The Truth and Other Stories by Stanislaw Lem

Author:Stanislaw Lem [Lem, Stanislaw]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262366656
Google: AQMPEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2021-09-13T23:00:00+00:00

Darkness and Mildew

1

“Is that the last one?” said the man in the raincoat. With the toe of his shoe, he tipped some crumbs of earth down into the bottom of the pit, where acetylene flames were roaring beneath leaning figures with gigantic, shapeless heads. Nottinsen turned away to wipe his teary eyes.

“Dammit, I’ve mislaid my dark glasses. The last one? I hope so. I can hardly stay upright. What about you?” The man in the shiny raincoat, which had fine drops of water trickling down it, put his hands in his pockets.

“I’m used to it. Don’t look,” he added, seeing that Nottinsen was glancing into the depths of the pit again. The earth was steaming and hissing under the acetylene torches.

“Just to be sure at least,” muttered Nottinsen, and squinted. “If it’s like this here, can you imagine what must have happened over there?” He nodded across the highway, where slender wisps of steam were rising from the turned-down edges of a crater, burning with a violet light from the gleam of invisible rays.

“He can’t have been alive by then,” said the man in the raincoat. One after the other, he turned each pocket inside out and shook the water from them. A fine rain was still falling.

“He didn’t have time to take fright, and he can’t have felt a thing.”

“Take fright?” said Nottinsen. He tried to look into the sky, but immediately pulled his head into his collar to keep off the rain. “Him? You didn’t know him. Well, of course you didn’t,” he realized. “He’d been working on it for four years—it could have happened at any moment in those four years.”

“So why did they let him do it?” said the man in the damp coat, glowering at Nottinsen.

“Because they didn’t believe he’d succeed,” said Nottinsen grimly.

Blue flames that stung the eyes were still licking the bottom of the pit.

“Really?” said the other man. “I . . . kept a bit of an eye on it while it was being built,” he said, glancing toward the faintly smoking crater a few hundred yards away. “It must have cost a pretty penny . . .”

“Thirty million,” admitted Nottinsen, shifting from foot to foot. He could feel his shoes getting soaked through.

“What of it? They’d have given him three hundred or three thousand million if they’d been sure . . .”

“It had something to do with atoms, right?” said the man in the waterproof coat.

“How do you know?”

“I heard about it. Anyway, I saw the column of smoke.”

“From the explosion?”

“And why did they have to build it so far off, anyway?”

“That was his wish,” replied Nottinsen. “That was why he had been working on his own—for the past four months, since he managed to . . .” He looked at the other man, and lowering his head, he added, “It was meant to be worse than atoms. Worse than atoms!” he repeated.

“What could be worse than the end of the world?”

“You can drop a single A-bomb and then stop,” said Nottinsen.

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