Nova 1 Read online

  “Let me tell you. I examined the thoughts of a ditch-digger. I found that he was the happiest man imaginable. He had been in his earlier years, I learned, an applied nuclear physicist in an atomic energy plant (I marveled that there had been such in his lifetime, and I was tempted to seek them out). His days had been spent in endless worries about the techniques of keeping the complicated machinery going. His nights had been haunted by calculations concerning possibilities which had been overlooked, and problems which had not been solved. Then, in a day of enlightenment, he had left all this, and he was enjoying the rest of his life out in the fresh air, digging ditches. Jimmy, for a moment I admired that man. This was what I had tried to do for humanity. But, Jimmy, I have always been curious. So, I thought, I will find out a little more about this atomic energy plant; where it is and what the present state of nuclear physics is. And, Jimmy, despite the position this man seemed to have held, I got no substantial information at all. His memories of his former life seemed to have been whittled down until nothing was left but their emotional content.

  “I’m a trusting man, Jimmy, but some things need explanation. So I followed this ditch-digger through all the rest of the day, and home that night to a third-floor walkup apartment (they had not succeeded in growing elevators) where he was greeted by a wife of remarkable ugliness.

  “You know, Jimmy, that man’s entire past life vanished from his mind the moment he saw his wife’s face. It was replaced by an entirely different past, which I won’t bother to describe. The gist of it was, of course, that because of these now-past events he was remarkably lucky to be married to this very ordinary and very ill-favored creature.

  “You see, Jimmy, what the Americans had achieved in a life of thought was a controlled rationalization of remarkable clarity. They could make their tastes conform to whatever they did, and they could make their memories back them up. It was remarkably successful, too, for they were all happy. I found men happy to be paralyzed, men happily dying of cancer, and women happy to have borne idiot children. There was nothing more to be desired, for whatever a man’s lot might be was just what he wanted.

  “Jimmy, I was shaken then. Where was my world of nature and thought and philosophy, music and contemplation, the world I had tried to give to men? But then, I wondered if such a civilization as I had seen might not fall to pieces, giving way to something better. So, Jimmy, I decided to look at the end product.

  I tried 50,000 a.d. It looked a lot better, Jimmy. You should see it yourself, for a bit.”

  Herr van Manderpootz broke off and led me to the room with the apparatus which looked like a dentist’s chair. He bade me to lie back, and he strapped a helmet over my head.

  “You won’t be there long,” he said, “and you won’t need to know what to do.”

  He turned a switch and I found myself, as nearly as I can describe it, floating in space. I hoped that for the first time in my life I had got where I was headed for.

  It was a space not empty, however, but filled everywhere with a faint illumination. There were luminous buildings, or temples, or palaces—I don’t know how to describe them, floating apparently in mid-air, and lighted from nowhere. And there were creatures, too, of various form. Some were tenuous, gaslike, with bright-colored nuclei of light. Some were geometrical and jewellike, flashing back rays which had never shone on them. And there was music, and a group of creatures of like form were weaving in a geometric pattern, a dance, I thought. But all of this was so different from anything I had ever seen, and so confusing, that I cannot remember it distinctly. Then one of the “onlookers” seemed to sense my presence.

  “He has returned,” I seemed to sense his thoughts.

  “He has returned,” a chorus of thoughts replied. The dancing stopped, and one of the dancers seemed to me to waiver. Then with a wrench I was back in van Manderpootzs dentist chair, staring at van Manderpootz’s clean-shaven face.

  “It’s beautiful, Jimmy, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “It came out all right in the end?” I asked, rather unbelievingly.

  “No, Jimmy,” he said, “that’s why I’m doing what I am.” And then he began the end of his tale:

  “I think they would recognize you, Jimmy; they would take you for me. You see, I spent some time with them in their world. Yes, where it was my first puzzle, for when I got past my initial astonishment and joy, I wondered at the absence of Earth, or sun or stars, or anything with which I had been familiar. Could these have vanished? Certainly, not in a few thousand years.

  “Jimmy, it didn’t take long for me to find out. Theirs is a mental world! It has space and light, form and color and music, because they think these things in their minds.

  “Indeed, they have legends of matter—old, misunderstood legends which are the myths of their world. Some of those have been woven into their art. They have a festival of the body, which they celebrate at times—at what times, I wonder, for what is time in a nonphysical world? They held the festival for me, once. I think it is a myth about a myth of creation. All of the creatures gathered around in a hollow sphere and thought a nebulous mist into being in the center of it. Then the mist congealed into the forms of a man and a woman, lying under a tree. To them, this had no meaning save as a very old ritual with a quaintness which gave it artistic value. Their forms have nothing to do with the human; they are entirely arbitrary. They are the result of fashion. In that world, someone creates a form as a woman would design a dress. Others take a fancy to it and copy it. The whole world is in a perpetual flux.

