Noon: 22nd Century

10. Languor of the Spirit

When Pol Gnedykh appeared on the streets of the Volga-Unicorn Farm early one morning, people stared after him. Pol was deliberately unshaven and barefoot. On his shoulder he carried a many-branched stick, with a dusty pair of shoes tied with twine dangling from the end. Starting near the latticed tower of the microweather installation, a litter robot began dogging his footsteps. From behind the openwork fence of one of the cottages came the laughter of many voices, and a pretty girl standing on a porch with a towel in her hand inquired of the whole street, “Hail pilgrim! Returning from some holy shrine?” Immediately, from the other side of the street came a question, “Don’t we have any opium for the masses?” The venture was working out gloriously well. Pol assumed a dignified air and began to sing loudly:

Into the astounded silence came a frightened voice: “What is he?” Then Pol stopped, shoved the robot with his foot, and asked into space, “Does anyone know where I can find Aleksandr Kostylin?”

Several voices vied with each other to explain that Kostylin must be in the laboratory now, right over in that building.

“On thy left,” a single voice added after a short pause.

Pol politely thanked them and continued on. The lab building was low, round, light blue. A towheaded, freckled youth in a white lab coat stood in the doorway, leaning against the doorpost, with his arms folded across his chest. Pol went up the steps and stopped. The towhead looked at him placidly.

“Can I see Kostylin?” Pol asked.

The youth ran his eyes over Pol, looked over Pol’s shoulder at the shoes, looked at the litter robot, which was rocking on the step below Pol, its manipulators gaping greedily, and then turning his head slightly, he called softly, “Sasha, hey Sasha! Come out here a minute. Some castaway is here to see you.”

“Have him come in,” a familiar bass rumbled from the depths of the laboratory.

The towheaded youth looked Pol over again. “He can’t,” he said, “he’s highly septic.”

“So disinfect him,” came the voice from the laboratory. “I’ll be happy to wait.”

“You’ll have a long wait—” the youth began.

And here Pol appealed plaintively, “Zow, Lin! It’s me, Polly!”

Something in the laboratory fell with a crash; out from the doorway, as if from a subway tunnel, came a whiff of cold air, the towheaded youth stepped aside, and on the threshold appeared Aleksandr Kostylin, enormous, broad, in a gigantic white coat. His hands, with fingers spread wide, were thickly smeared with something, and he carried them off to the side, like a surgeon during an operation. “Zow, Polly!” he yelled, and the litter robot, driven out of its cybernetic mind, rolled down off the porch and rushed headlong through the street.

Poi threw down his stick and, forgetful of self, darted into the embrace of the white coat. His bones crunched. What a way to go, he thought, and croaked, “Mercy… Lin… friend…”

“Polly—Little Polly!” Kostylin cooed in his bass, squeezing Pol with his elbows. “It’s really great to see you here!”

Pol fought like a lion, and at last managed to free himself. The towheaded youth, who had been following the reunion with fright, sighed with relief, picked up the stick with the shoes, and gave it to Pol.

“So how are you?” asked Kostylin, smiling the whole width of his face.

“All right, thanks,” said Pol. “I’m alive.”

“As you can see, we till the soil here,” Kostylin said. “Feeding all you parasites.”

“You look very impressive,” said Pol.

Kostylin glanced at his hands. “Yes,” he said, “I forgot.” He turned to the towhead. “Fedor, finish up by yourself. You can see that Polly has come for a visit. Little Lieber Polly.”

“Maybe we should just chuck it?” said Fedor. “I mean, it’s clear it’s not going to work.”

“No, we’ve got to finish,” said Kostylin. “You finish up, will you please?”

“Okay,” Fedor said reluctantly, and went off into the laboratory.

Kostylin grabbed Pol by the shoulder and held him off at arm’s length to look him over. “Haven’t grown a bit,” he said tenderly. “Have you been getting bad feed? Hold it…” He frowned worriedly. “What happened, your pterocar crack up? What kind of a getup is that?”

Pol grinned with pleasure. “No,” he said. “I’m playing pilgrim. I’ve walked all the way from the Big Road.”

“Wow!” Kostylin’s face showed the customary respect. “Almost three hundred kilometers. How was it?”

“Wonderful,” said Pol. “If only there’d been someplace to take a bath. And change clothes.”

Kostylin smiled happily and dragged Pol from the porch. “Let’s go,” he said. “Now you can have everything. A bath, and milk…”

He walked in the middle of the street, dragging the stumbling Pol after him, and passed sentence while waving the stick with the shoes: “… and a clean shirt… and some decent pants… and a massage… and an ion shower… and two or three lashes for not writing… and hello from Athos… and two letters from Teacher.”

“That’s great!” exclaimed Pol. “That’s great!”

“Yes, yes, you’ll have the works. And how about ignis fatuus? You remember ignis fatuus? And how I almost got married? And how I missed you!”

The workday was beginning on the farm. The street was full of people, men and girls, dressed colorfully and simply. The people made way for Kostylin and Pol. The two could hear cries:

“They’re bringing the Pilgrim!”

“Vivisect it—it’s sick!”

“Some new hybrid?”

“Sasha, wait, let us have a look.”

Through the crowd spread a rumor that during the night, near Kostylin’s laboratory, a second Taimyr had landed.

“Eighteenth century,” someone stated. “They’re handing out the crew to researchers in comparative anatomy.”

Kostylin waved the stick, and Pol gaily bared his teeth. “I love attention,” he said.

Voices among the crowd sang, “O, what a hero I, / Who cold or frost fear not!”

Pol the Pilgrim sat on a broad wooden bench at a broad wooden table amid currant bushes. The morning sun pleasantly warmed his antiseptically clean back. Pol luxuriated. In his hand he had an enormous mug of cranberry juice. Kostylin, also shirtless and with wet hair, sat opposite and looked at him affectionately.

“I always believed that Athos was a great man,” said Pol, making sweeping motions with the mug. “He had the clearest head, and he knew best of any of us what he wanted.”

“Oh, no,” Kostylin said warmly. “The Captain saw his goal best of any of us. And he moved straight toward it.”

Pol took a sip from the mug and thought. “Maybe,” he said. “The Captain wanted to be a spacer, and he became a spacer.”

“Uh-huh,” said Kostylin, “and Athos is still more of a biologist than a spacer.”

“But what a biologist!” Pol raised a finger. “Honestly, I brag about having been friends with him in school.”

“Me too,” Kostylin agreed. “But you wait five years or so, and we’ll be bragging about being friends with the Captain.”

“Right,” said Pol. “And here I drift around like a bit of foil in the wind. I want to try everything. Now, you were just scolding me for not writing.” He put down his mug with a sigh. “I can’t write when I’m busy with something. Writing is boring then. When you’re working on a subject, writing is boring, because everything is ahead of you. And when you finish, it’s boring because it’s all behind you… And then you don’t know what’s ahead. You know, Lin, everything has really been working out stupidly for me. Here I work four years on theoretical servomechanics. One girl and I solved Chebotarev’s Problem—you remember, Teacher told us about it? We solve it, build two very good regulators… and I fall in love with the girl. And then everything ended and… everything ended.”

“You haven’t gotten married?” Kostylin asked sympathetically.

“That’s not the point. It was just that when other people work, they always get new ideas of some sort, but I didn’t. The work was finished, and it didn’t interest me any more. In these ten years I’ve gone through four specialties. And again I’m out of ideas. So I thought to myself, I’ll go find old Lin.”

“Quite right!” Kostylin said in his deep voice. “I’ll give you twenty ideas!”

“So give,” Pol said sluggishly. He grew gloomy and buried his nose in the mug.

Kostylin looked at him with thoughtful interest. “Couldn’t you get into endocrinology?” he proposed.

“Could be endocrinology,” said Pol. “Even if it is a hard word. And anyhow, all these ideas are utter languor of the spirit.”

Kostylin said suddenly, and without obvious relevance to what had gone before, “I’m getting married soon.”

“Wonderful!” Pol said sadly. “Just don’t tell me all about your happy love in X thousand boring words.” He became more lively. “Happy love is inherently boring anyhow,” he declared. “Even the ancients understood that. No real craftsman has been attracted by the theme of happy love. For great works, unhappy love was always an end in itself, but happy love is at best background.”

Kostylin assented reluctantly.

“True depth of feeling is characteristic only of unrequited love,” Pol continued with inspiration. “Unhappy love makes a person active, churns him up, but happy love calms him down, spiritually castrates him.”

“Cheer up, Polly,” said Kostylin. “It will all pass. The good thing about unhappy love is that it is usually short-lived. Let me pour you some more juice.”

“No, Lin,” said Pol, “I think this is long-lived. After all, two years have already gone by. She probably doesn’t even remember me, and I…” He looked at Kostylin. “Excuse me, Lin. I know it isn’t very nice when someone cries all over your shoulder. Only this is all so interminable. I sure as hell wasn’t lucky in love.”

Kostylin nodded helplessly. “Would you like me to put you in touch with Teacher?” he asked uncertainly.

Pol shook his head and said, “No. I don’t want to talk to Teacher when I’m like this. I’d feel like a fool.”

“Mmm, yes,” Kostylin said, and thought, What’s true is true. Teacher can’t stand unhappy people. He looked at Pol suspiciously. Could clever Polly be playing the unfortunate? He had a good appetite—it was a pleasure to watch him eating. And he loved attention, as always. “Do you remember Operation October?” Lin asked.

“Of course!” Pol once again came to life. “Do you remember how the plan failed?”

“Well-how should I put it?… We were too young.”

“Good heavens!” said Pol He grew more cheerful. “Teacher sicked us on Walter on purpose! And then he smashed us in the examination—”

“What examination?”

“Zow, Lin!” Pol shouted delightedly. “The Captain was right—you’re the only one who never figured it out!”

Kostylin slowly came to the realization. “Yes, of course,” he said. “But what do you mean, I never figured it out? I just forgot. And do you remember how the Captain tested us for acceleration?”

“That was when you ate all that chocolate to see if you could handle the extra weight?” Pol said wickedly.

“And do you remember how we tested the rocket fuel?” Kostylin recollected hurriedly.

“Yeah,” Pol said dreamily. “Boy, did it thunder!”

“I have the scar to this day,” Kostylin said with pride. “Here—feel it.” He turned his back to Pol.

Pol felt it with pleasure. “We were good kids,” he said. “Glorious. Do you remember when on parade we turned into a herd of crayspiders?”

“Uff, it was noisy!”

They were sweet memories. Pol suddenly jumped up and with unusual animation imitated a crayspider. The surroundings filled with the repulsive gnashing howl of the multilegged monster that stole through the jungles of fearsome Pandora. And as if in reply, a deep roaring sigh came from afar. Pol froze in fright. “What’s that?” he asked.

Kostylin laughed. “Some spider you make! That’s cattle!”

“What sort of cattle?” Pol asked in indignation.

“Beef cattle,” Lin explained. “Astonishingly good either grilled or roasted.”

“Listen, Lin,” said Pol, “those are worthy opponents. I want a look at them. And anyhow, I want to see what you do around here.”

Kostylin’s face filled with boredom. “Forget it, Polly,” he said. “Cattle are cattle. Let’s sit here a little longer. I’ll get you some more juice. All right?”

But it was too late. Pol had filled with energy. “The unknown is calling us! Forward, on to the beef cattle, who throw down the gauntlet to crayspiders! Where’s my shirt? Didn’t some pedigreed bull promise me a clean shirt?”

“Polly, Polly,” Kostylin exhorted, “you’ve got cattle on the brain! Let’s go to the lab instead.”

“I’m septic,” Pol declared. “I don’t want to go to the lab. I want to go to the cattle.”

“They’ll butt you,” Kostylin said, and stopped short. That had been a mistake.

