The Investigation

by Stanisław Lem

  “Car… what car?” Williams repeated in a weak, stuttering voice. “I can’t get it out of my head, how he was rocking back and forth on his side and couldn’t do nothing, and how he was dragging those shavings along with him… if there was a rope I might have understood it, but there wasn’t no rope…”

  “What rope?”

  “A doormat? No. Rope? I don’t know. Where? God, no one ever saw anything like it. He looked like he didn’t like the light shining on him, but that’s impossible, Commissioner, isn’t it? The shavings — no! Straw… won’t… hold…”

  A long silence, interrupted by scratching, blurred noises — it sounded as if several persons were carrying on a furious whispered conversation at some distance from the microphone. A short choking, the sound of hiccups, and suddenly the voice was gruffer:

  “I’ll give it all away, I don’t want anything for myself. Where is she? Is this her hand? Is that you?”

  Again scratching, tapping as if something heavy was being moved, the sound of cracking glass, the hiss of escaping gas, some sharp static, then a deafening bass voice uttering the words:

  “Turn it off, there won’t be any more.”

  Sheppard stopped the reels, the tape stood still. He returned to his place behind the desk. Gregory was hunched over, pressing his hand against the arm of the chair and staring at his own whitened knuckles. He seemed to have forgotten about Sheppard.

  “If I could only turn everything back,” he thought. “The whole thing, all of it, to about a month ago — no, not enough, maybe a year. Ridiculous. I can’t escape…”

  “Chief Inspector,” he said at last, “if you had picked someone else instead of me, you’d probably have a perpetrator locked up for this by now. Do you understand what I’m talking about?”

  “Maybe. Why don’t you continue.”

  “Continue? When I was studying physics, the section on optical illusions in my textbook had an illustration that was either a white wine glass against a dark background or two dark human profiles against a white background. You only saw one or the other, and as a student I took it for granted that only one of the two images was genuine, although to this day I still can’t say which. That’s funny, isn’t it, Chief Inspector? Do you remember the conversation about order we once had in this room? About the natural order of things. You said that the natural order can be imitated.”

  “No, you said that.”

  “Did I? Maybe so. But what if it isn’t really that way? What if there isn’t anything to imitate? What if the world isn’t scattered around us like a jigsaw puzzle — what if it’s like a soup with all kinds of things floating around in it, and from time to time some of them get stuck together by chance to make some kind of whole? What if everything that exists is fragmentary, incomplete, aborted, events with ends but no beginnings, events that only have middles, things that have fronts or rears but not both, with us constantly making categories, seeking out, and reconstructing, until we think we can see total love, total betrayal and defeat, although in reality we are all no more than haphazard fractions. Our faces and our fates are shaped by statistics — we human beings are the resultant of Brownian motion — incomplete sketches, randomly outlined projections. Perfection, fullness, excellence are all rare exceptions — they occur only because there is such an excess, so unimaginably much of everything! The daily commonplace is automatically regulated by the world’s vastness, its infinite variety; because of it, what we see as gaps and breaches complement each other; the mind, for its own self-preservation, finds and integrates scattered fragments. Using religion and philosophy as the cement, we perpetually collect and assemble all the garbage comprised by statistics in order to make sense out of things, to make everything respond in one unified voice like a bell chiming to our glory. But it’s only soup… The mathematical order of the universe is our answer to the pyramids of chaos. On every side of us we see bits of life that are completely beyond our understanding — we label them unusual, but we really don’t want to acknowledge them. The only thing that really exists is statistics. The intelligent person is the statistical person. Will a child be beautiful or ugly? Will he enjoy music? Will he get cancer? It’s all decided by a throw of the dice. At the very moment of our conception — statistics! Statistics determine which clusters of genes our bodies will be created from, statistics determine when we’re going to die. A normal statistical distribution decides everything: whether I’m going to meet a woman and fall in love, how long I’m going to live, maybe even whether I’m going to be immortal. From time to time, it may be, statistics participate in some things blindly, by accident — beauty and lameness, for example. But explicit processes will cease to exist before long: soon even despair, beauty, happiness, and ugliness will result from statistics. Our knowledge is underlined by statistics — nothing exists except blind chance, the eternal arrangement of fortuitous patterns. An infinite number of Things taunt our fondness for Order. Seek, and ye shall find; in the end ye shall always find, if you only look with enough fervor; statistics doesn’t exclude anything, and therefore it renders everything possible, or more or less probable. History, on the other hand, comes true by Brownian motion, a statistical dance of particles that never stop dreaming about another temporal world…”

  “Maybe even God only exists from time to time,” the Chief Inspector added quietly. He had leaned forward, and with his face averted was listening attentively to what Gregory was spewing forth with such difficulty from deep inside himself.

  “Maybe,” Gregory replied indifferently. “But the gaps in his existence are very wide, you know.”

  He stood up, walked over to the wall, and stared at a photograph without seeing it.

  “Maybe even we…” he began hesitantly, “even we only exist from time to time; I mean: sometimes less, sometimes almost disappearing, dissolving, and then, with a sudden spasm, a sudden spurt that disintegrates the memory center, we merge for a moment… for a day… and we become—”

  He stopped abruptly. After a moment he spoke again in a different tone of voice.

