The Frankenstein Papers

by Fred Saberhagen

  "Wasn't right? What do you mean by that?"

  "Well, there it was, not set neatly to one side on the table—there would have been room—but just sprawled right on top of all the work that Herr Frankenstein was always warning me and Metzger not to touch. And the new one was huge, sir. It was as big as you are, I suppose."

  "Go on."

  "And worst of all, it had all its clothes on. If there was one thing that the Herr Doktor was always telling me, it was 'Karl, take their clothes off and be sure you get rid of them.' The clothes, that is. Very particular on that point, he was."

  When I thought about it for a moment, that seemed logical to me. A naked body would be harder to trace and identify, should there ever arise any dispute with angry relatives or medical school officials. And it would also, of course, be easier to examine and work with.

  "So what did you do, Karl?" I asked.

  "It seemed to me, Your Honor, that there was only one thing I could do. I got busy taking off the clothes. I had them all off—and then I realized that the body was still alive."

  "Alive!"

  "Yes sir. That was a bad moment for me, I tell you. A bad moment."

  "Were you drinking on that night, Karl? Before you found the brandy bottle in the laboratory, I mean."

  "Well, sir, no. Well, only a little. Just a little cheap wine was all I had before I came into town to see Herr Doktor Frankenstein. And then, once I got there, I hardly had time to take even a little nip out of the brandy bottle before I started to notice things, like the new body having its clothes on. But I saw that bottle just sitting on the table and I thought, why not? After that lightning bolt I needed something to help me pull myself together."

  "Go on."

  "Only a little something… you see, I thought it unfair of Frankenstein to say what he sometimes said about my work. I wasn't—I am not—a drunken fool, as the gentleman once accused me of. I did good work for him, always."

  Freeman was indignant. "You had been drinking, then, that night, when you went to see him. When you got there you probably couldn't tell a live body from a corpse."

  At that the peasant became resentful. "I could tell, sir! I could tell. It was just…"

  "Not until you had the body stripped. Anyway, what happened then?"

  The remainder of the story came out in bits and pieces. Amazed to see and feel a shudder of life run through the giant frame under his hands, Karl had let it slide back to the table. All he could think of in that horrible moment was that someone, either Metzger or the Herr Doktor or both of them, had made a catastrophic mistake. They had brought a body here before the man was dead. Perhaps—Karl still shuddered, telling us his fear—perhaps Metzger had even tried to kill the man, to provide a suitable specimen, and had failed.

  Karl himself, or so he protested to us, has never hurt anyone in his life. I can believe that that is true, or almost true. Like so many huge men, he gives the impression of having basically a gentle nature; and I believe that his nature is basically a timid one as well.

  So to me the claim is quite credible, that it never entered Karl's mind to complete the job that Metzger perhaps had bungled, to finish off the helpless man before him. I can believe that Karl thought only of how to separate himself from the catastrophe that was sure to bring down trouble on the Herr Doktor's head, and that he did what he could to destroy or confuse the evidence before escaping.

  "They had me in jail once, sir, for two days, just for sleeping in the square, when I was younger. And I don't mean to go back to jail. No sir, enough of that for me."

  "That's wise of you. So what did you do?"

  His first impulse, he told us, had been to get the live man out of the house, and dump him somewhere else. But as soon as Karl had tried to lift the huge slippery body from the table, the victim had started to struggle ferociously, and had seemed likely to raise an outcry that would rouse the house, deaf landlady or not. Karl let him slump back on the marble slab, where he lay groaning faintly.

  After an agonizing moment of indecision, Karl had decided that it was the Herr Doktor's work that had to go.

  He told us, with the calm of one accustomed to handling corpses, how the dead construction on the table, the object of Frankenstein's labors for so long, and rotting now despite all efforts at preservation and reanimation, had come to pieces in his grip when he had attempted to lift it quickly. There was a large canvas bag available in the laboratory, in which some previous delivery had been made. Karl began stuffing chunks of body into the bag, like a butcher packing meat. Though the reconstructed frame was eight feet tall, or rather eight feet long, it was attenuated by dehydration as well as being weakened by surgery. The weight was no more, in fact was rather less, than that of a normal body of ordinary size.

  Into the bag as well went the spare anatomy from around the room, and the clothing that had just been removed from the living victim. Karl's idea was that a naked man would be less likely to raise an immediate outcry or come running in pursuit when he woke up completely.

  "You disposed of all the clothing?" I demanded. "What about the boots?"

  "Your Honor, I—yes, these that I am wearing are his boots, I admit. They looked so good I couldn't throw them away, not like the rest of his strange garments. And when I tried them on they fit."

  "Go on, then—wait!" My grip tightened on his arm. "Was there any other clothing in the room?"

  "Any other… no sir. Why do you ask?"

  "Are you sure?"

  "Why… wait. Yes sir, there were the clothes that Herr Frankenstein had been getting ready for the person on the table to wear, on the day that person should be able to get up and walk about. Those things were all kept on a shelf in the laboratory. But they'd been sitting there for quite a while, and I never thought about them at the time—"

  "Stop!" I cried. "Wait. On a shelf… yes."

