His Master's Voice

by Stanisław Lem

  Rappaport made no attempt to hide these views. It was amusing to observe the reactions of our colleagues to his pronouncements (not made at the official meetings, of course). The younger ones simply laughed, which angered Rappaport, because the truth was that he thought and spoke entirely in earnest. But there was no help for it: one's personal experience in life is fundamentally unconveyable. Nontransmittable. Rappaport came from Europe, which is equated by the "military-senatorial mind" (as he liked to put it) with the Red Menace. Thus he never would have got into the Project had he not accidentally become its coauthor. Only the fear of possible "leaks" landed him in our team.

  He had emigrated to the States in 1945. His name was known to a handful of experts before the war. There are few philosophers with a genuinely thorough schooling in mathematics and the natural sciences; he belonged in that rare category, and consequently turned out to be extremely useful in the work of the Project. Rappaport and I lived next door to each other in the hotel at the compound, and it was not long before we became more closely acquainted. He left his native country as a man of thirty, alone, the Holocaust having claimed his entire family. He never spoke about it, except one evening, after I had let him in on—and he was the only one—my and Prothero's secret. True, I am anticipating events in telling the story here, but I think this is indicated. Whether it was, oddly, to reciprocate my confidence with another, or for some unknown reason, Rappaport then told me how, before his eyes, a certain mass execution had taken place—the year was 1942, I think—in his hometown.

  He was pulled off the street, a random pedestrian. They were shooting people in groups, in the yard of a prison recently shelled and with one wing still burning. Rappaport gave me the details of the operation very calmly. The executing itself could not be seen by those herded against the building, which heated their backs like a giant oven; the shooting was done behind a broken wall. Some of those waiting, like him, in his turn, fell into a kind of stupor; others tried to save themselves—in mad ways.

  He remembered a young man who, rushing up to a German gendarme, howled that he was not a Jew—but howled it in Yiddish, probably because he knew no German. Rappaport felt the insane comedy of the situation, and suddenly the most precious thing to him was to preserve to the end the integrity of his mind, which would enable him to maintain an intellectual distance from the scene around him. However, he had to find—he explained this to me objectively and slowly, as to a man from "the other side" who could not be expected to understand anything of such experiences—some value external to himself, a prop of some sort for his mind. Since that was altogether impossible, he decided to believe in reincarnation. Maintaining the belief for fifteen or twenty minutes would be sufficient. Yet he could not accomplish that, not even in an abstract way, so he picked out from among a group of officers situated some distance from the place of execution one who, by his appearance, stood apart.

  He described him to me, as though from a photograph. This was a young deity of war: tall, handsome, in battle dress, of which the silver borders seemed to have turned slightly ash-gray from the heat; he had on his full outfit, the iron cross under the collar, field glasses in a case on his chest, a deep helmet, a revolver with the holster conveniently moved toward the buckle of the belt, and in his gloved hand a handkerchief, clean and neatly folded, which he pressed to his nose now and then, because the executions had lasted so long—since that morning—that the flames had reached some of those cut down earlier in the corner of the yard, and from that place now belched the stench of burning flesh. But—and this, too, Rappaport did not forget—he grew aware of the presence of the sweetish corpse-smoke only when he observed the handkerchief in the hand of the officer he had singled out. He told himself that the moment he was shot, he would become that German.

  He knew perfectly well that the idea was complete nonsense, even from the point of view of any metaphysical doctrine, reincarnation included, because the "place in the body" was already occupied. But somehow this did not bother him; in fact, the longer and more greedily he stared at the chosen man, the better he was able to cling to this thought that was to sustain him until the final moment. Already it was as if he were being given support—by the man. The man would help him.

  This, too, Rappaport said calmly, but in his voice there was, I thought, a catch of admiration for the "young deity" who directed the entire operation so expertly, without moving from his place, without shouting or falling into the half-drunk trance of striking and kicking in which his subordinates worked, iron-chested. In that moment Rappaport understood even this: the subordinates had to behave that way; they were hiding from the victims in the hatred of them, but the hatred could not be produced in themselves except through acts of brutality. They had to batter the Jews with their rifle butts; blood had to flow from lacerated heads and crust upon faces, because it made the faces hideous, inhuman, and in this way—I am quoting Rappaport—there did not appear, in what was done, a gap through which horror might peer, or compassion.

  But the young deity in the silver-braided uniform required neither these nor any other contrivances to act perfectly. He stood in a slightly elevated place, the white handkerchief applied to his nose with a movement that had something in it of the refined duelist. He was the master of the house and the commander, in one person. In the air floated flakes of ash, driven by the heat that pulsed from the fire; behind the thick walls, through the grated windows without panes, flames roared, but not a single ash fell on the officer or on his white handkerchief.