  “And that is true of the buildings themselves, and of the very pattern of space. Mostly they, and their buildings, exist in a space very much like our own, for they are used to this. But in play, they delight in changing the laws, in making up spaces with queer but consistent geometries. Some are periodic; in them creatures and things appear endlessly repeated. Other simple spaces are oddly warped, so that everything changes shape as it moves, queerly but consistently. Indeed, one of their games is to invent a space according to geometrical postulates. Then a group will imagine themselves and a portion of their world in it, and imagine their behavior and appearance, and together, imagine the appearance of their buildings. And to make an error, to imagine something inconsistent with the assumed laws, is to lose the game.

  “I said, Jimmy, that they sometimes imagine in a group. Their buildings are made that way; they are there because a group of the creatures imagine them. For in larger things, with great detail, it takes the minds of many, although each one imagines his own form, or so I thought at first.

  “Well, Jimmy, you can believe that I was delighted. Here was the future of humanity (of that I was sure, by the festival of the body, and by other familiar aspects of their thought and imaginings). But it was a humanity entirely freed from the physical. Vestiges remained, but only as pleasing aspects of thought. Thus, in some vague way there seemed to be sex left in the creatures (how, I could not then imagine) and love, but these were more of a mode of artistic expression than any fixed reality. There were poems, which could be graven across their heavens of the mind in fiery letters, or rolled out in imagined voices. There was music, too, to be heard with the ear of the mind, and accompanied with flashing patterns and harmonies of scent which could not have seemed more real had they been physical. And there was contemplation, and thought of mathematics, or of philosophy, so consistent in all of its subtle relations that it seemed to be beyond human criticism—even of the great van Manderpootz.

  “You can imagine, Jimmy, that I wasn’t looking for flaws, at least, not at first. And then, I began to wonder. Some way, Jimmy, it didn’t seem too good. I looked for flaws. I found sickness.

  “Yes, sickness, Jimmy, in a world without anything physical in it. First I asked, and no one paid any attention. But then, it happened even as I was thinking mathematics with a wonderful creature of shimmering whorls. For a moment his thoughts were troubled. He lost the thread of his argument—his thoughts became unpleasant and disconnecte
d, as if, almost, of pain.

  “And then his fellows gathered around, and helped him. They thought the right thoughts with him. It was as if they were leading him back to the right path. I could not understand it all; there was a period of confusion during which I thought that his form waivered. And then he steadied again. His thoughts cleared and we resumed our discussion for a moment. Then I asked him what had been wrong. The reply seemed to mean, I was sick, but now I am well again. I noticed that some of his companions still lingered, following the conversation, and I wondered if the creature of whorls were not wholly recovered.

  “Well, Jimmy, I am suspicious, a little, and I watched my creature of whorls, and kept him, well, where I could see him out of the comer of my mind. And you know, Jimmy, he was weak yet. When it came time to think into existence a new building, or to change an old one, he seemed to take little part, and this puzzled me.

  “And being puzzled, Jimmy, I became critical, too. The world was beautiful, and impressive beyond all compare, but, despite its manifold and arbitrary changes, it came to seem monotonous to me. At first I did not know what I missed. Then I realized what it was. This world was a world of thought alone. It lacked the infinite and arbitrary variety of nature and of a world modeled on nature. There was no beach made up of grains of sand, uncountable and yet each a little different from the rest. There were no snowflakes, all hexagonal and yet no two alike. And, in the buildings, there was no hidden and forgotten carving, as in a Gothic cathedral, to be rediscovered by the curious, in a dark corner, seen by the light of a flickering candle. The world was of the mind. There could be nothing outside of the mind; all there was, it had made, and there was nothing to discover.

  “And in these disquieting meditations, I thought of my creature of whorls and of his sickness. I thought for him, but I could not find him. And, Jimmy, I was frightened. And I fled the place, back to here.

  “I didn’t know what to do, Jimmy. I, the great van Manderpootz. I was so hurt, and so disappointed to doubt the future which I had helped to bring about, or which I would help to bring about if I continued with my biology and psychology. But I can face the truth. Van Manderpootz is no coward. So I went back to the machine, and I explored time back from that remote future in which I had been. And do you know what I found, Jimmy? Symbiosis! I found men preparing closed tanks, filled with all the elements needful to life, and with glass tops faced to the sun. And I saw them lowering unconscious human bodies into those tanks, into a mess of what looked like slime and must have been alive. And I knew what had happened. Man had found a way to live without effort, in the partnership with some simple organism, his body cradled and fed and kept young through the ages. And he had found telepathy as well. Finally, the very last man to walk the face of the earth had lowered himself into a tank and closed the lid. And men had lived in a world of dreams, thinking their thoughts together. They had forgotten their bodies, which lay on the face of the earth.

  “Perhaps they had planned that someone would tend the bodies. I suppose so, but no one had. And now, earthquakes, or floods, or life—some successor to the termite, perhaps, boring into the tanks, was killing men, one by one. And as a man’s body died, his consciousness faded. I thought of the creature of whorls. He had died, and his fellows had taken over his thoughts; they had maintained him in their consciousness, just as they did the buildings which they built together, and they called this curing him. And then, they forgot him, and he vanished, and no one remembered him, and those who were left were happy.