  Freeman grasped my arm. "My friend, what is it?"

  "I am beginning to remember," I said to him. And bits and pieces were coming back to me, quite painfully. As they are now, once more, as I write about it.

  Later_In that first moment of my cloudy awareness, on that November night, alone in that hideous, malodorous room, what had I been doing? My hands had been fumbling with my garments. Reaching to a shelf.

  Getting dressed. Of course. If only—

  Later_I have remembered—enough—and I am certain that now I know the truth. But I cannot tell it to anyone here, not even Freeman, my good friend. Nor dare I write it in this journal.

  One consolation is that I know my name at last.

  FINAL LETTER

  April 7,1783 Ingolstadt

  Dear Sir—

  Looking back on the course of this investigation, I feel that I have been led from the unlikely and the improbable on to the inconceivable and the impossible. Now, once more, after yet another series of mystifying events, I write you from this quiet university town. Its peaceful aspect has not changed in the five months I have been gone, and the horrifying events that have concerned me since then, seem, at this moment, as remote as if they had never happened.

  I believe—I am sure—that my companion has very recently experienced some substantial return of memory; that he is now satisfied that he has solved the riddles posed by the mystery of his being, and the question of his identity. But the knowledge, whatever it may be, has not brought him happiness, but rather the reverse; and no plea of mine will induce him to share it with me.

  Briefly, this morning, he tentatively attempted to do so. We were seated out of doors on this pleasant spring morning, at one side of the town square, while around us the normal business of shopkeepers, workers, and loiterers went on—my friend's extraordinary figure has now been seen here so much that it has ceased to attract any very particular attention.

  He leaned toward me, and interrupted a lengthy silence to say suddenly: "Freeman, you are my friend. You have risked your life for me. I owe you some kind of an explanation."

  "I am relieved to hear you sa
y there is to be an explanation, but I do not consider that you owe me one." Though of course I did. At that moment there was nothing in the world I wanted more.

  But again he fell silent; I could see that, for whatever reason, the effort to explain was very difficult for him.

  After lengthy private consideration, staring at the fountain and the pigeons, and now and then dartling me a worried glance, he began, or tried to begin, the answer I so desired to have. "Once there was a scientist—a philosopher—who wondered if it might be possible to create intelligent life, the equal of his own."

  "A worthy ambition," I remarked, when a pause threatened to prolong itself unduly.

  "Yes. Oh yes." My friend nodded. "And natural enough, I think. You see, although there were many others of his kind around him—and he had colleagues, who were interested in the same things_this philosopher still found the universe something of a lonely place. I wonder now—I wonder now sometimes if, perhaps, nobody loved him—if perhaps his researches would have followed a different direction if he had been loved."

  I did not know what to make of this at all, and murmured or grunted something, in what I hoped was a wise and thoughtful tone.

  My friend resumed. "They all did—all felt this loneliness—he and his colleagues too. They all felt tormented by the same questions."

  I grunted again, encouragingly as I thought. But again my friend fell silent. He sat for so long without speaking, still staring into the flowing waters of the fountain, that I thought it necessary to prompt him.

  "The philosopher," I said.

  "Hey?" muttered my tall friend absently.

  "The one who tried to create life," I reminded him. "I suppose that he never really succeeded?"

  My companion started, and looked at me as if for a moment he did not recognize me. "Oh but he did," he said then, joylessly. "Yes, he succeeded. With the help of others. And then he found that his difficulties were just beginning. He felt a responsibility for the beings of his creation…"

  "Beings?" I asked. "More than one?"

  But yet another lengthy silence ensued. I waited, more confused than ever, but confidently expecting that eventually I should hear more.

  But it was not to be. My companion arose suddenly, turned his back on our bench, and without casting another look in my direction walked away from me with long strides. In a moment he was out of the square; too late I jumped to my feet and made a halfhearted attempt to follow him; halfhearted, because I know it is impossible for mere human legs to keep up with the pace his legs can set. At the edge of town I caught one more glimpse of him as he vanished into the countryside. I am awaiting his return.

  Item: There were strange sights reported in the sky above Bavaria last night, and I suppose that garbled rumors of the man-carrying balloons now being tested in France are somehow responsible. The descriptions were quite lurid; I should not be surprised to learn that the prescientific idea of stones falling from the sky is not, in these hinterlands, completely dead. God knows how such news—particularly that of the balloons, I mean_can travel so rapidly, but some of the populace here are excited, which excitement I suppose must be a thousand times intensified in Paris.

  Later_Frankenstein is just arrived here in Ingolstadt, much to my surprise, and we have spoken again. He is quite agitated, says he is determined to recompense me in some way for the ill-treatment I have suffered on occasion from his former associates. I say "former" because he has now resolved, he says, to have nothing more to do with Saville and Walton.

