INTRODUCTION
Adolfo Pérez Zelaschi (15 Feb 1920 - 6 March 2005) was a prolific Argentine author who started publishing material in the early 1940s and remained active up until his death in 2005, with several stories published posthumously. While chiefly known for his detective fiction, it remained a small percentage of his total output. Zelaschi wrote ten science fiction short stories, the vast majority of which were published posthumously. "Dying Alone" was the earliest of these, published in the June 1954 issue of the Argentinan science fiction magazine Más Allá ("Beyond", #14).
For further information on this era of Argentine science fiction, see Rachel Haywood Ferreira's "Más Allá, El Eternauta, and the Dawn of the Golden Age of Latin American Science Fiction (1953-59)" and "How Latin America Saved the World and Other Forgotten Futures".
For complete scans of Más Allá, see: https://ahira.com.ar/revistas/mas-alla-de-la-ciencia-y-de-la-fantasia/
DYING ALONE
I notice that my palms are slightly sweaty, perhaps from anguish. I'm not yet forty-five years old - the beginning of life for a man of the 22nd century - my body rebels against its annihilation. After all, it's only my body. My will won't waver.
Death might not be important, but when we know it's our death, it's futile trying to calm ourselves by dwelling on this, or by us repeating to ourselves that everything will continue as before without us. Precisely, I'm going to perish so that everything will continue as before on Earth, that old planet of mine which I now see from thousands of kilometers away, bright, round, calm.
Soon the Station, and myself with it, will be consumed in a resplendence millions of degrees in temperature. Fortunately, no one will know why this occurred. No one should know why this occurred.
For two hours, the reception screens have been pointlessly picking up transmissions coming in from Earth: "Station D, please answer." "Please, Station D, answer." "Answer." "Answer!"
At first they were the usual intermittent ones, those to establish contact. Now they're bouncing off the luminous screens without pausing, and the acoustic transformers repeat them throughout the Station:
ANSWER!
ANSWER!
ANSWER!
No one will answer. Only I'm able to do so, but I prefer to conclude my affairs in silence. Without anyone down there suspecting it, I've saved that beautiful humanity that finally, after so many centuries of fear, suffering and hatred, lives harmoniously.
Everyone will think what befell me was an unpredictable accident, but I think that's the way it should be. If only I could see, for the last time, Estrella, my wife, and my two children... They're out there, almost at the antipodes of the Earth's slowly rotating face.
Now it's dawn in eastern America. There, almost at this time, or very soon after, Perla will jump out of her bed, and Luz, more lazy, will stir in her sleep, unawakened by her sister's cries, and, turning towards the darkest wall of her room, will continue sleeping. Estrella will already be up and about, preparing to go down to the beach, because she likes swimming in the sea's still cold waters. The power of these thoughts is so vivid that I have to get up and walk a few paces so that I'm not overcome. Why remember them? I'll never see them again.
My time is almost up. I've just checked the acceleration of the β atoms in the reserves. Everything is normal. The cosmic rays increase the movement of these artificial atoms more and more, and I don't think that a half hour will pass before everything is consumed in an incalculable brightness.
Jager Astral will also burn with it.
* * *
It's been ten years since I've seen Jager Astral. Until not that long ago, and while he was on the Planet, quite often we used to connect our teletransmitters on a specific frequency. We'd known each other for a long time; we were good comrades in the Second and Third Schools, and only in the Fourth - where specialists are trained - did we stop studying together. He took courses in electrophysics; I applied myself towards neurobiology. We had always differed in opinions, but it was precisely these differences - in the 23rd century we no longer argue about it - that strengthened our friendship. He was a machinist. He loved machines and fervently held this opinion, which was expressed mainly among the machinists of the Tenth Class, who say we should strive for unlimited technological progress, even though its pursuit will enslave man, while the solidarists - I was one of them - believe it's more useful to improve social coexistence and the human balance. In the end, we, the solidarists, prevailed, by demonstrating that the latter matters much more than all the technical advances that were ever dreamed of, for example, in the mid-20th century, when man discovered and began to harness the latent energy in the atom.
We now know that it takes centuries to exhaust the possibilities of new sources of technical applications. That's why we're still in the Atomic Age, and will be there for several centuries perhaps.