“Really?” Polly said with quiet rapture. “A shirt. Red. I’ll get a bullfight going.”

Kostylin slapped his hands on his thighs in despair. “Look what I get stuck with! A craymatador!”

He got up and headed for the building. As he walked past Pol, Pol stood on tiptoes, bent over, and did a semiveronica with great elegance. Lin began to bellow, and butted him in the stomach.

When he saw the cattle, Pol immediately realized that there would be no bullfight. Under the bright, hot sky, enormous spotted hulks moved slowly in a row through thick, succulent, man-high grass stretching out to the horizon. The line ate its way into the soft green plain-and behind it was left black steaming ground bare of a single blade of grass. A steady electric odor hung over the plain—there was the smell of ozone, warm black soil, grass, and fresh manure.

“Zow!” Pol whispered, and sat down on a hummock.

The line of cattle moved past him. The school where Pol had studied was in a grain district and Pol knew little about cattle raising, and had long forgotten what little he had learned. He had never had occasion to think about beef cattle, either. He simply ate beef. And now, with a rumble and ceaseless crackling, a herd of beef on the hoof, crunching, tramping, and masticating, went past him with heart-rending sighs. From time to time some enormous brown dribbling muzzle, smeared with green, stuck up from the grass and let out an indistinct deep roar.

Then Pol noticed the cybers. They walked a bit ahead of the line—brisk, flat machines on broad soft caterpillar treads. Now and again they stopped and dug into the ground, lagged behind, and then rushed forward. There were few of them, perhaps fifteen in all. They rushed along the line with frightening speed, throwing moist black clods out from under their treads in fan-shaped showers.

Suddenly a dark cloud covered the sun. A heavy, warm rain began. Pol looked back at the village, at the white cottages scattered over the dark green of gardens. It seemed to him that the paraboloid grids of the weather condensers, on the openwork tower of the microweather station, were staring straight at him. The rain passed quickly; the cloud moved along after the herd. Dim silhouettes that had unexpectedly appeared on the horizon caught Pol’s attention, but here he started getting bitten. They were nasty-looking insects, small, gray, winged. Pol realized that these were flies. Perhaps even dung-covered ones. Once he had figured this out, Pol jumped up and rushed briskly back to the village. The flies did not pursue him.

Pol crossed a stream, stopped on the bank, and debated for some time whether or not to go swimming. Deciding it wasn’t worth it, he began climbing the path to the village. As he walked, he thought, It was right that I got the rain dumped on me. And the flies know who to land on… It’s what I get for being a parasite. Everybody works like human beings. The Captain is up in space… Athos catches fleas on blue stars… Lin, the lucky man, cures cattle. Why am I like this? Why should I, an honest, hard-working man, feel like a parasite? He shuffled down the path and thought about how good it had been the night when he latched onto the solution of Chebotarev’s Problem, and had dragged Lida from her bed and made her verify it. When everything had turned out right, she even kissed him on the cheek. Pol touched his cheek and sighed. It would be great to bury himself now in some really good problem like Fermat’s Theorem! But there was nothing in his head but ringing emptiness and some idiotic voice that affirmed, “If we find a square root…”

On the edge of the village Pol stopped again. Under a spreading cherry tree, a one-seater pterocar was resting on its wing. Near the pterocar squatted a boy of about fifteen, with a sorrowful expression. In front of him, buzzing monotonously, a long-legged litter robot rolled through the grass. Evidently all was not well with the litter robot.

Pol’s shadow fell over the boy, and the boy raised his head and then got up. “I landed the pterocar on him,” he said with an unusually familiar guilty look.

“And now you’re repenting, huh?” Pol asked as a teacher might.

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” the boy said angrily.

For some time they watched silently the evolutions of the squashed robot. Then Pol squatted down decisively. “Well, let’s see what we’ve got here,” he said, and took the robot by a manipulator. The robot let out a squeal.

“Does it hurt?” Pol sang tenderly, easing his fingers into the regulatory system. “Did im hurt ims paw? Poor baby hurt ims paw.”

The robot squealed again, shuddered, and was quiet. The boy sighed with relief and squatted down too. “That’s it,” he muttered. “Boy, was it yelling when I got out of the pterocar!”

“Of course we yelled, we did,” cooed Pol, unscrewing the armor. “We’ve got ourselves a good acoustics system, a loudmouthed one. It’s an itty bitty AKU-6, it is, with longitudinal vibration… molecular-notchedy-watchty, it is… ye-es.” Pol took off the armor plate and carefully laid it on the grass. “And what is your name?”

“Fedor,” said the boy, “Fedor Skvortsov.” He watched Pol’s deft hands enviously.

“Well, Uncle Fedor, the litter robot is as strong as three bears,” Pol communicated, extracting the regulator block from the depths of the robot. “I already know one Fedor here. A likable fellow, freckled. A very, very aseptic young man. Are you related to him?”

“No,” the boy said cheerfully. “I’m here for practical training. Are you a cyberneticist?”

“We’re passing through, we are,” Pol said, “in search of ideas. Do you-ums have any sparey-wary ideas?”

“I… my… in the laboratory we get a lot of ideas, and nothing ever works out.”

“I understand,” muttered Pol, digging into the regulator block. “A flock of ideas rush every whichway up into the air. At this point the hunter runs out and shoots the crayspider…”

“You’ve been on Pandora?” the boy asked with envy.

Pol looked around furtively, then let out the yelp of a crayspider that is overtaking its prey.

“Great!”

Pol put the litter robot back together, whispered to it through its steel-blue back, and the robot rolled into the direct sunlight to accumulate energy.

“Marvelous!” Pol said, wiping his hands on his pants. “Now let’s see what shape the pterocar’s in.”

“No, please,” Fedor said quickly. “I’ll do it myself, honest.”

“By yourself, then,” said Pol. “In that case I’ll go wash my hands. Who’s your teacher?”

“My teacher is Nikolai Kuzmich Belka, the oceanographer,” the boy said, bristling.

Pol did not risk anything witty, and silently clapped the boy on the shoulder and went on his way. He felt much better. He had already gone two blocks into the village when a familiar pterocar darted by with a whoosh and a boy’s voice, intolerably out of tune, imitated the yelp of a crayspider that is overtaking its prey.

Lost in thought, Pol ran into a two-headed calf. It shied off to the side and stared at Pol with both pairs of eyes. Then it lowered its left head to the grass under its feet and turned the right to a lilac branch hanging over the road. Here it was nicked with a switch, and it ran on, kicking. The two-headed calf was being herded by a very attractive suntanned girl who wore a colorful peasant dress and a tilted straw hat. Pol muttered crazily, “And everywhere that Mary went, her, uh, calf was sure to go.”

“What?” asked the girl, stopping.

No, she wasn’t just attractive. She was plain beautiful. So beautiful she couldn’t fail to be smart, so smart she couldn’t fail to be nice, so nice… Pol suddenly wanted to be tall and broad-shouldered, with an unfurrowed brow and steely calm eyes. His thoughts darted in a zigzag. If nothing else, I have to be witty. He said, “My name is Pol.”

The girl answered, “I’m Irina. Did you say something to me, Pol?”

Pol broke out in a sweat. The girl waited, looking impatiently after the calf, which was moving off. The thoughts in Pol’s head darted in three layers. Let us find the square root… Cupid fires from a double-barreled carbine… Now she’ll think I’m a stutterer. Aha! A stutterer—that was a thought.

“Y-you’re in a h-hurry, I see,” he said, stuttering with all his might. “I’ll Hook you up th-this evening, if I m-may. Th-this evening.”

“Of course.” The girl was obviously pleased.

“T-till evening,” Pol said, and went on. I talked a little, he thought. We had a little c-conversation. I’m a veritable skyrocket of wit. He pictured himself at the moment of that conversation, and even moaned nasally at his awkwardness.

Somewhere nearby a loudspeaker boomed: “Will all unoccupied anesthesia specialists please stop by Laboratory Three? Potenko calling. We’ve got an idea. Will all unoccupied anesthesia specialists please stop by Laboratory Three? And don’t come crashing into the main building like last time. Laboratory Three. Laboratory Three.”

Why aren’t I a specialist in anesthesia? thought Pol. After all, I wouldn’t dream of crashing into the main building. Two fair maidens in shorts rushed past, down the middle of the street, their elbows pressed to their sides. Probably specialists.

It was quiet and empty in the village. A lonely litter robot languished in the sun at a perfectly clean intersection. Out of pity, Pol threw it a handful of leaves. The robot immediately came to life and set to work. I haven’t met so many litter robots in any city, thought Pol. But then, on a stock farm anything can happen.

A solid thunder of hoofs sounded from behind. Pol turned around in fright, and four horses galloped headlong past him, flanks foaming. On the lead horse, crouched over the mane, was a fellow in white shorts, tanned almost black and glossy with sweat. The other steeds were riderless. Near a low building twenty yards from Pol, at full gallop, the fellow jumped from the horse right onto the steps of the porch. He whistled piercingly and disappeared into the door. The horses, snorting and twisting their necks, described a semicircle and came back to the porch. Pol did not even have time to be properly envious. Three boys and a girl ran out of the low building, leaped onto the horses, and rushed back past Pol at the same mad gait. They were already turning the corner when the fellow in the white shorts jumped out onto the porch and shouted after them, “Take the samples right to the station. Aleshka!”

There was no longer anyone on the street. The fellow stood there a little while, wiped his forehead, and returned to the building. Pol sighed and went on.

He stopped and listened at the threshold to Kostylin’s laboratory. The sounds that reached him seemed strange: A muffled blow. A heavy sigh. Something sliding. A bored voice said, “Right.” Silence. Again a muffled blow. Pol looked around at the sun-flooded laboratory square. Kostylin’s voice said, “Liar. Hold it.” A muffled blow. Pol went into the entryway and saw a white door with a sign, SURGICAL LABORATORY. Behind the door the bored voice said, “Why do we always take the thigh? We could take the back.” Kostylin’s bass answered, “The Siberians tried that—it didn’t work.” Again a muffled blow.

Pol went up to the door. It opened noiselessly. There was a lot of light in the laboratory, and along the walls shined strange-looking installations frosted with white. The broad panes set in the wall showed dark. Pol asked, “Can someone septic come in?”

No one answered. There were about ten people in the laboratory. They all looked gloomy and pensive. Three sat together, silent, on a large low bench. They looked at Pol without any expression. Two others sat with their backs to the door, by the far wall, with their heads together, reading something. The rest were gathered together in a semicircle in a corner. In the center of the semicircle, his face to the wall, towered Kostylin. He was covering his eyes with his right hand. His left hand was pushed through under his right arm. Freckled Fedor, who was also standing in the semicircle, slapped him on the left palm. The semicircle stirred, and thrust forward fists with thumbs up. Kostylin silently turned and pointed to a person, who silently shook his head, and Kostylin took up his former pose.

“So can someone septic come in?” Pol asked again. “Or is this a bad time?”

“The Pilgrim,” one of the people sitting on the bench said in a bored voice. “Come on in, Pilgrim. We’re all septic here.”

Pol went in. The man with the bored voice said into space, “Peasants, I propose we look over the analyses one more time. Maybe there’s still not enough protein.”

“There’s even more protein than we calculated,” said one of the players of this strange game. An oppressive silence reigned; only the blows rang out, and somebody said from time to time, “Liar, you guessed wrong.”

Ha! thought Pol. All is not for the best in the surgical laboratory.

Kostylin suddenly pushed the players apart and walked out into the middle of the room. “A proposal,” he said briskly. Everyone, even the ones poring over their notes, turned toward him. “Let’s go swimming.”

“Let’s go,” the man with the bored voice said decisively. “We’ve got to think it all out from the beginning.”

No one responded further to the proposal. The surgeons spread out over the room and were quiet once again.

