unnerving experience, and I’m getting old. You know I’ve never
shouted at you before. But I’ve got the feeling those creatures could
have told us much more. Perhaps life asks more questions, the more
perfect it gets.’
‘The main thing is, we saved our homes’, said the second officer.
‘Saved them? From what? Questions aren’t dangerous to anyone.’
‘They’re starting up again!’ The doctor ran in from the watch room
without knocking or saluting. ‘They’re not going back to Androme-
da—they’re heading out into space again. And they’re slowing down.’
‘That means they still think they’ll find the answer to their
questions somewhere in the universe.’
‘Fundamental questions, sir’, his adjutant reminded him.
‘Fundamental questions.’ Captain Nemo was still angry with his
adjutant. He turned to the crew and read the orders for the next day.
Never before had they heard him speak so quietly.
‘He’s getting old’, they said to each other. But they were wrong.
The captain had just begun to think.
Nautillus 300
On the journey home no one bothered to think up any problems for
the crew, and no one bothered to keep the men from worrying. The
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captain sat in his cabin all day long, watching through the window
the dark void that surrounded them, the mysterious depths of
eternity—perhaps not so eternal after all—the utter infinite. The
cooks began to hand out better food, the officers relaxed; roll call
was held when the men turned up for it, and nobody bothered much
about the flight itself. At first the men were contented; then they
began to feel afraid, lost their appetites—the mess hall was next to
empty at mealtimes—suffered from insomnia and were prey to
disquieting thoughts. And in this state they landed. Needless to say,
the rocket returned to the point where it had taken off. It was late
evening; as far as they could see, there had been no changes at the
base since the day they left. The moment they landed, old fashioned
luggage trailers drove up from the hangars and men in overalls helped
them down and into the trailers. They smiled and shook hands with
the newcomers warmly, looking very friendly. But that was all. There
was no crowd of welcoming officials, no reporters, no curious
onlookers and not even a government delegation complete with
military band. Nothing. Just a run-of-the-mill arrival, as though
they had come back from a stroll around Mars. The captain felt
injured.
‘Didn’t you know we were going to land?’
‘Of course we knew. You interrupted traffic on the main line to
Mercury. We had to take five rockets off, since we had no guarantee
you’d be on time.’
‘We’re always on time!’, the captain shouted angrily. ‘Is there no
higher officer coming to thank us?’, he added in a haughty voice.
‘Tomorrow, tomorrow morning. In your quarters’, replied the man
he had been talking to. He was tall, with an ashen face, and did not
look well. He asked the crew to take their places in the trailers and
take only essential luggage with them. They drove off with mixed
feelings. This was not the way they had imagined their return to the
Earth they had saved.
‘We might just as well have sent the monsters instead. They’d
probably have made a bigger impression.’ They had just turned into
the main road when they heard an explosion behind them. The
captain swung around to look. At the base, someone had set fire to
the Nautilus: the tanks had just gone up. Nemo and the men with him
beat on the door of the truck in a rage, but the trailer only picked up
speed.
‘And we didn’t even bring a gun with us’, the second officer
growled. The captain’s adjutant leaned over and tried to jab a pen-
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knife into the rear tyre as they drove along at top speed. A voice came
from the loudspeaker:
‘Please behave reasonably, men. We must ask you to remember
that you come from an era that sent several rockets a day into space. If
we tried to save all of those that return to Earth, there would soon be
no landing room left. You are the three-hundredth crew to have
returned after hundreds of years in space. We cannot understand why
you people were so anxious to fly around—in fact, we find it
incomprehensible. But we do try to make allowances, and you
must also try to understand our position.’
The adjutant gave up: the trailer had solid rubber tyres, and now
they were drawing up in front of the camp. It was a huddle of low
buildings similar to those of the era they had known. Porters came
running toward them and picked up their bags. They all looked pale.
The captain liked their quarters.
‘I should like to thank your commanding officer’, he said to the
drivers.
‘You must wait until tomorrow’, they smiled shyly. ‘Tomorrow
morning, please.’ And they saluted and drove off.
As Nemo approached the dormitory he heard loud laughter. He
opened the door: his men were standing silently, hesitantly by their
bunks, and in one corner lay an elderly bearded fellow in the tattered
remains of an astronaut’s suit, rocking with laughter.
‘He says—’
‘Do you know what he’s been telling us?’
‘—that they aren’t men’, the captain heard someone say.
