Memoirs of a Space Traveler (5 page)

“Follow me,” he said without any preliminaries. Through a long, dimly lit corridor in which machines, barrels, and dusty white bags of cement were stored, he led me to a large steel door. Above it shone a bright lamp. He took a key from his coat pocket, opened the door, and went in ahead. I followed him. We went up a flight of winding iron stairs. Before us opened a large factory hall with a glass ceiling; several naked light bulbs did not so much illuminate the hall as reveal its size. It was dim and deserted. The wind roared against the roof, and the rain that had begun to fall as I neared Corcoran’s home lashed the dark, dirty windowpanes. Here and there, water trickled through holes in the broken glass. Corcoran, seemingly unaware of this, walked ahead, the tin gallery rumbling under his footsteps. Again, a locked steel door. Behind it a corridor where tools covered with a thick layer of dust lay scattered along the walls, as though abandoned in flight. The corridor turned, went by tangled conveyor belts that resembled desiccated snakes. Our journey, which gave me an idea of the immensity of the building, continued. Once or twice Corcoran, in pitch-dark places, warned me to watch out for a step or to duck. He stopped at the last of the steel doors, which was thickly studded with rivets and obviously fireproof, and opened it. I noticed that, unlike the other doors, it did not creak; perhaps its hinges were oiled. We entered a high, bare hall. Corcoran stopped in the center of it, where the concrete of the floor was somewhat lighter in color, as though on this spot there once had stood a machine, from which only projecting stubs of beams remained. Thick vertical bars ran along the walls, reminiscent of a cage. I recalled the question about ghosts… Strong shelves with supports were fastened to the bars, and a number of cast-iron boxes rested on these. You know the treasure chests that pirates bury, in storybooks? They were exactly that kind of box, with bulging lids. On each was a cellophane-covered white card, like the charts one finds on hospital beds. A dusty light bulb shone from the ceiling, but was so dim I couldn’t read a single word of what was written on those cards. The boxes stood in two rows, with one box higher and apart from the rest. I counted them; there were twelve, fourteen, I don’t remember exactly.

“Tichy.” Corcoran turned to me, his hands in his coat pockets. “Listen carefully for a moment and tell me what you hear. Go on!”

There was an unusual impatience about the man—you could not help being struck by it. Whenever he spoke, he immediately wanted to get to the point, and to be finished, as if every moment spent with someone else was wasted.

I closed my eyes and stood motionless for a while, more out of courtesy than curiosity, having noticed no sound as I came in. I heard nothing. There may have been a faint hum, as of electric current in a coil, something like that, but I assure you, it was so low that the buzz of a dying fly could have been heard over it.

“Well, what do you hear?” he asked.

“Hardly anything,” I confessed. “A hum … but it may be only the blood in my ears…”

“It isn’t … Tichy, listen carefully; I don’t like to repeat myself, and I say this only because you don’t know me. I’m not the boor or cad people take me for, but it’s hard to put up with idiots for whom one must repeat the same thing ten times over. I hope you aren’t one of them.”

“We’ll see,” I replied. “Go on, Professor…”

He nodded and, pointing to the rows of iron boxes, said:

“Are you familiar with electronic brains?”

“Only as much as you need to know in navigation,” I replied. “I’m kind of weak in theory.”

“I figured as much. It doesn’t matter. Listen, Tichy. These boxes contain perfect brains. Do you know wherein lies their perfection?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Their perfection lies in the fact that they serve no purpose, are absolutely, totally useless—in short, they are Leibnizian monads, which I have brought into being and clad in matter…”

I waited, and he went on. His gray mustache fluttered in the semidarkness like a moth.

“Each box contains an electronic system that generates consciousness, as does our brain. The structure is different, the principle is the same. But there the similarity ends. Because our brains are plugged, so to speak, into the external world, by means of sensory receptors—the eyes, ears, nose, skin, and so on. However, I these”—he pointed to the boxes—“have their own ‘external world,’ inside…”

“How is that possible?” I asked. Something began to dawn on me. I couldn’t quite make it out, but it made me shudder.

