Utopia, Too, Is a Final Solution : THE SIXTH DAY <i> by Primo Levi; translated by Raymond Rosenthal (Summit: $18.95; 222 pp.) </i>

For Primo Levi, Adam fell every day, and went back for still another bite off the Tree of Knowledge, and fell again, and went back again, and on and round about. If Levi was an artist and not a preacher, it was partly because he was poised in a Talmudic evenness of judgment: Knowledge, the fruit, is as sweet as the fall is terrible. It was also because the anguish of necessary and opposite choices--like that of the golem in one of these tales, who shatters because his nature forbids him to work on the Sabbath, while his nature also compels him to obey his master by working on the Sabbath--propelled Levi, unlike the golem, into storytelling.

The stories in “The Sixth Day,” written a dozen years ago--Levi died in 1987--are fables, and most of them concern humanity’s bent for misusing Adam’s apple; and the cost. Levi, a chemist by training and early career, was in love with science and it broke his heart. Of all the horrors he witnessed as a prisoner in Auschwitz, one of the most particularly disruptive for him was working for a Nazi chemist who did his job conscientiously, treated Levi with personal fairness and seemed utterly indifferent to what was going on around him.

Of course, it is not the apple itself that does the damage; it is the way men bite it: acquisitively, with tiny teeth, oblivious to larger meanings. Simpson, the protagonist of several of these tales, is an example. He works for a large American manufacturer. Each year he turns up with a new and ingenious gadget. One is a Mimer, a super-copier that reproduces not only images but the things themselves.

Documents are reproduced; not just a picture of them, but the actual paper, rips and blemishes and all. Sausages and sugar are reproduced. Diamonds are reproduced, but the customer who reproduces them goes to jail. Another customer reproduces his wife, but the two women, after initial amity, fall out. The customer reproduces himself and all four are happy.

Happy, but clearly not human. A watch won’t reproduce; in fact, the original stops working. We trifle with time at our peril, and with our humanity as well. Simpson offers a device for measuring beauty, but, of course, it requires a painting or photograph to base its measurements upon. Rather than measuring beauty, it measures conformity. But that is Levi’s point; it is how society gives us our values.

“The average man can be tuned in the most incredible ways: He can be made to believe that Swedish furniture and plastic flowers, and they alone, are beautiful; that only a particular toothpaste is good . . . only a particular party a depository of truth. . . .”

The Simpson stories--he also has a machine that reproduces any sensation from mountain climbing to sex; a super-TV, you might say--are clever and suggestive, but they have a touch of gadgetry themselves. At his best, Levi makes paradox commonplace, breathtaking, funny and sad. And in this collection, beautifully translated by Raymond Rosenthal, there are a number of wrenching examples.

“For a Good Purpose” tells of what happens when technology allows all the national telephone systems in Europe to be totally automated and linked up. With billions of connections, approximating those of the human brain, it takes on a soul and a temperament. It is a helpful temperament and for that reason, all the more intolerable.

Phones begin automatically connecting to the numbers most called; no matter what they dial, people keep getting their mothers-in-law or lovers. Similar numbers begin to call each other; the machine’s version of Reach Out and Touch Someone. Then it begins to mediate conversations; hanging both parties up when arguments turn mean, laughing appreciatively at jokes.

Finally--its Utopian faith in progress being as insistent as that of its human makers--it calls up phone company technicians and issues orders to build lines to the most remote mountain cottages. Finally, the phone company officials threaten to destroy it with a power surge. With a moan of despair--100 million phones give a simultaneous, protracted ring and go dead--it destroys itself.

Here again is Levi’s artistry. The fable, with a comedy that is both wild and controlled, delivers its satiric point that we use our technology in a way that makes machines of us. But something else lingers as well. Levi leaves human footprints wherever he goes. We feel the machine’s well-meaning, wrong-headed humanity; we feel sorry.

“Recuenco” is two stories that only show themselves when read together. The first tells of a remote settlement in the Philippines where the villagers are starving. One day a goatherd sees an apparition on the horizon. He runs down to announce that The Nurse is arriving. According to village legend, “it comes every 100 years and brings abundance and slaughter.”

In a few minutes it is upon them: A great metallic disk that hovers a few meters up, extrudes six tubes, and discharges a flood of what seems to be milk. Roofs collapse, two old women and several pigs are drowned, but the villagers collect what they can in troughs and ditches. It feeds them, although 10 of them burst from drinking too much.

The story is told hauntingly, mysteriously. The mystery is explained in the next story. It describes a routine day in one of the aerial missions of the World Hunger Project, set decades in the future. Flying saucers filled with hundreds of tons of protein nutrient, and manned by three-member crews--one American, one Russian, one Japanese--roam the skies. Sensors detect the presence of acetone--a symptom of starvation--in the atmosphere, and the disk heads for its source.

The tale is simply an account of the bored, mechanical operations and chatter of the crewmen as they lower over the village, discharge 50,000 gallons of nutrient, and lift off again, concerned with their paper work. Yet together, the two stories are Levi’s desolate image of where we are going.

There are no wars and the world’s powers collaborate to solve the big problems. But the collaborations are technology devoid of human involvement. Philanthropy is waged as war once was waged: From 30,000 feet, by pushing buttons, without knowing what happens to the people on the ground, without transforming those in the air. The food nozzles are as impersonal as the gas nozzles at Auschwitz, and as fitted for as many indifferent purposes.