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Title: Angerhelm
Author: Smith, Cordwainer [Linebarger, Paul Myron Anthony]
   (1913-1966)
Date of first publication: 1959
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1989
   ["The Instrumentality of Mankind":
   apparently a hardcover reprint of the 1988
   Gollancz paperback collection of the same name]
Date first posted: 9 October 2017
Date last updated: 9 October 2017
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1474

This ebook was produced by Al Haines and Mark Akrigg


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.








ANGERHELM

by Cordwainer Smith


    _Funny funny funny.  It's sort of funny funny funny to think
    without a brain--it is really something like a trick but not a
    trick to think without a brain.  Talking is even harder but it can
    be done._


I still remember the way that phrase came ringing through when we
finally got hold of old Nelson Angerhelm and sat him down with the
buzzing tape.

The story began a long time before that.  I never knew the beginnings.

My job is an assistant to Mr. Spatz, and Spatz has been shooting holes
in budgets now for eighteen years.  He is the man who approves, on
behalf of the Director of the Budget, all requests for special liaison
between the Department of the Army and the intelligence community.

He is very good at his job.  More people have shown up asking for money
and have ended up with about one-tenth of what they asked than you
could line up in any one corridor of the Pentagon.  That is saying a
lot.

The case began to break some months ago after the Russians started to
get back those odd little recording capsules.  The capsules came out of
their Sputniks.  We didn't know what was in the capsules as they
returned from upper space.  All we knew was that there was something in
them.

The capsules descended in such a way that we could track them by radar.
Unfortunately they all fell into Russian territory except for a single
capsule which landed in the Atlantic.  At the seven-million-dollar
point we gave up trying to find it.

The Commander of the Atlantic fleet had been told by his intelligence
officer that they might have a chance of finding it if they kept on
looking.  The Commander referred the matter to Washington, and the
budget people saw the request.  That stopped it, for a while.

The case began to break from about four separate directions at once.
Khrushchev himself said something very funny to the Secretary of State.
They had met in London after all.

Khrushchev said at the end of a meeting, "You play jokes sometimes, Mr.
Secretary?"

The Secretary looked very surprised when he heard the translation.

"Jokes, Mr. Prime Minister?"

"Yes."

"What kind of jokes?"

"Jokes about apparatus."

"Jokes about machinery don't sit very well," said the American.

They went on talking back and forth as to whether it was a good idea to
play practical jokes when each one had a serious job of espionage to do.

The Russian leader insisted that he had no espionage, never heard of
espionage and that his espionage worked well enough so that he knew
damn well that he didn't have any espionage.

To this display of heat, the Secretary replied that he didn't have any
espionage either and that we knew nothing whatever that occurred in
Russia.  Furthermore not only did we not know anything about Russia but
we knew we didn't know it and we made sure of that.  After this
exchange both leaders parted, each one wondering what the other had
been talking about.

The whole matter was referred back to Washington.  I was somewhere down
on the list to see it.

At that time I had "Galactic" clearance.  Galactic clearance came a
little bit after universal clearance.  It wasn't very strong but it
amounted to something.  I was supposed to see those special papers in
connection with my job of assisting Mr. Spatz in liaison.  Actually it
didn't do any good except fill in the time when I wasn't working out
budgets for him.

The second lead came from some of the boys over in the Valley.  We
never called the place by any other name and we don't even like to see
it in the federal budget.  We know as much as we need to about it and
then we stop thinking.

It is much safer to stop thinking.  It is not our business to think
about what other people are doing, particularly if they are spending
several million dollars of Uncle Sam's money every day, trying to find
out what they think and most of the time ending up with nothing
conclusive.

Later we were to find out that the boys in the Valley had practically
every security agent in the country rushing off to Minneapolis to look
for a man named Angerhelm.  Nelson Angerhelm.

The name didn't mean anything then but before we got through it ended
up as the largest story of the twentieth century.  If they ever turn it
loose it is going to be the biggest story in two thousand years.

The third part of the story came along a little later.

Colonel Plugg was over in G-2.  He called up Mr. Spatz and he couldn't
get Mr. Spatz so he called me.

He said, "What's the matter with your boss?  Isn't he ever in his room?"

"Not if I can help it.  I don't run him, he runs me.  What do you want,
Colonel?" I said.

The colonel snarled.

"Look, I am supposed to get money out of you for liaison purposes.  I
don't know how far I am going to have to go to liaise or if it is any
of my business.  I asked my old man what I ought to do about it and he
doesn't know.  Perhaps we ought to get out and just let the
Intelligence boys handle it.  Or we ought to send it to State.  You
spend half your life telling me whether I can have liaison or not and
then giving me the money for it.  Why don't you come on over and take a
little responsibility for a change?"

I rushed over to Plugg's office.  It was an Army problem.

These are the facts.

