Fred Saberhagen - The Frankenstein Papers

Later _Frankenstein is just arrived here in Ingolstadt, much to my surprise, and we have spoken again. He is quite agitated, says he is determined to recompense me in some way for the ill-treatment I have suffered on occasion from his former associates. I say "former" because he has now resolved, he says, to have nothing more to do with Saville and Walton.

He says, further, that you have given him good advice, and he is determined to follow it; but if his past record is considered, perhaps we should not place too great a reliance on his persistence in any course of action. I have told him that to make amends to me, he ought to seek you out, and reveal to you all his electrical secrets. I hope that this tactic meets with your approval. For myself, I want nothing from the man, and feel as wary of his sudden friendship as I should if he declared himself my enemy.

After talking to me, Frankenstein departed, having hired some men to help him, announcing that he plans to search the countryside for the being he has authored—or believes that he has authored. I have a premonition that he may find the search no easy one.

Later again _Captain Walton also has arrived in town, somewhat to my alarm—I have seen him only at a distance. He looks worried, and I hear he has been asking after Saville, who was en route here also but has not arrived. The sea captain, without his leader, is behaving in what appears to be a harmless manner, but I shall certainly be on my guard. He has already announced locally, I hear, that he is here to gather material for his next book.

Later still _Twenty four hours have elapsed, since my companion stalked off leaving me in the square, and he still has not reappeared. I am worried about him but can discover nothing. Saville was definitely reported in Munich, but seems to have disappeared somewhere along the road between that city and here, a highway, as you know, relatively short and well traveled. My fear is that the two of them have met, and that my friend has suffered by the encounter. Perhaps they have somehow destroyed each other.

I will write more as soon as I have discovered more.

Your Son,

Benjamin Freeman

PRELIMINARY REPORT

From: Observer First Class Osak Larkas

To: Commander, Fourth Rescue Unit, Headquarters Fleet

Subject: Current situation on Cultivated Planet 43

Sir:

The medical officers aboard this excellent ship assure me that my recovery is now virtually complete, and I believe that I can now consider my own recent actions with the necessary objectivity.

First, allow me to express my gratitude to you and the people under your command for their most efficient action in locating me and extracting me from a most dangerous situation. My predicament not only threatened to have an adverse effect upon the overall mission of the Observer Force, but it had grown personally intolerable.

It adds greatly to the credit of the rescue team that they managed a most complicated and difficult operation while complying fully with all Observers' Rules. I must admit that my own gross failure to do the same was the cause of all my difficulties, and not only created problems for the rescue team, but threatened to place the whole process of cultivation on Planet 43 in some degree of jeopardy. I offer, for whatever they may be worth, my abject apologies for this failure.

Having said that, I feel I must next offer as much of an explanation—I do not say excuse—as I can for my blundering, in the hopes that knowledge of where I went wrong may prevent some other Observer in future from getting into such a bizarre predicament.

Although, I say it once more, I accept full responsibility for what happened, I think it is necessary to point out that there were contributing factors involved—I seem to be trying here to find an elegant way to say that not only was I a damned fool, but I had damned back luck as well. Otherwise it is quite possible that my foolishness might not have had such potentially disastrous consequences.

My motives, I shall maintain, were praiseworthy_the pursuit of knowledge. It was my judgment that was at fault.

The difficulty, as I see it, began about four standard years ago. It was at that time, in the course of routine observations from my orbital station near my assigned planet, that I detected certain electrical emanations from the surface, of a surprising type. These radiations were brief and intermittent but they bore the unmistakable signs of artifice. It appeared to me, though I could detect nothing that sounded like the deliberate coding of information, as if some kind of primitive spark-gap transmitters might be in operation at three or four widely separated locations on the planet below. None of the sites were at all near our permanent ground-monitoring stations and it was entirely possible that I was missing portions of the signals, or that other, similar, signals were being and had been transmitted that I had missed entirely.

If spark-gap transmitters were in fact being used by the locals, this would have been news indeed. The Schedule as envisioned by Headquarters Planning did not predict that the natives should independently develop a true radio capability for more than another hundred years. Even if the signals were only incidental, not meant as a form of communication, still, the strength of their ragged pulses, their frequency range, and other characteristics convinced me that at least a few individuals among the local population were much farther advanced in their technology than Planning had predicted, or any of us had expected.

Naturally my intellectual curiosity regarding this phenomenon was intense from the outset. That would have been the case even had it not seemed to bear upon my personal career. What I mean by that is that if the advance communication explanation of the phenomenon should prove correct, it would have the most decisive effect upon the thesis I was preparing for my Penultimate Degree_not to mention the implications of such a discovery for Development Theory in general.

I have said that the signals I detected were emanating from several locations. All of these were in the planet's northern hemisphere, but widely dispersed upon two continents. I considered it obvious that no natural phenomenon, however freakish, could be responsible. My next question was, who were the researchers? Were they in communication with each other, by other means if not through the signals themselves?

To make the long story of my temptation short, my curiosity increased until I allowed it to overwhelm my common sense. My tour of solo duty still had several years to run; it would be a discouragingly long time before I could expect to have help from other Observers, whose presence alone would make a manned trip down to the surface possible under existing regulations. Meanwhile I had been expecting to be able to complete my thesis.

Gradually I convinced myself that there was no real reason why I should not be able to break regulations with impunity, and complete a solo trip to the surface without anyone else ever realizing that I had done so. I could not, of course, report officially anything I might happen to discover in this way; but I could include the new information, if any, as speculation in my thesis. And above all, I would know an answer or two that would otherwise remain for years out of reach. The urge to know may at times be stronger than any other.

I did, thank all the Divinities, arm the autopilot of my observation satellite, as per regulations for an emergency descent. The autopilot, as would be expected, functioned normally, and when I failed to return to the station within my preset time, it transmitted the emergency signal in C-space, to which Fourth Rescue so capably responded.

There were three models of landing pod available aboard my station. I chose the UP-465, as being best suited for a quick, one-time landing and quick return to station with a single occupant. For protection of both pod and pilot against the rudimentary tools of observation available to the locals, I selected the Mark VII cloaking system, the one with which I was most familiar after basic training. The cloaking technology performed flawlessly at all times, and I believe we have no reason to worry that the local inhabitants at any time were able to perceive anything that might suggest to them the presence of a vastly superior technology. (Parenthetically, let me say here that I have confidence that the prisoner/specimen gathered by the rescue team will, upon orientation, fully confirm this and certain other aspects of my report.) At least two local observers (the prisoner/ specimen and one other) were absolutely convinced that no living person besides themselves could have been in the room where I stood beside them, all of us simultaneously investigating the local experimenter's laboratory.