The Chain of Chance by Stanisław Lem

First published:Katar, 1976 (English translation, 1978)

Type of work: Science fiction

Time of work: The late 1970’s

Locale: Naples, Rome, and Paris

Principal Characters:

• John, the narrator, a former astronaut
• Annabella, a girl whom John saves from death from a terrorist’s bomb
• Dr. Philippe Barth, a computer scientist

The Novel

John, the narrator, a former astronaut, has been hired to investigate the death of a fellow American named Adams, who has died of unknown causes in Naples. This is only the most recent in a series of twelve strange deaths in which the victim first exhibited evidence of great excitement and aggressive behavior, followed by hallucinations and delusions of persecution, and, finally, total withdrawal, leading to death, in most cases by suicide. Though the twelve were unknown to one another, John believes that the pattern cannot be mere coincidence. Were they the victims of a great, mysterious conspiracy?

In an attempt to discover precisely what caused the death of Adams, John, monitored by two colleagues who follow at a distance, duplicates exactly the movements of Adams in Naples and Rome, hoping to tempt the presumed killer to attack him. He stays at the same hotel, drives the same highway from Naples to Rome, stops at the same service station, and registers at the same hotel in Rome. Although he is suspicious of some of the things that happen to him—a young woman in the service station, for example, approaches him and then faints—he learns nothing that can explain what happened to Adams.

He decides, therefore, to go to Paris to consult with Dr. Philippe Barth, a distinguished computer scientist who has been programming a computer to solve problems in which the amount of data exceeds the storage capacity of human memory. At the Rome airport, however, John is delayed when he saves a young girl from a terrorist’s bomb which kills several people. At first he is arrested as the terrorist’s accomplice; then, as a hero, he must endure a news conference, though he wishes to be anonymous. Eventually, he is able to deliver the girl, Annabella, to her father in Paris.

In Paris, he meets Barth, to whom he describes the twelve deaths and the problem inherent in the fact that they seem simultaneously related and unrelated. Barth is convinced that whoever is responsible for the deaths in Naples wants to create the impression that he does not exist; Barth believes that the only way to discover the motive and the perpetrator’s method is to examine all the elements of the pattern. All the victims, for example, were bald, or balding, and all of them suffered from allergies, for which they were taking an antihistamine which contained the stimulant Ritalin.

When John leaves Barth’s institute, his car is sideswiped, and he realizes that if he had been killed his death would have fit the Naples pattern. Later, at a party given by Barth, he meets a police inspector who tells him about the case of an optician who attempted to throw himself into the Seine and later died of heart failure. It was discovered that the optician had repaired the eyeglasses of a chemist who was doing research for the French government into depressants for chemical warfare. The glasses were contaminated by the drug. This story leads Barth and John to consider the possibility that the Naples victims were objects of an experiment by some secret agency that was testing some drug as part of a plot, perhaps to assassinate public officials in Italy.

To test this hypothesis, John prepares to return to Italy. Without realizing it, however, he commits a series of acts which finally explain the mystery. That night he eats some almonds, then sleeps in a bed in which Barth’s superstitious mother, who has no confidence in his antihistamine, has sprinkled “flowers of sulfur” to cure his hay fever. The next day, at the airport, he gets a haircut, and the barber rubs a green jelly into his scalp. Unable to buy a plane ticket for Rome, he manages to get a room in the airport hotel without a reservation because he shows the clerk his picture in a newspaper article about his heroism in the Rome airport. That night he experiences a psychedelic nightmare and is prevented from leaping from a window to his death because he has managed during his “frenzy” to handcuff himself to a steam radiator.

John’s bizarre experience leads to an explanation of the mystery of the Naples deaths—all of them the result of a coincidental combination of chemicals. One is present in the green jelly used in the treatment of baldness, and when it is combined with the Ritalin in the antihistamine it produces a mild form of the depressant which affected the French optician. When it is combined with cyanide and sulfur its toxicity is increased a million times. Almonds contain tiny traces of cyanide, and all the Naples victims ate almonds which had been contaminated with a disinfectant containing sulfur. John, therefore, experiences the suicidal hallucinations of the Naples victims because of the combined effect of the sulfur in his bed, the almonds, the barber’s treatment of his scalp, and the Ritalin in his antihistamine.

The Characters

John—it is the only name given to the narrator—is the sole character in the novel who is developed at any length. John is a man of action, a World War II veteran who entered the astronaut program but was reduced to backup status and finally dismissed from the Mars mission because of his allergies to grass and dust. Now, middle-aged, his only appropriate employment is as a private detective working for the executor of the Adams will.

His narration of the story is rather laconic and offhand, in the manner of the private detectives of the traditional American hard-boiled novel which, ironically, is Stanisław Lem’s model. As a soldier, astronaut, and detective, John has learned to wait patiently for those moments when quick, decisive, unreflective action is required; in a sense, he is himself a kind of machine. (At one point he says that the only time he was excited during his simulation of Adams’ experience in Naples and Rome was when he was frightened.) Furthermore, he does not undergo any transformation as a character. At the end of the story, he is the same person he was at the beginning, except that he now knows the answer to the puzzle.

Yet Lem’s decision to employ such a character is appropriate, because he is dealing with a scientific puzzle which requires for its solution the kind of objectivity one expects from a technician, even in his account of the temporary psychedelic derangement which is the result of a remarkable chemical coincidence.

Barth, his colleagues, Annabella, and the optician are not characterized sufficiently to enable the reader to see them as fully rounded characters. That, however, must not be considered a flaw in the novel, because Lem’s interest is less in the development of characters than in the explication of a scientific puzzle for the sake of its philosophical implications.

Critical Context

Lem apparently became disheartened with the writing of fiction in the 1960’s, in part because of his disgust with the genre of science fiction itself. Particularly with Solaris (1961; English translation, 1970), he had established himself as a master in this field, even though he felt an increasing repugnance for it. With The Chain of Chance, however, he developed what, in a sense, is science fiction of a different kind—a fiction, that is, which deals with problems produced by scientific discovery in the contemporary world and which depends for its intellectual content on those problems and on their solution. The Chain of Chance begins as an apparently straightforward private-eye detective story, soon seems to become a story of international intrigue, and finally is found to be an account of the solution of a scientific mystery—all of this on behalf of Lem’s explication of a profound statement about the nature of reality and the social state of the modern world. Because it is this kind of novel, it may disappoint readers who wish to place it within the narrow confines of the genres of detective, espionage, or science fiction. Those who read to challenge their intelligence, however, will be rewarded by Lem’s brilliant handling of scientific data and ideas, and the development of their philosophical implications.

Bibliography

Lem, Stanisław. Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy, 1984.

Solataroff, Theodore."A Master of Science Fiction—and More,” in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXI (August 29, 1976), pp. 1, 14.

Steiner, T.R. “Stanisław Lem’s Detective Stories: A Genre Extended,” in Modern Fiction Studies. XXIX (Autumn, 1983), pp. 451-462.

Updike, John. “Lem and Pym,” in The New Yorker. LV (February 26, 1979), pp. 115-121.

Ziegfeld, Richard E. Stanisław Lem, 1985.