scattered and unrelated remnants, factual accounts altered beyond all recognition and thoroughly garbled through countless retellings in the oral tradition. Even the most important events are of doubtful chronology.

One must concur with Subgnostor Nappro Leis when he says that papyralysis meant historioparalysis. Only in this perspective can we a.s.sess the true value of the work of Prognostor Wid-Wiss who, in his single-handed battle against official historiography, discovered the "Notes from the Neogene," a voice speaking to us across the abyss of centuries, a voice belonging to one of the last inhabitants of the lost land of Ammer-Ka. This monument is all the more precious in that there are no others to rival it in importance; it cannot be compared, for example, with the papyrantic finds made by the archeological expedition of Syrtic Paleognostor Bradrah the Mnemonite at the Marglo shale diggings in the Lower Preneogene. Those finds concern religious beliefs prevalent during the Eighth Dynasty of Ammer-Ka; they speak of various Perils -- Black, Red, Yellow -- evidently cabalistic incantations connected in some way with the mysterious deity Rayss, to whom burnt offerings were apparently made. But this interpretation is still being debated by the Trans-Sindental and Greater Syrtic Schools, as well as by a group of disciples of the famous Bog-Wood.

Most of the Neogene, we fear, will forever remain shrouded in mystery, for even chronotraction methods have failed to provide the most fundamental details of the social life at that age. Any systematic presentation of those few moments of history which we have been able to re-create goes well beyond the limits of this introduction. So we will limit ourselves to a few remarks in the way of background to the "Notes."

The evolution of ancient beliefs underwent a curious bifurcation. In the first period, the Archeocredonic, various religions were founded upon the recognition of a supernatural, nonmaterial principle, causative with respect to everything in existence. The Archeocredonic left behind permanent monuments -- the pyramids of the Early Neogene, the excavations of the Mesogene (the Gothic cathedrals of Lafranss).

In the second period, the Neocredonic, faith a.s.sumed a different aspect. The metaphysical principle somehow merged with the materialistic, the earthly. Wors.h.i.+p of the deity Kap-eh-Taahl (or, in the Cremonic palimpests, Kapp-Taah) became one of the dominant cults of the time. This deity was revered throughout Ammer-Ka and the faith quickly spread to Australindia and parts of the European Peninsula. Any connection, however, between the cult of Kap-Eh-Taalh and the graven images of the elephant and the a.s.s found here and there throughout Ammer-Ka does seem somewhat doubtful. It was forbidden to utter the name itself, "Kap-Eh-Taahl" (a.n.a.logous to the Hebrew interdiction); in Ammer-Ka the diety was generally called "Almighty Da-Laahr." But there were many other liturgical names, and special monastic orders devoted themselves entirely to an appraisal of their changing status (the Mer-L-Finches, for example). Indeed, the fluctuation in the accepted value of each of the many names (or were they attributes?) of Kap-Eh-Taahl remains an enigma to this day. The difficulty in understanding the true nature of that last of the Prechaotic religions lies in the fact that Kap-Eh-Taahl was denied any supernatural existence, was therefore not a spirit, nor was he even considered a being (which would help explain the totemistic features of that cult, so unusual in an age of science) -- he was, to all extents and purposes, equated with a.s.sets, liquid, fixed, and hidden, and had no existence beyond that. However, it has been shown that in times of economic decline, sacrifices of sugar cane, coffee, and grain were made to placate the angry G.o.d. This contradiction is deepened by the fact that the cult of Kap-Eh-Taahl did possess some elements of the doctrine of incarnation, according to which, the world owed its continuing existence to "sacred property." Any violation of that doctrine met with the most severe punishment.

As we know, the epoch of global cybereconomics was preceded, at the close of the Neogene, by the rise of sociostasy. As the cult of Kap-Eh-Taahl, mired in complex corporational rites and intricate inst.i.tutional rituals, began in the course of time to lose one territory after another to the followers of secular sociostatic management, there arose a conflict between the lands still ruled by that antiquated faith and the remaining world.

Up to the very end -- that is, to the formation of the Earth Federation -- the center of the most fanatic devotion to Kap-Eh-Taahl was Ammer-Ka, a land governed by a series of dynasties of Prez-tendz. These were not high priests of Kap-Eh-Taahl in the strict sense of the word. It was during the Nineteenth Dynasty that the Prez-tendz (or Prexy-dents, in the nomenclature of the Thyrric School) built in the Pentagon. What was it, that first of many granite leviathans, that stern edifice which ushered in the twilight of the Neogene? Prehistorians of the Aquillian School considered the Pentagon's tombs for Prez-tendz, a.n.a.logous to the Egyptian pyramids. This hypothesis was discarded in the light of subsequent discoveries, as was the theory that these were shrines to Kap-Eh-Taahl, where crusades were planned against the Heathen Dog, or strategies devised to ensure his successful conversion.

