Unmasking Space Curators Logbook

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The protagonist is a 24-year-old student, a fat and cigar-smoking loner, who boards his usual train to reach his university, but surprisingly, when the train enters a very small tunnel, the tunnel doesn’t end. The darkness continues for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes. The student gets nervous, but the other passengers are calm, because they don’t see (or don’t want to see) the imminent catastrophe. The student finds the train conductor, and questions him about what is going on with the train. The conductor is evasive at first, but eventually leads the student to the locomotive, which is empty. The conductor tells the student that the engineer already jumped when he realized what was happening to the train. After a failed attempt to pull the emergency brake, the train gets faster and faster, tipping into an abyss. Finally, the train is heading completely vertically and the falling student lands on the front glass of the still falling locomotive, where he greedily stares into the oncoming darkness. The train conductor, ever concerned with duty, asks what they should do, but the student answers: “Nothing (...) God let us fall. And now we'll come upon him.” Later, Dürrenmatt abridged the ending. In the second version, first published in 1978, the last two sentences (one sentence in the German original: "Gott ließ uns fallen, und so stürzen wir denn auf ihn zu") are omitted and the story ends with the word "Nothing".