Crossposted from European Tribune.

Here is the second and final part of Peter Wessel Zapffe’s Science Fiction fable from 1936, as translated by yours truly. Professor Dreistein has successfully returned to earth after his revolutionary co-discovery of a perished civilization on Venus. His new challenge is to decipher the alien document he brought along.

The inscribed-upon, or more accurately, nucleostilographed cylinder, now preserved in the Professor’s laboratory where it has already begun to corrode, is believed to be a kind of matrix for audiographic replication… The cryptic tokens are of course resisting any and all interpretation at the present time. – Thus declared the official communiqué.

Yet the Professor did not begin work on the cylinder before having paid his respects to his brave colleague’s bereaved ones; his old lonely mother and pregnant wife. He personally felt it a poor consolation that the earthly shape of the deceased had gained eternal preservation by freezing to -273 degrees, now being as hard as diamond. But he did, at any rate, promise them a copy of the translation when available, complete with a personal dedication, and this seemed to help a little.

Professor Dreistein then went into total seclusion in his highly modern laboratory, to which no sound, beam, or living soul was allowed – except the two young philologists who had shared the last Nobel prize for their work on cryptogral coefficients. The thousand-headed crowd besieging the building all day and all night, preferring to starve and freeze rather than to miss any opportunity of whatever nature, had to be dispersed by the police as it began to assume a threatening attitude. The silence from within the building caused psychosis; many would kneel and pray out loud while others presented their ailing children to the Professor’s blackened windows. Armed sentries had to guard the entrance; nothing, it was felt, was quite impossible anymore.

The frantic efforts of the three gentlemen did not fail to bear fruit. On the 24th of December the press, in inch-thick headlines, announced that the Professor and his co-workers, by a supra-brilliant synthesis, had discovered the key to interpreting the cylinder, it being now a matter of time before the first word from transglobal cultures would come forth in intelligible form.

Already on the next morning the trinitarian team, in the Professor’s name, dared offer a waiting world the prospect that he, on the following Monday at 20.00.00 o’clock, in a lecture at the Hauptakademie der Integrierten Wissenschaften, would outline the phases of the interpretive process and likely, allow a preliminary glimpse of the result. His sole caveat concerned the eventuality that ill health might preclude his public appearance. The Professor’s old age, combined with a lengthy period of late hours and with the absorbing excitement of it all, gave his physicians cause for concern.

The key discovered, the philologists retreated leaving the old enthusiast bent in cosmic solitude over the final hermeneutic meta-theses. One wished to allow him the glory of being alone about this gift to humankind; the apex of his life and of his century.

“There is every reason”, wrote Berliner Abend in high-flown Aryan syntax, “to anticipate the deciphering’s impending announcement, not only with the utmost interest, but even with disquieting unease. A world that has lived its life to the fullest measure can be presumed to have attained such outer and inner maturity, such harmonious balance of technology and spirit, as humans too anticipate at our journey’s end – the end that shall validate our efforts and bestow meaning upon the self-denial and forgotten heroism of all perished generations, upon their shining, unfaltering faith, their productive labours, suffering, and struggle. A world that has passed through the concluding phases of its thousand times ten thousand years of history, onto the final stage, and engraved its profoundest insight into a material everlasting1 – that insight which is now spilling over to our own world in one fertilising flash, a spark from the singing forge of Depth itself – whatever may it not divulge to a humankind still so painfully on its way, so ravaged by the storms of mature existence? Whatever may not be awaiting us in terms of scientific impulses, of occult apocalyptic revelation, of food for popular thought and conversation, of novel spiritual domains – indeed, in plain terms: of gates flung wide open into the ultimate, so yearningly desired deliverance of the human soul? Surely we do not go too far when anticipating that Professor Dreistein’s lecture on next Monday will signify no less than a mutation in the history of the human spirit, without thereby losing sight of the awe-inspiring fact that culture does not die as planets do, but instead, carries on its elated crusade across universes ever new…”

Every room in the Hauptakademie der Integrierten Wissenschaften was crammed to capacity. From all over Europe, indeed, from the remotest corners of the globe, distinguished scholars had gathered to fully savour the impressions of this event and its creator, while every transmitter on earth was attuned to the little steely lectern in the Hörsaal für Sinnesempfang.

It was already a quarter past eight, yet none would dream of taking offense at this slight academic delay. The Professor’s excuse would doubtless be a valid one.

At about nine o’clock a certain unrest was felt in the lecture hall, and at half past nine the Presidency decided to make for the Professor’s study. One knocked on the door, but there was no reply. One waited another fifteen minutes before knocking again – with the same result. One then withdrew to cancel the meeting. At five o’clock the next morning, after exhaustive deliberation, one determined to force open the door.

For a moment the little assembly stood as if nailed to the floor – before scrambling to the rescue. Lying on the isolopyrium tiles in front of his desk was Professor Dreistein, his hair whitened overnight, with a bloody wound in his temple and an expression on his harried face suggesting to the gaping adepts the profoundest human despair. His bony, sinewy graybeard’s hand convulsively clutched a short-barrelled laser gun.

At the center of the desk were papers indicating various stages of interpretation, and in front of these, at the table’s edge, was a sheet with the first few sentences in modern German.

With throbbing heart, the President leaned over the table and recited:

“The prohibition of sale of intoxicating drink will lead to bitterness in wide circles of our people.”

—————–
(1) In a sterile atmosphere, that is.