The Chain of Chance

by Stanisław Lem

  “Though Proque’s death was only indirectly related to Monday’s attack, the case was becoming more serious. Nothing like having a corpse for a trump card. The day before he died, I had gone to pay Proque’s mother a visit. For a woman her age she turned out to be very cooperative and obliging. On my way out to Rue Amélie I picked up a man from Narcotics to examine the darkroom and the photo-lab chemicals. I was tied up for quite a while with Madame Proque, because once she got started on something there was nothing I could do but sit and listen patiently. Near the end of my visit, I thought I heard the shop’s doorbell ring through a crack in the window. I found my helper behind the counter going through the work ledger.

  “‘Find anything?’ I asked.

  “‘Nothing to speak of.’

  “His voice betrayed uncertainty.

  “‘Did someone come in?’

  “‘Yes. How did you know?’

  “He then told me what had happened. When the bell rang, he had been standing on a chair searching an electrical cable box, so it was a few seconds before he was able to enter the shop. The customer heard him tinkering around in the back and, thinking it was Proque, called out in a loud voice, ‘How are you feeling today, Dieudonné?’

  “Just then my assistant came into the shop and spotted a bareheaded, middle-aged man who, the moment he saw him, instinctively made a move for the door. The reason was purely accidental. Normally the Narcotics Squad wore civilian clothes on the job, but that afternoon they were obliged to appear in full uniform for a small decoration ceremony being held in honor of one of their superiors. Since it wasn’t scheduled to begin until four, my assistant had decided to wear his uniform to work so he wouldn’t have to go home again to change clothes.

  “It was obviously the sight of the uniform that had startled the intruder. He said he had come for his glasses and showed the agent his repair tag. The agent explained that the owner of the shop had been incapacitated and that therefore he would have to wait for his glasses. It looked as if there was nothing left to be said, but the stranger refused to leave. Then he asked in a low voice if Proque had suddenly been taken ill. The agent said he had.

  “‘Seriously ill?’

  “‘Fairly seriously, yes.’

  “‘I… desperately need those glasses,’ the stranger said quite unexpectedly, apparently unable to ask the question uppermost in his mind.

  “‘Is he… is he still alive?’ he blurted out suddenly.

  “By now my assistant was getting suspicious. Without giving a reply, he placed his hand on the counter top’s hinged lid with the idea of checking the man’s identification, but just then the man spun around and left the shop. By the time the agent lifted the counter top and ran outside, the stranger was gone. It was the start of the four o’clock rush hour, a light drizzle was falling, and the sidewalks were packed.

  “I was upset that he’d let him get away, but I postponed giving him a reprimand. Besides, we now had the optician’s work ledger. I asked the agent whether he could recall the number on the man’s repair tag, but it had escaped his notice. The ledger included a number of recent entries, but only the customers’ initials were given, which didn’t look too promising. Our only other lead was the missing stranger, who knew Proque well enough to call him by his first name. I jotted down the most recent entries, though I wasn’t very optimistic. Was the repair tag a pretext or cover? I wondered. But any drugs that well hidden would have meant it was the work of professionals. I didn’t know what to make of Proque any more. But even if I’d misjudged the man and his shop was being used as a drop, it seemed pretty absurd to think Proque would have helped himself to a dose, much less taken an overdose. The stuff could have been counterfeit, which was often the case, but it was unusual for dealers and middlemen to use narcotics themselves: they’re too well acquainted with the aftereffects to be tempted. I was nearly at the end of my wits when my assistant suddenly recalled that, even though it had been raining, the stranger had been without an umbrella or a hat, and that his mohair coat was almost completely dry. We knew he couldn’t have come by car, because the street had been blocked off for repairs, so chances were that he lived somewhere in the neighborhood. It took us five days to track him down. How did we find him? Very simple. Based on the agent’s description a composite sketch was made of the missing man and circulated among all the concierges on Rue Amélie. The man identified was a prominent scientist, a doctor of chemistry by the name of Dunant. Jérôme Dunant. While going through the ledger I’d noticed something unusual: the initials J. D. were listed on each of the three days preceding Proque’s attacks. The doctor lived a few doors down the street, so early one afternoon I went to call on him. When he met me at the door, I recognized him at once from the sketch.

