Stanislaw Lem: The Invincible

Rohan sat down on one of the empty, freshly made up cots that were arranged in two long rows. Everything here was in perfect order. Several times he heard the clicking of some instruments, the whispered consultation between the two medical men. Finally Sax stepped back from the stretcher and said: “There’s nothing else we can do here.”

“You mean he’s dead,” said Rohan. It was not so much a question he posed as a conclusion he drew, the only possible interpretation of the doctor’s words.

Nygren had switched on the air conditioning system in the meantime. It was not long before warm air began to stream into the room. Rohan rose from the cot in order to leave the hibernator when he noticed the physician returning to the stretcher. He picked up a small black satchel off the floor, opened it and pulled out that apparatus about which Rohan had heard so much but which he had never seen until now. With slow, almost pedantic movements, Sax began to untangle the cords whose ends had flat electrodes attached to them. He placed six electrodes against the dead man’s skull and fastened them with an elastic band. Then he crouched down and pulled three pairs of headphones out of the satchel. He put on one of these and kept testing the buttons of the machine inside a plastic case. His eyes were closed, his face bore an expression of deepest concentration. Suddenly he frowned, bent over further and stopped fiddling with the button. He quickly removed the earphones from his head.

“Dr. Nygren — ” he said in a strange voice. His colleague seized the earphones in turn.

“What is it?” whispered Rohan with trembling lips.

This apparatus was referred to by the space crews as the “corpse-spy.” With it one could “auscultate the brain” of recently deceased persons, or those dead in whom decay had not yet set in, or a body like this one that had been preserved by very low temperatures. Long after death had occurred one could ascertain what the last conscious thoughts and emotions had been.

The apparatus sent electrical impulses into the brain; there they followed the path of least resistance, moving along those nerve tendrils that had formed one functional entity during the preagonal phase. The results were never too reliable, but it was said to have obtained extraordinarily significant data on many occasions. In cases like the present one use of the “corpse-spy” was clearly indicated,

Rohan somehow suspected that the neurologist had never really counted on reviving the dead man, but had only come to listen and find out the secrets buried in his frozen brain. Rohan stood without moving, aware of the dull beating of his heart and the dryness in his mouth, as Sax handed him the second set of earphones. Had this gesture not been so simple, so matter of fact, he would not have dared put on the headphones. But he felt encouraged by the steady gaze of Dr. Sax who squatted before the seats he slowly turned the amplifier button.

At first he heard nothing but the humming of the current. He felt relieved, for he did not really want to hear more. Without realizing it on a conscious level, he wanted nothing more than that the dead man’s brain remain silent.

Sax straightened up and adjusted Rohan’s headphones. Rohan saw something emerge from the white light that fell on the wall of the cabin: a gray light, dimmed as if by ashes, floating vaguely somewhere at an undeterminable distance. Without knowing why, he tightly squeezed his eyelids together.

Suddenly he could perceive clearly what it was he had just seen. It looked like one of the corridors inside the Condor; there were pipes running along the ceiling. The passage was totally blocked by human bodies that seemed to move. But it was only the image that was waving to and fro. The people were half-naked; shreds of clothing barely covered them. Their skin was unnaturally white and was sprinkled with dark spots like some kind of a rash. Perhaps these spots were not on the skin but were rather a peculiar visual phenomenon, for they were scattered everywhere: tiny black dots on the floor and the walls. The entire image seemed to fluctuate like a blurred photograph taken through a deep layer of flowing water. The picture seemed to stretch, then contracted again, billowing and swaying.

Terrified, Rohan forced his eyes open. The image faded away and vanished; only a shadow remained in the brightly lit room.

Sax began to make some adjustments on the apparatus and Rohan heard, coming from inside him a faint whisper: “. . ala… ama… lala… ala… ma… mama…” Nothing else. Suddenly wierd noises came from the earphones: caterwauling, tweeting and crowing; high-pitched sounds that repeated over and over again like some crazy hiccup or some wild horrible laughter, or tortured electronic circuits.

Sax rolled up the cords and put them back in his bag. Nygren took a sheet and threw it over the dead man, covering up his body and face. The man’s mouth had been tightly shut but now his lips parted slightly, giving his face an enormously surprised expression. It must be the heat, thought Rohan; it had become quite warm inside the hibernator, or at least it felt warm to him. He perspired heavily, the water trickled down his back. He was glad to see the face disappear under the white sheet.

“What is it? Why don’t you say anything?” Rohan called out.

Sax tightened the straps around the plastic case, then stepped closer to Rohan. “Pull yourself together, Navigator!”

Rohan narrowed his eyelids and clenched his fists. But it did not help. In such moments he would fly into a violent rage, which he could suppress only with great difficulty.

“Sorry,” he stammered. “But what did that mean?”

Sax unzipped his protective suit. The bulky garment slid to the ground; nothing remained now of his portly figure. Once again he was the same gaunt, stoop-shouldered man with the narrow chest and delicate hands.

“I don’t know any more than you do,” he answered. “Maybe even less.”

Rohan felt lost; he did not understand any longer, but he seized upon the neurologist’s last words.

“What do you mean, less?”

“Because I just arrived. I haven’t seen anything besides this corpse. But you’ve been here all day. Doesn’t this image suggest anything to you?”

“No. Those — they were moving. Were they still alive then? What were those little black spots all over them?”

“They weren’t moving. That was an optical illusion. These engrams are registered on the brain like a photographic still. And sometimes it happens that several images are present, like in a multiple exposure. But this was not the case here.”

“But those spots? Are they also an optical illusion?”

“I don’t know. Anything is possible. But I don’t think so. What would you say, Nygren?”

Nygren had already peeled off his protective suit.

“I don’t know either. I’m not sure whether they were artifacts or not. There weren’t any on the ceiling, were there?”

“The black spots? No. They only covered the dead bodies and the floor. And some of them were on the walls — ”

“If that had been a second projection, they would have been all over the image;” said Nygren. “But you can never be sure with engrams. So much is purely due to chance.”

“And that voice? That — babbling?” Rohan searched desperately for an answer.

“One word was perfectly clear: ‘Mama.’ Did you hear it?”

“Yes, I did. But there was something else. ‘Ala… lala.’ That was repeated over and over again.”

“Yes, but only because I made a systematic examination of the entire occipital lobe,” said Sax. “In other words, the area that controls acoustic memory,” he explained for Rohan’s benefit. “That’s what’s so unusual here.”