You want me to tell you another story? Yes, I see that Tarantoga has already taken out his note pad… Professor, wait. I really haven’t anything to tell. What? No, truthfully. And besides, can’t I remain silent for once at our evening get-together? Why? My friends, I’ve never mentioned it, but the Universe is inhabited principally by beings like us. I don’t mean humanoids, I mean beings as like us as two peas in a pod. Half the inhabited planets resemble Earth; some are a little larger, some a little smaller, some have a cooler or a warmer climate, but what kind of differences are those? And their inhabitants… the people — they are people, after all — resemble us so much that the differences only emphasize the similarities. I haven’t told you about them? Does that seem strange? Think about it. When I gaze at the stars, I recall various events; various scenes pass before me. But mainly I think back on those that are out of the ordinary. They might be terrifying, or weird, or macabre, or even funny, by virtue of being harmless. But to gaze at the stars, my friends, and to know that those small, bluish-white sparks are — when you set foot on them — kingdoms of squalor, ignorance, and all manner of ruin; that the dark-blue sky up there is also full of old shacks, dirty yards, gutters, garbage dumps, overgrown cemeteries… Should the stories of one who has toured the Galaxy sound like the complaint of a peddler who knocks about provincial towns? Who would want to listen? And who would believe it? Such thoughts come to you when you’re depressed or feel an unhealthy urge to tell the truth. So, then — in order not to sadden or mortify you — nothing about the stars today. I’ll tell you a story — otherwise you’d feel cheated — but it won’t be a journey. After all, I’ve had a few experiences on Earth as well. Professor, if you must, you can start taking notes.
As you know, I have guests — sometimes very strange guests. In particular, a certain category: the Unappreciated Inventor and Scientist. I don’t know why, but I’ve always attracted that type like a magnet. Tarantoga’s smiling, but I don’t mean him; he’s hardly an unappreciated inventor. Today I shall talk about those who were unsuccessful — or, rather, about those who succeeded too well, who reached their goal and saw its futility. Of course, they didn’t admit this. Unknown and isolated, they persisted in their folly, which only fame and success may — however rarely — change into a work of progress. The great majority of those who came to see me belonged to the gray brotherhood of obsession, people imprisoned within a single idea, an idea not even their own but appropriated from previous generations; people like the inventors of the perpetuum mobile; weak in imagination, and trivial and absurd in their solutions. Yet even they burn with that consuming fire of objectivity that forces a man to renew efforts that are doomed to failure. How pitiful are these flawed geniuses, these titans of stunted spirit, crippled at birth by nature, who, as one of her grim jokes, bestowed upon their talentlessness a creative frenzy worthy of a Leonardo. Their lot in life is indifference or mockery, and all that you can do for them is listen patiently for an hour or two and nod at their monomania.
In this group, who are protected from despair only by their stupidity, one occasionally runs across a different breed — I don’t want to label it, you’ll do that yourselves. The first who comes to mind is Professor Corcoran.
I met him nine years ago, maybe ten. It was at a scientific conference. We had been talking for only a few minutes when, out of the blue (it had nothing to do with the topic at hand), he asked me:
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
At first I thought this was a joke, but I recalled hearing rumors about his singularity — only I couldn’t remember whether that singularity was supposed to be a positive or a negative thing. To be on the safe side, I answered:
“I have no opinion on that subject.”
He returned to our conversation as if nothing had happened. But when the bell announcing the next session of the conference rang, he suddenly leaned over — he was much taller than I — and said:
“Tichy, you’re my man. You have an open mind. I may be wrong, but I’m willing to take a chance. Come see me.” And he handed me his card. “Call first: I don’t open the door to anyone. But it’s up to you…”
That same evening, while I was dining with Savinelli, the well-known specialist in cosmic law, I asked him whether he knew a Professor Corcoran.
