Under the Glacier (14 page)

Pastor Jón: There have mercifully always been sheep present whenever mankind was saved, Hnallþóra dear.

Miss Hnallþóra: Speaking for myself, if professors and doctors are going to come here on top of bishops and saviours, and the wretch of a calf dies, then I’ll lock up the farmhouse and no one will get anything from me alive or dead—so now you know, pastor Jón!

26

Intergalactic
Communication

Prof. Dr. Godman Sýngmann, originally Guðmundur Sigmundsson, is descended, as already stated, from merchants and commission agents or sheriffs from the trading posts farther west. He is a big, thickset old man, not too fat but heavy in the shoulders and beginning to stoop; he would probably be a full six feet tall if he were stretched. He is splay-footed, and carries his head sunk into his neck like some seabirds, the guillemot, for example, or more particularly the penguin. There is no sign of his having knees when he walks. He has an enormous face. His eyes have the moist sheen of a snake’s. For an elderly man, his hair is wavy and vital, chestnut in colour and with a life of its own like Saint Olaf’s beard after his death; a grey toothbrush moustache. The lower lip sags in a loop to one side; in dogs this is called baring the teeth; perhaps the professor once had a protruding tusk there that was extracted, leaving a kind of sag in the lip; perhaps the professor has also clenched his teeth too hard at one time or another. The pastor’s empty room is filled by this man alone, yet he did not move much, at least never more than necessary; even his hand movements were measured, perhaps long training in self-control, or just a sign of old age. He also tended to speak in rather short sentences. A hint of a grin accompanied his words, as if the speaker expected that the listener wouldn’t take them too seriously. He screwed up his eyes and looked sidelong at the person he was talking to, like an experimental scientist keeping an eye on the indicator on some sort of dial while he is making up his concoctions. Dr. Sýngmann is wearing a long and bulky wind-cheater jacket, and has a faded, worn old hat, badly shrunk and much too small, festooned with flies, spoons, and colourful tin minnows.

Hello, John—with these words Dr. Sýngmann makes his greeting; shaping his mouth like any elderly American, and a little hoarse.

Pastor Jón Prímus: Mundi? So you’re here! Well, well. Hnallþóra thought as much. And as splay-footed as ever.

Dr. Sýngmann: And you pigeon-toed!

Pastor Jón: Yes, always stubbing my toes on my heels. The late pastor Jens of Setberg used to say that pigeon-toed people eventually turned in on themselves, and splay-footed people turned out from themselves. May I offer you a strip of dried halibut to keep a young man and myself company?

Dr. Sýngmann: No, John.

Pastor Jón: It costs £10 a kilo.

Dr. Sýngmann (in English): Skip it, John.

Pastor Jón: It’s no use talking English to me.

Dr. Sýngmann: By the way, who is this good-looking young man?

Pastor Jón: He is the bishop’s emissary.

The Doctor absently gives the undersigned his hand and says: Launch out into the deep, young man.

Embi: Thank you.

Pastor Jón: Have a seat, Mundi dear.

Dr. Sýngmann was holding a stick of the kind that upper-class Englishmen carry when they go horse racing; these contraptions are called shooting sticks. They can be converted into a chair out-of-doors. The stick’s grip consists of two handles that can be opened out to either side to form a seat; other devices serve to stabilise it at the other end. These are what people sit on at horse races. Instead of accepting a seat on pastor Jón’s wooden benches, Dr. Sýngmann manipulates his stick and sits on it. Pastor Jón Prímus becomes enamoured of this stick at once; he gets up and examines it high and low, and says he simply must get a stick like it for himself; he asks what it costs, but Dr. Sýngmann has forgotten. When the parish pastor has studied this shooting stick minutely and noted carefully how the Doctor adjusts it and sits down on it, he says: Well, old friend, where have you come from?

Dr. Sýngmann: From Ojai.

Pastor Jón: Good farming there?

Dr. Sýngmann: Yes and no.

Pastor Jón: And what are you up to yourself ?

Dr. Sýngmann: I’ve had a house there for a few years.

Pastor Jón: What attracted you there?

Dr. Sýngmann: The light of the world.

Pastor Jón: Spin us more yarns, old chap.

Dr. Sýngmann: Nada, John, nada.

Dr. Sýngmann moved his shooting stick over to the window because that pest of a ewe was bleating outside: Nice to hear sheep bleating. We don’t have many sheep in Ojai.

