The Rediscovery of Man - The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Illustrated

by Cordwainer Smith

  There was only one connection that Angerhelm had with the larger world. He had a younger brother, whose name was Tice. Funny name and I don’t know why he got it. Somebody told us later on that the full name tied in with Theiss Ankerhjelm, which was the name of a Swedish admiral a couple hundred years ago. Perhaps the family was proud of it.

  The younger brother was a West Pointer. He had had a regular career; that came easily enough out of the Adjutant General’s Office.

  What did develop, though, was that the younger brother had died only two months previously. He too was a bachelor. One of the psychiatrists who got into the case said, “What a mother!”

  Tice Angerhelm had traveled a great deal. He had something to do, as a matter of fact, with two or three of the projects that I was liaising on. There were all sorts of issues arising from this.

  However, he was dead. He had never worked directly on Soviet matters. He had no Soviet friends, had never been in the Soviet Union, and had never met Soviet forces. He had never even gone to the Soviet Embassy to an official reception.

  The man was no specialist, outside of Ordnance, a little tiny bit of French, and the missile program. He was something of a Saturday evening Don Juan. It was then time for the fourth stage.

  Colonel Plugg was told to get hold of Lieutenant Colonel Potariskov and find out what Potariskov had to give him. This time Potariskov called back and said that he would rather have his boss, the Soviet Ambassador himself, call on the Secretary or the Undersecretary of State.

  There was some shilly-shallying back and forth. The Secretary was out of town, the Undersecretary said he would be very glad to see the Soviet Ambassador if there were anything to ask about. He said that we had found Angerhelm, and if the Soviet authorities wanted to interview Mr. Angerhelm themselves they jolly well could go to Hopkins, Minnesota, and interview him.

  This led to a real flash of embarrassment when it was discovered that the area of Hopkins, Minnesota, was in the “no travel” zone proscribed to Soviet diplomats in retaliation against their “no travel” zones imposed on American diplomats in the Soviet Union.

  This was ironed out. The Soviet Ambassador was asked, would he like to go see a chicken farmer in Minnesota?

  When the Soviet Ambassador stated that he was not particularly interested in chicken farmers, but that he would be willing to see Mr. Angerhelm at a later date if the American government didn’t mind, the whole thing was let go.

  Nothing happened at all. Presumably the Russians were relaying things back to Moscow by courier, letter, or whatever mysterious ways the Russians use when they are acting very deliberately and very solemnly.

  I heard nothing and certainly the people around the Soviet Embassy saw no unusual contacts at that time.

  Nelson Angerhelm hadn’t come into the story yet. All he knew was that several odd characters had asked him about veterans that he scarcely knew, saying that they were looking for security clearances.

  And an Internal Revenue man had a long and very exhausting talk with him about his brother’s estate. That didn’t seem to leave much.

  Angerhelm went on feeding his chickens. He had television and Minneapolis has a pretty good range of stations. Now and then he showed up at the church; more frequently he showed up at the general store.

  He almost always went away from town to avoid the new shopping centers. He didn’t like the way Hopkins had developed and preferred to go to the little country centers where they still have general stores. In its own funny way this seemed to be the only pleasure the old man had.

  After nineteen days, and I can now count almost every hour of them, the answer must have gotten back from Moscow. It was probably carried in by the stocky brown-haired courier who made the trip about every fortnight. One of the fellows from the Valley told me about that. I wasn’t supposed to know and it didn’t matter then.

  Apparently the Soviet Ambassador had been told to play the matter lightly. He called on the Undersecretary of State and ended up discussing world butter prices and the effect of American exports of ghee to Pakistan on the attempts of the Soviet Union to trade ghee for hemp.