‘Robots or something like that . . .‘‘Black and white servants’’ . . .
‘‘Grey doubles’’ . . .’
Nemo strode over to the old man, who was holding his sides in
uncontrollable laughter, and dealt him several resounding slaps. The
man jumped to his feet and clenched his fists. But a glance at the
captain’s broad shoulders calmed him down, and he could see that the
rest were all against him.
‘They don’t even know what this means—brawling’, he snapped.
‘And they don’t like it if we fight.’
‘Who’s ‘‘we’’?’, asked the captain.
‘Who we are? The small crew of a private rocket from California
that set out to see whether there was anything to be exploited on
Mercury. Only our joystick went out of action and we bounced back
and forth between Mercury and Earth for years before someone
happened to notice us and bring us down. I can tell you we felt
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161
pretty foolish when we found out that the people who had saved us,
who played cards with us and drank grapefruit juice with us all the
way here were really machines from a factory. Yes, gentlemen, you’ll
hear all about it from Dr Erasmus tomorrow. Just wait until morning.’
The Fundamental Question of Life
‘You’ve come back to Earth at a time when technical progress has
been completed’, Dr Erasmus told them the next morning. He was
almost paler than his black-and-white servants. ‘Man began to invent
machines to save him drudgery. But work was really ideal for man.
Man
is best suited to do his own work; the only thing he cannot stand
is the humiliation. As soon as machines had been invented that could
in fact do all jobs, there was only one problem left: what the machines
should look like. It didn’t seem appropriate to create models of
attractiveness; some people might fall in love with their own ser-
vant-machines, might hate them, punish them, take revenge on
them—in short, transfer human emotions to their relationships
with the machines. It was also suggested—this simply to give you
the whole picture—that the form of a monkey or a dog be used. But
the monkey was not considered efficient enough, and the dog,
though he has been man’s companion for ages, cannot clean up
after man, or do his work for him, or look after him so well that man
can devote himself to the two things only man can do: create and
think. Finally, the servants were built, in black and white, and each
man was given one so like himself as to be indistinguishable from
himself, a grey double, as it were, who did all his work and looked
after the man in whose image it was made. You can order doubles like
that for yourselves, if you like our society and decide to try to adapt to it. You won’t need to take care of anything; all the servants are
directed from a common computer centre which follows a single chief
command: look after humanity. Thus the technical problems have been
solved for good, and man is free of work for all time.
‘Of course, if you prefer to go on living in your old way—many
elderly people do find it difficult to adapt themselves to something
new—you can remain here. This camp has been set aside for you and
anyone else who may return to Earth from space.’
It sounded so strange. ‘What did people do with their time, then?’
Nemo asked.
‘I can show you’, answered Dr Erasmus, and switched on the
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telewall. They saw a garden, where Dr Erasmus’s double was strolling
along deep in discussion with several friends. Only then did they
realize that the man they were watching on the telewall was the real
Dr Erasmus and the one talking to them his grey double. Dr Erasmus
on the telewall suddenly turned around and smiled at the crew,
waving a friendly hand before going on with his talk as though there
was nothing more important on Earth . . .
The crew of the Nautilus decided to have a look at the new society.
Dr Erasmus’s double smiled: everyone started out this way; but, alas,
not all retained their initial enthusiasm.
The captain’s first errand was to the Historical Institute. There he
asked to see the records of his last flight—the date of their take off and the date on which their death was announced. He could find nothing
to fall back on. There was no mention of cosmic pirates anywhere; the
minister had been so afraid of creating a panic that he had forgotten to
leave any evidence which could help the men now.
‘Look up Feather for me’, he ordered. The double looked at him in
perplexity. ‘Leonard Feather, the famous hero, also known as Nemo’,
the captain went on, looking around to see if anyone he knew
happened to be listening. But the double still looked blank.
‘Don’t you mean Igor Feather?’ Igor was the name of the captain’s
half-blind son. ‘Dvork, Janaek, Feather? The three greatest Czech
musicians?’, the robot asked politely.
‘Musicians?’
‘Composers, that is . . . Feather is certainly the greatest of the three, as every child knows today. The house where he was born has been
preserved for a thousand years in its original state; concerts and
evening discussions on music are arranged there. You will find the
place full of people’, the robot stressed the word people. And so the
captain came home after a thousand years.