The Soviet Assistant Military Attach, a certain Lieutenant Colonel
Potariskov, asked for an interview.  When he came over he brought
nothing with him.  This time he didn't even bring a translator.  He
spoke very funny English but it worked.

The essence of Potariskov's story was that he didn't think it was very
sporting of the American military to interfere in solemn weather
reporting by introducing practical jokes in Soviet radar.  If the
American army didn't have anything else better to do would they please
play jokes on each other but not on the Soviet forces?

This didn't make much sense.

Colonel Plugg tried to find out what the man was talking about.  The
Russian sounded crazy and kept talking about jokes.

It finally turned out that Potariskov had a piece of paper in his
pocket.  He took it out and Plugg looked at it.

On it there was an address.  Nelson Angerhelm, 2322 Ridge Drive,
Hopkins, Minnesota.

It turned out that Hopkins, Minnesota, was a suburb of Minneapolis.
That didn't take long to find out.

This meant nothing to Colonel Plugg and he asked if there was anything
that Potariskov really wanted.

Potariskov asked if the Colonel would confess to the Angerhelm joke.

Potariskov said that in Intelligence they never tell you about the
jokes they play with the Signal Corps.  Plugg still insisted that he
didn't know.  He said he would try to find out and let Potariskov know
later on.  Potariskov went away.

Plugg called up the Signal Corps, and by the time he got through
calling he had a lead back into the Valley.  The Valley people heard
about it and they immediately sent a man over.

It was about this time that I came in.  He couldn't get hold of Mr.
Spatz and there was real trouble.

The point is that all three of them led together.  The Valley people
had picked up the name (and it is not up to me to tell you how they got
hold of it).  The name Angerhelm had been running all over the Soviet
communications system.  Practically every Russian official in the world
had been asked if he knew anything about Nelson Angerhelm and almost
every official, at least as far as the boys in the Valley could tell,
had replied that he didn't know what it was all about.

Some reference back to Mr. Khrushchev's conversation with the Secretary
of State suggested that the Angerhelm inquiry might have tied in with
this.  We pursued it a little further.  Angerhelm was apparently the
right reference.  The Valley people already had something about him.
They had checked with the F.B.I.

The F.B.I. had said that Nelson Angerhelm was a 62-year-old retired
poultry farmer.  He had served in World War I.

His service had been rather brief.  He had gotten as far as Plattsburg,
New York, broken an ankle, stayed four months in a hospital, and the
injury had developed complications.  He had been drawing a Veterans
Administration allowance ever since.  He had never visited outside the
United States, never joined a subversive organization, had never
married, and never spent a nickel.  So far as the F.B.I. could
discover, his life was not worth living.

This left the matter up in the air.  There was nothing whatever to
connect him with the Soviet Union.

It turned out that I wasn't needed after all.  Spatz came into the
office and said that a conference had been called for the whole
Intelligence community, people from State were sitting in, and there
was a special representative from OCBM from the White House to watch
what they were doing.

The question arose, "Who was Nelson Angerhelm?  And what were we to do
about him?"

An additional report had been made out by an agent who specialized in
pretending to be an Internal Revenue man.

The "Internal Revenue agent" was one of the best people in the F.B.I.
for checking on subversive activities.  He was a real expert on
espionage and he knew all about bad connections.  He could smell a
conspirator two miles off on a clear day.  And by sitting in a room for
a little while he could tell whether anybody had an illegal meeting
there for the previous three years.  Maybe I am exaggerating a little
bit but I am not exaggerating much.

This fellow, who was a real artist at smelling out Commies and anything
that even faintly resembles a Commie, came back with a completely blank
ticket on Angerhelm.

There was only one connection that Angerhelm had with the larger world.
He had a younger brother, whose name was Tice.  Funny name and I don't
know why he got it.  Somebody told us later on that the full name tied
in with Theiss Ankerhjelm, which was the name of a Swedish admiral a
couple hundred years ago.  Perhaps the family was proud of it.

The younger brother was a West Pointer.  He had had a regular career;
that came easily enough out of the Adjutant General's Office.

What did develop, though, was that the younger brother had died only
two months previously.  He too was a bachelor.  One of the
psychiatrists who got into the case said, "What a mother!"

Tice Angerhelm had traveled a great deal.  He had something to do, as a
matter of fact, with two or three of the projects that I was liaising
on.  There were all sorts of issues arising from this.

However, he was dead.  He had never worked directly on Soviet matters.
He had no Soviet friends, had never been in the Soviet Union, and had
never met Soviet forces.  He had never even gone to the Soviet Embassy
to an official reception.

The man was no specialist, outside of Ordnance, a little tiny bit of
French and the missile program.  He was a card player, an awfully good
man with trout and something of a Saturday evening Don Juan.

It was then time for the fourth stage.

