Memoirs of a Space Traveler (2 page)

The professor, when I told him this idea, smiled sadly and explained to me that the Universe could not have arisen from any ordinary atom; the cosmic nucleus would have had to contain the energy of all the transformations and events that expanded to fill the metagalactic void. I saw my error, but continued to mull over the problem. Then, one afternoon, as I rubbed oil on my legs, which were swollen with mosquito bites, my mind wandered back to the old days, when, while flying through the spherical cluster of Canes Venatici, I had read theoretical physics for lack of anything better to do. I had been particularly engrossed in a volume devoted to elementary particles, and I recalled Feynman’s hypothesis that there are particles that move “upstream” against the flow of time. When an electron moves in this manner, we perceive it then as an electron with a positive charge (a positron). I asked myself, with my feet in a washbasin: What if we took one electron and accelerated it, accelerated it so much that it would begin moving backward in time, faster and faster? Couldn’t we give it such a tremendous impulse that it would fly back beyond the beginning of cosmic time to that point when there was still nothing? Couldn’t the Universe arise from this accelerated positron?!

I ran to the professor as I was, my bare feet dripping wet. He immediately realized the magnitude of my idea and without a word began to calculate. It turned out that the project was feasible: his calculations showed that the electron, as it moved against the flow of time, would gain greater and greater energy, so that when it reached beyond the beginning of the Universe, the force accumulated within it would split it apart, and the exploding particle would release the energy required to cancel the debt. The Universe then would be saved from collapse, since it would no longer exist on credit!

Now we had only to think about the practical side of the undertaking that was to legitimize the World or, in short, to create it! As a man of integrity, Razglaz repeatedly said to Professor Tarantoga and to all his assistants and colleagues that it was I who had originated the concept of the Creation; that therefore it was I, and not he, who deserved the double title of Creator and Saviour of the World. I mention this not to boast but to humble myself. Because the endless praise and appreciation that I received at that time in Bombay, well, I’m afraid it turned my head a little and caused me to neglect my work. I rested on my laurels, thinking that the most important part had been done—the intellectual part—and that what followed now would be the purely technical details, which others could take care of.

A fatal mistake! Throughout the summer and most of the fall, Razglaz and I determined the parameters, the characteristics and properties that were to be carried by the electron—the cosmic seed, or, perhaps more correctly, the constructional quantum. As for the mechanical aspect of Project Genesis, we took a huge university synchrophasetron and rebuilt it into a cannon aimed at the beginning of time. All its power, concentrated and focused in a single particle—the constructional quantum—was to be released on October 20. Professor Razglaz insisted that I, the author of the idea, fire the world-forming shot from the Chronocannon. Because, you see, this was a unique historical opportunity. Our machine, our mortar, was to shoot not just any random electron, but a particle suitably remade, reshaped, and remodeled to bring forth a
much more orderly and solid
Universe than the one that existed at present. And we paid particular attention to the
intermediate and late stages of Cosmocreation
—the human race!

Of course, to program and pack such an ungodly wealth of information into one electron was no easy task. I must confess that I did not do everything myself. Razglaz and I shared the work; I thought up the improvements and corrections, and he translated these into the precise language of the parameters of physics, the theory of vacuums, the theory of electrons, positrons, and sundry other trons. We also set up a kind of incubator where we kept test particles in strict isolation. We would choose from among them the most successful particle, which, as I said, was to give birth to the Universe on October 20.

What good, what wonderful things I planned during those hectic days! How often did I work late into the night poring over books on physics, ethics, and zoology in order to gather, combine, and concentrate the most valuable information, which the professor, starting at dawn, fashioned into the electron, the cosmic nucleus! We wanted, among other things, to have the Universe develop harmoniously, not as before; to prevent supernovas from jolting it too much; to eliminate the senseless waste of quasar and pulsar energy; to keep stars from sparking and smoking like damp candlewicks; and to shorten interstellar distances, which would facilitate space travel and thus bring together and unify sentient races. It would take volumes to tell of all the corrections I managed to plan in a relatively short time. But these were not the most important thing. I need not explain why I concentrated on the human race; to improve it, I changed the principle of natural evolution.

