Harry Harrison - Famous First Words

Millions of words of hatred, vitriol, and polemic have been written denigrating, berating, and castigating the late Professor Ephraim Hakachinik.

I feel that the time has come when the record must be put straight. I realize that I too am risking the wrath of the so-called authorities by speaking out like this, but I have been silent too long. I must explain the truth just as my mentor explained it to me, because only the truth, lunatic as it may sound, can correct the false impressions that have become the accepted coin in reference to the professor.

Let me be frank: early in our relationship I, too, felt that the professor was, how shall we describe it, eccentric even beyond the accepted norm for the faculties of backwater universities. In appearance he was a singularly untidy man, almost hidden behind a vast mattress of tangled beard that he affected for the dual purpose of saving the trouble and the expense of shaving and of dispensing with the necessity of wearing a necktie.

This duality of purpose was common to almost everything that he did. I am sure that simultaneous professorships in both the arts and the sciences is so rare as to be almost unique-yet he occupied two chairs at Miskatonic University; those of quantum physics and conversational Indo-European. This juxtaposition of abilities undoubtedly led to the perfection of his invention and to the discovery of the techniques needed to develop its possibilities.

As a graduate student I was very close to Professor Hakachinik and was present at the very moment when the germ of an idea was planted that was to flower eventually into the tremendous growth of invention that was to be his contribution to the sum of knowledge of mankind. It was a sunny June afternoon, and I am forced to admit that I was dozing over a repetitious (begat, begat, begat) fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls when a hoarse shout echoed from the paneled walls of the library and shocked me awake.

"Neobican!" the professor exclaimed again-he has a tendency to break into Serbo-Croatian when excited-and a third time, "Neobican!"

"What is wonderful, Professor?" I asked.

"Listen to this quotation, it is inspirational indeed, from Edward Gibbon; he was visiting Rome, and this is what he wrote: As I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter . . . the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.'"

"Isn't that incredible, my boy, simply breathtaking. A singularly important and historical beginning if I ever heard one. It all started there until, twelve years and five hundred thousand words later, racked by writer's cramp, Gibbon scribbled `The End' and dropped his pen. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was finished. Inspiring!"

"Inspiring?" I asked dimly, my head still rattling with begats.

"Do lt!" he snarled, and added a few imprecations in Babylonian that will not bear translation in a modern journal. "Have you no sense of perspective? Do you not see that every great event in this universe must have had some tiny beginning?"

"That's rather an obvious observation," I remarked.

"Imbecile!" he muttered through clenched teeth. "Do you not understand the grandeur of the concept! Think! The mighty redwood, reaching for the sky, so wide in the trunk that it is pierced with a tunnel for motor vehicles to be driven through; this goliath of the forest was once a struggling single-leafed shrub incapable of exercising a tree's peculiar attractions for even the most minuscule of dogs. Do you find this concept a fascinating one?"

I mumbled something incoherent to cover up the fact that I did not, and as soon as Professor Hakachinik had turned away I resumed my nap and forgot the matter completely for a number of days, until I received a message summoning me to the professor's chambers.

"Look at that," he said, pointing to what appeared to be a normal radio, housed in a crackle-gray cabinet and faced with a splendid display of knobs and dials.

"Bully," I said, with enthusiasm. "We will listen to the final game of the World Series together."

"Stumpfsinnig Schwein," he growled. "That is no ordinary radio, but is an invention of mine embodying a new concept, my Temporal Audio Psychogenetic detector, TAP for short - and `tap' is what it does. By utilizing a theory and technique that are so far beyond your rudimentary powers of comprehension that I will make no attempt to explain them, I have constructed my TAP to detect and amplify the voices of the past so that they can be recorded. Listen and be amazed!"

The professor switched on the device and, after a few minutes of fiddling with the dials, exacted from the loud-speaker what might be described as a human voice mouthing harsh animal sounds.

"What was that?" I asked.

"Proto-mandarin of the later part of the thirteenth century B.C., obviously,"

he mumbled, hard at work again on the dials, "but just idle chatter about the rice crop, the barbarians from the south, and such. That is the difficulty; I have to listen to volumes of that sort of thing before I chance on an authentic beginning and record it. But I have been doing just that - and succeeding!"

He slapped his hand on a loose pile of scrawled pages that stood upon the desk. "Here are my first successes, fragmentary as yet, but I'm on the way. I have traced a number of important events back to their sources and recorded the very words of their originators at the precise moment of inception. Of course the translations are rough and quite colloquial-but that can be corrected later. My study of beginnings has begun."

I'm afraid I left the professor's company at that time. I did want to hear the ball game and I regret to say that it was the last time that I or anyone else ever saw him alive. The sheets of paper he so valued were taken to be the ravings of an unwell mind, their true worth misunderstood, and they were discarded. I have salvaged some of them and now present them to the public, who can truly judge their real worth. For fragmentary as they are, they still cast the strong light of knowledge into many a darkened corner of history that has been obscured in the past.