  “‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Come right in.’

  “‘It looks as if you were expecting me,’ I said as I followed him inside.

  “‘I was. Is Proque still alive?’

  “‘I beg your pardon, but it was I who wanted to ask you a few questions, not vice versa. What makes you think Proque might not be alive?’

  “‘Now it’s my turn not to answer. You see, inspector, it’s absolutely essential there be no publicity about this. It must be kept out of the press. Otherwise the consequences could be disastrous.’

  “‘Disastrous for whom? For yourself?’

  “‘For France.’

  “I ignored this last comment but couldn’t get any more out of him,

  “‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but any statement I make will have to be to the head of the Sûreté, and then not before I have special clearance from my superiors.’

  “He volunteered no other information, afraid I might be one of those policemen who like to pass on sensational news stories to the media. That I found out only afterward. He gave us quite a hard time, but in the end he got his way. My superior got in touch with his superior, and two ministries had to approve before he was allowed to testify.

  “It’s a well-known fact that every nation loves peace and makes plans for war. France is no exception. Chemical warfare is always treated with moral indignation, but still the research goes on. It just so happened that Dr. Dunant was working on a project aimed at developing chemical compounds known as psychotropic depressants, which in pill or gas form would be capable of paralyzing the enemy’s will and morale. Under the seal of secrecy we were told that for over four years Dr. Dunant had been trying to synthesize such a depressant. By working with a certain chemical compound, he had obtained a number of derivatives, one of which proved to be capable of producing the desired effect on the brain but only when administered in massive doses. Only when taken by the spoonful did it produce the symptomatic effects of hyperexcitability and aggression, followed by depression, and culminating in an acute suicidal mania. Finding the right compound is very often a matter of luck, arrived at by substituting various chemical groups in the original compound and then analyzing the derivatives for their pharmacological properties. Sometimes it can take years of research to find the right combination; other times one can achieve instantaneous results, the latter being of course the exception, rather than the rule.

  “Since he was extremely nearsighted, Dr. Dunant was forced to wear his glasses at all times. For the past several years he had been a steady customer of Proque’s. Since he was severely handicapped without his glasses, he made it a point always to keep three pairs on hand. He would wear one pair, carry the second pair around with him as a spare, and keep the third pair at home. He’d begun taking these precautions after breaking a pair of glasses in the lab and having to interrupt his work as a result. And just before his last visit to the shop—three weeks before, to be exact—he had had another accident. Dunant worked in a maximum-security laboratory. Before entering the lab he would have to change into a new set of clothes, including special shoes and underwear, and deposit all his personal items in a changing room separated from the work area by a pressure chamber. While he worked he was required to wear
a transparent plastic hood equipped with its own air supply system. At no time was his body or glasses allowed to come into contact with any of the chemical substances under investigation. To avoid any further possible inconvenience, he had got into the habit of putting his extra pair of glasses on one of the reagent shelves before going to work. One day, as he was reaching for a reagent, he accidentally knocked them to the floor, shattering one lens and damaging the frame by stepping on it with his foot. He immediately took them to Proque for repair, but two days later, when he went to pick them up, he hardly recognized the optician, who had the tired and haggard look of someone who’s just recovered from a serious illness. Proque told him he suspected having been poisoned, because the night before he’d been overcome by a strange attack that for some reason made him feel like crying even now.

