Some six years ago — I had returned from a voyage and was already bored with leisure and the simple routine of domestic life, but not so bored as to plan a new expedition — late one evening I was interrupted in my diary writing by an unexpected visitor.
He was a red-haired fellow in the prime of life, with such a terrible squint that it was difficult to look him straight in the face; to make matters worse, one of his eyes was green and the other brown. His face, in its expression, appeared to combine two persons, one timid and nervous, the other — the dominant one — an arrogant and sharp-witted cynic. An amazing mixture, for sometimes he looked at me with the brown, motionless, surprised eye, and sometimes with the green, which was screwed up derisively.
“Mr. Tichy,” he said as soon as he entered my study, “various tricksters, frauds, and madmen must intrude on you and try to swindle you or put something over on you. Isn’t that so?”
“It does happen,” I replied. “What can I do for you?”
“Among these many individuals,” the stranger went on without giving his name or the reason for his visit, “from time to time there must be, if only one in a thousand, some unappreciated, truly brilliant mind. The infallible laws of statistics require this. I, Mr. Tichy, am that one in a thousand. My name is Decantor. I am a professor of comparative ontogenetics, a full professor. I hold no position at the moment because I do not have time for it. Teaching, anyway, is a futile occupation. No one can teach anyone anything. But enough of that. I came to tell you that I have solved a problem to which I have devoted forty-eight years of my life.”
“I, too, have little time,” I replied. I did not like this man. His manner was arrogant, not fanatic, and I prefer fanatics if I have to choose. Moreover, it was obvious he would ask for money, and I am tightfisted and not ashamed to admit it. This does not mean I will not back certain projects, but I do so reluctantly and, as it were, in spite of myself, for I do then what I know has to be done.
So I added: “Would you perhaps state your business? Naturally, I cannot promise you anything. There was one thing you said that struck me. You mentioned you had devoted forty-eight years to your problem. How old are you now, if I may ask?”
“Fifty-eight,” he replied coldly.
He stood behind a chair as though waiting for me to ask him to sit down. I would have asked him, of course, because, even if a tightwad, I am still polite, but the obviousness of his waiting annoyed me. Besides, he was, as I have said, an extremely obnoxious character.
“I took up the problem,” he resumed, “as a boy of ten. Because, Mr. Tichy, not only am I a brilliant man, I was also a brilliant child.”
Accustomed though I was to such boasting, this brilliance business was a bit much. I grimaced.
“Go on,” I said. If an icy tone of voice could lower the temperature, stalactites would have been hanging from the ceiling after this exchange.
“I have invented the soul,” said Decantor, looking at me with his dark eye while the mocking one seemed fixed upon grotesque phantoms near the ceiling, phantoms visible to it alone. He said this the way one would say, “I have come up with a new eraser.”
“Aha. I see, the soul,” I said almost cordially, for this insolence suddenly began to amuse me. “The soul? You invented it, did you? That’s interesting — I seem to have heard of it before. Perhaps from an acquaintance of yours?”
I broke off insultingly. He measured me with his terrible squint and said quietly:
“Mr. Tichy, let’s make a deal. Refrain from scoffing for fifteen minutes. Then you can scoff to your heart’s content. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” I said, reverting to my former dry tone. “Continue.”
He was not a braggart, I decided now. His tone was too categorical. Braggarts are not dogmatic. He was probably mad.
“Have a seat,” I mumbled.
