Noon: 22nd Century

3. Old-timer

When his assistant returned, the traffic controller was standing as before in front of the screen, with his head bent and his arms thrust into his pockets almost up to the elbows. A bright white dot was crawling slowly within the depths of the coordinate-gridded screen.

“Where is he now?” the assistant asked.

The controller did not turn around. “Over Africa,” he growled. “At nine megameters.”

“Nine—” said the assistant. “And the velocity?”

“Almost circular.” The controller turned around. “Well, what do you think? And what else is out there?”

“You’d better calm down,” said the assistant. “What can you do from here?… He grazed the Big Mirror.”

The controller exhaled noisily and, without taking his hands out of his pockets, sat down on the arm of a chair. “Madman,” he muttered.

“So what’s gotten you so worked up?” the assistant asked uncertainly. “Something’s happened. His controls are malfunctioning.”

They fell silent. The white dot kept crawling, cutting slantwise across the screen.

“Where did he get the gall to enter the station zone with malfunctioning controls?” the controller said. “And why doesn’t he give his call sign?”

“He is transmitting something.”

“It’s not a call sign—it’s gibberish.”

“It’s still a call sign,” the assistant said quietly. “All the same, it’s on a fixed frequency.”

“‘Frequency, frequency,’” the controller said through his teeth.

The assistant bent toward the screen, peering myopically at the figures on the coordinate grid. Then he looked at the clock and said, “He’s passing Station Gamma now. Let’s see who it is.”

The controller laughed gloomily. What else can I do? he thought. I think we’ve done everything we can. All flights have been stopped. All touchdowns have been forbidden. All near-Earth stations have been alerted. Turnen is getting the emergency robots ready.

The controller fumbled at the microphone on his chest and said, “Turnen, what’s happening with the robots?”

Turnen answered unhurriedly: “I’m planning on launching the robots in five or six minutes. After they’re launched, I’ll tell you more.”

“Turnen,” said the controller, “I’m begging you, don’t dawdle—hurry it up a little.”

“I never dawdle,” Turnen answered with dignity. “But it’s senseless to hurry when you don’t have to. I will not delay takeoff by one extra second.”

“Please, Turnen,” said the controller, “please.”

“Station Gamma,” said the assistant. “I’m giving maximum magnification.”

The screen blinked, and the coordinate grid disappeared. In the black emptiness appeared a strange construction like a distorted garden summerhouse with absurdly massive columns. The controller gave a drawn-out whistle and jumped up. This was the last thing he had expected. “A nuclear rocket!” he shouted in astonishment. “How? From where?”

“Ye-es,” the assistant said indecisively. “Really… can’t understand it…”

The incredible structure, with its five fat pillarlike tubes sticking out from under a dome, was slowly turning. A violet radiance trembled under the dome—the pillars looked black against its background. The controller slowly lowered himself down onto the arm of the chair. Of course—it was a nuclear rocket, an interplanetary ship. Photon drive, two-layer parabolic reflector of mesomatter, hydrogen engines. A century and a half ago there had been many such ships. They had been built for the conquest of the planets. Solid, leisurely machines with a fivefold safety margin. They had served long and well, but the last of them had been scrapped long ago—long, long ago.

“Really…” muttered the assistant. “Amazing! Where have I seen something like that?… Greenhouses!” he shouted.

From left to right, a wide gray shadow quickly crossed the screen. “Greenhouses,” the assistant whispered.

The controller narrowed his eyes. A thousand metric tons, he thought. A thousand tons and speed like that… To bits… to dust… the robots! Where the hell are the robots?

The assistant said hoarsely, “He got through… Can it really be? He got through!”

The controller opened his eyes wide again. “Where are the robots?” he yelled.

A green light flared up on the selector board by the wall, and a calm male voice said, “This is D-P. Slavin calling Main Control. Request permission for touchdown at Base Pi-X Seventeen.”

The controller, flushing red, started to open his mouth, but did not make it. Several voices at once thundered through the hall:

“Go back!”

“D-P, permission denied.”

“Captain Slavin, go back!”

“Captain Slavin, this is Main Control. Immediately assume any orbit in Zone Four. Do not touch down. Do not approach. Wait.”

“Roger, wilco,” Slavin responded in confusion. “Enter Zone Four and wait.”

The controller, suddenly remembering, closed his mouth. He could hear a woman’s voice at the selector board, arguing with someone, “Explain to him what’s going on. Explain it, for pity’s sake.” Then the green light on the selector board went out again, and all the noise ceased.

The display on the screen faded. Once again the coordinate grid appeared, and once again a bright glimmering spark crawled within the depths of the screen.

Turnen’s voice rang out: “Emergency officer to control. The robots have launched.”

At the same second, in the lower right corner of the screen appeared two more bright points. The controller rubbed his hands nervously, as though he felt chilly. “Thank you, Turnen,” he muttered. “Thank you very much.”

The two bright dots—the emergency robots—crawled across the screen. The distance between them and the nuclear craft gradually decreased.

The controller looked at the glimmering point crawling between the precise lines, and thought that the old-timer was just entering Zone Two, which was thick with orbital hangars and fueling stations; that his daughter worked on one of those stations; that the mirror of the Orbiting Observatory’s Big Reflector had been smashed; that the ship moved as if blind, and it either did not hear signals or did not understand them; that every second it risked destruction by plowing into any of the numerous heavy structures or by ending up in the launching zone of the D-ships. He thought that it would be very hard to stop the blind and senseless motion of the ship, because it kept changing velocity in a wild and disorderly fashion; and that the robots could end up ramming through it, even though Turnen must be directing them himself.

“Station Delta,” said the assistant. “Maximum magnification.”

On the black screen, once again the image of the ungainly hulk appeared. The flashes of plasma under the dome grew uneven, arhythmical, and it seemed as if the monster were advancing convulsively on fat black legs. The dim outlines of the emergency robots appeared alongside. The robots approached carefully, springing back at every jerk of the nuclear rocket.

The controller and his assistant were all eyes. Stretching his neck as far as it would go, the controller whispered, “Come on, Turnen… Come on… come on, old buddy… Come on.”

The robots moved quickly and surely. From both sides, titanic tentacles stretched out toward the nuclear rocket and seized hold of the widely spaced pillar-tubes. One of the tentacles missed, ended up under the dome, and vanished into dust beneath the force of the plasma. (“Ouch!” the assistant said in a whisper.) A third robot dropped down from somewhere above, and latched onto the dome with magnetic suckers. The nuclear rocket moved slowly downward. The flickering radiance below its dome went out.

“Ooh!” the controller muttered, and wiped his face with his sleeve.

The assistant laughed nervously. “Like giant squids and a whale,” he said. “Where does it go now?”

The controller inquired into his microphone, “Turnen, where are you taking it?”

“To our rocket field,” Turnen said unhurriedly. He was gasping slightly.

The controller suddenly imagined Turnen’s round face, shiny with sweat, lit up by the screen. “Thank you, Turnen,” he said with feeling. He turned to the assistant. “Give the all-clear. Correct the schedule and have them get back to work.”

“And what are you going to do?” the assistant asked plaintively.

“I’m going to fly there.”

The assistant also wanted to be there, but he only said, “I wonder whether the Cosmonautical Museum is missing any ships.” The matter was coming to a more or less happy ending, and he was now in a fairly good mood. “What a watch!” he said. “All day I’ve been quaking in my boots.”

The controller clicked a few keys, and a rolling plain appeared on the screen. The wind drove broken white clouds about the sky, and it formed ripples on dark puddles between the sparsely vegetated hummocks. Ducks splashed about in a large pond. Spaceships haven’t taken off from there in a long time, thought the assistant.

“I’d still like to know who it is,” the controller said between his teeth.

“You’ll find out soon enough,” the assistant said enviously.

The ducks unexpectedly took to the air and darted forward in a sparse flock, beating their wings as hard as they could. The clouds began to whirl into a funnel, and a tornado of water and steam began to rise from the middle of the plain. The hills disappeared, the pond disappeared, and scrawny uprooted bushes rushed off into the clouds of turbulent haze. Something dark and enormous showed for an instant in the spreading mist, something flared with a scarlet glow, and they saw a hill in the foreground tremble, distend, and slowly flop over, like a layer of turf under the share of a powerful plow.

“My God!” said the assistant, his eyes glued to the screen. But by now he could see nothing except the fast-spreading white and gray clouds of steam.

By the time the helicopter had landed, a hundred yards from the edge of the enormous crater, the steam had dispersed. In the center of the crater the nuclear vessel lay on its side, the thick posts of its reactor rings jutting stupidly and helplessly into the air. The steel-blue hulks of the emergency robots, half-buried in hot mud, lay nearby. One of them slowly drew its mechanical paws back under its armor.

Hot air shimmered over the crater.

“Doesn’t look good,” someone muttered as they were getting out of the helicopter.

Overhead, rotors softly whirred—more helicopters rushed through the air and landed close by.

“Let’s go,” said the controller, and everyone straggled out after him.

They went down into the crater. Their feet sank up to the ankles in the hot slush. They did not see the man at first, but when they did see him, they all stopped at once.

He was lying face down with his arms spread out and his face buried in the damp ground, pressing his whole body into the soil and trembling as if from severe cold. He wore a strange suit, crumpled and seemingly chewed up, of unusual cut and color. The man himself was red-haired, vividly red-haired, and he did not hear their footsteps. When they ran up to him, he raised his head, and everyone saw his face, blue-white and dirty, slashed across the lips by an unhealed scab. The man must have been crying, for his deepset blue eyes sparkled, and there was mad joy and suffering in those eyes. They picked him up, grasping him under his arms. Then he spoke.

“Doctor,” he said faintly and unclearly—the scab crossing his lips hindered his speech.

At first no one understood him—it was only after several seconds that they realized he was asking for a medic.

“Doctor, hurry. Sergei Kondratev is in bad shape.” He shifted his wide-open eyes from one face to another and suddenly smiled. “Hello, great-great-grandchildren.”

The tension of the smile made the wound on his face open up, and thick red drops hung on his lips. Everyone had the impression that the man had not smiled for a long time. People in white coats hurried down into the crater.

“Doctor,” the redhead repeated, and collapsed, his dirty blue-white face slumping back.

4. The Conspirators

The four inhabitants of Room 18 were widely renowned within the confines of the Anyudin School, and this was only natural. Such talents as consummate skill in the imitation of the howl of the giant crayspider of the planet Pandora, the ability to discourse freely upon ten methods of fuel economy in interstellar travel, and the capacity to execute eleven knee-bends in a row on one leg could not go unnoticed, and not one of these talents was foreign to the inhabitants of Room 18.

The history of Room 18 begins at a point in time when the companions were only three in number and still lacked both their own room and their own teacher. Even in those days Genka Komov, better known as the Captain, exercised unlimited authority over Pol Gnedykh and Aleksandr Kostylin. Pol Gnedykh, familiarly known as Polly or Lieber Polly, was famous as an individual of great cleverness of mind, an individual capable of anything. Aleksandr Kostylin was of unquestionable good nature, and covered himself with glory in battles associated with the application not so much of intelligence as of physical force. He could not endure being called Kostyl for short (and understandably so, for “kostyl” means “crutch”), but he willingly answered to the nickname of Lin. Captain Genka, who had mastered to perfection the popular-science book The Road to Space, who knew many various useful things, and who was, to all appearances, easily capable of repairing a photon reflector without so much as changing the spacecraft’s course, indefatigably led Lin and Polly toward reknown. Thus, for example, wide celebrity resulted from the tests of a new type of rocket fuel that were conducted under his direction in the school park. A fountain of dense smoke flew up higher than the tallest trees, while the crash of the explosion could be heard by all who were on the school grounds at the right moment. It was an unforgettable feat, and long afterward Lin still sported a long scar on his back, and went shirtless whenever possible in order that this scar should be exposed to the gaze of envious eyes. This too was the threesome that revived the pastime of ancient African tribes by swinging from trees on long ropes simulating lianas—simulating them inadequately, as experience demonstrated. Moreover, it was they who introduced the practice of welding together the plastic of which clothing is made, and they repeatedly utilized this ability to temper the unbearable pride of the older comrades who were permitted to go swimming with face masks and even aqualungs. However, while all these feats covered the threesome with glory, they did not bring the desired satisfaction, and so the Captain decided to participate in the Young Cosmonauts’ Club, which held forth the brilliant prospect of riding the acceleration centrifuge and perhaps even of winning one’s way at last to the mysterious cosmonautical simulator.

It was with great amazement that the Captain discovered in the club one Mikhail Sidorov, known for various reasons also as Athos. To the Captain, Athos initially appeared to be an arrogant and empty-headed individual, but the first serious conversation with him demonstrated that in his personal qualities he undoubtedly surpassed one Walter Saronian, who was at that time on reasonably affable terms with the threesome, and who occupied the fourth bunk in the just-assigned Room 18.

The historic conversation proceeded in approximately this wise:

“What do you think about nuclear drive?” Genka inquired.

“Old hat,” quoth Athos shortly.

“I agree,” the Captain said, and he looked at Athos with interest. “And photon-annihilation drive?”

“So-so,” said Athos, shaking his head sadly.

Genka then put to him the premier question: which system seemed more promising, the gravigen or the gravshield?

“I acknowledge only the D-principle,” Athos declared haughtily.

“Hmm,” said Genka. “Okay, let’s go to Eighteen—I’ll introduce you to the crew.”

“You mean your crummy roommates?” Athos-Sidorov winced, but he went.

A week later, unable to endure intimidation and open violence, and with the teacher’s permission, Walter Saronian fled Room 18; Athos established himself in his place. After that the D-principle and the idea of intergalactic travel reigned in the minds and hearts of Room 18 firmly and to all appearances for good. Thus was formed the crew of the superstarship Galaktion: Genka, captain; Athos-Sidorov, navigator and cyberneticist; Lieber Polly, computerman; Sashka Lin, engineer and hunter. The crew moved forward with bright hopes and extremely specific plans. The master blueprints of the superstarship Galaktion were drawn up; regulations were worked out; and a top-secret sign (a special way of holding the fingers of the right hand) by which the crew members might recognize one another was put into effect. The threat of imminent invasion hung over the galaxies Andromeda, Messier 33, and others. So went the year.

Lin, engineer and hunter, delivered the first blow. With his characteristic thoughtlessness, he had asked his father (on leave from an orbital weightless casting factory) how old you had to be to be a spaceman. The answer was so horrifying that Room 18 refused to believe him. The resourceful Polly induced his kid brother to ask the same question of one of the teachers. The answer was identical. The conquest of galaxies must be put off for an essentially infinite period—about ten years. A short era of disarray ensued, for the news brought to naught the carefully elaborated Operation Flowering Lilac, according to which the full complement of Room 18 would stow away on an interplanetary tanker bound for Pluto. The Captain had counted on revealing himself a week after takeoff and thus automatically merging his crew with that of the tanker.

The next blow was less unexpected, but much heavier for all of that. During this era of confusion the crew of the Galaktion somehow all at once became conscious of the fact—which they had been taught much earlier—that, strange as it might seem, the most honored professionals in the world were not spacemen, not undersea workers, and not even those mysterious subduers of monsters, the zoopsychologists, but doctors and teachers. In particular, it turned out that the World Council was sixty percent composed of teachers and doctors. That there were never enough teachers, while the world was rolling in spacemen. That without doctors, deep-sea workers would be in real trouble, but not vice versa. These devastating facts, as well as many others of the same ilk, were brought home to the consciousness of the crew in a horrifyingly prosaic fashion: on the most ordinary televised economics lesson; and, most frightful of all, the allegations were not disputed in the least degree by their teacher.

The third and final blow brought on genuine doubts. Engineer Lin was apprehended by the Captain in the act of reading Childhood Catarrhal Diseases, and in response to a sharp attack he insolently declared that in future he planned on bringing some concrete benefit to people, not merely the dubious data resultant from a life spent in outer space. The Captain and the navigator were obliged to bring to bear the most extreme measures of persuasion, under the pressure of which the recreant acknowledged that he would never make a children’s doctor anyhow, while in the capacity of ship’s engineer or, in a pinch, of hunter, he had a chance of winning himself eternal glory. Lieber Polly sat in the corner and kept silent for the duration of the inquiry, but from that time on he made it a rule, when under the least pressure, to blackmail the crew with venomous but incoherent threats such as, “I’ll go be a laryngologist” or “Ask Teacher who’s right.” Lin, on hearing these challenges, breathed heavily with envy. Doubt was dividing the crew of the Galaktion. Doubt assailed the soul even of the Captain.

Help arrived from the Outside World. A group of scientists who had been working on Venus completed, and proposed for the consideration of the World Council, a practical plan to precipitate out the atmospheric cover of Venus, with the aim of the eventual colonization of the planet. The World Council examined the plan and approved it. Now the turn had come of the wastes of Venus—the great fearsome planet was to be made into a second Earth. The adult world set to work. They built new machines and accumulated energy; the population of Venus skyrocketed. And in Room 18 of the Anyudin School, the captain of the Galaktion, under the curious gaze of his crew, worked feverishly on the plan of Operation October, which promised an unprecedented sweep of ideas, and a way out of the current serious crisis.

The plan was finished three hours after the publication of the World Council’s appeal, and was presented for the crew’s inspection. The October plan was striking in its brevity and in its information density:

Within six weeks, master the industrial and technological specifications of standard atmospherogenic assemblies.

Upon expiry of the above-mentioned period, early in the morning—so as not to disturb the housefather—run away from school and proceed to the Anyudin rocket station, and in the inevitable confusion attendant upon a landing, sneak into the cargo hold of some vessel on a near-Earth run and hide until touchdown;

Then see.

