“Don’t be so sure of that,” said the old man. “My brother minded almost everything. As a matter of fact, my brother once said to me, ‘Listen, Nels, I’d come back from Hell itself rather than let somebody put something over on me.’ That’s what he said. I think he meant it. There was a funny pride to him and if you’ve got anything here on my brother, you’d better just show it to me.”
With that, we got over the small talk and we did what we were told to do. We got out the tape and put it on the portable machine, the hi-fi one which we brought along with us.
We played it for the old man.
I had heard it so often that I think I could almost have reproduced it with my vocal cords. The clickety-click and the buzz, buzz. There wasn’t any whee, whee, but there was some more clickety-click and there was some buzz, buzz, and long periods of dull silence, the kind of contrived silence which a recording machine makes when it is playing but nothing is coming through on it.
The old gentleman listened to it and it seemed to have no effect on him, no effect at all.
No effect at all? That wasn’t true.
There was an effect. When we got through the first time, he said very simply, very directly, almost coldly, “Play it again. Play it again for me. There may be something there.”
We played it again.
After that second playing he started to talk.
“It is the funniest thing, I hear my own name and address there and I don’t know where I hear it, but I swear to God, gentlemen, that’s my brother’s voice. It is my brother’s voice I hear there somewhere in those clicks and noises. And yet all I can hear is Nelson Angerhelm, 2322 Ridge Drive, Hopkins, Minnesota. But I hear that, gentlemen, and it is not only plain, it is my brother’s voice and I don’t know where I heard it. I don’t know how it came through.”
We played it for him a third time.
When the tape was halfway through, he threw up his hands and said, “Turn it off. Turn it off. I can’t stand it. Turn it off.”
We turned it off.
He sat there in the chair breathing hard. After a while in a very funny cracked tone of voice he said, “I’ve got some whisky. It’s back there on the shelf by the sink. Get me a shot of it, will you, gentlemen?”
The F.B.I. man and I looked at each other. He didn’t want to get mixed up in accidental poisoning so he sent me. I went back. It was good enough whisky, one of the regular brands. I poured the old boy a two-ounce slug and took the glass back. I sipped a tiny bit of it myself. It seemed like a silly thing to do on duty but I couldn’t risk any poison getting to him. After all my years in Army counterintelligence I wanted to stay in the Civil Service and I didn’t want to take any chances on losing my good job with Mr. Spatz.
He drank the whisky and he said, “Can you record on this thing at the same time that you play?”
We said we couldn’t. We hadn’t thought of that.
“I think I may be able to tell you what it is saying. But I don’t know how many times I can tell you, gentlemen. I am a sick man. I’m not feeling good. I never have felt very good. My brother had the life. I didn’t have the life. I never had much of a life and never did anything and never went anywhere. My brother had everything. My brother got the women, he got the girl—he got the only girl I ever wanted, and then he didn’t marry her. He got the life and he went away and then he died. He played jokes and he never let anybody get ahead of him. And, gentlemen, my brother’s dead. Can you understand that? My brother’s dead.”
We said we knew his brother was dead. We didn’t tell him that he had been exhumed and that the coffin had been opened and the bones had been X-rayed. We didn’t tell him that the bones had been weighed, fresh identification had been remade from what was left of the fingers, and they were in pretty good shape.
We didn’t tell him that the serial number had been checked and that all the circumstances leading to the death had been checked and that everybody connected with it had been interviewed.
We didn’t tell him that. We just told him we knew that his brother was dead. He knew that too.
“You know my brother is dead and then this funny thing has his voice in it. All it’s got is his voice…”
We agreed. We said that we didn’t know how his voice got in there and we didn’t even know that there was a voice.
We didn’t tell him that we had heard that voice ourselves a thousand times and yet never knew where we heard it.
We didn’t tell him that we’d played it at the SAC base and that every man there had heard the name, Nelson Angerhelm, had heard something saying that and yet couldn’t tell where.