“The thing is elementary,” said the man who called himself Professor Decantor. “People have believed in the soul for thousands of years. Philosophers, poets, founders of religions, priests, and churches have repeated all possible arguments in favor of its existence. According to some beliefs, the soul is an immaterial substance separate from the body which preserves a person’s identity after his death; according to others it is supposed to be — this is a view prevalent among Eastern thinkers — an entelechy devoid of individual personality. But the belief that man does not pass into nothingness at the time of death, that something in him survives death, has remained unshakable in minds for ages. We now know that there is no soul. There are only networks of nerve tissue in which certain life-related processes occur. What the possessor of such a network feels, what his consciousness perceives — that is the soul. Such was the situation until I appeared. Or, rather, until I told myself: There is no soul. The fact has been proved. But there is a need for an immortal soul, a desire for permanence, for infinite personal continuation in time, despite the passing and ultimate decay of all things. This intense longing, which mankind has felt since the dawn of its existence, is all too real. Why, I thought, shouldn’t I be able to fulfill this age-old dream? I first considered making people physically immortal — but rejected that solution as being, basically, the prolongation of false and deceptive hopes, because immortal people can die, all the same, from accidents and disasters. Besides, it would have entailed a host of difficulties, such as overpopulation. This and other considerations led me to invent the soul. Only the soul. Why — I asked myself — could it not be built as an airplane is built? After all, at one time flight was only a fantasy, and now look. By approaching the problem thus, I solved it. The rest was merely a matter of gathering information, acquiring the means, and exercising patience. Which I did — and therefore can tell you today that the soul exists, Mr. Tichy. Anyone can have one, an immortal one. Individually tailored, fully guaranteed. Is it eternal? The word really means nothing. But my soul — the soul I can produce — will survive the death of the Sun and the freezing of the Earth. I can bestow a soul, as I said, on any person, provided that the person is living. I cannot bestow souls on the dead; that does not lie within my power. But the living are another matter. They will receive an immortal soul from Professor Decantor. Not for free, of course. Being the product of modern technology, of a complex and time-consuming process, it will cost a great deal. With mass production the price should drop, but for the time being the soul is far more expensive than an airplane. However, considering that it is eternal, I think the price is relatively low. I have come to you because the construction of the first soul has completely exhausted my funds. I propose to you that we form a joint company with the name ‘Immortality.’ In return for financing the enterprise, you will receive a majority of the shares and forty-five percent of the new profit. The shares would be nominal, but on the board of directors I would reserve the…”
“Excuse me,” I interrupted. “You have, I can see, an extremely detailed plan for this enterprise. But shouldn’t you, first, tell me more about your invention?”
“Of course,” he replied. “But until we sign a notarized contract, Mr. Tichy, I can only give you information of a general nature. I laid out so much money in the course of my experiments, there was not even enough left to pay for patenting.”
“I understand your caution. But surely you realize that neither I nor any financier — not that I am a financier — in short, no one will take your word for it.”
“Of course.” He reached into his pocket and lookout a package. Wrapped in white paper, it was as flat as a small cigar box.
“This contains the soul… of a certain person,” he said.
“May I know whose?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied after a moment’s hesitation. “My wife’s.”
I looked at the tied and sealed box with great disbelief, and yet, because of his forceful, categorical manner, I felt something like a shudder.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” I saw that he held the box in his hands without touching the seal.
“No. Not yet. My idea, Mr. Tichy, simplified almost to the point of distortion, is as follows. What is our consciousness? As you look at me at this very moment from your comfortable chair and smell the odor of your good cigar, which you did not see fit to offer me; as your eyes perceive my figure in the light of this exotic lamp; as you wonder whether to consider me a swindler, a lunatic, or a remarkable person; and, finally, as your eyes observe all the lights and shadows of your surroundings, and your nerves and muscles keep sending telegrams about their condition to your brain — all this represents your soul, to use the language of the theologians. You and I would say, rather, the active state of your mind. Yes, I admit I use the term ‘soul’ out of a certain perversity. The term, however, is simple and enjoys universal recognition: everyone thinks he knows what is meant when he hears it.