The plan was greeted with exclamations of “Zow-zow-zow!” and approved, with three votes for and one abstention. The abstention was the noble Athos-Sidorov. Gazing at the far horizon, he spoke with unusual scorn of “crummy atmosphere plants” and of “wild goose chases,” and averred that only the feelings of comradeship and mutual assistance prevented him from subjecting the plan to sharp criticism. However, he was prepared to withhold all objections, and he even undertook to think out certain aspects of their departure, provided than no one should look upon this as consent to the abandonment of the D-principle for the sake of a bunch of cruddy-smelling precipitators. The Captain made no comment but gave the order to set to work. The crew set to work.

In Room 18 of the Anyudin School, a geography lesson was in progress. On the screen of the teaching stereovision, a scorching cloud over Paricutin blazed with lightning, hissing lapilli flashed past, and the red tongue of a lava stream, like an arrowhead, thrust out of the crater. The topic was the science of volcanology, volcanoes in general and unsubdued volcanoes in particular. The tidy domes of the Chipo-Chipo volcanological station showed white through the gray magma that was piling up and that would harden only God knew when. In front of the stereovision sat Lin, his eyes glued to the screen and feverishly biting the nails of his right and left hands by turns. He was running late. He had spent the morning and half the afternoon on the playground, verifying a proposition expressed by his teacher the day before: that the ratio of the maximum height of a jump to the maximum length of a jump is approximately one to four. Lin had high-jumped and broad-jumped until he started seeing spots before his eyes. Then he obliged some little kids to concern themselves with the matter, and he tired them out completely, but the resultant data indicated that the teacher’s proposition was close to the truth. Now Lin was making up for what he had missed, and was watching the lessons the rest of the crew had already learned that morning.

Captain Genka, at his desk by the transparent outside wall of the room, was carefully copying the diagram for a medium-power two-phase oxygen installation. Lieber Polly was lying on his bed (an activity that was not encouraged during the daytime), pretending to read a fat book in a cheerless jacket—Introduction to the Operation of Atmospherogenic Assemblies. Navigator Athos-Sidorov stood by his desk and thought. This was his favorite pastime. Simultaneously he observed with contemptuous interest the instinctive reactions of Lin, who was enthralled by geography.

Beyond the transparent wall, under a kindly sun, the sand showed yellow and the slender pines rustled. The diving tower, with its long springboards, jutted over the lake.

The instructor’s voice began to tell how the volcano Stromboli had been extinguished, and Lin forgot himself completely. Now he was biting his nails on both hands at the same time, and the noble nerves of Athos could stand no more. “Lin,” he said, “stop that gnawing!”

Without turning around, Lin shrugged in vexation.

“He’s hungry!” declared Pol, coming to life. He sat up on the bed in order to elaborate upon this theme, but here the Captain slowly turned his large-browed head and glared at him.

“What are you looking at me for?” asked Pol. “I’m reading, I’m reading. ‘The output of the AGK-7 is sixteen cubic meters of ozonized oxygen per hour. The stra-ti-fi-ca-tion method permits—’”

“Read to yourself!” Athos advised.

“Well, I don’t think he’s bothering you,” the Captain said in an iron voice.

“You think he isn’t, and I think he is,” said Athos-Sidorov.

Their glances met. Pol watched the development of the incident with enjoyment. He was sick to the nth degree of the Introduction to.

“Have it your way,” said the Captain. “But I’m not figuring on doing everyone’s work myself. And you’re not doing anything, Athos. You’re as much use as a fifth wheel.”

The navigator smiled scornfully and did not deem it necessary to answer. At that moment the screen went out, and Lin turned around with a creak of his chair.

“Guys!” he said. “Zow! Guys! Let’s go there.”

“Let’s go!” Pol shouted, and jumped up.

“Where is there?” the Captain asked ominously.

“To Paricutin! To Mount Pelée! To—”

“Hold it!” yelled the Captain. “You’re a bunch of lousy traitors! I’m sick and tired of messing around with you! I’m going by myself. You can take off for wherever you feel like. Is that clear?”

“Phooey!” said Athos elegantly.

“Phooey yourself, you understand? You approved the plan, you shouted ‘zow-zow,’ but what are you doing now? Well, I’m just plain sick and tired of messing around with you. I’ll make a deal with Natasha or with that idiot Walter, you hear? You can go fly a kite. I’ve had it with you, and that’s final!”

The Captain turned his back and wrathfully resumed copying the blueprint. A heavy silence ensued. Polly quietly lay back down and resumed studying the Introduction to furiously. Athos compressed his lips, and the ponderous Lin got up and started pacing the room with his hands in his pockets. “Genka,” he said indecisively. “Captain, you-cut-this out. What do you want to—”

“You take off for your Mount Pelée,” the Captain muttered. “For your Paricutin. We’ll manage.”

“Captain… what are you saying? You can’t tell Walter, Genka!”

“Just watch me. I’ll tell him all right. He may be an idiot, but he’s no traitor.”

Lin increased his pace to a run without taking his hands out of his pockets. “What would you go and do that for, Captain? Look, Polly is already grinding.”

“‘Polly, Polly’! Polly is full of hot air. And I’ve just plain had it with Athos. Think of it—navigator of the Galaktion! The blow-hard!”

Lin turned to Athos. “You’re right. Athos, something… it’s not right, you know. We’re all trying.”

Athos studied the forested horizon. “What are you all jabbering for?” he inquired politely. “If I said I’d go, I’ll go. I don’t think I’ve ever lied to anyone yet. And I’ve never let anyone down, either.”

“Cut it out,” Lin said fiercely. “The Captain’s right. You’re just loafing, being a pig.”

Athos turned and narrowed his eyes. “So tell me, o Great Worker,” he said, “why is a Diehard inferior to an AGK-7 under conditions of nitrogen surplus?”

“Huh?” Lin said distractedly, and looked at the Captain. The Captain barely raised his head.

“What are the nine steps in operating an Eisenbaum?” asked Athos. “Who invented oxytane? You don’t know, you grind! Or in what year? You don’t know that either?”

That was Athos—a great man despite his numerous failings. A reverent silence settled over the room, except for Pol Gnedykh’s angry leafing of the pages of the Introduction.

“Who cares who invented what?” Lin muttered uncertainly, and stared helplessly at the Captain.

The Captain got up, went over to Athos, and poked him in the stomach with his fist. “Good man, Athos,” he declared. “I was a fool to think you were loafing.”

“Loafing!” Athos said, and poked the Captain in the side. He had accepted the apology.

“Zow! Guys!” proclaimed the Captain. “Set your course by Athos. Feeders on cycle, spacers! Stand by for Legen accelerations. Watch the reflector. Dust flow to the left! Zow!”

“Zow-zow-zow!” roared the crew of the Galaktion.

The Captain turned to Lin. “Engineer Lin,” he said, “do you have any questions on geography?”

“Nope,” the engineer reported in turn,

“What else do we have today?”

“Algebra and work,” said Athos.

“Ri-ight! So let’s start with a fight. The first pair’ll be Athos versus Lin. Polly, go sit down. Your legs are tired.”

Athos started getting ready for the fight. “Don’t forget to hide the materials,” he said, “They’re scattered all over—Teacher’ll see them.”

“Okay. We’re leaving tomorrow anyhow.”

Pol sat down on the bed and laid aside his book. “It doesn’t say here who invented oxytane.”

“Albert Jenkins,” the Captain said without having to think. “In seventy-two.”

Teacher Tenin arrived at Room 18, as always, at 4:00 p.m. There was no one in the room, but water was flowing copiously in the shower, and he could hear snorting, slapping, and exultant cries of “zow-zow-zow!” The crew of the Galaktion was washing up after their exertions in the workshops.

The teacher paced the room. Much here was familiar and usual. Lin, as always, had scattered his clothes over the whole room. One of his slippers lay on Athos’s desk, undoubtedly representing a yacht. The mast was made out of a pencil; the sail, of a sock. This, of course, was Pol’s work. In this regard Lin would mutter angrily, “You think that’s pretty smart, huh, Polly?” The transparency system for the walls and ceiling was out of order—Athos had done that. The controls were by the head of his bed, and as he went to sleep, he would play with them. He would lie there pressing keys, and at one moment the room would become quite dark, and in the next the night sky and moon over the park would appear. Usually the controls were broken, if no one had stopped Athos in time. Athos today was doomed to fix the transparency system.

Lin’s desk was chaos. Lin’s desk was always chaos, and there was nothing to be done about it. This was simply one of those cases where the teacher’s contrivances and the entire powerful apparatus of child psychology were helpless.

As a rule, everything new in the room was linked with the Captain. Today there were diagrams on his desk that had not been there before. It was something new, and consequently something that required some thinking. Teacher Tenin very much liked new things. He sat down at the Captain’s desk and began to look over the diagrams.

From the shower room came:

“Add a little more cold, Polly!”

“Don’t! It’s cold already! I’m freezing!”

“Hold onto him, Lin. It’ll toughen him up.”

“Athos, hand me the scraper.”

“Where’s the soap, guys?”

Someone fell onto the floor with a crash. A yelp: “What idiot threw the soap under my feet?”

Laughter, cries of “Zow!”

“Very clever! Boy, will I get you!”

“Back! Pull in your manipulators, you!”

The teacher looked the diagrams over and replaced them. The plot thickens, he thought. Now an oxygen concentrator. The boys are really taken up with Venus. He got up and looked under Pol’s pillow. There lay the Introduction to. It had been thoroughly leafed through. The teacher flipped thoughtfully through the pages and put the book back. Even Pol, he thought. Curious.

Then he saw that the boxing gloves that had been lying on Lin’s desk day in and day out, regularly and unvaryingly for the last two years, were missing. Over the Captain’s bed, the photograph of Gorbovsky in a vacuum suit was gone, and Pol’s desktop was empty.

Teacher Tenin understood everything. He realized that they wanted to run away, and he knew where they wanted to run to. He even knew when they wanted to go. The photograph was missing, and therefore it was in the Captain’s knapsack. Therefore the knapsack was already packed. Therefore they were leaving tomorrow morning, early. The Captain always liked to do a thorough job, and not put off until tomorrow what he could do today. (On the other hand, Pol’s knapsack couldn’t be ready yet—Pol preferred to do everything the day after tomorrow.) So they were going tomorrow, out through the window so as not to disturb the housefather. They had a great dislike of disturbing housefathers. And who did not?

The teacher glanced under a bed. The Captain’s knapsack was made up with enviable neatness. Pol’s lay under his bed. Pol’s favorite shirt—red stripes and no collar—stuck out from the knapsack. In the cabinet reposed a ladder skillfully woven from sheets, undoubtedly Athos’s creation.

So… that meant there was some thinking to be done. Teacher Tenin grew gloomy and cheerful simultaneously.

Pol, wearing only shorts, came tearing out of the shower room, saw the teacher, and turned a cartwheel.

“Not bad, Pol!” the teacher exclaimed. “Only keep your legs straight.”

“Zow!” Pol yelped, and cartwheeled the other way. “Teacher, spacemen! Teacher’s here!”

They always forgot to say hello.

The crew of the Galaktion darted into the room and got stuck in the doorway. Teacher Tenin looked at them and thought… nothing. He loved them very much. He always loved them. All of them. All those he brought up and launched into the wide world. There were many of them, and these were the best of all. Because they were now. They were standing at attention and looking at him just the way he liked. Almost.

“K-T-T-U-S-T-X-D,” signaled the teacher. This meant, “Calling crew of Galaktion. Have good visual contact. Is there dust on course?”

“T-T-Q-U-Z-C,” the crew answered discordantly. They also had good visual contact, and there was almost no dust on the course.

“Suit up!” the teacher commanded, and stared at his chronometer.

Without saying anything more, the crew rushed to suit up.

“Where’s my other sock?” Lin yelled, and then he saw the yacht. “You think that’s clever, Polly?” he muttered.

The suiting-up lasted thirty-nine and some tenths seconds,

Lin finishing last. “You pig, Polly,” he grumbled. “Wise guy!”

Then everyone sat down at random, and the teacher said, “Literature, geography, algebra, and work. Right?”

“And a little phys ed too,” added Athos.

“Undoubtedly,” said the teacher. “That’s clear from your swollen nose. And speaking of phys ed, Pol is still bending his legs. Alexandr, you show him how.”

“Okay,” Lin said with satisfaction. “But he’s a little slow, Teacher.”

Pol answered quickly, “Better a somewhat sluggish knee / Than a head full of stupidity.”

“C plus.” The teacher shook his head. “Not too elegant, but the idea is clear. In thirty years maybe you’ll learn to be witty, Pol, but when it happens don’t abuse your power.”

“I’ll try not to,” Pol said modestly.

C plus wasn’t so bad, but Lin sat there red and sulky. By evening he would have thought up a rejoinder.

“Let’s talk about literature,” Teacher Tenin proposed. “Captain Komov, how is your composition feeling today?”

“I wrote about Gorbovsky,” the Captain said, and fished in his desk.

“A fine topic!” said the teacher. “I hope you’ve been equal to it.”

“He’s not equal to anything,” Athos declared. “He thinks that the important thing about Gorbovsky is the know-how.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think that the main thing about Gorbovsky is the daring, the courage.”

“I would suppose you’re wrong, Navigator,” said the teacher. “There are very many daring people. And among spacemen you won’t find any cowards. The cowards simply die out. But the Assaultmen, especially ones like Gorbovsky, are unique. I ask you to believe me because I know, and you don’t, not yet. But you’ll find out, Navigator. And what did you write?”

“I wrote about Doctor Mboga,” said Athos.

“Where did you find out about him?”

“I gave him a book about flying leeches,” Pol explained.

“Wonderful, boys! Have you all read the book?”

“Yes,” said Lin.

“Who didn’t like it?”

“We all liked it,” Pol said with pride. “I dug it out of the library.”

He of course had forgotten that the teacher had recommended that book to him. He always forgot such details—he very much liked to “discover” books. And he liked everyone to know about this. He liked publicity.

“Good for you, Pol!” said the teacher. “And you, of course, wrote about Doctor Mboga too?”

“I wrote a poem!”

“Oho, Pol! And aren’t you afraid?”

“What is there to be afraid of?” Pol said blithely. “I read it to Athos. The only things he complained about were trivia. And just a little bit.”

The teacher looked doubtfully at Athos. “Hmm. As far as I know Navigator Sidorov, he is rarely distracted by trivia. Well see, we’ll see. And you, Alexandr?”

Lin silently thrust a thick composition book at the teacher. A monstrous smudge spread over the cover. “Zvantsev,” he explained. “The oceanographer.”

“Who is that?” Pol asked jealously.

Lin looked at him with shocked contempt and remained silent. Pol was mortified. It was unbearable. It was awful. He had never so much as heard of Zvantsev the oceanographer.

“Well, great,” the teacher said, and gathered up the composition books. “I’ll read them and think about them. We’ll talk about them tomorrow.”

He immediately regretted saying that. The Captain was so visibly discomfited by the word “tomorrow.” To lie, to dissemble, ran very much against the grain of the boy. There was no need to torture them—he would have to be more careful in his choice of words. After all, they were not planning anything bad. They were not even in any danger—they would get no farther than Anyudin. But they would have to come back, and that would really hurt. The whole school would laugh at them. Kids were sometimes malicious, especially in cases like this, where their comrades imagined that they could do something that others couldn’t. He thought of the great scoffers in Rooms 20 and 72, and about the jolly smallfry who would jump with a whoop upon the captive crew of the Galaktion and tear them limb from limb.

“Speaking of algebra,” he said. (The crew smiled. They very much liked that “speaking of.” It seemed to them so enthrallingly illogical.) “In my day one very quaint instructor gave the lectures on the history of mathematics. He would stand by the board”—the teacher started to demonstrate—”and begin, ‘Even the ancient Greeks knew that (a+b)² equals a² plus 2ab plus—’” The teacher looked at his imaginary notes. “‘Plus… uhhh… b².’”

The crew broke out into laughter. The seasoned spacemen looked at Teacher. They were in raptures. They thought this man was great and simple, like the world.

“But now look at what curious things sometimes happen with (a+b)²,” the teacher said, and sat down. Everyone crowded around him.

There began that without which the crew could no longer live and the teacher would not want to—the adventures of numbers in space and time. A mistake in a coefficient threw a ship off course and plunged it into a black abyss from which there would be no return for the man who had put a plus instead of a minus before the radical; a cumbersome, horrible-looking polynomial broke up into astonishingly simple factors, and Lin yelped in distress, “Where were my eyes? How simple!”; there resounded the strange, solemn-funny stanzas of Cardano, who had described in verse his method of solving cubic equations; the incredibly mysterious story of Fermat’s Last Theorem rose up from the depths of history…

Then the teacher said, “Fine, boys. Now you can see: if you can reduce all of your problems in life to polynomials, they’ll be solved. At least approximately.”

“I wish I could reduce them to polynomials,” burst out Pol, who had suddenly remembered that tomorrow he wouldn’t be here, that he had to leave Teacher, perhaps forever.

“I read you, Comrade Computerman,” the teacher said affectionately. “The most difficult part is putting the question properly. Six centuries of mathematical development will do the rest for you. And sometimes you can get along even without the mathematics.” He was silent for a moment. “Well, boys, shall we have a four-one fight?”

“Zow!” the crew exploded, and dashed out of the room, because for the game four-one you needed room, and soft ground underfoot. Four-one was an exacting game, demanding great intelligence and an excellent knowledge of the ancient holds of the sambo system of combat. The crew worked up a sweat, and Teacher threw off his jacket and collected himself a few scratches. Then they all sat under a pine on the sand and rested.