Lacking the firsthand information needed to solve this puzzle, undoubtedly the key to an understanding of the whole final phase (the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Dynasties), our historians turned to the Temporal Inst.i.tute for help. The Inst.i.tute's full cooperation made possible the application of the latest technological developments in chronotraction to the task of penetrating the riddle of the Pentagons. We sent 290 probes into the far past, tapping 17 trillion erg-seconds from the time wells that orbit the Moon.

According to the theory of chronotraction, movement back in time is practicable only at a considerable distance from objects of great ma.s.s, since their proximity consumes staggering amounts of energy. Consequently, sightings of the past had to be taken from probes placed high in the stratosphere. Their sudden appearance and disappearance in the sky must have mystified the people of the Neogene. Prodoctor Two Sturlprans maintains that the projection of a retrochronal probe would show up in the past as a bulging disc, not unlike two horizontal saucers floating rim-to-rim through s.p.a.ce.

Chronotraction yielded an abundance of data, including authentic photoshots of the First Pentagon soon after its construction. This building, indeed a pentagon, each side measuring 460 feens, was a veritable labyrinth of steel and concrete. Histognostor Ser Een estimates the corridors ran about seventeen or eighteen of their mylz. The entrances were guarded day and night by over two hundred priests of lower rank. Further time delving, prompted by the chronicles excavated in the ruins of Waa-Sheetn, led to the discovery of the Second Pentagon, a much less imposing structure than the First, as most of it lay beneath the ground. Certain pa.s.sages from the chronicles pointed to the existence of yet another, a Third Pentagon. This was to have been a closed, completely independent unit, a state within a state, by virtue of sophisticated camouflaging and enormous reserves of food, water and compressed air. However, after systematic chronoaxial soundings were taken over the entire length and breadth of twentieth-century Ammer-Ka and revealed not a trace of any such structure, most historians accepted the thesis that the Waa-Sheetn chronicles spoke of the Third Pentagon in a figurative sense only, that the building was raised purely in the minds and hearts of the faithful, and that the propagation of the legend was designed to uplift the flagging spirits of those few remaining followers of Kap-Eh-Taahl.

So stood the official version of our historiography when the young Prognostor Wid-Wiss began his archeological career.

Wid-Wiss reexamined all the available materials and published a treatise in which he maintained that, as the power of the Prez-tendz began to wane and their dominions diminish, they resolved to build a new seat of government, one far from all populated areas, somewhere in the mountainous regions of Ammer-Ka and hidden deep beneath the rocks, that this last refuge of Kap-Eh-Taahl might be inaccessible to the uninitiated. Wid-Wiss held that the postulated Pentagon of the Last Dynasty was a kind of collective military brain whose task was twofold: first, to watch over and preserve the purity of the faith, and secondly to convert those peoples of the world who had abandoned the true path.

But Wid-Wiss's treatise was pooh-poohed by the experts; it clearly ran counter to most of the known facts. Critics like Supergnostors Yoo Na Vaak, Quirlsto and Pisuovo of the Martian School of Comparative Paleography pointed out the many contradictions in Wid-Wiss's chronology.

For example, the Last Pentagon had been built, according to Wid-Wiss, only a few decades before the papyr catastrophe. But if this Third Pentagon had really existed, argued the critics, the Prez-tendz within would have surely taken advantage of the postpapyr anarchy and attempted to conquer the world in the very first days of the Chaotic. And even had such an attempt to overthrow the Federation been thwarted, some trace of it would have survived in the oral tradition. Yet our historiography notes nothing of the kind.

Wid-Wiss defended his hypothesis, claiming that when the populace of Ammer-Ka went over to the side of the "heretics" and joined the Federation, the priests of the Last Pentagon ordered it to be completely sealed off from the outside world. So the underground Moloch isolated itself from the rest of humanity and endured to the Chaotic without the least knowledge of what was taking place on the surface of the earth.