Kostylin went up to Pol and grasped him by the shoulders. “Let’s go, Polly,” he said sadly. “Let’s go, boy. We won’t be downhearted, right?”

“Of course not, Lin,” said Pol. “If it doesn’t work today, it’ll work day after tomorrow.”

They went out onto the sunny street. “Don’t hold back, Lin,” said Pol. “Don’t be afraid to cry a little on my shoulder. Don’t hold back.”

There were about one hundred thousand stock-raising farms on the Planet. There were farms that raised cattle, farms that raised pigs, farms that raised elephants, antelope, goats, llamas, sheep. In the middle stream of the Nile there were two farms which were trying to raise hippopotamuses.

On the Planet there were about two hundred thousand grain farms growing rye, wheat, corn, buckwheat, millet, oats, rice, kaoliang. There were specialized farms like Volga-Unicorn, and broad-based ones. Together they provided the foundation for abundance—giant, very highly automated complexes producing foodstuffs: everything from pigs and potatoes to oysters and mangoes. No accidental mishap, no catastrophe, could now threaten the Planet with crop failure and famine. The system for ample production, established once and for all, was maintained completely automatically and had developed so swiftly that it had been necessary to take special precautions against overproduction. Just as there had never been a breathing problem, now mankind had no problem eating.

By evening Pol already had an idea, though only the most general, of what the livestock farmers did. The Volga Farm was one of the few thousand stock farms in the temperate zone. Evidently here you could busy yourself with practical genetics, embryomechanical veterinary science, the production side of economic statistics, zoopsychology, or agrological cybernetics. Pol also encountered here one soil scientist who was evidently loafing-he drank milk fresh from the cow, and courted a pretty zoopsychologist all out, continually striving to entice her off to the swamps of the Amazon, where there was still something for a self-respecting soil scientist to do.

There were about sixty thousand head in the Volga-Unicorn herd. Pol very much liked the herd’s total autonomy—around the clock cybers and autovets cared for the cattle as a group, and each individually. The herd, in its turn, around the clock, served, on the one hand, the delivery-line processing complex and, on the other, the ever-growing scientific demands of the stock-raisers. For example, you could get in touch with the dispatch office and demand of the cowherd on duty an animal seven hundred twenty-two days old, of such-and-such a color and with such-and-such parameters, descended from the pedigreed bull Mikolaj II. In half an hour the designated animal, accompanied by a manure-smeared cyber, would be waiting for you in the receiving compartment of, say, the genetics lab.

Moreover, the genetics lab conducted the most insane experiments and functioned as the continual source of a certain friction between the farm and the processing complex. The processing workers, humble but ferocious guardians of world gastronomy, would be driven to a frenzy by the discovery in the regular cattle consignment of a monstrous beast reminiscent in appearance, and, more important, in flavor, of Pacific crab. A representative of the complex would quickly appear on the farm. He would immediately go to the genetics lab and demand to see “the creator of this unappetizing joke.” All one hundred eighty staff members of the genetics lab (not counting schoolchildren doing field work) would invariably step forward to claim the title of creator. The representative of the complex would, with restraint, recall that the farm and the complex were responsible for the uninterrupted supply to the delivery line of all forms of beef, and not of frog’s legs or canned jellyfish. The one hundred eighty progressively inclined geneticists would object as one man to this narrow approach to the supply problem. To them, the geneticists, it seemed strange that such an experienced and knowledgeable worker as so-and-so should hold such conservative views and should attach no significance to advertising, which, as everyone knew, existed to alter and perfect the taste of the populace. The processing representative would remind them that not one new food product could be introduced into the distribution network without the approbation of the Public Health Academy. (Shouts from the crowd of geneticists: “The great heroes saving us from indigestion!” “The Appendix-Lovers’ Society!”) The processing representative would spread his hands and indicate by his entire appearance that he was helpless. The shouts would turn into a muted growl and soon die out: the authority of the Public Health Academy was enormous. Then the geneticists would take the processing representative through the laboratories to show him “a little something new.” The processing representative would go pale, and assert with oaths that “all this” was completely inedible. In response the geneticists would give him a formal tasting consisting of meat that did not need spices, meat that did not need salt, meat that melted in the mouth like ice cream, special meat for cosmonauts and nuclear technicians, special meat for expectant mothers, meat that could be eaten raw. The processing representative would taste, and then shout in ecstacy, “This is good! This is great!” and would demand amid oaths that all this should get through the experimental stage within the next year. Completely pacified, he would take his leave and depart, and within a month it would all start over again.

The information gathered during the day encouraged Pol, and inspired him with a certainty that there was something to do here. For a start I’ll join the cyberneticists, I’ll herd cattle, thought Pol, sitting on the open veranda of the cafe and looking absentmin d-edly at a glass of carbonated sour milk. I’ll send half the litter robots into the fields. Let them catch flies. Evenings I’ll work with the geneticists. It’ll be neat if Irina turns out to be a geneticist. Of course they’d attach me to her. Every morning I’d send her a cyber with a bouquet of flowers. Every evening too, Pol finished the milk and looked down at the black field across the river. Young grass already showed faint green there. Very clever! thought Pol. Tomorrow the cybers will turn the herd around and drive it back. There we have it, shuttle pasture. But it’s all just routine—I see no new principles. Irina and I will develop cattle that eat dirt. Like earthworms. That will be something! If only the Public Health Academy…

A large company, arguing noisily about the meaning of life, tumbled onto the veranda, and immediately began moving tables around. Someone muttered, “A person dies, and he doesn’t care whether he has successors or not, descendants or not.”

“It doesn’t matter to Mikolaj II the bull, but—”

“Stuff the bull! You don’t care either! You’re gone, dissolved, disappeared. You don’t exist, understand?”

“Hold on, guys. There is a certain logic in that, of course. Only the living are interested in the meaning of life.”

“I wonder where you would be if your ancestors had thought like that. You’d still be making furrows with a wooden plow.”

“Nonsense! What has the meaning of life got to do with anything here? It’s simply the law of the development of productive forces.”

“What’s a law got to do with it?”

“The fact that productive forces keep developing whether you like it or not. After the plow came the tractor, after the tractor, the cyber—”

“Okay, leave our ancestors out of it. But do you mean there were people for whom the meaning of life consisted in inventing the tractor?”

“Why are you talking nonsense? Why do you always talk nonsense? The question is not what any given person lives for but what the human race lives for! You don’t understand a thing, and—”

“You’re the one who doesn’t understand a thing!”

“Listen to me! Everybody listen! Peasants! I’ll explain everything to you-Ow!”

“Let him talk! Let him talk!”

“This is a complex question. There are as many people arguing about the meaning of their existence as there are people in—”

“Shorter!”

“—in existence. First, ancestors don’t have anything to do with it. A person is given life independently of whether he wants it or—”

“Shorter!”

“Well, then explain it yourself.”

“Right, Alan, make it shorter.”

“Shorter? Here you go: Life is interesting, ergo we live. And as for those who don’t find it interesting, well, right in Snegirevo there’s a fertilizer factory.”

“‘Ataway, Allan!”

“No, guys. There’s also a certain logic to this.”

“It’s cracker-barrel philosophy! What does ‘interesting’ or ‘uninteresting’ mean? What do we exist for? That’s the question!”

“So what does displacement of the perihelion exist for? Or Newton’s law?”

“‘What for’ is the stupidest question there is. What does the sun rise in the east for?”

“Bah! One fool brings that question up to lead a thousand sages astray.”

“Fool? I’m as much a fool as you are sages.”

“Forget the whole thing! Let’s talk about love instead!”

“‘What is this thing called love?’”

“What does love exist for-there’s the question! Well, Zhora?”

“You know, peasants, pretend somebody is looking at you in a laboratory—people are just people. As to how philosophy begins… love, life…”

Pol took his chair and squeezed into the company. They recognized him.

“Ah! The Pilgrim! Pilgrim, what is love?”

“Love,” said Pol, “is a characteristic property of highly organized matter.”

“What’s the ‘organized’ for and what’s the matter for—there’s the question!”

“So then will you—”

“Pilgrim, know any new jokes?”

“Yes,” said Pol, “but not any good ones.”

“We aren’t very good ourselves.”

“Have him tell one. Tell me a joke and I’ll tell you who you are.”

Pol began, “A certain cyberneticist—” (laughter) “—invented a prognosticator, a machine that could foretell the future—a great, huge complex a hundred stories tall. For a start he asked the prognosticator the question, ‘What will I be doing in three hours?’ The prognosticator hummed away until morning, and then answered, ‘You’ll be sitting here waiting for me to answer your question.’”

“Ye-es,” someone said.

“What do you mean ‘ye-es’?” Pol said coolly. “You asked for it yourselves.”

“Hey peasants, why are all these cyberjokes so dumb?”

“Not just ‘why’ but to what end, what for? There’s the real question!”

“Pilgrim! What’s your name, Pilgrim?”

“Pol,” Pol muttered.

Irina came onto the veranda. She was more beautiful than the girls sitting at the table. She was so beautiful that Pol stopped listening. She smiled, said something, waved to someone, and sat down next to long-nosed Zhora. Zhora immediately bent over to her and asked her something, probably “what for?” Pol exhaled and noticed that his neighbor on the right was crying on his shoulder: “We simply can’t do it—we haven’t learned how. There’s no way Aleksandr can get that through his head. Such things can’t be done in bursts.”

Pol finally recognized his neighbor—it was Vasya, the man with the bored voice, the same Vasya they had gone swimming with at noon.

“Such things can’t be done in bursts. We aren’t even adjusting Nature—we’re smashing her to pieces.”

“Ah… just what is the topic here?” Pol asked cautiously. He had absolutely no idea when and from where Vasya had appeared.

“I was saying,” Vasya repeated patiently, “that a living organism that does not change its genetics outlives its time.”

Pol’s eyes were glued to Irina. Long-nosed Zhora was pouring her champagne. Irina was saying something rapidly, tapping the glass with dark fingers.

Vasya said, “Aha! You’ve fallen in love with Irina! Such a pity.”

“With what Irina?” muttered Pol.

“That girl there—Irina Egorovna. She worked for us in general biology.”

Pol felt as if he had fallen on his face. “What do you mean ‘worked’?”

“As I was saying, it’s a pity,” Vasya said calmly. “She’s leaving in a few days.”

Pol saw only her profile, lit up by the sun. “For where?” he asked.

“The Far East.”

“Pour me some wine, Vasya,” said Pol. Suddenly his throat had become dry.

“Are you going to work here?” asked Vasya. “Aleksandr said you had a good head on your shoulders.”

“A good head,” muttered Pol. “A lofty unfurrowed brow and steely-calm eyes.”

Vasya started to laugh. “Don’t go pine away,” he said. “We must both be all of twenty-five.”

“No,” said Pol, shaking his head in despair. “What is there to hold me here? Of course I’m not staying here… I’ll go to the Far East.”

A heavy hand came to rest on his shoulder, and Kostylin’s powerful bass inquired, “Just who is going to the Far East? Huh?”

“Lin, listen, Lin,” Pol said plaintively. “How come I never have any luck?”

“Irina,” said Vasya, getting up.

Lin sat down in his place and drew over to himself a plate of cold meat. His face looked tired.

Pol looked at him with fear and hope, just as in the old days when their neighbors on the floor would arrange a school-wide manhunt to catch the clever Lieber Polly and teach him not to be quite so clever.

Kostylin wolfed down an enormous piece of meat and said in a bass that overcame the noise on the veranda, “Peasants! The new catalogue of publications in Russian has arrived. If you want it, ask at the club.”

Everyone turned toward him.

“What have they got?”

“Is there any Mironov, Aleksandr?”

“Yes,” said Kostylin.

“How about The Iron Tower?”

“Yes. I already ordered it.”

“Pure as Snow?”

