Authors: Stanislaw Lem
This delinquency, something that never would have entered my head even in a nightmare, had to do with the so-called business of the brooms. It was the work of groups of wild youths, mostly recruited from our staff personnel, lab technicians, secretaries, etc. Those endless medieval tales of pacts with the devil, incubi and succubi, sabbats, witch trials, temptations of saints, etc., all of that derived from “bootleg” chronomotion, practiced by adolescents bereft of any moral ballast. An individual chronocycle consists of a pipe, a saddle, and an exhaust funnel, therefore one could easily mistake it—particularly in bad lighting—for a broom. A number of shameless hussies went off on joy rides, usually at night, terrorizing villagers in the early Middle Ages. Not only did they go swooping over people’s heads, but actually set out—for the 13th, say, or 12th century—in shocking deshabille, topless even, it’s not surprising then that they were thought to be (for the lack of any better description) naked witches astraddle flying brooms. By an odd coincidence I was aided in the tracking down and capture of the guilty parties by none other than H. Bosch, at that time already in exile; he certainly wasn’t about to faint at the sight of an ordinary temporician, and in his “hell” cycle painted true-to-life portraits—not of devils, but of dozens of illegal chronocyclists and their cohorts, which was all the easier for him, in that many he knew personally.
Considering the number of people victimized by these chronooligan escapades, I sent the offenders back seven hundred years (the “20th-century student radicals”). Meanwhile, since the field of our activities had now spread over more than forty centuries, N. Betterpart, commander in chief of MOIRA, informed me that the situation was getting out of hand and asked for special reinforcements in the form of emergency crews of chronochutists. We began to take on hundreds of new workers, sending them off immediately to where the distress signals were coming from, though often these were people with little or no training. Their being concentrated in certain centuries led to serious incidents, things like migrations of whole nations; we did our best to conceal the arrival of each such landing party, but in the 20th century (about halfway through) there was common talk of “flying saucers,” for the circulation of the news was made possible by a then rapidly developing mass-media technology.
Yet this was nothing compared to the next scandal, whose author and later principal character turned out to be the chief of MOIRA himself. I began to receive reports from time to the effect that his people were not so much observing the progress of meliorization as they were actively participating in the historical process, and this not in the spirit of Lado and Doddle’s instructions, but rather according to their own temporal politics, which was being merrily pursued by Betterpart. Before I was able to remove him from his post he absconded, that is, fled to the 18th century, for there he could count on his old cronies; the next thing I knew, he was emperor of France. This foul deed called for severe punishment; Lado suggested I dispatch a reserve brigade against Versailles of 1807, but that was quite out of the question, such a raid would undoubtedly produce an unparalleled perturbation in all subsequent history—mankind would realize, from there on out, that it was in protective custody. The more circumspect Doddle came up with a plan for the “natural,” i.e. cryptochronistic, castigation of Napoleon. The mounting of an anti-Bonapartist coalition was begun, military marching drills, but wouldn’t you know, the chief of MOIRA got wind of it immediately and lost no time in assuming the offensive himself; not for nothing was he a professional strategist, he had strategy in his little finger, and one by one defeated all the enemies Doddle sent up against him. For a while it looked like we had him cornered in Russia, but in that campaign too he gave us the slip somehow, meanwhile half of Europe lay in smoldering ruins; finally I made my well-meaning shapers of history step aside and dealt with Napoleon myself, near Waterloo. As if that were anything to boast about!
Napoleon escaped from Elba, there hadn’t been time to arrange a better exile, so many other matters demanded my immediate attention; those guilty of infractions were now no longer quietly waiting to receive their just deserts, but taking off posthaste for the distant past, smuggling out things to help them acquire fame or an aura of extraordinary powers (these were the alchemists, Cagliostro, Simon Magus, and scores of others). And reports came in, reports I had no way of verifying, e.g. that Atlantis was sunk not by any ricochet from operation GENESIS, but by one Dr. Huey Hokum, with premeditation, to keep me from finding out what mischief he had perpetrated there. In a word, everything was falling apart on me. I lost my faith in a successful outcome and, what was worse, had grown suspicious. I no longer knew what was the result of optimization, and what the effect of its abandonment, and what—for that matter—was due to the insubordination and corruption among my centurial police patrols.