Evolution, as we know, is either the wholesale devouring of the weaker by the stronger (zoocide), or the conspiracy of the weaker, who attack the stronger from within (parasitism). Only green plants are moral, living as they do at their own expense, on solar energy. I therefore provided for the chlorophyllization of all living things; in particular, I devised the Foliated Man. Since this meant the stomach had to go, I transferred to its location a suitably enlarged nerve center. I did not do all this directly, of course, having at my disposal only one electron. I simply established, in cooperation with the professor, that the fundamental law of evolution in the new, debt-free Universe would be the rule of decent behavior of every life form toward every other. I also designed a much more aesthetic body, a more refined sexuality, and numerous other improvements I will not even mention, for my heart bleeds at the recollection of them. Suffice it to say that by the end of September we had completed the World-creating Cannon and its electron bullet. There were still some highly complicated calculations to make; these were done by the professor and his assistants, because aiming for a target in time (or, in this case, before time) was an operation requiring the utmost precision.

I should have stayed on the premises and watched over everything, in view of my tremendous responsibility. But no, I wanted to unwind … and went to a small resort. Actually—to tell the truth—I was all swollen with mosquito bites, and that was why I longed for a dip in the cool ocean. If it hadn’t been for those damned mosquitoes… But I’m not going to put the blame on anything or anyone: it was all my fault. Just before I left, I had a quarrel with one of the professor’s colleagues, a certain Aloysius Bunch. Actually, he was not even a colleague, only a lab assistant, but a fellow countryman of Razglaz’s. This individual, whose job it was to monitor the equipment, demanded—out of the blue—that he be included in the list of Creators. Because—he said—if it weren’t for him, the cryotron wouldn’t work, and if the cryotron didn’t work, the electron wouldn’t act properly … etc. I laughed at him, naturally, and he appeared to back down, but actually the man began to make his own plans in secret. He could do nothing intelligent himself, but he formed a conspiracy with two acquaintances, types who hung around the Nuclear Research Institute in Bombay in hopes of finding a sinecure. They were the German Ast A. Roth and the American Lou Cipher.

As was shown by the inquiry conducted after the event, Bunch let them into the lab at night, and the rest was owing to the carelessness of Professor Razglaz’s junior assistant, a doctoral candidate named Sarpint. Sarpint had left the keys to the safe on a desk, which made the intruders’ task all the easier. He later pleaded illness and presented medical evidence, but the whole institute knew that the jerk was involved with a certain married woman, one Eve Addams, and was so busy groveling at her feet that he neglected his official duties. Bunch led his accomplices to the cryotron; they removed the Dewar vessel from the cryotron, extracted from the vessel the box containing the priceless bullet, and made their infamous parametric “adjustments,” the results of which anyone can see. All you have to do is look around you. Afterward they pleaded, each upstaging the others, that they had had the “best intentions,” and had also hoped for glory (!!), especially since there were three of them.

A fine Trinity! As they admitted under the weight of evidence and under the fire of cross-examination, they had divided up the work. Herr Roth, a former student at Göttingen (but Heisenberg himself had booted him out for putting pornographic pictures in the Aston Spectograph), handled the physical side of Creation and made a royal mess of it. It is because of him that the so-called weak interactions do not correspond to the strong, and that the symmetry of the laws of conservation is imperfect. Any physicist will immediately know what I mean. This same Roth, who made a mistake in simple addition, is responsible for the fact that the electron charge, when it is calculated now, gains an
infinite
value. It is also thanks to this blockhead that one cannot find quarks anywhere, although in theory they exist! The ignoramus forgot to make a correction in the dispersion formula! He also deserves “credit” for the fact that interfering electrons blatantly contradict logic. And to think that the dilemma over which Heisenberg racked his brains his whole life long was caused by his worst and dullest student!

But he committed a far more serious crime. My Creation Plan provided for nuclear reactions, for without them there would be no radiant energy of stars, but I eliminated the elements of the uranium group, so that mankind would be unable to produce atom bombs in the mid-twentieth century—that is, prematurely. Mankind was to harness nuclear energy only as the synthesis of the hydrogen nuclei into the helium, and since that is more difficult, the discovery could not be expected before the twenty-first century. Roth, however, brought the uranides
back into the project
. Unfortunately, I was unable to prove that he had been put up to this by agents of a certain imperialist intelligence agency in connection with plans of military supremacy… The man ought to have been tried for genocide; but for him the Japanese cities would not have been bombed in World War II.

