— It's still a shame it happened like that. The fact is that heaven and earth are only linked by means of the word — the present operation has precisely made that clear yet again.
— Exactly. This operation was the period we put after that conversation.
— It would be nice if people were scared to death when they hear what has happened — namely, that the testimony has been returned — and the shock brought them to their senses.
— No one will ever know. And anyway: senses? Don't make me laugh. Did you really think, that brood would give up anything at all? Come now. What they once have, they want to keep. That wretch Lucifer knows exactly what he's doing. With each new invention, people have stolen a piece of our omnipotence and in so doing have demonized their own reality step by step. Under the terms of the contract he has turned them into vampires, who are sucking us dry under his patronage. With their rockets they are already traveling faster than the wind, sound even, and one day they will approach the speed of light; with their television they are in fact already virtually omnipresent — they can see in the dark, they can look, into the insides of a human being without opening him up; with their computers they have a complete operating and monitoring system, in which they're already vying with your department; they can observe elementary particles, and they already know what happened ten to the minus forty-third seconds after our explosion of light. Beyond that limit their theories have failed up to now; for the time being all their calculations result in infinity, and let's hope that they never realize the deeper meaning of that; but by now I'm not sure of anything anymore.
— I've something to tell you about that in a moment.
— If they want, they can even destroy the earth. Excuse my saying so, but that power really was our prerogative. Meanwhile they're busy destroying the planet without meaning to, and to be on the safe side, they're already walking on the moon as a jumping-off point for the rest of the universe. In the foreseeable future they will have mastered our absolute privilege: the creation of life, as a pendant to its wholesale extermination. A virus to begin with, then a microbe, then a worm, Caenorhabditis elegans probably, and one day they will produce people in their own image — and these days that's often as vacuous as a dolclass="underline" instead of an expression, they have things, like cars. Of necessity they will become peoplelike things. Human knowledge doubles every twelve years — now, in their 1985, they know and can do twice as much as in their 1973, and as omnipotence draws closer, literally everything becomes possible down there. Knowledge itself is power — who do you think thought up that aphorism? That damn Francis Bacon again, of course. Knowledge is power sure enough, and not just over nature, but over people, and us too. The earth has changed once and for all into his doomed House of Solomon and people no longer need us — we've become fairy stories to them, curiosities, literature. . Do you remember that string of questions that the Chief once fired at Job — whether he could raise his voice to the clouds, and whether he could shut out the sea with doors, and heaven knows what else? No, he could not, only the Chief could do that, and now just look at everything our Job can do. There are some things that are brand-new even to our Chief. Lucifer has won, and there's no use in beating around the bush any longer. Through his devilish move with the treacherous viscount, he has proved the stronger — there's no getting away from it. Less than five years after Bacon's death, Galileo and Descartes wrote their fundamental works, the Dialogo and the Discours de la methode, the beginning of the modern age, which set us off along the fateful road to Auschwitz and Hiroshima and the decoding of DNA. Old Goethe had foreseen that course of events, although he gave it a worthily positive twist: he has his hundred-year-old Faust end up as a technocrat who subdues the sea with dikes and canals — that is, he turns nature into a human creation.
— A kind of Dutch polder engineer from the Ministry of Transport, in fact, who shuts out the sea with doors. Perhaps Goethe was thinking of Leeghwater; he was very famous as early as the seventeenth century with his Book of the Haarlemmer Meer.
— Maybe, but I can't concentrate on literary historical reflections at the moment. You're distracting me from my argument — what was I talking about?
— About the general downfall of everything.
— Yes, and especially our own. Because that was what Lucifer was after from the very first day: our complete humiliation and destruction. In the last analysis human beings leave him cold. And for that matter don't forget that the damn technology also has all kinds of pleasant aspects. Not only the construction of polders, but take medical technology for example. Think of local anesthetic, to mention one small thing. Did you think that anyone at all would want to go back to having a tooth pulled without anesthetic? And can you blame them? How dreadful to have teeth! No, take it from me — that it's hopeless. Via people's bodies, Lucifer has gotten a grip on their minds. Our greatest mistake is that we have always underestimated him. We thought things wouldn't be that bad, because who could challenge the Chief? Well, he could. Sometimes I think — it's a shame to have to say it — that he knows people much better than the Chief. The Chief is an idealist, a darling, who wants the best for people without knowing what he has taken on. But Lucifer knows that they would prefer to let heaven and earth go under rather than get rid of their car. He has ensured that their salvation now resides in things. He knows that they'd sooner get rid of their own legs. So heaven and earth will go under. And there will be nothing left to be lost in that Twilight of Humankind, because it has been devilishly betrayed, sold and melted down to make machines. A motorist is not a pedestrian in a car but a totally new creature, made of flesh, blood, steel, and gasoline. They are modern centaurs, griffons, and the actual mythical creatures are the only thing that will ultimately remain, because they have been created at the cost of nature, human beings, us and the Chief. With every new technological gadget, human life has automatically become more absurd. And our world will finally contain only that triumphant Negative in the ice-cold flames of its hell, with in heaven the eternal agony of the Chief as the flickering ember of a great Light. Looking back on it, it's all been for nothing. What was I actually going to say? I've totally lost the thread. Yes, I'm getting more and more confused. I can feel the decay and exhaustion in myself, too. Go on. I'm listening.
34. The Gift
"Healthy baby born to brain-dead mother," reported the morning paper the following day; Ada survived the operation without complications, and the weeks following — during which Quinten had to remain in the incubator— brought new changes.
The director of the observatory kept his word: he had made an appointment for Max with an old friend from his student days, a Baron Gevers, who lived a few miles south of the radio observatory at Westerbork and, as he had informed Max, had a place to rent. It was a sunny June day when Max drove there from Dwingeloo, with the caretaker's description of the route in his head. On his right, the sun flickered like a strobe light between the alder trees along the provincial road as they flashed by, which meant he had to resist something like a threatening hypnosis; as always he glanced at the space on the left of the road where there were two trees missing.
After driving along the main highway for a few miles, he took a turn-off into a winding woodland path by a collapsed barn. There were still fallen trees everywhere, their crowns forever in their bare wintry state, their roots, which had been torn out of the earth, already dried out and whitish. To his amazement he suddenly saw a group of Indonesian boys creeping through the bushes, in improvised battle dress, as though there were a war on — a moment later he had the feeling that he had dreamt it. And now and then the wood gave way to meadows with a farmhouse, fields, maize plantations, the path crossed an unmanned level crossing — and at the moment he saw the house looming up, he thought of what Goethe had once said, according to Onno: "Humanity begins with barons."