I decided to attack the problem from the other end. I picked up a copy of the Great Encyclopedia of World History in twelve volumes and started studying it, and whenever anything seemed the least bit suspicious to me I sent out a reconnaissance flight. Such was the case, for example, with Cardinal Richelieu; having checked with MOIRA and made sure that this was not one of our agents, I asked Lado to place a controller of some intelligence there. He entrusted the mission to a certain Reichplatz; then something told me to consult a dictionary; I turned numb, for sure enough, Richelieu and Reichplatz meant the same thing—“Rich Place”—but by then it was too late, since he had already worked his way up into the higher circles of the court and was now the gray eminence of Louis XIII. I left him alone, for after the Napoleonic Wars I knew what such attempts could lead to.
In the meantime another problem was developing. Certain centuries were literally crawling with exiles; the tempolice couldn’t keep tabs on them—they were spreading rumors, superstitions, purely to spite me, or actually tried bribing the controllers; so I started herding all those who were up to no good into a single place and single time, namely Ancient Greece, as a result of which, that turned out to be the spot where civilization made its greatest strides; why, there were more philosophers in the town of Athens than in all the rest of Europe. By then Lado and Doddle had already been banished; both of them abused my trust; Lado, one of the most hard-headed fanatics that ever was, sabotaged my orders by pursuing his own policy (its full exposition you can find in his “Republic”), which was undemocratic in the extreme, based on oppression in fact, take the Middle Kingdom for instance, the caste system in India, the Holy Roman Empire, and even the Japanese belief in the divinity of the Mikado from 1868 on, yes, that too was his doing. As to whether or not he married off some Miss Schicklgruber or other, so that that famous child could be born, who later trampled half of Europe underfoot, I can’t say for sure, as it was Doddle who told me this, and he and Lado had always been at one another’s throats.
Lado designed the Aztec kingdom, Doddle sent the Spaniards there; at the last minute, receiving reports from MOIRA, I ordered Columbus’s trip postponed, and horses to be bred in South America, for Cortez’s men would never hold up against a cavalry of Indians, however the coordinators bungled and the horses all died out as far back as the Quaternary, when there weren’t any Indians around, so we had no one to pull the war wagons, though the wheel was available in plenty of time. As for Columbus, he made it in 1492, having greased the right palms. That’s how this optimization of ours worked. I was even accused—as if there weren’t more than enough philosophers in Greece already—of having Harris Doddle and Pat Lado transported there. Not true! It was precisely to show a little humanity that I let them choose the time and place of exile; I did, I’ll admit, deposit Plato not exactly where he wanted, but in Syracuse, for I knew that, what with the wars going on in that city, he wouldn’t be able to put into practice that pet idea of his, the “Kingdom of Philosophers.”
Harris Doddle became, as everyone knows, tutor to young Alexander the Macedonian. He had been guilty of oversights, and with ghastly consequences. Giving in—as he invariably did—to that weakness he had for composing enormous encyclopedias, Doddle would dabble at classification as well as a general methodology for his Theory of the Perfect Project, while behind his back all sorts of things were going on. The head accountant, unsupervised, threw in with a frogman friend of his, together they fished out the gold of Montezuma from the same canal in which Cortez’s men had foundered during their retreat, and with that played the stock market, starting in 1922; but crime doesn’t pay and they brought on the well-known crash of 1929. I don’t believe I dealt unfairly with Aristotle, it was to me after all that he owed his fame, which he certainly didn’t merit as far as his work on the Project went. But then it was said that under the pretext of dismissals, replacements and exiles I was running a kind of nepotistic merry-go-round, setting my old pals up in plush sinecures throughout the ages. Well, with such critics I was damned if I did, damned if I didn’t.
There isn’t time to go into details, so I won’t dwell on the allusions to myself contained in the works of Plato and Aristotle. Naturally they weren’t exactly thrilled about their exile, but I couldn’t concern myself with personal resentments, not with the fate of mankind hanging in the balance. Greece was another matter entirely, and I took her downfall very much to heart. It isn’t true I brought it about by putting all those philosophers together; Lado kept an eye on things there, he did it for the sake of Sparta, which he hoped to mold into the image of his beloved utopia, but after his removal there was no one to sustain the Spartans and they folded up before the Persian army; and what could I do about it? Local favoritism was unthinkable, no, we had to extend our protection to
all
humanity, and yet here was this problem of the exiles undermining our most vital plans; I couldn’t send anyone into the future, they were on the lookout up there, and since every blessed one of the condemned requested the Azure Coast, and I couldn’t refuse, great numbers of people possessing a higher education became concentrated around the Mediterranean and, well, that’s precisely where you have your cradle of civilization and, later, the culture of the West.
