Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, Page 2

  But Wid-Wiss’s treatise was pooh-poohed by the experts; it clearly ran counter to most of the known facts. Critics like Supergnostors Yoo Na Vaak, Quirlsto and Pisuovo of the Martian School of Comparative Paleography pointed out the many contradictions in Wid-Wiss’s chronology.

  For example, the Last Pentagon had been built, according to Wid-Wiss, only a few decades before the papyr catastrophe. But if this Third Pentagon had really existed, argued the critics, the Prez-tendz within would have surely taken advantage of the postpapyr anarchy and attempted to conquer the world in the very first days of the Chaotic. And even had such an attempt to overthrow the Federation been thwarted, some trace of it would have survived in the oral tradition. Yet our historiography notes nothing of the kind.

  Wid-Wiss defended his hypothesis, claiming that when the populace of Ammer-Ka went over to the side of the “heretics” and joined the Federation, the priests of the Last Pentagon ordered it to be completely sealed off from the outside world. So the underground Moloch isolated itself from the rest of humanity and endured to the Chaotic without the least knowledge of what was taking place on the surface of the earth.

  This absolute, hermetic isolation of a community of priests and warriors of Kap-Eh-Taahl did seem, Wid-Wiss admitted, a bit unlikely. So he went on to speculate that the Last Pentagon may have possessed scanning devices on the outside. He did not think, however, that the collective military brain of the Last Dynasty was capable of any offensive or even diversive action. It certainly could not have attacked or engineered a coup against the Federation, for once the colossus had buried itself in rock and severed all ties with the future course of history, it was imprisoned not only by impenetrable walls but by the very nature of its internal organization. From that time on it thrived exclusively on the myth, the legend of the glory that was Kap-Eh-Taahl, and investigated, rooted out and waged bitter war against heresy—the heresy within.

  Our Histognostors answered these arguments with a stony silence. But Wid-Wiss did not give in. For twenty-seven years, with only a handful of loyal colleagues to help him, he combed the Rocket Mountains from end to end. Just when almost everyone had forgotten him, his stubbornness was dramatically vindicated. On 28 Mey 3146, the head archeological team, having cleared away several hundred tons of rubble at the foot of Haar-Vurd Peak, stood before a convex shield, cleverly camouflaged, excellently preserved: this was the entrance to the Last Pentagon.

  Exploration of the underground building, however, proved extremely difficult and demanded extraordinary methods. In the seventy-second year of its retreat from the world, the Pentagon of the Last Dynasty succumbed to a natural disaster. A slight shift in the mountain’s granite core produced a fissure that traveled down through several strata until it came into contact with magma. The building’s concrete protective shell could not withstand the volcanic pressure; molten lava entered and filled the interior from top to bottom. And so that strange anthill of the last of the Prez-tendz became a giant fossil and, as such, waited one thousand six hundred and eighty years to be discovered.

  It is not our task to describe here the tremendous archeological wealth of the Third Pentagon diggings. We refer the interested reader to the many volumes devoted specially to that subject. Only a few remarks remain to be added to this introduction to the “Notes.”

  The “Notes” were discovered in the third year of excavation, on the fourth level, within an intricate corridor system where there were several sanitation facilities. In me of these facilities, filled as the rest with igneous rock, were two human skeletons and, beneath them, a scroll of papyr—the “Notes”

  The reader will see for himself that the daring suppositions of Histognostor Wid-Wiss were for the most part quite accurate. The “Notes” portray the fate of a community locked beneath the earth, a community that refused to allow the infiltration of any news of real events, pretending it constituted the Brain, the Headquarters of an empire that extended even to the most remote galaxies. In time the pretense became belief, the belief a certainty. The reader will witness how the fanatical servants of Kap-Eh-Taahl created the myth of the Antibuilding, how they spent their lives in mutual surveillance, in tests of loyalty and devotion to the Mission, even when the last figment of that Mission’s reality had become an impossibility and nothing remained but to sink ever deeper into the pit of collective madness.