  In the presence of such perfection, Rappaport managed to forget about himself, when suddenly the gate opened and in drove a film crew. Various orders were given in German, and the gunshots immediately ceased. Rappaport did not know then—or later, when he told me this—what had happened. Perhaps the Germans intended to film a pile of corpses, to use the footage in a newsreel depicting the enemy's actions (this took place near the Eastern Front). The slain Jews would be shown as the victims of the Bolsheviks. That may have been the case; Rappaport, however, offered no interpretation; he only related what he saw.

  Immediately afterward came his failure. Those still alive were put in a row and filmed, whereupon the officer with the handkerchief asked for one volunteer. Rappaport understood at once that he should step forward. He did not know exactly why he should, but felt that if he did not, it would be terrible for him. The moment arrived in which the whole force of his will was exerted to make that one step—but he did not budge. The officer then gave them fifteen seconds to think and, turning his back on them, spoke quietly, casually, to some younger soldier.

  Rappaport, as a doctor of philosophy, having earned his university degree with a brilliant dissertation on logic, hardly needed the entire apparatus of syllogisms to realize that if no one stepped forward, all would die: hence whoever now came forth from the line really would be risking nothing. It was simple, clear, and certain. He renewed his effort—this time, true, without conviction—and again did not budge. A few seconds before the time was up, someone presented himself, however, and disappeared with two soldiers behind a broken wall. Several revolver shots rang out. The young volunteer, smeared with blood, his own or not his own, then returned to the group.

  It was dusk when the large gate was set ajar and, staggering in the cold evening air, the group of those left alive ran out into the empty street.

  They dared not flee at first, but no one showed any interest in them. Why, Rappaport could not say. He did not attempt to analyze what the Germans did; they were like fate, which one did not have to explain.

  The volunteer—need it be said?—had moved the bodies of the executed, and those still alive were finished off with the revolver. As if to see whether he was right that I really had not understood a thing about his story, Rappaport then asked me why the officer requested a volunteer and had been prepared, in the absence of one, to kill the lot of them, though that would have been "unnecessary"—on that particular day, at any rate—and why, moreover, he did n
ot even consider announcing that nothing would happen to the volunteer. I did not, I confess, pass this test: I replied that perhaps the German had acted thus from contempt, scorning to enter into conversation with the victims. Rappaport shook his birdlike head.

  "I understood it later," he said, "thanks to other things. Although he spoke to us, you see, we were not people. He knew that we comprehended human speech but that nevertheless we were not human; he knew this quite well. Therefore, even if he had wanted to explain things to us, he could not have. The man could do with us what he liked, but he could not enter into negotiations, because for negotiation you must have a party in at least some respect equal to the party who initiates it, and in that yard there were only he and his men. A logical contradiction, yes, but he acted exactly according to that contradiction, and scrupulously. The simpler ones among his men did not possess this higher knowledge; the appearance of humanity given by our bodies, our two legs, faces, hands, eyes, that appearance deterred them a little from their duty; thus they had to butcher those bodies, to make them unlike people's. But for him such primitive proceedings were no longer necessary. This sort of explanation is usually received metaphorically, as a kind of fable, but it is completely literal."

  About this fragment of his past we never spoke again, nor did we touch on any others. But some time had to pass before I could stop remembering, whenever I saw Rappaport, the scene he had drawn so vividly for me, of the prison yard with bomb craters, the people with faces veined in red and black from blows to the head, and the officer whose body he wanted—fraudulently—to move into. I cannot say to what extent there remained in him a mindfulness of the annihilation he escaped. Rappaport was, in any case, a very sensible man—yet at the same time quite comical. I will incur his displeasure the most when I tell the way he left his room each day (though I did not mean to spy). In the hotel corridor, by the elevator, there was a large mirror. Rappaport, who had a bad stomach and stuffed his pockets with bottles of multicolored pills, when he left each morning always stuck out his tongue in front of the mirror, to see if it was coated. He did this so regularly that I would have thought it extraordinary had he omitted the practice.

  At the meetings of the Science Council he was conspicuously bored, but proved particularly allergic to the utterances—seldom made, however, and generally tactful—of Dr. Eugene Albert Nye. If one did not want to listen to Nye, one could watch the mimicking accompaniment to the speech on Rappaport's face. Rappaport would scowl, as if suddenly aware of something vile on his tongue, would pull his nose, scratch behind his ear, squint at the speaker with an expression that seemed to say, "You can't be serious." But when Nye once, finally losing patience, asked him outright if he wished to take issue with some point, Rappaport, innocent and surprised, shook his head several times, held up his hands, and said that he had nothing, absolutely nothing to say.

  I dwell on these descriptions to show the reader the central figures of the Project from a less official angle, and also to introduce him to the special atmosphere of a community sealed off from the world. Indeed, it was curious, that creatures as different from each other as Baloyne, Nye, Rappaport, and myself should have come together in a single place, with the mission of "establishing Contact," an ersatz diplomatic corps representing mankind vis-à-vis the Universe.

