The Pacific and Other Stories (43 page)

From the oohs and aahs it was clear that everyone in the audience wanted one of these. “To take you to the edge,” Spelchek said, “and give you an idea of the potential of this instrument, in the future the mouthpiece and the earpiece will be joined in a single device, with a handle for holding them both! Looking even further ahead, a new venture founded by Moshe Itzcovitz has received a huge influx of capital for his invention of a sculpted anatomical accessory that attaches to the handle of the mouth-ear unification device, allowing this to be cradled on the shoulder, freeing the hands.

“It doesn’t stop there. Beneath the main body of the telephone you may someday find a sliding tray with a pad on it and a pen attached by a flexible rubber cord! Brilliant? Yes. And, on top of it, an alphabetically keyed listing of telephone numbers. Ha ha! But that’s just the beginning. Let me tell you about what eventually will be possible.” Everyone’s favorite part was always the wonderful things that did not yet exist.

“Right now, I can speak to Moscow simply by lifting my telephone and moving my mouth. Thus, I can tell them what the weather is in Minsk, so they can know what they have in store. Or, if the winds go in the opposite direction, they can tell me. Soon, telephone lines will be laid under the sea, alongside telegraph cables, and from capital to capital in Europe. If you are in Brazil, you will be able to know the weather in Bucharest. Think of it! Right now, I can order groceries on the telephone. I don’t have to go out, I can just read the merchants a list and they deliver to my door. Do you realize how much time this will save once everyone does the same? Reading services will someday read newspapers to you over the telephone. Eventually, there won’t have to be books. One person reading a book in a telephone exchange can convey it aloud to thousands of subscribers.

“The problem we’re grappling with now is mechanizing the network. Eventually you won’t have to use an operator. With mechanized exchanges all you’ll need do is enter a code by tapping electrical pulses automatically with a machine that will be called a
dialer
.” Haskell Samoa smiled, as if to say, “Everything I have ever believed in has been proved.”

“Eventually,” Avraham Spelchek said, “no one will have to go anywhere.
The roads and streets will be populated only by a corps of delivery workers who will, of course, be called
bintlers
, and who will dress in red suits with brass buttons and wear little brimless hats. They will drive shiny brown motorized wagons with gold trim and a huge golden strawberry on each side. They will never have to return to offices—they won’t have offices—as they will only need stop at roadside telephones to get lists of what to pick up and deliver.

“It will be possible for a child to be born in his home, delivered by a doctor telephoning from Burma or Buffalo, for him to have books read to him on the telephone, friends by telephone, and to have all his clothing and food brought to him. The roads will be clogged with
bintlers
. In hundreds of years, perhaps, telephones may not even need wires. Already, this is possible on a small scale in ships. When the technology is made affordable, each home will have a telephone, about the size of a grand piano, with no wires, and the
bintlers
will have them in huge motorized wagons. There is no end to the wonders. As for the implications of this, I will leave that to the scientists and philosophers,” he said, looking with intense flattery at his demented colleagues, “because I’m just a businessman.”

A woman stood. “I would like to say,” she said, falling victim to the amateur’s overwhelming feeling that no one wants to listen, and thus compressing her words and radiating an acute, scarlet-colored shame, “that the other day I wanted to make some
p’tcha.
I was getting my basket when my husband said, ‘We have a telephone. Why go out?’ So I called Markovich the egg handler and Sam the butcher, who sent over eggs and calves’ feet—I already had garlic—and made my
p’tcha
without stepping from the house.”

“It comes true already,” Haskell Samoa stated, as Spelchek glowed. Haskell Samoa then pointed to an old man in back of Jacob Bayer, but as Jacob Bayer was in the line of sight, he stood, blotting out the tiny man behind him.

“So?” he said.

“So, what?” Haskell Samoa asked.