  Our historiography has not yet passed final judgment on the “Notes” commonly called, for the location of their discovery, “Memoirs Found in a Bathtub.” Then too, no agreement has been reached as to when and in what order certain parts of the manuscript were written. The Hyberiad Gnostors, for example, consider the first twelve pages apocryphal, an addition of later years. But the reader will hardly be interested in such technical matters. Let us then be silent and allow this last message from the Neogene, the Era of Papyrocracy, to speak to us in its own voice.

  1

  …I couldn’t seem to find the right room—none of them had the number designated on my pass. First I wound up at the Department of Verification, then the Department of Misinformation, then some clerk from the Pressure Section advised me to try level eight, but on level eight they ignored me, and later I got stuck in a crowd of military personnel—the corridors rang with their vigorous marching back and forth, the slamming of doors, the clicking of heels, and over that martial noise I could hear the distant music of bells, the tinkling of medals. Now and then janitors would go by with steaming percolators, now and then I would stumble into rest rooms where secretaries hastily renewed their make-up, now and then agents disguised as elevator men would strike up conversations—one of them had an artificial leg and he took me from floor to floor so many times that after a while he began waving to me from a distance and even stopped photographing me with the camera-carnation in his lapel. By noon we were buddies, and he showed me his pride and joy, a tape recorder under the elevator floor. But I was getting more and more depressed and couldn’t share his enthusiasm.

  Stubborn, I went from room to room and pestered people with questions, though the answers were invariably wrong. I was still on the outside, still excluded from that ceaseless flow of secrecy that kept the Building strong. But I had to get in somewhere, find an entry at some point, no matter what. Twice I ended up in a storage cellar and leafed through some secret documents lying about. But there was nothing there of any value to me. After several hours of this, thoroughly annoyed and hungry as well (it was past lunchtime and there wasn’t even a cafeteria to be found), I decided to take a different tack.

  I recalled that the highest concentration of tall, gray officers was on the fourth level, so I headed there, opened a door bearing the sign BY APPOINTMENT ONLY and entered an empty reception room, from there went through a side door marked KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING and into a conference room full of moldering mobilization plans. Here I ran into a problem—there were two doors. One said NO ADMITTANCE, the other CLOSED. After some deliberation I decided on the second door—the correct choice as it turned out, since this was the office of General Kashenblade himself, the Commander in Chief. I walked in, and the officer who was on duty at the time led me to the Chief without asking any questions.

  A powerful, bald old man, Kashenblade stirred his coffee. His head was perched upon the collar of his uniform; the bristling, many-folded jowls covered the galactic insignia and stripes like a bib. The desk was cluttered with phones and surrounded by computer consoles, speakers, buttons, and in the center was a row of labeled glass jars—specimens, apparently, though I couldn’t see a thing in them apart from the alcohol. Kashenblade, the veins bulging on his shiny pate, was busy pushing buttons to silence the phones as soon as they began to ring. When several rang together, he rammed his fist into the whole bank of buttons. Then he noticed me. In the silence that followed there was only the grim tapping of his teaspoon.

  “So there you are!” he snapped. It was a powerful voice.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Wait, don’t tell me, I
have a good memory,” he growled, watching me from under those bushy eyebrows. “X-27 contrastellar to Cygnus Eps, right?”

  “No,” I said.

  “No? No! Well then. Morbilantrix B-KuK 81 dash Operation Nail? B as in Bipropodal?”

  “No,” I said, trying to maneuver my pass before his eyes. He waved it aside impatiently.

  “No?” He looked hurt. Then he looked pensive. He stirred his coffee. The phone rang—his hand came down on the button like a lion’s paw.

  “Plastic?” he shot at me.

  “Plastic?” I said. “Well, hardly… I’m just an ordinary—”

  Kashenblade stilled the rising din of phones with one quick slap and looked me over once more.

