Fred Saberhagen: The Frankenstein Papers

The descent to the surface was without incident. I had selected a landing site very near to the source of the most recent and persistent signals, which proved to be in the topmost story of a wooden dwelling inhabited mostly by aged and retired members of the local population. My experimenter, however, proved to be a young student—there is what might be called an institution of higher learning within the same small metropolitan area.

Once I had reached the equipment I had so desired to examine, my investigation was carried out with hands-on thoroughness. Yes, hands-on indeed. I have no doubt that I would have been able to complete my foray to the surface and return without incident to my satellite observation post, were it not for the sheer bad luck in the timing of a lightning bolt that struck very near while I was thus engaged. Had the lightning struck any nearer, I should now be dead. A powerful voltage was induced across the equipment I was handling, and my life was probably saved only by the presence of a primitive lightning rod protecting, to some extent, the structure in which I stood. The experimenter had perverted this rod to the extent of making some idiotic connection between it and his own equipment, doubtless in an effort to augment his power by drawing fire down from the sky.

The two local snoopers had already left the room, but the bolt caught me with my hands actually in contact with some of the gear—interconnected Leyden jars, and so on. Intense voltage dissipated the fields of my cloaking device from around my body, and left me stretched prone and unconscious upon the worktable—atop what was already there.

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I should add here that one beneficial side effect of my sojourn on the surface was the opportunity to meet and speak with the native generally credited with the invention of this device. Another century or so, and someone down there will have invented radio, and an Observer's job will have become much easier. Keeping up with the changes in language, etc., by means of transmissions from the automatic stations only is extremely difficult.

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The student-owner of that worktable—not nearly so sagacious a man as the lightning-rod inventor_was intent, not upon discovering the basic laws of electricity, but rather on creating human life, by means of galvanic applications to an assemblage of dead parts. The hubris of this attempt, on the part of one at his level of science, may be apparent to us, but remember that in their world, the circulation of the blood is a recent discovery, still mentioned with considerable pride. The difficulties of the creation of life cannot yet be imagined by the natives, let alone seriously addressed.

A second effect of the shock on me, besides the brief unconsciousness, was a permanent disruption of my short-term memory, so that a period of some seconds, perhaps a minute, immediately preceding the shock, is still a blank to me.

A third effect, one with far greater consequences, was a temporary derangement of my entire memory, that is, amnesia. This condition persisted until a short time before I was actually rescued. The amnesia, as so often the case in individuals of our race, was accompanied by a heightened suggestibility, so that I was ready to accept without question the identity assigned to me by the natives with whom I first came in contact.

Strange as it may seem, this identity was that of a new life-form, experimentally created by the man whose equipment I had been inspecting when I was struck down. A concatenation of events made this seem to them the only possible explanation of my sudden appearance in their midst.

I am not sure whether the "creator" himself still believes that his experiment was an unqualified success; I do know that he has striven frequently to repeat it, and that his continued failures have at least begun to awaken some self-doubts in his heart. But I now know also, after having lived among them, that this race of our creation is given to strange and powerful dreams; that though physically smaller than we are, and ugly in our sight, they are more like us, indeed, than we in our creation ever expected or dared to hope that they might be; and that ultimately they may be the ones to provide for us the companionship we have long sought and lacked, as we continue to seek answers to the great unsolved questions of life and death, and of our true place in the Universe.