This absolute, hermetic isolation of a community of priests and warriors of Kap-Eh-Taahl did seem, Wid-Wiss admitted, a bit unlikely. So he went on to speculate that the Last Pentagon may have possessed scanning devices on the outside. He did not think, however, that the collective military brain of the Last Dynasty was capable of any offensive or even diversive action. It certainly could not have attacked or engineered a coup against the Federation, for once the colossus had buried itself in rock and severed all ties with the future course of history, it was imprisoned not only by impenetrable walls but by the very nature of its internal organization. From that time on it thrived exclusively on the myth, the legend of the glory that was Kap-Eh-Taahl, and investigated, rooted out and waged bitter war against heresy -- the heresy within.

Our Histognostors answered these arguments with a stony silence. But Wid-Wiss did not give in. For twenty-seven years, with only a handful of loyal colleagues to help him, he combed the Rocket Mountains from end to end. Just when almost everyone had forgotten him, his stubbornness was dramatically vindicated. On 28 Mey 3146, the head archeological team, having cleared away several hundred tons of rubble at the foot of Haar-Vurd Peak, stood before a convex s.h.i.+eld, cleverly camouflaged, excellently preserved: this was the entrance to the Last Pentagon.

Exploration of the underground building, however, proved extremely difficult and demanded extraordinary methods. In the seventy-second year of its retreat from the world, the Pentagon of the Last Dynasty succ.u.mbed to a natural disaster. A slight s.h.i.+ft in the mountain's granite core produced a fissure that traveled down through several strata until it came into contact with magma. The building's concrete protective sh.e.l.l could not withstand the volcanic pressure; molten lava entered and filled the interior from top to bottom. And so that strange anthill of the last of the Prez-tendz became a giant fossil and, as such, waited one thousand six hundred and eighty years to be discovered.

It is not our task to describe here the tremendous archeological wealth of the Third Pentagon diggings. We refer the interested reader to the many volumes devoted specially to that subject. Only a few remarks remain to be added to this introduction to the "Notes."

The "Notes" were discovered in the third year of excavation, on the fourth level, within an intricate corridor system where there were several sanitation facilities. In one of these facilities, filled as the rest with igneous rock, were two human skeletons and, beneath them, a scroll of papyr -- the "Notes."

The reader will see for himself that the daring suppositions of Histognostor Wid-Wiss were for the most part quite accurate. The "Notes" portray the fate of a community locked beneath the earth, a community that refused to allow the infiltration of any news of real events, pretending it const.i.tuted the Brain, the Headquarters of an empire that extended even to the most remote galaxies. In time the pretense became belief, the belief a certainty. The reader will witness how the fanatical servants of Kap-Eh-Taahl created the myth of the Antibuilding, how they spent their lives in mutual surveillance, in tests of loyalty and devotion to the Mission, even when the last figment of that Mission's reality had become an impossibility and nothing remained but to sink ever deeper into the pit of collective madness.

Our historiography has not yet pa.s.sed final judgment on the "Notes," commonly called, for the location of their discovery, "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub." Then too, no agreement has been reached as to when and in what order certain parts of the ma.n.u.script were written. The Hyberiad Gnostors, for example, consider the first twelve pages apocryphal, an addition of later years. But the reader will hardly be interested in such technical matters. Let us then be silent and allow this last message from the Neogene, the Era of Papyrocracy, to speak to us in its own voice.

1.

. . . I couldn't seem to find the right room -- none of them had the number designated on my pa.s.s. First I wound up at the Department of Verification, then the Department of Misinformation, then some clerk from the Pressure Section advised me to try level eight, but on level eight they ignored me, and later I got stuck in a crowd of military personnel -- the corridors rang with their vigorous marching back and forth, the slamming of doors, the clicking of heels, and over that martial noise I could hear the distant music of bells, the tinkling of medals. Now and then janitors would go by with steaming percolators, now and then I would stumble into rest rooms where secretaries hastily renewed their make-up, now and then agents disguised as elevator men would strike up conversations -- one of them had an artificial leg and he took me from floor to floor so many times that after a while he began waving to me from a distance and even stopped photographing me with the camera-carnation in his lapel. By noon we were buddies, and he showed me his pride and joy, a tape recorder under the elevator floor. But I was getting more and more depressed and couldn't share his enthusiasm.

Stubborn, I went from room to room and pestered people with questions, though the answers were invariably wrong. I was still on the outside, still excluded from that ceaseless flow of secrecy that kept the Building strong. But I had to get in somewhere, find an entry at some point, no matter what. Twice I ended up in a storage cellar and leafed through some secret doc.u.ments lying about. But there was nothing there of any value to me. After several hours of this, thoroughly annoyed and hungry as well (it was past lunchtime and there wasn't even a cafeteria to be found), I decided to take a different tack.