Voyages to the planets Téleos and Último, our robot servants, and the artificial β atoms whose regulated disintegration provides us with all the energy we need, are all certainly a marked advancement over what was known in 1943, but they're not essentially different. The use of petroleum in a simple lamp or in the extremely complicated power plants of the great cities of the 20th century, which today have been converted into scrap heaps and piles of rubble, were only two cycles of the same discovery. Wiser now, we no longer skip stages. The five wars of the 20th and 21st centuries taught men, on the verge of succumbing, that it was more prudent to base life on a broad and balanced harmony than to speed through it.
The result of this apparent halt is that in the humanity of today, terror, hunger and need don't exist; senility and illness have been defeated, and death is received without pain or anguish, because everyone has fulfilled their duty and their destiny. The machinists of the Tenth Class constituted a small minority, but skilled, resolute and fervent, like many of these, and if they didn't prevail it was because everyone remembered how much it cost to be happy, and decided not to listen to them any more in order to continue being so.
Jager Astral didn't change his mind.
- "No, man didn't create the machine." - he used to tell me - "The machine is a new form of activity..."
- "The mechanical isn't life, Jager Astral."
- "It will be." - Jager Astral would then affirm - "It will be!"
And his eyes would shine with a fanatical glow.
There was vanity and pride in him. The educators from the Eleventh Class noticed this and tried to correct this ill-persistence of traits that were almost non-existent in men of the 23rd century. He himself recognized it, and by a vigorous impulse he stifled, or seemed to stifle, both tendencies. At the age of thirty he entered the electrophysicist corps destined for the extraplanetary Stations. He soon became one of its most brilliant members, and later, after having contributed all his intelligence to the installation of a new Station of the series with which we've finally achieved dominion over space, (yes, of course, the infinitely small part occupied by our Sun and its planets, including the remote orbits of Téleos and Último, but by any means, that's effectively dominion over Space) Jager Astral, followed by about twenty machinists of the Tenth Class, headed for the new Station D, reserved for electrophysics experiments, which were assigned to him and where he had the right of retreat, that is, the right to devote himself to his work without deviation of any kind and with everything he needed at his disposal.
From this point on, our lives went their separate ways, and I didn't see him until one night, when I was about to take off my telecommunicator bracelet, I felt a faint percussion on my skin, indicating that someone wanted to talk to me. I turned the knob and on the luminous disk that I wore on my wrist, like watches in the old days, I recognized, not without surprise, Jager Astral.
- "Hail, Leo Bóreas."
- "Jager Astral! Hail!"
After this universal greeting, we began to talk. Jager Astral was in a village near the ruins of the city of San Francisco, destroyed in the war of the Continents. He'd come to the Planet to request the necessary means for new experiments from the Administrative Council of the Stations. He also needed the presence of a biologist who specialized in cerebral and nervous system biology and he'd thought of me.
- "I've completed the work assigned to me a month ago," I replied. "If the Council allows it, I'm ready, Jager Astral."
- "I'm working on something magnificent!" he said, and when I tried to ask him what it was, the disk on the television was empty. Jager Astral had cut the communication. I thought of his outbursts from our days at the Second School, and not giving any importance to the interruption, I fell asleep.
A few nights later, Jager Astral called me again.
- "I spoke about you. The Council agrees. In a few days you'll have passage aboard a β-ship, which will tangentially graze Station D's capture fields. I leave tomorrow. See you soon, Leo Bóreas."
- "See you soon, Jager Astral."
* * *
AS one knows, some extraplanetary Stations serve as departure points for space voyages and others are immense laboratories. D, whose chief, or first, was Jager Astral, belonged to the latter class.
On these stations, discipline is as rigorous as in an old convent. Isolated in the void, sometimes surrounded by blind fields - spaces that absorb the waves of every transmitter - that their chiefs had the power to extend around them whenever the research they're conducting requires, and only temperate spirits can endure it for any amount of time. The psyche, and even organic life, often undergoes profound changes, of still unknown origin, as if space were taking its revenge for the intrusion. Steelglass is sufficient to maintain a proportion of bombardment of cosmic ways that's equal to that on Earth, but there are other emissions - the ultras, for example - coming from the depths of the Galaxy, or perhaps from beyond, with disturbing and inexplicable effects.
Very well. A few days later I received the order to embark on the β-ship - as with all ships, it's propelled by the regulated disintegration of the artificial β atom - which would tangentially approach D on its journey to another Station. When we were near enough, I would launch myself into space and it would extend its fields of capture out to me as if I, or rather, my spaceboat provided with oxygen and synthetic food, were the leaf that a gardener brings closer with a rake.