As for Spinoza—a very good man, I grant you, but he allowed the Crusades, though he didn’t actually start them himself; I’d put him in Lado’s place, oh he had a sterling character, but what a woolgatherer, signing whatever they stuck in front of him, without even looking; he gave unlimited powers to Löwenherz (yes, the Lion-Hearted), then someone back in the 13th century was hatching something and when they began looking for the guilty party Löwenherz threw in chronobus after chronobus of secret agents, so the suspect—I forget who it was—caused the Crusades in order to hide in the resulting confusion. I didn’t know what to do with Spinoza, Greece was already overflowing with thinkers like himself, first I had him travel back and forth across the ages, letting him seesaw with a forty-century amplitude, which gave rise to the legend of the Wandering Jew, however each time he swung through our here-and-now he complained of fatigue, so I finally sent him off to Amsterdam, for he liked to tinker with things and there could cut diamonds to his heart’s content.
More than once I’ve been asked why none of the exiles chose to reveal from where they came. A lot of good it would have done them. Anyone who told the truth would have found himself quickly headed for the loony bin. Wouldn’t a man have been thought crazy, before the 20th century, who claimed that out of ordinary water you could make a bomb capable of blowing the entire globe to bits? And before the 23rd century, certainly, there was no knowledge of chronomotion. Besides which, such admissions would have laid bare the derivative nature of the work of many of the exiles. We forbade them to prophesy the future, but even so they let more than one cat out of the bag. In the Middle Ages, happily, no one paid much attention to those references to jets and bathyspheres in Bacon, or the computers in Lull’s ARS MAGNA. It was worse with the exiles sent improvidently to the 20th century; calling themselves “futurologists,” they began to give out top-secret information.
Fortunately General Angus Kahn, the new chief of MOIRA after Napoleon, employed the so-called Babel tactic. This was how it worked. Once, sixteen tempo engineers, summarily banished to Asia Minor, decided to build a time main to escape, under the guise of constructing some sort of tower or dome; the name given to it was the cryptonym-password of their plot (Banished Asian Builders’ Escape League). MOIRA, having detected their operation in a fairly advanced stage, dispatched its own specialists to the spot as “new exiles,” and these intentionally introduced such errors into the blueprint, that the mechanism flew apart at the very first trial run. Kahn repeated this maneuver of “communication confusion,” sending diversionary units into the 20th century; they completely discredited those who were trying to set themselves up as prophets—by turning out all sorts of rubbish (called “Science Fiction”) and placing in the ranks of the futurologists our secret agent, one McLuhan.
I must confess that when I read through the malarkey that MOIRA had prepared, and which McLuhan was to disseminate as his “prognoses,” I threw up my hands in despair, for it didn’t seem possible to me that anyone with half a brain could take seriously, even for a minute, all that crap about the “global village” towards which the world was supposed to be heading, not to mention the other inanities contained in that hash. And yet, as it turned out, McLuhan was a much greater success than all the people who were betraying the simple truth; he acquired such fame that he ended up actually believing—so it seems—the drivel we had ordered him to advocate. We didn’t remove him, though, since this didn’t hurt us in the least. As for Swift and his
Gulliver’s Travels,
in which there is a reference, plain as day, to the two small satellites of Mars including all the elements of their motion, which no one could have known at the time—that was the result of an idiotic mistake. The orbital data for the moons of Mars served, then, as a secret password among a group of our controllers in southern England and one of them, nearsighted, took Swift (at a tavern) for the new agent he was scheduled to meet with there; he didn’t report his blunder, thinking that Swift had understood nothing of his words, however two years later (1726), in the first edition of
Gulliver's Travels,
we found an accurate description of both Martian moons; the password was immediately changed, but that passage had to stay the way it was, in print.