I recalled that the highest concentration of tall, gray officers was on the fourth level, so I headed there, opened a door bearing the sign BY APPOINTMENT ONLY and entered an empty reception room, from there went through a side door marked KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING and into a conference room full of moldering mobilization plans. Here I ran into a problem -- there were two doors. One said NO ADMITTANCE, the other CLOSED. After some deliberation I decided on the second door -- the correct choice as it turned out, since this was the office of General Kashenblade himself, the Commander in Chief. I walked in, and the officer who was on duty at the time led me to the Chief without asking any questions.

A powerful, bald old man, Kashenblade stirred his coffee. His head was perched upon the collar of his uniform; the bristling, many-folded jowls covered the galactic insignia and stripes like a bib. The desk was cluttered with phones and surrounded by computer consoles, speakers, b.u.t.tons, and in the center was a row of labeled gla.s.s jars -- specimens, apparently, though I couldn't see a thing in them apart from the alcohol. Kashenblade, the veins bulging on his s.h.i.+ny pate, was busy pus.h.i.+ng b.u.t.tons to silence the phones as soon as they began to ring. When several rang together, he rammed his fist into the whole bank of b.u.t.tons. Then he noticed me. In the silence that followed there was only the grim tapping of his teaspoon.

"So there you are!" he snapped. It was a powerful voice.

"Yes," I answered.

"Wait, don't tell me, I have a good memory," he growled, watching me from under those bushy eyebrows. "X-27 contrastellar to Cygnus Eps, right?"

"No," I said.

"No? No! Well then, Morbilantrix B-KuK 81 dash Operation Nail? B as in Bipropodal?"

"No," I said, trying to maneuver my pa.s.s before his eyes. He waved it aside impatiently.

"No?" He looked hurt. Then he looked pensive. He stirred his coffee. The phone rang-his hand came down on the b.u.t.ton like a lion's paw.

"Plastic?" he shot at me.

"Plastic?" I said. "Well, hardly. . . I'm just an ordinary --"

Kashenblade stilled the rising din of phones with one quick slap and looked me over once more.

"Operation Cyclogastrosaur. . . Ento-mo. . . pentacla," he kept trying, unwilling to admit to any gap in his infallibility. When I failed to respond, he suddenly leaned forward and roared: "Out!!"

And it really looked as if he himself were ready to throw me out bodily. But I was too determined -- also too much a civilian -- to obey that order. I held my ground and kept the pa.s.s under his nose. At last Kashenblade reluctantly took it and -- without even examining it -- tossed it into a drawer of some machine, which immediately began to hum and whisper. Kashenblade listened to the machine; his face clouded over and his eyes glittered. He gave me a furtive glance and started pressing b.u.t.tons. The phones rang out together like a bra.s.s band. He silenced them and pressed other b.u.t.tons: now the speakers drowned one another out with numbers and cryptonyms. He stood there and listened with a scowl, his eyelid twitching. But I could see the storm had pa.s.sed.

"All right, hand over your sc.r.a.p of paper!" he barked.

"I already did. . ."

"To whom?"

"To you."

"To me?"

"To you, sir."

"When? Where?"

"Just a moment ago, and you threw --" I began, then bit my tongue.

Kashenblade glared at me and opened the drawer of that machine: it was empty, my pa.s.s had disappeared. Not that I believed for a moment that this was an accident; in fact, I had suspected for some time now that the Cosmic Command, obviously no longer able to supervise every a.s.signment on an individual basis when there were literally trillions of matters in its charge, had switched over to a random system. The a.s.sumption would be that every doc.u.ment, circulating endlessly from desk to desk, must eventually hit upon the right one. A time-consuming procedure, perhaps, but one that would never fail. The Universe itself operated on the same principle. And for an inst.i.tution as everlasting as the Universe -- certainly our Building was such an inst.i.tution -- the speed at which these meanderings and perturbations took place was of no consequence.

At any rate, my pa.s.s was gone. Kashenblade slammed the drawer shut and observed me for a while, blinking. I stood there, my hands at my side, uncomfortably aware of their emptiness. His blinking became more insistent as I stood there, then positively fierce. I blinked back. That seemed to pacify him.

