Memoirs of a Space Traveler

“Of course.” I was in possession of myself now. There is something of the investigator in me, and I know when to remain calm. “Mallengs published a couple of papers on the denaturation of proteins…”

“Excellent,” he said, now altogether professorial, and eyed me with new interest, as if discovering in me a quality for which I deserved some small respect. “But besides that he developed a method of synthesizing large molecules, artificial protein solutions that were living, you see. They were a kind of gluey jelly. He doted on them. Gave them their daily bread, so to speak. Sprinkled sugar, carbohydrates on them, and those jellies, those shapeless proto-amebas swallowed everything so nicely and kept on growing. First in small Petri dishes… he transferred them to larger containers, fussed over them… his lab was full of them. Some died on him and decomposed, from the lousy diet, I assume. The man went off the deep end after that, kept racing around with that beard of his, which he was always accidentally dipping into his beloved glue, but he made no more progress. He was too stupid, he needed something more — up here.” Zazul put his finger to his head. Its bald spot gleamed under the low-hanging lamp like a piece of yellowish ivory. “And then I got to work, Tichy. I won’t go into the details; it’s very specialized, and those who could truly understand the greatness of my achievement have not yet been born. In short, I created a protein macromolecule that can be set on a definite course of development, as an alarm clock can be set… No, that’s a poor analogy. You know about monozygotic twins, of course?”

“Yes, but what does that have to do with it — “

“You’ll see in a moment. The fertilized egg divides into two identical halves that yield two perfectly identical individuals, two neonates, two mirror-image twins. Imagine, now, that there is a way to create, by studying thoroughly the organism of a mature, living person, the egg from which he was born. One could therefore produce the twin of this person, although with many years’ delay. Do you follow?”

“Why,” I said, “even if that were possible, you would obtain only half the egg — only one gamete — and it would immediately die.”

“Maybe for some people, not for me,” he replied haughtily. “I take this artificially created gamete, set it on a definite course of development, place it in a nutritive solution and that in an incubator, like a mechanical womb. I transform it into a fetus at a rate a hundred times faster than normal fetal development. In three weeks the embryo is a child; in a year, after the application of other procedures, the child has a biological age often; in four more years he is a man of forty. And that is exactly what I did, Tichy.”

“The homunculus!” I cried. “The dream of the medieval alchemists! I understand. You claim — but even if it were so, that you created that man, do you think you had the right, therefore, to kill him? And that I’ll go along with you in the crime? You’re mistaken, badly mistaken, Zazul…”

“I am not finished,” Zazul said coldly. His head seemed to sprout directly from the misshapen mass of his hump. “First, of course, I experimented on animals. In those jars over there you have pairs of cats, rabbits, and dogs. The jars with the white labels contain the original creatures; the jars with the black labels contain the duplicates that I created. There is no difference between them. If you switched the labels, it would be impossible to tell which animal was born naturally and which came from my retort.”

“All right,” I said, “that may be true. But why did you kill him? Was he retarded? Physically underdeveloped? Even in that case you had no right…”

“You insult me!” he hissed. “He was in complete possession of his faculties, Tichy, and fully developed, equal in every particular to the original as regards the soma… but as for the mind, his potential was greater than that shown by his biological prototype. Yes, there is something more than the creation of a twin; this copy is more than a duplicate. Professor Zazul surpassed nature. Surpassed it, do you understand?”

I was silent. He rose, went to the tank, stood on tiptoe, and with a single movement pulled off the tattered curtain. I did not want to look, but my head turned in that direction and I saw, through the glass, through the cloudy alcohol, the softened, pickled face of Zazul… the large hump afloat like a bundle… the flaps of the jacket spread out like soaked black wings… the whitish gleam of the eyeballs… the matted gray of his beard. I stood thunderstruck while Zazul piped:

“You see, this was to record the achievement permanently. A human being, even one created artificially, is mortal. I wanted him to last and not return to dust, I wanted to keep him as a monument, yes. However, you must know, Tichy, a basic difference of opinion arose between us, between him and me, and as a result it was not I, no, but he who ended up in the jar. He, Professor Zazul, while I, I am in fact the…”