Paradox: Stories Inspired by the Fermi Paradox

by Resnick, Mike

  That evening we dined at a restaurant named Hanaczik, at the very top of Jacobsbergergasse. The main course was of middling quality, but dessert – apple torte and fine-whipped cream – was delicious, and the claret belonged in the first class. We strolled side by side along to Gutenbergplatz where the Theatre is situated, half-thinking of seeing a play. But we had not planned ahead and by the time we got there the performance had already started. It was, moreover, a Germanic translation of a Dion Boucicault play, and Albert was of the opinion that we could see Boucicault any day of the week at home. “We’re in Rhineland!” he told me. “We ought to immerse ourselves in Germanic culture!”

  “Oh that we could walk, arm in arm, through these streets,” I declared.

  He hushed me at once. “You wouldn’t enjoy being arrested, Harold.”

  “These people?” I said, gesturing. The Platz was thronged. “Ordinary Germans going about their business – they pay us no mind. It’s as if they don’t see us. We are merely two foreigners, babbling in a barbarian tongue!”

  “They’d see us pretty quick if we started behaving as spoony young lovers,” Albert retorted, in a quiet voice. “And you’d see them too, if you looked properly –” So I looked again; and saw that the crowd of people possessed a markworthy homogeneity. Black-clad people, moving without timidity and yet with unobtrusive haste across the square. Jews. For the Friday evening commences their Sabbath, and I suppose they were returning from their temple to their homes. “These Hebrew gentlemen will be even less disposed to notice us,” I said. “Keeping themselves to themselves.”

  We returned to the hotel, and sat in the lounge smoking and reading. Albert made his slow way, brow furrowed so deeply it was as though the book were a plough, carving up the soil of his head, through a work of German philosophy – that same Freddie Nietzsche upon whom the clever set in London is so keen at the moment. I read for the second time my copy of Herbert Wells’ War of the Worlds.

  The following day we caught the train to Frankfort.

  On the train I completed my re-read of the Wellsian story. There was something about it that snagged meaningfully upon my imagination, though I couldn’t decide for myself what this something was. As storytelling it made no absurd pretence to great art; Wells himself, a man I knew distantly – the acquaintance of an acquaintance – was no Goethe, or Shakespeare, or Homer. He was, in point of fact, a servant’s son, bred in the honest humbleness of the Kent countryside. To meet him in the flesh was to be struck by his ingenious cleverness and his bouncy earnestness – both characteristics as clear markers as you could hope to see of his lack of gentility. True breeding cannot be counterfeited. This same fellow was now making a name for himself in the literary world with nothing more than a Penny Dreadful sensibility and a few handfuls of journalistic glitter cast upon the page. Nonetheless, his was the book that refused to leave my mind! Having read it twice, I was now certain I would read it a third time. What was it that so fascinated me? I asked Albert’s opinion on the matter, but he was dismissive. “That trash,” he said. “To call it a penny dreadful overvalues the work. Farthing dreadful, let us say. Lights on Mars? Strange creatures descending from the sky to wreak havoc in…”

  He stopped speaking. For a moment we looked at one another. Indigestion clawed at my guts. “Sausage is supposed to be,” I said, looking out of the window. “I mean, the people of Germany are alleged to be masters of the making of sausage! And yet my poor old guts are rumbling on that breakfast meal.”

  “Mine too,” said Albert, returning to his philosophical treatise. “Intestines having a fearful job chewing over this stuff. It’s unaccountable, I must say.”

  “You usually have the most enviable digestive constitution,” I observed.

  “Indeed!”

  After a while the sensation passed out of my midriff, and I felt more at ease. For a while I attempted to peruse a local newspaper, by way of improving my German; but Albert grew cross-tempered with my continual interruptions to his reading, asking after the meaning of this word, or that word. So I threw that project over, and instead stared out of the window of our compartment. The train line passed for many miles through woodland; but then it broke free of the trees and ran alongside the Rhine. I stared at the waterway, which returned a muddy-silver version of the wide sky back to the heavens. The trees on the distant far bank were small as grass blades. The motion of the train, and the pacifying fullness and inexhaustible flow of the river, soothed me. Then, but then, oh but then fleetingly I saw something reflected in the body of the water – a mile-long snake in the sky, with fanning blue feather-like protuberances on its tail, and lights gleaming as portholes along its length. I cried out, and looked up, and there were tears in my eyes: I was weeping with a kind of terror of recognition, a strange throat-closing emotion combining horror and delight. Why delight?