“It’s very simple. How do we know that we have such-and-such a body and not another, or such-and-such a face, that we are standing, that we hold a book, that flowers smell good? Because certain stimuli act upon our senses, and nerves relay messages to the brain. Imagine, Tichy, that I could stimulate your olfactory nerve in exactly the same way that a carnation does—what would you smell?”

“A carnation, of course,” I replied.

The professor, nodding as though glad that I was adequately intelligent, continued:

“And if I do the same with all your nerves, you will perceive not the external world but what
I
telegraph, through these nerves, to your brain. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“Now, then. These boxes have receptor organs that function analogously to our sight, smell, hearing, touch, and so on. And the wires from these receptors are connected like nerves, but not to the external world, as our nerves are; they are connected to the drum there in the corner. You noticed it?”

“No,” I said. Indeed, a drum, perhaps three meters in diameter, stood far in the back, like an upright millstone. I realized, after a while, that it was very slowly turning.

“
That
is their fate,” Professor Corcoran said calmly. “Their fate, their world, their existence—everything they can attain and experience. It has special tapes, recorded electrical stimuli that correspond to the one or two hundred billion phenomena a person may encounter in the most impression-packed life. If you raised the lid of the drum, you would see only shiny tapes covered with white zigzags, like mold on celluloid; but, Tichy, they are sultry southern nights, the murmur of waves, the forms of animal bodies, and the crackle of gunfire; funerals and drinking binges; the taste of apples and oranges, snowstorms on evenings spent with the family by the fireside, and the pandemonium aboard a sinking ship; the convulsions of illness, and mountain peaks, and graveyards, and the hallucinations of the delirious—Tichy, it contains the world!”

I remained silent. Corcoran, seizing my arm with an iron grip, said:

“These boxes, Tichy, are plugged into an artificial world. That one”—he pointed to the first box—“thinks it is a seventeen-year-old girl with green eyes, red hair, and the body of a Venus. She is the daughter of a statesman … in love with a young man whom she sees from her window almost every day … and who will be her ruin. The second, here, is a scientist. He is coming close to a general theory of the gravity that operates in his world—a world whose boundaries are the iron walls of the drum—and he will fight for his truth in a solitude intensified by impending blindness, because he will go blind, Tichy… And up there is a member of the priesthood who is going through the most difficult time of his life, for he has lost faith in the existence of his immortal soul… Next to him, behind the partition, we have … but it is impossible for me to tell you of all the beings I have created.”

“But I’d like to know—”

“Don’t interrupt!” snapped Corcoran. “I’m speaking! You still don’t understand. You probably think that various signals are set down in that drum, as on a phonograph record; that events are arranged like a melody, with all the notes, waiting only for a needle to bring them to life; that these boxes reproduce what are predetermined experiences. Wrong! Wrong!” He was yelling so loudly that the tin ceiling echoed. “That drum is to them what the world is to you! It never seems to you, does it, when you eat, sleep, get up, travel, and visit old madmen, that all that is a phonograph record whose touch you call the present!”

“But…” I said.

“Silence! I’m speaking!”

Those who called him a boor, I thought, were correct. But I had to pay attention, for what he said was fascinating. He went on:

“The fate of my iron boxes is not predetermined, because the events in the drum are laid out on rows of parallel tapes, and it is a random selector that decides from which tape the sensor of a given box will next draw content. Of course, it is not so simple as this, because the box itself can to some degree affect the movement of the selector, so that the selection is completely random only when the being I have created reacts passively… But they have free will, and it is limited only by what limits ours. Personality, compulsions, congenital deformities, external conditions, the level of intelligence—I can’t go into all the details…”

“Even so,” I interjected quickly, “they do not know that they are iron boxes.”

That was all I could blurt out before he cut me off:

“Don’t be an ass, Tichy. You’re made of atoms, aren’t you? Do you feel your atoms?”

“No.”

“Those atoms form molecules, proteins. Do you feel your proteins?”

“No.”

“Every second of the night and day, cosmic rays pass through your body. Do you feel that?”

“No.”