Colonel Plugg was told to get hold of Lieutenant Colonel Potariskov and
find out what Potariskov had to give him.  This time Potariskov called
back and said that he would rather have his boss, the Soviet Ambassador
himself, call on the Secretary or the Undersecretary of State.

There was some shilly-shallying back and forth.  The Secretary was out
of town, the Undersecretary said he would be very glad to see the
Soviet Ambassador if there were anything to ask about.  He said that we
had found Angerhelm, and if the Soviet authorities wanted to interview
Mr. Angerhelm themselves they jolly well could go to Hopkins,
Minnesota, and interview him.

This led to a real flash of embarrassment when it was discovered that
the area of Hopkins, Minnesota, was in the "no travel" zone prescribed
to Soviet diplomats in retaliation against their "no travel" zones
imposed on American diplomats in the Soviet Union.

This was ironed out.  The Soviet Ambassador was asked, would he like to
go see a chicken farmer in Minnesota?

When the Soviet Ambassador stated that he was not particularly
interested in chicken farmers, but that he would be willing to see Mr.
Angerhelm at a later date if the American government didn't mind, the
whole thing was let go.

Nothing happened at all.  Presumably the Russians were relaying things
back to Moscow by courier, letter or whatever mysterious ways the
Russians use when they are acting very deliberate and very solemnly.

I heard nothing and certainly the people around the Soviet Embassy saw
no unusual contacts at that time.

Nelson Angerhelm hadn't come into the story yet.  All he knew was that
several odd characters had asked him about veterans that he scarcely
knew, saying that they were looking for security clearances.

And an Internal Revenue man had a long and very exhausting talk with
him about his brother's estate.  That didn't seem to leave much.

Angerhelm went on feeding his chickens.  He had television and
Minneapolis has a pretty good range of stations.  Now and then he
showed up at the church; more frequently he showed up at the general
store.

He almost always went away from town to avoid the new shopping centers.
He didn't like the way Hopkins had developed and preferred to go to the
little country centers where they still have general stores.  In its
own funny way this seemed to be the only pleasure the old man had.

After nineteen days, and I can now count almost every hour of them, the
answer must have gotten back from Moscow.  It was probably carried in
by the stocky brown-haired courier who made the trip about every
fortnight.  One of the fellows from the Valley told me about that.  I
wasn't supposed to know and it didn't matter then.

Apparently the Soviet Ambassador had been told to play the matter
lightly.  He called on the Undersecretary of State and ended up
discussing world butter prices and the effect of American exports of
ghee to Pakistan on the attempts of the Soviet Union to trade ghee for
hemp.

Apparently this was an extraordinary and confidential thing for the
Soviet Ambassador to discuss.  The Undersecretary would have been more
impressed if he had been able to find out why the Soviet Ambassador
just out of the top of his head announced that the Soviet Union had
given about a hundred and twenty million dollars' credit to Pakistan
for some unnecessary highways and was able to reply, therefore,
somewhat tartly to the general effect that if the Soviet Union ever
decided to stabilize world markets with the cooperation of the United
States we would be very happy to cooperate.  But this was no time to
discuss money or fair business deals when they were dumping every piece
of export rubbish they could in our general direction.

It was characteristic of this Soviet Ambassador that he took the rebuff
calmly.  Apparently his mission was to have no mission.  He left and
that was all there was from him.

Potariskov came back to the Pentagon, this time accompanied by a
Russian civilian.  The new man's English was a little more than
perfect.  The English was so good that it was desperately irritating.

Potariskov himself looked like a rather horsey, brown-faced schoolboy,
with chestnut hair and brown eyes.  I got to see him because they had
me sitting in the back of Plugg's office pretending just to wait for
somebody else.

The conversation was very simple.  Potariskov brought out a recording
tape.  It was standard American tape.

Plugg looked at it and said, "Do you want to play it right now?"

Potariskov agreed.

The stenographer got a tape recorder in.  By that time three or four
other officers wandered in and none of them happened to leave.  As a
matter of fact one of them wasn't even an officer but he happened to
have a uniform on that very day.

They played the tape and I listened to it.  It was _buzz, buzz, buzz_.
And there was some hissing, then it went _clickety, clickety,
clickety_.  Then it was _buzz, buzz, buzz_ again.  It was the kind of
sound in which you turn on a radio and you don't even get static.  You
just get funny buzzing sounds which indicate that somebody has some
sort of radio transmission somewhere but it is not consistent enough to
be the loud _whee, wheeeee_ kind of static which one often hears.

All of us stood there rather solemnly.  Plugg thoroughly a soldier,
listened at rigid attention, moving his eyes back and forth from the
tape recorder to Potariskov's face.  Potariskov looked at Plugg and
then ran his eyes around the group.

The little Russian civilian, who was as poisonous as a snake, glanced
at every single one of us.  He was obviously taking our measure and he
was anxious to find out if any of us could hear anything he couldn't
hear.  None of us heard anything.