  The Central Railway Station of Frankfort is the largest and handsomest structure of its type I have encountered upon my travels in Germany (I hear the Berlin Banhof is larger, but I have yet to go to Berlin). The station overlooks its own spacious Bahnhofsplatz, from which wide and tree-lined streets radiate – Kronprinzenstrasse, Kaiserstrasse, Taunusstrasse. Inconveniently, however, the station is located a distance west of the centre of the city, and the hotels of Frankfort do not send omnibuses to meet the trains. We were obliged therefore to hire a private cab, and some foolish delay in loading our luggage was the occasion for Albert to lose his temper. It is not like his normal character to rage so, but something had agitated his balance of mind, and he railed at the blank-faced driver in fluent German for five full minutes. Eventually we clambered aboard and rode bumpily to the hotel Schwan, on the Goethe Platz. According to my Baedeker, it was at this luxurious establishment that the peace of 10th May 1871 was concluded, the defeated remnants of once-mighty Martial France forced to capitulate to the resurgence of German might. And what opulence there was inside! A large gilded reception hallway, and blood-red carpets soft as silk up the two arching stairways. The Schwan also operates a mechanical elevator, in which, with some small apprehension at its prison-like sliding grill and confined space, the two of us ascended to our room.

  I’m sorry to say we quarrelled like children as soon as the porter left us to ourselves. I rebuked Albert for his ill-tempered words to the cabriolet-driver, and he retaliated with hot words about me sticking my nose in when I ‘couldn’t even get my mouth around the simplest deutscher terms’. We parted badly, and I tried to cool my fury by wandering through the streets of this strange city with only my guidebook to direct me. I stood beneath Schwanthaler’s Monument of Goethe, erected in 1844, twelve years after the poet’s death. The reliefs on the front of the pedestal are allegorical, and on the ones on the sides are figures from Goethe’s poems. I strolled to the Römer, the townhall of the former free imperial city, and the most interesting edifice in Frankfort from a historical point of view. The façade presented three lofty gables to the Römerberg, or market-place, opposite. I passed the Cathedral without going inside, and instead wasted an idle hour in the Städel Art-Institute, a handsome building of grey sandstone which contains collections of pictures, engravings and drawings by all the great European masters, as well as numerous casts and busts. The main picture gallery is especially rich in specimens of the early Flemish and German schools of the 15th and 16th centuries, as well as many pretty Dutch interiors from the 17th century and even a few from Italy. The names of the artists appear on the picture frames.

  I took a solitary luncheon, feeling gloomy indeed, and watched the passers-by. Frankfort has a population of some 179,800 inhabitants, including 18,000 Jews and a military garrison of 1800 soldiers. The city lies in a spacious plain bounded by mountains, on the right bank of the navigable Main. Wherefore did I comprehend such dread, in my very guts? Of what was I scared? That Albert did not love me? No, for I knew he loved me, and I said so, to myself, aloud, quietly and in English. Saying the words, like a charm, helped reduce the sensation of intestine a
gony a little. But then a new fear leapt up in my heart – did he doubt my love for him? Such a supposition was not to be endured. I left a banknote on my table and ran straight off, not even finishing my pitcher of Rhenish, all the way back to the Schwan, and up the stairs – for I could not abide the thought of locking myself in that elevator cage – to our room. Albert was there, sitting with his feet up on the rail of the balcony, smoking and reading. The little emotion I could read on his face, that beautiful, reserved, manly face, was enough to reassure me that he knew. We had no need of words of apology. Instead I drew the shutters, and wedged a chaise-longue against the door to prevent the ingress of unwanted servants or maids, and took him to the large bed, where we lay together as Achilles and Patroclus had once lain, millennia ago.

