The Frankenstein Papers

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.

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.

____________________

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.

____________________

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.