Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (54 page)

“A very small one, yes, sir.”

Two weeks later Souvan spoke to the people on television. The people were simply the people. With the end of the great atomic fire storms of three thousand years past had come the end of nations and races and tongues. The handful of people who survived gathered together and intermarried among themselves, and out of their tongues came a single language, and in time they spread over the five continents of the earth; and now there were half a billion of them. Once again there were wheatfields, forests and orchards, and fish in the sea. But no song of birds and no cry of any beast; of those, no single one had survived.

“Yet we know something of birds,” Souvan said, somewhat awed at speaking for the first time over the worldwide circuit. He had already told them of his calculations, his dig, and his find. “Not a great deal, unfortunately, for no picture or image of a bird survived the fire storms. Yet here and there we were rewarded with a book that mentioned birds, a line of verse, a reference in a novel. We know that their habitat was the air, where they soared on outstretched wings, not as our airplanes fly with the drive of their atomic jets, but as the fish swim, with ease and grace and beauty. We know that some of them were small, some quite large, and we know that their wings were covered with downy things called feathers. But what in all truth a bird or a wing or a feather was like, we do not know—except out of the imaginations of our artists who have created so many of their dreams of what birds were.

“Now, in the last room we examined in the strange resurrection place that the ancient people built in America, in the single refrigeration cell that was still operative, we discovered a small ovoid thing which we believe is the egg of a bird. As you know, there has been a dispute among naturalists as to whether any warm-blooded creature could reproduce itself through eggs, as insects and fish do, and that dispute has still not been finally resolved. Many scientists of fine reputation believe that the egg of the bird was simply a symbol, a mythological symbol. Others state just as emphatically that the laying of eggs was the means of reproduction among all birds. Perhaps this dispute will finally be resolved.”

“In any case, you will now see a picture of the egg.”

A small white thing, perhaps an inch in length, appeared upon the television screens, and the people of the earth looked upon it.

“This is the egg. We have taken the greatest pains in removing it from the refrigeration chamber, and now it rests in an incubator that was constructed for it. We have analyzed every factor that might indicate the proper heat, and now having done what we can do, we must wait and see. We have no idea how long the incubation will take. The machine which was used to freeze it and maintain it was probably the first of its kind ever to be built—perhaps the only one of its kind ever to be built—and certainly its builders planned to freeze the egg for only a very short while, perhaps to test the efficiency of the machine. That a germ of living life remains now, three thousand years later, we can only hope.”

But with Souvan it was more than a hope. The egg had been turned over to a committee of naturalists and biologists, but with his privileges as the discoverer, Souvan was allowed to remain on the scene. His friends, his family saw nothing of him; he remained in the laboratory, had his meals there, and slept on a cot he had fixed up for himself. Television cameras, trained on the tiny white object in its glass incubator, reported to the world on the hour, but Souvan—and the committee of scientists as well—could not tear themselves away. He awakened from his sleep to prowl through the silent corridors and look at the egg. When he slept, he dreamed about the egg. He pored over pictures of artists' conceptions of birds, and he recalled ancient legends of metaphysical beings called angels, wondering whether these had not derived from some species of bird.

He was not alone in his fanatical interest. In a world without boundaries, wars, disease, and to a large degree without hatred, nothing in living man's memory as exciting as the discovery of the egg had ever happened. Millions and millions of viewers watched the egg through their televisions; millions of them dreamed of what the egg might become.

And then it happened. Fourteen days had gone by when Souvan was shaken awake by one of the laboratory assistants.

“It's hatching!” she cried. “Come on, Souvan, it's hatching.”

In his nightclothes, Souvan raced to the incubator room, where the naturalists and biologists had already gathered about the incubator. Amid the hubbub of their voices, he heard the pleas of the cameramen to allow some space for pictures; but he ignored this as he pushed through to see for himself.

It was happening. The shell of the egg was already cracked, and as he watched, a tiny beak pecked its way free, to be followed by a little ball of downy yellow feathers. His first response was one of intense disappointment; was this then the bird? This tiny shapeless ball of life that stood on two tiny legs, barely able to walk and obviously unable to fly? Then reason and scientific training reassured him that the infant need not resemble the adult, and that the very fact of life emerging from the ancient frozen egg was more miracle than he had ever known in his lifetime.

Now the naturalists and biologists took over. They had already determined, piecing together every fragment of information they possessed and using their own wit as well, that the diet of most birds must have consisted of grubs and insects, and they had all the various possible diets ready—so that they might discover which was most congenial to the tiny yellow fluff. They worked with instinct and prayer, and fortunately they found a diet acceptable to the infant bird before it perished of indigestion.

For the next several weeks the world and Souvan observed the most wonderful thing they had ever experienced, the growth of a little chick into a beautiful yellow songbird. It moved from incubator into a cage and then into a larger cage, and then one day it spread its wings and made its first attempt at flight. Almost half a billion people cheered it, but of this the bird knew nothing. It sang, tentatively at first, and then more and more strongly. It sang its trilling little song, and the world listened with more excitement and interest than it gave to any one of the many great symphony orchestras.

They built a larger cage, a cage thirty feet high and fifty feet long and fifty feet wide, and they set the cage in the midst of a park; and the bird flew and sang and circled the cage like a darting ball of sunlight. By the millions, people came to the park to see the bird with their own eyes. They came across continents, across the broad seas—from the farthest reaches of the world, they came to see the bird.

