View from Another Shore : European Science Fiction
Page 28
Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure
165
rocket: it was more like a globe, or a huge drop of liquid. It made him
feel a twinge of fear. The firing mechanism was altogether different as
well; he could not understand how it worked. The grey robots let him
go wherever he wished and look at anything he cared to look at. Their
smiles were strangely apologetic, as though it were not quite right for
such a serious-looking man to be wasting his time with such
foolishness as rockets. Nemo went back to the rendezvous point.
His men were coming up in the morning mist, one by one. They were
wearing their old suits again. This time they would be leaving without
the fanfare, without the flags, but it would be better for them all. They couldn’t possibly stay on Earth, they would never be able to adjust to
this strange life . . .
That was more or less what he said to them on the little rocket base.
The mist almost choked him and he had to clear his throat. Then he
read off the roll: the men were to answer to their names and step
forward to shake hands with him. They answered and stepped
forward to shake his hand.
But they were robots. They were the grey doubles of his men, who
had sent the robots rather than come themselves. Not one of those
ungrateful sons of bitches had reported for duty. The captain rubbed
his eyes. It must be the mist, he thought. And he sat down on the
nearest stone because he found himself somehow unable to breathe
properly.
‘Captain Feather?’ A broad-shouldered fellow bent over him. He
was wearing a beautifully brushed uniform, covered with gold braid,
such as Nemo had never seen before.
‘Yes.’ He looked at him closely.
‘They sent me over from the central office. With your permission,
I’ll take over the command . . .’ Yes, of course, it was himself. Just a bit greyer, that was all.
‘If you wish. If they wish’, answered the captain, who felt defeated.
His double saluted respectfully and stood smartly to attention just as
Feather always did. In a short time he heard his own voice coming
from the rocket, giving brief, staccato commands, reports and orders,
just as he had done in previous years. In a few minutes the rocket
silently moved away from the ground—what kind of fuel do they have in
there?—and slowly rose toward the clouds. He waved after it. And
looked around, just in case anyone was watching. It was silly, after all, to wave at a machine that worked so precisely all by itself.
He turned away and went slowly back to his old home. This time
there were crowds of people in the house. His son’s last symphony
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Josef Nesvadba
was being performed. He recognized those strange sounds that had
upset him so much before he had left on his last flight. But now they
no longer seemed so odd: he found himself beginning to listen
attentively. He remained where he was, standing by a tree, at a
considerable distance from the audience; the breeze carried snatches
of music to him. Far up in the sky he saw the rocket pass out of sight.
And it occurred to him suddenly that if his son had stood before
those pilgrims from distant galaxies, he might have been able to
answer their questions.
‘I must tell them not to send rockets out to look for the answer to
the fundamental question of life’, he thought. ‘We must find the
answer down here, on Earth.’
The orchestra fell silent and the harp sang out alone. It reminded
him of something very beautiful.
translated by IRIS URWIN
ROMANIA
The Altar of the Random Gods
ADRIAN ROGOZ
Everything began in a fit of absentmindedness. Homer probably didn’t
even know that Lethe’s quiet waters have their source in our world.
And, since every effect has a cause (which in turn is an effect), it may
be that forgetfulness made its appearance with the first stirrings of life, as did life’s negation, death.
Homer Hidden was sitting in the cabin of an express car that was
taking him from Mobile across Alabama to Huntsville on the Tennes-
see border.
His eyes were fixed on the tachometer needle which hovered
around the 590 mph mark, but his thoughts were moving into the
past, a time of cruel agitation for him, and into the even more difficult future that awaited him at Houndsville, as he had ironically dubbed
the city of his destination. Yet, though his thoughts were grim, they
gave him no hint of the terrible thrill in store for him in the next four minutes. How could his weak mind, which had so little insight into
his own nature, have doubted the competence of the tiny electronic
brain which was guiding him, cushioned on air, over the concrete-
and-titanium super-highway? Why did he have to quarrel with
Barbara, throw aside his past life and leave Mobile? Life itself
moved at dizzying speed! Homer sat there, slack-jawed, hardly
realizing that his car was now flying at 600 mph even though it
seemed motionless. The deceptive thing (some would say ‘the para-
dox’) about speed was that whatever its degree, you soon got used to
it and ceased to be conscious of it. Then they increased the speed. This
was what made a mess of life for Homer: the continuous, mad
acceleration.
Homer looked at his watch. There was still time enough before he
reached his destination, he thought: time enough to be bored. He
didn’t suspect that he had only three minutes now. ‘Progress’, he
muttered, as though it were a dirty word. Barbara, too, invoked
progress, but she was really concerned only with status. Status was
another illusion, as soon as it became an obsession and led you to
ruin. Without thinking, he pushed the visibility button on the wall.
