Memoirs of a Space Traveler by Stanislaw Lem Read Free Book Online Page B

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