“Yes. Look, there are eighty-six titles—I can’t remember everything.”

The veranda began to empty quickly. Allan left. Vasya left. Irina left with long-nosed Zhora. She didn’t know anything. She hadn’t even noticed. And, of course, she didn’t understand. Nor would she remember. She’ll remember Zhora. She’ll remember the two-headed calf. But she won’t remember me.

Kostylin said, “Unhappy love churns a person up. But it’s short-lived, Polly. You stay here. I’ll look after you.”

“Maybe I’ll go to the Far East anyhow,” said Pol.

“What for? You’ll only bother her and get underfoot. I know Irina and I know you. You’re fifty years stupider than her Prince Charming.”

“Still…”

“No,” said Kostylin. “Stay with me. Really, has your old buddy Lin ever led you astray?”

Pol gave in. He patted Kostylin’s immense back affectionately, got up, and went over to the railing. The sun had set, and a warm pellucid dusk had settled over the farm. Somewhere nearby a piano was playing and two voices were singing beautifully in harmony. Eh, thought Pol. He bent over the railing and quietly let out the yelp of a giant crayspider that has just lost its trail.

11. The Assaultmen

The satellite was enormous. It was a torus a mile and a quarter in diameter, divided inside into numerous chambers by massive bulkheads. The corridor rings were empty and bright, and the triangular hatchways leading into the bright empty rooms stood wide open. The satellite had been abandoned an improbably long time ago, perhaps even millions of years earlier, but the rough yellow floor was clean, and August Bader had said that he hadn’t seen even one speck of dust here.

Bader walked in front, as befitted the discoverer and master. Gorbovsky and Falkenstein could see his big protruding ears, and the blondish tuft of hair on the top of his head.

“I had expected to see signs of neglect here,” Bader said unhurriedly. He spoke in Russian, painstakingly enunciating each syllable. “This satellite interested us most of all. That was ten years ago. I saw that the outer hatches were open. I said to myself, ‘August, you will see a picture of horrifying disaster and destruction.’ I told my wife to stay on the ship. I was afraid of finding dead bodies here, you see.” He stopped before some sort of hatch, and Gorbovsky almost ran into him. Falkenstein, who had fallen a bit behind, caught up to them and stopped alongside, knitting his brows.

“Aber here it was empty,” said Bader. “It was light here, very clean, and completely empty. Please, look around.” He made a smooth gesture with his arm. “I am inclined to think that this was the traffic control room of the satellite.”

They pushed through to a chamber with a dome-shaped ceiling, and with a low semicircular stand in the middle. The walls were bright yellow, translucent, and they shone from within. Gorbovsky touched the wall. It was smooth and cool.

“Like amber,” he said. “Feel it, Mark.”

Falkenstein felt it and nodded.

“Everything had been dismantled,” said Bader, “but in the walls and bulkheads, and also even in the toroid covering of the satellite, remain light sources as yet hidden from us. I am inclined to think—”

“We know,” Falkenstein said quickly.

“Oh?” Bader looked at Gorbovsky. “But what have you read? You, Mark, and you, Leonid.”

“We’ve read your series of articles, August,” said Gorbovsky. “‘The Artificial Satellites of Vladislava.’”

Bader inclined his head. “‘The Artificial Satellites of Nonterrestrial Origin of the Planet Vladislava of the Star EN 17,’” he corrected. “Yes. In that case, of course, I can omit an exposition of my ideas on the question of the light sources.”

Falkenstein walked along the wall, examining it. “Strange material,” he said from a distance. “Metaloplast, probably. But I never saw metaloplast like this.”

“It’s not metaloplast,” said Bader. “Don’t forget where you are. You, Mark, and you, Leonid.”

“We won’t forget,” said Gorbovsky. “We’ve been on Phobos, and there, it’s an entirely different material, actually.”

Phobos, a satellite of Mars, had for a long time been considered a natural one. But it had turned out to be a two-and-a-half-mile torus covered with a metal antimeteorite net. The thick net had been eaten away by meteorite corrosion, and torn through in places. But the satellite itself was intact. Its exterior hatches were open, and the gigantic doughnut was just as empty as this one. By the wear on the antimeteorite net they had calculated that the satellite had been placed in orbit around Mars at least ten million years before.

“Oh, Phobos!” Bader shook his head. “Phobos is one thing, Leonid. Vladislava is something else entirely.”

“Why?” Falkenstein inquired as he came up. He disagreed.

“For example, because between the Sun, or Phobos, and Vladislava where we are now, there are two and a half million astronomical units.”

“We covered that distance in half a year,” Falkenstein argued. “They could do the same. And the satellites of Vladislava and Phobos have much in common.”

“That remains to be proven,” said Bader.

Grinning lazily, Gorbovsky said, “That’s just what we’re trying to do.”

Bader pondered for some time and then announced, “Phobos and Earth’s satellites also have much in common.”

It was an answer in Bader’s style—very weighty and off target by half a meter.

“Well, all right,” said Gorbovsky. “What else is there besides the traffic-control room?”

“On this satellite,” Bader said pompously, “there are one hundred sixty chambers ranging in size from fifteen to five hundred square meters. We can look at them all. But they’re empty.”

“If they’re empty,” Falkenstein said, “we’d be better off getting back to the Tariel.”

Bader looked at him and once again turned to Gorbovsky. “We call this satellite Vladya. As you know, Vladislava has another satellite, also artificial, and also of nonterrestrial origin. It is smaller in size. We call it Slava. Do you get it? The planet is called Vladislava. It is only natural to call its two satellites Vladya and Slava. Right?”

“Yes, of course,” said Gorbovsky. This elegant reasoning was familiar to him. This was the third time he had heard it. “It was very clever of you to suggest that, August. Vladya and Slava. Vladislava. Wonderful.”

“You people on Earth,” Bader continued unhurriedly, “call these satellites Y-i and Y-2, corresponding respectively to Vladya and Slava. But as for us, we do it differently. We call them Vladya and Slava.”

He looked sternly at Falkenstein. Falkenstein bit his lip to keep from smiling. As far as Falkenstein knew, “we” was Bader himself, and only Bader.

“As for the composition of this yellow material, which is by no means metaloplast, and which I call amberine—”

“A very good name,” Falkenstein put in.

“Yes, not bad… Well, its composition is as yet unknown. It remains a mystery.”

A silence set in. Gorbovsky looked absently about the room. He tried to imagine the beings who had built this satellite and then had worked here at a time so long past. They were another race. They had come to the Solar System and had departed, leaving to Mars the abandoned space laboratories and a large city near the northern icecap. The satellites were empty, and the city was empty—there remained only strange buildings which extended for many levels below the ground. Then—or perhaps earlier—they had come to the EN 17 system, had constructed two artificial satellites around Vladislava, and then had left there as well. And here, on Vladislava, there ought to be an abandoned city as well. Where had they come from, and why? Where had they gone and why? The whys were clear. They were of course great explorers—the Assaultmen of another world.

“Now,” said Bader, “we will go and examine the chamber in which I found the object which I arbitrarily call a button.”

“Still there?” asked Falkenstein, coming to life.

“Who?” asked Bader.

“The object.”

“The button,” Bader said weightily, “at the present time is to be found on Earth, in the keeping of the Commission for Research of the Evidence of the Activity of Extraterrestrial Intelligence in Outer Space.”

“Ah,” said Falkenstein. “The Pathfinders have it. But I collected material about Vladislava, and no one showed me this button of yours.”

Bader tugged his chin. “I sent it with Captain Anton Bykov half a subjective year ago.”

They had passed Bykov en route. He should be arriving at Earth seven months after the takeoff of the Tariel for EN 17. “So,” Gorbovsky said. “In that case we will have to postpone inspection of the button.”

“But we can look at the chamber where I found it,” Bader said. “There is a possibility, Leonid, that in the hypothetical city on the surface of the planet Vladislava you will find analogous objects.” He climbed through the hatch.

Falkenstein said through his teeth, “I’ve had it with him, Leonid.”

“Patience,” said Gorbovsky.

The chamber where Bader had found the button turned out to be a third of a mile off. Bader pointed to the place where the button had lain and related in detail how he had found the button. (He had stepped on it and squashed it.) In Bader’s opinion, the button was a battery, which originally had been spherical in shape. It was made of silvery translucent material, very soft. Its diameter was thirty eight point one six millimeters… density… weight… distance from the nearest wall…

In the room opposite, on the other side of the corridor, two young fellows in blue work jackets sat amid instruments arranged on the floor. As they worked, they glanced over at Gorbovsky and Falkenstein, and conversed in low tones.

“Assaultmen. Docked yesterday.”

“Um-hum. The tall one there is Gorbovsky.”

“I know.”

“And the other one, with the blond hair?”

“Mark Falkenstein. Navigator.”

“Ah. I’ve heard of him.”

“They’re beginning tomorrow.”

Bader at last finished his explanations and asked whether they had understood everything. “Everything,” Gorbovsky said, and he heard laughter in the room opposite.

“Now we will go back home,” Bader said.

They emerged into the corridor, and Gorbovsky nodded to the fellows in blue. They got up and bowed, smiling. “Good luck,” one said. The other smiled silently, turning a skein of multicolored wiring in his hands.

“Thanks,” Gorbovsky said.

Falkenstein also said, “Thanks.”

After he had gone a hundred paces or so, Gorbovsky turned around. The two fellows in blue jackets were standing in the corridor watching them.

In the Baderian Empire (as jokers called the whole system of artificial and natural satellites of Vladislava—observatories, workshops, repair stations, chlorella plantations in black tanks, greenhouses, plant nurseries, glassed-in recreational gardens, and the empty tori of nonterrestrial origin), time was calculated in thirty-hour cycles. At the end of the third cycle after the D-ship Tariel, a giant almost four miles in length that from a distance looked like a sparkling flower, had assumed a meridional orbit around Vladislava, Gorbovsky undertook the first search run. D-ships are not suited for landings on massive planets, especially planets with atmospheres, and especially planets with wild atmospheres. The ships are too fragile for this. Auxiliary boats with either atomic-impulse or photon drive, steady, lightweight, intrasystem craft with a variable center of gravity, carry out such landings. A regular starship carries one such boat, but an Assault ship, two to four. The Tariel had two photon boats on board, and Gorbovsky made the first attempt to sound Vladislava’s atmosphere in one of them. “To see whether it’s worth it,” Gorbovsky said to Bader.

Bader visited the Tariel personally. He did a lot of nodding and saying “ah, yes,” and now, when Gorbovsky had cast off from the Tariel, he sat on a stool to one side of the observation board, and began to wait patiently.

All the Assaultmen had gathered by the screen and were watching the indistinct flashes on the gray oscillograph screen-the traces of the signal impulses sent by the telemetry on the boat. There were three Assaultmen in addition to Bader. They kept silent and thought about Gorbovsky, each in his own way.

Falkenstein thought about the fact that Gorbovsky would return in an hour. Falkenstein could not stand uncertainty, and he wished that Gorbovsky had already returned, even though he knew that the first search run always comes out all right, especially with Gorbovsky piloting the Assault boat. Falkenstein remembered his first meeting with Gorbovsky. Falkenstein had just returned from a jaunt to Neptune—had returned without losses, was proud of this, and was boasting dreadfully. That was on Chi Fei, the circumlunar satellite from which all photon ships usually took off. Gorbovsky had come over to him in the mess-room and had said, “Excuse me—you wouldn’t happen to be Mark Falkenstein?” Falkenstein had nodded and said, “What can I do for you?” Gorbovsky had a very sad expression. He sat down alongside, twitched his long nose and asked plaintively, “Listen, Mark, do you know where I can get a harp around here?”