“Our materialist viewpoint, of course, reduces to fiction not only the immortal, incorporeal soul, but also the soul as an invariable, timeless, and eternal thing. Such a soul, you will agree, has never existed; none of us possesses it. The soul of a young man and that of an old man, though there may be points in common when we speak of the same person — his soul when he is a child and at the moment when he lies at death’s door — these are extremely different states of consciousness. In speaking of a person’s soul, we automatically think of his mental state when he is in his prime and in the best of health. It was this state, therefore, that I chose for my purpose. My synthetic soul is the permanently recorded cross section of the awareness of a normal, vigorous individual. How do I do this? I take a substance well suited for the purpose and reproduce in it the configuration of the living brain with the utmost fidelity, atom for atom, vibration for vibration. The copy is reduced on a scale of fifteen to one. That is why the box you see is so small. With a little effort the soul could be further reduced in size, but I see no reason to do so; besides, the cost of production would become exorbitant. Now, then, the soul remains recorded in this material; it is not a model, not an immobile, inert network of nerves, as I first thought, when I was still conducting experiments on animals. Here I came up against the greatest, the only, obstacle. You see, I wished to preserve a living, alert consciousness in this material, a consciousness capable of the freest thought, of dreaming and waking, of flights of imagination, a consciousness ever changing, ever sensible of the passage of time — but I wished also to keep it ageless, to prevent the material from tiring, cracking, or crumbling. There was a time, Mr. Tichy, when this task seemed impossible to me, as it must seem impossible now to you. The one ace up my sleeve was persistence. Because I am persistent, Mr. Tichy. That is why I succeeded…”
“One moment,” I said, slightly confused. “What are you saying? Here, in this box, there is a material object, yes? Which contains the consciousness of a living person? But how does it communicate with the outside world? And see? And hear?…” I broke off, for an indescribable smile appeared on Decanter’s face. He looked at me out of his screwed-up green eye.
“Mr. Tichy,” he said, “you fail to understand. What communication, what contact can there be between partners when the lot of one of them is eternity? Mankind, after all, will cease to exist in fifteen billion years at the most. Whom, then, would that immortal soul hear, to whom would it speak? Did I not say that it was eternal? The time that will have elapsed when Earth freezes, when the youngest and most powerful of today’s stars collapse, when the laws governing the Universe change to such an extent that it will take on a form completely unimaginable to us — that time does not constitute even the tiniest fraction of this soul’s duration, because this soul will last forever. Religions are quite right to ignore the body, for what use would a nose be, or legs, in eternity? What good, after Earth and flowers have disappeared, after the suns have burned out? But let’s skip this trivial aspect of the problem. You said ‘communicate with the outside world.’ Even if this soul made contact with the outer world only once every hundred years, then after a billion centuries, in order to contain the memories of those contacts, it would have to grow to the size of a continent… and after a trillion years, even the volume of Earth would not suffice. But what is a trillion years compared with eternity? However, it was not that technical difficulty that held me back, but the psychological consequences. You see, the thinking personality, the human psyche, would dissolve in that ocean of memory as a drop of blood in the sea, and what would become of guaranteed immortality then…?”
“What?” I stammered. “So you claim… you say… there’s a complete severance…”
“Naturally. Did I say that the box contained the whole person? I was speaking only of the soul. Imagine that from this second on you stop receiving news from the outside, that your brain is removed from your body but continues to exist with all its vital powers intact. You will be blind and deaf, of course, and paralyzed, in a sense, because you will possess no body, but you will retain your inner vision, I mean your clearness of mind and imagination; you will be able to think freely, develop and shape your fantasies, experience hope, sorrow, the joy derived from the play of passing mental states. This is precisely what has been given to the soul I place on your desk.”
“Horrible,” I said. “To be blind, deaf, and paralyzed… for ages.”
“For eternity,” he corrected me. “I have said everything; there is only one thing to add. The medium is a crystal, a type of crystal that does not occur in nature, an independent substance that does not enter into any chemical or physical bonds. Its endlessly vibrating molecules contain the soul, which feels and thinks.”