  He says, further, that you have given him good advice, and he is determined to follow it; but if his past record is considered, perhaps we should not place too great a reliance on his persistence in any course of action. I have told him that to make amends to me, he ought to seek you out, and reveal to you all his electrical secrets. I hope that this tactic meets with your approval. For myself, I want nothing from the man, and feel as wary of his sudden friendship as I should if he declared himself my enemy.

  After talking to me, Frankenstein departed, having hired some men to help him, announcing that he plans to search the countryside for the being he has authored—or believes that he has authored. I have a premonition that he may find the search no easy one.

  Later again_Captain Walton also has arrived in town, somewhat to my alarm—I have seen him only at a distance. He looks worried, and I hear he has been asking after Saville, who was en route here also but has not arrived. The sea captain, without his leader, is behaving in what appears to be a harmless manner, but I shall certainly be on my guard. He has already announced locally, I hear, that he is here to gather material for his next book.

  Later still_Twenty four hours have elapsed, since my companion stalked off leaving me in the square, and he still has not reappeared. I am worried about him but can discover nothing. Saville was definitely reported in Munich, but seems to have disappeared somewhere along the road between that city and here, a highway, as you know, relatively short and well traveled. My fear is that the two of them have met, and that my friend has suffered by the encounter. Perhaps they have somehow destroyed each other.

  I will write more as soon as I have discovered more.

  Your Son,

  Benjamin Freeman

  PRELIMINARY REPORT

  From: Observer First Class Osak Larkas

  To: Commander, Fourth Rescue Unit, Headquarters Fleet

  Subject: Current situation on Cultivated Planet 43

  Sir:

  The medical officers aboard this excellent ship assure me that my recovery is now virtually complete, and I believe that I can now consider my own recent actions with the necessary objectivity.

  First, allow me to express my gratitude to you and the people under your command for their most efficient action in locating me and extracting me from a most dangerous situation. My predicament not only threatened to have an adverse effect upon the overall mission of the Observer Force, but it had grown personally intolerable.

  It adds greatly to the credit of the rescue team that they managed a most complicated and difficult operation while complying fully with all Observers' Rules. I must admit that my own gross failure to do the same was the cause of all my difficulties, and not only created problems for the rescue team, but threatened to place the whole process of cultivation on Planet 43 in some degree of jeopardy. I offer, for whatever they may be worth, my abject apologies for this failure.

  Having said that, I feel I must next offer as much of an explanation—I do not say excuse—as I can for my blundering, in the hopes that knowledge of where I went wrong may prevent some other Observer in future from getting into such a bizarre predicament.

  Although, I say it once more, I accept full responsibility for what happened, I think it is necessary to point out that there were contributing factors involved—I seem to be trying here to find an elegant way to say that not only was I a damned fool, but I had damned back luck as well. Otherwise it is quite possible that my foolishness might not have had such potentially disastrous consequences.

  My motives, I shall maintain, were praiseworthy_the pursuit of knowledge. It was my judgment that was at fault.

  The difficulty, as I see it, began about four standard years ago. It was at that time, in the course of routine observations from my orbital station near my assigned planet, that I detected certain electrical emanations from the surface, of a surprising type. These radiations were brief and intermittent but they bore the unmistakable signs of artifice. It appeared to me, though I could detect nothing that sounded like the deliberate coding of information, as if some kind of primitive spark-gap transmitters might be in operation at three or four widely separated locations on the planet below. None of the sites were at all near our permanent ground-monitoring stations and it was entirely possible that I was missing portions of the signals, or that other, similar, signals were being and had been transmitted that I had missed entirely.

  If spark-gap transmitters were in fact being used by the locals, this wo
uld have been news indeed. The Schedule as envisioned by Headquarters Planning did not predict that the natives should independently develop a true radio capability for more than another hundred years. Even if the signals were only incidental, not meant as a form of communication, still, the strength of their ragged pulses, their frequency range, and other characteristics convinced me that at least a few individuals among the local population were much farther advanced in their technology than Planning had predicted, or any of us had expected.

  Naturally my intellectual curiosity regarding this phenomenon was intense from the outset. That would have been the case even had it not seemed to bear upon my personal career. What I mean by that is that if the advance communication explanation of the phenomenon should prove correct, it would have the most decisive effect upon the thesis I was preparing for my Penultimate Degree_not to mention the implications of such a discovery for Development Theory in general.

  I have said that the signals I detected were emanating from several locations. All of these were in the planet's northern hemisphere, but widely dispersed upon two continents. I considered it obvious that no natural phenomenon, however freakish, could be responsible. My next question was, who were the researchers? Were they in communication with each other, by other means if not through the signals themselves?

  To make the long story of my temptation short, my curiosity increased until I allowed it to overwhelm my common sense. My tour of solo duty still had several years to run; it would be a discouragingly long time before I could expect to have help from other Observers, whose presence alone would make a manned trip down to the surface possible under existing regulations. Meanwhile I had been expecting to be able to complete my thesis.