“On Pandora a scratch like that would call for an emergency alarm,” the teacher informed them, looking at his palm. “They’d put me in isolation in the med section, and would drown me in virophages.”

“But what if a crayspider bit off your hand?” Pol asked with sweet horror.

The teacher looked at him. “A crayspider doesn’t bite like that,” he said. “It couldn’t get a hand into its mouth. Anyway, now Professor Karpenko is working on an interesting little thing which makes virophages look like kid games. Have you heard about bioblockading?”

“Tell us!” The crew were all ears.

Teacher started to tell them about bioblockading. The crew listened with such fascination that Tenin felt sorry that the world was so enormous, and that he couldn’t tell them right now about everything known and unknown. They listened without stirring, hanging on his every word. And everything was very fine, but he knew that the ladder made from sheets was waiting in the cabinet, and he knew that the Captain—at least the Captain!—knew this too. How to stop them? Tenin thought. How? There were many ways, but none of them were any good, because he had not only to stop them, but to make them understand why they must stop themselves. There was also one good way. One, at least. But for that he would need a night, and a few books on the regeneration of atmospheres, and the complete plan of the Venus project, and two tablets of sporamine in order to last it out. The boys couldn’t leave that night. And not that evening either—the Captain was intelligent and saw a good deal. He saw that Teacher was onto something, and maybe onto everything. So I’ll do without night, thought the teacher. But give me just four or five hours. I’ve got to hold them back, keep them busy, for that long. How?

“Speaking of love of neighbor,” he said—and the crew once more rejoiced in that ‘speaking of’—”what do you call a person who picks on those weaker than himself?”

“A parasite,” Lin said quickly. He could not express himself more strongly.

“The three worst things are a coward, a liar, and a bully,” recited Athos. “Why do you ask, Teacher? We never have been, and we never will be.”

“I know. But in the school it happens… sometimes.”

“Who?” Pol jumped up. “Tell us, who?”

The teacher hesitated. Actually, what he planned to do was foolish. To involve the boys in such a matter meant risking a good deal. They were hot-headed and could ruin everything. And Teacher Schein would be justified in saying something not very pleasant regarding Teacher Tenin. But he had to stop them and…

“Walter Saronian,” the teacher said slowly. “But this is hearsay, boys. Everything has to be carefully verified.” He looked at them. Poor Walter! Knots of tension moved across the Captain’s cheeks. Lin was terrible to behold.

“We’ll check it out,” Pol said, his eyes narrowing meanly. “We’ll be very careful.”

Athos exchanged glances with the Captain. Poor Walter!

“Let’s talk about volcanoes,” proposed the teacher. And he thought, It will be a little hard to talk about volcanoes. But I think I’ve hit on the natural thing to hold them back until dark. Poor Walter! Yes, they’ll verify everything very carefully, because the Captain doesn’t like to make mistakes. Then they’ll go looking for Walter. All that will take a lot of time. It’s hard to find a twelve-year-old after supper in a park that occupies four hundred hectares. They won’t leave until late evening. I’ve won my five hours, and… oh, my poor head! How are you going to cram in four books and a six-hundred-page plan?

And Teacher Tenin started telling them how in eighty-two he had happened to take part in the extinguishing of the volcano Stromboli.

They caught up with Walter Saronian in the park, by the pond. This was in one of the park’s most remote corners, where not every smallfry would venture, and therefore only a few knew about the pond’s existence. It was spring-fed, with dark deep water in which, fins moving, large yellow fish rested between the long green water-lily stems stretching up from the bottom. The local hunters called the fish bliamb, and shot them with homemade underwater rifles.

Walter Saronian was stark naked except for a face mask. In his hands was an air pistol that shot jagged-edged darts, and on his feet were red and blue swim fins. He stood in a haughty pose, drying off, with his mask pushed up on his forehead.

“We’ll get him wet for a start,” whispered Pol.

The Captain nodded. Polly rustled the bushes and gave a quiet, low-pitched cough. Walter did exactly what any of them would have done in his place. He pulled the mask over his face and, wasting no time, dove without the least splash into the water. Slow ripples swept over the dark surface, and the water-lily leaves placidly rose and sunk a few times.

“Pretty well done,” Lin remarked, and all four emerged from the bushes and stood on the bank, looking into the dark water.

“He dives better than I do,” said the objective Pol, “but I wouldn’t want to trade places with him now.”

They sat down on the bank. The waves dispersed, and the water-lily leaves grew still. The low sun shone through the pines. It was a bit close, and quiet.

“Who’s going to do the talking?” inquired Athos.

“I am,” Lin eagerly suggested.

“Let me,” said Pol. “You can follow it up.”

The gloomy Captain nodded. He did not like any of this. Night was approaching, and nothing was ready yet. They wouldn’t manage to get away today, that was for sure. Then he remembered Teacher’s kind eyes, and all desire to leave evaporated. Teacher had once told him, “All the worst in a human being begins with a lie.”

“There he is!” Lin said in a low tone. “Swimming.”

They sat in a semicircle by the water and waited. Walter swam beautifully and easily—he no longer had the pistol.

“Hi, Eighteen,” he said as he was climbing out of the water. “You really snuck up on me.” He stopped knee-deep in the water and started to dry himself with his hands.

Pol went first. “Happy sixteenth birthday,” he said warmly.

Walter took off his mask and opened his eyes wide. “What?” he said.

“Happy sixteenth birthday, old buddy,” Pol said still more affectionately.

“Somehow I don’t quite understand you, Polly.” Walter smiled uncomfortably. “You always say such clever things,”

“Right,” agreed the objective Pol. “I’m smarter than you. Besides, I read a whole lot more. And so?”

“And so what?”

“You didn’t say thank you,” Athos explained, taking up the lead. “We came to say happy birthday.”

“What is this, guys?” Walter shifted his gaze from one to another, trying to make out what they wanted. His conscience was not clear, and he began to be wary. “What birthday? My birthday was a month ago, and I turned twelve, not sixteen.”

“What?” Polly was very much surprised. “Then I don’t understand what this face mask is doing here.”

“And the fins,” said Athos.

“And the pistol you hid on the other bank,” said Lin, joining in again.

“Twelve-year-olds can’t swim underwater by themselves,” the Captain said angrily.

“Well, well!” Walter swelled up with contempt. “So you’re going to tell my teacher?”

“What a nasty little boy!” exclaimed Pol, turning toward the Captain. The Captain did not deny it. “He means that he would rat if he caught me like that. Eh? So he’s not just a rulebreaker, he’s a—”

“Rules, rules,” muttered Walter. “Haven’t you ever gone hunting under water? Just think, I shot a bunch of bliamb.”

“Yes, we’ve gone hunting,” said Athos. “But always the four of us. Never alone. And we always tell Teacher about it. And he trusts us.”

“You lie to your teacher,” said Pol. “That means you could lie to anyone, Walter. But I like the way you’re trying to make excuses.”

The Captain narrowed his eyes. The good old formula—it cut him to pieces now: “Lie to teacher, lie to anyone.” It was stupid getting involved this way with Walter. Perfectly stupid. We have no right…

Walter was very uncomfortable. He said plaintively, “Let me get dressed, guys. It’s cold. And… it’s none of your business. It’s my business, and my teacher’s. Isn’t that right, Captain?”

The Captain parted his lips. “He’s right, Polly. And he’s already softened up-he’s making up excuses.”

Pol pompously agreed: “Oh, yes, he’s ready. His conscience is flickering. This was a psychological study, Walter. I really like studies in psychology.”

“You and your bunch can clear out!” Walter muttered, and tried to get to his clothes.

“Quiet!” said Athos. “Don’t be in such a hurry. That was the pre-am-ble. And now the amble begins.”

“Let me,” said the mighty Lin, standing up.

“No, no, Lin,” said Pol. “Don’t. It’s vulgar. He won’t understand.”

“He’ll understand,” Lin promised. “He’ll understand me all right.”

Walter jumped nimbly into the water. “Four against one!” he shouted. “Conscience? Screw you!”

Pol jumped up and down with rage. “Four against one!” he yelled. “That smallfry Valka was four times weaker than you. No, five times, six times! But you knocked the daylights out of him, you lousy pig! You could’ve found Lin or the Captain if your paws were itching!”

Walter was pale. He had fastened his face mask, but he had not pulled it down, and now he was looking around distractedly, seeking a way out. He was cold. And he understood.

“Shame on you, Walter!” said the majestic Athos. “I think you’re a coward. Shame on you. Come on out. You can fight us one at a time.”

Walter hesitated, then came out. He knew what it was to fight Room 18, but still he came out and took up a stance. He felt that he had to settle up, and he realized that this was the best way to do it. Athos pulled his shirt over his head unhurriedly.

“Hold it!” yelled Pol. “It’ll leave bruises! And we have something else to do!”

“Let me do it,” requested the mighty Lin. “I’ll be quick.”

“No!” Pol quickly started undressing. “Walter! Do you know what the worst thing in the world is? I’ll remind you—to be a coward, a liar, or a bully. You’re not a coward, thank God, but you’ve forgotten the rest of it. And I want you to remember for a long time. I’m coming in, Walter. Repeat the magic words.”

He gathered up Walter’s clothes, which were lying in the bushes, and jumped into the water.

Walter watched him helplessly, and Athos started bounding exultantly along the shore. “Polly!” he shouted. “Polly, you’re a genius! Walter, how come you’re not saying anything? Say it, say it, gorilla: a liar, a coward, or a bully.”

The Captain gloomily kept track of Polly, who was dog-paddling, making a tremendous noise, and leaving a foamy trail behind him. Yes, Polly was as clever as ever. The opposite shore was overgrown with stinging nettles, and Walter could search there naked for his pants and such. In the dark, for the sun was setting. That’s just what he needs. But who’s going to punish us? We’re no angels ourselves—we’re liars. That’s not much better than being a bully.

Polly came back. Gasping and spitting, he climbed onto the bank and immediately said, “There you are, Walter. Go and get dressed, gorilla. I don’t swim as well as you, and I don’t dive as well, but I wouldn’t like to trade places with you now!”

Walter did not look at him. He silently pulled the mask over his face and got into the warm, steaming water. Before him was the bank with the stinging nettles.

“Remember!” Pol shouted after him. “A coward, a liar, or a bully. A bully, Walter! There’s nothing worse than that. The nettles’ll help out your bad memory.”

“Right,” said Athos. “Get dressed, Lieber Polly. You’ll catch cold.”

They could hear Walter on the opposite shore, hissing with pain through his teeth as he pushed through the thickets.

When they got back home to Room 18, it was already late evening—after Walter’s chastisement, Lin had proposed that they play Pandora to relax, and Pandora was played with great gusto. Athos, Lin, and the Captain were hunters, and Polly the giant crayspider, while the park was the Pandoran jungle—impenetrable, marshy, and terrifying. The moon, which showed up at just the right time, played EN 9, one of Pandora’s suns. They played until the giant crayspider, leaping from a tree onto Lin the hunter, tore his superdurable tetraconethylene pants down their entire length. Then they had to go home. They did not want to disturb the housefather, and the Captain was about to propose that they go in through the garbage chute (a magnificent idea that flashed like lightning through his gloomy ruminations), but then decided to take advantage of a humble workshop window.

They came into Room 18 noisily, discussing on the run the dazzling prospects opening up in connection with the idea of the garbage chute, and then they saw Teacher sitting at Athos’s desk with a book in his hands.

“I ripped my pants,” Pol said in confusion. Naturally he forgot to say good evening.

“Really!” exclaimed the teacher. “Tetraconethylene?”

“Uh-huh.” Pol basked in his glory.

Lin grew green with envy.

“But boys,” said the teacher, “I don’t know how to mend them!”

The crew began to yell with triumph. They all knew how. They all thirsted to demonstrate, to talk and to do the repair.

“Go ahead,” the teacher agreed. “But Navigator Sidorov will fix not the pants, but the transparancy system. Fate is cruel to him.”

“Great galaxies!” said Athos. He could hardly reconcile himself to it.

Everyone got busy, including the Captain. For some reason he felt happy. We won’t leave tomorrow, he thought. We’ll stay a little longer and make plans. The idea of running away no longer seemed so attractive to him, but he could not very well let six weeks of study go for nothing.

“There are remarkable and interesting problems,” Teacher told them, deftly wielding the high-frequency nozzle. “There are problems as great as the world. But there are also problems that are small but extremely interesting. A few days back I was reading an old, old book—very interesting. One thing it said was that up to that time the problem of ignis fatuus had never been solved—you know, the will-o’-the-wisp, in swamps? It was clear that it was some sort of chemiluminescent substance, but what? Phosphorus trisulphide, for example? I linked up with the Informatoreum, and what do you think? That riddle isn’t solved even today!”

“Why not?”

“The fact is that it’s very hard to catch this ignis fatuus. Like Truth, it flickers in the distance and refuses to be apprehended. Lepelier tried to construct a cybernetic system to hunt it down, but nothing came of it.”

Teacher Tenin’s head ached unbearably. He felt awful. In the past four hours he had read and mastered four books on atmosphere regeneration, and had memorized the Venus plan. He had been forced to resort to the hypnoteacher for this, and after the hypnoteacher it was absolutely essential to lie down and sleep it off. But he couldn’t. Perhaps he should not have overloaded his brain that way, but the teacher did not want to take chances. He had to know ten times more about Venus and about the project than the four of them put together. Otherwise his plan wasn’t worth wasting time on.

Waiting for the moment to turn to the attack, he told them about the search for ignis fatuus, and he saw their childish eyes open wide, and saw the flame of great imagination writhe and flare in them, and as always it felt surprisingly gladdening and good to see this, even though his head was splitting into pieces.

But the boys were already sloshing through a marsh, wearing real, entrancing swamp boots, and around them were night, darkness, fog, and mysterious thickets; and from the depths of the swamp rushed clouds of repulsive exhalations, and it was very dangerous and frightening, but you mustn’t be afraid. In front flickered the bluish tongues of ignis fatuus, whose secret—as was now clear—it was vital to discover, and on the chest of each of the hunters hung a miniaturized control for the trusty agile cybers who were stumbling through the quagmire. And these cybers had to be invented quickly, immediately, or else the last swamps would be drained and everyone would be left looking like fools.

By the time that the pants and the transparency system had been put into shape, no one cared any more about either. Pol was musing on a poem to be called “Will o’ the Wisp,” and while pulling on his pants he uttered the first line to flow out of him: “Mark! In the dark—The swampfire’s glimmering spark!” The Captain and Athos, independently of each other, cogitated upon the design of a swamp cyber suitable for rapid locomotion through marshy regions, and reacting to chemiluminescence. Lin simply sat with his mouth open and thought, Where were my eyes? How about that! He firmly resolved to devote the rest of his life to swamps.

The teacher thought, It’s time. Just so I don’t force them to lie or dissemble. Forward, Tenin! And he began, “Speaking of diagrams, Captain Komov, what is this misshapen thing?” He tapped the diagram of the extractor with his finger. “You distress me, lad. The idea is good, but the execution is highly unsuccessful.”

The Captain flared up and rushed into battle.

At midnight Teacher Tenin came out into the park and stopped by his pterocar. The enormous flat block of the school lay before him. All the windows on the first floor were dark, but above, some lights were still on. There was light in Room 20, where the five noted scoffers must be having a discussion with their teacher Sergei Tomakov, a former doctor. There was light in Room 107, where shadows were moving and it was clear that somebody was hitting somebody else over the head with a pillow, and intended to go on hitting him until the inaudible and invisible stream of infrarays forced even the most restless to go to sleep, which would happen in two minutes. There was light in many of the rooms of the oldest pupils—they were working on problems a little more important than ignis fatuus or how to put back together a torn pair of tetraconethylene pants. And there was light in Room 18.

The teacher got into the pterocar and began to watch the familiar window. His head raged on. He wanted to lie down and close his eyes, and put something cold and heavy on his forehead. Well, my boys, he thought. Have I really stopped you? Oh, how hard it is, what a burden. And I’m not always sure whether I’m right, but in the end I’ve always turned out to be. And how remarkable that is, and how wonderful, and I couldn’t live without it.

The light in Room 18 went out. So he could go to sleep. He felt sleepy, but also sorry. I probably didn’t tell them everything I could have and should have. No, I did too. I wish it were morning! I feel bored without them, and lonely. Crummy little kids! Teacher Tenin smiled and turned on the engine. He wished it were morning.

In Room 18, courageously fighting off sleep, the Captain was delivering a speech. The crew kept silent.

“Disgraceful! Showed up everyone! You lousy spongers! You miserable collection of slowboats and ignoramuses! What have you been doing for forty days? You, Lin? Shame on you! Not one intelligent answer.”

Athos, playing with the transparency controls, muttered, “Cut the nagging, Captain! You’re one to talk—out of five questions you missed four. And on the fifth—”

“What do you mean, out of five—”

“Don’t argue, Captain, I counted.”

If Athos said he had counted, that was it. Good grief, how disgraceful! The Captain screwed his eyes up to the point where he saw spots before his eyes. Operation October had failed. Had collapsed disgracefully. You couldn’t storm Venus with this bunch of ignoramuses. No one had understood anything or learned anything. How much there was to cram about atmospheric assemblies, damn it all! We’re not ready to go anywhere. The great colonists from Room 18—ha!

But Walter had really gotten his. Should they hand out some more? No, that was enough. And enough of all this nonsense in general. It was time to think about ignis fatuus.

… The Captain was sloshing through the swamp, together with Athos and Lin and Polly, who was wearing tattered pants. Amid the hazy exhalations flashed the quick-moving cybers, which they still had to invent.