At the end of the tape Plugg reached out to turn off the machine.

"Don't stop it," Potariskov said.

The other Russian interjected, "Didn't you hear it?"

All of us shook our heads.  We had heard nothing.

With that, Potariskov said with singular politeness, "Please play it
again."

We played it again.  Nothing happened, except for the buzzing and
clicking.

After the fifteen-minute point it was beginning to get pretty stale for
some of us.  One or two of the men actually wandered out.  They
happened to be the bona fide visitors.  The non-bona fide visitors
slouched down in the room.

Colonel Plugg offered Potariskov a cigarette which Potariskov took.
They both smoked and we played it a third time.  Then the third time
Potariskov said, "Turn it off."

"Didn't you hear it?" said Potariskov.

"Hear what?" said Plugg.

"Hear the name and the address."

At that the funniest feeling came over me.  I knew that I had heard
something and I turned to the Colonel and said, "Funny, I don't know
where I heard it or how I heard it but I do know something that I
didn't know."

"What is that?" said the little Russian civilian, his face lighting up.

"Nelson," said I, intending to say, "Nelson Angerhelm, 2322 Ridge
Drive, Hopkins, Minnesota."  Just as I had seen it in the "galactic"
secret documents.  Of course I didn't go any further.  That was in the
document and was very secret indeed.  How should I know it?

The Russian civilian looked at me.  There was a funny, wicked,
friendly, crooked sort of smile on his face.  He said, "Didn't you hear
'Nelson Angerhelm, 2322 Ridge Drive, Hopkins, Minnesota,' just now, and
yet did you not know _where_ you heard it?"

The question then arose, "What had happened?"

Potariskov spoke with singular candor.  Even the Russian with him
concurred.

"We believe that this is a case of marginal perception.  We have played
this.  This is obviously a copy.  We have many such copies.  We have
played it to all our people.  Nobody can even specify at what point he
has heard it.  We have had our best experts on it.  Some put it at
minute three.  Others put it at minute twelve.  Some put it at minute
thirteen and a half and at different places.  But different people
under different controls all come out with the idea that they have
heard 'Nelson Angerhelm, 2322 Ridge Drive, Hopkins, Minnesota.'  We
have tried it on Chinese people."

At that the Russian civilian interrupted.  "Yes, indeed, they tried it
on Chinese persons and even they heard the same thing, Nelson
Angerhelm.  Even when they do not know the language they hear 'Nelson
Angerhelm.'  Even when they know nothing else they hear that and they
hear the street numbers.  The numbers are always in English.  They
cannot make a recording.  The recording is only of this noise and yet
it comes out.  What do you make of that?"

What they said turned out to be true.  We tried it also, after they
went away.

We tried it on college students, foreigners, psychiatrists, White House
staff members, and passers-by.  We even thought of running it on a
municipal radio somewhere as a quiz show and offering prizes for anyone
that got it.  That was a little too heavy, so we accepted a much safer
suggestion that we try it out on the public address system of the SAC
base.  The SAC was guarded night and day.

No one happened to be getting much leave anyhow and it was easy enough
to cut off the leave for an extra week.  We played that damn thing six
times over and almost everybody on that base wanted to write a letter
to Nelson Angerhelm, 2322 Ridge Drive, Hopkins, Minnesota.  They were
even calling each other Angerhelm and wondering what the hell it meant.

Naturally there were a great many puns on the name and even some jokes
of a rather smutty order.  That didn't help.

The troublesome thing was that on all these different tests we too were
unable to find out at what point the subliminal transmission of the
name and address came.

It was subliminal, all right.  There's not much trick to that.  Any
good psychologist can pass along either a noise message or a sight
message without the recipient knowing exactly when he got it.  It is
simply a matter of getting down near the threshold, running a little
tiny bit under the threshold and then making the message sharp and
clear enough, just under the level of conscious notice, so that it
slips on through.

We therefore knew what we were dealing with.  What we didn't know was
what the Russians were doing with it, how they had gotten it and why
they were so upset about it.

Finally it all went to the White House for a conference.  The
conference, to which my boss Mr. Spatz went along as a sort of
rapporteur and monitor to safeguard the interests of the Director of
the Budget and of the American taxpayer, was a rather brief affair.

All roads led to Nelson Angerhelm.  Nelson Angerhelm was already
guarded by about half of the F.B.I. and a large part of the local
military district forces.  Every room in his house had been wired.  The
microphones were sensitive enough to hear his heart beat.  The safety
precautions we were taking on that man would have justified the program
we have for taking care of Fort Knox.

Angerhelm knew that some awful funny things had been happening but he
didn't know what and he didn't know who was concerned with it.

Months later he was able to tell somebody that he thought his brother
had probably done some forgery or counterfeiting and that the
neighborhood was being thoroughly combed.  He didn't realize his
safeguarding was the biggest American national treasure since the
discovery of the atomic bomb.