  “Forgive me for going on like that. It’s all nonsense. Maybe… I’ve had it for today. I think it’s time for me to go.”

  “Can’t you stay a little longer?”

  Gregory paused. He gave Sheppard a surprised look.

  “I suppose so, but it’s been a long day; I think—”

  “Do you know Mailer trucking?”

  “Mailer?”

  “Big trucks with red and gold stripes. You must have seen them.”

  “Oh sure, ‘Mailer Goes Anywhere.’ ” Gregory recalled the slogan in their ads. “What about it?” He didn’t finish.

  Not moving from his chair, Sheppard handed him a newspaper and pointed to a short paragraph at the bottom of the page. “Yesterday afternoon a Mailer Company truck crashed into a freight train near Amber. The driver, who drove onto the railroad tracks even though he had seen the warning signal, was killed instantly. None of the train crew was hurt.”

  Gregory looked up at the Chief Inspector with a puzzled expression.

  “He was probably on his way back to Tunbridge Wells with an empty truck. Mailer has a garage there,” said Sheppard. “About a hundred vehicles. They transport food in refrigerator trucks, mostly meat and fish. The deliveries are made at night so the shipment will be available in the morning. Each truck has a driver and a helper — they usually start out sometime in the late evening.”

  “The paper only mentions a driver,” Gregory said slowly. He still didn’t understand any of this.

  “That’s right. After the truck is unloaded, the driver takes it back to the garage, and the helper stays behind to help move the cargo into the warehouse.”

  “The helper was lucky,” Gregory said indifferently.

  “That’s for sure. These people work very hard. They have to keep their trucks rolling in all kinds of weather. Mailer services four routes — they form a cross on the map: Bromley and Levering to the north, Dover to the east, Hors
ham and Lewes in the west, and Brighton in the south.”

  “What’s the point of all this?” Gregory asked.

  “Each driver has a regular schedule. He’s on every third and fifth night, and he gets compensatory time off if road conditions are bad. The drivers weren’t too lucky this winter. Maybe you remember, there wasn’t any snow at all at the beginning of January. We had a little snow around the third week of January, and we got quite a bit of it in February. The more trouble the highway department has clearing the snow off the roads, the longer it takes the trucks to cover their routes. Their average speed was about fifty miles per hour at the beginning of January, it fell to thirty-five in February; and in March, when the thaw set in and the roads were covered with ice, it dropped another ten miles per hour.”

  “What are you getting at?” Gregory asked uncomfortably. He was leaning against the desk with his hands spread wide apart, staring at the Chief Inspector. Sheppard gave him a bland look and asked:

  “Did you ever drive a car in a thick fog?”

  “Of course. What—”

  “In that case you know what hard work it is. For hours on end there’s nothing but pea soup in front of your windshield. No matter how hard you try, you can’t see a thing. Some people open their doors and drive while leaning out, but it doesn’t do any good. You have to depend on intuition to tell you where the sides of the road are; the fog diffuses the light of your headlights and in the end you can hardly tell whether you’re going forward, sideways, or uphill; the fog is constantly rolling and swirling around you and your eyes start tearing from the strain of trying to see through it. After a while you start seeing things — strange things… moving shadows, weird shapes deep in the fog; all alone in a dark car you lose your perception, you can hardly feel your own body — you can’t even tell if your hands are still on the steering wheel and you begin to feel numb — fear is the only thing that keeps you going. So you keep driving that way, with the sweat dripping down your back and face, the motor droning monotonously in your ears, alternately dozing off and waking up with a spasmodic twitch. It’s like a nightmare. Try to imagine what it’s like to go through that year after year. Furthermore, imagine that a long time ago you began seeing things, having visions, peculiar thoughts that you wouldn’t dare tell anyone about, confide in anyone… thoughts about the world maybe, or about things no one should believe in, or about how you should have acted toward other people while they were still alive or even now that they’re dead. During the day, at work, when you’re fully conscious, you realize that these are nothing but hallucinations, fantasies, and like any normal person you suppress them. But the thoughts go on living inside you, they appear in your dreams, they become more and more persistent. You learn how to hide them, you’re afraid that your reputation will be ruined if anyone finds out about them. You don’t want to be different from anyone else. Then you get a chance to earn a good salary by working nights, but of course you have to remain awake and alert all night; when you’re driving through the moors, you have plenty of time to think, especially when you’re alone in an empty eight-ton truck and can’t distract yourself by making small talk with the helper when you really… So there you are driving your truck month after month; autumn passes, whiter comes, and you’re caught in a thick fog for the first time. You try to shake yourself free of the hallucinations, you stop the truck, get out, rub your face and forehead with snow, and drive on. Hours go by. The fog is like milk all around you; it’s as if you’re surrounded by an overflowing, infinite whiteness — as if such things as ordinary roads, muddy, lit-up streets, small towns, houses never existed. You’re all alone, completely and eternally alone in the dark little cab of your truck and you stare frontward, blinking your eyes, trying to rub something out of them that becomes clearer and clearer, more and more insistent no matter how much you try. You’re driving and driving, and the vision goes on for an hour, maybe two, maybe three; finally there comes a moment in which it is so compelling, so uncontrollable, that it seizes you, it becomes you, and soon you feel better, you finally know what has to be done, so you stop the truck and get out…”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Gregory shouted. He was trembling.