“Then how can my boxes discover that they are boxes, you ass? Just as this world is authentic and the only one for you, so the content that flows to their brains from my drum is authentic and the only real thing for them. The drum holds their world, Tichy, and their bodies—their bodies do not exist in our reality except as certain configurations of holes in perforated tapes. The box at the very end of the row considers itself a woman of unusual beauty. I can tell you exactly what she sees when she looks at herself naked in the mirror. What jewels she loves. The wiles she uses to trap men. I know all that, for it was I who created her and her form—a form imaginary to us but real to her—having a face, teeth, the smell of sweat, a stiletto scar on the shoulder blade, and hair into which she can stick orchids. A form no less real than your arms, legs, belly, neck, and head are real to you! You do not doubt your own existence?”

“No,” I answered calmly. No one had ever raised his voice to me like that, but I was too stunned by the words of the professor—whom I believed, seeing no reason to distrust him—to take offense at his lack of manners.

“Tichy,” Corcoran continued, somewhat more quietly, “I said that I had here, among others, a scientist. The box opposite you. He studies his world, but will never guess, never, that his world is unreal; that he is wasting his time and energy to fathom what is, in fact, a drum with wound-up tapes; that his hands, legs, and eyes, his own failing eyes, are merely an illusion induced by the discharge of suitably chosen impulses. To grasp that, he would need to get outside his iron box—that is, outside himself—and think without his electronic brain, which is as impossible as it is impossible for you to know the existence of that cold, heavy box other than by touch and sight.”

“But I know from physics that I’m made of atoms,” I shot back. Corcoran raised his hand in a peremptory gesture.

“He knows physics, too, Tichy. He has his own laboratory with all the equipment his world can provide… He looks at the stars through a telescope, studies their movements, and feels the cold weight of the glasses on his face. No, not now. Now, in keeping with his custom, he is in the garden that surrounds his laboratory, strolling in the sunlight—for the sun is just rising in his world.”

“But where are the other people—the ones he lives among?” I asked.

“The other people? Obviously, each of the boxes, each of the beings, moves among people … they’re in the drum, all of them. You still don’t understand! Perhaps an example, though a remote one, will make it clear to you. You encounter various people in your dreams—often people that you have never seen or known—and carry on conversations with them while you sleep. Isn’t that so?”

“Yes.”

“Those people are the products of your brain. But while you dream, you are not aware of that. Please note—that was only an example. It’s different with them”—he stretched out his arm—“they themselves do not create their families, friends, and strangers; these are in the drum, whole hosts of them, and when, let’s say, my scientist gets a sudden hankering to leave his garden and speak to the first passer-by, you could see what makes that happen by lifting the lid of the drum: his sensory reader, affected by an impulse, deviates imperceptibly from its previous course, moves onto another tape, and picks up what is recorded there. I say ‘reader,’ but actually it is hundreds of microscopic electrical collectors, because just as you perceive the world with your sight, smell, touch, hearing, and organ of balance, so he comes to know his world by means of separate sensory inputs and separate channels, and only his electronic brain unites all these impressions into one whole. But these are technical details, Tichy, of little consequence. Once the mechanism has been set in motion, I can assure you, it is only a question of patience, nothing more. Read the philosophers, Tichy, and you’ll see how little we can rely upon our sensory impressions, how uncertain, misleading, and mistaken they are. But they are all we have. It is the same with the boxes,” he said with upraised arm. “But that does not prevent them from loving, lusting, and hating, just as it does not prevent us. They can touch each other to kiss or to kill… And my creations, in their perpetual iron immobility, also abandon themselves to passions and compulsions, they betray one another, they yearn, they dream…”

“In vain, do you think?” I asked suddenly.

Corcoran measured me with piercing eyes. For a long while he did not answer.

“Yes,” he said at last, “I’m glad I brought you here, Tichy. All the idiots I’ve shown this to ended by railing against my cruelty… What do you mean by your question?”

“You only supply them with raw material,” I said, “in the form of those impulses, just as the world supplies us. When I stand and gaze at the stars, what I feel and what I think belong to me alone, not to the world. With them”—I pointed to the rows of boxes—“it is the same.”