  “Operation Cyclogastrosaur… Ento-mo … pentacla,” he kept trying, unwilling to admit to any gap in his infallibility. When I failed to respond, he suddenly leaned forward and roared:

  “Out!!”

  And it really looked as if he himself were ready to throw me out bodily. But I was too determined—also too much a civilian—to obey that order. I held my ground and kept the pass under his nose. At last Kashenblade reluctantly took it and—without even examining it—tossed it into a drawer of some machine, which immediately began to hum and whisper. Kashenblade listened to the machine; his face clouded over and his eyes glittered. He gave me a furtive glance and started pressing buttons. The phones rang out together like a brass band. He silenced them and pressed other buttons: now the speakers drowned one another out with numbers and cryptonyms. He stood there and listened with a scowl, his eyelid twitching. But I could see the storm had passed.

  “All right, hand over your scrap of paper!” he barked.

  “I already did…”

  “To whom?”

  “To you.”

  “To me?”

  “To you, sir.”

  “When? Where?”

  “Just a moment ago, and you threw—” I began, then bit my tongue.

  Kashenblade glared at me and opened the drawer of that machine: it was empty, my pass had disappeared. Not that I believed for a moment that this was an accident; in fact, I had suspected for some time now that the Cosmic Command, obviously no longer able to supervise every assignment on an individual basis when there were literally trillions of matters in its charge, had switched over to a random system. The assumption would be that every document, circulating endlessly from desk to desk, must eventually hit upon the right one. A time-consuming procedure, perhaps, but one that would never fail. The Universe itself operated on the same principle. And for an institution as everlasting as the Universe—certainly our Building was such an institution—the speed at which these meanderings and perturbations took place was of no consequence.

  At any rate, my pass was gone. Kashenblade slammed the drawer shut and observed me for a while, blinking. I stood there, my hands at my side, uncomfortably aware of their emptiness. His blinking became more insistent as I stood there, then positively fierce, I blinked back. That seemed to pacify him.

  “Okay,” he muttered, pushing a few buttons. Computers churned, multicolored tapes snaked out onto the desk. He tore them off bit by bit, read them, absent-mindedly set other machines going, machines that made copies and destroyed originals. Finally a white folder emerged with INSTRUCTIONS B-66-PAPRA-LABL in letters so large I could read them from across the desk.

  “Your assignment … a Mission, a Special Mission,” General Kashenblade said with tremendous gravity. “Deep penetration, subversion—were you ever there?” he asked with a blink.

  “Where?”

  “There.”

  He lifted his head; once again the eyelids fluttered. I didn’t know what to answer.

  “And this is an agent,” he said with disgust. “An agent … a modern agent…” He grew morose. The word “agent” was stretched out of shape and became a taunt, it whistled through his teeth, every consonant and vowel was chewed and slowly tortured. Then he exploded: “Everything has to be spelled out, eh? Don’t you read the papers? Stars, for example—tell me about the stars! What do they do? Well?!”

  “They shine,” I said doubtfully.

  “They shine, he says! All right, how? How do they shine? Tell me how!”

  And he pointed to his eyelids.

  “Uh, they twinkle—they blink—they—wink,” I answered in an involuntary whisper.

  “How clever he is! At last! They wink! Yes, they wink! But when do they wink? Do you know when? I bet you don’t! And that’s the kind of material I have to work with around here! At night! They wink, they cower under cover of night!!”

  He roared like a lion. I stood at attention, straight as an arrow, waiting for the storm to pass. But it was not passing. Kashenblade, puffed up and purple to the top of his bald head, shook the room with his bellow, shook the Building itself.

  “And the spiral nebulae?! Well?! Don’t tell me you don’t know what that means! SPY-ral!! And the expanding universe, the retreating galaxies! Where are they going? What are they running from? And the Doppler shift to the red!! Highly suspicious—no, more! A clear admission of guilt!!”

  He gave me a withering look, sat back and said in a voice cold with contempt:

  “Moron!”

  “Now just a minute—” I flared up.