“Here” was a distance of one hundred ninety thousand miles from Earth, at a starship base. Falkenstein choked on his soup. Gorbovsky looked him over with curiosity, then introduced himself and said, “Calm down, Mark; it’s not urgent. Actually, what I want to know is at what rate did you enter Neptune’s exosphere?” That was Gorbovsky’s way—to go up to somebody, especially a stranger, and ask a question like that to see how the victim would handle it.

The biologist Percy Dickson—black, overgrown, with curly hair—also thought about Gorbovsky. Dickson worked in space psychology and human space physiology. He was old, he knew a great deal, and he had carried out on himself and others a heap of insane experiments. He had come to the conclusion that a person who has been in space all in all for more than twenty years grows unused to Earth and ceases to consider it home. Remaining an Earthman, he ceases to be a man of Earth. Percy Dickson himself had become one such, and he could not understand why Gorbovsky, who had covered fifty parsecs and had touched on a dozen moons and planets, now and then would suddenly raise his eyes high and said with a sigh, “Oh, to be in a meadow! On the grass. Just to lie there. And with a stream.”

Ryu Waseda, atmosphere physicist, thought about Gorbovsky too. He thought about his parting words, “I’ll go see whether it’s worth it.” Waseda greatly feared that Gorbovsky, on returning, would say, “It’s not worth it.” That had happened several times. Waseda studied wild atmospheres and was Gorbovsky’s eternal debtor, and it seemed to him that he was sending Gorbovsky off to his death every time. Once Waseda had told Gorbovsky about this. Gorbovsky had answered seriously, “You know, Ryu, there hasn’t been a time yet when I haven’t come back.”

Professor and Assaultman August Johann Bader, general plenipotentiary of the Cosmonautical Council, director of the far-space starship base and laboratory Vladislava (EN 17), also thought about Gorbovsky. For some reason he remembered how Gorbovsky had said good-by to his mother fifteen years before, on Chi Fei. Gorbovsky and Bader were going to Transpluto. That was a very sad moment—taking leave of relatives before a space flight. It seemed to Bader that Gorbovsky had said good-by to his mother very brusquely. Bader, as ship’s captain—he had been captain of the ship then—had considered it his duty to provide inspiration for Gorbovsky. “In such a sad moment as this,” he had said sternly but softly, “your heart must beat in unison with that of your mother. The sublime virtue of every human being consists in…” Gorbovsky had listened silently, and when Bader finished his reprimand, had said in a strange voice, “August, do you have a mama?” Yes, that was how he said it! “Mama.” Not mother, not Mutter, but mama.

“He’s come out on the other side,” said Waseda.

Falkenstein looked at the screen. The splotches of dark spots had disappeared. He looked at Bader. Bader sat there gripping the seat of his stool, looking nauseated. He raised his eyes to Falkenstein’s and gave a labored smile. “It is one thing,” he said, enunciating with effort, “when it’s you yourself. Aber it is quite another when it is someone else.”

Falkenstein turned around. In his opinion it did not matter in the least who was doing it. He got up and went into the corridor. By the airlock hatch he caught sight of an unfamiliar young man with a tanned, clean-shaven face and a gleaming, clean-shaven skull. Falkenstein stopped and looked him over from head to toe and back. “Who are you?” he asked ungraciously. Meeting an unfamiliar person on the Tariel was the last thing he had expected.

The young man grinned a bit crookedly. “My name is Sidorov,” he said. “I’m a biologist and I want to see Comrade Gorbovsky.”

“Gorbovsky’s on a search run,” said Falkenstein. “How did you get on board?”

“Director Bader brought me—”

“Ah…” said Falkenstein. Bader had arrived on board two hours before.

“—and probably forgot about me.”

“It figures,” said Falkenstein. “That’s quite natural for Director Bader. He’s quite excitable.”

“I understand.” Sidorov looked at the toes of his shoes and said, “I had wanted to talk with Comrade Gorbovsky.”

“You’ll have to wait a little,” Falkenstein said. “He’ll be back soon. Come on, I’ll take you to the wardroom.” He took Sidorov to the wardroom, laid a bundle of the latest Earth magazines in front of him, and returned to the control room. The Assaultmen were smiling. Bader was wiping sweat from his forehead and smiling too. The flashes of dark could again be seen on the screen.

“He’s coming back,” said Dickson. “He said one turn is enough for the first time.”

“Of course it’s enough,” said Falkenstein.

“Quite enough,” said Waseda.

In a quarter-hour Gorbovsky scrambled out of the airlock, unfastening his pilot’s coverall as he walked. He seemed abstracted, and looked over their heads,

“Well?” Waseda asked impatiently.

“Everything’s all right,” said Gorbovsky. He stopped in the middle of the corridor and started climbing out of his flight suit. He freed one leg, stepped on a sleeve, and almost fell. “That is to say, everything’s all right, but nothing’s any good.”

“What is it, exactly?” inquired Falkenstein.

“I’m hungry,” Gorbovsky declared. He finally got out of the flight suit and headed for the wardroom, dragging the suit along the deck by a sleeve. “Stupid planet!” he snapped.

Falkenstein took the suit from him and walked alongside.

“Stupid planet,” repeated Gorbovsky, staring over their heads.

“It is quite a difficult planet for landings,” Bader affirmed, enunciating distinctly.

“Let me have something to eat,” said Gorbovsky.

In the wardroom he collapsed onto the sofa with satisfied moaning. As he entered, Sidorov jumped to his feet.

“Sit down, sit down,” Gorbovsky said graciously.

“So what happened?” asked Falkenstein.

“Nothing in particular,” said Gorbovsky. “Our boats are no good for landing.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Photon craft are no good for landing. The tuning of the magnetic traps in the reactor is always breaking down.”

“Atmospheric magnetic fields,” Waseda, the atmosphere physicist, said, and wrung his hands, making an audible rubbing sound.

“Perhaps,” said Gorbovsky.

“Ah, well,” Bader said unhurriedly. “I’ll give you an impulse rocket. Or an ion craft.”

“Do that, August,” said Gorbovsky. “Please give us an ion craft or an impulse rocket. And somebody get me something to eat.”

“Good lord,” said Falkenstein. “I can’t even remember the last time I flew an impulse rocket.”

“Never mind,” said Gorbovsky. “It’ll come back. Listen,” he said affectionately. “Are they going to feed me today?”

“Right away,” said Falkenstein. He excused himself to Sidorov, took the magazines off the table, and covered it with a chlorovinyl tablecloth. Then he placed bread, butter, milk, and kasha on the table.

“The table is laid, sir,” he said.

Gorbovsky got up from the sofa reluctantly. “You’ve always got to get up when you have to do something,” he said. He sat down at the table, took a cup of milk with both hands, and drank it in one gulp. Then he drew a plate of kasha toward him with both hands and picked up a fork. Only when he picked up the fork did it become clear why he had used both hands for the cup and the plate. His hands were trembling. His hands were trembling so badly that he missed twice when he tried to take a bit of butter on the end of his knife.

Craning his neck, Bader looked at Gorbovsky’s hands. “I’ll try to give you my very best impulse rocket, Leonid,” he said in a weak voice. “My very best.”

“Do that, August,” said Gorbovsky. “Your very best. And who is this young man?”

“This is Sidorov,” Falkenstein explained. “He wanted to talk with you.”

Sidorov stood up again. Gorbovsky looked benevolently up at him and said, “Please, sit down.”

“Oh,” said Bader. “I completely forgot. Forgive me. Leonid, comrades, allow me to introduce—”

“I’m Sidorov,” said Sidorov, grinning uncomfortably because everyone was looking at him. “Mikhail. Biologist.”

“Welcome, Mikhail Sidorov,” Percy Dickson said in English.

“Okay,” said Gorbovsky. “I’ll finish eating in a minute, Comrade Sidorov, and then we’ll go to my cabin. There’s a sofa there. There’s a sofa here too,” he said, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “but Bader is sprawled out all over it, and he’s the director.”

“Don’t even think of taking him,” Falkenstein said in Japanese. “I don’t like him.”

“Why not?” asked Gorbovsky.

Gorbovsky was taking his ease on the couch, and Falkenstein and Sidorov were sitting by the table. On the table lay shiny skeins of videotape.

“I advise against it,” said Falkenstein.

Gorbovsky put his hands behind his head.

“I don’t have any relatives,” Sidorov said. Gorbovsky looked at him sympathetically. “No one to cry over me.”

“Why ‘cry’?” asked Gorbovsky.

Sidorov frowned. “I mean that I know what I’m getting into. I need data. They’re waiting up for me on Earth. I’ve been sitting here over Vladislava for a year already. A year gone almost for nothing.”

“Yes, that’s annoying,” Gorbovsky said.

Sidorov linked his fingers together. “Very annoying, sir. I thought there would be a landing on Vladislava soon. I couldn’t care less about being among the first ones down. I just need data, do you understand?”

“I understand,” Gorbovsky said. “Indeed so. You, as I recall, are a biologist.”

“Yes. Besides that, I passed the cosmonaut-pilot courses and graduated with honors. You gave me my examinations, sir. But of course you don’t remember me. I’m a biologist first and last, and I don’t want to wait any more. Quippa promised to take me with him. But he made two landing attempts and then gave up. Then Sterling came. There was a real daredevil. But he didn’t take me along either. He didn’t have the chance—he went for a landing on the second run, and he didn’t come back.”

“He was an idiot!” said Gorbovsky, looking at the ceiling. “On a planet like this you have to make at least ten runs. What did you say his name was? Sterling?”

“Sterling,” Sidorov answered.

“An idiot,” declared Gorbovsky. “A brainless idiot.”

Falkenstein looked at Sidorov’s face and muttered, “Well, there we have it. We’ve got ourselves a hero here.”

“Speak Russian,” Gorbovsky said sternly.

“What for? He knows Japanese.”

Sidorov flushed. “Yes,” he said. “I know it. Only I’m no hero. Sterling—there’s a hero. But I’m a biologist, and I need data.”

“How much data did you get from Sterling?” asked Falkenstein.

“From Sterling? None,” said Sidorov. “He got killed, after all,”

“So why are you so thrilled with him?”

Sidorov shrugged. He did not understand these strange people. They were very strange people-Gorbovsky, Falkenstein, and probably their friends too. To call the remarkable daredevil Sterling a brainless idiot… He remembered Sterling—tall, broad-shouldered, with a booming carefree laugh and sure gestures. And how Sterling had said to Bader, “The careful ones stay on Earth, August. It’s a qualification for the job, August!” and snapped his sturdy fingers. Brainless idiot…

Okay, thought Sidorov, that’s their business. But what should I do? Sit back again with folded hands and radio Earth that our allotment of cyberscouts have burned up in the atmosphere; that the scheduled attempt to land hasn’t succeeded; that the scheduled detachment of explorer spacers refused to take me along on a search run; that I argued myself blue in the face with Bader again and he still insists he won’t trust me with a ship, and that he’s expelling me from “the little corner of the universe entrusted to his care” for “systematic impertinence”? And once again kind old Rudolf Kruetzer in Leningrad, shaking his head under his academic skullcap, will put forward his intuitive notions in favor of the existence of life in systems of blue stars, and that mad dog Gadzhibekov will roar on about his experimental conclusions denying the possibility of life in the systems of blue stars; and again Rudolf Kruetzer will tell everyone about the same eighteen bacteria caught by Quippa’s expedition in the atmosphere of the planet Vladislava; and Gadzhibekov will deny any link whatsoever between these eighteen bacteria and the atmosphere of Vladislava, alluding with full justification to the difficulty of identification given the actual conditions of the experiment in question. And once again the Academy of Biology will leave open the question of the existence of life in the systems of blue stars. But there is life, there is, is, is, and we only need to reach out to it. Reach out to Vladislava, a planet of the blue star EN 17.