  “Dunant quickly forgot about Proque and his troubles, but he was far from satisfied with the repair job: not only did one of the stems pinch, but also one of the newly fitted lenses came loose from its plastic frame and finally popped out and broke on the laboratory’s tiled floor. Dunant brought the glasses back a second time, but when he stopped by for them the following day Proque seemed to have aged overnight. Casually he began inquiring about the details of this latest ‘attack.’ Proque’s description sounded like an acute depression caused by a chemically induced psychosis, very similar, in fact, to the symptoms produced by the compound X he had been working on. But since it would have taken a hefty dose of at least ten grams in pure form to provoke such a violent reaction, he failed to see what connection this could have with the glasses. Twice he had brought for repair the pair that usually lay on the reagent shelf located above the Bunsen burner. Then he began wondering whether the chemical fumes might have traveled through the air and settled on the glasses in microscopic amounts. He decided to run a test on them. By subjecting the glasses to a chemical analysis, he established that traces of the compound were indeed present on the lenses and frame stems, but in amounts measurable in gammas—in other words, in micrograms. The story of how LSD was discovered is a familiar one among chemists. Like everyone else at the time, the chemist experimenting with it was completely unaware of its hallucinogenic effects. But after returning home from work one night, he started experiencing all the symptoms of a ‘trip’—visions, psychic manifestations, and the like—though before leaving the lab he had washed his hands as thoroughly as he always did. But the infinitesimal amount lodged under his fingernails had been enough to induce the symptoms while he was making dinner.

  “Dunant began thinking how an optician goes about installing a new set of lenses and adjusting the stems. He recalled that the synthetically made stems are passed quickly back and forth over a gas flame. Could the heat have altered the chemical composition of the compound, in a way that it made its effect a million times more potent? Taking samples of the compound, Dunant tried heating them by every means possible—with burners, spirit lamps, candle flame—but with no results. At that point he decided to perform the experimentum crucis. He deliberately bent one of the stems and bathed it with a thin enough solution of compound X so that a residue amounting to one-millionth of a gram remained on the frame after the solvent had evaporated. He then brought the glasses back to the optician for the third time. This was the pair he had come to pick up when he saw the agent behind the counter.

  “There you have the whole story, monsieur, a story without a solution or an end. Dr. Dunant theorized that the chemical alteration was caused by something in the optician’s workshop and that the resulting catalytic reaction made the chemical’s effect a million times more powerful. But since nothing was found to corroborate his theory, we decided to drop the case: if you have to chase after atoms instead of people, then it’s time to call off the investigation. No crime was committed, since the amount smeared by Dr. Dunant on the glasses was barely enough to kill a fly, much less the optician. I later heard that Dunant—or someone acting on his behalf—acquired the contents of the darkroom from Madame Proque and tested all the reagents for their effect on compound X, but without any results.

  “Madame Proque died before Christmas that same year. In the department it was rumored that after her death Dunant spent the whole winter in the abandoned shop and during that time took samples of everything—the plywood partition, the grinding stone, the varnish on the wall, the dust on the floor—but found nothing. It was Inspector Pingaud who insisted I tell you the whole story. I suspect your Naples case falls into the same category. Now that the world has reached a state of scientific perfection, such things are bound to happen. That’s all I have to say.”

  Because of the traffic, it took us nearly an hour to drive back to Garges. Neither of us said very much along the way. The story of Proque’s gradual insanity was as familiar to me as the back of my own hand. All that was missing was the hallucination phase, but, then, who knows what sort of visions the poor bastard might have had. Funny, all along I’d been treating the other victims like the pieces of a puzzle, but Proque was different. I felt sorry for him. Thanks to Dunant. Oh, I could understand that mice weren’t enough. Mice couldn’t be driven to suicide. For that he needed a human being. He wasn’t taking any risks, either: the moment he saw a cop at the door, he could always use France as an alibi. Even that I could understand. But what made me so furious was that “How are you feeling today, Dieudonné?” of his. If that Japanese assassin in Rome was a criminal, then what was Dunant? I bet Dunant wasn’t even his real name. Why had the inspector let me listen to the story? I wondered. Not out of sympathy, that’s for sure. And what was the real story behind all this? The ending could have been faked, too. If that was the case, then the whole thing could have been staged as a harmless pretext for relaying information to the Pentagon about a new type of chemical weapon.

