Memoirs Found In a Bathtub Read Free Page A

the rest of humanity and endured to the Chaotic without the least knowledge of what was taking place on the surface of the earth.
    This absolute, hermetic isolation of a community of priests and warriors of Kap-Eh-Taahl did seem, Wid-Wiss admitted, a bit unlikely. So he went on to speculate that the Last Pentagon may have possessed scanning devices on the outside. He did not think, however, that the collective military brain of the Last Dynasty was capable of any offensive or even diversive action. It certainly could not have attacked or engineered a coup against the Federation, for once the colossus had buried itself in rock and severed all ties with the future course of history, it was imprisoned not only by impenetrable walls but by the very nature of its internal organization. From that time on it thrived exclusively on the myth, the legend of the glory that was Kap-Eh-Taahl, and investigated, rooted out and waged bitter war against heresy—the heresy within.
    Our Histognostors answered these arguments with a stony silence. But Wid-Wiss did not give in. For twenty-seven years, with only a handful of loyal colleagues to help him, he combed the Rocket Mountains from end to end. Just when almost everyone had forgotten him, his stubbornness was dramatically vindicated. On 28 Mey 3146, the head archeological team, having cleared away several hundred tons of rubble at the foot of Haar-Vurd Peak, stood before a convex shield, cleverly camouflaged, excellently preserved: this was the entrance to the Last Pentagon.
    Exploration of the underground building, however, proved extremely difficult and demanded extraordinary methods. In the seventy-second year of its retreat from the world, the Pentagon of the Last Dynasty succumbed to a natural disaster. A slight shift in the mountain’s granite core produced a fissure that traveled down through several strata until it came into contact with magma. The building’s concrete protective shell could not withstand the volcanic pressure; molten lava entered and filled the interior from top to bottom. And so that strange anthill of the last of the Prez-tendz became a giant fossil and, as such, waited one thousand six hundred and eighty years to be discovered.
    It is not our task to describe here the tremendous archeological wealth of the Third Pentagon diggings. We refer the interested reader to the many volumes devoted specially to that subject. Only a few remarks remain to be added to this introduction to the “Notes.”
    The “Notes” were discovered in the third year of excavation, on the fourth level, within an intricate corridor system where there were several sanitation facilities. In me of these facilities, filled as the rest with igneous rock, were two human skeletons and, beneath them, a scroll of papyr—the “Notes”
    The reader will see for himself that the daring suppositions of Histognostor Wid-Wiss were for the most part quite accurate. The “Notes” portray the fate of a community locked beneath the earth, a community that refused to allow the infiltration of any news of real events, pretending it constituted the Brain, the Headquarters of an empire that extended even to the most remote galaxies. In time the pretense became belief, the belief a certainty. The reader will witness how the fanatical servants of Kap-Eh-Taahl created the myth of the Antibuilding, how they spent their lives in mutual surveillance, in tests of loyalty and devotion to the Mission, even when the last figment of that Mission’s reality had become an impossibility and nothing remained but to sink ever deeper into the pit of collective madness.
    Our historiography has not yet passed final judgment on the “Notes” commonly called, for the location of their discovery, “Memoirs Found in a Bathtub.” Then too, no agreement has been reached as to when and in what order certain parts of the manuscript were written. The Hyberiad Gnostors, for example, consider the first twelve pages apocryphal,