  Apparently this was an extraordinary and confidential thing for the Soviet Ambassador to discuss. The Undersecretary would have been more impressed if he had been able to find out why the Soviet Ambassador just out of the top of his head announced that the Soviet Union had given about a hundred and twenty million dollars’ credit to Pakistan for some unnecessary highways and was able to reply, therefore, somewhat tartly to the general effect that if the Soviet Union ever decided to stabilize world markets with the cooperation of the United States we would be very happy to cooperate. But this was no time to discuss money or fair business deals when they were dumping every piece of export rubbish they could in our general direction.

  It was characteristic of this Soviet Ambassador that he took the rebuff calmly. Apparently his mission was to have no mission. He left and that was all there was from him.

  Potariskov came back to the Pentagon, this time accompanied by a Russian civilian. The new man’s English was a little more than perfect. The English was so good that it was desperately irritating.

  Potariskov himself looked like a rather horsey, brown-faced school-boy, with chestnut hair and brown eyes. I got to see him because they had me sitting in the back of Plugg’s office pretending just to wait for somebody else.

  The conversation was very simple. Potariskov brought out a recording tape. It was standard American tape.

  Plugg looked at it and said, “Do you want to play it right now?”

  Potariskov agreed.

  The stenographer got a tape recorder in. By that time three or four other officers wandered in and none of them happened to leave. As a matter of fact one of them wasn’t even an officer but he happened to have a uniform on that very day.

  They played the tape and I listened to it. It was buzz, buzz, buzz. And there was some hissing, then it went clickety, clickety, clickety. Then it was buzz, buzz, buzz again. It was the kind of sound in which you turn on a radio and you don’t even get static. You just get funny buzzing sounds which indicate that somebody has some sort of radio transmission somewhere but it is not consistent enough to be the loud whee, wheeeee kind of static which one often hears.

  All of us stood there rather solemnly. Plugg, thoroughly a soldier, listened at rigid attention, moving his eyes back and forth from the tape recorder to Potariskov’s face. Potariskov looked at Plugg and then ran his eyes around the group.

  The little Russian civilian, who was as poisonous as a snake, glanced at every single one of us. He was obviously taking our measure and he was anxious to find out if any of us could hear anything he couldn’t hear. None of us heard anything.

  At the end of the tape Plugg reached out to turn off the machine.

  “Don’t stop it,” Potariskov said.

  The other Russian interjected, “Didn’t you hear it?”

  All of us shook our heads. We had heard nothing.

  With that, Potariskov said with singular politeness, “Please play it again.”

  We played it again. Nothing happened, except for the buzzing and clicking.

  After the fifteen-minute point it was beginning to get pretty stale for some of us. One or two of the men actually wandered out. They happened to be the bona fide visitors. The non-bona fide visitors slouched down in the room.

  Colonel Plugg offered Potariskov a cigarette, which Potariskov took. They both smoked and we played it a third time. Then the third time Potariskov said, “Turn it off.”

  “Didn’t you hear it?” said Potariskov.

  “Hear what?” said Plugg.

  “Hear the name and the address.”

  At that the funniest feeling came over me. I knew that I had heard something and I turned to the Colonel and said, “Funny, I don’t know where I heard it or how I heard it but I do know something that I didn’t know.”

  “What is that?” said the little Russian civilian, his face lig
hting up.

  “Nelson,” said I, intending to say, “Nelson Angerhelm, 2322 Ridge Drive, Hopkins, Minnesota.” Just as I had seen it in the “galactic” secret documents. Of course I didn’t go any further. That was in the document and was very secret indeed. How should I know it?

  The Russian civilian looked at me. There was a funny, wicked, friendly, crooked sort of smile on his face. He said, “Didn’t you hear ‘Nelson Angerhelm, 2322 Ridge Drive, Hopkins, Minnesota,’ just now, and yet did you not know where you heard it?”

  The question then arose, “What had happened?”

  Potariskov spoke with singular candor. Even the Russian with him concurred.

  “We believe that this is a case of marginal perception. We have played this. This is obviously a copy. We have many such copies. We have played it to all our people. Nobody can even specify at what point he has heard it. We have had our best experts on it. Some put it at minute three. Others put it at minute twelve. Some put it at minute thirteen and a half and at different places. But different people under different controls all come out with the idea that they have heard ‘Nelson Angerhelm, 2322 Ridge Drive, Hopkins, Minnesota.’ We have tried it on Chinese people.”