5. Chronicle

Novosibirsk, 8 October 2021. It was announced here today that the commission of the USCR Academy of Sciences studying the results of the Taimyr-Ermak expedition has finished its work.

As is well known, in pursuance of the international program of research into deep space and into the possibility of interstellar travel, in 2017 the Academy of Sciences of the USCR sent into deep space an expedition consisting of the two first-line interplanetary craft Taimyr and Ermak. The expedition departed November 7,2017, from the international spaceport Pluto-2, in the direction of the constellation Lyra. The crew of the spaceship Taimyr consisted of captain and expedition head A. E. Zhukov, engineers K. I. Falin and G. A. Pollack, navigator S. I. Kondratev, cyberneticist P. Koenig, and physician E. M. Slavin. The spaceship Ermak served as an unmanned data collector.

The purpose of the expedition was to attempt to approach the light barrier (an absolute velocity of 300 thousand kilometers per second), and to perform research in proximity to the light barrier into the characteristics of space-time under arbitrary changes of velocity.

On 16 May 2020, the unmanned craft Ermak was detected and intercepted near the planet Pluto on its return orbit, and was brought to the international spaceport Pluto-2. The spaceship Taimyr did not appear on its planned return orbit.

A study of the data obtained by the spacecraft Ermak has demonstrated, in part, the following:

a) On the 327th day, subjective time, the Taimyr-Ermak expedition attained a velocity of 0.957 absolute relative to the sun, and turned to the execution of the research program; b) The expedition obtained, and the receiving devices on the Ermak recorded, extremely valuable data relating to the behavior of space-time under conditions of arbitrary changes of velocity in proximity to the light barrier; c) On the 342nd day, subjective time, the Taimyr initiated planned maneuvers bringing its distance from the Ermak up to 900 million kilometers. At 13 hours 09 minutes 11.2 seconds of the 344th day, subjective time, the tracking equipment on the Ermak detected, at the location of the Taimyr, a bright flash, after which the data flow from the Taimyr to the Ermak ceased, and was not resumed.

On the basis of the above-mentioned information, the commission has been obliged to conclude that the first-line interplanetary craft Taimyr has been lost with all hands (Aleksei Eduardovich Zhukov, Konstantin Ivanovich Falin, George Allen Pollack, Sergei Ivanovich Kondratev, Peter Koenig, and Evgeny Markovich Slavin) as a result of a serious accident. The cause and nature of the accident remain undetermined.

—Bulletin of the International Scientific Data Center, No. 237 (9 October 2021).

6. Two from the Taimyr

After his midday meal, Sergei Kondratev took a little nap. When he woke up, Evgeny Slavin came in. Evgeny’s red hair lit up the walls—they turned pink, as at sunset. Evgeny smelled pleasantly but powerfully of an unfamiliar cologne.

“Hello, Sergei old man!” he shouted from the threshold.

And immediately someone said, “Please, talk a little more quietly.”

Evgeny nodded readily toward the corridor, walked over to the bed on tiptoe, and sat so that Kondratev could see him without turning his head. His face was joyful, exultant. Kondratev could no longer remember when he had last seen him like that. And he saw the long reddish scar on Evgeny’s face for the first time.

“Hello, Evgeny,” Kondratev said.

Evgeny’s head of flaming hair suddenly blurred. Kondratev squinted and sobbed. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he muttered angrily.

“Sorry about that. I’ve gone all to pieces here. Well, how are you doing?”

“All right, quite all right,” Evgeny said in a choked-up voice. “Everything is simply amazing! The main thing is that they’ve brought you through. I was really worried about you, Sergei. Especially at first. All by myself, the depression, the homesickness! I rush off to see you and they won’t let me in. I swear at them, and it makes no dent at all. I start talking, arguing, trying to prove that I’m a doctor myself… though what kind of a doctor am I now, anyhow?

“All right, I believe you, I believe you,” Kondratev said affectionately.

“And suddenly today Protos himself calls me. You’re really on the mend, Sergei! In ten days or so I’ll be teaching you how to drive a pterocar. I’ve already ordered you one.”

“Oh?” said Kondratev. He had a spinal column broken in four places and a torn diaphragm, and his neck had parted from his skull. In his delirium he kept imagining himself as a rag doll that had been flattened under the caterpillar track of a truck. But you could depend on Protos. The doctor was a ruddy fat man, around fifty years old (or a hundred—who could tell these days?), very taciturn and very kind. He came every morning and every evening, sat down beside the bed, and breathed out so comfortably that Kondratev at once would begin to feel better. And he was, of course, a superb doctor, if up to now he had kept alive a rag doll flattened by a truck.

“Well, what the hell,” said Kondratev. “Could be.”

“Hey!” Evgeny shouted enthusiastically. “In ten days you’ll be driving a pterocar for me. Protos is a magician, and I say that as a former doctor!”

“Yes,” said Kondratev. “Protos is a very good man.”

“A brilliant doctor! When I found out what he was working on, I realized that I would have to change professions. So I’m changing professions, Sergei! I’m going to be a writer!”

“So,” said Kondratev. “You mean the writers haven’t gotten any better?”

“Well, you see,” said Evgeny, “one thing is clear: they’re all modernists, and I’ll be the only classicist. Like Trediakovsky the poet in the eighteenth century.”

Kondratev looked at Evgeny out of half-opened eyes. Evgeny certainly was not wasting time. Dressed in the height of fashion, no doubt-shorts and a loose soft jacket with short sleeves and an open collar. Not one single seam, everything in soft, bright colors. The hair given a light, casual trim. Smooth-shaven and co-logned. He was even trying to enunciate the way the greatgrandchildren did-firmly and resonantly, and without gesticulation. And the pterocar… and only a few weeks had gone by. “Evgeny, I’ve forgotten again what year it is here,” Kondratev said.

“Two thousand one hundred and nineteen,” Evgeny answered ceremoniously. “They just say ‘one nineteen’.”

“Well then, Evgeny,” Kondratev said very seriously. “How are redheads doing? Have they survived into the twenty-second century or have they all died out?”

Evgeny answered just as ceremoniously, “Yesterday I had the honor of conversing with the secretary of the Northwest Asian Economic Council: a most intelligent man, and quite infrared.”

They laughed and looked at each other. Then Kondratev asked, “Listen, Evgeny, where did you get that slash across your face?”

“That?” Evgeny fingered the scar. “You mean you can still see it?” he asked, distressed.

“Well, naturally,” said Kondratev. “Red on white.”

“I got that the same time you got smashed up. But they promised it would go away soon. Disappear without a trace. And I believe it, because they can do anything.”

“Who are ‘they’?” Kondratev asked gravely.

“What do you mean who? People—Earthlings.”

“You mean ‘we’?”

Evgeny was silent a moment. “Of course,” he said uncertainly. “‘We.’ In one sense of the word.” He stopped smiling and looked at Kondratev attentively. “Sergei,” he said softly, “does it hurt a lot, Sergei?”

Kondratev smiled weakly and said with his eyes, No, not much. But it was still good that Evgeny had asked. “Sergei, does it hurt a lot, Sergei?”—those were good words, and he had said them well. He had said them exactly as he had on the unlucky day when the Taimyr had buried itself in the shifting dust of a nameless planet and Kondratev, during a sortie, had hurt his leg.

That had hurt a lot, although, of course, not like now. Evgeny had thrown away his movie camera and had crawled along the crumbling slope of a dune, dragging Kondratev after him and swearing furiously. And then, when at last they had managed to scramble onto the crest of the dune, Evgeny had felt Kondratev’s leg through the fabric of the spacesuit and had suddenly asked quietly, “Sergei, does it hurt a lot, Sergei?” Over the pale blue desert a hot white disk crawled into the violet sky, static hissed annoyingly in the headphones, and they sat a long time waiting for the return of the cyberscout. The cyberscout never did return—probably it had sunk into the dust—and finally they had started crawling back to the Taimyr…

“What do you want to write about?” Kondratev asked. “About our trip?”

Evgeny began to speak with animation about sections and chapters, but Kondratev was no longer listening. He looked at the ceiling and thought, It hurts, it hurts, it hurts. And as always when the pain became unendurable, an oval hatch opened in the ceiling, and a rough gray tube with tiny winking green openings slid out noiselessly. The tube came down steadily until it had almost touched Kondratev’s chest, and then stopped. Then a quiet vibrating rumble began.

“Wh-what’s that?” Evgeny asked, jumping up.

Kondratev remained silent, his eyes closed, delightedly feeling the mad pain subside, disappear.

“Perhaps I had better leave?” Evgeny said, looking around.

The pain had gone. The tube retracted noiselessly upward, and the hatch in the ceiling closed.

“No,” said Kondratev. “That’s just treatment. Sit down, Evgeny.” He tried to remember what Evgeny had been talking about. Yes—a fictionalized sketch to be called Across the Light Barrier. About the flight of the Taimyr. About the attempt to slip through the light barrier. About the accident that had brought the Taimyr across a century.

“Listen, Evgeny,” Kondratev said. “Do they understand what happened to us?”

“Yes, of course,” said Evgeny.

“Well?”

“Hmm,” said Evgeny. “They understand, of course. But that doesn’t help us any. I for one can’t understand what they understand.”

“But still?”

“I told them everything, and they said, ‘Ah, yes: Sigma deritrinitation.’”

“What?” said Kondratev.

“De-ri-tri-ni-ta-tion. With a sigma in front.”

“Trimpazation,” Kondratev muttered. “Did they happen to say anything else?”

“They told me straight out, ‘Your Taimyr came right up to the light barrier under Legen acceleration and sigma-deritrinitated the space-time continuum.’ They said that we shouldn’t have resorted to Legen accelerations.”

“Right,” said Kondratev. “So then we shouldn’t have resorted, but the fact remains that we did resort. Deri-teri—What’s that word?”

“Deritrinitation. That’s the third time I’ve told you. To put it briefly, so far as I understand it, any body approaching the light barrier under certain conditions distorts the form of worldlines extremely strongly, and pierces Riemann space, so to speak. Well… that’s about what Bykov Junior had predicted in our day.”

“Uh-huh,” said Kondratev.

“They call this penetration deritrinitation.’ All their long-range ships work on that principle. D-ships.”

“Uh-huh,” Kondratev said again.

“Under deritrinitation, those same Legen accelerations are especially hazardous. I didn’t understand at all where they come from or what they consist of. Some sort of local vibrational field, plasmatic hypertransition, or something. The fact remains that under Legen interference extraordinarily strong distortions of time scale are inevitable. That’s what happened to us in the Taimyr.”

“Deritrinitation,” Kondratev said sadly, and closed his eyes.

They fell silent. It’s a bum deal, Kondratev thought. D-ships. Deritrinitation. We’ll never get through it all. Plus a broken back.

Evgeny stroked Kondratev’s cheek and said, “Never mind, Sergei. I think we’ll understand in time. Of course, we’ll have to learn an awful lot.”

“Relearn,” Kondratev whispered without opening his eyes. “Don’t deceive yourself, Evgeny. Relearn. Relearn everything from the very beginning.”

“So all right, I’m willing,” Evgeny said brightly. “The main thing is to want to.”

“‘I want to’ means ‘I can’?” Kondratev inquired bitterly.

“That’s it.”

“That saying was invented by people who could even when they didn’t want to. Iron men.”

“Well,” said Evgeny, “you’re not made of paper either. A couple weeks back I met a certain young woman…”

“Oh?” said Kondratev. Evgeny very much liked meeting young women.

“She’s a linguist. Smart. A wonderful, amazing person.”

“Of course,” said Kondratev.

“Let me talk, Sergei. I understand everything. You’re afraid. But here there’s no need to be lonely. There are no lonely people here. Get well soon, Navigator. You’re turning sour.”

Kondratev was silent a while, and then asked, “Evgeny, do me a favor and go over to the window.”

Evgeny got up and, walking noiselessly, went over to the enormous—wall-high—blue window. Kondratev could see nothing out the window except sky. At night the window was a blue-black abyss studded with piercing stars, and once or twice the navigator had seen a reddish glow blaze up—blaze up and quickly die out.

“I’ve arrived,” said Evgeny.

“What’s there?”

“A balcony.”

“And farther?”

“Below the balcony is a pad,” Evgeny said, and looked back at Kondratev.

Kondratev frowned. Even old Evgeny was no help. Kondratev was as alone as could be. So far he knew nothing. Not a thing. He didn’t even know what sort of floor there was in his room, because footsteps made no sound on it. Last evening the navigator had tried to sit up and look the room over, and had immediately fainted. He had not tried again, because he could not stand being unconscious.

“This building where you are is a nursing home for serious cases,” said Evgeny. “The building has sixteen stories, and your room—”

“Ward,” muttered Kondratev.

“—and your room is on the ninth floor. There’s a balcony. Outside are mountains-the Urals—and a pine forest. From here I can see, first, another nursing home like this one. It’s about fifteen kilometers away. Farther in the same direction is Sverdlovsk. It’s ninety kilometers off. Second, I see a landing pad for pterocars. They’re really wonderful machines! There are four of them there now. So. What else? Third, a plaza with flowers and a fountain. Near the fountain there’s a child. By all appearances, he’s thinking about how much he would like to run away into the forest.”

“Is he a serious case too?” the navigator asked with interest.

“It’s possible. Though it doesn’t look like it. So. He’s not going to manage his getaway, because a certain barefoot woman has caught him. I am already acquainted with the woman because she works here. A very charming individual. She’s around twenty. Recently she asked me whether I had happened to know Norbert Wiener and Anton Makarenko. Now she’s dragging the serious case off, and, I think, edifying him en route. And here another pterocar is landing. Or no, it’s not a pterocar. You should ask the doctor for a stereovision, Sergei.”

“I did,” the navigator said gloomily. “He won’t let me have one.”

“Why not?”

“How should I know?”

Evgeny turned toward the bed. “All this is sound and fury, signifying nothing,” he said. “You’ll see everything, learn everything, and stop feeling strange. Don’t be so impressionable. Do you remember Koenig?”

“Yes?”

“Remember when I told him about your broken leg, and he shouted out loud in his magnificent accent, ‘Ach, how impressionable I am! Ach!’”

Kondratev smiled.

“And the next morning I came to see you,” Evgeny continued, “and asked how things were, and you answered with a touch of spite that you had spent ‘a variegated night’.”

“I remember,” said Kondratev. “And I’ve spent many variegated nights right here. And there are a lot of them coming up.”

“Ach, how impressionable I am!” Evgeny quickly shouted.

Kondratev closed his eyes again and lay silent for some time. “Listen, Evgeny,” he said without opening his eyes. “What did they say to you on the subject of your skill in piloting spaceships?”

Evgeny laughed merrily. “It was a great big scolding, although very polite. It seems I smashed through some enormous telescope, but I didn’t even notice at the time. The head of the observatory almost slugged me, but his upbringing wouldn’t permit it.”

Kondratev opened his eyes. “Well?” he said.

“But later, when they learned I wasn’t a pilot, it all cleared up. They even congratulated me. The observatory head, in an access of good feeling, even invited me to help with the rebuilding of the telescope.”

“Well?” said Kondratev.

Evgeny sighed. “Nothing came of it. The doctors wouldn’t let me.

The door opened a bit, and a dark girl wearing a white coat tightly belted at the waist looked into the room. She looked sternly at the patient, then at the visitor, and said, “It’s time, Comrade Slavin.”

“I’m just leaving,” said Evgeny.

The girl nodded and closed the door. Kondratev said sadly, “Well, here you are leaving me.”

“But not for long!” exclaimed Evgeny. “And don’t go sour, I beg you. You’ll be flying again, you’ll make a first-class D-spacer.”

“D-spacer—” The navigator smiled crookedly. “Okay, be on your way. They are now going to feed the D-spacer his porridge. With a baby spoon.”

Evgeny got up. “I’ll be seeing you, Sergei,” he said, carefully shaking Kondratev’s hand, which lay on top of the sheet. “Get well. And remember that the new world is a very good world.”

“Be seeing you, classicist,” said Kondratev. “Come again. And bring your intelligent young lady. What’s her name?”

“Sheila,” said Evgeny. “Sheila Kadar.”

He went out. He went out into an unknown and alien world, under a limitless sky, into the green of endless gardens. Into a world where, probably, glass superhighways ran arrow-straight to the horizon, where slender buildings threw delicate shadows across the plazas. Where cars darted without drivers or passengers, or with people dressed in strange clothing-calm, intelligent, benevolent, always very busy and very pleased to be so. Evgeny had gone out to wander over a planet both like and unlike the Earth they had abandoned so long ago and so recently. He would wander with his Sheila Kadar and soon would write his book, and the book would, of course, be very good, because Evgeny was quite capable of writing a good, intelligent book.

Kondratev opened his eyes. Next to the bed sat fat, ruddy Doctor Protos, watching him silently. Doctor Protos smiled, nodded, and said quietly, “Everything will be all right, Sergei.”

7. The Moving Roads

“Perhaps you’ll spend the evening with us after all?” Evgeny said indecisively.

“Yes,” said Sheila. “Let’s stay together. Where will you go by yourself with such a sad expression on your face?”

Kondratev shook his head. “No, thank you,” he said. “I’d rather be alone.” Sheila smiled at him warmly and a little sadly, and Evgeny bit his lip and looked past Kondratev.

“Don’t worry about me,” Kondratev said. “It bothers me when people worry about me. See you.” He stepped away from the pterocar and waved.

“Let him go,” said Evgeny. “It’ll be all right. Let him walk by himself. Have a good walk, Sergei-and you know where to find us.”