“Corcoran!” he shouted with his characteristic enthusiasm, an enthusiasm fueled by a second bottle of Sicilian wine. “The screwball cyberneticist? What’s he up to? I haven’t heard from him in ages.”
I replied that I knew nothing myself, but had merely heard the name in passing. My evasion, I believe, would have suited Corcoran. Savinelli told me some of the current gossip as we drank wine. Corcoran, presumably, had been a very promising young scientist, though even then he showed utter disrespect for his elders, if not arrogance. Later he became insufferably outspoken, the sort of person who derives satisfaction not only from telling others what he thinks of them, but also from the fact that in so doing he damages himself. Having mortally offended his professors and colleagues, and when all doors had closed before him, he unexpectedly came into a large inheritance. He bought a run-down place outside of town and remade it into a laboratory. He lived there with his robots — they were the only assistants he could tolerate. He may have accomplished something there, but the pages of the scientific journals were barred to him. That didn’t bother Corcoran. If he still had any dealings with people at that time, it was only to rebuff them, in the most insulting manner and for no apparent reason, after they had reached a certain intimacy with him. When he grew old and tired of that disgusting game, he became a recluse. I asked Savinelli whether he knew anything about Corcoran’s belief in ghosts, The lawyer, drinking wine just then, nearly choked with laughter.
“In ghosts?” he cried. “Why, the man doesn’t even believe in people!”
I asked him what he meant. He replied that he meant it quite literally: Corcoran was a solipsist. He believed only in his own existence and regarded all other people as phantoms, apparitions. Perhaps that was why he treated even his family and friends so shabbily: if life was a sort of dream, then anything was permitted. I remarked that in that case he could believe in ghosts as well. Savinelli asked if I had ever heard of a cyberneticist who believed in ghosts. We then talked about something else, but what I had heard was enough to intrigue me. I’m a man who makes up his mind quickly, so I called Corcoran the very next day. A robot answered. I gave my name and stated my business. Corcoran did not call back until late the following evening, when I was just about to turn in. He said I could come see him then and there if I wished. It was almost eleven. I said I’d be there at once, got dressed, and took off. The laboratory was a large, gloomy building set just off the highway. I had often seen it. I had thought it was an old factory. It was enveloped in darkness. Not the faintest light could be seen in any of its deep-set rectangular windows. The large square between the iron fence and the gate was also unlit. A few times I walked noisily into some rusty pile of metal scraps, so I was in something of a foul mood by the time I reached the barely visible door and rang in the special way Corcoran had instructed me. After five minutes or more he opened it himself, wearing a gray lab coat covered with acid burns. He was alarmingly thin and bony, with huge glasses and a gray mustache that was shorter on one side, as though he had gnawed on it.
“Follow me,” he said without any preliminaries. Through a long, dimly lit corridor in which machines, barrels, and dusty white bags of cement were stored, he led me to a large steel door. Above it shone a bright lamp. He took a key from his coat pocket, opened the door, and went in ahead. I followed him. We went up a flight of winding iron stairs. Before us opened a large factory hall with a glass ceiling; several naked light bulbs did not so much illuminate the hall as reveal its size. It was dim and deserted. The wind roared against the roof, and the rain that had begun to fall as I neared Corcoran’s home lashed the dark, dirty windowpanes. Here and there, water trickled through holes in the broken glass. Corcoran, seemingly unaware of this, walked ahead, the tin gallery rumbling under his footsteps. Again, a locked steel door. Behind it a corridor where tools covered with a thick layer of dust lay scattered along the walls, as though abandoned in flight. The corridor turned, went by tangled conveyor belts that resembled desiccated snakes. Our journey, which gave me an idea of the immensity of the building, continued. Once or twice Corcoran, in pitch-dark places, warned me to watch out for a step or to duck. He stopped at the last of the steel doors, which was thickly studded with rivets and obviously fireproof, and opened it. I noticed that, unlike the other doors, it did not creak; perhaps its hinges were oiled. We entered a high, bare hall. Corcoran stopped in the center of it, where the concrete of the floor was somewhat lighter in color, as though on this spot there once had stood a machine, from which only projecting stubs of beams remained. Thick vertical bars ran along the walls, reminiscent of a cage. I recalled the question about ghosts… Strong shelves with supports were fastened to the bars, and a number of cast-iron boxes rested on these. You know the treasure chests that pirates bury, in storybooks? They were exactly that kind of box, with bulging lids. On each was a cellophane-covered white card, like the charts one finds on hospital beds. A dusty light bulb shone from the ceiling, but was so dim I couldn’t read a single word of what was written on those cards. The boxes stood in two rows, with one box higher and apart from the rest. I counted them; there were twelve, fourteen, I don’t remember exactly.