  Although different, we joined to become an organism that studied the "letter from the stars"; we formed a group that had its own customs, tempo, and social patterns, with subtle variations on the official, semiofficial, and private levels. All this, taken together, created the "spirit" of the institution, but more than that, too—what a sociologist would take pleasure in calling a "local subculture." This aura within the Project—and the Project, after all, numbered nearly three thousand people in its most dynamic phase—was distinct and unique, and, in the long run, for me at least, wearisome.

  One of the oldest members of the Project, Lee Reinhorn, who as a very young physicist had worked, once upon a time, on the Manhattan Project, told me that the atmospheres of the two undertakings were in no way comparable: the Manhattan Project had sent its people on an exploration typically natural-scientific, physical in character; while ours somehow remained implanted in human civilization and was unable to free itself from that dependency. Reinhorn called HMV a test of our culture's cosmic invariance—and thereby annoyed our humanist colleagues (in particular), because he was preening himself, with naïve good nature, for discoveries from their bailiwick. He studied, irrespective of the research of his own group (physics), material from all over the world, and from the preceding few decades—material primarily linguistic, devoted to the problem of cosmic communication, and especially to the aspect of it called the "cracking of languages of closed semantics."

  Now, the uselessness of this pyramid of learned material—and the bibliography, with which I, too, acquainted myself, contained, if memory serves me right, about five and a half thousand titles—was obvious to every man in the Project. And the amusing thing was that such books and articles continued to appear in considerable numbers in the world, which, except for a small circle of chosen people, knew nothing of the existence of the "letter from the stars." Consequently the professional pride and sense of loyalty of the linguists who worked in the Project were put through the wringer when Reinhorn—receiving in the mail yet another bundle of relevant articles—filled us in, at the semiofficial research colloquia, on the latest from the field of "interstellar semantics." The worthlessness, the sterility of all those lines of reasoning, laced lovingly with mathematics, was really comical, though at the same time depressing.

  Tempers flared; the linguists accused Reinhorn of maliciously mocking them. But friction between the humanists and the natural scientists of the Project was the order of the day. The former we called "elves," the latter "dwarfs." The internal jargon of the Project had a rich vocabulary; it could serve, along with the forms that the coexistence of both "parties" took, as a worthy subject for some future sociologist.

  Fairly complicated factors inclined Baloyne to include within the frame of the HMV group a whole slew of humanistic fields: not least of which was the fact that he himself was, after all, by training and predilection, a humanist. But this rivalry could not very well take any productive form if our anthropologists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts, as well as the philosophers, refused to make use of the data as raw material for their research. Thus, whenever there was a seminar given in one of the "elf" sections, someone would write on the bulletin-board announcement, next to the title of the topic, the letters SF, for "science fiction." Unfortunately, this childish graffiti humor had justification in the barrenness of those sessions.

  The general meetings almost always ended in open quarrels. The most petulant, I would say, were the psychoanalysts; they were especially aggressive in their demands—they wanted the appropriate experts to decipher the "literal layer" of the stellar message so that they could then set to work determining the entire system of symbols employed by the civilization of the Senders. Here, of course, came the inevitable rejoinder, in the form of a bold hypothesis, as, for example, that the civilization might reproduce asexually, which perforce would desexualize its "symbolic lexicon" and thereby in advance doom to failure any attempt at psychoanalytic penetration. The one who spoke thus would immediately be labeled an ignoramus, because modern-day psychoanalysis was no longer a primitive Freudian pansexualism. And if, at such a meeting, a phenomenologist also spoke up, there would be no end to the objections raised and countered.

  For we had a veritable embarras de richesses, a quite unnecessary excess of "elfin" specialists—representing even such esoteric fields as psychoanalytic history and pleiography (for the life of me I cannot remember exactly what it is pleiographers do, though I am certain it was explained to me once).

  It would appear that Baloyne was nevertheless wrong to have acceded, in this regard, to the Pentagon's wishes. Those advisers had mastered only one maxim, but that they mastered for all time: if one man
dug a hole with a volume of one cubic meter in ten hours, then a hundred thousand diggers of holes could do the job in a fraction of a second. And likewise, just as such a multitude would crack one another's heads open with their shovels before they broke the first clod of earth, so our poor "elves" tussled and scuffled—mainly with themselves, but with us as well—instead of "producing."

  But if the Pentagon believed results were directly proportional to the investment, that was that. The thought that our guardians were people who held that a problem that five experts were unable to solve could surely be taken care of by five thousand, was hair-raising. Our unfortunate "elves" suffered frustrations and complexes, because the truth of the matter was that they were condemned to complete idleness, albeit an idleness decked up in various appearances. When I arrived at the Project, Baloyne admitted to me, in private, that his dream—impossible—was to jettison all that academic ballast. But one could not even consider such a thing, for a very mundane reason: whoever entered the Project, once in, could not simply get up and leave; that would threaten us with the "breaking of the seal," i.e., the escape of the Secret into the wide, as yet unsuspecting world.