We didn’t tell him that the entire apparatus of Soviet Intelligence had been swearing over this for an unstated period of time and that our people had the unpleasant feeling that this came out of a Sputnik somewhere out in the sky.
We didn’t tell him all that but we knew it. We knew that if he heard his brother’s voice and if he wanted to record, it was something very serious.
“Can you get me something to dictate on?” the old man said.
“I can take notes,” the F.B.I. man replied.
The old man shook his head. “That isn’t enough,” he said. “I think you probably want to get the whole thing if you ever get it and I begin to get pieces of it.”
“Pieces of what?” said the F.B.I. man.
“Pieces of the stuff behind all that noise. It’s my brother’s voice talking. He’s saying things—I don’t like what he is saying. It frightens me and it just makes everything bad and dirty. I’m not sure I can take it and I am not going to take it twice. I think I’ll go to church instead.”
We looked at each other. “Can you wait ten minutes? I think I can get a recording machine by then.”
The old man nodded his head. The F.B.I. man went out to the car and cranked up the radio. A great big aerial shot up out of the car, which otherwise was a very inconspicuous Chevrolet sedan. He got his office. A recording machine with a police escort was sent out from downtown Minneapolis toward Hopkins. I don’t know what time it took ambulances to make it but the fellow at the other end said, “You better allow me twenty to twenty-two minutes.”
We waited. The old man wouldn’t talk to us and he didn’t want us to play the tape. He sat there sipping the whisky.
“This might kill me and I want to have my friends around. My pastor’s name is Jensen and if anything happens to me you get a hold of him there but I don’t think anything will happen to me. Just get a hold of him. I may die, gentlemen, I can’t take too much of this. It is the most shocking thing that ever happened to any man and I’m not going to see you or anybody else get in on it. You understand that it could kill me, gentlemen.”
We pretended that we knew what he was talking about, although neither one of us had the faintest idea, beyond the suspicion that the old man might have a heart condition and might actually collapse.
The office had estimated twenty-two minutes. It took eighteen minutes for the F.B.I. assistant to come in. He brought in one of these new, tight, clean little jobs, the kind of thing that I’d love to take home. You can pack it almost anywhere. And it comes out with concert quality.
The old man brightened when he saw that we meant business.
“Give me a set of headphones and just let me talk and pick it up. I’ll try to reproduce it. It won’t be my brother’s voice. It will be my voice you’re hearing. Do you follow me?”
We turned on the tape.
He dictated, with the headset on his head.
That’s when the message started. And that’s the thing I started with in the very beginning.
Funny funny funny. It’s sort of funny funny funny to think without a brain—it is really something like a trick but not a trick to think without a brain. Talking is even harder but it can be done.
Nels, this is Tice. I’m dead.
Nels, I don’t know whether I’m in Heaven or Hell, but I think it’s Hell, Nels. And I am going to play the biggest joke that a
nybody’s ever played. And it’s funny, I am an American Army officer and I am a dead one, and it doesn’t matter. Nels, don’t you see what it is? It doesn’t matter if you’re dead whether you’re American or Russian or an officer or not. And even laughter doesn’t matter.
But there’s enough left of me, Nels, enough of the old me so that perhaps for one last time I’ll have a laugh with you and the others.
I haven’t got a body to laugh with, Nels, and I haven’t got a mouth to laugh with and I haven’t got cheeks to smile with and there really isn’t any me. Tice Angerhelm is something different now, Nels. I’m dead.
I knew I was dead when I felt so different. It was more comfortable being dead, more relaxed. There wasn’t anything tight.
That’s the trouble, Nels, there isn’t anything tight. There isn’t anything around you. You can’t feel the world, you can’t see the world, and yet you know all about it. You know all about everything.
It’s awfully lonely, Nels. There are some corners that aren’t lonely, some funny little corners in which you feel friendship and feel things creeping up.
Nels, it’s like kittens or the faces of children or the smell of the wind on a nice day. It’s any time that you turn away from yourself and you don’t think about yourself.
It’s the times when you don’t want something and you do want something.