Before him appeared the exciting panorama of a line of pylons with
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Adrian Rogoz
thousands of cars travelling atop them, but the picture left him cold
now and even made him squeamish. Besides, the rules for travel on
the expressways recommended that those with weak nerves should
not look at the trajectory of the cars. To the left he could make out the dozens of colours that indicated different speeds: many-coloured
blobs that stayed to the rear if they were slanting off to out-of-state
destinations. To the right was a cliff that towered over the waters of
the Tombigbee River. In front of and behind Homer, cars travelling at
the same speed as his seemed to be vibrating and stationary. Some-
times the cars came within a hundred feet of each other, but they
could not collide since the motors produced air cushions in front and
back as well as beneath the cars. In addition, there seemed to be a
kind of telepathic communication between the electronic brains
operating over the same roadway; thanks to this interconnection
the speeds were regulated relative to each other.
In case of accident the cars were usually parked in a vertical
position. But Homer was suddenly terrified at the thought of a mad
chaos which a single collision would cause. There was only a minute
and a half now to the
fatal moment, and under the influence which a
dreaded future exercises on our minds, Homer began to feel uneasy.
He suddenly sensed how irreparable his break with Barbara was, and
immediately, stimulated as it were by his emancipation from the iron
necessity he had felt weighing on him hitherto, he found himself
filled with immense and unreserved love for her. Her green eyes and
chestnut hair—43 seconds, 42—her scarlet mouth and the downy
nape of her neck—38 seconds, 37—her breasts and shoulders and
knees, that had all the innocence of things forever vanished—29
seconds, 28—again her cascading hair, no, done up in a coil and then
cascading down; and the mouth that asked for unheard-of things—23
seconds, 22—again her eyes, ever larger, ever deeper; her whole
figure with its different postures, as though she were always poised
for play yet serious as though for a ritual—17 seconds, 16—he seemed
now to see her across a dark, impassable stream—13 seconds, 12—
‘Impossible!’, he groaned in despair; one of them must surely die for
the other!—9 seconds, 8—‘Barbara, come back!’, he shouted, though
it was he that had gone away—5 seconds, 4—but he was already
annihilated, and only the great inertia of desire had made him move
his arm like one entranced—3 seconds—and his hands—2 seconds—
and his finger which reached out to touch the return button—1.5
seconds—but fell instead on the accelerator—1 second—and in a flash
of realization he absurdly shouted ‘Stop!’ —zero!
The Altar of the Random Gods
169
These days the manual operation of a hovercraft flying at full speed
was as rare as the pulling of an emergency cord on the trains of long
ago. You could ask for a change of lane or for parking, both
manoeuvres being effected by a shift of the craft to a vertical position; in any case, the commands could not be obscure or contradictory. On
most routes no passenger intervention was possible since the entire
trip was programmed; in the case of a major crisis the whole vehicular
system simply ejected the damaged car. But many technocrats had
palaces along the Gulf of Mexico, and so the route Homer was
travelling was a privileged artery. This is why the mechanical pilot,
receiving the wrong command, tried to satisfy the client. But then
came the second, senseless command.
For a few fractions of a second the electronic brains along hundreds
of miles of skyway emitted insane signals. They seemed to be trying
desperately to understand the two contradictory manoeuvres, to put
them into the system, lessen their effect, isolate the catastrophic
accident. Over hundreds of miles the instrument boards sounded
the alarm. The most surprised passengers were those at the head of
the immense column, for they were suddenly subjected to frightful
overloads. The lead cars received the first command and accelerated.
One after another they leaped forward like jets of water. Guardpilots
flying over the convoy were open-mouthed at the sight. But then,
almost simultaneously, came Homer’s ‘Stop!’ Overtaxed by these
successive commands or finally grasping their illogicality, the mega-
route system decided that Homer’s car should leave the caravan.
What happened, in fact, was that Homer’s cabin was catapulted
vertically upward, while the rest of the car disintegrated. Then began
the sequence of events that would make Homer famous.
