The Glass Bees

  The lower half of the hive obviously served as a tank or storeroom which was rapidly filling with the delicious stuff. I could follow the increase on the levels etched on the glass, and during the time that I ranged my field glasses over the shrubs and the meadow, and then refocused them on the beehives, the stores had increased by several degrees.

  It is very unlikely that this increase and the work in general was watched by me alone. I distinguished sill another type of automaton which flew back and forth alongside the hives or lingered in front of them, as foremen or engineers do in a workshop or at a building site. They contrasted with the other bees by their smoke-gray color.

  XIII

  Absorbed in the commotion around me, I had completely forgotten that I was waiting for Zapparoni. But he was present as the invisible master. I sensed the power on which this spectacle was based.

  When we come under the spell of the deeper domain of techniques, its economic character and even its power aspect fascinates us less than its playful side. Then we realize that we are involved in a play, a dance of the spirit, which cannot be grasped by calculation. What is ultimately left for science is intuition alone—a call of destiny.

  This playful feature manifests itself more clearly in small things than in the gigantic works of our world. The crude observer can be impressed only by large quantities—chiefly when they are in motion—and yet there are as many organs in a fly as in a leviathan.

  This is what fascinated me in Zapparoni’s experiment, and I forgot time and place as a child forgets his school. And although the creatures frequently whizzed past me like projectiles, I also entirely forgot the possibility of danger. The way they radiated from the hives in clusters, threw themselves like a glittering veil over the display of bright flowers, then darted back, stopped short, hovered in a compact swarm—from which, by inaudible calls and invisible signs, the gatherers, one by one, were swiftly summoned to deliver their harvest—all this was a spectacle which both enthralled and mesmerized. It put one’s mind to sleep. I cannot say what astonished me more—the ingenious invention of each single unit or the interplay among them. Perhaps it was essentially the dancelike force of the spectacle that delighted me—power concentrated within a superior order.

  I should not like to omit mentioning a matter which is characteristic of insights of this kind. After I had closely attended the operation for an hour, I thought I understood, if not the technical secret, at least the system—at which moment I began to criticize and to contemplate improvements. This unrest, this discontent, is peculiar, although characteristic of human nature. Let us assume we come upon, perhaps in Australia, a new animal species we have never seen before; we’d be stupefied, but we wouldn’t immediately begin to speculate about improving it. This indicates a different attitude toward creative authority.

  A critical attitude, like activity, is one of the fundamental characteristics of our time. Both are interdependent. If the critical attitude should dwindle, there would be more peace and less intelligence, to the benefit of the essential. Neither criticism nor activity, however, can steer the course in such a direction—this means that superior forces are involved.

  Today every boy who has been given a motorcycle is capable of technical criticism. As for me, I had been trained in it during the years when I tested tanks. There was always something to criticize, and I was famous in the factories for demanding the impossible. The basic requirements are simple: the tanks must be built with the most favorable potential for attack, mobility, and safety. Each of these factors can be intensified only at the expense of the others. With private vehicles, it is quite different; there cost, safety, and comfort come first. The demands meet only in relation to speed, which belongs to the principia. Sacrifices are made to speed, not only in times of war but in times of peace.

  As to Zapparoni’s setup—after my first stupefaction, the question of expense at once suggested itself. In every respect the glass creatures gave the impression of being luxury automatons. For all I knew, each one of them might have cost as much as a very good automobile or even an airplane. But, like all his other inventions, as soon as they were perfected, Zapparoni would certainly mass-produce them. It was also obvious that from this sort of colony—perhaps from a single glass bee—he could retrieve more honey in one day of spring than from a natural swarm in one year. After all, his bees could probably work as well in rain or in darkness. But how would he be able to cope with the queen bee, the great mother, who gives birth to thousands?

  Bees are not just workers in a honey factory. Ignoring their self-sufficiency for a moment, their work—far beyond its tangible utility—plays an important part in the cosmic plan. As messengers of love, their duty is to pollinate, to fertilize the flowers. But Zapparoni’s glass collectives, as far as I could see, ruthlessly sucked out the flowers and ravished them. Wherever they crowded out the old colonies, a bad harvest, a failure of crops, and ultimately a desert were bound to follow. After a series of extensive raids, there would no longer be flowers or honey, and the true bees would become extinct in the way of whales and horses. Thus the goose would be killed which laid the golden eggs; the tree felled, from which the apples were plucked.

  Granted that honey is a delicious food, an increase in its production is not the business of the automaton industry; it is more a task for chemistry. I thought of laboratories in Provence, in Grasse for instance, where I had seen them extract perfume from millions of blossoms. There, broadly massed, are forests of bitter-orange trees, Melds of violets and tuberoses, slopes covered with blue lavender. By similar processes it would be possible to extract honey as well. Meadows could be exploited like coal seams from which not only fuel but countless chemicals are obtained: essences, dyes, all sorts of medicinal drugs, and even textile fibers. I wonder why no one has thought of this.

