Free The Chain of Chance by Stanislaw Lem Page A

surprisingly young, but then I was still not accustomed to my own age. I was given a polite but restrained welcome, which made me wonder if I hadn’t made a mistake in approaching him by way of the Sûreté, rather than the CNRS. But Randy was on friendlier terms with the police than with the scientific community.
    Barth showed me into the library—his study was still in a state of chaos following the move—and then briefly excused himself while he went to change out of his varnish-stained smock. The house had been made to look like new already; rows of books stood freshly arrayed on the shelves, the smell of wax and varnish was everywhere. On the wall I noticed a blowup of Barth and his kids mounted on an elephant. Judging from the face in the photo I would never have guessed he was the promise of French computer science, but then I’d already had occasion to observe that people in the exact sciences tend to be less conspicuous in appearance than those in the humanities.
    Barth came back into the room, frowning at his hands, which still showed traces of varnish, prompting me to suggest various ways of getting rid of the stains. We sat down by the window. I started out by saying I was neither a detective nor a criminologist, but that I had become involved in a rather bizarre and morbid case, and that I had come to him as a last resort. He was impressed by my fluent but not very European French. I explained that I was of French Canadian origin.
    Randy had more confidence in my personal charm than I did. I was so anxious to gain this man’s favor that I was somewhat embarrassed by the situation. The Sûreté was not a reference that he seemed to hold in particularly high esteem. Then, too, the attitude prevailing in academic circles is a decidedly antimilitaristic one. In such circles it’s widely believed that astronauts are recruited from the armed forces, which was not always so, at least not in my case. But then I could hardly confide in him my whole life history. I was in doubt, therefore, as to what course I should take to break the ice. It wasn’t till much later that he confessed to having been somewhat moved by the look of utter desperation on my face. My guess had been right: the colonel Randy had got to introduce me was in Barth’s eyes a clown; nor was Barth exactly on the best of terms with the Sûreté. But sitting there in the library, I had no way of knowing that this indecision of mine was the best possible strategy.
    He agreed to hear my story. I’d been involved with the case for so long I could have recited every detail from memory. I’d also brought along a set of microfilms containing all the documentation needed to illustrate my lecture, and Barth had just finished unpacking his projector. We plugged it in, leaving the windows and curtains open since the trees were already suffusing the room with a greenish half-light.
    “It’s a jigsaw puzzle,” I began, feeding the first reel into the projector. “A puzzle consisting of numerous pieces; each of them is distinct enough on its own, but when fitted together they make for an indistinct whole. Not even Interpol has been able to crack the case. Just recently we conducted a simulation mission, the details of which I’ll save till later on. The results were negative.”
    I was aware that his computer program was still in the experimental stage, that it had never been tested in the field, and that it was the subject of conflicting reports; but I was anxious to arouse his curiosity, and so I decided to give him a succinct version of the whole affair.
    On June 27 of last year, the management of the Savoy Hotel in Naples notified the police that Robert T. Coburn, an American, aged fifty, had failed to return after setting out for the beach on the previous morning. His disappearance was all the more suspicious in that Coburn, a guest of the hotel for the past ten days, had been in the habit of going to the beach every morning, even walking the