The President himself gave the word.  He reviewed the evidence.  The
Secretary of State said that he didn't think that Khrushchev would have
brought up the question of a joke if Khrushchev himself had not missed
out on the facts.

We had even tried Russians on it, of course--Russians on our side.  And
they didn't get any more off the record than the rest of the people.
Everybody heard the same blessed thing, "Nelson Angerhelm, 2322 Ridge
Drive, Hopkins, Minnesota."

But that didn't get anybody anywhere.

The only thing left was to try it on the man himself.

When it came to picking inconspicuous people to go along, the
Intelligence committee were pretty thin-skinned about letting outsiders
into their show.  On the other hand they did not have domestic
jurisdiction, particularly not when the President had turned it over to
J. Edgar Hoover and said, "Ed, you handle this.  I don't like the looks
of it."

Somebody over in the Pentagon, presumably deviled on by Air
Intelligence, got the bright idea that if the Army and the rest of the
Intelligence committee couldn't fit into the show the best they could
do would be to get their revenge on liaison by letting liaison itself
go.  This meant Mr. Spatz.

Mr. Spatz has been on the job for many, many years by always avoiding
anything interesting or dramatic, always watching for everything that
mattered--which was the budget and the authorization for next year--and
by ditching controversial personalities long before anyone else had any
idea that they were controversial.

Therefore, he didn't go.  If this Angerhelm fiasco was going to turn
out to be a mess he wanted to be out of it.

It was me who got the assignment.

I was made a sort of honorary member of the F.B.I. and they even let me
carry the tape in the end.  They must have had about six other copies
of the tape so the honor wasn't as marked as it looked.  We were simply
supposed to go along as people who knew something about the brother.

It was a dry, reddish Sunday afternoon, looking a little bit as though
the sunset were coming.

We drove up to this very nice frame house.  It had double windows all
the way around and looked as tight as the proverbial rug for a bug to
be snug in in cold winter.  This wasn't winter and the old gentleman
obviously couldn't pay for air conditioning.  But the house still
looked snug.

There was no waste, no show.  It just looked like a thoroughly livable
house.

The F.B.I. man was big-hearted and let me ring the doorbell.  There was
no answer so I rang the doorbell some more.  Again, nobody answered the
bell.

We decided to wait outside and wandered around the yard.  We looked at
the car in the yard; it seemed in running order.

We rang the doorbell again, then walked around the house and looked
into the kitchen window.  We checked his car to see if the radiator
felt warm.  We looked at our watches.  We wondered if he were hiding
and peeking out at us.  Once more we rang the doorbell.

Just then, the old boy came down the front walk.

We introduced ourselves and the preliminaries were the usual sort of
thing.  I found my heart beating violently.  If something had stumped
both the Soviet Union and the rest of the world, something salvaged
possibly out of space itself, something which thousands of men had
heard and none could identify, something so mysterious that the name of
Nelson Angerhelm rang over and over again like a pitiable cry beyond
all limits of understanding, what could this be?

We didn't know.

The old man stood there.  He was erect, sunburned, red-cheeked,
red-nosed, red-eared.  Healthy as he could be, Swedish to the bone.

All we had to do was to tell him that we were concerned with his
brother, Tice Angerhelm, and he listened to us.  We had no trouble, no
trouble at all.

As he listened his eyes got wide and he said, "I know there has been a
lot of snooping around here and you people had a lot of trouble and I
thought somebody was going to come and talk to me about it but I didn't
think it would be this soon."

The F.B.I. man muttered something polite and vague, so Angerhelm went
on.  "I suppose you gentlemen are from the F.B.I.  I don't think my
brother was cheating.  He wasn't that dishonest."

Another pause, and he continued.  "But there is always a kind of a
funny sleek mind--he looked like the kind of man who would play a joke."

Angerhelm's eyes lit up.  "If he played a joke, gentlemen, he might
even have committed a crime, I don't know.  All I do is raise chickens
and try to have my life."

Perhaps it was the wrong kind of Intelligence procedure but I broke in
ahead of the F.B.I. and said, "Are you a happy man, Mr. Angerhelm?  Do
you live a life that you think is really satisfying?"

The old boy gave me a keen look.  It was obvious that he thought there
was something wrong and he didn't have very much confidence in my
judgment.

And yet underneath the sharpness of his look he shot me a glance of
sympathy and I am sure that he suspected I had been under a strain.
His eyes widened a little.  His shoulders went back, and he looked a
little prouder.

He looked like the kind of man who might remember that he had Swedish
admirals for ancestors, and that long before the Angerhelm name ran out
and ran dry there in this flat country west of Minneapolis there had
been something great in it and that perhaps sparks of the great name
still flew somewhere in the universe.

I don't know.  He got the importance of it, I suppose, because he
looked me very sharply and very clearly in the eye.