The undersigned isn’t sufficiently knowledgeable in languages always to be able to identify a foreign accent, for instance in such a complex man as this. Often he emits a distinct American sound. Sometimes, on the other hand, there occurs a guttural
r
that could originally be an Icelandic speech defect whose roots go back to Danish summer traders, called a burr. Then suddenly there would come a Greek
chi
-sound as in the word
loch
. In Spanish this sound is denoted by a
j
in the place-name the Doctor had mentioned: Ojai.

Pastor Jón Prímus: Where is Úa?

The Doctor was a little taken aback; he turned round in his seat and looked searchingly at the parish pastor. Úa? he says, as if he had no idea what’s what. She’s been dead for a long time. Didn’t I tell you that at the time? She sent me a telegram and said she was dead. Let’s hope she’s not hiding somewhere in Paris, or Switzerland.

Pastor Jón: I seem to recall, the last time you were here, you said you were going to perform a miracle on her.

Dr. Sýngmann: Did I say that?

Pastor Jón: How did it turn out?

Dr. Sýngmann: I changed her into a fish.

Pastor Jón: The devil you did! How did you manage that?

Dr. Sýngmann: Nous sommes en route pour l’épagogique et
l’astrobiologie
.

Pastor Jón: I don’t speak French.

Dr. Sýngmann: I cultivate epagogics and astrobiology.

Pastor Jón: Is that so!

Dr. Sýngmann: We induce life. We induct life from one body to another: biotelekinesis. Likewise between planets, astrobioradiophony. I travel with determinants from three corners of the globe and am myself the representative of the fourth. We have been making experiments on fish. We are going to induct men into fish and fish into men. We have made such progress that we have not only raised insects from the dead but also week-old fish fry, and even minnows. In America we have a collection of individual creatures, both insects and lower vertebrates, that we have resurrected. We hope that with special methods we shall manage to preserve life for up to as much as three thousand years. Perhaps we shall one day reawaken the mummies in Egypt. This is all based on cosmobiological foundations. We have achieved intergalactic communication.

Pastor Jón: I think I’d better have some more dried halibut. (To the undersigned.) Do help yourself to more dried halibut, young man, before it resurrects. You’re a great one for the tall stories, Mundi! Do carry on.

Dr. Sýngmann pulls out a leather case containing long corona cigars: Wouldn’t you like a Henry Clay, John?

Pastor Jón: I’ll stick to the fish. What’s dried halibut in Greek, again? Well, well, old friend! But if Úa has now become a fish, and at the same time is hanging about in Paris and Switzerland, how is it possible to reassemble her?

Dr. Sýngmann: One can be one’s own ghost and roam about in various places, sometimes many places simultaneously. Perhaps I didn’t approach it quite correctly. A ghost is always the result of botched work; a ghost means an unsuccessful resurrection, a shadow of an image that has perhaps once been alive, a kind of abortion in the universe.

Pastor Jón: Ah yes, the universe, my children, as the late pastor Jens used to say—that’s saying something. You should offer this young theologian something good to smoke.

Mercifully no attention was paid to the undersigned in this respect; indeed, I would have been in poor shape had I started puffing at a large-size Henry Clay. In company that was so far above me, I enjoyed the privilege of being allowed to dissolve and coalesce with the elements of the air as soon as I had been greeted with a suitably meaningless compliment. I sat slightly behind the visitor, and the silent recorder ran smoothly between the changes of spools from my parka pocket. Unfortunately, for a long time there is a piercing bleat at thirty-second intervals—it’s the ewe looking for her lamb outside on the paving.

Pastor Jón: Well, old chap, as always you have no small undertakings ahead of you, I should say. The resurrection of a fish, is that it?

Dr. Sýngmann: Yessir, the resurrection of the fish. It was three years ago. I happened to be here at the Bláfeldará when the telegram came saying that Úa was dead. Naturally I went on fishing. A few minutes later I had on my hook the largest salmon that has ever taken my fly in any river anywhere in the world. It took so zestfully that it snapped my rod and swam off with the stump. That evening we found the fish far down the river, where the gut had snagged round a jutting stone. It was a hen-fish. She weighed 40 pounds. I have had this fish preserved. I realise at once that this was a special fish that had a special mission. And now I have come here with my three determinants.