  The more I thought about it, the more plausible this seemed. They’d shown their hand so well that if worst came to worst, they could always deny everything. Even they had said they came away empty-handed, and how the hell was I to tell whether they were telling the truth. If I’d been your ordinary private detective, you can be sure they wouldn’t have bothered with such a show; but an astronaut, even a second-string one, has ties with NASA, and NASA has ties with the Pentagon. If the whole thing was planned by the higher-ups, then Pingaud was merely carrying out orders, and Barth’s confusion wasn’t to be taken at face value, either. Barth was in a far trickier situation than I. He, too, must have detected an element of big-league politics in this unexpected “generosity” of theirs, but he didn’t feel it was worth telling me about because it must have taken him by surprise. I was sure he hadn’t been tipped off in advance; I knew enough about the rules of the game to know that. They couldn’t very well take him aside and say, “OK, all we have to do is show that Yank one of our high cards and he’s bound to pass it on.” That’s just not the way it’s done. And it would have looked funny as hell if they’d clued me in and not Barth, especially when they knew he’d already promised me the use of his team. No, they could afford neither to leave him out nor to bring him in, so they did the next most sensible thing: they let him hear exactly what I heard and then left him to worry about the implications on his own. I would have bet he was sorry he ever offered me his help. Then I started meditating on what all this meant in terms of the investigation. It didn’t present a very rosy picture. From the Italian series we’d deduced a number of qualifying factors: the mineral baths, men past the age of fifty, sturdy physique, bachelors, sun, allergy, and here was someone well over sixty, skinny, not allergic to anything, living with his mother, who never took sulfur baths, never got a tan, and hardly ever left the house! In fact, he couldn’t have been a more dissimilar type. In a fit of magnanimity I suggested to Barth that each of us digest this latest bit of news on his own, to avoid influencing the other, and compare notes later on that evening. He was all for it.

  Around three I went into the garden, where little Pierre was waiting for me. This meeting was our very own secret. He
showed me the parts of his rocket. The first stage was a wash-tub. No one is more sensitive than a child, so I did not mention that a washtub wasn’t exactly cut out to be a booster rocket, and I drew for him on the sand the various stages of a Saturn V and IX.

  At five I went to keep my appointment with Barth in the library. He took me somewhat by surprise when he led off by saying that since France was doing research on factor X, it was safe to assume that other countries were engaged in similar research. Such work, he said, was always carried out on a parallel basis, in which case even the Italians might have… Maybe it was time to re-examine the whole affair. The compound wouldn’t have had to come from a government lab; it could also have originated in a private company. It might have been developed by a chemist connected with the extremists, or, as seemed more likely, some of it might have been pirated. Perhaps the people in charge of administering it did not know how to exploit it to its maximal effect, and so they decided to conduct some experiments. But, then, why were the victims all foreigners, all in the same age group, all rheumatics, and so on?

  He had an answer for that as well.

  “Put yourself in the place of the group’s leader. You’ve heard about the chemical’s powerful reaction, but you’re not exactly sure what kind of effect it has. Since you’re a man without any moral scruples, you decide to try it out on various people. But which people? You can’t very well test it out on your own members. So who? On just anyone? That would mean an Italian, with a family. But since the initial symptoms would be interpreted as a personality change, an Italian would very soon wind up under a doctor’s care or as a patient in a clinic. A single man, however, can do just about anything before anyone will take notice, especially in hotels, where every sort of whim is indulged. And the better the hotel, the greater the isolation. At a third-class boardinghouse, the landlady is likely to keep a watchful eye on her tenants’ every move, whereas at the Hilton you can walk around on your hands and still not attract any attention. Neither the management nor the employees will bat an eyelash as long as it doesn’t involve a criminal offense. Speaking a foreign language is another isolating factor. So far so good?”