"No, young man, my life hasn't been much of a life and I haven't liked
it.  And I hope nobody has to live a life like mine.  But that is
enough of that.  I don't suppose you're guessing and I suppose you've
got something pretty bad to show me."

The other fellow then took over.

"Yes, but it doesn't involve any embarrassment for you, Mr. Angerhelm.
And even Colonel Angerhelm, your brother, wouldn't mind if he were
living."

"Don't be so sure of that," said the old man.  "My brother minded
almost everything.  As a matter of fact, my brother once said to me,
'Listen, Nels, I'd come back from Hell itself rather than let somebody
put something over on me.'  That's what he said.  I think he meant it.
There was a funny pride to him and if you've got anything here on my
brother, you'd better just show it to me."

With that, we got over the small talk and we did what we were told to
do.  We got out the tape and put it on the portable machine, the hi-fi
one which we brought along with us.

We played it for the old man.

I had heard it so often that I think I could almost have reproduced it
with my vocal cords.  The _clickety-click_ and the _buzz, buzz_.  There
wasn't any _whee, whee_, but there was some more _clickety-click_ and
there was some _buzz, buzz_, and long periods of dull silence, the kind
of contrived silence which a recording machine makes when it is playing
but nothing is coming through on it.

The old gentleman listened to it and it seemed to have no effect on
him, no effect at all.

No effect at all?  That wasn't true.

There was an effect.  When we got through the first time, he said very
simply, very directly, almost coldly, "Play it again.  Play it again
for me.  There may be something there."

We played it again.

After that second playing he started to talk.

"It is the funniest thing, I hear my own name and address there and I
don't know where I hear it, but I swear to God, gentlemen, that's my
brother's voice.  It is my brother's voice I hear there somewhere in
those clicks and noises.  And yet all I can hear is Nelson Angerhelm,
2322 Ridge Drive, Hopkins, Minnesota.  But I hear that, gentlemen, and
it is not only plain, it is my brother's voice and I don't know where I
heard it.  I don't know how it came through."

We played it for him a third time.

When the tape was halfway through, he threw up his hands and said,
"Turn it off.  Turn it off.  I can't stand it.  Turn it off."

We turned it off.

He sat there in the chair breathing hard.  After a while in a very
funny cracked tone of voice he said, "I've got some whisky.  It's back
there on the shelf by the sink.  Get me a shot of it, will you,
gentlemen?"

The F.B.I. man and I looked at each other.  He didn't want to get mixed
up in accidental poisoning so he sent me.  I went back.  It was good
enough whisky, one of the regular brands.  I poured the old boy a
two-ounce slug and took the glass back.  I sipped a tiny bit of it
myself.  It seemed like a silly thing to do on duty but I couldn't risk
any poison getting to him.  After all my years in Army
counterintelligence I wanted to stay in the Civil Service and I didn't
want to take any chances on losing my good job with Mr. Spatz.

He drank the whisky and he said, "Can you record on this thing at the
same time that you play?"

We said we couldn't.  We hadn't thought of that.

"I think I may be able to tell you what it is saying.  But I don't know
how many times I can tell you, gentlemen.  I am a sick man.  I'm not
feeling good.  I never have felt very good.  My brother had the life.
I didn't have the life.  I never had much of a life and never did
anything and never went anywhere.  My brother had everything.  My
brother got the women, he got the girl--he got the only girl I ever
wanted, and then he didn't marry her.  He got the life and he went away
and then he died.  He played jokes and he never let anybody get ahead
of him.  And, gentlemen, my brother's dead.  Can you understand that?
My brother's dead."

We said we knew his brother was dead.  We didn't tell him that he had
been exhumed and that the coffin had been opened and the bones had been
X-rayed.  We didn't tell him that the bones had been weighed, fresh
identification had been remade from what was left of the fingers, and
they were in pretty good shape.

We didn't tell him that the serial number had been checked and that all
the circumstances leading to the death had been checked and that
everybody connected with it had been interviewed.

We didn't tell him that.  We just told him we knew that his brother was
dead.  He knew that too.

"You know my brother is dead and then this funny thing has his voice in
it.  All it's got is his voice..."

We agreed.  We said that we didn't know how his voice got in there and
we didn't even know that there was a voice.

We didn't tell him that we had heard that voice ourselves a thousand
times and yet never knew where we heard it.

We didn't tell him that we'd played it at the SAC base and that every
man there had heard the name, Nelson Angerhelm, had heard something
saying that and yet couldn't tell where.

We didn't tell him that the entire apparatus of Soviet Intelligence had
been swearing over this for an unstated period of time and that our
people had the unpleasant feeling that this came out of a Sputnik
somewhere out in the sky.

We didn't tell him all that but we knew it.  We knew that if he heard
his brother's voice and if he wanted to record, it was something very
serious.