And perhaps the lives of some of them were changed, even as Souvan's life had been changed. He lived now with dreams and memories of a world that once had been, of a world where these airy, dancing feathered things were a commonplace, where the sky was filled with their darting, swooping, dancing forms. What an unending joy it must have been to live with them! What ecstasy to look at them from one's front door, to watch them, to hear their trilling songs from morning to nightfall! He often went to the park—so often that it interfered with his work—to push his way slowly through the enormous crowds until he was near enough to see the tiny dancing bit of sunlight that had returned to the world from aeons past. And one day, standing there, he looked up at the broad blue reaches of the sky, and then he knew what he must do.

He was a world figure by now, so it was not difficult for him to get an audience with the council. He stood before the august body of one hundred men and women who managed the business of life on earth, and the chairman, a venerable, white-bearded old man of more than ninety years, said to him:

“We will hear you, Souvan.”

He was nervous, uneasy—as who would not be to stand before the council—but he knew what he must say and he forced himself to say it.

“The bird must be set free,” Souvan said.

There was silence—minutes of silence—before a woman rose and asked, not unkindly, “Why do you say that, Souvan?”

“Perhaps—perhaps because, without being egotistical, I can claim a special relationship to the bird. In any case, it has entered into my life and my being, and it has given me something I never had before.”

“Possibly so with all of us, Souvan.”

“Possibly, and then you will know what I feel. The bird had been with us for more than a year now. The naturalists I have discussed this with believe that so small a creature cannot live very long. We live by a rule of love and brotherhood. We give for what we receive. The bird has given us one of the most precious of gifts, a new sense of the wonder of life. All we can give it in return is the blue sky—the place it was meant for. That is why I suggest that the bird should be set free.”

Souvan left, and the council talked among themselves, and the next day its decision was announced to the world. The bird would be set free. They gave an explanation simply, using the few words that Souvan had spoken.

Thus there came a day, not too long after this, when half a million people thronged the hills and valleys of the park where the cage was, and half a billion more watched their television screens.

Souvan was close to the cage; he had no need for one of the thousand pairs of binoculars trained upon the cage. He watched as the roof of the cage was rolled back, and then he watched the bird.

It stood upon its perch, singing with all its heart, a torrent of sound from the tiny throat. Then, somehow, it became aware of freedom. It flew, first in the cage, then in circles, mounting higher and higher until it was only a bright flicker of sunshine—and then it was gone.

“Perhaps it will return,” someone close by Souvan whispered.

Strangely, he hoped it would not. His eyes were filled with tears, yet he felt a joy and completeness he had never known before.

25
The Insects

P
eople heard about the first transmission in various ways. Although unidentified radio appeals are fairly frequent and not generally subject to any general new dissemination—being more or less of oddities and often the work of cranks—they are not jealously guarded. The interesting part of this signal was that it had been repeated at least two dozen times and had been picked up in various parts of the world in various languages, in Russian in Moscow, in Chinese in Peking, in English in New York and London, in Swedish in Stockholm. In all these various places it was on the high-frequency band, somewhat less than twenty-five megacycles.

We heard about it from Fred Goldman, who runs the monitor room for the National Broadcasting Company, when he and his wife dined with us early in May. He has his ear to things; he listens to the whole damn world breathing in half a dozen languages, and he likes to drop things, like a ship at sea pleading for help and then silence and not one word in the press, or a New Orleans combination playing the latest hard rock—if such a thing is possible—in Yarensk, which is somewhere in the tundra of Northern Siberia, or any other of a dozen incongruous daily happenings across the radio waves of the earth. But on this night he was rather suppressed and thoughtful, and when he came out with it, it was less odd than reasonable.

“You know,” he said, “there was a sort of universal complaint today and we can't pinpoint it.”

“Oh?”

My wife poured drinks. His own wife looked at him sharply, as if this was the first she had heard of it and she resented being put on parity with us.

“Good, clear signal,” he said. “High frequency. Queer voice though—know what it said?”

There was another couple there—the Dennisons; he was a rather important surgeon—and Mrs. Dennison made a rather inept attempt at humor. I try to remember her first name, but it escapes me. She was a slim, beautiful blond woman, but not very bright; yet she managed to turn it on Fred and he retreated. We tried to persuade him, but he turned the subject away and became a listener. It wasn't until after dinner that I pinned him down.

“About that signal?”

“Oh, yes.”

“You've become damn sensitive.”

“Oh, I don't know. Nothing very special or mysterious. A voice said, ‘You must stop killing us.'”

“Just that?”

“It doesn't surprise you?” Fred asked.

“Oh, no—hardly. As you said, it's a sort of universal plea. I can think of at least seven places on earth where those would be the most important words they could broadcast.”

“I suppose so. But it did not originate in any of those places.”

“No? Where, then?”

“That's it,” Fred Goldman said. “That's just it.”

That's how I heard about it first. I put it out of mind as I imagine so many others did, and the truth is that I forgot about it. Two weeks later I delivered the second lecture in the Goddard Free Series at Harvard, and during the question period one student demanded:

“What is your own reaction, Dr. Cornwall, to the curtain of silence the Establishment has thrown around the radio messages?”

I was naive enough to ask what messages he referred to, and a ripple of laughter told me that I was out of it.

“‘You must stop killing us.' Isn't that it, Dr. Cornwall?” the boy shouted, and more applause greeted this than I had gotten on my own. “Isn't that the crux of it?” the student went on. “‘You must stop killing us'—isn't that it?”

I took a brandy afterward with Dr. Fleming, the dean, in front of the fire of his own warm and comfortable study, and he mentioned that the university did a certain amount of monitoring of sorts. “The kids weren't too disturbing, were they?” he asked.

I assured him that I agreed with them. “We're both Establishment of sorts,” I said, “so I don't want to wriggle out of it. But isn't that the radio signal? A friend of mine was telling me something about it. Did it come across again?”