  “Jimmy, I wept. I did, Jimmy, I, the great van Manderpootz. But I am a man of action, so next I thought, what could I do about it? At first, I was dazed, and I went far ahead into the world of the gorgeous creatures, and I tried to tell them about the physical world, about stars and the sun and the Earth and seas and stones and soil and creatures, hoping even to tell them about their bodies in the tanks. But it was no good, Jimmy. At first they listened, for it was strange—like ghost stories to us, and tales of heaven and hell. But then, they lost interest, and when I tried to make them believe that this was serious, and real, they turned their minds away. They knew, you see, that thoughts alone were real. At first I despaired, but then I realized that it was too late. Suppose the impossible, that I did convince them. What could they do? They had no way of raising their bodies out of the tanks, and living in them again. So I thought, where shall I start to prevent this? And I thought of the earlier worlds. When they were putting them into the tanks, that was too late already. And the world of rationalizations, one should stop before that. And the world of forgetting, where people muttered over a favorite phrase; that too should be prevented. And then, Jimmy, I came right back to this house. If these things were to exist, it would be because I, Haskel van Manderpootz, gave to the world the results which I should achieve through my biological researches, instead of what I should give the world.”

  “But you said that life was the most wonderful thing,” I exclaimed. “And surely, all your plants were wonderfully useful. Even that chair . . .” and I pointed to the object.

  “It’s crooked, Jimmy,” he said. “And I was thinking crooked. I was wrong when I was right. I’m not too proud to admit I can be wrong,” he added magnanimously, “when I find it out myself.

  “What was wrong, Jimmy, was thinking that what the future needed was chairs, or houses that were easier to make, or crops that were easier to take care of. What the world really needed was better people. Smarter people. More aggressive people. People who don’t just lie in a tank and dream, but people who think and then get up and do things.”

  “You mean, you can use your genetic visualizer and manipulator to make better people?” I asked.

  “Better people!” he replied. “How could people be better than van Manderpootz? What the world needs is more van Manderpootzes.”

  “And so, Joyce?” I asked.

  “Yes, Joyce,” he replied. “She’s healthy. And she has a wonderful mind—capable, and absolutely blank. All she thinks of are tennis and siding and horses. They come next,” he added. “Van

  Manderpootz can do anything a woman can, and better, except make him little van Manderpootzes.”

  I was awed at this revelation. Here was something my guru hadn’t told me about man and his future. When I left van Manderpootz to visit my guru’s spiritual colleague in Carmel, I found I had taken a flight to Iowa. Married to a farmer’s daughter, I’m thinking of asking van Manderpootz if he really destroyed all of those pest-proof, self-tending crops.

  SWASTIKA!

  by Brian W. Aldiss

  Black humor is the mark of our times. Perhaps because if we do not laugh at the state of things we shall have to cry. And crying is simply a waste of time, no matter how good it feels while indulging in it. Catch 22 was the hook on this theme, and Dr. Strangelove the movie. Now we have Brian Aldiss’s short story that, once and for all, should lay to rest all those vicious rumors about Adolf Hitler being alive and well in Argentina. He is not. He is . . . well, let Mr. Aldiss tell you. . . .

  On April 30, 1945, in his bunker in the Berlin Chancellery, Adolf Hitler crunched an ampule of potassium cyanide. Then he was shot through the head by Heinz Linge, his valet, and his body taken out into the garden of the Chancellery and burned— or partially burned.

  Some of these facts were known almost immediately. Luckily, the Soviet forces got to the scene of the crime first and, only twenty-three years later, rushed out the rest of the facts. The one thing that makes me doubt the truth of the whole account is that I happen to know Hitler is alive and well and living in Ostend under the assumed name—at least, I assume it is assumed—of Geoffrey Bunglevester.

  I was over to see him last week, before the winter became too advanced. Of course, he is getting on in years now, but is amazingly spry for his age and still takes an interest in politics, supporting the Flems against the Walloons.

  We had been talking business but gradually turned to more personal matters.

  “Looking
back,” I said, “do you ever have any regrets?”

  “I wish I’d done more with my painting.” A far-off look came into his eyes. “Landscape painting—that would have suited me. I flatter myself I always had an eye for pretty landscapes.” He started reeling off their names: the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland . . . To keep him to the subject, I said, “I’d certainly agree that some of your early watercolors showed astonishing promise, but haven’t you ever regretted—well, any of your military judgments?”

  He looked me straight in the eye, brushing his forelock back to do so.

  “You’re not getting at me, Brian, are you? You’re not trying to be sarcastic at my expense?”

  “No, honestly, Geoff, why should I?”

  He leaned over the table toward me and glanced over one shoulder.

  “You are Aryan, aren’t you?”

  “I went to an English public school, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s good enough for me. Very fine unrivaled disciplinary system! Well, I apologize, I thought you were trying to get at me for attempting to apply a final solution to the Jewish problem.”

  “It never entered my head, Geoff.”