The second “expert” in this select trio, Cipher, had finished medical school, but his license to practice was revoked for numerous violations. Cipher handled the biological side and made suitable “improvements” in it. My own reasoning had gone as follows. The world is the way it is, and mankind behaves the way it does, because everything arose by chance, that is, haphazardly, through the initial violation of fundamental laws. One has but to reflect a moment to see that under such conditions things could be worse! The determining factor, after all, was randomness—the “Creator” being the
fluctuational caprice of Nothingness
, which contracted a monstrous and nightmarish debt by inflating, without rhyme or reason, the metagalactic bubble!

I recognized, to be sure, that certain features of the Universe could be left as they were, with a little touching up and correction, so I filled in what was needed. But as far as Man went, ah, there I became radical. I crossed out all his vileness with one stroke. The foliation I mentioned above, which replaced body hair, would have helped establish a new ethics, but Mr. Cipher thought hair more important. He “missed” it, you see. One could make such nice fringes, whiskers, and other fancy things with it. On the one hand, my morality of fellowship and humanism; on the other, the value system of a hairdresser! I assure you, you would not know yourselves if it hadn’t been for Lou Cipher, who copied back into the electron from a cassette all the hideous features that you behold in the mirror.

Finally, as for Lab Assistant Bunch, though he was not capable of doing anything himself, he demanded that his cronies immortalize his part in the Creation of the World. He wanted—and I shudder as I write this—he wanted his name to be visible from every corner of the firmament. When Roth explained to him that stars cannot form permanent monograms or letters, because of their movements, Bunch desired that they at least be grouped in large clusters, or bunches. This, too, was done.

On October 20, when I placed my finger on the button of the console, I had no idea what I was actually creating. It came to light a couple of days later, when we were checking the tapes and discovered what had been recorded, by the vile trio, in our positron. The professor was crushed. As for me, I did not know whether to blow out my brains or someone else’s. Eventually reason prevailed over anger and despair, because I knew that nothing could be changed now. I did not even take part in the interrogation of the miscreants who had befouled the world I created. Professor Tarantoga told me about half a year later that the three intruders had played in the Creation a role that religion usually assigned to Satan. I shrugged. What sort of Satan did those three asses make? But the blame is mine; I was careless and left my post. If I wanted to look for excuses, I could say the culprit was the Bombay pharmacist who sold me, instead of decent mosquito repellent, an oil that attracted them as honey does bees. But in this way you could blame God-knows-whom for the flaws in existence. I do not intend to defend myself thus: I am responsible for the world as it is and for all human failing, since it was in my power to make both better.

On day 1,006, having left the local system of the Nereid Nebula, I noticed a spot on the screen and tried rubbing it off with a chamois cloth. There was nothing else to do, so I spent four hours rubbing before I realized that the spot was a planet and rapidly growing larger. Circling this heavenly body, I was not a little surprised to find that its vast continents were covered with regular patterns and geometric configurations. I landed with due caution in the middle of an open desert. It was covered with small disks, perhaps half a meter in diameter; hard and shiny, as if turned on a lathe, they ran in long rows in various directions, forming the designs I had noticed from a high altitude. After making a few tests, I went cruising just above the ground seeking an answer to the riddle of the disks, which intrigued me enormously. During a two-hour flight I discovered, one after the other, three immense and beautiful cities; I touched down in a square in one of them. But the city was completely deserted; houses, towers, squares, everything was dead; no sign of life anywhere, or any trace of violence or natural disaster. More amazed and bewildered than ever, I flew on. Around noon I found myself above a vast plateau. Catching sight of a shiny building near which there was some sort of movement, I immediately landed. A palace rose from the rocky plain, sparkling as though cut from a single diamond. A wide marble staircase led up to its gilded portal. At the foot of the staircase several unfamiliar beings were milling about. I looked at them close up. If my eyes did not deceive me, they were alive and, moreover, resembled humans so much (especially from a distance) that I dubbed them “hominiformicans.” I was prepared with this name because I had spent time during my voyage thinking up nomenclature, in order to have terms handy for such occasions. “Hominiformicans” fit the bill, for these beings walked upon two legs and had hands, heads, eyes, ears, and lips. True, the lips were in the middle of the forehead, the ears under the chin (a pair on each side), and the eyes—ten in all—were arranged like rosary beads across their cheeks. But to a traveler like me, who has encountered the most bizarre creatures in the course of his expeditions, they were the spit and image of humans.