Pastor Jón: Is it true that these men are saviours of mankind? Or merely apostles?

Dr. Sýngmann: That would be a misnomer. I consider them to be scientists. I recruit laboratory workers, not hangers-on. We have been investigating the law of determinants, and for that we have a laboratory in California. We draw upon the experience of at least three major religions, and furthermore, all known methods of scientific verification.

Pastor Jón: A great enterprise, my dear Mundi, a great enterprise.

Dr. Sýngmann: Could become that. Not least at Glacier. This place is unique on earth.

Pastor Jón: Yes, we here at Glacier have Snæfellsjökull. That’s a fact.

Dr. Sýngmann: Iceland could set the pace in this field.

Pastor Jón: Yes, it has a very beneficial effect on people to sit here for example, just north of the homefield hillock where I have my shed and contemplate the glacier in good weather.

Dr. Sýngmann: People with second sight all over the world know this spot, have always known it. Here in the glacier is one of the most remarkable natural power stations in this solar system, one of the All-thought’s induction centres. With the law of determinants one can harness this power.

Pastor Jón: Forgive me, Mundi, but what are you talking about?

Dr. Sýngmann: I am talking about the only quality that was worth creating the world for, the only power that is worth controlling.

Pastor Jón: Úa?

Dr. Sýngmann in a tired, gravelly bass: I hear you mention once more that name which is no name. I know you blame me; I blame myself. Úa was simply Úa. There was nothing I could do about it. I know you have never recovered from it, John. Neither have I.

Pastor Jón: That word could mean everything and nothing, and when it ceased to sound, it was as if all other words had lost their meaning. But it did not matter. It gradually came back.

Dr. Sýngmann: Gradually came back? What did?

Pastor Jón: Some years ago, a horse was swept over the falls to Goðafoss. He was washed ashore, alive, onto the rocks below. The beast stood there motionless, hanging his head, for more than twenty-four hours below this awful cascade of water that had swept him down. Perhaps he was trying to remember what life was called. Or he was wondering why the world had been created. He showed no signs of ever wanting to graze again. In the end, however, he heaved himself onto the river-bank and started to nibble.

Dr. Sýngmann: Only one thing matters, John: do you accept it?

Pastor Jón: The flower of the field is with me, as the psalmist said. It isn’t mine, to be sure, but it lives here; during the winter it lives in my mind until it resurrects again.

Dr. Sýngmann: I don’t accept it, John! There are limits to the Creator’s importunacy. I refuse to carry this universe on my back any longer, as if it were my fault that it exists.

Pastor Jón: Quite so. On the other hand, I am like that horse that was dumbfounded for twenty-four hours. For a long time I thought I could never endure having survived. Then I went back to the pasture.

Dr. Sýngmann: You are in actual fact a Mohammedan, John.

Pastor Jón: Primuses are repaired here.

Dr. Sýngmann, impatient and a little irritable: Yes, but it’s out of the question! I don’t accept it.

Pastor Jón: I begin to look forward to the spring during the last months of winter as soon as the first kittiwake comes flying in over the land. In summer there grows this little flower that dies. In the autumn I begin to look forward to winter, when everything falls silent except the surf, and rusted locks, useless pots, and broken knives pile up around this jack-of-all-trades. Perhaps one will be allowed to die by candlelight at Christmas while the earth sails into the darkness of the universe where God lives and all the Christmas elves.

Dr. Sýngmann: Haven’t I told you over and over again, John, that I don’t accept it! In this centre here on the glacier we shall produce scientific interstellar bioinduction. We shall here and now establish communion with far-off planets where life is so advanced it cannot die; do you hear what I’m saying, John! We shall not stop before the aim is achieved, with the help of the law of determinants, of inducting life here that cannot die but can only grow stronger and more beautiful.

Pastor Jón: Don’t frighten me, my dear chap.

Dr. Sýngmann: We live here on the edge of space. An attempt is being made to live here. The experiment has got no further than that, as of now. Perhaps the experiment will fail utterly. We live in a world where demons prevail; murder weapons are what they live for, murder is what they believe in, but they lie about everything else. And when I say the world is governed by nothing but demons, who will continue to be demons until they have destroyed the world, I am not using profanities; on the contrary,
demon
is a scientific term, a formula covering a specific chemical composition without connotations from politics, religion, or moral philosophy.