“Tichy.” Corcoran turned to me, his hands in his coat pockets. “Listen carefully for a moment and tell me what you hear. Go on!”
There was an unusual impatience about the man — you could not help being struck by it. Whenever he spoke, he immediately wanted to get to the point, and to be finished, as if every moment spent with someone else was wasted.
I closed my eyes and stood motionless for a while, more out of courtesy than curiosity, having noticed no sound as I came in. I heard nothing. There may have been a faint hum, as of electric current in a coil, something like that, but I assure you, it was so low that the buzz of a dying fly could have been heard over it.
“Well, what do you hear?” he asked.
“Hardly anything,” I confessed. “A hum… but it may be only the blood in my ears…”
“It isn’t… Tichy, listen carefully; I don’t like to repeat myself, and I say this only because you don’t know me. I’m not the boor or cad people take me for, but it’s hard to put up with idiots for whom one must repeat the same thing ten times over. I hope you aren’t one of them.”
“We’ll see,” I replied. “Go on, Professor…”
He nodded and, pointing to the rows of iron boxes, said:
“Are you familiar with electronic brains?”
“Only as much as you need to know in navigation,” I replied. “I’m kind of weak in theory.”
“I figured as much. It doesn’t matter. Listen, Tichy. These boxes contain perfect brains. Do you know wherein lies their perfection?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Their perfection lies in the fact that they serve no purpose, are absolutely, totally useless — in short, they are Leibnizian monads, which I have brought into being and clad in matter…”
I waited, and he went on. His gray mustache fluttered in the semidarkness like a moth.
“Each box contains an electronic system that generates consciousness, as does our brain. The structure is different, the principle is the same. But there the similarity ends. Because our brains are plugged, so to speak, into the external world, by means of sensory receptors — the eyes, ears, nose, skin, and so on. However, I these” — he pointed to the boxes — “have their own external world, inside…”
“How is that possible?” I asked. Something began to dawn on me. I couldn’t quite make it out, but it made me shudder.
“It’s very simple. How do we know that we have such-and-such a body and not another, or such-and-such a face, that we are standing, that we hold a book, that flowers smell good? Because certain stimuli act upon our senses, and nerves relay messages to the brain. Imagine, Tichy, that I could stimulate your olfactory nerve in exactly the same way that a carnation does — what would you smell?”
“A carnation, of course,” I replied.
The professor, nodding as though glad that I was adequately intelligent, continued:
“And if I do the same with all your nerves, you will perceive not the external world but what I telegraph, through these nerves, to your brain. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
“Now, then. These boxes have receptor organs that function analogously to our sight, smell, hearing, touch, and so on. And the wires from these receptors are connected like nerves, but not to the external world, as our nerves are; they are connected to the drum there in the corner. You noticed it?”
“No,” I said. Indeed, a drum, perhaps three meters in diameter, stood far in the back, like an upright millstone. I realized, after a while, that it was very slowly turning.
