“Dr. Müller managed to complete his experiment at the last moment. I have brought your lads along for you. You can carry out the Führer’s last order now,” he said as he pinned another decoration on Hutzvalek, this time with a diamond bar. And he added softly: “Brother!” It was Borovetz and not Kopfenpursch. He had got the news through in time, then. He thanked Hutzvalek with a warm glance, at least, and took a brusque farewell of his “wife.” Why did he not release Hutzvalek? What was the man to do now? What did he think he was doing? The pharmacist ran out after him and shouted his questions in at the car window, speaking Czech. The car moved off.
“Disappear to Berne. That’s what you wanted to do, isn’t it? There’s a check folded up inside the Iron Cross. . . .” The answer was in German, and the car was gone. Hutzvalek was alone in the street. Then he realized that facing him on the opposite pavement stood four new SS recruits, each as tall and as well-built as the next, and each with his features. They were smiling at him politely and obsequiously, just the way Hutzvalek himself always smiled at his customers. He thought they were horrid.
Later, when the Hutzvalek detachment were earnestly sorting out test tubes in the suburban laboratory, checking up on their weapons and the dynamite charge beneath the building, he shouted at them impatiently:
“There’s no need to pretend with me. I know you’re not the Yeschke detachment, you’re my own lot. And this murderous business is revolting to me, I hate Nazism and I am fighting against it. We’re going over to the other side now!” and he pressed his revolver into Leni Yeschke’s back to prevent her calling for help. His sons were confused and afraid, they looked at each other helplessly. After a while the first in the row came up to him and said as he held his automatic at the ready:
“I don’t know what you are talking about; we don’t feel too happy about this job we’ve got to do, either, to tell the truth. Murdering little kids. But we were promised, they said that was the only way we could get into the special force of heroes that was going to work in Switzerland after the war.”
“To hell with Switzerland! To hell with my life—what I care about are my real children; they won’t just be caricatures of me, they’ll have the chance to do things better than I did, they’ll be able to learn from my mistakes. What I care about are the lives of all the others.” And that was the moment, it seems, when he realized that he had completely changed from the moment he knew what “Heil Herod” was all about. He was not the old Hutzvalek any more, the conscientious SS pharmacist he could see before him in four replicas, threatening him from the barrels of four automatics. The fourth Hutzvalek, by the window, had even turned the light machinegun on him. He realized he would have to destroy his own Hutzvalek, he would have to kill that conscientious counter-jumper who was threatening the whole city and the whole of a generation. He was not capable of changing as other people were, after some experience, some profound emotion, the advice or example of others. He had to shoot at himself, protect himself against himself, smash his own skulls, as though he were a fairy-tale dragon, until at last, wounded in several places, he reached the lever that looked like the main switch on an electric meter. At one turn of the lever he buried the whole Heil Herod business. Three days later the rising broke out in Prague. The doctor fell silent and watched us for a while.
“Rather incredible, the whole story,” I said sceptically. “Sounds like a madman’s dream.”
“It was in the madhouse that I met Hutzvalek, last year,” the narrator smiled again. “Or rather, in a home for nervous cases. He had been there several times before. When Prague was liberated, he was found under the debris of a ruined building in one of the suburbs. He was unconscious for weeks. He had the remains of a German uniform on, true enough, but everybody in the Revolutionary Guard had something of the sort. It was assumed that he had escaped from the Gestapo prison in Pankrac during the fighting that May, and been wounded. He did not talk much about his experiences himself and agreed that it sounded incredible. The fits of unconsciousness kept on coming back; he was operated several times, brain operations, and then for a time a specific infection was treated at a sanatorium in the Tatras. It was fifteen years after the war before he really got back to normal life. That was when his nervous troubles really started. His son, young Hutzvalek, worked in a nationalized chemist’s shop and had been arrested on a charge of stealing from the shop; his daughter ran away when she was sixteen, crossed the frontier illegally, and sent no good news home of herself, either. She was not in Berne, it was true. In the weeks that followed, the pharmacist began attacking passersby whenever he thought they wore their scarves suspiciously high across their faces, or whenever they seemed to be hiding behind dark glasses.
“ ‘You are Dr. Müller!’ he would shout, and call a policeman. The policeman usually brought him straight round to us. He even attacked a former factory owner that way, a man who lived in Hanspaulka and was in fact called Müller; he started a fight with the local Youth Club leader in Hodkovičky, whose name was luckily Vytiska; and he almost blinded a history teacher who had to wear dark glasses because he suffered from conjunctivitis, I can’t remember the man’s name now.
“ ‘What do you do it for?’ I asked him. ‘Why do you think your Dr. Müller is in hiding in our midst? How could he go on with his experiments?’
“ ‘Just look round you,’ he replied. ‘Look at my family, the family I sacrificed myself for. They are just like I used to be, the boy and the girl, as if nothing had happened, as if those millions of dead hadn’t fallen in between their youth and mine. He took away from them our common experience. They did not change as I wanted them to. I fought myself in vain. I sacrificed myself for nothing.’ He went on talking for a while and then started laughing in embarrassment. We sent him home after a few days, and that was the last I heard of him.”
“From what has been said it is clear,” said the doctor, “that an experiment on human beings really was performed, one which could solve your problem. In the case we have described, the pharmacist really did change as a result of his own experience; he became a new and different person, as it were, ready to shoot at the likeness of himself as he was; he even wanted to change all those round him. That could be taken as proof of our theory.”
“What do you think?” I could not contain myself any longer and asked the blonde girl opposite outright. “What do you believe in?”
She started. “I beg your pardon?” Then she yawned, and I realized she had been fast asleep all the time. She pulled a small transistor radio out of her bag and lit a cigarette. She was a real beauty of a girl. The first bars of music. Jazz. But she did not answer my question.
“When Darwin and Wallace propounded the theory of evolution in the middle of the last century, it was explicitly stated that man is no longer subject to evolutionary processes. ... I do not think that we control the future at all, and I do not think that we are in any way free from, the evolutionary process.”
The quotation is from Of Men and Galaxies by cosmologist (and SF writer) Fred Hoyle, who argues that human evolution is no longer determined by the physical environment, but by “the things we know and the things we believe. ... We cannot think outside the patterns that our brains are conditioned to, or to be more accurate, we can think only a little outside, and then only if we are very original.” And, “New concepts are like genetic mutations . . . most of them turn out badly. But without mutations there can be no evolution.”