". . . even though it is a palace it is still my home, and it is too small by far with my new stepmother, who is a bitz. I had hoped to continue in my philosophy studies, but it is impossible here. Guess I better run the army down to the border; there may be trouble there." Alexander, Macedonia, 336 B.C

". . . hot is not Ye word for it, and all of VIRGINIA is like an Oven this summer. When Opportunity arose to earn a little l. s. d. running a Survey line through the hills I grabbed it before M.F. could change his Minde. That is how I met today (forgot his name, must ask him tomorrow) in the Taverne. We did have an Ale together and did both complain mightily upon the Heat. With one thing leading to Another as they are wont to do, we had more Ales and he did Confide in me. He is a member of a secret club named, I think since Memory is hazy here, The Sons of Liberty, or some such . . . ." George Washington, 1765

"France has lost its greatness when an honest inventor gains no profit from his onerous toil. I have neglected my practice for months now, perfecting my handy Hacker Supreme Salami Slicer. I should have earned a fortune selling the small models to every butcher in France. But no!, the Convention uses the large model without paying a sou to me, and the butchers are naturally reluctant now to purchase." J. I. Guillotine, M.D., 1791

"My head doth ache as though I suffereth an ague, and if I ever chance on the slippery-fingered soddish son of an illtempered whore who dropped that night-vessel in Fetter Lane, I will roundly thrash him to within an inch of his life, and perhaps a bit beyond. Since arrival in London I have learned the neatness of step and dexterity of motion needed to avoid the contents of the many vessels emptied into the street, but this is the first time there was need to dodge the container itself. Had I moved a trifle quicker this body, of crockery in motion would have continued in motion. But my head doth ache. As soon as it is better I must think on this; there is the shade of an idea here." Sir Isaac Newton, 1682

"I. is afraid that F. knows! If he does I have had it. If I. was not so seductively attractive I would find someone else's bed-but she does lead me on so. She says she can sell some of her jewelry and buy those three ships she was looking at. The last place I want to go is to the damn Spice Islands, right now at the height of the Madrid season. But F. is king, and if he finds out . . . !" (Attributed to Cristoforo Colombo of Genoa, 1492, but derivation is obscure.)

"Am I glad I got little Pierre the Erector Set. As soon as he is asleep I'll grab the funny tower he just made. I know the Exposition Committee won't use anything like this, but it will keep them quiet for a while." Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, 1888

"Woe unto China! Crop failures continue this year and the depression is getting worse. Millions unemployed. The only plan that seems at all workable is this construction project that Wah-Ping-Ah is so hot about. He says it will give a shot in the arm to the economy and get the cash circulating again. But what a screwball idea! Build a wall fifteen hundred miles long! He wants to use his own initials and call it the WPA project, but I'm going to call it something different and tell the people it's to keep the barbarians out, as you can always sell them on defense appropriations if you scare them enough." Emperor Shih Hwang-ti, 252 B.C.

"There will be a full moon tonight so I'll have enough light to find that balcony. I hate to take a chance going near that crazy family, but Maria is the hottest piece of baggage in town! She made her kid sister Julie, the buck-toothed wonder!, promise to have the window unlocked." Romeus Montague, 1562 (Extract from the ship's log.)

"Made a landfall today on a hunk of rock. What navigation! We head for Virginia and end up in Massachusetts! If I ever catch the Quaker brat who stole the compass . . . ! ! !" The brig Mayflower, 1620

There are many more like this, but these samples will suffice to prove that Professor Hakachinik was a genius far ahead of his time, and a man to whom the students of history owe an immeasurable debt.

Since there have been many rumors about the professor's death, I wish to go on record now and state the entire truth. I was the one who discovered the professor's body, so I know whereof I speak. It is a lie and a canard that the good man committed suicide; indeed he was in love with life and was cut off in his prime, and I'm sure he looked forward to many more productive years.

Nor was he electrocuted, though his TAP machine was close by and fused and melted as though a singularly large electrical current had flowed through it. The offical records read heart failure and for want of a better word this description will have to stand, though in all truth the cause of death was never determined. The professor appeared to be in fine health and in the pink of condition, though of course he was dead. Since his heart was no longer beating, heart failure seemed to be a satisfactory cause of death to enter in the records.

In closing let me state that when I discovered the professor he was seated at his desk, his head cocked toward the loudspeaker and his pen clutched in his fingers. Under his hand was a writing pad with an incomplete entry that he appeared to be writing when death struck. I make no conclusion about this, but merely record it as a statement of fact.

The writing is in Old Norse, which, for the benefit of those not acquainted with this interesting language, I have translated into modern English:

". . . this meeting will come to order and if you don't put those mead horns away there'll be a few cracked skulls around here, I tell you. Now, order of business. There have been reports of tent caterpillars in Yggdrasill and some dead branches, but we'll get onto that later. Of more pressing interest is the sandy concrete that has been found cracking in foundations of Bilfrost Bridge.

I want to - just one moment this is supposed to be a closed meeting and there is someone listening in. Thor, will you please take care of that eavesdropper. . . ."