“So what? So what if organ-grinders’ monkeys clog the roads with package-filled motorized carriages? So what if Markovich the egg handler gives his eggs to a
bintler
and the
bintler
brings them to Mrs. Hoo-Ha? So
what if you can switch off your telephone and not be disturbed? You can save some steps by not having a telephone in the first place. So what if someone reads you books on the telephone? Better to read a book by yourself. So what if you can stay all the time in your house? What about your legs? You have them for a reason, and your horse, if you have one, will become ill if you don’t ride him. So what if your house has wires or doesn’t have wires? My house doesn’t have wires now. I don’t even have a house. Can you boil water with the telephone? Will it warm you like a fire on a cold night? Can you embrace it like a woman? If you pick it up, will you feel the sun on your face, hear the birds in the trees, see and feel the wind moving across a lake or whipping and thrashing a wheat field into what I suppose, never having seen it, looks like the sea? Will the telephone sit in your lap, like a child, or sleep in your arms, like a baby? Will you love it? Will it love you? Will you cry for its beauty, and sob when it passes? Will it have a scent like pine tar or salt air or rose? Will it speak fearlessly like the prophets, and hold fast as truth takes its sharp turns? Will it show courage in the face of danger and death? Will it make a single line of poetry? Or bake a single loaf of bread?”

“Stop!” shouted Haskell Samoa, his body, no less than everyone else’s, shaking with anger and indignation. “What are you saying? Why are you saying it?” Whatever stratagem he had thought to employ, he had forgotten. He was merely enraged.

“I am speaking,” Jacob Bayer said, “of things that are great and never ending, that require a lifetime of work to do right, that are God’s gift to man and fill the world with their abundance, that have not changed in thousands of years and never will. And what I am saying is that, although you can add the telephone to them, and enjoy it for its miracles, such as they are—and they are, indeed, minuscule—you cannot emphasize it and concentrate upon it as you do without attendant disaster. This thing that you greet with erotic and worshipful enthusiasm, and the wealth it brings in train, are the golden calf. You are worshipping what you have made, which is shallow and dead, and have averted your eyes from the world you have been given, which is magnificent and full. It shows in your lives, in your town, in the arrest of all the normal rhythms that you have arrested, and in the sins you have committed and that you deny.”

This kind of challenge was Jacob Bayer’s talent and his curse, the reason he was thrown from one town after another and why he could bear it. Now would come the war, to which he would have to steel himself because he had faith not in arguments but in creation. As others rose to marshal their strengths, he would choke his into silence and defeat because he did not believe in man’s power, and could not bring himself to inflate with it.

As if sensing this, Zipsehr Tuchisheim announced magisterially, “You don’t understand.”

His was as much of a challenge as Jacob Bayer’s, and the silence that followed was a better introduction for Zipsehr than a brass fanfare. When finally he began to speak, even the birds had stopped singing. He was, after all, the chief philosopher of Bialystok, who had been the telephone’s loving advocate since, five years after the fact, news of its invention had appeared as a two-sentence article in a Bialystok newspaper, under an advertisement for
esrogs
.

“What is it, exactly, that I do not understand?” Jacob Bayer asked.

“That the telephone is the most important aspect of our lives, that it is changing the very nature of man, ending history as we know it, and setting us upon a divine plane. It will bring immortality, solve all riddles, open all doors, protect us from want, and show us the way. It is the key to perfection, and is itself divine.”

Hearts rose. Deep breaths were taken. Everyone expected that Jacob Bayer would have to bow to this fervent declaration, but he didn’t.

“Excuse me, please,” he said. “I believe you stated, did you not, that the telephone is divine?”

“Yes,” Zipsehr answered.

“Meaning that it is, or has the attributes of, a god?”

“Not just a god,” said Zipsehr, “God Himself.”

“God Himself?”

“Himself. He. Him. The instantaneous transmission of thought by electric waves, over a great articulation spread across the earth … thought traveling without constraint, multiplying, tumbling freely, projected across seas, humming on wires that vibrate and sing like locusts in the sun … Never has the spirit been so loosed from the body, electrified, liberated, and yet with a
disciplined resonance that vibrates across the universe. The telephone is the voice of God, born in us, echoing back to His distant precincts. If God is metaphorically in nature with such intensity that nature becomes the face of God, can He not jump at will to the machine, and would not this net of golden wires be an irresistible place for a divine being, capitalizing on a billion invisible impulses scattered musically to the winds with the swiftness of light? And we have made this dovecote, where the spirit of God, like a dove, has alighted.

“You, there, a bedraggled man, gross in feature, powerless and possession-free, trapped in the darkness of a previous age, would deny the very light. Look up, after a rainstorm, at the reticulation of wires in a ray of declining sun, and listen, and tell me that your heart is so hard as not to love the chant of God that sparkles and dries the golden drops with divine electricity, the sap of the blessed one that glistens in the moon, the gilded vibrations of the Jovian jug.”

