Galactic Dreams

As a graduate student I was very close to Professor Hakachinik and was present at the very moment when the germ of an idea was planted that was to flower eventually into the tremendous growth of invention that was to be his contribution to the sum of knowledge of mankind. It was a sunny June afternoon, and I am forced to admit that I was dozing over a repetitious (begat, begat, begat) fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls when a hoarse shout echoed from the paneled walls of the library and shocked me awake.

“Neobican!” the professor exclaimed again-he has a tendency to break into Serbo-Croatian when excited-and a third time, “Neobican!”

“What is wonderful, Professor?” I asked.

“Listen to this quotation, it is inspirational indeed, from Edward Gibbon; he was visiting Rome, and this is what he wrote: `As I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter … the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.’”

“Isn’t that incredible, my boy, simply breathtaking. A singularly important and historical beginning if I ever heard one. It all started there until, twelve years and five hundred thousand words later, racked by writer’s cramp, Gibbon scribbled `The End’ and dropped his pen. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was finished. Inspiring!”

“Inspiring?” I asked dimly, my head still rattling with begats.

“Dolt!” he snarled, and added a few imprecations in Babylonian that will not bear translation in a modern journal. “Have you no sense of perspective? Do you not see that every great event in this universe must have had some tiny beginning?”

“That’s rather an obvious observation,” I remarked.

“Imbecile!” he muttered through clenched teeth. “Do you not understand the grandeur of the concept! Think! The mighty redwood, reaching for the sky, so wide in the trunk that it is pierced with a tunnel for motor vehicles to be driven through; this goliath of the forest was once a struggling single-leafed shrub incapable of exercising a tree’s peculiar attractions for even the most minuscule of dogs. Do you find this concept a fascinating one?”

I mumbled something incoherent to cover up the fact that I did not, and as soon as Professor Hakachinik had turned away I resumed my nap and forgot the matter completely for a number of days, until I received a message summoning me to the professor’s chambers.

“Look at that,” he said, pointing to what appeared to be a normal radio, housed in a crackle-gray cabinet and faced with a splendid display of knobs and dials.

“Bully,” I said, with enthusiasm. “We will listen to the final game of the World Series together.”

“Stumpfsinnig Schwein,” he growled. “That is no ordinary radio, but is an invention of mine embodying a new concept, my Temporal Audio Psychogenetic detector, TAP for short — and `tap’ is what it does. By utilizing a theory and technique that are so far beyond your rudimentary powers of comprehension that I will make no attempt to explain them, I have constructed my TAP to detect and amplify the voices of the past so that they can be recorded. Listen and be amazed!”

The professor switched on the device and, after a few minutes of fiddling with the dials, exacted from the loudspeaker what might be described as a human voice mouthing harsh animal sounds.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Proto-mandarin of the later part of the thirteenth century B.C., obviously,” he mumbled, hard at work again on the dials, “but just idle chatter about the rice crop, the barbarians from the south, and such. That is the difficulty; I have to listen to volumes of that sort of thing before I chance on an authentic beginning and record it. But I have been doing just that — and succeeding!”

He slapped his hand on a loose pile of scrawled pages that stood upon the desk. “Here are my first successes, fragmentary as yet, but I’m on the way. I have traced a number of important events back to their sources and recorded the very words of their originators at the precise moment of inception. Of course the translations are rough and quite colloquial-but that can be corrected later. My study of beginnings has begun.”

I’m afraid I left the professor’s company at that time. I did want to hear the ball game and I regret to say that it was the last time that I or anyone else ever saw him alive. The sheets of paper he so valued were taken to be the ravings of an unwell mind, their true worth misunderstood, and they were discarded. I have salvaged some of them and now present them to the public, who can truly judge their real worth. For fragmentary as they are, they still cast the strong light of knowledge into many a darkened corner of history that has been obscured in the past.