The Motion Demon (6 page)

Szygon’s resistance slowly melted. The insolence of this person who insulted him with impunity, and for no apparent reason, disarmed him. He became interested in knowing more about this ‘stationmaster’.

‘It’s possible,’ he said, after clearing his throat. ‘Only it seems to me that until recently you wore some other uniform.’

At that moment a curious metamorphosis transformed the railwayman. The shirt with the glittering gold tinsel stars instantly disappeared, the red railway cap vanished, and now, instead of the kindly smiling stationmaster, the stooping, dishevelled, and sneering conductor, with his shabby jacket, and the ever-present bouquet of small lanterns attached to his person, sat opposite Szygon.

Szygon rubbed his eyes, involuntarily making a repelling gesture.

‘A transformation? Poof! Magic or what?!’

But already leaning towards him was the kindly ‘stationmaster’, equipped with all the insignias of his office, while the conductor had hidden himself inside the uniform of a superior.

‘Ah, yes,’ he replied casually, as if the process were nothing, ‘I’ve been promoted.’

‘I congratulate you,’ muttered Szygon, staring with amazement at the quick-change artist.

‘Yes, yes,’ the other chatted away, ‘there “above” they know how to value energy and efficiency. They recognize a good person: I’ve become a stationmaster. The railway, my dear sir, is a great thing. It is worthwhile to spend one’s life in its service. A civilizing element! A swift go-between of nations, an exchange of cultures! Speed, my dear sir, speed and motion!’

Szygon disdainfully pursed his lips.

‘Mr Stationmaster,’ he underlined scoffingly, ‘you’re surely joking. What kind of motion? Under today’s conditions, with improved technology, that excellent locomotive, the so-called “
Pacific Express
” in America, runs at 200 kilometres an hour; if we grant in due time a further increase to 250 kilometres, even 300 kilometres—what of it? We are looking at an end result; despite everything, we haven’t gone out even a millimetre beyond the Earth’s sphere.’

The stationmaster smiled, unconvinced. ‘What more do you want, sir? A wonderful velocity! 200 kilometres an hour! Long live the railway!’

‘Have you gone crazy?’ asked Szygon, already furious.

‘Not at all. I gave a cheer to the honour of our winged patron. How can you be against that?’

‘Even if you were able to attain a record 400 kilometres—what is that in the face of absolute motion?’

‘What?’ said the intruder, pricking up his ears. ‘I didn’t quite get that—absolute motion?’

‘What are all your rides, even with the greatest speed imaginable, even on the farthest extended lines, in comparison to absolute motion and the fact that, in the end, despite everything, you remain on the ground? Even if you could invent a devilish train that would circumvent the entire globe in one hour, eventually you’d return to the same point you started from: you are chained to the ground.’

‘Ha, ha!’ scoffed the railwayman. ‘You are certainly a poet, my dear sir. You can’t be serious?’

‘What kind of influence can even the most terrific, fabulous speed of an earthly train have on absolute motion and its effect?’

‘Ha, ha, ha!’ bellowed the amused stationmaster.

‘None!’ shouted Szygon. ‘It won’t change its absolute path by even an inch; it won’t change its cosmic route even by a millimetre. We are riding on a globe turning in space.’

‘Like a fly on a rubber ball. Ha, ha, ha. What thoughts, what concepts! You are not only a first-class conversationalist, but a splendid humorist as well.’

‘Your pathetic train, your ant-like, frail train with its best, boldest “speed”, as you like to term it, relies—notice, I’m clearly underlining this—relies simultaneously on twenty relative motions, of which every one on its own is by far stronger and unquestionably more powerful than your miniature momentum.’

‘Hmm…interesting, most fascinating!’ derided the unyielding opponent. ‘Twenty relative motions—a substantial number.’

‘I’ve omitted the incidental ones which for certain no railwayman has even dreamed of, and will mention the principal, pivotal ones known to every schoolboy. A train rushing with the greatest fury from A to B has simultaneously to make a complete rotation with the Earth round its axis in a twenty-four hour period….’