He offhandedly touched the keyboard on the control panel with his fingertips. He did not even look at the controls. His left arm lay behind Sheila’s back. He was magnificent. He didn’t even slam the door shut. He winked to Kondratev and jackrabbitted the pterocar from the spot in such a manner that the door slammed itself shut. The pterocar shot up into the sky and sailed off on its wings. Kondratev made his way toward the escalator.

Okay, he thought, let’s plunge into life. Old Evgeny says it’s impossible to get lost in this city. Let’s find out.

The escalator moved noiselessly. It was empty. Kondratev looked up. Overhead was a translucent roof. On it lay the shadows of pterocars and helicopters, belonging, no doubt, to the building’s inhabitants. Every roof in the city was a landing pad, it seemed. Kondratev looked down. Below was a wide, bright lobby. Its floor was smooth and sparkling, like ice.

Two young girls ran past Kondratev, clicking their heels in a staccato on the steps. One of them, small, wearing a white blouse and a vivid blue skirt, glanced at his face as she ran past. She had a freckled nose and a lock of hair across her forehead. Something about Kondratev struck her. She stopped a moment, grabbing the railing so as not to fall. Then she caught up to her friend, and they ran farther, but below, already in the lobby, both of them looked back. So, thought Kondratev, it begins. Here comes the elephant parading through the streets.

He descended to the lobby (the girls were already gone) and tested the floor with his foot to see whether it was slippery. It wasn’t. Alongside the lobby doors were enormous windows, and through one of them he could see that there was a great deal of greenery outside. Kondratev had already noticed this when flying over in the pterocar. The city was buried in greenery. Verdure filled up all the spaces between roofs. Kondratev walked around the lobby, and stood for a moment in front of a coat rack on which a solitary violet raincoat hung. After looking around cautiously, he felt the material, and then headed toward the doorway. On the steps of the porch he stopped. There was no street.

A trampled-down path stretched directly from the porch into thick, high grass. In ten paces it disappeared amid thickets of bushes. After the bushes came a forest-tall straight pines alternating with squat oaks, obviously very old. The clean light-blue walls of buildings extended to the right and to the left. “Not bad!” Kondratev said, and sniffed the air.

The air was very good. Kondratev put his hands behind his back and set off resolutely down the path. It led him to a fairly wide sandy walk. Kondratev hesitated, then turned right. There were many people on the walk. He even tensed up, expecting that at the sight of him the great-great-grandchildren would break off conversation, turn away from urgent problems, stop short, and start staring at him. Maybe even start asking him questions. But nothing of the sort occurred. Some elderly great-great-grandchild, overtaking him from behind, bumped into him clumsily and said, “Excuse me, please. No, I wasn’t talking to you, dear.” Kondratev smiled to be on the safe side.

“Has something happened?” He heard a faint feminine voice, coming, it seemed, from inside the elderly great-great-grandchild.

“No,” said the other great-great-grandchild, nodding benevolently toward Kondratev. “I’ve accidentally pushed a young man here.”

“Oh,” said the woman’s voice. “Then do some more listening. I said that I would have nothing to do with the plan and that you would be against it too.” The elderly great-great-grandchild moved off, and the woman’s voice gradually faded out.

Great-great-grandchildren overtook Kondratev from behind, and came toward him from the front. Many smiled at him, sometimes even nodding. But no one stared and no one was crawling with questions. True, for some time a dark-eyed lad with his hands in his pockets described a complicated trajectory around Kondratev, but at the very moment when Kondratev at last took pity and decided to nod toward him, the boy, in obvious despair, had dropped behind. Kondratev felt more at ease and started looking and listening.

Generally, the great-great-grandchildren seemed to be very ordinary people. Young and old, short and tall, homely and beautiful. Men and women. There was no one senile or sickly. And there were no children. The great-great-grandchildren on this green street behaved quite calmly and unconstrainedly, as if they were at home, with old friends. You couldn’t say that they all radiated joy and happiness. Kondratev saw worried and tired faces, and more rarely even gloomy ones. One young fellow sat by the side of the walk among dandelions, picking them one after another and blowing on them fiercely. It was obvious that his thoughts were wandering somewhere far away, and that these thoughts were anything but happy.

The great-great-grandchildren dressed simply and quite variously. The older men wore long pants and soft jackets with open collars; the women wore slacks or long elegant dresses. The young men and girls almost all wore loose shorts and white or colored smocks. Of course you also encountered women of fashion sporting purple or gold cloaks, thrown over short bright… shirts, Kondratev decided. These fashion plates were looked at.

It was quiet in the city, or at least there were no mechanical sounds. Kondratev heard only voices and, sometimes, from somewhere, music. The treetops rustled too, and very occasionally there came the soft “fr-r-r-r” of a pterocar flying past. Obviously most aircraft usually traveled at high altitudes. In short, nothing here was entirely alien to Kondratev, although it was very strange to be walking down paths and sandy walks, with clothes brushing against the branches of bushes, in the middle of an enormous city. The suburban parks of a hundred years earlier had been almost the same. Kondratev could have felt entirely at home here, if only he did not feel so useless, undoubtedly more useless than any of these gold and purple fashion plates with their short hems.

He overtook a man and woman walking arm in arm. The man was saying, “At this point the violin comes in—tra-la-la~la-a—and then the delicate and tender thread of the choriole—di-i-da-da-da… di-i-i.” His rendition was piercing but not very musical. The woman looked at him with some doubt.

By the wayside two middle-aged men stood silently. One suddenly said gloomily, “All the same, she had no call to tell the boy about that.”

“Too late now,” answered the other, and they again fell silent.

A threesome—a pale girl, a giant elderly black, and a pensive fellow who was smiling absentmindedly—walked slowly toward Kondratev. The girl was talking, abruptly waving about her clenched fist. “The question has to be resolved another way. As an artist, either you’re a writer or a sensationalist. There is no third possibility. But he plays games with spatial relationships. That’s craft, not art. He’s just an uncaring, self-satisfied hack.”

“Masha, Masha!” the black droned reproachfully.

The young fellow kept smiling absentmindedly.

Kondratev turned onto a side path, passed a hedge mottled with big blue and yellow flowers, and stopped dead. Before him was a moving road.

Kondratev had already heard about the amazing moving roads. Their construction had begun long ago and now they extended between many cities, forming an uninterrupted ramifying transcontinental system from the Pyrenees to the Tien Shan, and south across the plains of China to Hanoi, and in the Americas from Port Yukon to Tierra del Fuego. Evgeny had told improbable tales about the roads. He said that they did not use energy and need not fear time; if they were destroyed, they would restore themselves; they climbed mountains with ease and threw themselves across abysses on bridges. According to Evgeny, these roads would move as long as the sun shone and Earth was intact. And Evgeny also had said that the moving road was not actually a road, but a flow of something halfway between the animate and inanimate. A fourth kingdom.

A few steps away from Kondratev the road flowed in six even gray streams, the strips of the Big Road. The strips moved at various speeds and were separated from each other and from the outside grass by two-inch-high white barriers. On the strips people were standing, walking, sitting. Kondratev approached and placed one leg indecisively on the barrier. And then, bending and listening, he heard the voice of the Big Road: squeaking, crackling, rustling.

The surface of the road was soft like warm asphalt. He stood for a while, and then transferred to the next strip.

The road flowed down a hill, and Kondratev could see it stretch all the way out to the deep-blue horizon. It sparkled in the sun like a tarred highway.

Kondratev began to look at the rooftops sailing by over the crowns of the pines. On one roof there sparkled an enormous structure made from several huge square mirrors strung on a light openwork frame. On all the roofs sat pterocars—red, green, gold, gray. Hundreds of pterocars and helicopters hung over the city. With a faint whistling sound, eclipsing the sun for a long time, a triangular airship floated along the road, and then disappeared behind the forest. The outlines of some sort of structure—not exactly masts, not exactly stereovision towers—showed far off in the foggy haze. The road flowed evenly, without jolts; the green bushes and brown pine trunks ran merrily backward; great glass buildings, bright cottages, open verandas under sparkling multicolored awnings appeared and disappeared in the spaces between the branches.

Kondratev suddenly realized that the road was taking him to the outskirts of Sverdlovsk. Well, let it, he thought. Fine. This road must be able to take you anywhere you liked—Siberia, India, Vietnam. He sat down and clasped his knees with his arms. It wasn’t particularly soft seating, but it wasn’t hard either. In front of Kondratev three lads sat tailor-fashion, bending over multicolored squares of some sort. They must be solving a problem in geometry. Or perhaps they were playing a game. What are these roads good for? Kondratev thought. It wasn’t likely that anyone would take it into his head to ride this way to Vietnam or India. Too little speed. And too hard a seat. After all, there were stratoplanes, the enormous triangular airships, pterocars—what good was a road? And what it must have cost! He began to recall how they had built roads a century ago—not moving ones, either, but the most ordinary sort, and not especially good ones at that. The enormous semiautomatic road layers, the stench of tar, the heat, and the sweaty, tired people inside dust-powdered cabs. And of course enormously greater heaps of labor and thought had been hammered into the Big Road than into the Trans-Gobi Highway. And evidently all so that you could get on wherever you liked, sit wherever you liked, and poke along without worrying about anything, picking camomile flowers along the way. It was strange, incomprehensible, irrational…

The stories of glass above the pine tops suddenly came to an end. Ahead rose a gigantic block of gray granite. Kondratev stood up. On top of the block, with an arm stretched out over the city, straining ever forward, stood Lenin, just as he had stood, and must still be standing now, in the square in front of Finland Station in Leningrad. Lenin held his arm out over this city and over this world, this shining and wonderful world that he had seen two centuries before. Kondratev stood and watched the enormous monument retreat into the bluish haze over the glass roofs.

The pines grew lower and denser. For a moment a broad clearing opened up alongside the road. A group of people in coveralls were fiddling with some complicated mechanism. The road slipped under a narrow semicircular bow bridge and ran past a sign with an arrow which said, MATROSOVO—15 KM, YELLOW FACTORY—6 KM, and something else which Kondratev did not have time to read. He looked around and saw that there were few people left on the ribbons of road. The ribbons running the opposite way were almost empty. Matrosovo must be a housing development. But what about Yellow Factory? Through the pine trunks flashed a long veranda with tables. People at the tables sat eating and drinking. Kondratev felt hungry, but after hesitating, he decided to hold off for a bit. On the way back, he thought. He was very happy to feel strong, healthy hunger, and to know that he could satisfy it at any moment.

The pines thinned out, and from somewhere a broad superhighway turned up, sparkling in the rays of the evening sun. Along the superhighway whizzed a series of monstrous vehicles-on two, three, even eight undercarriages, or without an undercarriage altogether—bluntnosed, with enormous, boxcar-sized trailers covered with bright-colored plastic. The vehicles were moving toward him, toward the city. Evidently somewhere nearby the superhighway dived underground and disappeared into multileveled tunnels. Looking closely, Kondratev noticed that the vehicles did not have cabs—there was no place for a driver. The machines moved in an unbroken stream, buzzing modestly, maintaining a distance of two or three yards between each other. Through the spaces between, Kondratev saw several of the same sort of vehicle going the other way. Then thickets once again densely lined the road, and the superhighway disappeared from view.

“Yesterday a truck jumped off the road,” someone said behind Kondratev’s back.

“That’s because they took off the power monitor. They’re digging new levels.”

“I don’t like these rhinos.”

“Never mind—soon we’ll finish the conveyer, and then we can close the whole highway.”

“It’s about time.”

Another veranda with tables appeared ahead.

“Leshka! Leshka!” people at one of the tables shouted, and waved.

A fellow and a young woman in front of Kondratev waved back, transferred to the slow belt, and jumped onto the grass opposite the veranda. A few other people jumped off here too. Kondratev was about to do the same, but he noticed a post with the sign, YELLOW FACTORY—1 KM, and he stayed on.

He jumped off at a turn. Between the tree trunks a narrow trampled path leading up the side of a large hill could be seen. At the top of the hill the outlines of small structures stood out distinctly against the background of sunset. Kondratev moved unhurriedly along the path, feeling the springy ground under his feet with pleasure. It must get muddy when it rains, he thought. On the way he bent down and picked a large white flower from the grass. Small ants ran over the flower’s petals. Kondratev threw the flower away and walked more quickly. A few minutes later he came out onto the top of the hill and stopped at the edge of a gigantic basin that seemed to stretch to the very horizon.

The contrast between the peaceful soft greenery under the dark-blue evening sky and what opened before him in the basin was so striking that Kondratev took a step backward. At the bottom of the basin seethed hell. Real hell, with ominous blue-white flashes, swirling orange smoke, and bubbling viscous liquid, red hot. There something slowly swelled and puffed up, like a purulent boil, then burst, splashing and spilling shreds of orange flame; it clouded over with varicolored smoke, threw off steam, flame, and a hail of sparks, and once again slowly swelled and puffed up. In the vortices of raging matter many-forked lightnings flashed; monstrous indistinct forms appeared and disappeared within a second; whirlwinds twisted; blue and pink ghosts danced. For a long time Kondratev watched this extraordinary spectacle, spellbound. Then he came a little more to his senses and began to notice something else.

Hell was noiseless and bounded with strict geometry. The mighty dance of flame and smoke produced not one sound; not one tongue of flame, not one puff of smoke went beyond a certain limit, and, looking closely, Kondratev discovered that the whole vast expanse of hell stretching to the far horizon was enclosed by a barely noticeable transparent covering, the edges of which merged into the concrete—if it was concrete—that paved the bottom of the basin. Then Kondratev saw that the covering had two and even, it seemed, three layers, because from time to time flat reflections flashed in the air under the covering, probably images of sparks on the outer surface of an inner layer. The basin was deep; its round, even walls, lined with smooth gray material, plunged into the depths for hundreds of meters. The “roof” of the invisible covering soared over the bottom of the basin to a height of no less than fifty. Evidently this was the Yellow Factory of which the signs warned. Kondratev sat down on the grass, lay his arms on his knees, and began to look through the covering.

The sun set, and multicolored reflections began to leap along the gray slopes of the basin. Kondratev very soon noticed that chaos did not reign unchecked in the raging, hellish kitchen. Certain regular, distinct shadows appeared now and then in the smoke and flame, sometimes unmoving, sometimes rushing headlong. It was very difficult to get a proper look at them, but once the smoke suddenly cleared for several instants, and Kondratev got a fairly clear view of a complicated machine like a daddy longlegs. The machine jumped in place, as if trying to extricate its legs from some viscous fiery mass, or else it kneaded that flaming mass with its long sparkling articulations. Then something flashed under it, and again it was covered by clouds of orange smoke.

Over Kondratev’s head a small helicopter sputtered by. Kondratev raised his head and watched it. The helicopter flew over the covering, then suddenly turned sharply to the side and crashed down like a stone. Kondratev gave a cry, but the helicopter was already sitting on the “roof” of the covering. It seemed simply to be hanging motionless above the tongues of flame. A minute black figure got out of the helicopter, bent over, resting its hands on its knees, and looked down into hell.

“Tell them I’ll be back tomorrow morning!” shouted someone behind Kondratev’s back.

The navigator turned around. Nearby, buried in luxuriant lilac bushes, stood two neat one-story houses with large lit-up windows. The windows were half hidden in the bushes, and the lilac branches, swaying in the wind, stood out against a background of bright blue rectangles in delicate openwork silhouettes. He could hear someone’s steps. Then the steps stopped for a second, and the same voice shouted, “And ask your mother to tell Ahmed.”

The windows in one of the houses went dark. From the other house came the strains of a sad melody. Grasshoppers chirred in the grass, and he could hear the drowsy chirping of birds. Anyhow, I have nothing to do at this factory, thought Kondratev.

He got up and headed back. He floundered for a few minutes in the bushes, looking for the path, then found it and started walking among the pines. The path showed dull white under the stars. In a few more minutes Kondratev saw a bluish light in front of him—the gas lamps on the signpost—and almost at a run he came out to the moving road. It was empty.

Kondratev, jumping like a hare and shouting “Hup! Hup!,” ran over to the strip moving in the direction of the city. The ribbons shone gently underfoot, and to the right and left the dark masses of bushes and trees rushed backward. Far in front of him in the sky was a bluish glow-the city. Kondratev suddenly felt fiercely hungry.

He got off at a veranda with tables, the one near the sign that said YELLOW FACTORY—1 KM. From the veranda came light, noise, and appetizing smells; and all the tables were taken. Looks like the whole world eats supper here, Kondratev thought with disappointment, but all the same he went up the steps and stopped at the threshold. The great-great-grandchildren were drinking, eating, laughing, talking, shouting, and even singing.

A long-legged great-great-grandchild from the nearest table tugged at Kondratev’s sleeve. “Sit down, sit down, comrade,” he said, getting up.

“Thank you,” muttered Kondratev, “But what about you?”

“Never mind! I’ve eaten, don’t worry.”

Kondratev sat down uneasily, resting his hands on his knees. The person opposite him, an enormous dark-faced man who had been eating something very appetizing from a bowl, looked up at him suddenly and asked indistinctly, “Well, what’s going on over there? They drawing it out?”

“Drawing what out?” asked Kondratev.

Everyone at the table looked at him.

The dark man, distorting his face, swallowed and said, “You from Anyudin?”

“No,” said Kondratev.

A thickset youth sitting on the left said happily, “I know who you are! You’re Navigator Kondratev from the Taimyrl!”

Everyone became more lively. The dark-faced man immediately raised his right hand and introduced himself. “I am yclept Ioann Moskvichev. Or Ivan, as we say today.”

A young woman, sitting at the right, said, “Elena Zavadskaya.”