“Monster,” I said quietly. “Do you realise what you have done? But wait” — I felt a sudden relief — “human consciousness cannot be reproduced. If your wife lives, walks, and thinks, this crystal contains, at most, a copy of her, and is not the real —”
“Yes,” replied Decantor, squinting at the white package, “you are completely right. It is impossible to create the soul of a living person. That would be nonsense, a paradoxical absurdity. He who exists obviously exists only once. Continuation can be realized only at the moment of death. But the process of determining the precise neurological pattern of the person whose soul I produce destroys, in any case, the living brain.”
“You… you killed your wife?”
“I gave her eternal life.” He drew himself up. “But that has nothing to do with the subject under discussion. It is a matter, if you like, between my wife” — he indicated the package — “and me, and the law. We are talking about something altogether different.”
For a while I was speechless. I reached out and touched the package with my fingertips; it was wrapped in thick paper and was quite heavy, as if containing lead.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s talk about something else. Suppose I give you the funds you ask for. Do you honestly believe you will find one person willing to let himself be killed so that his soul can suffer unimaginable torment for all eternity, deprived even of the mercy of suicide?”
“Death does indeed present a difficulty,” Decantor admitted after a brief pause. I noticed that his dark eye was more hazel than brown. “But, to start with, we can count on such categories of people as the terminally ill, or those weary of life, old people physically infirm but in complete possession of their faculties…”
“Death is not the worst option compared to the immortality you propose,” I muttered.
Decantor smiled again.
“I will tell you something that may strike you as funny,” he said. The right side of his face remained serious. “I personally have never felt the need to possess a soul or the need for eternal existence. But mankind has lived by this dream for thousands of years. I have studied the subject a long time, Mr. Tichy. All religion is based on one thing: the promise of life everlasting, the hope of surviving the grave. I offer that, Mr. Tichy. I offer eternal life. The certainty of existence when the last particle of the body has crumbled into dust. Isn’t that enough?”
“No,” I replied, “it is not. You yourself said that it would be an immortality without the body, without the body’s energies, pleasures, experiences…”
“You repeat yourself. I can show you the sacred writings of all the religions, the works of philosophers, the songs of poets, summae theologicae, prayers, legends — I have found in them little concerning the eternal life of the body. They slight the body, scorn it, even. The soul — its infinite existence — that has been the goal and hope. The soul as the antithesis and antagonist of the body, as liberation from physical suffering, sudden danger, illness and decrepitude, from the struggle to satisfy the demands of the gradually disintegrating furnace called the organism as it smolders and burns out. No one has ever proclaimed the immortality of the body. The soul alone was to be saved. I, Decantor, have saved it for eternity. I have fulfilled the dream — not mine, but all humanity’s…”
“I understand,” I broke in. “Decantor, in a sense you are right. But right only in that your discovery has demonstrated — today to me, tomorrow perhaps to the world — that the soul is unnecessary; that the immortality treated in the sacred books, gospels, korans, Babylonian epics, vedas, and folk tales you cite is of no use to man. Anyone faced with the eternity you are ready to bestow on him will feel, I guarantee you, what I feel: the greatest aversion and fear. The thought that your promise could become my fate horrifies me. So, then, you have proved that humanity has been deluding itself for thousands of years. You have shattered that delusion.”
“You mean, no one will need my soul?” he asked in a suddenly wooden voice.
“I am sure of it. How can you think otherwise? Decantor! Would you want it? After all, you are human, too!”
“I already told you. I never felt the need for immortality. I believed, however, that that was my particular aberration, that humanity was of a different opinion. I wanted to satisfy others, not myself. I sought a problem that would be among the most difficult, one worthy of my abilities. I found it and solved it. In this respect, it was a personal thing; from an intellectual point of view, the problem interested me solely as a specific task to be tackled using the proper technology and resources. I took literally what the greatest thinkers in history had written. Tichy — you must have read of it. The fear of cessation, of the end, of consciousness suffering destruction at the time of its greatest richness, when it is ready to bear its finest fruits… at the end of a long life… They all repeated this. Their dream was to commune — with eternity. I have created that communion. Tichy, perhaps they …? Perhaps the most outstanding individuals? The geniuses…?”