‘Ha, ha, ha! That’s novel, absolutely novel.’

‘At the same time it whirls with the entire globe around the sun….’

‘Like a moth around a lamp.’

‘Spare me your jokes! They’re not interesting. But that’s not all. Together with the earth and the sun, the train goes along an elliptical line, relative to the constellation Centaurus, towards some unknown point in space to be found in the direction of the constellation Hercules.’

‘Philology at the service of astronomy.
Parbleu
! How profound!’

‘You’re an idiot, my dear sir! Let’s move over to the incidental motions. Have you ever heard anything about the Earth’s processional motion?’

‘Maybe I’ve heard about it. But what does all this concern us? Long live the motion of a train!’

Szygon fell into a rage. He raised his mallet-like hand and let it drop forcefully on the scoffer’s head. But his arm cut only through air: the intruder had vanished somewhere; the space opposite was suddenly vacant.

‘Ha, ha, ha!’ chortled someone from the other corner of the compartment.

Szygon turned around and spotted the ‘stationmaster’ squatting between the headrest and the net; somehow he had contracted himself to a small size, and now looked like an imp.

‘Ha, ha, ha! Well? Will we be civil in the future? If you want to talk further with me, then behave properly. Otherwise, I won’t come down. A fist, my dear sir, is too ordinary an argument.’

‘For thick-headed opponents it’s the only one; nothing else can be as persuasive.’

‘I’ve been listening,’ the other drawled, returning to his old place, ‘I’ve been listening patiently for a quarter of an hour to your utopian arguments. Now listen a little to me.’

‘Utopian?!’ growled Szygon. ‘The motions I’ve mentioned are therefore fictitious?’

‘I don’t deny their existence. But of what concern are they to me? I’m only interested in the speed of my train. The only conclusive thing to me is the motion of engines. Why should I be concerned about how much forward I’ve moved in relation to interstellar space? One has to practical; I am a positivist, my dear sir.’

‘An argument worthy of a table leg. You must sleep well, Mr Stationmaster?’

‘Thank you, yes. I sleep like a baby.’

‘Of course. That’s easy to figure out. People like you are not tormented by the Motion Demon.’

‘Ha, ha, ha! The Motion Demon! You’ve fallen onto the gist of the matter! You’ve hit upon my profitable idea—actually, to tell the truth, not mine, but merely commissioned by me for a certain painter at our station.’

‘A profitable idea? Commissioned?’

‘Oh, yes. It concerns a prospectus for a couple of new railway branches—the so-called
Veranuqunosbahnlinien
. Consider this—a type of publicity or poster that would encourage the public to use these new lines of communication. And so some vignette, some picture was needed, something like an allegory, or symbol.’

‘Of motion?!’ Szygon paled.

‘Exactly. The aforementioned gentleman painted a mythical figure—a magnificent symbol that in no time swept through the waiting rooms of every station, not only in my country, but beyond its borders. And because I endeavoured to get a patent and stipulated a copyright in the beginning, I haven’t done badly.’

Szygon raised himself from the cushions, straightening up to his full imposing height.

‘And what figure did your symbol assume, if it’s possible to know?’ he hissed in a choked, strange voice.

‘Ha, ha, ha! The figure of a genius of motion. A huge, swarthy young man balanced on extended raven wings, surrounded by a swirling, frenzied dance of planets—a demon of interplanetary gales, interstellar moon blizzards, wonderful, maddeningly hurling comets and more comets. . . .’

‘You’re lying!’ Szygon roared, throwing himself towards the speaker. ‘You’re lying like a dog.’

The ‘stationmaster’ curled up, diminished in size, and vanished through the keyhole. Almost at the same moment the compartment door opened, and the disappearing intruder merged into the figure of the conductor, who was at the threshold. The conductor measured the perturbed passenger with a mocking glance and began to hand him a ticket.

