NOTE
AFTER SO MUCH time has passed, I feel obliged to write this down. Holger and I first met more than twenty years ago. It was in another generation—another age. The bright lads whom I am training these days are friendly and all that, but we don’t think the same language and there’s no use pretending otherwise. I have no idea whether they will be able to accept a yarn like this. They are a more sober lot than my friends and I were; they seem to get less fun out of life. On the other hand, they have grown up with the incredible. Look at any scientific journal, any newspaper, out of any window, and ask yourself if outlandishness has not become the ordinary way of the world.
Holger’s tale does not seem altogether impossible to me. Not that I claim it’s true. I have no proof one way or the other. My hope is just that it shall not quite be lost. Assume, for argument’s sake, that what I heard was fact. Then there are implications for our own future, and we’ll have use for the knowledge. Assume, what is of course far more sensible, that I record only a dream, or a very tall story. Then I still think it’s worth preserving for its own sake.
This much is certainly true: Holger Carlsen came to work for the engineering outfit that employed me, in the fall of that remote year 1938. During the months which followed, I got to know him quite well.
He was a Dane, and like most young Scandinavians had a powerful hankering to see the world. As a boy, he had traveled by foot or bicycle across most of Europe. Later, full of his countrymen’s traditional admiration for the United States, he wangled a scholarship to one of our Eastern universities, where he studied mechanical engineering. His summers he spent hitchhiking and odd-jobbing around North America. He liked the land so much that after he graduated he obtained a position here and thought seriously of getting naturalized.
We were all his friends. He was an amiable, slow-spoken fellow, thoroughly down to earth, with simple tastes in living style and humor—though every so often he broke loose and went to a certain Danish restaurant to gorge on smorrebrod and akvavit. As an engineer he was satisfactory if unspectacular, his talents running more toward rule-of-thumb practicality than the analytical approach. In short, he was in no way remarkable mentally.
His physique was a different matter. He was gigantic, six feet four and so broad in the shoulders that he didn’t look his height. He’d played football, of course, and could have starred on his college team if his studies hadn’t taken too much time. His face was of the rugged sort, square, with high cheekbones, cleft chin, a slightly dented nose, yellow hair and wide-set blue eyes. Given better technique, by which I mean less worry about hurting their feelings, he could have cut a swathe through the local femininity. But as it was, that slight shyness probably kept him from more than his share of such adventures. All in all, Holger was a nice average guy, what was later called a good Joe.
He told me something about his background. “Believe it or not,” he grinned, “I really vas the baby in the cartoons, you know, the vun left on the doorstep. I must have been only a few days old ven I vas found in a courtyard in Helsnigor. That’s the very pretty place you call Elsinore, Hamlet’s home town. I never learned vere I came from. Such happenings is very rare in Denmark, and the police tried hard to find out, but they never did. I vas soon adopted by the Carlsen family. Otherwise there is not’ing unusual in my life.”
That’s what he thought.
I remember one time I persuaded him to go with me to a lecture by a visiting physicist: one of those magnificent types which only Britain seems to produce, scientist, philosopher, poet, social critic, wit, the Renaissance come back in a gentler shape. This man was discussing the new cosmology. Since then the physicists have gone further, but even in those days educated people used to hark back with a certain wistfulness to times when the universe was merely strange—not incomprehensible. He wound up his talk with some frank speculation about what we might discover in the future. If relativity and quantum mechanics have proven that the observer is inseparable from the world he observes, if logical positivism has demonstrated how many of our supposedly solid facts are mere constructs and conventions, if the psychic researchers have shown man’s mind to possess unsuspected powers, it begins to look as if some of those old myths and sorceries were a bit more than superstition. Hypnotism and the curing of psychosomatic conditions by faith were once dismissed as legend. How much of what we dismiss today may have been based on fragmentary observation, centuries ago, before the very existence of a scientific framework began to condition what facts we would and would not discover? And this is only a question about our own world. What of other universes? Wave mechanics already admits the possibility of one entire cosmos coexisting with ours. The lecturer said it was not hard to write the equations for an infinity of such parallel worlds. By logical necessity the laws of nature would vary from one to another. Therefore, somewhere in the boundlessness of reality, anything you can imagine must actually exist!