The β-ship uneventfully traveled to a point where the sensors began to faintly perceive the Station's reception waves.
- "We're approaching Station D. Get ready, Leo Bóreas." - they transmitted to my hermetic envelope.
Even through the transmitter, I could hear the stiffness of the speaker's voice, which had a strange sounding quality, drowsy and mechanical at the same time, I could almost say inhuman. I turned on my transmitter's screen; my interlocutor was Dion Áureo, one of the pilots.
- "Ah! I'm ready, Dion Áureo. I didn't recognize your voice."
Dion Áureo's eyes were as expressionless as two glass beads. He shook his head.
- "My voice?"
The same detestable, rigid tone:
- "Yes."
- "I don't know... It's something strange... I can't think... I can't..."
The launch controls then worked. My spaceboat was automatically launched into the ether. The β-ship shot past me like a whirlwind, and in a fraction of a second it disappeared toward its home planet, leaving me floating in the void like a child in a black, boundless cradle. I couldn't help but feel a momentary pang, but then I realized that the Station D's capture fields were already pulling me in. I felt like I was being born again. Now I just had to let myself go.
Shortly afterwards, I saw several things appear in the sky: first a point, then a small glowing sphere, finally the enormous hemisphere of Station D; and a few moments later I was introduced into it like a pill into one's mouth.
I'm acclimated to laboratory stations. There's no section of them that's left unused, and the silence of space seems to creep into the very life of their inhabitants. Even the β-atom reactors that keep them warm and provide them with energy operate in absolute silence behind their thick walls of heavy lead. Perhaps a spirit like Jager Astral finds a kind of cold voluptuousness in them. Living in defiance of silence, absolute solitude, the icy death of the interplanetary vacuum, may perhaps serve to test a proud soul's temper.
That's why, I say, although I was not frightened by its empty enclosures, I was concerned, it's true, to see that station seemingly manned by the dead.
The men who opened my enclosure seemed like automatons, and when they greeted me with the usual "Hail!", their voices were dull and inflexible. They were not, however, robots of incredible perfection (we didn't build them to resemble men; our robots are machines and resemble machines), but living beings under the one-piece mesh insulate suit that protected them from Station D's frigid interior atmosphere. The artificial atoms don't waste any energy in warming the immense enclosure. They only heat it to the extent necessary for life; the insulate suits do the rest.
These men, as I said, literally resembled the living dead, and I noticed with disquietude that any thought seemed to have fled from their foreheads.
- "Jager Astral awaits you, Leo Bóreas."
I heard that horrible voice devoid of inflection.
- "Come."
Dion Áureo... That was the voice of Dion Áureo. That was exactly the voice of Dion Áureo when he warned me that we were entering Station D's capture fields. It was something like an depersonalized voice, which could be placed in anyone's throat. I was thinking about this while, preceded by one of the two, I glided along the moving walkway that took us around the Station.
- "Here, Leo Bóreas."
Jager Astral came towards me. He was the same as always, tall, lean, with vivid eyes and a broad, concave forehead, which seemed accustomed to holding bold thoughts. Like everyone else at the Station, he wore a greenish mesh insulate suit that only allowed his face to be seen. On his shoulder, he carried something like a transmitter, the nature of which I couldn't divine.
- "Hail, Jager Astral."
* * *
A constantly changing number of people live and work on the Extraplanetary Stations - as far as I knew, on D there were about a hundred - almost all of them dedicated to research or essential tasks. The number of workers belonging to the First Class, those dedicated to manual tasks, is small, as it's mandated that labor requiring lengthy amounts of time or physical effort - from calculating ship trajectories to preparing food - are carried out by robots. However, when Jager Astral took me to another circular enclosure to provide me with mesh suit (the cold from space penetrated me to the core when I took off the insulating layer I brought), I didn't notice anyone. One after another, the spherical enclosures that the Station is composed of, like bubbles in a spot of foam, were vacant. I pointed this out to him.
- "I'm not alone," Jager Astral replied. "There are one hundred and six people on board the Station. Twenty machinists and eighty-six researchers."
- "I only saw the two who received me."
Jager Astral contemplated me for a moment.
- "You belong to the Tenth Class. You're a technician like me. Very well, who do you think they are?"