Normally (in a ‘normal’ accident!) Homer’s cabin, once catapulted
aloft, should have become a small plane with enough power to travel
a few miles. But it didn’t happen that way. Because of the extra-
ordinary pressure exerted on them, the cars behind Homer’s were also
catapulted upward. To travellers on other roadways the maximum
speed lane seemed suddenly to explode and to toss up a cloud of
beetles. The others landed safely outside the super-highway, but
Homer’s cabin struck the one immediately following it. The impact
was appalling. Barbara’s eyes leaped from their sockets, then grew
dark. The brain that had summoned up her image had the terrifying
sensation of coming apart. In the collision of the two machines
Homer’s capsule was damaged; it had the misfortune (a relative
thing!) to break one wing. The capsule then plunged down on to
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Adrian Rogoz
the nose of another car on the maximum speed lane. The shock
caused this car in turn to be suddenly transformed into a flying cabin.
Like a puck, Homer’s inert capsule was catapulted into the clouds a
second time. It crossed the line of cliffs and arrowed toward the river,
where a huge helicopter was buzzing pleasantly above the water. Less
than a minute had passed since the mad scene had begun, but the
helicopter pilot was already alerted. His television cameras were
zooming in on the super-highway, for transmission to the world’s
sets, at the instant when Homer’s capsule burst upon the screen.
As chance would have it (but chance, again, is a relative thing!)
Homer was still unconscious when his capsule was split in two, like an
apple, by one of the helicopter’s giant rotors. Millions of viewers
watched in astonishment as the man fell like a die tossed from the
cup.
Just as the immense sword sliced through the foreign body, a huge
metallic arm with a plastic net was shooting out, ready to catch
Homer. But chance was cleverer than technology. One half of the split
cabin pushed the net aside as it fell, and the man was pushed through
the torn side of his half by the speed of the falling ruin. At the same
moment the shock brought him back to consciousness. He almost lost
it again straight off.
It was a nightmarish awakening to find himself plummeting
towards a shapeless, seething something-or-other. Around him a
crowd of machines were whizzing at great speeds, trying now to
avoid the poor human body. During his frightful, fantastic somer-
saults in the air, Homer saw—or thought he saw, for in the few
seconds since he had recovered consciousness, his mind seemed
suspended in a void—heaven and earth sickeningly intermingling
above an abyss of foaming waters that were sucking him inexorably
down.
Before he touched the surface, Homer, who couldn’t swim, had
enough presence of mind to pull the collar of his suit over his head,
like a cowl, and sleeves over his hands, like gloves. He knew that
these would keep him from drowning: as soon as he entered the
water, his body would be covered with a membrane that would
isolate him and also draw oxygen from the water.
But so violent was his fall that the poor fellow was knocked groggy
again. Perhaps he struck something at the bottom of the river (if so,
we’ll never know exactly what it was), but in any event his protective
envelope was torn open while he was still half-unconscious.
At this point, chance, which was to make Homer famous, again
The Altar of the Random Gods
171
took a hand; on the river bottom there
was a factory and Homer
landed near it, with the current carrying him on to a mass of
radioactive mud which the factory spilled out towards the river bank.
*
*
*
*
*
When he came to, Homer found himself stretched out on a sandy
slope; a cement projection had kept him from rolling into a basin of
green-black mud left by the waves.
He crawled up the slope a bit. To either side of the Tombigbee the
unbroken streams of cars glittered hypnotically. Overhead, the
majestic sun was setting above these man-made inverted rainbows.
Homer felt alone and shattered, though without pain. The beauties
spread about him meant nothing to him. He moved on, stumbling and
leaning on the translucent handrail. His brain seemed to contain a
palpitating little sun, that faded and brightened in his arteries. He
asked himself no questions but moved forward with a kind of dumb
stubbornness, babbling sounds that had no meaning, except perhaps
to him.
When he reached the temple of the random gods, he was ex-
hausted. He entered the building as though it were a refuge,
completely forgetting the sarcasm he had formerly heaped on the
gods of these cybernetico-statistical altars. (Some young enthusiast, a
few years earlier, had constructed robots with immensely complex
circuits and astonishing memories, and installed them in every home
on the continent.)
Homer leaned against the wall. A pleasant coolness bathed him; the
pure (conditioned) air smelled of snow, ozone and spring flowers. A
smiling Barbara came to meet him, her cheeks rosy from a just-ended
game of tennis. Soft electronic music made her image waver. Then he
heard the hum of a loudspeaker and a metallic voice spoke: ‘Come
closer’.
Beside the altar was a lighted zirconium lamp; Homer limped
towards it. Behind the altar were three windows of water-green
glass, covered with elegant equations like arabesques on a Persian
carpet. Under the arch of each window was a large crystal parallele-
piped containing sextillions of cells. Two eyes, two ears, two nostrils
and a mouth gave each of the three random gods a disconcertingly
human appearance. They looked like three likeable (if grotesque)
monsters, but Homer stared at them with the superstitious terror of a