Fortunately, there was no concert scheduled for that day. He was
afraid that even after so many years he would not have been able to
stand the caterwauling. Their old home now stood in a park, and all
the adjacent houses had been torn down. While he was still a long
way off, he could see two gold plates gleaming on the front of the
house. One commemorated his son and the music he had written,
celebrating the young man’s service to the cause of music. The
other—Nemo approached it with quickening pulse—commemorated
his wife. No one had put up a plaque to the memory of Captain Nemo.
He looked around thoroughly, but he could find no mention of
himself.
Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure
163
‘She died a year before the first performance of Igor’s concerto in
Rudolfinum Hall . . .’, somebody said behind him. He started and
looked around to see his adjutant walking out of the shadow of the
bushes. ‘She had to take care of your son, who had gone completely
blind. She looked after him for twenty years, and he died in her arms.
She didn’t even live to see his name established: he became famous a
year after her death. That woman was a saint, sir.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘Because I loved her.’
‘You never said anything about it.’
‘Of course you never saw anything strange in my coming to see you
at home, but I was happy just to be near her. And you deceived her
with that black girl who got married a week after you started out on
your last flight.’
‘That’s a lie.’
‘It’s the truth. She had twelve children. You can trace her
descendants if you like. There’ll be hundreds of them by now. I was
one of your officers on the Nautilus only because of your wife, sir. I
wanted to show her it wasn’t so hard to be a hero, and that I could
stand as much as you could, even if my shoulders weren’t so broad.
But she only loved you. And you loved that other girl.’
‘Another one of life’s puzzles, isn’t it? Another fundamental
question.’
‘There’s no question about it. It’s a fact. You helped to kill her . . .
It’s a filthy business, and that’s the truth. You behaved shamefully to
her.’ His adjutant had never spoken in that tone before. Nemo
turned on his heel and walked away. He saw that once more he
would have to do something for his crew, find them another difficult
task, for this new age was too much like those empty days out there
in space.
In the Astronautics Institute they would not even hear of taking
him on. ‘We have our own robot crews. Why risk your life? Why
bother with things that can be done better by machines, while you
neglect those things that only the human mind can do?’
‘Here are my papers.’ He showed them his records like a desperate
man who had aged prematurely. ‘I can pilot a rocket as well as any of
your robots. And I’ve got a crew of men who’ll follow me to Hell if
need be.’
‘No human organism could hold out in our current programme of
space flight. We have no job you could do. We’re investigating the
curvature of space, the qualities of light, whether even higher speeds
/>
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can be reached—all tasks beyond your powers. Devote yourself to
philosophy, art, aesthetics. That’s the coming field, after all . . .’
‘I’m too old’, replied the captain, rising from his chair. The grey
robot said he was sorry. The wall of his office yawned and his human
image leaned into the room. He was about fifty, a Bohemian with a
palette and brush in his hand, and an enormous canvas behind him.
He had a ringing voice.
‘If anyone says that the time for philosophy has not yet arrived, or
that it has passed, it’s as good as saying that the time for happiness has not yet come, or that there is no longer any such thing . . . That’s
Epicurus, my friend, wisdom that’s thirty-five hundred years old.
Find yourself something creative to do. Everyone has some sort of
talent—something that makes him aware he is alive, that proves his
own existence to him, something he can express himself best in.
Leave those technical toys to machines and children; there’s nothing
in them to interest a grown man. We have more serious problems.
The most urgent are the fundamental questions of life . . .’ Nemo had
heard that before.
‘Has anybody found any answers yet?’, he asked.
‘My dear sir, humanity is still too young for that. It’s not like
smashing the atom or orbiting around Jupiter. These questions need
time and patience, they require a man’s whole being. The answer is
not only given in words, but in the way you live . . .’
‘I’m too old to change. I’m prepared to turn up at the old take-off
ramp tomorrow, with my whole crew’, Captain Nemo decided with
finality.
The painter shrugged his shoulders, as if to say he was sorry that he
had wasted his time. He turned back to his canvas, and the wall closed
behind him. His grey servant bowed the captain out.
‘As you wish. But I’ve warned you: it is suicide.’
The Final Answer
The captain could not sleep in the morning. He recalled how little
enthusiasm his men had shown the evening before, how uncon-
vinced some of them were that it would be better for them to move
off. Still, in the end he managed to persuade them, and they had
promised to come. He dashed out before it was light and stumbled up
to the ramp on foot. Robots were already hard at work there. The
rocket they were preparing for flight did not look anything like a
View from Another Shore : European Science Fiction Page 27