It’s what you’re not resenting, what you’re not hating, what you’re not fearing, and what you’re not jeering. That’s it, Nels, that’s the good part inside of death. And I suppose some people could call it Heaven. And I guess you get Heaven if you just get into the habit of having Heaven every day in your ordinary life. That’s what it is. Heaven is right there, Nels, in your ordinary life, every day, day by day, right around you.
But that’s not what I got. Oh, Nels, I am Tice Angerhelm all right, I am your brother and I’m dead. You can call where I am Hell since it’s everything I hated.
Nels, it smelts of everything that I ever wanted. It smells the way the hay smelled when I had my old Willys roadster and I made the first girl I ever made that August evening. You can go ask her. She’s a Mrs. Prai Jesselton now. She lives over on the east side of St. Paul. You never knew I made her and if you don’t think this is so, you can listen for yourself.
And you see, I am somewhere and I don’t know what kind of a where it is.
Nels, this is me, Tice Angerhelm, and I’m going to scream this out loud with what I’ve got instead of a mouth. I am going to scream it loud so that any human ear that hears it can put it on this silly, silly Soviet gadget and take it back. TAKE THIS MESSAGE TO NELSON ANGERHELM, 2322 RIDGE DRIVE, HOPKINS, MINNESOTA. And I’m going to repeat that a couple more times so that you’ll know that it’s your brother talking and I’m somewhere and it isn’t Heaven and it isn’t Hell and it isn’t even really out in space. I am in something different from space, Nels. It is just a somewhere with me in it and there isn’t anything but me. In with me there’s everything.
In with me there is everything I ever thought and everything I ever did and everything I ever wanted.
All the opposites are the same. Everything I hated and everything I loved, it’s all the same. Everything I feared and everything I yearned for—that’s the same. I tell you it’s all the same now and the punishment is just as bad if you want something and get it as if you want something and don’t get it.
The only thing that matters is those calm, nice moments in life when you don’t want anything, Nels. You aren’t anything. When you aren’t trying for anything and the world is just around you, and you get simple things like water on the skin, when you yourself feel innocent and you are not thinking about anything else.
That’s all there is to life, Nels. And I’m Tice and I’m telling you. And you know I’m dead, so I wouldn’t be telling you a lie.
And I especially wouldn’t be telling you on this Soviet cylinder, this Soviet gismo which will go back to them and bother them.
Nels, I hope it won’t bother you too much, if everybody knows about that girl. I hope the girl forgives me but the message has got to go back.
And yet that’s the message—everything I ever feared—I feared something in the war and you know what the war smells like. It smells sort of like a cheap slaughterhouse in July. It smells bad all around. There’s bits of things burning, the smell of rubber burning and the funny smell of gunpowder. I was never in a big war with atomic stuff. Just the old sort of explosions. I’ve told you about it before and I was scared of that. And right in with that I can smell the perfume that girl had in the hotel there in Melbourne, the girl that I thought I might have wanted until she said something and then I said something and that was all there was between us. And I’m dead now.
And listen. Nels—
Listen, Nels, I am talking as though it were a trick. I don’t know how I know about the rest of us—the other ones that are dead like me. I never met one and I may never talk to one. I just have the feeling that they are here too. They can’t talk.
It’s not that they can’t talk, really.
They don’t even want to talk.
They don’t feel like talking. Talking is just a trick. It is a trick that somebody can pick up and I guess it takes a cheap, meaningless man, a man who lived his life in spite of Hell and is now in that Hell. That’s the kind of silly man it takes to remember the trick of talking. Like a trick with coins or a trick with cigarettes when nothing else matters.
So I am talking to you, Nels. And Nels, I suppose you’ll die the way I do. It doesn’t matter, Nels. It’s too late to change—that’s all.
Good-bye, Nels, you’re in pretty good shape. You’ve lived your life. You’ve had the wind in your hair. You’ve seen the good sunlight and you haven’t hated and feared and loved too much.