'"Okay," he muttered, pus.h.i.+ng a few b.u.t.tons. Computers churned, multicolored tapes snaked out onto the desk. He tore them off bit by bit, read them, absentmindedly set other machines going, machines that made copies and destroyed originals. Finally a white folder emerged with INSTRUCTIONS B-66-PAPRA-LABL in letters so large I could read them from across the desk.

"Your a.s.signment. . . a Mission, a Special Mission," General Kashenblade said with tremendous gravity. "Deep penetration, subversion -- were you ever there?" he asked with a blink.

"Where?"

"There."

He lifted his head; once again the eyelids fluttered. I didn't know what to answer.

"And this is an agent," he said with disgust. "An agent. . . a modern agent. . ." He grew morose. The word "agent" was stretched out of shape and became a taunt, it whistled through his teeth, every consonant and vowel was chewed and slowly tortured. Then he exploded: "Everything has to be spelled out, eh? Don't you read the papers? Stars, for example -- tell me about the stars! What do they do? Well?!"

"They s.h.i.+ne," I said doubtfully.

"They s.h.i.+ne, he says! All right, how? How do they s.h.i.+ne? Tell me how!"

And he pointed to his eyelids.

"Uh, they twinkle -- they blink -- they -- wink," I answered in an involuntary whisper.

"How clever he is! At last! They wink! Yes, they wink! But when do they wink? Do you know when? I bet you don't! And that's the kind of material I have to work with around here! At night! They wink, they cower under cover of night!!"

He roared like a lion. I stood at attention, straight as an arrow, waiting for the storm to pa.s.s. But it was not pa.s.sing. Kashenblade, puffed up and purple to the top of his bald head, shook the room with his bellow, shook the Building itself.

"And the spiral nebulae?! Well?! Don't tell me you don't know what that means! SPY-ral!! And the expanding universe, the retreating galaxies! Where are they going? What are they running from? And the Doppler s.h.i.+ft to the red! Highly suspicious -- no, more! A clear admission of guilt!!"

He gave me a withering look, sat back and said in a voice cold with contempt: "Moron!"

"Now just a minute --" I flared up.

"What? What was that?! Just a minute --? Ah yes, the pa.s.sword! Good, good. Just a minute. . . the pa.s.sword, yes, that's better. . ."

And he attacked the b.u.t.tons -- the machines rattled like rain on a tin roof, green and gold ribbons spun out and coiled on the desk. The old man read them avidly.

"Good!" he concluded, clutching them in his fists. "Your Mission. Conduct an on-the-spot investigation. Verify. Search. Destroy. Incite. Inform. Over and out. On the nth day nth hour sector n subsector n rendezvous with N. Stop. Salary group under cryptonym Bareback. Voucher for unlimited oxygen. Payment by weight for denunciations, and sporadic. Report regularly. Your contact is Pyra-LiP, your cover Lyra-PiP. When you fall in action, posthumous decoration with the Order of the Top Secret, full honors, salutes, memorial plaque, and a written recommendation in your dossier. Any questions?"

"But if I don't fall in action?" I asked.

An indulgent smile spread across the general's face.

"A wise guy," he said. "I had to get a wise guy. Very funny. Okay, so much for the jokes. You have your Mission now. Do you know, do you understand what that is?" His lofty brow unwrinkled, the golden medals on his chest gleamed. "A Mission -- it's a wonderful thing! And Special -- a Special Mission! Words fail me! Go, go my boy, G.o.d be with you, and keep on your toes!"

"I'll do my best," I said. "But what exactly is the a.s.signment?"

He pressed several b.u.t.tons, phones rang, he silenced them. The purple pate slowly turned pink. He eyed me benevolently, like a father.

"Oh," he said, "extremely hazardous. But remember, it is not for me! I am not sending you! The Country! The Common Good! Yes, yes. . . you, I know. . . it'll be hard, no picnic, a tough nut to crack. . . You'll see! Tough, but it must be done, because. . . because. . ."

"Our Duty," I prompted.

He beamed. He rose. The medals on his chest swayed and jingled like bells, a hush fell over the machines, the phones grew silent and the lights dimmed. He approached me, he gave me his powerful, hairy hand, the hand of an old soldier. His eyes bored right through me, the bushy brows knitted in a solemn squint. Thus we stood, united by a handshake, the Commander in Chief and the secret agent.

"Our Duty!" were his words. "Well said, my boy! Our Duty! Take care!"

I saluted, about-faced, exited, hearing on the way out how he sipped his cold coffee. Kashenblade -- now there was a man.