The thickset youth, shuffling his feet under the table, said, “Basevich. Meteorologist. Aleksandr.”

A small pale girl, squeezed in between the meteorologist and Ivan Moskvichev, gaily chirped that she was Marina.

Ex-Navigator Kondratev rose and bowed.

“I didn’t recognize you at first either,” declared the dark-faced Moskvichev. “You’ve gotten a lot better. We people here have been sitting and waiting. We’ve got nothing left to do but sit and eat sacivi. This afternoon they offered us twelve places on a food tanker—they thought we wouldn’t take them. Like idiots we started drawing straws, and in the meantime they loaded a group from Vorkuta onto the tanker. Really great guys! Ten people barely squeezed into the twelve places, and the other five were left here.” He laughed unexpectedly. “And we sit eating sacivi… By the way, would you like a helping? Or have you already eaten?”

“No, I haven’t,” said Kondratev.

Moskvichev rose from the table. “Then I’ll bring you some.”

“Please,” Kondratev said gratefully.

Ivan Moskvichev went off, pushing his way through the tables.

“Have some wine,” Zavadskaya said, pushing a glass over to Kondratev.

“Thank you, but I don’t drink,” Kondratev said automatically. But then he remembered that he wasn’t a spacer, and never again would be one. “Excuse me. On second thought, I will, with pleasure.”

The wine was aromatic, light, good. Nectar, thought Kondratev. The gods drink nectar. And eat sacivi. I haven’t tried sacivi in a long time.

“Are you traveling with us?” squeaked Marina.

“I don’t know,” said Kondratev. “Maybe. Where are you going?”

The great-great-grandchildren looked at each other. “We’re going to Venus,” said Aleksandr. “You see, Moskvichev has got the urge to turn Venus into a second Earth.”

Kondratev put down his glass. “Venus?” he asked mistrustfully. He himself remembered what Venus was like. “Has your Moskvichev ever been on Venus?”

“He works there,” said Zavadskaya, “but that’s not the point. What is important is that he hasn’t supplied the transportation. We’ve been waiting for three days.”

Kondratev remembered how he had once orbited Venus in a first-line interplanetary ship for thirty-three days and had decided not to land. “Yes,” he said. “That’s terrible, waiting so long.”

Then he looked with horror at small pale Marina and imagined her on Venus. Radioactive deserts, he thought. Black storms.

Moskvichev returned and crashed a tray covered with plates onto the table. Among the plates stuck out a pot-bellied bottle with a long neck. “Here,” he said. “Eat, Comrade Kondratev. Here is the sacivi itself—you recognize it? Here, if you like, is the sauce. Drink this—here’s ice—Pegov is talking to Anyudin again, and they promise a ship tomorrow at six.”

“Yesterday they promised us a ship ‘tomorrow at six’ too,” said Aleksandr.

“Well, now it’s for sure. The starship pilots are coming back. D-ships aren’t your piddling food tankers. Six hundred people a flight, and the day after tomorrow we’ll be there.”

Kondratev took a sip from his wineglass and started in on the food. His table companions were arguing. Evidently except for Moskvichev they were all new volunteers, and they were all going to Venus. Moskvichev exemplified the present Venusian population, oppressed by the severe natural conditions. For him everything was perfectly clear. As a Venusian he gave Earth seventeen percent of its energy, eighty-five percent of its rare metals, and lived like a dog, that is, did not see the blue sky for months at a time, and waited for weeks his turn to lie for a while on greenhouse grass. Working under these conditions was of course intolerably difficult; Kondratev was in full agreement.

The volunteers also agreed, and they were setting off for Venus with great eagerness, but by this means they pursued quite various ends. Thus squeaky Marina, who turned out to be some sort of heavy-systems operator, was going to Venus because on Earth her heavy-systems work had ceased expanding. She did not want to go on moving houses from place to place or digging basins for factories any more. She yearned to build cities on swamps, and for ferocious storms, for underground explosions. And for people to say afterward, “Marina Chernyak built these cities!” There was nothing to be said against her plans. Kondratev was in full agreement with Marina too, although he would have preferred letting her grow a bit more and, by means of specialized physical training, making her more of a match for swamps, storms, and underground explosions.

Aleksandr the meteorologist was in love with Marina Chernyak, but it wasn’t only that. When Marina had asked him for the third time to cut the comedy, he became very judicious and proved logically that for terrestrials there were only two ways out: since the work on Venus was so hard, we had either to abandon it entirely, or to improve the working conditions. Could we, however, desert a place where we had once set foot? No, we could not! Because there was the Great Mission of Humanity, and there was the Hour of the Earthman, with all the consequences flowing therefrom. Kondratev agreed even with this, although he strongly suspected that Aleksandr was continuing to exercise his wit.

But Elena Zavadskaya was going to Venus with the most unexpected intentions. In the first place, she turned out to be a member of the World Council. She was categorically opposed to the conditions under which Moskvichev and twenty thousand of his comrades worked. She was also categorically opposed to cities on swamps, to underground explosions, and to new graves over which the black winds would sing the legends of heroes. In short, she was going to Venus in order to study the local conditions carefully and to take necessary measures toward Venus’s decolonization. She conceived the Earthman’s mission to be the establishment of automatic factories on alien planets. Moskvichev knew all this. Zavadskaya hung over him like the sword of Damocles, threatening all his plans. But besides that, Zavadskaya was an embryomechanical surgeon. She could work without a clinic, under any conditions, up to her waist in a swamp, and there were still very few such surgeons on Earth. On Venus they were irreplaceable. So Moskvichev held his tongue, evidently hoping that eventually everything would work out somehow. Kondratev, coming to the conclusion that Zavadskaya’s method was irrefutable, got up and quietly went out onto the porch.

The night was moonless and clear. Above the dark, huge, formless forest, bright white Venus hung low. Kondratev looked at it a long time and thought, Maybe I should have a try there? It wouldn’t matter as what—ditchdigger, a leader of some sort, demolition man. It can’t be that I’m no good for anything at all.

“Are you looking at it?” came a voice out of the darkness. “I am too. I’m waiting until it sets, and then I’ll go to bed.” The voice was calm and tired. “I think and think, you know. Planting gardens on Venus… drilling into the moon with an enormous anger. In the last analysis, that’s the meaning of our existence, expending energy. And, as much as possible, in such a way that it’ll be interesting to you and useful to somebody else. And it’s gotten rather difficult to expend energy on Earth. We have everything, we’re too powerful. A contradiction, if you like. Of course, even today there are many people who work at full output—researchers, teachers, doctors in preventive medicine, people in the arts. Agrotechnicians, waste-disposal specialists. And there always will be a lot of them. But what about the rest? Engineers, machine operators, doctors in curative medicine. Of course some go in for art, but the majority look in art not for escape but for inspiration. Judge for yourself—wonderful young guys. There’s too little room for them! They have to blow things up, remake things, build things. And not build just a house, but at least a world—Venus today, Mars tomorrow, something else the day after tomorrow. The interplanetary expansion of the human race is beginning—like the discharge of some giant electric potential. Do you agree with me, comrade?”

“I agree with you too,” said Kondratev.

8. Cornucopia

Evgeny and Sheila were working. Evgeny was sitting at a table, reading Harding’s Philosophy of Speed. The table was piled high with books, microbook tapes, albums, and files of old newspapers. On the floor, among scattered microbook cases, sat a portable access board for the Informatoreum. Evgeny read quickly, fidgeting with impatience and making frequent notations on a scratch pad. Sheila was sitting in a deep armchair, with her legs crossed, reading Evgeny’s manuscript. The room was bright and nearly quiet—colored shadows flashed by on the stereovision screen, and the tender strains of an ancient South American melody could barely be heard.

“This is an amazing book,” said Evgeny. “I can’t even slow down. How did he do it?”

“Harding?” Sheila said absently. “Yes, Harding is a great craftsman.”

“How does he do it? I don’t understand what his secret is.”

“I don’t know, dear,” Sheila said without taking her eyes off the manuscript. “No one knows. He himself doesn’t know.”

“You get an amazing feel of the rhythm of the thought and the rhythm of the words. Who is he?” Evgeny looked at the preface. “Professor of structural linguistics. Aha. That explains it.”

“That explains nothing,” said Sheila. “I’m a structural linguist too.”

Evgeny glanced at her, and then immersed himself again in his reading. The twilight was thickening outside the open window. Tiny lightning-bug sparks flashed in the dark bushes. Late birds called to one another sleepily.

Sheila gathered up the pages. “Wonderful people!” she said loudly. “Such daring!”

“Really?” Evgeny exclaimed happily, turning toward her.

“Did you people really endure all that?” Sheila looked at Evgeny with eyes wide. “You went through all that and still remained human. You didn’t die of fear. You didn’t go crazy from loneliness. Honestly, Evgeny, sometimes I think you really are a hundred years older than I.”

“Precisely,” said Evgeny.

He got up, crossed the room, and sat down by Sheila’s feet. She ran her fingers through his red hair, and he pressed his cheek to her knee.

“You know what was the most frightening part of all?” he said. “After the second ether bridge. When Sergei lifted me out of the acceleration cradle and I started to go to the control room, and he wouldn’t let me.”

“You didn’t write about that,” said Sheila.

“Falin and Pollack were still in the control room,” said Evgeny. “Dead,” he added after a silence.

Sheila stroked his head silently.

“You know,” he said, “in a certain sense ancestors are always richer than descendants. Richer in dreams. The ancestors dream about things that will be mere routine for the descendants. Oh, Sheila, that was a dream—to get to the stars! We had given everything for that dream. But you flit off to the stars the way we flew home to Mother for summer vacation. You people are poor, poor!”

“Each age has its dream,” said Sheila. “Your dream took man to the stars, while ours is returning him to Earth. But it will be a completely different person.”

“I don’t understand,” said Evgeny.

“We ourselves don’t understand it properly yet. It is a dream, after all. Homo omnipotens. Master of every atom in the universe. Nature has too many laws. We discover them and use them, but still they get in our way. You can’t break a law of nature. You can only obey it. And that’s very boring, when you stop to think about it. But Homo omnipotens will just change the laws he doesn’t like. Just up and change them.”

Evgeny said, “In the old days such people were called magicians. And they chiefly inhabited fairy tales.”

“Homo omnipotens will inhabit the universe. The way you and I do this room.”

“No,” said Evgeny. “That I don’t understand. That is somehow beyond me. Probably I’m a very prosaic thinker. Somebody even told me yesterday that I was boring to talk to. And I didn’t take offense. I really don’t understand everything yet.”

“Who was it that said you were boring?” Sheila asked angrily.

“Well, somebody. It doesn’t matter—I really wasn’t up to my usual form. I was in a great hurry to get home.”

Sheila took him by the ears and looked him straight in the eyes. “The person who said that to you,” she muttered, “is a jackass and an ingrate. You should have looked down your nose at him and said, ‘I gave you the road to the stars, and my father gave you the road to everything you have today.’”

Evgeny grinned. “Well, people forget that. Ingratitude to ancestors is the ordinary thing. Take my great-grandfather. He died in the siege of Leningrad, and I don’t even remember his name.”

“Well, you should,” said Sheila.

“Sheila, my dear, Sheila, my sweet,” Evgeny said lightly, “the reason descendants are forgetful is that ancestors aren’t touchy. Take me for example—the first person ever born on Mars. Who knows about that?” He took her in his arms and started to kiss her. There was a knock at the door and Evgeny said with annoyance, “Wouldn’t you know it!”

“Come in!” called Sheila.

The door opened a bit, and the voice of their neighbor Yurii the waste-disposal engineer asked, “Am I interrupting something?”

“Come in, Yurii, come on in,” said Sheila.

“Well, if I’m interrupting, I’ve already interrupted,” Yurii said, and came in. “Let’s go into the garden,” he requested.

“What is there new to see in the garden?” asked Evgeny, surprised. “Let’s watch stereovision instead.”

“I have a stereovision set of my own at home,” said Yurii. “Come on, Evgeny, tell Sheila and me something about Louis Pasteur.”

“Which disposal station do you work at?” Evgeny asked in turn.

“Disposal station? What’s that?”

“Just a disposal station. They bring all sorts of garbage, slop, and process it, and dump it. Into the sewer.”

“Ah!” the waste-disposal engineer cried happily. “I’ve just remembered. Disposal towers. But there haven’t been any disposal towers on the Planet for a long time, Evgeny!”

“Well, I was born a full century and a half after Pasteur,” said Evgeny.

“All right, then tell us about Doctor Morganau.”

“Doctor Morganau, as I understand it, was born a year after the takeoff of the Taimyr,” Evgeny replied tiredly.

“In short, let’s go into the garden,” said Yurii. “Sheila, bring him.”

They went out into the garden and sat on a bench under an apple tree. It was quite dark, and the trees in the garden looked black. Sheila shivered a bit from the chill, and Evgeny dashed back into the house for her jacket. For some time everyone was silent. Then a large apple broke off a branch and hit the ground with a muffled thunk.

“Apples still fall,” said Evgeny. “But somehow I don’t see any Newtons.”

“Polymaths, you mean?” Sheila asked seriously.

“Yes,” said Evgeny, who had only wanted to make a joke.

“In the first place, today we’re all polymaths,” Yurii said with unexpected warmth. “From your antediluvian perspective, of course. Because there is no biologist who does not know mathematics and physics, and a linguist like Sheila, for example, would be in real trouble without psychophysics and the theory of historical procession. But I know what you mean! There are, you say, no Newtons! Show me, you say, an encyclopedic mind! Everyone works in a narrow field, you say. When it comes down to the wire, Sheila is still only a linguist, and I’m still only a waste-disposal specialist, and Okada is still only an oceanographer. Why not, you say, all of them at once, in one person?”

“Help!” shouted Evgeny. “I didn’t want to upset anybody. I was just joking.”

“Well, do you know, Evgeny, about what we call the ‘narrow problem’? You chew it over all your life and there’s still no end in sight. It’s a tangle of the most unexpected complications. Take that same apple, for instance. Why was it that that apple in particular fell? Why at that particular moment? The mechanics of the contact of the apple with the ground. The process of the transference of momentum. The conditions of the fall. A quantum-mechanical picture of the fall. Finally, how, given the existence of the fall, to get some use out of it?”

“The last part is simple,” Evgeny said soothingly. He bent over, groped on the ground, and picked up the apple. “I’ll eat it.”

“It’s still unclear whether that would be the optimum utilization,” Yurii said irritably.

“Then I’ll eat it,” said Sheila, grabbing the apple away from Evgeny.

“And anyhow, about use,” Evgeny said. “You, Yurii, like to talk about optimum use all the time. Meanwhile, unimaginably complicated litter robots, gardener robots, moth-and-caterpillar-eating robots, and ham-and-cheese-sandwich-making robots are running all over the place. That’s crazy. It’s even worse than killing flies with a sledge hammer, as we said in my day. It’s building single-occupant studio apartments for ants. It’s sybaritism of the first water.”

“Evgeny!” protested Sheila.

Yurii laughed gaily. “It’s not sybaritism at all,” he said. “Quite the opposite. It’s the liberation of thought, it’s comfort, it’s economy. After all, who wants to pick up trash? And even if you did find some such garbage fancier, he’d still work more slowly and less thoroughly than the cybers. And then these robots are by no means as difficult to produce as you think. It’s true that they were a bit hard to invent. They were difficult to perfect. But as soon as they had reached mass production, they were much less trouble to make than… uh… what did they call shoes in your day? Buskins?”

“Shoes,” Evgeny said briefly.

“And the main thing is that nowadays no one makes single-purpose machines. So you’re quite wrong to distinguish between litter robots and gardener robots in the first place. They’re the same gadget.”

“Well, pardon me,” said Evgeny, “but I’ve seen them. Litter robots have these scoop things, and vacuum cleaners. And gardener robots—”

“It’s just a question of changing their manipulator attachments. And even that isn’t the point. The point is that all these robots, and all sorts of everyday machines and appliances in general, are magnificent ozonizers. They eat garbage, dry twigs and leaves, the grease from dirty dishes, and all that stuff serves them as fuel. You’ve got to understand, Evgeny, these aren’t the crude mechanisms of your time. In essence, they’re quasi-organisms. And in the process of their quasi-life they also ozonize and vitaminize the air, and saturate it with light ions. These are good little soldiers in the enormous, glorious army of waste disposal.”

“I surrender,” said Evgeny.

“Modern waste disposal, Evgeny, isn’t disposal towers. We don’t simply annihilate garbage, and we don’t pile up disgusting dumps on the seabed. We turn garbage into fresh air and sunlight.”

“I surrender, I surrender,” said Evgeny. “Long live waste-disposal specialists! Convert me into sunlight.”

Yurii stretched with pleasure. “It’s nice to meet someone who doesn’t know anything. The best recreation of all is to blab on about things everybody knows.”

“Well, I’m sick of being the man people recreate on,” said Evgeny.

Sheila took his hand, and he fell silent.

The thin squeal of a radiophone sounded.

“It’s mine,” Yurii whispered, and then said, “Hello.”

“Where are you?” inquired an angry voice.

“In the garden with Slavin and Sheila. I’m sitting and recreating.”

“Have you thought of anything?”

“No.”

“What a guy! He’s sitting and recreating! I’m going out of my mind, and he’s recreating! Comrade Slavin, Sheila, throw him out!”

“I’m going, I’m going, you don’t have to shout!” said Yurii, getting up.

“Get right to a screen. And listen to this: now I’m completely sure that the benzene processes are not the answer.”

“What did I tell you!” shouted Yurii, and with much crackling he crawled through the bushes toward his own cottage.

Sheila and Evgeny went back inside.