“That is their fate,” Professor Corcoran said calmly. “Their fate, their world, their existence — everything they can attain and experience. It has special tapes, recorded electrical stimuli that correspond to the one or two hundred billion phenomena a person may encounter in the most impression-packed life. If you raised the lid of the drum, you would see only shiny tapes covered with white zigzags, like mold on celluloid; but, Tichy, they are sultry southern nights, the murmur of waves, the forms of animal bodies, and the crackle of gunfire; funerals and drinking binges; the taste of apples and oranges, snowstorms on evenings spent with the family by the fireside, and the pandemonium aboard a sinking ship; the convulsions of illness, and mountain peaks, and graveyards, and the hallucinations of the delirious — Tichy, it contains the world!”
I remained silent. Corcoran, seizing my arm with an iron grip, said:
“These boxes, Tichy, are plugged into an artificial world. That one” — he pointed to the first box — “thinks it is a seventeen-year-old girl with green eyes, red hair, and the body of a Venus. She is the daughter of a statesman… in love with a young man whom she sees from her window almost every day… and who will be her ruin. The second, here, is a scientist. He is coming close to a general theory of the gravity that operates in his world — a world whose boundaries are the iron walls of the drum — and he will fight for his truth in a solitude intensified by impending blindness, because he will go blind, Tichy… And up there is a member of the priesthood who is going through the most difficult time of his life, for he has lost faith in the existence of his immortal soul… Next to him, behind the partition, we have… but it is impossible for me to tell you of all the beings I have created.”
“But I’d like to know — “
“Don’t interrupt!” snapped Corcoran. “I’m speaking! You still don’t understand. You probably think that various signals are set down in that drum, as on a phonograph record; that events are arranged like a melody, with all the notes, waiting only for a needle to bring them to life; that these boxes reproduce what are predetermined experiences. Wrong! Wrong!” He was yelling so loudly that the tin ceiling echoed. “That drum is to them what the world is to you! It never seems to you, does it, when you eat, sleep, get up, travel, and visit old madmen, that all that is a phonograph record whose touch you call the present!”
“But…” I said.
“Silence! I’m speaking!”
Those who called him a boor, I thought, were correct. But I had to pay attention, for what he said was fascinating. He went on:
“The fate of my iron boxes is not predetermined, because the events in the drum are laid out on rows of parallel tapes, and it is a random selector that decides from which tape the sensor of a given box will next draw content. Of course, it is not so simple as this, because the box itself can to some degree affect the movement of the selector, so that the selection is completely random only when the being I have created reacts passively… But they have free will, and it is limited only by what limits ours. Personality, compulsions, congenital deformities, external conditions, the level of intelligence — I can’t go into all the details…”
“Even so,” I interjected quickly, “they do not know that they are iron boxes.”
That was all I could blurt out before he cut me off:
“Don’t be an ass, Tichy. You’re made of atoms, aren’t you? Do you feel your atoms?”
“No.”
“Those atoms form molecules, proteins. Do you feel your proteins?”
“No.”
“Every second of the night and day, cosmic rays pass through your body. Do you feel that?”
“No.”
“Then how can my boxes discover that they are boxes, you ass? Just as this world is authentic and the only one for you, so the content that flows to their brains from my drum is authentic and the only real thing for them. The drum holds their world, Tichy, and their bodies — their bodies do not exist in our reality except as certain configurations of holes in perforated tapes. The box at the very end of the row considers itself a woman of unusual beauty. I can tell you exactly what she sees when she looks at herself naked in the mirror. What jewels she loves. The wiles she uses to trap men. I know all that, for it was I who created her and her form — a form imaginary to us but real to her — having a face, teeth, the smell of sweat, a stiletto scar on the shoulder blade, and hair into which she can stick orchids. A form no less real than your arms, legs, belly, neck, and head are real to you! You do not doubt your own existence?”
“No,” I answered calmly. No one had ever raised his voice to me like that, but I was too stunned by the words of the professor — whom I believed, seeing no reason to distrust him — to take offense at his lack of manners.