Gorbovsky looked at Sidorov and said affectionately, “When all is said and done, why is it so necessary to come with us? We have our own biologist—Percy Dickson, a wonderful scientist. He’s a little crazy but he’ll get you samples, whatever sort you like, and in any quantity.”

“Eh,” Sidorov said, and waved his hand.

“Honestly,” said Gorbovsky. “You wouldn’t like it at all if you did come along. And so everything will be all right. We’ll land and get you everything you need. Just give us instructions.”

“And you’ll do everything backward,” said Sidorov. “Quippa asked for instructions too, and then brought back two containers full of penicillium. An ordinary terrestrial mold. You yourself don’t know the working conditions on Vladislava. You won’t be in the mood for my instructions there.”

“You’ve got a point,” sighed Gorbovsky. “We don’t know the conditions. You’ll have to wait a little longer, Comrade Sidorov.”

Falkenstein nodded in satisfaction.

“All right,” said Sidorov. His eyes were almost closed. “Then at least take the instructions.”

“Absolutely,” said Gorbovsky. “Immediately.”

In the course of the next forty cycles, Gorbovsky made sixteen search runs. He was using an excellent impulse craft which Bader had supplied him, the Skiff-Aleph. He did the first five runs by himself, testing Vladislava’s exosphere at the poles, at the equator, at different latitudes. Finally he selected the north polar region and started taking Falkenstein with him. Time after time they plunged into the atmosphere of the orange-black planet, and time after time they jumped back out like corks from water. But each time they plunged deeper.

Bader assigned three observatories to the work of the Assaultmen. They continually kept Gorbovsky informed about the movements of weather fronts in Vladislava’s atmosphere. The production of atomic hydrogen—the fuel for the Skiff-Alepb—began on Bader’s order: the fuel expenditure had turned out to be enormous, beyond expectations. The research into the chemical composition of the atmosphere by means of bomb probes with meson emitters was curtailed.

Falkenstein and Gorbovsky would return from a run exhausted, worn to shreds, and they would greedily rush to a meal, after which Gorbovsky would force his way to the nearest sofa and lie there for a long time, amusing his friends with various maxims.

Sidorov, on Gorbovsky’s invitation, remained on the Tariel. He was allowed to place trap containers for biosamples, and an automatic biological laboratory, in the Skiff-Aleph’s test-equipment slots. In the course of this he cut into the domain of Ryu, the atmosphere physicist. But Sidorov had little to show for his efforts—the containers came back empty, the recordings of the autolab did not yield to decipherment. The influence on the instruments of the wild atmosphere’s magnetic fields fluctuated chaotically, and the autolab required human direction. When he came out of the airlock, Gorbovsky would first of all see Sidorov’s gleaming skull and would wordlessly clap his hand to his forehead. Once he said to Sidorov, “The thing is, Mikhail, that all biology flies out of my head at the one-hundred-twenty-kilometer mark. It’s simply knocked out. It’s very dangerous there. Just sneeze, and you’re dead.”

Sometimes Gorbovsky took Dickson with him. After each such run the long-haired biologist rested in bed. At Sidorov’s timid request that Dickson look after the instruments, he answered straight out that he did not plan on worrying about any side issues. “There’s just not enough time, kid.”

None of them is planning on worrying about side issues, Sidorov thought bitterly. Gorbovsky and Falkenstein are looking for a city, Falkenstein and Ryu are studying the atmosphere, and Dickson is observing the godlike pulses of all three of them. And they put off the landing, put it off, put it off… Why don’t they hurry? Can they really not care?

It seemed to Sidorov that he would never understand these strange creatures called Assaultmen. Everyone in the whole huge world knew of the Assaultmen and was proud of them. It was considered an honor just to be the personal friend of an Assaultman. But now it turned out that no one knew clearly what an Assaultman was. On the one hand, it was something incredibly daring—on the other, something shamefully cautious; they kept coming back. They always died natural deaths.

They said, “An Assaultman is one who prudently waits for the exact moment when he can afford to be imprudent.” They said, “An Assaultman stops being an Assaultman when he gets killed.” They said, “An Assaultman goes places that machines don’t come back from.” They also said, “You can say, ‘He lived and died a biologist.’ But you have to say, ‘He lived an Assaultman and died a biologist.’” All these sayings were very emotional, but they explained absolutely nothing. Many outstanding scientists and explorers were Assaultmen. There was a time when Sidorov had been thrilled by the Assaultmen too. But it was one thing to be thrilled sitting at a school desk, and quite another to see Gorbovsky crawl like a tortoise over miles that could be covered in a single risky but lightning-fast swoop.

When he returned from the sixteenth run, Gorbovsky declared that he intended to move on to the exploration of the last and most complex part of the path to the surface of Vladislava. “There are twenty-five kilometers of an unknown layer left before the surface,” he said, blinking his sleepy eyes and gazing over their heads. “Those are very dangerous miles, and I will move with particular caution. Falkenstein and I will make at least another ten or fifteen runs. If, of course, Director Bader will furnish us with the fuel.”

“Director Bader will furnish you with the fuel,” Bader said majestically. “You need not have the least doubt about that, Leonid.”

“Wonderful!” said Gorbovsky. “The fact is that I will be extremely cautious, and for that reason I feel justified in taking Sidorov with me.”

Sidorov jumped up. Everyone looked at him.

“Well, so you’ve waited it out, kid,” said Dickson.

“Yes. We have to give a new boy a chance,” said Bader.

Waseda only smiled, shaking his handsome head. And even Falkenstein remained silent, although he was displeased. Falkenstein did not like heroes.

“It’s the thing to do,” Gorbovsky said. He stepped back and, without looking behind him, sat down with enviable precision on the sofa. “Let the new boy go.” He smiled and lay down. “Get your containers ready, Mikhail—we’re taking you along.”

Sidorov tore himself from the spot and ran out of the wardroom. When he had left, Falkenstein said, “Bad move.”

“Don’t be selfish, Mark,” Gorbovsky drawled lazily. “The kid has been sitting here for a year already. And all he needs is to collect some bacteria from the atmosphere.”

Falkenstein shook his head and said, “It’s a bad move. He’s a hero.”

“That’s nothing,” Gorbovsky said. “I remember him now—the cadets called him Athos. Besides, I read a little book of his. He’s a good biologist and he won’t act up. There was a time when I was a hero too. And you. And Ryu. Right, Ryu?”

“Right, captain,” Waseda said.

Gorbovsky narrowed his eyes and rubbed his shoulder. “It aches,” he said in a plaintive voice. “Such a horrible turn. And against the wind at that. How’s your knee, Mark?”

Falkenstein raised his leg and flexed it several times. Everyone followed his movements attentively. “‘Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,’” he said in a drawl.

“I’ll give you a massage right now,” Dickson said, and got up ponderously.

The Tariel moved along a meridional orbit, passing over Vladislava’s north pole every three and a half hours. Toward the end of the cycle, the landing craft, with Gorbovsky, Falkenstein, and Sidorov aboard, separated from the starship and dropped down, into the very center of a black spiral funnel that slowly twisted inside the orange haze covering Vladislava’s north pole.

At first everyone was silent. Then Gorbovsky said, “They must have landed at the north pole.”

“Who?” asked Sidorov.

“Them,” Gorbovsky explained. “And if they built their city anywhere, then it’s right at the north pole.”

“In the place where the north pole was back then,” Falkenstein said.

“Yes, of course, there. Like on Mars.”

Sidorov tensely watched an orange kernel and black spots on the screen fly headlong from some sort of weather center. Then this motion slowed down. The Skiff-Aleph was braking. Now they were descending vertically.

“But they could have landed at the south pole too,” said Falk-enstein.

“They could have,” Gorbovsky agreed.

If Gorbovsky did not find the extraterrestrials’ settlement at the north pole, Sidorov thought, he would dawdle around the south pole just as methodically, and then, if he found nothing at the south pole, he would crawl over the whole planet, until he did find something. He even began to pity Gorbovsky and his colleagues. Especially his colleagues.

“Mikhail,” Gorbovsky suddenly called.

“Yes?” Sidorov called back.

“Mikhail, did you ever see elves dancing on the green?”

“Elves?” asked Sidorov in surprise.

He looked back. Gorbovsky was sitting turned half toward him, staring at him with a wicked look in his eyes. Falkenstein sat with his back to Sidorov.

“Elves?” asked Sidorov. “What elves?”

“With wings. You know, like this…” Gorbovsky took one hand off the control keys and moved his fingers vaguely. “You haven’t? A pity. I haven’t either. Nor Mark nor anyone else that I know of. But it would be interesting to watch, wouldn’t it?”

“Undoubtedly,” Sidorov said dryly.

“Leonid,” said Falkenstein. “Why didn’t they dismantle the shells of their stations?”

“They didn’t need to,” said Gorbovsky.

“It’s uneconomical,” said Falkenstein.

“So they were uneconomical.”

“Wastrel explorers,” Falkenstein said, and fell silent.

The craft shook.

“It’s got us, Mark,” Gorbovsky said in an unfamiliar voice.

The craft began to shake horribly. It was impossible to imagine that they could endure such violent shaking. The Skiff-Aleph was entering the atmosphere, where wild horizontal currents roared, dragging long black stripes of crystalline dust after them; where the radar was blinded; where lightning of unimaginable force flashed in the thick orange fog. Here powerful, completely inexplicable surges of magnetic fields deflected instruments and broke up the plasma cord in a photon rocket’s reactor. Photon rockets were no good here, but neither were things pleasant on the first-line atomic intrasystem craft Skiff-Alepk.

But it was quiet in the control room. Gorbovsky, lashed to his seat by straps, writhed in front of the control panel. Black hair fell into his eyes, and at every shock he bared his teeth. The shocks continued without interruption, and he looked as if he were laughing. But it was not laughter. Sidorov had never dreamed that Gorbovsky could look like that—not merely strange, but somehow alien. Gorbovsky was like a devil. Falkenstein was like a devil too. His legs spread apart, he hung over the atmosphere traps, jerking his stretched-out neck. It was surprisingly quiet. But the needles of the instruments, the green zigzags and spots on the fluorescent screens, the black and orange spots on the periscope screen-everything rushed about, circled around in a merry dance, and the deck swayed from side to side like a shortened pendulum, and the ceiling jerked, fell, and jumped up again.

“The cybernavigator,” Falkenstein croaked hoarsely.

“Too early,” Gorbovsky said, and once again bared his teeth.

“We’re getting carried away. There’s a lot of dust.”

“Damn it, it’s too early,” said Gorbovsky. “I’m going for the pole.”

Sidorov did not hear Falkenstein’s answer, because the autolab had started working. The indicator light flashed, and under the transparent plastic plate, the recording tape had started inching along. “Ha!” shouted Sidorov. There was protein outside. Living protoplasm. There was a lot of it, and with every second there was more. “What’s going on?” Sidorov said then. The width of the tape was not sufficient for the recorder, and the instrument automatically switched over to the zero level. Then the indicator light died out, and the tape stopped. Sidorov gave a growl, tore off the factory seal, and dug into the instrument’s mechanism with both hands. He knew this instrument well. He himself had taken part in its construction and he could not imagine what had gone wrong. Under great strain, trying to keep his balance, Sidorov groped at the block of printed circuits. They could fracture from shocks. He had completely forgotten about that. They could have fractured twenty times over during the previous runs. Just as long as they haven’t fractured, he thought. Just as long as they’re still intact

The ship shook unbearably, and Sidorov banged his forehead several times against a plastic panel. Once he banged the bridge of his nose, and for a while was completely blinded by tears. Evidently the circuit blocks were intact. Then the Skiff-Aleph turned sharply over on its side.

Sidorov was thrown from his seat. He flew across the control room, clenching in both arms fragments of panel torn out by the anchors. He did not even realize at first what had happened. Then he realized, but could not believe it.

“Should have strapped in,” said Falkenstein. “Some pilot.”