  “There are 218 drivers working out of the Mailer garage in Tunbridge Wells. In a group that big there’ll always be at least one who… who’s a little different. Who — let’s say — is not completely healthy. What do you think about it?”

  Sheppard was calm; he was speaking in an even, almost monotonous tone, but there was something relentless in his voice.

  “The incidents all took place between midnight and dawn in small provincial mortuaries. Aside from a few differences in detail, the individual cases are tied together by one connecting link — a certain consistency that no human being could have planned. No one, no human mind would have been capable of doing any of this. We’ve already agreed about that, haven’t we?

  “Now, let’s look at the case in the light of certain unusual circumstances surrounding it. First, a driver’s work schedule. Second, each consecutive incident took place farther and farther away from the ‘center,’ Tunbridge Wells, and almost at the center of the ‘center’ we find the Mailer garage, with empty trucks pulling in regularly from midnight on. Why did each subsequent incident take place farther and farther away from the ‘center’? Because the average speed of the trucks was decreasing, and even though they always left Tunbridge Wells at about the same time, the drivers were getting to their destinations later and later and as a result were beginning their return trips later and later; consequently, it was taking them longer to cover the same distance.”

  “How do you know?” Gregory interrupted.

  “From the fact that the fog is at its worst for a period of about two hours every night. This is the period in which it is most effective in inducing fantasies and delusions in drivers making their return trips alone. Even so, if road conditions are good on the return trip, the two-hour period doesn’t affect them as much as it does when the roads are covered with snow. So we find another regular item: the more resistance the snow offers to the tires of the truck, the less resistance the driver offers to the two-hour fantasy-producing period. Furthermore, the more snow on the road, the lower the temperature, and the lower the temperature, the worse the truck’s motor performs; therefore, we find, we get a constant if we multiply the difference in temperature by the product of the time between two incidents and the distance from the center to the site of an incident. As road conditions deteriorate, the dispatcher at the Mailer garage gives the drivers longer breaks between trips. Even so, on each subsequent trip the driver has less and less endurance during the two-hour period, and as a result he covers less and less distance. The second coefficient — the time between two trips counted in days — increases proportionately, and that’s why the product remains the same, speaking roughly.”

  “In other words… one of the drivers… is a paranoiac, is that it? He works on the night shift, stops his truck somewhere along the way and steals a body… but what did he do with them?”

  “At dawn, when he drove out of the foggy area, he regained his senses — he was coming back into the ordinary world — so he did his best to dump the evidence of his night of insanity. There were plenty of opportunities — after all, he was covering quite a bit of territory, with plenty of hills, shallow ravines, thickets, rivers, bushes.… Terrified, unable to believe what had happened, he would resolve to get help for himself, but he was afraid he’d lose his job, so when the dispatcher gave him the date of his next trip he wouldn’t say a word and right on schedule he’d be back behind the wheel again. He must have known the topography of the whole region by memory — every road, every estate, every grade crossing, every building — he knew exactly where all the cemeteries were located…”

  Gregory’s gaze moved from the Chief Inspector’s face to the open newspaper.

  “That’s him,” he said.

  “The madness must have increased steadily,
” Sheppard answered slowly. “The memory of deeds committed, anxiety that he would be exposed, growing distrust of his friends and co-workers, sick interpretations of innocent things other people said to him — everything must have combined to make his condition worse, to increase the tension in which he was living. You can see that it must have been getting harder and harder for him to come back to his senses; his condition was deteriorating steadily, his attention span was decreasing, he was less able to concentrate and more likely to become a victim of circumstances. For example — this guy—”

  Gregory suddenly walked away from the desk and sat down on a chair near the bookshelf, drawing his hand over his face.

  “So that’s how it happened,” he said. “An imitation of a miracle… ha, ha… is all this true?”

  “No,” Sheppard replied serenely, “but it might be. Or, strictly speaking, it can become the truth.”

  “What are you trying to say? Come on, Chief Inspector, I’ve had enough fooling around.”

  “This isn’t my theory, Gregory. Calm down. Out of six incidents — are you paying attention? — out of six incidents, this truck driver,” — he tapped the newspaper — “was definitely on the road near the place in question three times. In other words, three of the times, during the hours just before dawn, he drove past the places where the corpses disappeared.”

  “What about the other times?” Gregory asked. Something strange was happening inside him. An unexpected feeling of relief, of hope, was expanding his chest; it seemed to him that he was breathing more easily.

  “The other times? Well… about one incident… Lewes… we don’t know anything. For the second, the dead truck driver had… an alibi.”

  “An alibi?”

  “Yes. Not only did he have the night off but he was in Scotland for three days. We checked — there’s no doubt about it.”

  “Then it wasn’t him!” Gregory stood up, he had to get on his feet; the jolt resulting from this movement knocked the newspaper off the edge of the desk.