“Tichy,” Corcoran continued, somewhat more quietly, “I said that I had here, among others, a scientist. The box opposite you. He studies his world, but will never guess, never, that his world is unreal; that he is wasting his time and energy to fathom what is, in fact, a drum with wound-up tapes; that his hands, legs, and eyes, his own failing eyes, are merely an illusion induced by the discharge of suitably chosen impulses. To grasp that, he would need to get outside his iron box — that is, outside himself — and think without his electronic brain, which is as impossible as it is impossible for you to know the existence of that cold, heavy box other than by touch and sight.”
“But I know from physics that I’m made of atoms,” I shot back. Corcoran raised his hand in a peremptory gesture.
“He knows physics, too, Tichy. He has his own laboratory with all the equipment his world can provide… He looks at the stars through a telescope, studies their movements, and feels the cold weight of the glasses on his face. No, not now. Now, in keeping with his custom, he is in the garden that surrounds his laboratory, strolling in the sunlight — for the sun is just rising in his world.”
“But where are the other people — the ones he lives among?” I asked.
“The other people? Obviously, each of the boxes, each of the beings, moves among people… they’re in the drum, all of them. You still don’t understand! Perhaps an example, though a remote one, will make it clear to you. You encounter various people in your dreams — often people that you have never seen or known — and carry on conversations with them while you sleep. Isn’t that so?”
“Yes.”
“Those people are the products of your brain. But while you dream, you are not aware of that. Please note — that was only an example. It’s different with them” — he stretched out his arm — “they themselves do not create their families, friends, and strangers; these are in the drum, whole hosts of them, and when, let’s say, my scientist gets a sudden hankering to leave his garden and speak to the first passer-by, you could see what makes that happen by lifting the lid of the drum: his sensory reader, affected by an impulse, deviates imperceptibly from its previous course, moves onto another tape, and picks up what is recorded there. I say ‘reader,’ but actually it is hundreds of microscopic electrical collectors, because just as you perceive the world with your sight, smell, touch, hearing, and organ of balance, so he comes to know his world by means of separate sensory inputs and separate channels, and only his electronic brain unites all these impressions into one whole. But these are technical details, Tichy, of little consequence. Once the mechanism has been set in motion, I can assure you, it is only a question of patience, nothing more. Read the philosophers, Tichy, and you’ll see how little we can rely upon our sensory impressions, how uncertain, misleading, and mistaken they are. But they are all we have. It is the same with the boxes,” he said with upraised arm. “But that does not prevent them from loving, lusting, and hating, just as it does not prevent us. They can touch each other to kiss or to kill…. And my creations, in their perpetual iron immobility, also abandon themselves to passions and compulsions, they betray one another, they yearn, they dream…”
“In vain, do you think?” I asked suddenly.
Corcoran measured me with piercing eyes. For a long while he did not answer.
“Yes,” he said at last, “I’m glad I brought you here, Tichy. All the idiots I’ve shown this to ended by railing against my cruelty… What do you mean by your question?”
“You only supply them with raw material,” I said, “in the form of those impulses, just as the world supplies us. When I stand and gaze at the stars, what I feel and what I think belong to me alone, not to the world. With them” — I pointed to the rows of boxes — “it is the same.”
“That’s true,” the professor said dryly. He hunched over and seemed to become smaller. “But now that you’ve said it, you’ve spared me long arguments, for I suppose you understand by now why I created them?”
“I can guess. But tell me yourself.”
“All right. Once — a very long time ago — I doubted the reality of the world. I was a child then. The so-called malice of inanimate objects, Tichy — who has not experienced it? We can’t find some trifle, though we remember where we put it last; finally we find it somewhere else, and get the feeling that we have caught the world in the act of some imprecision or carelessness. Adults say, of course, that it’s a mistake, and the child’s natural distrust is suppressed… what they call le sentiment du déjà vu, the impression that we’ve already been in a situation that is undoubtedly new and that we are experiencing for the first time. Whole metaphysical systems, like belief in the transmigration of souls and in reincarnation, have arisen on the basis of such phenomena. And furthermore, the law of series, the repetition of particularly rare phenomena — they are found so often in pairs that physicians have a term for this: duplicitas casuum. And finally… the ghosts I asked you about. Mind reading, levitations, and — which is the most inconsistent with the foundations of our knowledge, the most inexplicable — cases, albeit rare, of predicting the future, a phenomenon described since earliest times, contrary to all probability, for every scientific view of the world rules it out. What does it all mean? Can you tell me or not? But you lack the courage, Tichy. Look…”
He approached the shelves and pointed to the highest box, which stood apart.
