Memoirs of a Space Traveler

“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.”