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The Experiment
(© Biswapriya Purkayastha)

Page 2

Could I actually refuse? Would I have even wanted to? It meant a passport to survival, at least for a while. So I nodded, and my eagerness was not even feigned.


Like many of his fellow doctors, Müller was an experimenter. He had a head full of theories and the opportunity of a lifetime – unfettered access to a mass of human material on which to work. But not for Müller the experiments on which the likes of Rascher and later Mengele wasted, as he put it, their time. No, Müller had set much higher goals for himself. One night, after we had finished and he was watching me clean up, he had begun to talk.

I still remember that night. It was December, and the snow had been heavy on the ground outside, and I had just finished scrubbing blood out of a basin and put a rack of washed test tubes up to dry. Müller had remained in the lab, sipping Schnapps and watching me. Suddenly he had laughed.

"You probably think I’m crazy, don’t you?"

"Oh no, Herr Doktor." I had glanced involuntarily at the slab on which something long and corpse-shaped lay under a canvas shroud. "Not at all."

"Don’t bother to lie," he had said cheerfully. "I won’t hold it against you." He got up and walked over to the window and looked outside at the falling snow. "At this very moment," he said, "German soldiers are fighting and dying for the Fatherland outside Moscow and Leningrad, freezing in the snow, while we sit here, safe and warm. What do you think about that, eh?"

I did not know what to say, so I said nothing.

"Now," he said, "just think about all those fresh young men – trained soldiers, the best in the world – dying. Once they’re dead, of what use are they? None.

"Imagine," he continued, coming back to me, "if we could get them back from the battlefield, these young men. Those of them who weren’t too badly damaged, let’s say, those who weren’t shelled or blown up but only shot or bayoneted or died of cold and exposure. Let’s say we could get them back and stitch up their wounds. Then what?"

I still didn’t say anything.

"You understand what I’m thinking of, don’t you? I can see it in your eyes. Suppose we fixed their wounds and then…suppose we could bring those dead men back to life?

"Can you imagine," he continued, his voice rising with excitement, "what we could do then? We would have an army of virtual immortals, who could be revived again and again, and sent back into the fray. Why," he shouted, "nothing could stop us from ruling the world. Nothing!"

"Will you need the microscope tomorrow, Herr Doktor? Or should I put it away?"

"Yes," he had said, clapping me on the back. "You think I’m crazy. But I’m serious. I plan to revive the dead…and you, my friend, shall help me do it."

That was the beginning.


Many weary months followed. For all his bizarre ideas, Müller was nothing if not thorough. He never took shortcuts, never assumed anything, and checked and rechecked every value, every result, until absolutely certain. Of course, this involved a great deal of work – work on the inmates, of whom Müller had as many as he could possibly want.

How many times have I seen him stand over some poor wretch, some luckless Jew or Romany or Communist whom he had shot or knifed or injected with some poison, and measure their last dying moments with sphygmomanometer and stethoscope and stopwatch? How many blood samples taken in those last moments have I not analysed, parsing their secrets for Müller’s edification? Sometimes – oh, many times – I swore to myself that I could not take it any more. But I realised – the knowledge never left my mind, actually, not for a moment – that the day Müller had no further use for me, I was done for. If I quit, I would find myself on that same slab before the night was out. Yes, self-preservation is a powerful force, young man. One should not mock it. You would do the same if you were in my place.

And so it went on. Time passed.

[ Continue to page 3 ]

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Genre:Science Fiction
Type:Short story
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