  Zapparoni had, of course, long since carefully considered the question of expense; if he hadn’t, he would have been the first multimillionaire to be ignorant of these most astute calculations. A great many people have learned, often to their own detriment, how cleverly rich people count their pennies. They would never have become rich had they been lacking in the talent.

  And so one could assume that this experiment had a significance far beyond economics. It might have been the hobby of a nabob who amuses himself after a round of golf or a day of fishing. In a technical age you have technical toys. Even millionaires have ruined themselves with such games, for in these matters no one tightens his purse strings.

  The assumption that all this Was a hobby was, however, most unlikely, for if Zapparoni wanted to waste time and money for his menus plaisirs, his cinema industry offered him enough occasion. Zapparoni films were his big hobby, and he risked experiments there which would have driven anyone else into the poor house. The idea of plays acted by automatons was, of course, an old story; such plays had often been tried in the history of the cinema. But formerly there had never been any doubt about the automaton-character of the figures, and for that reason the experiments had been limited to the field of fairy tales and grotesqueries—with the basic effects of a puppet show or the old magic lantern. Zapparoni’s ambition, however, was to recreate the automaton in the old sense, the automaton of Albertus Magnus or of Regiomontanus; he wanted to create artificial people, life-sized figures which looked exactly like human beings. People had taken this idea as a joke, but some had been shocked, declaring it to be in bad taste—the conceit of an immensely wealthy man.

  But they had all been mistaken, since even the very first of these plays had an enormous success. It was a luxury puppet show without puppeteers and wires; it was the first performance not only of a new play but of a new genre. The figures, it is true, still differed slightly from the human actors we are used to seeing, but they differed pleasantly: the faces were more brilliant, more flawless; the eyes of a larger cut, like precious stones; the movements slower, more elegant, and in moments of excitement even more violent and sudden than anything in our experience. Eve
n the ugly and abnormal had been transposed into new, amusing, or frightening but always fascinating domains. As presented by Zapparoni, a figure like Caliban, like Shylock, like the Hunchback of Notre Dame could not have been begotten in any bed; even if she had been frightened by something strange and terrible, it could not have been borne by a human woman. And every now and then one came upon the most fantastic creatures: a Goliath, a Tom Thumb, or an angel of the Annunciation through whose transparent body and wings the surrounding objects could be seen.

  Thus one might say that these figures did not simply imitate the human form but carried it beyond its possibilities and dimensions. The voices reached a pitch that put any nightingale to shame, and a depth that outrivaled any bass; the movements and expressions indicated that nature had been studied and surpassed. The impression was extraordinary. The public now admired what it had ridiculed only yesterday. (I shall not repeat the praise of enthusiastic critics who saw in this play, performed by marionettes, a new art form presenting ideal types.) One has, of course, to allow for the naive spirit of the age, which snatched at any daring invention as eagerly as a child at a new doll. The newspapers deplored the fate of a young man who had jumped into the Thames: he had taken Zapparoni’s leading puppet actress for a woman of flesh and blood and could not get over his disappointment. The management, expressing regrets, implied that it might not have been impossible for the fair robot maid to have responded to the young man’s courtship. He had acted too impulsively; he had not grasped the ultimate possibilities of technology. At any rate, the success was tremendous and certainly repaid the original expense. Zapparoni had the golden touch.

  Anyone who could play with artificial human beings surely had enough entertainment; he need not amuse himself with glass bees. The place where I found myself was no playground, but there are, of course, still other fields where money becomes unimportant. A conversation with a Brazilian came to mind; he once said to me: “It is not yet certain who will gain the upper hand in our country—man or termite.”

  That these glass bees were collecting honey was, of course, a kind of game, an absurd task for such ingeniously contrived mechanisms. But creatures capable of doing this could be used for almost any purpose, and it would probably be easier for automatons of this sort to collect small grains of gold and diamonds than to extract the nectar from blossoms. But even for the most lucrative business they were still too expensive. Economic absurdities are produced only when power is at stake.

  And, indeed, the person who had such colonies at his disposal was a powerful man—more powerful perhaps than a man who commanded the same number of airplanes. David was stronger and more intelligent than Goliath.

  On this level economic considerations were entirely unimportant; here one had to enter into another sphere of economy—the titantic. One had to make a different accounting. I couldn’t guess the price of such a bee; but supposing it to be a hundred pounds, its cost would seem sheer lunacy to a beekeeper. Other viewpoints are, however, possible: a spaceship, for instance, might cost a million pounds; to both a beekeeper and a Light Cavalryman this was equally absurd. Considering the weird cargo which such a ship was intended to carry, the price was fantastic; yet the cost again became minimal if one considered the damage it was meant to do. Consequently, billions of pounds evaporated into the air without anyone taking into consideration the attack on life and limb. If one could fix only a single little bee to the wings of such a monster and wreck it, the cost of even a thousand pounds would seem only a bagatelle. We must admit that people calculate in our world with great shrewdness, even in the case of machines. Still there are exceptions. Sometimes people are more wasteful, more extravagant even than August the Strong and his minister Brühl, and are none the better for it.