“Shall we go have supper?” Evgeny asked.

“I’m not hungry.”

“That’s how it always is! You fill up on apples and then you’re not hungry.”

“Don’t growl at me!” said Sheila.

Evgeny started hugging her.

“I’m frozen,” she said plaintively.

“That’s because you’re hungry,” Evgeny declared. “I’m a little frozen too, and I don’t at all feel like going to a restaurant. Is it really impossible to organize life so as to have supper at home?”

“Anything is possible,” said Sheila. “But what’s the point of it? Who eats at home?”

“I eat at home.”

“Evgeny, dear,” said Sheila, “would you like for us to move to the city? There’s the delivery line there, and you could eat at home all you wanted.”

“I don’t want to live in the city,” Evgeny said stubbornly. “I want to live out in the open air.”

Sheila looked at him thoughtfully for some time. “Would you like me to drop by the restaurant right now and bring supper home? It will only take a couple of minutes… Or maybe we could go together? Sit for a while and chat a bit with the guys?”

“I want just the two of us,” said Evgeny. Nonetheless he fetched his jacket and started putting it on. “You know, Sheila, I have an idea,” he said suddenly, and stuck his hand into his pocket. “Just listen to this.”

“What?” asked Sheila.

“An advertisement. Somehow it ended up in my pocket. Listen. ‘The Krasnoyarsk Appliance Factory…’ Well, we can skip that. Here. ‘The Universal Kitchen Machine, Model UKM-207, the Krasnoyarsk, is simple to operate and features a cybernetic brain rated for sixteen interchangeable programs. The UKM-207 includes a device for the trimming, peeling, and washing of raw or semiprepared foods, and an automatic dishwasher. The UKM-207 can prepare simultaneously two different three-course dinners, including first courses of various borschts, bouillons, ok-roshki, and other soups.”

“Evgeny!” Sheila laughed. “That’s a machine for restaurants and dining halls.”

“So?”

Sheila tried to explain. “Imagine a new housing development. Or a temporary settlement, a camp. The delivery line is far away. And there’s no link with Home Delivery—supply for the whole place is centralized. So they need a UKM.”

Evgeny was very disappointed. “So they wouldn’t give us one like that?” he asked, downcast.

“Well, they would, of course, but… but, you see, that’s pure sybaritism.”

“Sheila, sweetling! Sheila, dearest! May I order a machine like that? It’s not going to hurt anybody! And then we wouldn’t be forced to go anywhere in the evenings.”

“Have it your way,” Sheila said briefly. “But we’re still having supper in the restaurant today.”

They left—Evgeny following her docilely.

Early in the morning, Evgeny Slavin was awakened by the snorting of a heavy-duty helicopter. He jumped out of bed and ran to the window. He was just in time to see a dark blue helicopter fusilage with HOME DELIVERY printed on it in large white letters. The helicopter passed over the garden and disappeared behind the treetops, which were sparkling with dew and full of the chatter of birds. A large yellow box stood on the garden path by the porch. An emerald-green gardener robot stomped uncertainly around the box on its L-shaped legs.

“I’ll get you, waste-disposer!” yelled Evgeny, and he started climbing through the window. “Sheila! Sheila dear! It’s come!”

The gardener robot dashed off into the bushes. Evgeny ran up to the box and walked all the way around it without touching it.

“It’s here!” he said, deeply moved. “Great lads, Home Delivery. Krasnoyarsk,” he read off the side of the box. “It’s here.”

Sheila came out onto the porch, wrapping her bathrobe round her. “What a wonderful morning!” she said, yawning sweetly. “What are you making so much noise for? You’ll wake up Yurii.”

Evgeny looked toward the garden, where, behind the trees, he could see the white walls of Yurii’s cottage. Something over there suddenly gave a crash, and they heard indistinct exclamations. “He’s awake already,” said Evgeny. “Give me a hand, Sheila, eh?”

Sheila came down from the porch. “What’s that?” she asked. Near the box lay a large paper bag with a colorful label with pictures of various foods.

“That?” Evgeny stared absently at the colorful label. “That must be the raw ingredients and the semiprepared foods.”

Sheila said with a sigh, “Well, okay. Let’s pick up your toy.”

The box was light, and they dragged it inside without difficulty. Only at this point did Evgeny realize that the cottage did not have a kitchen. What do I do now? he thought.

“Well, what are we going to do with it?” asked Sheila.

By dint of superhuman mental effort Evgeny instantly pounced upon the necessary solution. “Into the bathroom with it,” he said lightly. “Where else?”

They put the box in the bathroom, and Evgeny ran back for the bag. When he returned, Sheila was doing her exercises. Evgeny started singing off key, “Monday roast beef, Tuesday string beans…” and tore the side off the box. The Krasnoyarsk, Model UKM-207, looked very inspiring. Much more inspiring than Evgeny had expected.

“Well?” asked Sheila,

“Now we’ll get down to it,” Evgeny said briskly. “I’ll fix you a meal right off.”

“I’d advise you to call for an instructor.”

“Nonsense. I’ll figure this machine out myself. After all, it said ‘simple to operate.’”

The machine, enclosed in a smooth plastic housing, sparkled proudly amid piles of crumpled paper.

“It’s all very simple,” declared Evgeny. “Here are four buttons. It’s perfectly clear that they correspond to the soup course, the main course, the dessert course, and…”

“… the after-dessert course,” Sheila put in helpfully.

“Exactly, the after-dessert course,” Evgeny affirmed. “Tea, for instance. Or cocoa.”

He squatted down and opened a lid that said “Control System.”

“It’s spaghetti inside,” he muttered, “spaghetti. God help us if it ever breaks down.” He stood up. “Now I know what the fourth button is for—slicing bread.”

“An interesting conclusion,” Sheila said thoughtfully. “Did it occur to you that the four buttons might correspond to the four elements of Empedocles? Earth, air, fire, and water.”

Evgeny smiled reluctantly.

“Or the four arithmetic operations,” Sheila added.

“All right,” Evgeny said, and started unloading the bag. “Talk is talk, but I want goulash. You still don’t know how I cook goulash, Sheila. Here’s the meat, here’s the potatoes… right… parsley… onion… I want goulash! Followed by cybernetic dishwashing! So the grease on the dishes turns into air and sunlight!”

Sheila went into the living room and brought back a chair. Evgeny, holding a piece of meat in one hand and four large potatoes in the other, was standing indecisively in front of the machine. Sheila put the chair beside the washbasin, and sat down comfortably.

Addressing no one in particular, Evgeny said, “I would be much obliged if somebody would tell me where the raw food goes in.”

Sheila said, “I saw a cyberkitchen two years ago. It wasn’t at all like this one, but I remember it had a sort of opening for the raw food on the right.”

“I thought so!” Evgeny shouted happily. “There are two openings here. So the one on the right is for raw food, and the one on the left is for cooked dinners.”

“Evgeny, dear,” said Sheila, “you know, we should really go to a restaurant.”

He did not answer. He put the meat and potatoes into the opening on the right, and set off, cord in hand, for the wall socket. “Turn it on,” he said from a distance.

“How?” said Sheila.

“Push the button.”

“Which one?”

“The second, dear. I’m making goulash.”

“We should go to a restaurant,” Sheila repeated, getting up reluctantly.

The machine responded to the push of the button with a muffled roar. A white light on its front panel went on, and Sheila, looking into the opening at the right, saw that there was nothing there. “It seems to have taken the meat,” she said with surprise. This was more than she had expected.

“There, you see!” said Evgeny proudly. He stood up and admired his machine, listening to it hum and click. Then the white light went out and a red one came on. The machine stopped humming.

“That’s it, Sheila my sweet,” Evgeny said with a wink. He bent down and got the dishes out of the bag. They were light and shiny. He took two, put them in the opening on the left, then stepped back a step and and folded his arms across his chest. He and Sheila were silent for a minute.

Finally Sheila, shifting her eyes in puzzlement from Evgeny to the machine and back, asked, “Just what exactly are you waiting for?”

Uncertainty appeared in Evgeny’s eyes. If the goulash were ready, he realized, it should have appeared in the opening on the left whether or not there were dishes there. He stuck his head into the opening on the left and saw that the dishes were still empty.

“Where’s the goulash?” he asked distractedly.

Sheila did not know where the goulash was. “There are levers of some sort over here,” she said.

On the upper part of the machine there were indeed levers of some sort. Sheila grabbed them with both hands and pulled toward herself. Out of the machine came a white box, and a strange odor spread through the room.

“What’s inside?” asked Evgeny.

“Look for yourself,” Sheila answered. She stood up, holding the box in her hands and, squinting, examined its contents. “Your UKM has converted the meat into air and sunlight. Maybe the instructions were here?”

Evgeny looked into the box and gave a cry. There lay a packet of some sort of thin sheets—red, speckled with white spots. A stench rose up from them. “What’s this?” he asked with irritation, taking the top sheet with both hands. It fell apart, and the pieces dropped onto the floor, jangling like tin cans.

“Wonderful goulash,” said Sheila. “Tinkling goulash, yet. A fifth element. I wonder what it tastes like.”

Evgeny, turning beet red, stuck a piece of “goulash” in his mouth.

“What a daredevil!” Sheila said enviously. “My hero!”

Evgeny silently put down the bag of groceries. Sheila looked to see where to get rid of the mess, and dumped the contents of the machine’s box onto the pile of packing paper. The odor got stronger.

Evgeny got out a loaf of bread. “Which button did you push?” he asked sternly.

“The second from the top,” Sheila answered timidly, and immediately got the feeling that she had pushed the second from the bottom.

“I’m sure you must have pushed the fourth button,” declared Evgeny. He stuck the loaf decisively into the opening on the right. “That’s the bread-slicing button!”

Sheila started to ask how that could explain the strange metamorphoses undergone by the meat and potatoes, but Evgeny shoved her away from the machine and pushed the fourth button. A sort of clank sounded, and they could hear frequent muffled blows.

“You see,” said Evgeny with a sigh of relief, “it’s cutting the bread. I wish I knew just what was going on inside right now.” He imagined what was going on inside right now, and shuddered. “But for some reason the light hasn’t come on,” he said.

The machine knocked and whinnied. The noise continued a fairly long time, and Evgeny started looking to see what to push to make it stop. But then the machine gave a pleasant-sounding ring, and the red light began blinking, while the machine continued to hum and knock. Evgeny looked at his watch and said, “I’d always thought that slicing bread was easier than cooking goulash.”

“Let’s go to a restaurant,” Sheila said timidly.

Evgeny was silent. After three minutes he walked around the machine and then looked inside. He saw absolutely nothing there which could serve as food for thought. Nothing that could serve as food period, for that matter. He straightened up and met his wife’s eyes. In answer to her inquiring glance he shook his head. “Everything’s fine there.” He risked nothing in making that declaration. There were two buttons yet to be investigated, and also a quantity of possible permutations and combinations of the four.

“Couldn’t you stop it?” he asked Sheila.

Sheila shrugged, and for some time they continued to stand expectantly, watching the machine’s blinking lights—the red one and the white by turns.

Then Sheila stretched out an arm and touched the uppermost button with her finger. There was a ring, and the machine stopped. The room became quiet.

“Good work!” Evgeny exclaimed in spite of himself.

Through the window they could hear grasshoppers chirring and the wind stirring the bushes.

“Where’s the box?” Evgeny asked apprehensively.

Sheila looked around. The box was on the floor by the dishes.

“So?” she asked.

“We didn’t put the box back, and now I don’t know where the sliced bread is.”

Evgeny walked around the machine and looked into both openings—the one on the right and the one on the left. There was no bread. He looked with trepidation into the deep black slit in the machine where the box had been. The machine responded to his threatening glare with a red light. He clenched his teeth, narrowed his eyes, and stuck his arm into the slot.

It was hot inside the machine. He felt some sort of smooth surfaces, obviously not the bread. He withdrew his arm and shrugged. “No bread.”

Sheila bent over and looked under the machine. “There’s some sort of hose down here,” she said.

“Hose?” he asked with horror.

“No, no—it’s not the bread. It doesn’t look in the least like bread. It’s a real hose.” She brought a long corrugated tube with a shiny ring on the end out from under the machine. “You haven’t hooked the UKM up to the water, stupid. Think of it-no water! No wonder the goulash came out like that.”

“Uh, yes,” said Evgeny, casting a glance at the remains of the goulash, “There certainly isn’t much water in it. But still, where’s the bread?”

“What does it matter?” said Sheila gaily. “A mere side issue. Bread isn’t the main problem. Observe as I attach the hose to the faucet.”

“Maybe it’s not worth the bother?” Evgeny said warily.

“Nonsense. Research is research. We’ll make stew. There are vegetables in the bag.”

The machine, roused into action by the top button, worked for about a minute this time. “The stew can’t really drop out into the box too, can it?” Evgeny muttered uncertainly, fingering the levers.

“Let’s give it a try,” said Sheila.

The box was filled to the top with odorless pink goop.

“Borscht,” Evgeny said sadly. “Ukrainian style. It’s like—”

“I see for myself. Good heavens, the shame of it! I’m embarrassed even to call for an instructor. Maybe Yurii?…”

“Right,” Evgeny said mournfully. “A waste-disposal specialist is just what we need here. I’ll go call him over.” He was desperately hungry.

“Come in!” shouted Yurii’s voice.

Evgeny went in and stopped in the doorway, stricken.

“I hope you haven’t brought your charming spouse along,” said Yurii. “I’m not dressed.”

He was wearing a clumsily ironed shirt. His tanned bare legs stuck out from underneath it. Strange machine parts and pieces of paper were strewn over the floor throughout the room. He was sitting on the floor, holding in his hands a box with rays of light streaming from little openings.

“What’s that?” asked Evgeny.

“A tester,” Yurii answered tiredly.

“No, no, all this!”

Yurii looked around. “That’s a UWM-16. Universal Washing Machine with semicybernetic control. Washes, irons, and sews on buttons. Watch it! Don’t step on anything.”

Evgeny looked under his feet and saw a pile of black rags lying in a puddle of water. Steam was rising from the rags.

“Those are my pants,” Yurii explained.

“So your machine isn’t working either?” asked Evgeny. The hope of receiving advice, and dinner, evaporated.

“It’s in perfect shape,” Yurii said angrily. “I dismantled it down to the last screw, and figured out its principle of operation. Here’s the output mechanism. Here’s the analyser. I didn’t dismantle that—it’s working as it is. Here’s the transporting mechanism and the heat-regulating system. Granted I haven’t found the sewing device yet, but the machine is in perfect shape. I think the trouble is that for some reason it has twelve programming keys, while in the brochure it said four.”

“Four?” asked Evgeny.

“Four,” answered Yurii, absently scratching his knee. “But why did you say ‘your machine’? Do you have a washing machine too? I just got mine an hour ago. Home Delivery.”

“Four!” Evgeny repeated in delight. “Four, not twelve… Tell me, Yurii, have you tried putting meat into it?”

9. Homecoming

Sergei Kondratev returned home at noon. He had spent all morning at the Minor Informatoreum—he was looking for a profession. It was cool, quiet, and very lonely at home. Kondratev walked through all the rooms, drank some Narzan water, stood up in front of his empty desk, and set to thinking how he could kill the afternoon. Out the window the sun shone bright, some sort of bird was chirping, and a metallic rattle and clicking came from the lilac bushes. Obviously one of the efficient multilegged horrors which deprived an honest man of the opportunity to work at, say, gardening, was puttering around out there.

The ex-navigator sighed and closed the window. Should he go see Evgeny? No, he would be sure not to catch him at home. Evgeny had loaded himself down with the latest model dictaphones and was rushing all over the Urals; he had thirty-three things to worry about, not counting the little ones. “Insufficiency of knowledge,” he would declare, “must be made up through an excess of energy.” Sheila was a wonderful person who understood everything, but she was never home except when Evgeny was. The navigator dragged himself to the dining room and drank another glass of mineral water. Perhaps he should eat dinner? Not a bad idea—he could dine carefully and tastefully. Except he wasn’t hungry.

He went over to the delivery line cube, tapped out a number at random, and waited curiously to see what he would get. A green light flashed on over the cube—the order had been filled. With a certain wariness, the navigator opened the lid. At the bottom of the spacious cube-shaped box lay a paper plate. The navigator took it and set it on the table. On the plate were two large fresh-salted cucumbers. If only they had had cucumbers like that on the Taimyr, toward the end of the second year… Maybe he should go see Protos? Protos was one in a million. But of course he was very busy, kindly old Protos. All the good people were busy with something.

The navigator absently picked a cucumber up off the plate and ate it. Then he ate the other one and put the plate in the garbage chute. I could go out and hang around with the volunteers for a while again, he thought. Or go to Valparaiso, I’ve never been to Valparaiso.

The navigator’s ruminations were interrupted by the song of the door signal. The navigator was glad—he did not get many visitors. Evidently the great-great-grandchildren, out of false modesty, had not wanted to bother him. The whole week that he had been living here, he had only been visited once, by his neighbor, a sprightly eighty-year-old woman with an old-fashioned bun of black hair. She had introduced herself as the senior technician at a bread factory, and in the course of two hours she had patiently taught him how to punch the numbers on the control panel of the delivery line. They had somehow not gotten into a serious conversation, although she was doubtless an excellent person. And a few times some very young great-great grandchildren, quite clearly innocent of any feeling of false modesty, had arrived uninvited. These visitations were dictated by purely selfish considerations. One individual had evidently come to read the navigator his ode “On the Return of the Taimyr,” of which the navigator had understood only individual words (Taimyr, kosmos), since it was in Swahili. Another was working on a biography of Edgar Allan Poe, and without any particular hope he asked for any little-known facts about the life of the great American writer. Kondratev told him the conjectures about meetings between Poe and Aleksandr Pushkin, and advised him to apply to Evgeny Slavin. Other boys and girls appeared for what Kondratev in the terminology of the twenty-first century would have called autograph hunting. But even the young autograph hunters were better than nothing, and consequently the song of the door signal gladdened Kondratev’s heart.

