Memoirs of a Space Traveler

He giggled, but I did not hear him. I felt that I was falling into an abyss. I looked at the living face contorted with joy, then at the dead face behind the glass pane, floating like some horrible underwater monster… and I could not speak. It was quiet. The rain had almost stopped; only the faint gurgling of the spouts could be heard intermittently through the wind.

“Let me go,” I began, but did not recognize my own voice.

I closed my eyes and repeated dully:

“Let me go, Zazul. You have won the bet.”

IV

One autumn afternoon, as it was growing dark in the streets outside and a fine gray rain fell steadily — the kind of weather that makes any memory of the sun unreal and that keeps a man glued to his seat by the fireplace — as I sat engrossed in old volumes (searching not for content — the content I knew well — but for myself from years ago), suddenly there was a rapping at my door. A violent rapping, as if my visitor, by not touching the bell, wished to announce at once that his mission was of a desperate nature. Putting aside my book, I went into the corridor and opened the door. I saw a man in a dripping oilskin; his face, twisted in great fatigue, glistened with raindrops. He did not look at me. He leaned with both his wet, reddened hands against a large chest that he had apparently carried up the flight of stairs himself.

“Sir,” I began, “what do you…” but corrected myself: “Can I help you?”

He made some vague waving gesture and continued panting; I realized then that he intended to bring his burden into my apartment but had not the strength. So I took hold of the soaked rough cords around the package and pulled it into the corridor. When I turned around, he was standing at my heels. I showed him the coatrack; he hung his coat up, put his hat (drenched to a shapeless felt rag) on the shelf, and on none-too-steady legs entered my study.

“What can I do for you?” I asked after a long pause.

It dawned on me that here was yet another of my unusual guests. Still not looking at me — absorbed, apparently, in his own thoughts — he mopped his face with a handkerchief and shivered at the touch of his wet shirt cuffs. I said that he should sit by the fireplace, but he did not respond. He seized the dripping crate and pulled, pushed, and turned it this way and that; it left a muddy track on the floor — an indication that during his journey here he must have put it down on the sidewalk once or twice to catch his breath. Only when it stood in the middle of the room and he could keep a constant eye on it did he take notice of me. He mumbled something, nodded, awkwardly went to an empty chair, and sank into its well-worn depths.

I sat opposite him. We were silent a long time, but somehow this seemed quite natural. He was not young; fifty, perhaps. His face was irregular, strikingly so, the left side smaller, as though it had fallen behind in its growth. The left corner of the mouth, the left half of the nose, and the left eyelid, all pinched, produced a permanent expression of gloomy puzzlement.

“You are Tichy?” he said finally, when I least expected it. I nodded. “Ijon Tichy? The traveler?” He leaned forward and looked at me doubtfully.

“Who else would be living in my apartment?”

“I could be on the wrong floor,” he muttered, as if preoccupied by something far more important.

Abruptly he stood up. He began to smooth out his jacket but then realized the futility of this — no ironing could have helped his clothes, which were threadbare in the extreme. He drew himself up and said:

“I am a physicist. Molteris is the name. You’ve heard of me?”

“No.” I really had not.

“It doesn’t matter,” he mumbled, more to himself than to me.

He was not so much morose as meditative; he was weighing some decision he had made, that had led to his visit, but now new doubts assailed him. I could read this in his furtive glances. I got the impression, almost, that he hated me — because of what he wanted, because of what he had to tell me.

“I’ve made a discovery,” he said suddenly in a hoarse voice. “An invention. Something that never before existed. Never. I don’t take others on faith; others don’t have to take me on faith. The facts will suffice. I’ll prove it to you. Prove everything. But — I’m not yet completely…”

“You’re afraid?” I suggested in a friendly, reassuring tone. They are, after all, children, these people — mad, brilliant children. “Afraid I’ll steal, give away your secret? Rest easy. This room has seen inventions…”

“None like this!” he exploded categorically, and for a moment in his voice, in his eye, there was infinite pride, as if he were a lord of creation. “Let me have a pair of scissors,” he said, again gloomy. “Or a knife.”