I shook my head. “You can try, but I doubt that even one… No, impossible.”
“But why?” he asked, and for the first time his voice trembled. “You think it is not… worth anything to anyone? That no one will want it? How can that be?”
“That’s how it is,” I said.
“Let’s not be hasty,” he implored. “Tichy, everything is still in my hands. I can adapt, alter… I can endow the soul with artificial senses. Of course, that would bar it from eternity, but if the senses are so important to them… the ears, the eyes…”
“And what would those eyes see?” I asked.
He was silent.
“The freezing of Earth… the collapse of the galaxies… the death of the stars in black infinity, isn’t that so?” I said slowly.
He was silent.
“People do not want immortality,” I continued. “They simply do not want to die. They want to live, Decantor. They want to feel the ground beneath their feet, see the clouds overhead, love other people, be with them, and think. Nothing more. Everything that has been said beyond that is a lie. An unconscious lie. I doubt that many would want to hear you out as patiently as I have. Don’t even think of getting customers.”
Decantor stood motionless for a moment, staring at the white package in front of him on the desk. Suddenly he picked it up and, with a slight nod to me, headed for the door.
“Decantor!” I cried. He stopped at the threshold. “What are you going to do with that?”
“Nothing,” he answered coldly.
“Please… come back. One moment more. We can’t leave it like this.”
Gentlemen, I do not know whether he was a great scientist, but a great scoundrel he definitely was. I will not describe the haggling that followed. I had to do it. I knew that if I let him go, even if I found out later that he had lied to me and everything he said had been a fiction from beginning to end, even so, at the bottom of my soul, my flesh-and-blood soul, would burn the thought that somewhere, in some junk-filled desk, in a drawer stuffed with papers, a human mind might be resting, the living consciousness of the unfortunate woman he had killed. And, as if killing her were not enough, he had bestowed upon her the most terrible thing, the most terrible, I repeat, for nothing can compare with the horror of being condemned to solitude for all eternity. The word, of course, is beyond our comprehension. When you return home, try lying down in a dark room, so that no sound or ray of light reaches you, and close your eyes and imagine that you will go on like that, in utter silence, without any, without even the slightest change, for a day and night, and then for another day; imagine that weeks, months, years, even centuries will go by. Imagine, furthermore, that your brain has been subjected to a treatment that makes escape into madness impossible. The thought of a person condemned to such torment, in comparison with which all the images of hell are a trifle, spurred me during our grim bargaining. I intended to destroy the box, of course. The sum he asked — gentlemen, let’s skip the details. I will say this much: all my life I have considered myself a skinflint. If I doubt that today, it is because… but enough. In short: it was not a payment, it was everything I had at the time. Money… yes. We counted it. Then he told me to turn out the light. In the darkness there was first a tearing of paper; suddenly, on a square white background (the cotton lining of the box) there appeared, like a lambent jewel, a faint glow. As I grew accustomed to the darkness, it seemed to shine with a stronger, blue light. Then, feeling his uneven, heavy breathing on my neck, I leaned over, grasped the hammer I had ready, and with a single blow —
Gentlemen, I believe he was telling the truth. Because as I struck my hand failed me, and I only glanced the oval crystal slightly… but even so it went out. In a split second something occurred like a microscopic, noiseless explosion; a myriad of violet dust motes whirled as if in panic and disappeared. The room became pitch-dark. Decantor said in a hollow voice:
“You needn’t hit it again, Mr. Tichy… The deed is done.”
He took it from my hands, and I believed him then, for I had visible proof. Besides, I knew. How, I could not say. I turned on the light, and we looked at each other, blinded, like two criminals. He stuffed both pockets of his overcoat with the bank notes and left without a word.
I never saw him again and do not know what became of him — of the inventor of the immortal soul that I killed.