  Into the Trojan lands, astride a horse larger than a palace. How could Ilium not see the danger, in that vast equine structure? They believed they had won, and saw everything – even their own defeat – in those terms. And so it was that they were fooled by the horse.

  In the comfortable shadow afterwards, with the slats of the shutter laying parallel strips of sunlight over his naked flanks, we two talked for a long time. I confessed to him of my own often roiling stomach, and of my bafflement as to the cause. Albert confided in me that he too had been feeling a sense of dread ever since Mayence. He couldn’t understand it, any more than I. Though he had toured through Germany many times, yet never before had he felt so apprehensive – of what? He knew not. “It may be this accursed stuff I’m reading,” he growled. “This Nietzsche is a devil – self-confessedly a devil. His job, as he conceives it, is to make his readers doubt everything they have hitherto taken for granted! It is, I do vouchsafe it, a most uncomfortable proceeding.”

  “What of truth, though?”

  “Oh, truth is mutable, saith the sage. Truth is power, not science; or rather, it is science, but science is power too. The strong legislate what is true, and after a while we forget from whence it came. Our habits of thought are stronger than strait-waistcoats. We walk about with habit-coloured spectacles before our eyes, and see everything as we are accustomed to see them.” He shuddered, and I embraced him to warm him, and this in turn led to a manlier embrace.

  We dined at the hotel, and the wine helped ease our mutual sense of existential dissatisfaction – or our sense of saturated satisfactions, as a man who has eaten too much rich food moans about his stomach.

  The next day we spent the morning at the Zoological Gardens, admission 1 Mark, built upon the grounds of an old estate, in the sink of the ruins of which is a remarkable salt-water aquarium. Afterwards we walked upon the Old Bridge, and stood in its centre, looking out upon the Main. The bridge is fashioned from red sandstone, and dates from 1342. The middle is embellished with a statue of Charlemagne, by Wendelstadt and Zwerger, and nearby is an antique cross of iron, with, in Catholic style, an iron-fashioned Christ upon it. A small figure of a cockerel surmounts this, memorial to an old story that the architect completed his bridge by means of a treaty with the devil, in which he agreed to sacrifice to the antichrist the first person to cross it. But the canny builder held back the crowds, and sent a hen over the span before anything else.

  Passing along the Schöne Aussicht Obermainstrasse, I noticed a street cleaner leaning on a wide broom. He was brushing the road in long, slow strokes. Curious as to what he was clearing away, I stepped over to him. My eyes stung. My stomach was abruptly burning with an inner blaze. I felt deeply, unconscionably afraid – but of what? Of what? The sweeper was moving piles of – I know not what they were. Dozens of them. A multitude of tadpole-like beings, each head the size of a bowling-ball and the colour of myrrh, the tails double-bladed and freaked with silver and blue. A semi-transparent jelly coated the heads. And though some of these weird monsters were clearly dead, many writhed sluggishly, and strained to move themselves in the heavy and unfamiliar gravity of our Earth. I knew, looking upon them, that they possessed powers of thought and will and even of spirit at least the equal of ours. Yet here they lay, heaped and discarded, in great banks of shuddering alien flesh.

  The sweeper stopped. The sweeper had stopped long minutes before, and was staring at me in frank alarm.

  “What are you doing?” Albert called to me. “Why are you gawping at that fellow? You’re spooking him, my dear boy.” He added something in rapid German, and the street-sweeper looked over at him, nodding slowly.

  “What’s he –?” I asked. “What’s he doing?”

  “Sweeping the streets, you goose.”

  “Sweeping what?”

  Albert was at my side, and slipped his arm through mine. “Rubbish, of course. What else? Come along.” And he led me off.

  After luncheon, Albert returned to the hotel for a sleep, but I did not feel sleepy. Instead I walked the streets, my mind pleasantly idle. I passed the old Leinwandhaus, which in English is Draper’s Hall, a structure dating originally from the first half of the 14th century, and provided with a splendid array of turrets and pinnacles, recently restored. There was nothing about which to be alarmed. I was in a civilised city, with a purse full of gold, and a head full of learning. I had my guide book in my hand. God was in his heaven and all was as right with the world as I wanted it to be.