Sidorov managed to crawl back to his seat on hands and knees along the dancing deck. He fastened the straps and stared dully at the smashed interior of the instrument.

The craft lurched as if it had run into a wall. His dry mouth gaping, Sidorov swallowed air. It was very quiet in the control room, except for Falkenstein’s wheezing—his throat had filled with blood. “The cybernavigator,” he said. At that moment the walls again shuddered. Gorbovsky remained silent.

“There’s no fuel feed,” said Falkenstein, unexpectedly calmly.

“I see,” said Gorbovsky. “Do your job.”

“Not a drop. We’re falling. It’s jammed.”

“I’m turning on the emergency tank, last one. Altitude forty-five kilometers… Sidorov!”

“Yes,” Sidorov said, and started coughing.

“Your containers are filling up.” Gorbovsky turned his long face with the dry flashing eyes toward him. Sidorov had never seen such an expression on him while he was lying on the sofa. “The compressors are working. You’re in luck, Athos!”

“In real luck,” said Sidorov.

Now they were hit from below. Something crunched inside Sidorov, and his mouth filled with bitter-tasting saliva.

“The fuel’s coming through!” shouted Falkenstein.

“Fine—wonderful! But man your own station, for God’s sake. Sidorov! Hey, Mikhail!”

“Yes,” Sidorov said hoarsely, without unclenching his teeth.

“Do you have a reserve rig?”

“Um,” said Sidorov. He was thinking poorly now.

“Um what?” shouted Gorbovsky. “Yes or no?”

“No,” said Sidorov.

“Some pilot,” said Falkenstein. “Some hero.”

Sidorov gnashed his teeth and started looking at the periscope screen. Turbid orange stripes raced from right to left across the screen. It was so frightening and so sickening to look at it that Sidorov shut his eyes.

“They landed here!” shouted Gorbovsky. “The city is there, I know it!”

Something in the control room chimed delicately during the frightful reeling silence, and suddenly Falkenstein roared out in a heavy broken bass:

I would go on, thought Sidorov. Fool, jackass. I should’ve waited for Gorbovsky to decide on a landing. Not enough patience. If he had gone for a landing today, I wouldn’t give a damn about the autolab.

And Falkenstein roared,

“Altitude twenty-one kilometers!” shouted Gorbovsky. “I’m switching over to horizontal.”

Now come the endless minutes of horizontal flight, thought Sidorov. The ghastly minutes of horizontal flight. Minute after minute of jerks and nausea, until they’ve enjoyed their explorations to the full. And I’ll sit here like a blind man, with my stupid smashed machine.

The craft lurched. The blow was very strong, enough to cause a momentary vision blackout. Then Sidorov, gasping for breath, saw Gorbovsky smash his face into the control board, and Falkenstein stretch out his arms, fly over the couch, and slowly, as if in a dream, come to rest on the deck. He remained there, face down. A piece of strap, broken in two places, slid over his back evenly, like an autumn leaf. For a few seconds the craft moved by inertia, and Sidorov, seizing the clasp of his straps, felt that everything was falling. But then his body became heavy once again.

Finally he unfastened the clasp and stood up on legs of cotton. He looked at the instruments. The needle of the altimeter was climbing upward, the yellow zigzags of the monitoring system rushed about in blue hops, leaving behind foggy traces which slowly faded out. The cybernavigator was heading the craft away from Vladislava. Sidorov jumped over Falkenstein and went up to the board. Gorbovsky was lying with his head on the control keys. Sidorov looked back at Falkenstein. He was already sitting up, propping himself up on the deck. His eyes were closed. Then Sidorov carefully lifted up Gorbovsky and laid him on the back of the seat. To hell with the autolab, he thought. He turned off the cybernavigator and rested his fingers on the sticky keys. The Skiff-Aleph began to swing about, and suddenly dropped a hundred yards. Sidorov smiled. He heard Falkenstein wheeze angrily behind him, “Don’t you dare!”

But he didn’t even turn around.

“You’re a good pilot, and you made a good landing. And in my opinion you’re an excellent biologist,” said Gorbovsky. His face was all bandaged. “Excellent. A real go-getter. Isn’t that so, Mark?”

Falkenstein nodded, and, parting his lips, he said, “Undoubtedly. He made a good landing. But he wasn’t the one who raised ship again.”

“You see,” Gorbovsky said with great feeling, “I read your monograph on protozoa—it’s superb. But we have come to the parting of the ways.”

Sidorov swallowed with difficulty and said, “Why?”

Gorbovsky looked at Falkenstein, then at Bader. “He doesn’t understand.”

Falkenstein nodded. He was not looking at Sidorov. Bader also nodded, and looked at Sidorov with a sort of vague pity.

“Well? And?” Sidorov asked defiantly.

“You’re too fond of excitement,” Gorbovsky said softly. “You know, Sturm und Drang, as Director Bader would say.”

“Storm and stress,” Bader translated pompously.

“Precisely,” said Gorbovsky. “Entirely too fond. And we can’t have that. It’s a rotten character trait. It’s deeply ingrained. And you don’t even understand.”

“My lab was smashed,” said Sidorov. “I couldn’t do anything else.”

Gorbovsky sighed and looked at Falkenstein. Falkenstein said with disgust, “Let’s go, Leonid.”

“I couldn’t do anything else,” Sidorov repeated stubbornly.

“You should have done something else. Something quite different,” said Gorbovsky. He turned and started down the corridor.

Sidorov stood in the middle of the corridor and watched the three of them leave, Bader and Falkenstein each supporting Gorbovsky by an arm. Then he looked at his own hand and saw red drops on the fingers. He started for the med section, leaning against the wall because he was swaying from side to side. I wanted to do what was right, he thought. I mean, that was the most important thing, landing. And I brought back the containers of microfauna. I know that’s very valuable. It’s valuable for Gorbovsky too: after all, sooner or later he himself will have to land and carry out a sortie across Vladislava. And the bacteria will kill him if I don’t neutralize them. I did what I had to. On Vladislava, on a planet of a blue star, there is life. Of course I did what I had to. He whispered several times, “I did what I had to.” But he felt that it wasn’t quite so. He had first felt this down there, down below, when they were standing by the spaceship, waist deep in seething petroleum, with geysers on the horizon rising up in enormous columns, and Gorbovsky had asked him, “Well, what do you intend to do now, Mikhail?” and Falkenstein had said something in an unfamiliar language and had climbed back into the spaceship. He had felt it again when the Skiff-Aleph had forced her way off the surface of the fearsome planet for the third time, and once again had flopped down into the oily mud, struck back by a blow of the storm. And he felt it now.

“I wanted to do what was right,” he said indistinctly to Dickson, who was helping him lie down on the examining table.

“What?” said Dickson.

“I had to land,” Sidorov said.

“Lie down,” said Dickson. He muttered, “Primordial enthusiasm…”

Sidorov saw a large white pear-shape coming down from the ceiling. The pear-shape hung quite close, over his very face. Dark spots swam before his eyes, his ears rang, and suddenly Falkenstein started singing in a heavy bass,

“Anybody at all,” Sidorov said stubbornly with closed eyes. “Anyone would go on ahead.”

Dickson stood by, and watched the cybersurgeon’s delicate shining needle enter the mutilated arm. There’s sure enough blood! thought Dickson. Oceans and oceans. Gorbovsky barely got them out of there in time. Another half hour, and the kid would never again be making excuses. Well, Gorbovsky always comes back in time. That’s the way it ought to be. Assaultmen ought to come back, or else they wouldn’t be Assaultmen. And once upon a time, every Assaultman was like Athos here.

12. Deep Search

The cabin was rated for one person, and now it was too crowded. Akiko sat to Kondratev’s right, on the casing of the sonar set. To keep out of the way, she squeezed herself against the wall, bracing her feet against the base of the control panel. Of course she was uncomfortable sitting like that, but the seat in front of the panel was the operator’s station. Belov was uncomfortable too. He was squatting beneath the hatch, from time to time stretching his numbed legs carefully by turns, first the right, then the left. He would stretch out his right leg, kick Akiko in the back, sigh, and in his low-pitched voice apologize in English, “Beg your pardon.” Akiko and Belov were trainees. Oceanographer trainees had to resign themselves to discomfort in the one-man minisubs of the Oceanic Guard.

Except for Belov’s sighs and the usual rumble of superheated steam in the reactor, it was quiet in the cabin. Quiet, cramped, and dark. Occasionally shrimp knocked against the spectrolite [unreadable: Sirw-riv:] porthole and rushed off in fright in a cloud of luminous slime. It was like small, soundless pink explosions. As if someone were shooting tiny bullets. During the flashes you could catch glimpses of Akiko’s flashing eyes and serious face.

Akiko watched the screen. She had squeezed sideways to the wall and started looking from the very beginning, although she knew that they would have to search a long time, perhaps all night. The screen was under the porthole, in the center of the control board, and in order to see it she had to crane her neck. But she watched it fixedly and silently, It was her first deep-water search.

She was a free-style swimming champion. She had narrow hips and broad muscular shoulders. Kondratev liked to look at her, and he felt like finding some pretext to turn on the light. In order to inspect the hatch fastener one last time before descent, for instance. But Kondratev did not turn on the light. He simply remembered Akiko: slender and angular like a teenager, with broad muscular shoulders, wearing loose shorts and a linen jacket with rolled-up sleeves.

A fat, bright blip appeared on the screen. Akiko’s shoulder squeezed up to Kondratev’s. He sensed that she was craning her neck in order to see better what was happening on the screen. He could tell this by the odor of perfume-and in addition, he smelled the barely noticeable odor of salt water. Akiko always smelled of salt water: she spent two-thirds of her time in it.

Kondratev said, “Sharks. At four hundred meters.”

The blip trembled, broke into tiny spots, and disappeared. Akiko moved away. She did not yet know how to read the sonar signals. Belov did, since he had already spent a year’s apprenticeship on the Kunashir, but he sat in back and could not see the screen. He said, “Sharks are nasty customers.” Then he made a clumsy movement and said, “Beg your pardon, Akiko-san.”

There was no need to speak English, since Akiko had studied in Khabarovsk for five years and understood Russian perfectly well.

“You didn’t have to eat so much,” Kondratev said angrily. “You didn’t have to drink. You know what happens.”

“All we had was roast duck for two,” said Belov. “And two glasses of wine apiece, I couldn’t say no. We hadn’t seen each other in ages, and his flight leaves this evening. Has already left, probably. Just two glasses… Does it really smell?”

“It smells.”

This is rotten, thought Belov. He stuck out his lower lip, blew out softly, and sucked in through his nose. “All I smell is perfume,” he said.

Idiot, thought Kondratev.

Akiko said guiltily, “I didn’t know it would be so strong, or I wouldn’t have used it.”

“There’s nothing wrong with perfume,” Belov said. “It’s nice.”

Taking him along was a bad move, thought Kondratev.

Belov banged the top of his head against the hatch fastener and hissed in pain.

“What?” asked Kondratev.

Belov sighed, sat down tailor-fashion, and raised an arm, feeling the hatch fastener over his head. The fastener was cold, with sharp, rough corners. It fastened the heavy hatch cover to the hatchway. Over the hatch cover was water. A hundred meters of water to the surface.

“Kondratev,” said Belov.

“Yes?”

“Listen, Kondratev, why are we running submerged? Let’s surface and open the hatch: fresh air and all that.”

“It’s wind force five up there,” Kondratev answered.

Yes, thought Belov, a wind force of five, choppy water, so an open hatch would flood. But still, a hundred meters of water over your head is uncomfortable. Fifty-five fathoms. Three hundred thirty feet. Soon the dive will begin, and it’ll be two hundred meters, three, five. Maybe down to a kilometer or even two. Pushing my way in here was a bad move, Belov thought. I should have stayed on the Kunashir and written an article.