The audience was so taken by this poesie that Jacob Bayer’s heart began to threaten him from within his chest. Why, at this moment, was he not free of the reminders of mortality? He did not know, and though he felt ill, he plodded on.

“What is the quality of this machine that you have made …?” he began.

“I didn’t make it,” Zipsehr Tuchisheim declared with precision and contempt.

“That others have made, then, and to which you accord such singular status. What is the quality that makes it divine? What goes over its wires? Let us say, hypothetically, not a message in any language but merely a pattern of electrons. Why would God favor or distinguish, much less leap to, a pattern of electrons moving feebly across the surface of a single planet of a single star, when in the infinity of the universe there are countless stars of far greater power than ours, from which emanate every kind of wave on the spectrum of radiation and in such great quantities as to make what pulses from dry cells and generators perhaps less than significant?”

Professor Voolsamdrek of the Technische Hochschule cocked his head. This ragged, itinerant creature was speaking without authority of things in which he had no qualification or degree, which was dangerous. (Indeed it
was, and the reason Jacob Bayer had been ejected from one town after another like bullet casings from the port of a gun.)

“Significant!” Jacob Bayer repeated derisively. “The emanations that you take to be enough to provide for God a dwelling are equal only to a tiny fraction of the flood that reaches us from the sun. A billionth? No. A trillionth? No. Perhaps a trillionth part of a trillionth part, if that? And that flood that strikes us is of the sun’s full generation only what strikes [pausing to calculate the circumference of the earth’s orbit around the sun and convert it, approximately, to degrees, he appeared to be undergoing some sort of attack] thirty seconds of arc on a flat plane, concomitantly reduced by the fact that the sun is a sphere. In other words, half a sixtieth of a three-hundred-and-sixtieth, of half a sixtieth of a three-hundred-and-sixtieth, or, approximately, one part in two billion. And that just of our sun, an incomprehensibly minor part of the fleet of suns that stretch into the infinity of the universe.

“Mind you, to be infinitely insignificant in power is only one shortcoming of your golden network. It is also a weakling of variety, a tiny sliver of the radio spectrum, not even a piccolo to a great symphony orchestra. The curtains of light and sound that flood through space in mutual clashes and interference are something rather different from your little mousetrap for God. But perhaps you did not know this.

“Perhaps it is, then, quality that distinguishes this construction. I have been in Koidanyev only a day, but I have heard, or heard reported, quite a few telephone conversations. Many of them were about the telephone itself, and how miraculous it is. Surely a declaration of miraculousness does not, cannot, itself provide the substance of a miracle. And then I have heard inquiries about the health of interlocutors, How are you? for example; and the exchange of contractual information, You bring me the planks, and I’ll attach them to the axles; and the articulation of great questions, such as, Didn’t his eyes sweep over Mrs. Molodetsky’s bosom like a hand stroking a cat? Of course, we can infer the substance of the
p’tcha
-making woman’s exchange with Markovich the egg handler and Sam the butcher. Orders for calves’ feet and eggs, or perhaps for blotting paper and glue, certainly would attract the eye of God, if not His envy, and excite in Him the lust to lie in a place where such miracles occur, to take up residence even, amid the dim and
monochromatic electrons, confined in hair-thin channels rather than exploding in stormlike fronts across galaxies, because such miraculous quality cannot prove to Him anything but irresistible. Right?

“But I ask you this,” he said, as if dismissing his previously stated arguments, as of course he was not. “What makes this network more miraculous than the telegraph, which has been with us in force for half a century, which casts a wider and more comprehensive net, runs under more seas, crosses more passes, and branches into countless more locations? Would God favor speech more than abstract code, and, if so, why? Why, in fact, would He not want to live in the post office? Hundreds of thousands of nodes, branching into hundreds of millions of terminals, in a spectacular network the mission of which is to transmit great masses of silent, simple, unspoken code—that is, lines that make letters, letters that make words, words that make phrases, and so on. A code that, though transmitted in utter soundlessness and privacy, blossoms at its destination into colorful and evocative images—of battles, love affairs, great cities, oceans in storm, stars bursting, children born, wagons creaking, hearts healing. A code that opens like fireworks against a black sky, and rises in its solidity and beauty like prayer. Why is this in any way a lesser network, a lesser attraction, or a lesser temptation to the eye of God?