  I took a seat outside a café on Hotzgarten and drank a glass of German beer in the sunlight. I brought out the Wells novel, and laid it on the table in front of me. Something about its oatmeal-coloured binding filled with me a sort of revulsion, and yet I felt the compulsion to begin re-reading it for a third time. I resisted this. No good would come of it. Instead I brought out the Baedeker, and read up about Darmstadt, attempting to determine whether it was worth detouring south of the river to visit that place.

  My glass contained nothing but suds and air. The waiter removed it. He brought me another.

  “You are a believer, I see, in the efficacy of Baedeker,” declared a fellow from a nearby table.

  I conceded that I was, and introduced myself. The stranger told me his name, and got up to reach across so that we could shake hands. He sat back in his seat. “It is always a pleasure to meet a fellow countryman when abroad,” he said. He moved his chair round to face me better and wished me health with a sup from his glass. He was a pleasant-faced elderly fellow, with a grey-white beard trimmed to cover only his chin, and a broad pink forehead reaching, under some strands of brown hair, all the way up to the top of his crown.

  “You do not use a guidebook yourself?” I asked.

  “I find,” replied my new friend, “that to tour a town with a guidebook in hand is to see only what the guidebook permits.”

  “There’s no law that it must tyrannise us so,” I countered. “One may stroll where one wishes! Only in that case, one will not know where one is, or what one is seeing.”

  “I fear I have expressed myself badly,” said the man, with a queer little smile. “I do not mean that the Baedeker forces us to walk this street or that. I mean that we do not see Frankfort – we see only Baedeker’s Frankfort. I mean, we tick off the things the book lists, and see them only as the book describes them. And when we leave, and think back, we find ourselves remembering not the city, but the pages of a book.”

  “There may be something in what you say,” I admitted, laughing. “Is the choice so stark, though? Slavery of the mind – or ignorance?”

  “Is that other book The War of the Worlds?” he asked.

  “Do you know it?”

  “Indeed I do. And think highly of it, I must say.”

  “It fills me with a strange dread,” I blurted, and as soon as I said it I realised the truth of it. Dread clung to the book like a smell. I nudged it away from me with my knuckles.

  “Do you mean,” the man asked, “that you fear Mr Wells’ predictions might come true, and Martians lay waste to Woking? I know Woking, sir, and figure the possibilities for post-bellum architectural improvement would outweigh the inconvenience!”

  “You are from there?”

&n
bsp; “Ascot,” he said. “You?”

  “Chelsea. But, no, no, you are right to mock.”

  “I beg your pardon indeed if I have done anything so ill-mannered!”

  “Not in the least. Most kindly, rather, you have pointed out how small my nonsense is,” I nodded. “Still: it is not as prophecy that the book upsets me. There is an… uncanniness to the narrative. Or not even the story: just to the material fact of the book. I am,” I added, moved obscurely to confess myself to this stranger, “touring the Rhine cities with a friend of mine. There is much for us to enjoy, and many fine sights. And yet sight increasingly fills me with –” I stopped speaking.

  “Dread?” he prompted.

  “Such that I almost wish – Providence forgive me – to be blind, that I might never again have to worry about what can be seen.”

  The man was silent for a while, and drained his glass of hock and soda water. The waiter, hovering behind, approached; and the fellow ordered a new drink – in French. “I speak no German at all,” he confessed to me.

  “My Deutsch is rudimentary, I fear. Though I have enough to order a drink, thank God.”

  “Fortunately for me they all speak French hereabouts. I understand,” he continued, looking directly at me, “why you are fearful.”

  The acidic bubbling sensation sparked-up in my gut. My heart began to beat faster. “You do?”

  “I have seen what you see. Books like that,” and he tipped his chin at The War of the Worlds, “are something of a favourite of mine. Scientific romances.”

  “You have not seen what I have seen,” I said, in a trembling voice, “because I have not seen anything.”