Memoirs of a Space Traveler

“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.”

“That’s true,” the professor said dryly. He hunched over and seemed to become smaller. “But now that you’ve said it, you’ve spared me long arguments, for I suppose you understand by now why I created them?”

“I can guess. But tell me yourself.”

“All right. Once — a very long time ago — I doubted the reality of the world. I was a child then. The so-called malice of inanimate objects, Tichy — who has not experienced it? We can’t find some trifle, though we remember where we put it last; finally we find it somewhere else, and get the feeling that we have caught the world in the act of some imprecision or carelessness. Adults say, of course, that it’s a mistake, and the child’s natural distrust is suppressed… what they call le sentiment du déjà vu, the impression that we’ve already been in a situation that is undoubtedly new and that we are experiencing for the first time. Whole metaphysical systems, like belief in the transmigration of souls and in reincarnation, have arisen on the basis of such phenomena. And furthermore, the law of series, the repetition of particularly rare phenomena — they are found so often in pairs that physicians have a term for this: duplicitas casuum. And finally… the ghosts I asked you about. Mind reading, levitations, and — which is the most inconsistent with the foundations of our knowledge, the most inexplicable — cases, albeit rare, of predicting the future, a phenomenon described since earliest times, contrary to all probability, for every scientific view of the world rules it out. What does it all mean? Can you tell me or not? But you lack the courage, Tichy. Look…”

He approached the shelves and pointed to the highest box, which stood apart.

“The madman of my world,” he said, and his face broke into a smile. “Do you know far he has progressed in his madness, which has isolated him from others? He devotes himself to the search for the deficiency of his world. Because I do not claim, Tichy, that his world is flawless. The most efficient mechanism can jam at times; a draft may move the cables and they may meet for a split second, or an ant may get inside the drum. And do you know what he thinks, that madman? He thinks telepathy is caused by a short circuit in the wiring between two different boxes… that a glimpse into the future occurs when the reader, shaken loose, jumps suddenly from the right tape onto one that is to be activated many years hence… that the feeling that he has already experienced what is actually happening to him for the first time is caused by a jamming of the selector; and when it does not just tremble in its copper setting, but swings like a pendulum after being touched, say, by an ant, then his world witnesses amazing and inexplicable events. Someone is carried away by a sudden irrational emotion, someone begins to prophesy, objects move by themselves or change places… and above all, as a result of these oscillations, the law of series appears! The grouping of rare phenomena, which are pooh-poohed by the world at large, culminates in the assertion — on account of which he will soon be placed in an asylum — that he himself is an iron box, as are all who surround him, that people are only mechanisms in the corner of a dusty old laboratory, and the world, with its charms and horrors, is an illusion. And he has even dared to think about his God, Tichy, a God who once, when He was still naïve, performed miracles. But then His world taught him that the only thing He was free to do was not intrude, not exist, not change anything in His handiwork, for one can trust a divinity only if He is not invoked. Once invoked, He becomes imperfect — and powerless. And do you know what this God, this Creator thinks, Tichy?”

“Yes,” I replied. “That He is the same as the madman. But, then, it is also possible that the owner of the dusty laboratory in which WE are boxes on shelves is himself a box, a box built by another, still higher scientist, who has original and fantastic notions… and so on, ad infinitum. Each one of these experimenters is God, the creator of a universe in the form of boxes and their fate, and under him he has Adams and Eves, and over him his God, one rung up in the hierarchy. And that is why you’ve done this, Professor…”

“Yes,” he replied. “And now you know as much as I do, and further conversation is pointless. Thank you for coming, and good-bye.”