“I’m sure it will,” I answered distractedly. We walked back to our cabin, while I puzzled over that stupid locker. So he was concealing…? And that entire conversation…? My cheeks started to burn so badly I rubbed them despite myself. Lord, this was madness. And what had we actually decided? Nothing? Oh right, tomorrow morning…
Suddenly I was overcome by fear almost as powerful as the previous night. My encephalogram. A complete recording of all my cerebral processes, converted into the oscillations of a bundle of rays, to be sent down below. Into the depths of that elusive, boundless monster. How did he put it: “If she vanished, you’d suffer terribly, right?” An encephalogram is a total recording. Including subconscious processes. What if I want her to disappear, to perish? Otherwise why would I have been so horrified when she survived that terrible attempt? Can a person be responsible for his own subconscious? If I’m not responsible for it, then who could be…? What foolishness! Why the hell had I agreed the recording should be of me… Of course, I could examine it beforehand, but I wouldn’t be able to read it anyway. No one would. Specialists can determine only what the subject was thinking about, and even then they’re just generalizations: for example, they can say he was solving math problems, but they have no idea which kind. They say it’s not possible to know, because the encephalogram is a random combination of a whole mass of simultaneous processes, only some of which have a mental underpinning. And the subconscious parts…? These they’re unwilling to discuss at all. So they’re a very long way from being able to decipher a person’s memories, suppressed or otherwise… Then why am I so afraid? I myself had told Harey earlier that the experiment wouldn’t do any good. Because if our neurophysiologists can’t read a recording, then how could this utterly alien, black, liquid monster…
Yet it had entered into me, I have no idea how; it had sifted through my entire memory and found its most painful atom. How could that be doubted? And without any assistance, without any “radiation transmission” it had broken through the double hermetic plating, the thick armoring of the Station, had found my body inside it, and had made off with its plunder…
“Kris…?” said Harey quietly. I was standing at the window, gazing with unseeing eyes at the beginnings of the night. The stars were veiled by a delicate film, faint at that geographic latitude — a thin, even covering of clouds that were so high the sun, from far below the horizon, pervaded them with the subtlest silvery-pink glow.
If she disappears afterwards, that will mean I wanted it. Because I killed her. Should I not go there tomorrow? They couldn’t force me. But what would I tell them? Not — that. I couldn’t. No, I needed to pretend, to lie, all the time, always. Though that was because there may have been thoughts in me, intentions, hopes, cruel, wonderful, murderous, yet of which I was quite unaware. Human beings set out to encounter other worlds, other civilizations, without having fully gotten to know their own hidden recesses, their blind alleys, well shafts, dark barricaded doors. To give her up to them… out of shame? To give her up only because I’d run out of courage?
“Kris,” Harey whispered even more softly than before. I felt rather than heard her coming noiselessly up to me, and I pretended I hadn’t noticed. At that moment I wanted to be alone. I had to be alone. I still hadn’t found strength inside myself. I’d reached no decision, no resolution. As I stared at the darkening sky, at the stars that were only a spectral shadow of terrestrial stars, I stood there motionless; in the emptiness that was gradually taking the place of the whirlwind of thoughts from a moment before, there arose without words the dead, indifferent certainty that deep down, in a place I could not reach, I had already chosen; and, pretending that nothing had happened, I didn’t even have the strength to despise myself.
Thinkers
“Kris, is it because of this experiment?”
I flinched at the sound of her voice. I’d been lying sleepless for hours, staring into the darkness, alone, because I couldn’t even hear her breathing, and in the tangled labyrinth of nighttime thoughts that were feverish, half logical, and thus acquired a new dimension and meaning, I’d forgotten about her.
“What… How did you know I wasn’t asleep…?” I asked. There was fear in my voice.
“From the way you’re breathing,” she said quietly, as if apologetically. “I didn’t mean to bother you… If you can’t talk, don’t…”
“No, why not. Yes, it’s the experiment. You guessed.”
“What do they expect it to accomplish?”
“They don’t know themselves. Something. Anything. This isn’t Operation Thought, it’s Operation Despair. Now they only need only one thing, someone who’ll have enough courage to make a decision, but most people see that kind of courage as ordinary cowardice, because it’s a retreat, you know, surrender, an escape that’s unworthy of a person. As if worthiness was plodding forward and getting bogged down, and drowning in something you don’t understand and never will.”
I broke off, but before my quickened breathing calmed down I gave vent to a new burst of anger:
“Of course there’s never any lack of guys with a practical outlook. They said that even if contact isn’t made, still, by studying the plasma and all those crazy living cities that pop out of it for a single day then disappear again, we’ll learn the secrets of matter, as if they didn’t know they’re fooling themselves. They’re wandering around in a library of books written in an unknown language, and just looking at the colors of the spines… That’s how it is!”
“Are there no other planets like this?”
“No one knows. Perhaps there are, but we only know this one. In any case it’s something extremely rare, unlike Earth. Us, we’re common, we’re the grass of the universe, and we take pride in our commonness, that it’s so widespread, and we thought it could encompass everything. It was a kind of schema we took with us when we set off intrepidly and joyfully on our long journey: other worlds! But what exactly are they, those other worlds? We’d conquer them or we’d be conquered, there was nothing else in those wretched brains of ours. It wasn’t worth it. It really wasn’t.”
I got up; in the dark I found the first aid kit and a flat bottle of sleeping pills.
“I’m going to get some sleep, darling,” I said, turning towards the darkness, from where there came the high-pitched hum of the air conditioning. “I need to sleep. Otherwise I really don’t know…”
I sat back down on the bed. She touched my hand. I put my arms around her, unseen, and held her without moving until my grip was loosened by slumber.
In the morning, when I woke fresh and rested, the experiment seemed trivial to me; I couldn’t understand how I could have attached so much importance to it. I didn’t care either that Harey had to go to the lab with me. All her efforts became futile after I’d been gone from the room for a few minutes, so I gave up any thoughts of further attempts, even though she herself urged them (she was even prepared to be locked up somewhere); I suggested she take a book to read.
I was interested less in the procedure itself than in what I’d find in the laboratory. Aside from certain evident gaps in the bookcases and the cabinets with chemical glassware (in addition to which, panes were missing in the doors of several of the cabinets, while one of the doors itself had a star-shaped crack as if there’d been a recent struggle whose traces had been hurriedly though rather carefully covered over), there was nothing out of the ordinary in that blue and white room. Snaut, who was bustling about among the equipment, behaved entirely correctly, accepting the presence of Harey as something quite ordinary, and bowing slightly to her from a distance. As he was moistening my temples and forehead with conductive gel, Sartorius came in through a small door that led to the darkroom. He was wearing a white lab coat, over which he had a black anti-radiation apron that reached down to his ankles. Brisk and matter-of-fact, he greeted me as if we were just two employees among a hundred at some big institute on Earth and had seen each other just the previous day. It was only now I noticed that the lifeless expression of his face came from contact lenses, which he wore instead of eyeglasses.