‘Your ticket is ready; the price, including the fine, is 200 francs.’

But his smile was his ruin. Before he got a chance to figure out what was happening, some hand, strong like destiny, grabbed him by the chest and pulled him inside. A desperate cry for help was heard, then the cracking of bones. A dull silence followed.

After a moment, a large shadow moved along the windows of an empty corridor and towards the exit. Somebody opened the coach door and pulled the alarm signal. The train began to brake abruptly….

The dark figure hurried down a couple of steps, leaned in the direction of the motion of the train, and with one leap jumped between roadside thickets glowing in dawn’s light….

The train halted. The uneasy crew searched long for the person who had pulled the alarm; it was not known from which coach the signal had originated. Finally the conductors noticed the absence of one of their colleagues. ‘Coach No. 532!’ They rushed into the corridor and began to search through the cubicles. They found them empty, until in the last one, a first-class compartment at the end, they found the body of the unfortunate man. Some type of titanic force had twisted his head in such a hellish manner that his eyes had popped out of their sockets and were gazing at his own chest. Over the plucked whites, the morning sun played a cruel smile.

THE SLOVEN

AFTER MAKING THE ROUNDS of the coaches charged to his care, the old conductor, Blazek Boron, returned to the nook given over exclusively to his disposition, the so-called ‘place designated for the conductor’.

Wearied by an entire day of tramping through the coaches, hoarse from calling out stations in the fog-swelled autumn season, he intended to rest a while on his narrow oilcloth-upholstered little chair; a well-earned
siesta
smiled worthily on him. Today’s trip was actually over; the train had already made all its evenly distributed and short distance stops and was heading to the last station at a fast clip. Until the end of the trip Boron would not need to jump up from the bench and run through the coaches for several minutes to announce to the world, with a worn-out voice, that such and such station is here, that the train will stop for five minutes, ten minutes, or an entire lengthy quarter hour, or that the time has come to change trains.

He put out the lantern fastened to his chest and placed it high above his head on a shelf; he took off his greatcoat and hung it on a peg.

Twenty-four hours of continuous service had filled his time so tightly that he had eaten almost nothing. His body demanded its rights. Boron took out victuals from a bag and began to nourish himself. The conductor’s grey, faded eyes settled on the coach window and he looked at the world beyond. The glass, rattling with the coach’s tossing, was constantly smooth and black—he saw nothing.

He tore his eyes from the monotonous picture and directed them towards the corridor. His glance slid over the door leading to the compartments, went to the wall of windows opposite, and rested on the boring beaten pathway.

He finished his ‘supper’ and lit a pipe. He was, in truth, still on the job, but in this area, particularly before the final destination, he did not fear the supervisor.

The tobacco was good, smuggled at the border; it smoked in circular, fragrant coils. From the conductor’s lips spun out pliable ribbons and, twisting into balls of smoke, they rolled like billiard balls along the car corridor; in the next moment thick, dense spools unreeled from his lips to drift lazily upwards like blue stalks and crack like a petard at the ceiling. Boron was a master at smoking a pipe.

Fundamentally, Boron couldn’t stand passengers; their ‘practicality’ irritated him. For him the railway existed for the railway, not for travellers. The job of the railway was not to transport people from place to place with the object of communication, but motion in and of itself, the conquest of space. Of what concern to it were the trivial affairs of earthly pigmies, the endeavours of industrial swindlers, the obscene allocations of tradesmen? Stations were present not to get off at, but to measure the distance passed; the stops were the gauge of the ride, and their successive change, as in a kaleidoscope, evidence of progressive movement.

The conductor glanced with similar scorn at the throngs pressing through the car doors; he observed with a sardonic grimace the panting women and feverish-with-haste gentlemen pressing on heads, necks, amidst shouts, curses, sometimes jabs to get to the compartments to ‘occupy a place’ and beat out their companions in the sheep-like run.