Kondratev went out into the entryway and shouted, “Come in!” A tall man entered, wearing a full-cut gray jacket and long blue sweatsuit-style pants. He quietly closed the door behind him and, inclining his head a bit, started looking the navigator over. His physiognomy seemed to Kondratev to bear a very lively resemblance to the photographs he had once seen of the stone idols of Easter Island—narrow, long, with a high narrow forehead and powerful brows, deep-sunk eyes, and a long, sharply curved nose. His face was dark, but fair white skin showed unexpectedly from his open collar. This man bore little resemblance to an autograph hunter.

“You wish to see me?” Kondratev asked hopefully.

“Yes,” the stranger said quietly. “I do.”

“Then come on in,” said Kondratev. He was moved, and a little disappointed, by the sad tone of the stranger. Looks like an autograph hunter after all, he thought. But I must receive him a little more warmly.

“Thank you,” the stranger said still more quietly. Stooping a little, he walked past the navigator and stopped in the middle of the living room.

“Please, have a seat,” said Kondratev.

The stranger was standing silently, looking fixedly at the couch. Kondratev, with some worry, looked at the couch too. It was a wonderful folding couch, broad, noiseless, and soft, with a springy light green cover that was porous like a sponge.

“My name is Gorbovsky,” the stranger said quietly, without taking his eyes off the couch. “Leonid Andreevich Gorbovsky. I came to have a talk with you, spacer to spacer.”

“What’s happened?” Kondratev asked in fright. “Did something happen to the Taimyr? And sit down, please!”

Gorbovsky continued to stand. “To the Taimyr? Not at all. Or rather, I don’t know,” he said. “But then the Taimyr is in the Cosmonautical Museum. What could happen to it there?”

“Of course,” said Kondratev, smiling. “After all, it won’t likely be going anywhere.”

“Nowhere at all,” Gorbovsky agreed, and also smiled. His smile, like that of many homely people, was kind and somehow childlike.

“What are we standing for?” Kondratev exclaimed brightly. “Let’s sit down.”

“You… I’ll tell you what, Navigator Kondratev,” Gorbovsky said suddenly. “Could I perhaps lie down?”

Kondratev choked. “P-please do,” he muttered. “Don’t you feel well?”

Gorbovsky was already lying on the couch. “Ah, Comrade Kondratev!” he said. “You’re like the rest. Why does a man have to be feeling bad to want to lie down? In classical times practically everyone used to lie down—even at meals.”

Kondratev, without turning around, groped for the back of his chair and sat down.

“Even in those days,” Gorbovsky continued, “they had a multistage proverb the essence of which was, ‘Why sit when you can lie down?’ I’m just back from a flight. You yourself know, Navigator Kondratev—what sort of sofas do they have on shipboard? Disgustingly hard contrivances. And is it only on ships? Those unspeakable benches in stadiums and parks! The folding, or rather self-collapsing, chairs in restaurants! Or those ghastly rocks at the seaside! No, Comrade Kondratev, any way you like, the art of creating really comfortable things to lie on has been irretrievably lost in our stern era of embryomechanics and the D-principle.”

You don’t say! thought Kondratev. The problem of things to lie on presented itself to him in an entirely new light. “You know,” he said, “I started out at a time when what they called ‘private companies’ and ‘monopolies’ were still in business in North America. And the one that survived the longest was a small company that made a fabulous fortune on mattresses. It put out some sort of special silk mattress—not many of them, but frightfully expensive. They say billionaires used to fight over those mattresses. They were splendid things. On one of them your arm would never get pins and needles.”

“And the secret of them perished along with imperialism?” Gorbovsky asked.

“Probably,” Kondratev answered. “I shipped out on the Taimyr and never heard any more about it.”

They were silent a while. Kondratev was enjoying himself. Protos and Evgeny were splendid conversationalists too, but Protos liked to talk about liver operations, and Evgeny was usually teaching Kondratev how to drive a pterocar, or scolding him for his social inertia.

“And why?” said Gorbovsky. “We have splendid things to lie down on too. But no one is interested in them. Except me.” He turned onto his side, rested his cheek on a fist and suddenly said, “Ah, Sergei old fellow! Why did you land on Blue Sands?”

The navigator choked again. The planet Blue Sands hung before his eyes with horrifying vividness. Child of an alien sun. Itself very alien. It was covered with oceans of fine blue dust and in these oceans were tides, ferocious gales and typhoons, and even, it seemed, some sort of life. Round-dances of green flame whirled around the buried Taimyr, blue dunes shouted and howled in various voices, dust clouds crawled across the whitish sky like giant amoebas. And human beings had not solved a single one of Blue Sands’ mysteries. The navigator had broken his leg on the first sortie, they had lost every last cyberscout, and then in the middle of a total calm a real storm had set in, and good old Koenig, who had not had time to get back to the ship, was thrown along with the hoist against the reactor ring, was crushed, was flattened, was carried hundreds of miles into the desert, where among the blue waves gigantic rifts showered billions of tons of dust into the incomprehensible depths of the planet.

“Well, wouldn’t you have landed?” Kondratev said hoarsely.

Gorbovsky was silent.

“You’re in fine shape today on your D-ships. One sun today, tomorrow another, a third the day after tomorrow. But for me, for us, this was the first alien sun, the first really alien planet, do you understand? We had gotten there by a miracle. I couldn’t refuse to land, because otherwise… what would it all be for then?” Kondratev stopped. Nerves, he thought. Got to be calmer. It’s all behind me now.

Gorbovsky said thoughtfully, “The first one to land on Blue Sands after you must have been me. I started down in the landing boat and began with the pole. Ah, Sergei, what a time that was! For half a month I went around and around. Twelve probing runs! And all the machines we lost there! A quintessentially rabid atmosphere, Sergei. And you threw yourselves at her from the equator. Without reconnaissance. And in a decrepit old Tortoise. Yes.”

Gorbovsky put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. Kondratev could not figure out whether he was approving or condemning their action. “I couldn’t do anything else, Comrade Gorbovsky,” he said. “I repeat, that was the first alien sun. Try to put yourself in my place. It’s hard to think of an analogy you might understand.”

“Yes,” said Gorbovsky. “No doubt. Still, it was very audacious.”

Again, Kondratev did not know whether he was approving or condemning. Gorbovsky sneezed deafeningly and quickly sat up, taking his feet off the couch. “Pardon me,” he said, and sneezed again. “I’ve caught another cold. I lie one night on the shore, and I’ve got a cold.”

“On the shore?”

“Well, of course, Sergei. There’s a meadow, grass, and you watch the fish swimming to the factories—” Gorbovsky sneezed again. “Pardon me… And the moonlight on the water—’the road to happiness,’ you know?”

“Moonlight on the water…” Kondratev said dreamily.

“You don’t have to tell me! I’m from Torzhok myself. We have a river there—small, but very clean. And water lilies in the fish farms. Ah, marvelous!”

“I understand,” Kondratev said, smiling. “In my time we called that ‘pining for blue sky.’”

“We still call it that. But by the sea… So yesterday evening I was sitting by the sea at night, a wonderful moon, and girls singing somewhere, and suddenly out of the water, slowly, slowly, comes some bunch or other wearing horned suits.”

“Who!”

“Sportsmen.” Gorbovsky waved his arm and lay back down. “I come home a lot nowadays. I go to Venus and back, ferrying volunteers. Great people, the volunteers. Only they’re noisy, they eat a godawful lot, and they all, you know, are rushing off to some suicidal great deed.”

Kondratev asked with interest, “What do you think about the project, Leonid?”

“The plan is all right,” Gorbovsky said. “I was the one who made it up, after all. Not by myself, but I took part. When I was young I had a great deal to do with Venus. It’s a mean planet. But of course you know that yourself.”

“It must be very boring to haul volunteers on a D-ship,” said Kondratev.

“Yes, of course, the real missions of D-ships are a little different. Take me, for example, with my Tariel. When all this is over, I’m going to EN 17—that’s on the frontier, twelve parsecs out. There’s a planet Vladislava there, with two alien artificial satellites. We’re going to look for a city there. It’s very interesting, looking for alien cities, Sergei.”

“What do you mean ‘alien’?”

“Alien… you know, Sergei, as a spacer, you would probably be interested in what we are doing now. I made up a little lecture especially for you, and if you like, I’ll give it to you now. Okay?”

“It sounds fascinating.” Kondratev leaned back in the chair. “Please.”

Gorbovsky stared at the ceiling and began, “Depending on tastes and inclinations, our spacers are usually working on one of three problems, but I myself am personally interested in a fourth. Many consider it too specialized, too hopeless, but in my view a man with imagination can easily find a calling in it. Even so, there are people who assert that under no circumstances will it repay the fuel expenditure. This is what the snobs and the utilitarians say. We reply that—”

“Excuse me,” Kondratev interrupted. “What exactly does this fourth problem consist of? And the first three, while you’re at it.”

Gorbovsky was silent for a while, looking at Kondratev and blinking. “Yes,” he said finally. “The lecture didn’t come out right, it seems. I started with the middle. The first three problems—planetological, astrophysical, and cosmogonic research. Then verification and further elaboration of the D-principle, id est, taking a brand new D-ship and driving it up against the light barrier until you can’t stand any more. And finally, attempts to establish contact with other civilizations in space—very cautious attempts, so far. My own favorite problem is connected with nonhuman civilizations too. Only we aren’t looking for contacts, but for traces. Traces of the visits of alien space travelers to various worlds. Some people maintain that under no circumstances can this mission be justified. Or did I already say that?”

“You did,” said Kondratev. “But what sort of traces do you mean?”

“You see, Sergei, any civilization must leave a great number of remains. Take us, the human race. How do we treat a new planet? We place artificial satellites around it, and a long chain of radio buoys stretches from there to the Sun—two or three buoys a light-year—beacons, universal direction-finders… If we manage to land on the planet, we build bases, science cities. And we don’t exactly take everything along when we leave! Other civilizations must do likewise.”

“And have you found anything?” asked Kondratev.

“Well, of course! Phobos and Deimos—you must know about that; the underground city on Mars; the artificial satellites around Vladislava… very interesting satellites. Yes… that’s more or less what we do, Sergei.”

“Interesting,” said Kondratev. “But I still would have chosen research into the D-principle.”

“Well, that depends on tastes and inclinations. And anyhow, now we’re all ferrying volunteers. Even proud researchers of the D-principle. Now we’re like the streetcar coachmen of your time.”

“There weren’t any streetcars left by my time,” Kondratev said with a sigh. “And streetcars were driven not by coachmen, but by… they called it something else. Listen, Leonid, have you had dinner?”

Gorbovsky sneezed, excused himself, and sat up. “Hold it, Sergei,” he said, extracting an enormous multicolored handkerchief from his pocket. “Hold it. Have I told you what I came for?”

“To talk spacer to spacer.”

“Right. But I didn’t say anything more? No?”

“No. Right away you got very interested in the couch.”

“Aha.” Gorbovsky blew his nose thoughtfully. “Do you by any chance know Zvantsev the oceanographer?”

“The only person I know is Protos the doctor,” Kondratev said sadly. “And now I’ve just met you.”

“Wonderful. You know Protos, Protos knows Zvantsev well, and I know both Protos and Zvantsev well. Anyhow, Zvantsev is dropping by shortly. Nikolai Zvantsev.”

“Wonderful,” Kondratev said slowly. He realized there was an ulterior motive lurking around here somewhere.

They heard the song of the door signal. “It’s him,” Gorbovsky said, and lay down again.

Zvantsev the oceanographer was enormously tall and extremely broad-shouldered. He had a broad copper-colored face, close-cropped thick dark hair, large steel-blue eyes, and a small straight mouth. He silently shook Kondratev’s hand, cast a sidelong glance at Gorbovsky, and sat down.

“Excuse me,” said Kondratev, “I’ll go order dinner. What would you like, Comrade Zvantsev?”

“I like everything,” said Zvantsev. “And he likes everything.”

“Yes, I like everything,” said Gorbovsky. “Only please, not oatmeal kissel.”

“Right,” Kondratev said, and went into the dining room.

“And not cauliflower!” Gorbovsky shouted.

As he punched out the numbers by the delivery-line cube, Kondratev thought, They had some reason for coming. They’re intelligent people, so they didn’t come out of simple curiousity—they came to help me. They’re energetic and active people, so they scarcely dropped by to console me. But how do they plan on helping? I need only one thing…. Kondratev narrowed his eyes and stood still for a moment, with his hand braced against the lid of the delivery cube. From the living room came:

“You’re lying around again, Leonid. There’s something of the mimicrodon in you.”

“Lolling is an absolute necessity,” Gorbovsky said with deep conviction. “It’s philosophically unassailable. Useless motions of the arms and legs steadily increase the entropy of the universe. I would like to say to the world, ‘People! Lie around more! Beware the heat death!’”

“I’m surprised you haven’t yet taken up crawling.”

“I thought about it. Too much friction. From the entropic point of view, locomotion in the vertical position is more advantageous.”

“Blatherer,” said Zvantsev. “Get up, and now!”

Kondratev opened the lid and set the table. “Dinner is served!” he shouted in a violently cheerful voice. He felt as if he were facing an exam.

There was noise of horseplay in the living room, and Gorbovsky answered, “I’m being brought.”

He appeared in the dining room, however, in a vertical position.

“You must excuse him, Comrade Kondratev,” said Zvantsev, who appeared close behind. “He’s always lying around. First in the grass, and later, without even cleaning himself up, he lies on the couch!”

“Where’s the grass stain? Where?” Gorbovsky shouted, and began looking himself over.

With difficulty, Kondratev smiled.

“I’ll tell you what,” Zvantsev said as he sat down at the table. “I see by your face, Sergei, that preambles are superfluous. Gorbovsky and I came to recruit you for work.”

“Thank you,” Kondratev said softly.

“I am an oceanographer and am working in an organization called the Oceanic Guard. We cultivate plankton—for protein—and herd whales—for meat, fat, hides, chemicals. Doctor Protos has told us that you are forbidden to go offplanet. And we always need people. Especially now, when many are leaving us for the Venus project. I’m inviting you to join us.”

There was a moment of silence. Gorbovsky, not looking at anyone, assiduously ate his soup. Zvantsev also began eating. Kondratev crumbled his bread. “Are you sure I’ll be up to it?” he asked.

“I’m sure,” said Zvantsev. “We have many former spacemen.”

“I’m about as former as you can get,” said Kondratev. “You don’t have any others like me.”

“Give Sergei a little more detail about what he could end up doing,” said Gorbovsky.

“You could be a supervisor on a laminaria plantation,” said Zvantsev. “You could guard the plankton plantations. There’s patrol work, but for that you need special qualifications—that will come with time. Best of all, there’s whale herding. Get into whale herding, Sergei.” He laid down his knife and fork. “You can’t imagine how fine that is!”

Gorbovsky looked at him with curiosity.

“Early, early in the morning… quiet ocean… reddish sky in the east. You rise up to the surface, throw open the hatch, climb out onto the turret and wait and wait. The water below your legs is green, clear; up from the deep rises a jellyfish—it turns over and goes off under the minisub… A big fish swims lazily past… It’s really fine!”

Kondratev looked at his dreamy, satisfied face, and suddenly, so unbearably that he even stopped breathing, he wanted to be on the ocean, in the salt air, instantly.

“And when the whales move to new pasture!” Zvantsev continued. “Do you know how it looks? In front and in back go the old males, two or three to a herd—they’re enormous, bluish-black, and they surge forward so evenly that it seems that they’re not moving, it’s the water rushing past them. They go in front, and the young ones and pregnant females after them. We’ve got the old males tamed—they’ll lead wherever we want, but they need help. Especially when young males are growing up in the herd—they always try to split it up and take part off with them. That’s where we have our work. This is where the real business begins. Or all of a sudden grampuses attack.”

He suddenly came to himself again and looked at Kondratev with a completely sober glance. “To put it briefly, the job has everything. Wide-open spaces, and depths, and being useful to people, and having good comrades-and adventures, if you especially want that.”

“Yes,” Kondratev said with feeling.

Zvantsev smiled.

“He’s ready,” said Gorbovsky. “Well, that’s a spacer for you. Like you, I want to be on the turret… and with the jellyfish

“That’s how it is,” Zvantsev said in a businesslike manner. “I’ll take you to Vladivostok. The course in the training school there begins in two days. Have you finished eating?”

“Yes,” said Kondratev. Work, he thought. Here it is—real work!

“Then let’s be on our way,” said Zvantsev, rising.

“Where?”

“To the airport.”

“Right now?”

“Well, of course right now. What is there to wait for?”

“Nothing,” Kondratev said confusedly. “Only…” He recollected himself and quickly began clearing away the dishes.

Gorbovsky helped him while finishing a banana. “You go on,” he said, “and I’ll stay here. I’ll lie down and read a bit. I have a flight at twenty-one thirty.”

They went out into the living room, and the navigator looked around. The thought came distinctly that wherever he would go on this planet, he would find at his disposal the same sort of quiet little house, and kind neighbors, and books, and a garden out the window. “Let’s go,” he said. “Goodbye, Leonid. Thank you for everything.”

Gorbovsky had already oozed onto the couch. “Goodbye, Sergei,” he said. “We’ll be seeing a good deal of each other.”