  “What? What was that?! Just a minute—? Ah yes, the password! Good, good. Just a minute … the password, yes, that’s better…”

  And he attacked the buttons—the machines rattled like rain on a tin roof, green and gold ribbons spun out and coiled on the desk. The old man read them avidly.

  “Good!” he concluded, clutching them in his fists. “Your Mission. Conduct an on-the-spot investigation. Verify. Search. Destroy. Incite. Inform. Over and out. On the nth day nth hour sector n subsector n rendezvous with N. Stop. Salary group under cryptonym Bareback. Voucher for unlimited oxygen. Payment by weight for denunciations, and sporadic. Report regularly. Your contact is Pyra-LiP, your cover Lyra-PiP. When you fall in action, posthumous decoration with the Order of the Top Secret, full honors, salutes, memorial plaque, and a written recommendation in your dossier. Any questions?”

  “But if I don’t fall in action?” I asked.

  An indulgent smile spread across the general’s face.

  “A wise guy,” he said. “I had to get a wise guy. Very funny. Okay, so much for the jokes. You have your Mission now. Do you know, do you understand what that is?” His lofty brow unwrinkled, the golden medals on his chest gleamed. “A Mission—it’s a wonderful thing! And Special—a Special Mission! Words fail me! Go, go my boy, God be with you, and keep on your toes!”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said, “But what exactly is the assignment?”

  He pressed several buttons, phones rang, he silenced them. The purple pate slowly turned pink. He eyed me benevolently, like a father.

  “Oh,” he said, “extremely hazardous. But remember, it is not for me! I am not sending you! The Country! The Common Good! Yes, yes … you, I know … it’ll be hard, no picnic, a tough nut to crack… You’ll see! Tough, but it must be done, because … because…”

  “Our Duty,” I prompted.

  He beamed. He rose. The medals on his chest swayed and jingled like bells, a hush fell over the machines, the phones grew silent and the lights dimmed. He approached me, he gave me his powerful, hairy hand, the hand of an old soldier. His eyes bored right through me, the bushy brows knitted in a solemn squint. Thus we stood, united by a handshake, the Commander in Chief and the secret agent.

  “Our Duty!” were his words. “Well said, my boy! Our Duty! Take care!”

  I saluted, about-faced, exited, hearing on the way out how he sipped his cold coffee. Kashenblade—now there was a man.

  2

  Still a little dazed by my conversation with the Chief, I entered the main office. The secretaries were all busy putting on lipstick and stirring coffee. A wad of papers tumbled out of the mail chute: my orders, signed by General Kashenblade. One clerk stamped them “classified”
and handed them to another, who put them on index cards, which in turn were filed away, retrieved, coded by machine—then the key was destroyed, all the original papers burned, the ashes sifted, registered and sealed in an envelope bearing my number, and the envelope was dispatched by pneumatic tube to an unknown vault. But I was unable to pay proper attention to this procedure; the unexpected turn of events had left me quite numb. General Kashenblade’s cryptic remarks clearly indicated matters so secret that one could only hint at them. Though sooner or later I would have to be apprised of their substance. How else could I accomplish my Mission? Did the Mission have anything to do with my original pass? But that question was utterly insignificant in the light of this new, all-too-sudden career of mine.

  My musings were interrupted by the arrival of a young officer who introduced himself as the Chiefs undercover aide, Lieutenant Blanderdash. This Lieutenant Blanderdash shook my hand, told me he had been assigned to my person, led me to an office across the hall, offered me some coffee, began to extol my extraordinary abilities (they had to be extraordinary indeed for Kashenblade to have given me such a tough nut to crack), and also marveled at the naturalness of my face, particularly the nose—then I realized he assumed it was false. I stirred my coffee in silence, deciding that reticence was the best policy. After some fifteen minutes he took me through an officers’ passageway to a service elevator. We broke the seal and rode it down.

  “Incidentally,” he said as soon as we stepped out, “do you yawn much?”