"Can you get me something to dictate on?" the old man said.

"I can take notes," the F.B.I. man replied.

The old man shook his head.  "That isn't enough," he said.  "I think
you probably want to get the whole thing if you ever get it and I begin
to get pieces of it."

"Pieces of what?" said the F.B.I. man.

"Pieces of the stuff behind all that noise.  It's my brother's voice
talking.  He's saying things--I don't like what he is saying.  It
frightens me and it just makes everything bad and dirty.  I'm not sure
I can take it and I am not going to take it twice.  I think I'll go to
church instead."

We looked at each other.  "Can you wait ten minutes?  I think I can get
a recording machine by then."

The old man nodded his head.  The F.B.I. man went out to the car and
cranked up the radio.  A great big aerial shot up out of the car, which
otherwise was a very inconspicuous Chevrolet sedan.  He got his office.
A recording machine with a police escort was sent out from downtown
Minneapolis toward Hopkins.  I don't know what time it took ambulances
to make it but the fellow at the other end said, "You better allow me
twenty to twenty-two minutes."

We waited.  The old man wouldn't talk to us and he didn't want us to
play the tape.  He sat there sipping the whisky.

"This might kill me and I want to have my friends around.  My pastor's
name is Jensen and if anything happens to me you get a hold of him
there but I don't think anything will happen to me.  Just get a hold of
him.  I may die, gentlemen, I can't take too much of this.  It is the
most shocking thing that ever happened to any man and I'm not going to
see you or anybody else get in on it.  You understand that it could
kill me, gentlemen."

We pretended that we knew what he was talking about, although neither
one of us had the faintest idea, beyond the suspicion that the old man
might have a heart condition and might actually collapse.

The office had estimated twenty-two minutes.  It took eighteen minutes
for the F.B.I. assistant to come in.  He brought in one of these new,
tight, clean little jobs, the kind of thing that I'd love to take home.
You can pack it almost anywhere.  And it comes out with concert quality.

The old man brightened when he saw that we meant business.

"Give me a set of headphones and just let me talk and pick it up.  I'll
try to reproduce it.  It won't be my brother's voice.  It will be my
voice you're hearing.  Do you follow me?"

We turned on the tape.

He dictated, with the headset on his head.

That's when the message started.  And that's the thing I started with
in the very beginning.

Funny funny funny.  It's sort of funny funny funny to think without a
brain--it is really something like a trick but not a trick to think
without a brain.  Talking is even harder but it can be done.

Nels, this is Tice.  I'm dead.

Nels, I don't know whether I'm in Heaven or Hell, but I think it's
Hell, Nels.  And I am going to play the biggest joke that anybody's
ever played.  And it's funny, I am an American Army officer and I am a
dead one, and it doesn't matter.  Nels, don't you see what it is?  It
doesn't matter if you're dead whether you're American or Russian or an
officer or not.  And even laughter doesn't matter.

But there's enough left of me, Nels, enough of the old me so that
perhaps for one last time I'll have a laugh with you and the others.

I haven't got a body to laugh with, Nels, and I haven't got a mouth to
laugh with and I haven't got cheeks to smile with and there really
isn't any me.  Tice Angerhelm is something different now, Nels.  I'm
dead.

I knew I was dead when I felt so different.  It was more comfortable
being dead, more relaxed.  There wasn't anything tight.

That's the trouble, Nels, there isn't anything tight.  There isn't
anything around you.  You can't feel the world, you can't see the world
and yet you know all about it.  You know all about everything.

It's awfully lonely, Nels.  There are some corners that aren't lonely,
some funny little corners in which you feel friendship and feel things
creeping up.

Nels, it's like kittens or the faces of children or the smell of the
wind on a nice day.  It's any time that you turn away from yourself and
you don't think about yourself.

It's the times when you don't want something and you do want something.

It's what you're not resenting, what you're not hating, what you're not
fearing and what you're not jeering.  That's it, Nels, that's the good
part inside of death.  And I suppose some people could call it Heaven.
And I guess you get Heaven if you just get into the habit of having
Heaven every day in your ordinary life.  That's what it is.  Heaven is
right there, Nels, in your ordinary life, every day, day by day, right
around you.

But that's not what I got.  Oh, Nels, I am Tice Angerhelm all right, I
am your brother and I'm dead.  You can call where I am Hell since it's
everything I hated.

Nels, it smells of everything that I ever wanted.  It smells the way
the hay smelled when I had my old Willys roadster and I made the first
girl I ever made that August evening.  You can go ask her.  She's a
Mrs. Prai Jesselton now.  She lives over on the east side of St. Paul.
You never knew I made her and if you don't think this is so, you can
listen for yourself.

And you see, I am somewhere and I don't know what kind of a where it is.

