Michael Frayn - Sweet Dreams

“God, it’s handy having you around!” says Phil, scribbling as fast as he can. “This is just the kind of thing you waste months reconstructing under laboratory conditions — the difference in reaction between when you think you’re morally right, and when you think you’re factually right. So let me just check. First you laughed at him?”

“That’s right.”

“How?”

“Oh, a sort of astonished laugh. Ha-ha! Something like that.”

“And then you said: ‘But no one’s going to go up the mountains!’ Just like that? No repetitions? No sort-ofs?”

“I don’t think so.”

“This is a most astonishing contrast with the moral response, you see. Only a minute or two earlier you were saying things like: ‘It’s just a sort of a, a sort of a, a, a, a question of as it were sort of behaving sort of, well, for want of a better word, decently, sort of thing.’ And now here you are getting out one, two, three … nine words in a row without any defensive byplay at all.”

“Exactly. But we had got onto a subject I do happen to know something about. I don’t know much about most things, but I do know whether people will be going up the Alps or not.”

Phil makes a note.

“May I just ask you one more question?” he says.

“Shoot.”

“Just say if you’d prefer to knock off.”

“No, no. It really gives me a kick to be of some use like this.”

“Well,” says Phil, “do you remember that time when we were undergraduates, and we hitch-hiked to Rome?”

“Yes,” says Howard, puzzled. “But what’s that got to do with it?”

“And on the way we went through Switzerland?”

“Yes. But …”

“And in the youth hostel in Interlaken we met an American called Todd?”

Howard thinks.

“The man with the beard?” he asks.

“That’s right,” says Phil. “A curly black beard.”

“The one who used to hollow out the inside of a baguette for breakfast, and fill it up with condensed milk, and lower it into his mouth like a sword-swallower?”

“That’s right.”

Howard laughs. “That was the lunatic who insisted we climbed the Eiger with him,” he says, “and the clouds came down, and we lost the path, and we almost walked over the top of a thousand-metre cliff, and …”

His voice trails away. The smile fades from his face. He gazes thoughtfully at a spot about half-way up the wall, blinking slowly.

Phil makes rapid notes.

“Good,” he says. “Well done. That’s nice. I like the blinking. I shouldn’t have thought of the blinking.”

Howard has the feeling that the floor is dropping away beneath his feet, as if he is in an express lift.

His voice sounds as if it is attempting to name the floors as he passes them.

“Oh, I see…” he says. “Oh, heavens, I don’t think that’s got anything to do with it…. I mean, we only got half-way up…. The fact that three halfwits without even a rope tried to … Well, all right, everyone knows that there are going to be a few fools who insist on trying to break their necks…. You’re always going to get some tiny minority you can’t take into consideration….”

Phil notes it all down.

Howard falls and falls. It’s the kind of sensation that people pay money to suffer in fair grounds. To think that this abyss of revelation was waiting inside himself all the time!

“I see what you mean,” he says at last. He makes little humorous concessive noises in his throat, to admit his mistake. He adopts his familiar ape walk, with knees bent outwards and fingers trailing, to express his wry awareness of having boobed. He is at his most Howard-like, his funniest and most lovable. You can create a good impression on yourself by being right, he realizes, but for creating a good impression on others there’s nothing to beat being totally and catastrophically wrong.

Even Phil, noting the syndrome down, can’t help smiling a little.

“But what I don’t understand,” says Howard later, with genuine humility, “is how you know more about everything than I do. Not only about the city, but about myself, even.”

“Oh, plenty of people know things,” says Phil, and sighs. “It’s the skill you’ve got that really counts — the ability not to know things, or to know them without knowing that you know them. If we can get man set up the same way we’ll have a real world-beater on our hands.”

“Obviously,” says Howard seriously, “I shall have to get out of mountains. I can’t go on working on instruments of mass destruction.”

Quietly, unhesitatingly — just like that — he faces up to the moral consequences of his realization. In that moment he changes careers — changes lives.

“What are you going to do instead?” asks Phil, chewing up little pieces of graph paper into sodden balls, and flicking them at the laboratory ceiling with a slide-rule to try and make them stick.

“I suppose I’ll go into rivers,” says Howard.

“Rivers drown people.”

“Or forests.”

“Forests fall on people.”

“I don’t know. Plains, perhaps. I’ll have to think about it.”

“Howard,” says Phil, grinning. “I don’t think you’ve got the point. There isn’t anything that isn’t going to cause trouble. Make the whole world as smooth as a billiard ball, and people are still going to fall over and split their skulls open. Fill the world with nothing but good clean pure air and someone’s going to get up into it and fall out of it. I can tell you, the people we’re putting together on my project are going to drop to pieces without doing anything . They’ll sit in their armchairs safely watching television and smiling at the children, and be eaten away by growths and shot in the heart by the disintegration of their own arteries.”

Howard stares at him.

“You’re joking, of course,” he says.

“No.”

“But this is terrible!”

“Yes.”

“What job can I do, then?”

“You could try doing nothing,” says Phil. “We could all try doing nothing.”

“Nothing? How do you mean nothing?”

“Not create the world.” Howard tries to focus his mind on this idea.

“We couldn’t do that,” he says.

“Why not?” says Phil. “Why don’t we leave everything as a nice quiet lot of nothingness?”

“Because obviously …” says Howard. “Because … Well, because …”

“Because,” says Phil, “if we didn’t have a universe to create and run, and a nice lot of trouble to sort out, there wouldn’t be any point to our existence. The whole thing’s a gigantic boondoggle.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” says Howard.

“Exactly,” says Phil.

“The world’s not perfect — all right. We’re responsible for some of its troubles — all right. We’re all profiting from its trouble — all right ! But that’s not to say that we’re not doing a reasonably good job on the whole ! After all, we’re the ones who’ve provided them with … I don’t know … fresh air to breath, and … sunsets to look at, and …”

“The soft refreshing rain?”

“Right! And on the whole they’re very grateful to us! They’re very pleased with what we’ve done for them!”

“Are they?”

“Of course they are!”

“Has anyone ever bothered to find out? Has anyone ever actually gone over there and had a look at them? Asked them what they felt?”

Howard gazes out of the window of Phil’s laboratory, thinking. With natural neatness a new career is opening up to replace the old.

At the airport, planes of astonishingly different sizes — like children’s toys on different scales mixed up in the same game — queue to use the runway for takeoff. They are bound for Brazzaville, Tucson, Irkutsk, Belfast, London, and Caracas. They wait in the sunshine, trembling slightly, shimmering like mirages in each other’s jetstreams, while incoming planes land, from Fairbanks, Bucharest, Huntsville, Glasgow, Karachi, and Albuquerque.