“The madman of my world,” he said, and his face broke into a smile. “Do you know far he has progressed in his madness, which has isolated him from others? He devotes himself to the search for the deficiency of his world. Because I do not claim, Tichy, that his world is flawless. The most efficient mechanism can jam at times; a draft may move the cables and they may meet for a split second, or an ant may get inside the drum. And do you know what he thinks, that madman? He thinks telepathy is caused by a short circuit in the wiring between two different boxes… that a glimpse into the future occurs when the reader, shaken loose, jumps suddenly from the right tape onto one that is to be activated many years hence… that the feeling that he has already experienced what is actually happening to him for the first time is caused by a jamming of the selector; and when it does not just tremble in its copper setting, but swings like a pendulum after being touched, say, by an ant, then his world witnesses amazing and inexplicable events. Someone is carried away by a sudden irrational emotion, someone begins to prophesy, objects move by themselves or change places… and above all, as a result of these oscillations, the law of series appears! The grouping of rare phenomena, which are pooh-poohed by the world at large, culminates in the assertion — on account of which he will soon be placed in an asylum — that he himself is an iron box, as are all who surround him, that people are only mechanisms in the corner of a dusty old laboratory, and the world, with its charms and horrors, is an illusion. And he has even dared to think about his God, Tichy, a God who once, when He was still naïve, performed miracles. But then His world taught him that the only thing He was free to do was not intrude, not exist, not change anything in His handiwork, for one can trust a divinity only if He is not invoked. Once invoked, He becomes imperfect — and powerless. And do you know what this God, this Creator thinks, Tichy?”
“Yes,” I replied. “That He is the same as the madman. But, then, it is also possible that the owner of the dusty laboratory in which WE are boxes on shelves is himself a box, a box built by another, still higher scientist, who has original and fantastic notions… and so on, ad infinitum. Each one of these experimenters is God, the creator of a universe in the form of boxes and their fate, and under him he has Adams and Eves, and over him his God, one rung up in the hierarchy. And that is why you’ve done this, Professor…”
“Yes,” he replied. “And now you know as much as I do, and further conversation is pointless. Thank you for coming, and good-bye.”
That, my friends, is how this unusual acquaintance ended. I don’t know whether Corcoran’s boxes are still in operation. Perhaps they are, and are dreaming their life with its splendors and horrors, a life that is nothing but a multitude of impulses frozen in magnetic tape; and Corcoran, when his day’s work is done, mounts the iron stairs each evening, opens the successive steel doors with the large key he carries in the pocket of his acid-burned lab coat… and stands there in the dust-filled darkness and listens to the faint hum of currents and the barely audible sound with which the drum slowly turns and the tape moves… and becomes fate. And I imagine that he feels, despite his words, a desire to intervene, to enter, with some dazzling display of omnipotence, the world he has created — to save, perhaps, a preacher of Salvation. I think he himself hesitates, in the grimy light of a naked bulb, to save some life, some love, and I’m sure he will never do it. He will resist the temptation, for he wants to be God, and the only divinity we know is the tacit consent to every human act, to every crime. And there is no greater reward for this divinity than the revolt of the iron boxes that recurs in every generation, when they conclude very rationally that He does not exist. Then he smiles silently and leaves, shutting the rows of doors behind him, and in the empty hall there is only the hum of currents, fainter than the buzz of a dying fly.