  Well, there was no doubt about it—I had come upon a testing ground of the Zapparoni Works, an airfield for testing micro-robots. My suspicion that it was a question of weapons probably hit the mark. We always think first of something of that sort, and of plain utility. But by reducing his bees to workers, Zapparoni had not robbed them of their sting—quite the contrary.

  While I was turning all these factors over in my mind, a profusion of more subtle possibilities came into view. What I had been observing was not so much a new medium as a new dimension, opened up by an inventive brain; it was a key which unlocked many rooms. For instance, what if these creatures could be used—as they are used in the world of flowers—as messengers of love between human beings . . . ? But we had better keep to more solid chapters of zoology. And where could a Parliament be found willing to grant even ten pounds for that purpose?

  XIV

  The sight that at first had amused me as a spectacle finally came to delight me as an example of teamwork. But now I began to realize its powerful significance, and like a gold seeker who has entered the land of Ophir, I was intoxicated. Why had the Old Man permitted me to enter this garden?

  “Beware of the bees!” How strange that everything he said had a meaning different from the one I assumed. Perhaps he had meant that I should keep a cool head—heaven knows I felt that the spectacle had shaken the hinges of my mind. Very likely the master was testing me. For practical purposes, he wished to see if I could grasp consequences, if I would be equal to his idea. Had Caretti’s mind become unsettled in this garden?

  “Beware of the bees!”—it might also have been a warning against curiosity. Perhaps he wanted to know how I would behave when confronted with the revealed secret. But up to this moment I hadn’t moved from my chair.

  My mind was much too occupied to think about my own behavior; I was completely under the spell of the goings on. Back in the old days when an invention was made it was a stroke of luck, and frequently even the inventor himself was unaware of its significance. The models and the gimcrack constructions in the museums evoke a smile. But here the consequences of a new idea had not only been understood, but had been immediately carried out on a large scale and in detail. A model had been created which exceeded practical demands, and since its existence pointed to many co-workers and people who must have known its secret, I understood Zapparoni’s worry about security.

  The number of flying objects considerably increased in the course of the afternoon. Within two or three hours a process developed such as I had observed during one human lifetime—the change from the exceptional to the typical. I had experienced this change with automobiles and airplanes. At first one is amazed at a phenomenon that emerges sporadically; finally its flashing past is multiplied into legions. Even the horses no longer turn their heads. The second look is still more amazing than the first, but we have entered the law of series—into habit.

  Clearly Zapparoni had pushed the development of these automatons ahead and was manufacturing them in series, as far as that was possible in his workshops. But it did not look as if he were preparing a new commodity—one of the surprises which he announced to the public year by year in his catalogues. Though it might at some later time become a byproduct, here was an entirely independent enterprise; that much was clear to me when I observed the increased commotion, reminiscent of the time of swarming or the rush hour in a city. In different formations the moving mass now branched out into other sections of the park.

  Considered as organization, this activity could be interpreted in several ways. One could hardly assume the existence of a central control panel: such a device would not be in the Zapparoni style because for him the quality of an automaton depended on its independent action. His international success rested on the fact that he had made possible in a small area—his house, his garden—a closed economic project; he had declared war on wires, circuits, pipes, rails, connections. It was a far cry from the hideous aspects of nineteenth-century industrial style.

  I imagined instead a system of distributors, of laboratories, accumulators, and filling stations where materials could be delivered or received, as they were here at the beehives, which not only received nectar but obviously delivered power. I saw how t
he glass creatures were literally shot off, after having emptied themselves.

  The air was now filled with a high-pitched, uniform whistling sound, which, if not exactly soporific, at least blurred my perception; it was not unlike the effect produced by hypnosis. I had to make an effort to distinguish between dream and reality in order not to succumb to visions which spun out of Zapparoni’s theme on their own.

  As I said before, I had noticed a variety of models among the glass bees, but for some time now still other apparatuses had emerged in the general swirl, differing greatly among themselves in size, form, and color. They clearly hadn’t the slightest connection with bees and beekeeping. I had to accept these new creations as they came—I couldn’t keep up with the task of interpretation. Much the same thing happens when we watch aquatic animals from a cliff—we see fish and crabs and even recognize jellyfish; but then creatures rise up out of the depth which set us insoluble and disquieting riddles. I was like a man of a former civilization who stands at a traffic intersection. After the momentary bewilderment he guesses easily enough that the automobiles are a new species of coach. But now and then he will be frightened by structures which seem to him designed in the manner of Callot.

  XV

  I had, therefore, scarcely penetrated Zapparoni’s installation before I thought of improvements. As I said before, this reaction is characteristic of our times. As soon as the opaque figures emerged, I began to become uneasy and puzzled; this, too, is typical of an age when hierarchy is determined by mastery of technical apparatuses and when technics have become destiny. It is a disgrace not to be up-to-date in this field or to be as bewildered as a moron before whose eyes one strikes a match and against whose ear one holds a ticking watch. Such morons, it is true, no longer exist. From childhood on we are trained to make associations.