Stanislaw Lem - The Investigation

Dr. Sciss, who until now had been standing behind his armchair as if it were a lecturn, took a few steps in the direction of the door, turned unexpectedly, inclined his head, and continued, looking into the room at the seated men.

“Now, let us begin. First, you will recall that before any of these phenomena occurred there was a temporary phase which we can label conventionally as the ‘forerunner stage.’ During this stage bodies changed positions. Some turned upside down. Others were found on their sides. Still others were found on the floor next to their coffins.

“Second, with only one exception, each corpse belonged to someone who had died in his prime.

“Third, in each incident, again with one exception, some kind of covering was provided for the body. Twice this was ordinary clothing. Once it was most likely a doctor’s coat and white trousers, and once — a black cloth curtain.

“Fourth, none of the corpses involved had been autopsied; all were undamaged; all were well preserved. Furthermore, every incident took place within thirty hours of the time of death, a fact particularly worthy of your attention.

“Finally, all the incidents, again with one exception, took place in small town mortuaries to which entrance is usually quite easy. The only disappearance that doesn’t fit this pattern is the one at the Medical School.”

Sciss turned to the Chief Inspector.

“I need a powerful spotlight. Can you get something for me?”

The Chief Inspector said a few quiet words into the intercom. During the ensuing silence, Sciss opened his spacious, bellowslike leather briefcase and slowly drew out a sheet of tracing paper, folded several times and covered with colored markings. Gregory looked at it with a mixture of aversion and curiosity. The scientist’s patronizing attitude irritated him. Stubbing out his cigarette, he tried unsuccessfully to guess what was written on the paper rustling in Sciss’s awkward hands.

Meanwhile, tearing one side of the paper slightly as he worked, Sciss unfolded it and spread it out on the desk in front of the Chief Inspector, whom he hardly seemed to notice, then walked over to the window and looked out at the street, holding one wrist with the fingers of the other hand as if checking his own pulse rate.

The door opened; a policeman came in with an aluminum spotlight on a high tripod and connected it to an outlet. Sciss switched it on. Waiting until the door had closed behind the policeman, he focused a bright circle of light on the huge wall map of England, then placed the sheet of tracing paper over it. Unfortunately, it was impossible to see the map through the translucent paper, so he moved the spotlight away, took the map down from the wall (swaying precariously on a chair to do so), and clumsily hung it on a stand which he pulled from a corner to the middle of the room. The spotlight was set up again where it could shine through the map from behind, while Sciss, with his arms spread wide to hold the sheet of tracing paper open, moved in front of it. This position — with outstretched, raised arms — was obviously uncomfortable beyond description.

Sciss finally managed to steady the stand with his leg. Holding the tracing paper from the top, he turned his head sideways.

“Please direct your attention to the area in which our incidents have occurred,” he said.

Sciss’s voice was more high-pitched than before, possibly because he was trying not to show how much he was exerting himself.

“The first disappearance took place in Treakhill on January sixteenth. Please remember the places and dates. The second — January twenty-third, in Spittoon. The third — February second, in Levering. The fourth, February twelfth, in Bromley. The most recent incident took place on March eighth in Lewes. If we treat the location of the first incident as the starting point, and enclose it in a circle with an expanding radius, the results are as shown by the notations on my tracing paper.”

A section of southern England along the Channel coast was clearly demarcated by the powerful beam of light. Five concentric circles encompassed five towns, each marked by a red cross. The first cross appeared in the center, the others were much closer to the perimeter of the largest circle.

Watching for signs of fatigue in Sciss, whose arms, still outstretched to hold the tracing paper, were not even trembling, Gregory began to feel tired.

“If you want me to,” Sciss said in a shrill voice, “I will explain my calculations later on. Right now I shall only give you the results. The incidents occurred in a particular sequence: the more recently each incident took place, the farther it is located from the center — that is, from the site of the first disappearance. In addition, there is another significant item: the time between the respective incidents, counting from the first one, gets longer and longer, although not as if they were in proportion to each other in some specific ratio. But if temperature is also taken into account, it becomes evident that there is a certain regularity. More specifically, the product obtained by multiplying the time elapsed between any two incidents, and the distance separating any two consecutive disappearing-body sites from the center, when multiplied by the differential between the prevailing temperatures at both sites…

“This gives us,” Sciss continued after a moment, “a constant of five to nine centimeters per second and degree. I say five to nine because the exact time of disappearance was not ascertained in any of the incidents. Therefore, in each case we have to deal with a broad, multi-houred time block during the night, or, more precisely, during the latter half of the night. If we take a mean of seven centimeters as the true quantity of the constant, and then do certain calculations, which I have already completed, we get a rather curious result. The causal factor of these phenomena, which have been moving steadily from the center toward the perimeter, does not lie in Treakhill at all, but has shifted westward to the towns of Tunbridge Wells, Engender, and Dipper… that is, the very places where there were rumors circulating about moving corpses. If, on the other hand, we attempt an experiment based on a completely accurate location point to determine the geometric center of the phenomena, we find that it is not located in any of the mortuaries, but about eighteen miles southwest of Shaltam — in the moors and wastelands of Chinchess…”

Inspector Farquart, whose neck had been turning progressively more red as he listened to all this, was finally unable to contain himself.

“Are you trying to tell us,” he exploded, “that an invisible spirit of some kind came up out of those damned moors, flew through the air, and snatched the bodies?”

Sciss began to roll up his paper. Standing in the glow of the hidden spotlight, thin and dark against the bright greenish map behind him, he resembled a bird more than ever (a swamp bird, Gregory thought to himself). Sciss carefully hid the tracing paper in his battered old briefcase and straightened up. He looked coldly at Farquart, his face covered with red blotches.

“I have nothing to add beyond the results of my statistical analysis,” he declared. “A close relationship can easily be demonstrated between eggs, bacon, and the stomach, to name only one example, or a distant relationship, with somewhat more difficulty, between, for example, a country’s political system and its average marital age. But regardless of the degree of difficulty, there is always a definite correlation, a valid basis for a discussion of causes and effects.”

With a big, carefully folded handkerchief, Sciss wiped several droplets of sweat from his upper lip. Replacing it in his pocket, he continued.

“This series of incidents is hard enough to explain, and preconceived notions of any kind must be avoided. If you insist on displaying your prejudices to make things difficult for me, I will be forced to give up the case, as well as my cooperation with the Yard.”