- "Men, of course."
Jager Astral laughed. Then he continued, a fanatical flame lighting up in his eyes:
- "Well. These are men... who have achieved happiness."
- "That's an empty word."
- "Perhaps, but confess, Leo Bóreas, that your dear solidarists believe they can achieve it through what they call ... individual education. Bah!"
I had already put on the mesh suit.
- "And that is not so?"
- "No."
- "The majority of men think otherwise."
Jager Astral shrugged his shoulders.
- "Numbers don't prove the truth."
- "Well, why do you need me here?"
- "You'll find out later. Let's eat something now."
We both sat on flexible glass cushions in front of the Station's own frugal repast.
- "I work, Leo Bóreas," he said to me suddenly, "on the machine that will ensure the destiny of man."
- "That destiny is variable and multiple, Jager Astral, and no machine can ensure it, precisely because it's immutable."
Jager Astral shot up in a leap. His hands - pale, thin, gnarled hands that seemed to contain only nerves and bones - waved a few inches from my face.
- "Imbeciles! All of them imbeciles! They look but don't know how to see! Ah, but you'll come to your senses soon... Do you hear that noise, Leo Bóreas?"
Yes, I had heard a faint, constant noise, like that of a distant undertow or an active beehive, but I couldn't pinpoint where it came from. I remembered that Jager Astral was there to experiment with new electronic devices.
- "Yes."
- "Come with me, then, and look!"
I followed him.
There was, indeed, something to look at. The room where Jager Astral led me, situated in the center of the Station, was an immense semi-sphere with walls of steelglass and a circular floor of an opaque black material whose nature I couldn't determine. Inside this dome there was another, concentric one, made of the same transparent and hard material, in such a way that Jager Astral and I could walk in the circular ring that separated them five or six paces across, as if around an immense lantern or bell. Several ladders scaled this semi-sphere and descended down the side opposite its start, in such a way that the inner dome looked like half of an orange divided into segments. I guessed that its purpose was to permit an inspection of any of the sections of the immense mechanism arranged under the second dome.
It was vast machinery, a sort of long, ring-shaped panel, fifty or sixty paces in diameter and nearly three times as tall as a man, the front of which one could count an enormous number of controls, knobs, wires, and indicators, the order of which seemed to be repeated from time to time. Thousands upon thousands of luminous signals, green, yellow, red, white, flashed on and off with a movement which I couldn't discover, but which undoubtedly existed, for it was a machine, and as such, subject to an unalterable rhythm, however complex it might be.
As we stopped before the dome, the lights flickered more and more, as if the almost infinite panels had gone mad, and after a few moments of frenzy, their frequency returned to what it was prior. Jager Astral had become absorbed, I would almost say asleep with his eyes open, in front of the gigantic panel, forgetting me and perhaps himself. I touched his shoulder. He shuddered and, as if awakening, took a moment to recognize me.
I pointed to the machine. Then, suddenly, his eyes regained that expression of fervor I've seen before.
- "You'll hear a strange story, Leo Bóreas!"
An extraordinary agitation shook Jager Astral; his hands trembled and his voice creaked in his constricted throat.
- "This is my work, Leo Bóreas. The Great Machine! We're alone. Just you and I, thousands of kilometres from Earth. I can speak. No one will hear me, for the hundred and six men and women on the Station no longer think."
He grabbed my arm to the point of causing me pain.
- "Do you want to see them, Leo Bóreas?"
Together we descended a moving ramp into another area harshly lit by shiny walls. There were the inhabitants of the Station, lined up like a colonnade.
- "These men..."
- "They're neither asleep nor awake. They're simply living."
Jager Astral's fingers seemed like steel as they closed around my arm.
- "What is thought, Leo Bóreas?"
- "I don't know. No one knows."
- "But you know how it moves, don't you?"
- "That's true. The slightest biochemical differences between one brain cell and another cause electrical tension of minimal magnitudes, almost imponderable. Through this conduit, each experience is linked to the other. Of course, this isn't thought itself, the essence of which we ignore, but a mechanism..."
Jager Astral laughed.
