I couldn't do it all in one session. No way — that's why I dissolved him. I couldn't let out a cripple with arms and legs of different length. And I couldn't possibly have known that each time I dissolved him I killed him. How could I have known?
As soon as the liquid cleared his head and shoulders, the double grabbed the edge of the tank with his powerful hands and jumped out. I was running the movie camera, capturing the historic moment of a man appearing from a machine. He fell on the linoleum before me, sobbing with a hoarse, howling cry. I ran to him:
“What's the matter?”
He was hugging my leg with his sticky hands, rubbing his head against them, kissing my hands as I tried to lift him.
“Don't kill me, don't kill me! Don't kill me any more! Why do you torture me, aaah! Don't! Twenty — five times you've killed me, twenty — five times. Aaah!”
But I hadn't known. I couldn't know that his consciousness revived with every experiment! He understood that I was reshaping his body, doing what I wanted with him, and he couldn't do a thing about it. My command “No!” first dissolved his body, and then his consciousness dimmed. Why didn't that artificial idiot tell me that the consciousness begins functioning before the body?
“Damn it!” the student muttered. “Really — the brain must be unplugged last. When was that?” He turned the pages and sighed with a certain relief. No, it wasn't his fault. In August and September he couldn't have told him, he didn't know it himself. If he were running the experiment, he would have made the same mistake.
And so I got a man with a classic physique, a pleasant look, and the broken spirit of a slave. “A knight without fear or flaw.”
Go ahead, look for a scapegoat, you louse. You didn't know; you tried! But did you!? Wasn't it conceit, self — love? Didn't you feel like God sitting up in the clouds in a labeled leather armchair? A god, on whose whims depended the appearance and disappearance of a man, whether he would be or not be. Didn't you experience an intellectual passion when you gave the computer — womb the orders over and over: “You may!” and “Not it!” and “No!”?
He tried to escape from the lab immediately. I barely talked him into washing up and dressing. He was trembling. There could be no question of his working alongside me in the lab.
He spent five days with me^ five horrible days. I kept hoping he'd relax, get better. No way! No, he was healthy in body, knew everything, remembered everything — the computer — womb recorded all my information in him, my knowledge, my memory — but the terror of his experience was overwhelming and could not be controlled by his will or thoughts. His hair turned gray the first day from the memories.
He was terrified of me. When I would come home, he would jump up and get into a position of submission: his gladiator's back would hunch and his arms, bulging with rippling muscles, would hang limp. He was trying to look smaller. And his eyes — oh, God, those eyes! They looked at me with a prayer, entreaty, with a panic — stricken readiness to do anything to mollify me. I felt terrified and guilty. I've never seen a man look that way.
And tonight, sometime after three… I don't know why I woke up. There was a dead gray light from the streetlights on the ceiling. Adam the double was standing over my bed with a raised dumbbell. I could see his muscles in his right arm tense for the blow. We stared at each other for a few seconds. Then he giggled nervously and moved away, his bare feet scuffling on the wood floor.
I sat up on the bed and turned on the overhead light. He was crouching on the floor by the closet, his head on his knees. His shoulders and the dumbbell in his hand were shaking.
“What's the matter?” I asked. “You should strike, once you've aimed. You would have felt better.”
“I can't forget,” he muttered in a hollow baritone through the sobs. “You see, I can't forget how you used to kill me… twenty — five times!”
I opened the desk, took out my passport, engineering degree, what money there was, and shook him by the shoulder. “Get up! Get dressed and go. Go off somewhere, make a life for yourself, work, live. We won't be able to do anything together. No rest for you or me. It's not my fault! Damn it, can't you understand that I didn't know? I was doing something that had never been done. Surely there were things I couldn't have known. A man can be born a monster or mentally ill, or become that way after an illness or accident, but then it's nobody's fault, nobody to bash with a dumbbell. If you had been in my place, the same thing would have happened, because you are me! Understand?”
He was backing toward the wall, shaking. That sobered me up.
“I'm sorry. Take my papers. I'll manage here somehow. Here,” I said, opening the passport, “you look more like me on the picture than I do. The photographer must have tried to perfect my features, too. Take the money, a suitcase, clothes — and go where you want. You'll live on your own, work a bit, and maybe things will be easier for you.”
Two hours later he was gone. We agreed that he would write to me from wherever he settled. He won't write….
It's a good sign that he tried to kill me. That means he's no slave. He feels hurt and insulted. Maybe things will work out for him?
And I'm sitting here without a thought in my head. I have to start over. Oh, nature, what a bitch you are! How you enjoy laughing at our ideas! You seduce us, and then….
Drop it! Stop looking for someone to blame. Nature has nothing to do with it, it is part of your work only on an elementary level. And the rest is all you. Don't try to get out of it.
The alarm went off: 7:15. Time to get up, shave, wash, and go to work. A murky sun over the buildings, the sky full of smoke, dirty, like an old curtain. The wind raised dust, whipping the trees, blowing through the balcony door. Downstairs a bus licks people off the street at the stops. They gather again, and they all have the same expression on their faces: can't be late for work!
And I have to get to work too. I'll get to the lab, jot down the results of my unsatisfactory experiment, and console myself with the bromides: “You learn from your mistakes;” “There are no beaten paths in science;” and so on. And I'll start the next experiment. And I'll make more mistakes and destroy not guinea pigs, but… people? You conceited, dreaming cretin, armed with the latest technology!
The wind whips the trees. It was all in the past: the days of research and discovery, the evenings of meditation, the nights of dreaming. And here you are, the cold, clear morn, wiser than the night. Merciless morning! It's probably in this sober time that women who had dreamed all night of having a child go for an abortion. And I had an abortion. I dreamed. I wanted to bring happiness to the world, and I've created two miserable people already. I'll never master this work. I'm weak, unneeded, and stupid. I must take up something mediocre, that I can handle — for an article, for a dissertation. And then everything will be fine.
The wind whips the trees. The wind whips the trees….
On the next balcony there's a recording of Mozart's Requiem playing. My neighbor, associate professor Prishchepa, wants to get into a mathematical mood first thing in the morning. “Requi. requiem….” The voices are bidding farewell to someone clearly and simply. This is good music to shoot oneself by. Nobody would notice the shot.
The wind whips the trees.
What have I done? And yet I had doubts, and then not doubts but knowledge. I knew that any change I made stayed with him, that the computer — womb remembered everything. I didn't pay attention. Why?
I had a thought, not expressed in words, so that I wouldn't be ashamed, or a feeling of well — being and safety, I guess: “after all, it's not me. It's not happening to me….” And also a feeling of impunity: “Whatever I want, I'll do. Nothing will happen to me….”
You won't shoot yourself, you animal! You won't do anything to yourself — you'll live to a ripe old age and even set yourself up as an example to others.