Nels, this is me, Tice Angerhelm, and I'm going to scream this out loud
with what I've got instead of a mouth.  I am going to scream it loud so
that any human ear that hears it can put it on this silly, silly Soviet
gadget and take it back.  TAKE THIS MESSAGE TO NELSON ANGERHELM, 2322
RIDGE DRIVE, HOPKINS, MINNESOTA.  And I'm going to repeat that a couple
more times so that you'll know that it's your brother talking and I'm
somewhere and it isn't Heaven and it isn't Hell and it isn't even
really out in space.  I am in something different from space, Nels.  It
is just a somewhere with me in it and there isn't anything but me.  In
with me there's everything.

In with me there is everything I ever thought and everything I ever did
and everything I ever wanted.

All the opposites are the same.  Everything I hated and everything I
loved, it's all the same.  Everything I feared and everything I yearned
for--that's the same.  I tell you it's all the same now and the
punishment is just as bad if you want something and get it as if you
want something and don't get it.

The only thing that matters is those calm, nice moments in life when
you don't want anything, Nels.  You aren't anything.  When you aren't
trying for anything and the world is just around you, and you get
simple things like water on the skin, when you yourself feel innocent
and you are not thinking about anything else.

That's all there is to life, Nels.  And I'm Tice and I'm telling you.
And you know I'm dead, so I wouldn't be telling you a lie.

And I especially wouldn't be telling you on this Soviet cylinder, this
Soviet gismo which will go back to them and bother them.

Nels, I hope it won't bother you too much, if everybody knows about
that girl.  I hope the girl forgives me but the message has got to go
back.

And yet that's the message--everything I ever feared--I feared
something in the war and you know what the war smells like.  It smells
sort of like a cheap slaughterhouse in July.  It smells bad all around.
There's bits of things burning, the smell of rubber burning and the
funny smell of gunpowder.  I was never in a big war with atomic stuff.
Just the old sort of explosions.  I've told you about it before and I
was scared of that.  And right in with that I can smell the perfume
that girl had in the hotel there in Melbourne, the girl that I thought
I might have wanted until she said something and then I said something
and that was all there was between us.  And I'm dead now.

And listen, Nels--

Listen, Nels, I am talking as though it were a trick.  I don't know how
I know about the rest of us--the other ones that are dead like me.  I
never met one and I may never talk to one.  I just have the feeling
that they are here too.  They can't talk.

It's not that they can't talk, really.

They don't even want to talk.

They don't feel like talking.  Talking is just a trick.  It is a trick
that somebody can pick up and I guess it takes a cheap, meaningless
man, a man who lived his life in spite of Hell and is now in that Hell.
That's the kind of silly man it takes to remember the trick of talking.
Like a trick with coins or a trick with cigarettes when nothing else
matters.

So I am talking to you, Nels.  And Nels, I suppose you'll die the way I
do.  It doesn't matter, Nels.  It's too late to change--that's all.

Good-bye, Nels, you're in pretty good shape.  You've lived your life.
You've had the wind in your hair.  You've seen the good sunlight and
you haven't hated and feared and loved too much.

When the old man got through dictating it, the F.B.I. man and I asked
him to do it again.

He refused.

We all stood up.  We brought in the assistant.

The old man still refused to make a second dictation from the sounds
out of which only he could hear a voice.

We could have taken him into custody and forced him but there didn't
seem to be much sense to it until we took the recording back to
Washington and had this text appraised.

He said good-bye to us as we left his house.

"Perhaps I can do it once again maybe a year from now.  But the trouble
with me, gentlemen, is that I believe it.  That was the voice of my
brother, Tice Angerhelm, and he is dead.  And you brought me something
strange.  I don't know where you got a medium or spirit reader to
record this on a tape and especially in such a way that you can't hear
it and I could.  But I did hear it, gentlemen, and I think I told you
pretty good what it was.  And those words I used, they are not mine,
they are my brother's.  So you go along, gentlemen, and do what you can
with it and if you don't want me to tell anybody that the U.S.
government is working on mediums, I won't."

That was the farewell he gave us.

We closed the local office and hurried to the airport.  We took the
tape back with us but a duplicate was already being teletyped to
Washington.

That's the end of the story and that is the end of the joke.
Potariskov got a copy and the Soviet Ambassador got a copy.

And Khrushchev probably wondered what sort of insane joke the Americans
were playing on him.  To use a medium or something weird along with
subliminal perception in order to attack the U.S.S.R. for not believing
in God and not believing in death.  Did he figure it that way?

Here's a case where I hope that Soviet espionage is very good.  I hope
that their spies are so fine that they know we're baffled.  I hope that
they realize that we have come to a dead end, and whatever Tice
Angerhelm did or somebody did in his name way out there in space
recording into a Soviet Sputnik, we Americans had no hand in it.

If the Russians didn't do it and we didn't do it, who did do it?

I hope their spies find out.






[End of Angerhelm, by Cordwainer Smith]