  At that the Russian civilian interrupted. “Yes, indeed, they tried it on Chinese persons and even they heard the same thing, Nelson Angerhelm. Even when they do not know the language they hear ‘Nelson Angerhelm.’ Even when they know nothing else they hear that and they hear the street numbers. The numbers are always in English. They cannot make a recording. The recording is only of this noise and yet it comes out. What do you make of that?”

  What they said turned out to be true. We tried it also, after they went away.

  We tried it on college students, foreigners, psychiatrists, White House staff members, and passers-by. We even thought of running it on a municipal radio somewhere as a quiz show and offering prizes for anyone that got it. That was a little too heavy, so we accepted a much safer suggestion that we try it out on the public address system of the SAC base. The SAC was guarded night and day.

  No one happened to be getting much leave anyhow and it was easy enough to cut off the leave for an extra week. We played that damn thing six times over and almost everybody on that base wanted to write a letter to Nelson Angerhelm, 2322 Ridge Drive, Hopkins, Minnesota. They were even calling each other Angerhelm and wondering what the hell it meant.

  Naturally there were a great many puns on the name and even some jokes of a rather smutty order. That didn’t help.

  The troublesome thing was that on all these different tests we too were unable to find out at what point the subliminal transmission of the name and address came.

  It was subliminal, all right. There’s not much trick to that. Any good psychologist can pass along either a noise message or a sight message without the recipient knowing exactly when he got it. It is simply a matter of getting down near the threshold, running a little tiny bit under the threshold, and then making the message sharp and clear enough, just under the level of conscious notice, so that it slips on through.

  We therefore knew what we were dealing with. What we didn’t know was what the Russians were doing with it, how they had gotten it, and why they were so upset about it.

  Finally it all went to the White House for a conference. The conference, to which my boss Mr. Spatz went along as a sort of rapporteur and monitor to safeguard the interests of the Director of the Budget and of the American taxpayer, was a rather brief affair.

  All roads led to Nelson Angerhelm. Nelson Angerhelm was already guarded by about half of the F.B.I. and a large part of the local military district forces. Every room in his house had been wired. The microphones were sensitive enough to hear his heart beat. The safety precautions we were taking on that man would have justified the program we have for taking care of Fort Knox.

  Angerhelm knew that some awful funny things had been happening but he didn’t know what and he didn’t know who was concerned with it.

  Months later he was able to tell somebody that he thought his brother had probably done some forgery or counterfeiting and that the neighborhood was being thoroughly combed. He didn’t realize his safeguarding was the biggest American national treasure since the discovery of the atomic bomb.

  The President himself gave the word. He reviewed the evidence. The Secretary of State said that he didn’t think that Khrushchev would have brought up the question of a joke if Khrushchev himself had not missed out on the facts.

  We had even tried Russians on it, of course—Russians on our side. And they didn’t get any more off the record than the rest of the people. Everybody heard the same blessed thing, “Nelson Angerhelm, 2322 Ridge Drive, Hopkins, Minnesota.”

  But that didn’t get anybody anywhere.

  The only thing left was to try it on the man himself.

  When it came to picking inconspicuous people to go along, the Intelligence committee were pretty thin-skinned about letting outsiders into their show. On the other hand they did not have domestic jurisdiction, particularly not when the President had turned it over to J. Edgar Hoover and said, “Ed, you handle this. I don’t like the looks of it.”

  Somebody over in the Pentagon, presumably deviled on by Air Intelligence, got the bright idea that if the Army and the rest of the Intelligence committee couldn’t fit into the show the best they could do would be to get their revenge on liaison by letting liaison itself go. This meant Mr. Spatz.