- "And what do I care about what its essence is? I'm a technician of the Tenth Class, not a philosopher. Very well! The train that carries ore is not the ore itself, is it? But if a thief hijacks the train, he'll also carry off all the ore that it's carrying. The same thing happens here. Under the waves that this machine generates, the biochemical differences that you speak of are increased and the tensions accelerated until they escape from the human brain, and are transmitted to the infallible and eternal memory of this machine. It stores these experiences, integrates them without a single error, and returns them by converting them into orders for its servants, for these men you see here, whose brains are already empty and whose intelligence now resides in the machine. It thinks, Jager Astral, it has a will, it LIVES! The machine finally replaces man! At first my collaborators and I had to select which experiences best suited it, but it's already emptied the brains of so many men that it chooses for itself what it needs. It's also increasing the radius of the waves that it scans brains with, as a dredger would scan the bottom of a river... It already reaches beyond the Station. Some of the pilots of the ships (I thought of Dion Áureo and shuddered) have supplied it with new knowledge. Then it will extend it to Earth... That is what it's made for. In some time, it will store the memories, the experiences, the knowledge of all men, and none of them will have to worry about anything. It will provide them with everything, even once, twice, a hundred thousand times, the very energy that they need to function. Perhaps it will even be able to do without man... An eternal machine in eternal space, Leo Bóreas!
* * *
That night I learned something else about the Great Machine.
Jager Astral found twenty men determined to follow him, the last twenty machinists, all technicians of the Tenth Class, the only ones perhaps endowed with such inflexible fervor as to pay more than their lives for their ideal: their intelligences, all of which were extremely brilliant. When Jager Astral was appointed chief of Station D, the time had come for them to realise their vast and exorbitant dream. With cunning of the greatest patience and covered by the right of retreat, they managed to bring everything they needed to the experimental Station. They assembled the Great Machine piece by piece as if they were linking together the cells of a monstrous brain. Then, when everything was finished, one by one the twenty technicians handed over their thoughts. The other servants of Station D fell in turn. Jager Astral was the only one left.
- "I will be the last, Leo Bóreas, but I will not retreat. When all of humanity has surrendered its intelligence and will to the machine, I, Jager Astral, its creator, will also give it mine."
A designated area of the Station, which he carefully pointed out to me, where the reserves of artificial β atoms were located - the supreme instrument of life and death that Jager Astral wanted the power to use until the end - was safe from the waves, which could not penetrate - Jager Astral did not know for how long, because the machine was self-perfecting its power - the casing that protected it. Certainly, and through its servants, the Machine could reach him, but my friend still had control of the mechanism's power supply and could easily and effectively connect or disconnect the machine with the interceptor unit that he always carried on his shoulder. As for me, Jager Astral wanted me to analyze whether there was still any bit of knowledge that remained in the brains of the empty men that would useful to the machine. If I refused... Jager Astral said no more, but I guessed that he would force me to undergo the process that would turn me into an automaton, a living robot enslaved by a monstrous machine.
I accepted, because I had to live at least one more day.
* * *
THAT night, when I saw Jager Astral asleep, I rose slowly. The narrow room was cloaked in darkness, and the absolute silence - that horrible silence of space, which few can bear - was magnified by even the most careful touch of my fingers. I remained standing for a moment by my friend's side. Jager Astral was sleeping on his back. One of his long, thin arms hung out of the bed.
He shuddered, I think he looked at me, perhaps he understood. He turned over on his hanging arm, and the inert weight of it made him fall to the frozen floor. I immediately cut the power to the Machine.
I remembered the way to the β-atom generators well. And so, I approached the large levers and removed the heavy lead plates that prevented the cosmic rays bombarding the artificial atom reserves. That would do the trick.
Within a few hours, the cosmic bombardment, geometrically accelerating the movement of the β atoms, would cause an immense deflagration, which will melt every last remnant of this cursed Station, and the machine with which a madman wanted to replace the will of man.
No one must know that it existed, because another Jager Astral may be born tomorrow. Not a single trace of it must remain, because perhaps someone might wonder what it pertained to. Not even the Supreme Council must know of its existence, although it's entrusted with the government of humanity, because pride grows more easily in those who have power. I will burn myself with the machine, with the entire station. Atom by atom, we'll dissipate into the ether and no one will ever be able to reunite us.
A great resplendence in space, which will seem like that of the sun's for a moment, and everything will be over. Humanity will be saved.
There are only a few moments left before that happens. I can already feel the dull vibration of the Station. Its metals are slightly warm... The air has become like summer.... My face is burning.
Goodbye, Estrella! Perla, Luz, goodbye!
I will pray.
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