When the old man got through dictating it, the F.B.I. man and I asked him to do it again.
He refused.
We all stood up. We brought in the assistant.
The old man still refused to make a second dictation from the sounds out of which only he could hear a voice.
We could have taken him into custody and forced him but there didn’t seem to be much sense to it until we took the recording back to Washington and had this text appraised.
He said good-bye to us as we left his house.
“Perhaps I can do it once again maybe a year from now. But the trouble with me, gentlemen, is that I believe it. That was the voice of my brother, Tice Angerhelm, and he is dead. And you brought me something strange. I don’t know where you got a medium or spirit reader to record this on a tape and especially in such a way that you can’t hear it and I could. But I did hear it, gentlemen, and I think I told you pretty good what it was. And those words I used, they are not mine, they are my brother’s. So you go along, gentlemen, and do what you can with it and if you don’t want me to tell anybody that the U.S. government is working on mediums, I won’t.”
That was the farewell he gave us.
We closed the local office and hurried to the airport. We took the tape back with us but a duplicate was already being teletyped to Washington.
That’s the end of the story and that is the end of the joke. Potariskov got a copy and the Soviet Ambassador got a copy.
And Khrushchev probably wondered what sort of insane joke the Americans were playing on him. To use a medium or something weird along with subliminal perception in order to attack the U.S.S.R. for not believing in God and not believing in death. Did he figure it that way?
Here’s a case where I hope that Soviet espionage is very good. I hope that their spies are so fine that they know we’re baffled. I hope that they realize that we have come to a dead end, and whatever Tice Angerhelm did or somebody did in his name way out there in space recording into a Soviet Sputnik, we Americans had no hand in it.
If the Russians didn’t do it and we didn’t do it, who did do it?
I hope their spies find out.
The Good Friends
Fever had given him a boyish look. The nurse, standing behind the doctor, watched him attentively. Her half-smile blended tenderness with an appreciation of his manly attraction.
“When can I go, doc?”
“In a few weeks, perhaps. You have to get well first.”
“I don’t mean home, doc. When can I go back into space? I’m captain, doc. I’m a good one. You know that, don’t you?”
The doctor nodded gravely.
“I want to go back, doc. I want to go back right away. I want to be well, doc. I want to be well now. I want to get back in my ship and take off again. I don’t even know why I’m here. What are you doing with me, doc?”
“We’re trying to make you well,” said the doctor, friendly, serious, authoritative.
“I’m not sick, doc. You’ve got the wrong man. We brought the ship in, didn’t we? Everything was all right, wasn’t it? Then we started to get out and everything went black. Now I’m here in a hospital. Something’s pretty fishy, doc. Did I get hurt in the port?”
“No,” said the doctor, “you weren’t hurt at the port.”
“Then why’d I faint? Why am I sick in a bed? Something must have happened to me, doc. It stands to reason. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. Some stupid awful thing must have happened, doc. After such a nice trip. Where did it happen?” A wild light came into the patient’s eyes. “Did somebody do something to me, doc? I’m not hurt, am I? I’m not ruined, am I? I’ll be able to go back into space, won’t I?”
“Perhaps,” said the doctor.
The nurse drew in her breath as though she were going to say something. The doctor looked around at her and gave her an authoritative frown, meaning keep quiet.
The patient saw it.
Desperation came into his voice, almost a whine, “What’s the matter, doc? Why won’t you talk to me? What’s wrong? Something has happened to me. Where’s Ralph? Where’s Pete? Where’s Jock? The last time I saw him he was having a beer. Where’s Larry? Where’s Went? Where’s Betty? Where’s my gang, doc? They’re not killed, are they? I’m not the only one, am I? Talk to me, doc. Tell me the truth. I’m a space captain, doc. I’ve faced queer hells in my time, doc. You can tell me anything, doc. I’m not that sick. I can take it. Where’s my gang, doc—my pals from the ship? What a cruise that was! Won’t you talk, doc?”
The Rediscovery of Man - The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Illustrated Page 88