  Mr. Spatz has been on the job for many, many years by always avoiding anything interesting or dramatic, always watching for everything that mattered—which was the budget and the authorization for next year—and by ditching controversial personalities long before anyone else had any idea that they were controversial.

  Therefore, he didn’t go. If this Angerhelm fiasco was going to turn out to be a mess he wanted to be out of it.

  It was me who got the assignment.

  I was made a sort of honorary member of the F.B.I. and they even let me carry the tape in the end. They must have had about six other copies of the tape so the honor wasn’t as marked as it looked. We were simply supposed to go along as people who knew something about the brother.

  It was a dry, reddish Sunday afternoon, looking a little bit as though the sunset were coming.

  We drove up to this very nice frame house. It had double windows all the way around and looked as tight as the proverbial rug for a bug to be snug in in cold winter. This wasn’t winter and the old gentleman obviously couldn’t pay for air conditioning. But the house still looked snug.

  There was no waste, no show. It just looked like a thoroughly livable house.

  The F.B.I. man was big-hearted and let me ring the doorbell. There was no answer so I rang the doorbell some more. Again, nobody answered the bell.

  We decided to wait outside and wandered around the yard. We looked at the car in the yard; it seemed in running order.

  We rang the doorbell again, then walked around the house and looked into the kitchen window. We checked his car to see if the radiator felt warm. We looked at our watches. We wondered if he were hiding and peeking out at us. Once more we rang the doorbell.

  Just then, the old boy came down the front walk.

  We introduced ourselves and the preliminaries were the usual sort of thing. I found my heart beating violently. If something had stumped both the Soviet Union and the rest of the world, something salvaged possibly out of space itself, something which thousands of men had heard and none could identify, something so mysterious that the name of Nelson Angerhelm rang over and over again like a pitiable cry beyond all limits of understanding, what could this be?

  We didn’t know.

  The old man stood there. He was erect, sunburned, red-cheeked, red-nosed, red-eared. Healthy as he could be, Swedish to the bone.

  All we had to do was to tell him that we were concerned with his brother, Tice Angerhelm, and he listened to us. We had no trouble, no trouble at all.

  As he listened his e
yes got wide and he said, “I know there has been a lot of snooping around here and you people had a lot of trouble and I thought somebody was going to come and talk to me about it but I didn’t think it would be this soon.”

  The F.B.I. man muttered something polite and vague, so Angerhelm went on. “I suppose you gentlemen are from the F.B.I. I don’t think my brother was cheating. He wasn’t that dishonest.”

  Another pause, and he continued. “But there is always a kind of a funny sleek mind—he looked like the kind of man who would play a joke.”

  Angerhelm’s eyes lit up. “If he played a joke, gentlemen, he might even have committed a crime, I don’t know. All I do is raise chickens and try to have my life.”

  Perhaps it was the wrong kind of Intelligence procedure but I broke in ahead of the F.B.I. and said, “Are you a happy man, Mr. Angerhelm? Do you live a life that you think is really satisfying?”

  The old boy gave me a keen look. It was obvious that he thought there was something wrong and he didn’t have very much confidence in my judgment.

  And yet underneath the sharpness of his look he shot me a glance of sympathy and I am sure that he suspected I had been under a strain. His eyes widened a little. His shoulders went back, and he looked a little prouder.

  He looked like the kind of man who might remember that he had Swedish admirals for ancestors, and that long before the Angerhelm name ran out and ran dry there in this flat country west of Minneapolis there had been something great in it and that perhaps sparks of the great name still flew somewhere in the universe.

  I don’t know. He got the importance of it, I suppose, because he looked me very sharply and very clearly in the eye.

  “No, young man, my life hasn’t been much of a life and I haven’t liked it. And I hope nobody has to live a life like mine. But that is enough of that. I don’t suppose you’re guessing and I suppose you’ve got something pretty bad to show me.”

  The other fellow then took over.

  “Yes, but it doesn’t involve any embarrassment for you, Mr. Angerhelm. And even Colonel Angerhelm, your brother, wouldn’t mind if he were living.”