Still another shrimp knocked against the porthole. Like a tiny pink explosion. Belov stared into the darkness, where for an instant the silhouette of Kondratev’s close-cropped head had appeared.

Such things, of course, never came into Kondratev’s mind. Kondratev was quite different, not like your average person. In the first place, he was from the last century. In the second place, he had nerves of iron. As much iron as in the damned hatch fastener. In the third place, he did not give a damn for the unknown mysteries of the deep. He was immersed in methods of precise calculation of head of livestock, and in the variation of protein content per hectare of plankton field. He was worried about the predator that had been killing young whales. Sixteen young whales in the quarter, and all the very best, as if by choice. The pride of the Pacific whale-herders.

“Kondratev!”

“Yes?”

“Don’t be angry.”

“I’m not angry,” Kondratev said angrily. “Where did you get that idea?”

“I thought you were angry. When do we start the dive?”

“Soon.”

Thunk… thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk… A whole school of shrimp. Just like the fireworks at New Year’s. Belov yawned convulsively and hurriedly slammed his mouth shut. That was what he would do—keep his mouth shut tight the whole mission. “Akiko-san,” he said in English, “how do you feel?”

“Fine, thank you,” Akiko answered politely in Russian. From her voice it was clear that she had not turned around. She’s angry too, Belov decided. That’s because she’s in love with Kondratev. Kondratev’s angry, so she is too. She looks up at Kondratev and never calls him anything but “Comrade Captain. She respects him very highly, she practically worships him. Yes, she’s in love with him up to her ears, that’s clear to everyone. Probably even to Kondratev. Only so far it isn’t clear to her herself. Poor thing, she’s really had rotten luck. A man with nerves of iron, muscles of steel, and a face of bronze. That Kondratev is a monumental man. Literally. A Buddha-man. A living monument to himself. And to his century. And to the whole heroic past.

At 2:00 a.m., Kondratev turned on the cabin light and got out the chart. The submarine hung over the center of a depression eight nautical miles southwest of the drifting Kunashir. Kondratev tapped his fingernails absentmindedly on the chart and announced, “We’re beginning the dive.”

“At last,” muttered Belov.

“Will we descend vertically, Comrade Captain?” asked Akiko.

“We’re not in a bathyscaphe,” Kondratev said dryly. “We’ll go down in a spiral.”

He did not himself know why he said it dryly. Perhaps because he had glimpsed Akiko again. He thought he had remembered her well, but it turned out that in the few hours of darkness he had endowed her with the features of other women who were not like her at all. Women whom he had liked before. Colleagues at work, actresses from various films. In the light these features disappeared, and she seemed more slender, more angular, darker than he had imagined. She was like a small teenage boy. She sat peacefully beside him, with a lowered glance, her hands resting on her bare knees. Strange, he thought. She never used perfume before, so far as I noticed.

He turned off the light and headed the submarine into the depths. The sub’s nose slanted sharply, and Belov braced himself with his knees against the back of the chair. Now, over Kondratev’s shoulder, he saw the illuminated dials and the sonar screen in the upper part of the panel. Trembling sparks flared up and died out on the screen: probably blips of deep-sea fish still too far away for identification. Belov ran his eyes over the dials, looking for the depth indicator. The bathymeter was at the far left. The red needle was slowly crawling to the 200-meter mark. Then it would just as slowly crawl to the 300 mark, then 400… Under the submarine was an abyssal chasm, and the minisub was a tiny mote in an inconceivable mass of water. Belov suddenly felt as if something were interfering with his breathing. The darkness in the cabin became thicker and more unrelenting, like the cold salt water outside. It’s begun, Belov thought. He took a deep breath and held it. Then he narrowed his eyes, grabbed the back of the chair with both hands, and began to count to himself. When colored spots started swimming before his narrowed eyes he exhaled noisily and ran his hand across his forehead. The hand got wet.

The red needle crossed the 200 mark. The sight was both beautiful and ominous: the red needle and green numbers in the darkness. A ruby needle and emerald numbers: 200, 300… 1000… 3000… 5000… I can’t understand at all why I became an oceanographer. Why not a metallurgist or gardener? Ghastly stupidity. Out of every hundred people only one gets depth sickness. But this one-out-of-a-hundred is an oceanographer, because he likes to study cephalopods. He’s simply crazy out of his head about cephalopods. Cephalopods, damn them! Why don’t I study something else? Say rabbits. Or earthworms.

Nice, fat earthworms in the wet soil under a hot sun. No darkness, no horror of a saltwater grave. Just earth and sun. He said loudly, “Kondratev!”

“Yes?”

“Listen, Kondratev, did you ever get the urge to study earthworms?”

Kondratev bent over and groped into the darkness. Something clicked with a ringing sound, and an icy stream of oxygen hit Belov’s face. He breathed in greedily, yawning and choking. “Enough,” he said finally. “Thanks.”

Kondratev turned off the oxygen. No, of course he wouldn’t give a damn about earthworms. The red needle crawled past the 300 mark. Belov called once more, “Kondratev?”

“Yes?”

“Are you sure it’s a giant squid?”

“I don’t understand.”

“That a giant squid is what has been getting the whales?”

“It’s probably a squid.”

“But it could be grampuses?”

“Could be.”

“Or a sperm whale?”

“It could be a sperm whale. But a sperm whale usually attacks females. There were plenty of females in the herd. And grampuses attack stragglers.”

“No, it’s ika,” Akiko said in a small voice. “O-ika.”

O-ika was the giant deep-sea squid. Fierce and quick as lightning. It had a powerful taut body, ten strong arms, and cruel, intelligent eyes. It would rush at a whale from below and instantly gnaw out its insides. Then it would force the carcass down to the bottom. Not even a shark, not even the hungriest, would dare to come close to it. It dug into the silt and feasted at leisure. If a submarine of the Oceanic Guard should catch up to it, it would not give way. It would accept battle, and sharks would gather to pick up the lumps of meat. Giant-squid meat was tough as rubber, but the sharks didn’t care.

“Yes,” said Belov. “Probably it’s a giant squid.”

“Probably,” said Kondratev. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a squid or not, he thought. Creatures even more fearsome than the giant squid could have set up housekeeping in depressions like this one. You have to find them and destroy them, for once they taste whale they’ll never leave you alone. Then he thought that if they should meet something really unknown, the trainees would doubtless hang all over his shoulders and demand that he let them “investigate.” Trainees always got the idea that a working submarine was a research bathyscaphe.

Four hundred meters.

It was very stuffy in the cabin. The ionizers weren’t correcting it. Kondratev heard Belov’s heavy breathing behind his back. On the other hand he couldn’t hear Akiko at all; you would think she wasn’t there. Kondratev let a little more oxygen into the cabin. Then he glanced at the compass. A strong current was swinging the submarine away from its course.

“Belov,” Kondratev said, “make a note: warm current, depth four hundred forty meters, direction south-southwest, speed two meters per second.”

Belov flicked the dictaphone switch with a squeak, and muttered something in a low voice.

“A regular Gulf Stream,” said Kondratev. “A little Gulf Stream.”

“Temperature?” Belov asked in a weak voice.

“Twenty-four degrees Celsius.”

Akiko said timidly, “A curious temperature. Unusual.”

“It would be very quaint if there’s a volcano somewhere under us,” Belov moaned. “Have you ever tasted giant-squid soup, Akiko-san?” he asked. He started in English and finished in Russian.

“Watch it,” said Kondratev. “I’m going to leave the current. Hang onto something.”

“Easier said than done,” muttered Belov.

“Aye, aye, Comrade Captain,” said Akiko.

You can hang onto me, Kondratev wanted to suggest to her, but he was too shy. He rolled the submarine sharply over to the port side, and plunged almost straight down.

“Uffff,” grunted Belov. He let go of the dictaphone, which hit Kondratev in the back of the head. Then Kondratev felt Akiko’s fingers grip his shoulder-grip and slide off. “Grab onto my shoulders,” he ordered.

At that instant she almost fell face first onto the edge of the control panel. He barely managed to catch her arm, and she hit her face against his elbow. “Excuse me,” she said.

“Ufff, easy there,” moaned Belov. “Take it easy, Kondratev!”

It felt like an elevator coming to a sharp stop. Kondratev took his head away from the board, fumbled to his right, and encountered Akiko’s downy hair.

“Did you hurt yourself?” he asked.

“No, sir. Thank you for asking.”

He bent down and caught hold of her by the arm. “Thank you,” she repeated. “Thank you. I can manage myself.”

He let go of her and glanced at the bathymeter. Six hundred fifty… six hundred fifty-five… six hundred sixty.

“Take it easy, Kondratev,” Belov pleaded in a weak voice. “Enough already.”

Six hundred eighty meters. Three hundred seventy-two fathoms. Two thousand two hundred thirty feet. Kondratev leveled off. Belov hiccuped loudly and pushed away from the back of the seat.

“That’s it,” Kondratev announced, and turned on the light.

Akiko hid her nose with her hand; tears were running down her cheeks. “Eyes are sparking,” she said, smiling with difficulty.

“I’m sorry, Akiko-san,” Kondratev said. He felt guilty. There had been no need for such a sharp dive. It was just that he had gotten tired of the endless spiral descent. He wiped sweat from his forehead and looked back. Belov sat hunched up, bare to the waist, holding his crumpled shirt near his mouth. His face was damp and gray, his eyes red.

“Roast duck,” said Kondratev. “Remember, Belov.”

“I’ll remember. Let me have some more oxygen.”

“No. You’ll poison yourself.” Kondratev felt like saying a few more words about wine, but he restrained himself and turned out the light. The submarine again moved in a spiral and everyone, even Belov, kept silent for a long time. Seven hundred meters, seven hundred fifty, eight hundred…

“There it is,” Akiko whispered.

A hazy narrow spot was moving unhurriedly across the screen. The creature was still too far away—so far it was impossible to identify. It could be a giant squid, a sperm whale, a food whale away from the herd, a large whale shark, or some unknown animal. There were still many animals either unknown or little known to humans in the deep. The Oceanic Guard had reports of enormous long-legged and long-tailed turtles, of sea serpents, of deep-sea spiders that nested in the chasms to the south of the Bonin Islands, of sea gnats-little predatory fish that swarmed in herds of many thousands at a depth of a mile or a mile and a quarter and wiped out everything in their path. So far there had been neither the opportunity nor any special need to verify these reports.

Kondratev quietly swung the submarine to keep the creature in its field of vision.

“Let’s get a little closer to it,” Belov asked. “Get closer!” He breathed noisily in Kondratev’s ear. The submarine slowly began the approach.

Kondratev turned on the sight, and crossed threads of light flashed onto the screen. The narrow spot was swimming near the crosshairs.

“Wait,” said Belov. “There’s no hurry, Kondratev.”

Kondratev got annoyed. He bent over, felt under his legs for the dictaphone, and poked it over his shoulder into the darkness.

“What’s going on?” asked Belov, displeased.

“The dictaphone,” Kondratev said. “Make a note: depth eight hundred meters, target sighted.”

“We’ve got time.”

“Let me,” said Akiko.

“Beg your pardon.” Belov gave a cough. “Kondratev! Don’t even think of shooting it, Kondratev. We’ve got to have a look first.”

“So look,” said Kondratev.

The distance between the submarine and the animal lessened. Now it was clearly a giant squid. If it were not for the trainees, Kondratev would not have delayed. A worker of the Oceanic Guard had no business delaying. Not one other sea creature brought as much harm to whaleherding as did the giant squid. It was subject to instant annihilation whenever one encountered a submarine—the squid’s blip would move within the crosshairs of the screen, and then the submarine would launch torpedoes. Two torpedoes. Sometimes three, to be certain. The torpedoes would dart along the ultrasonic beam and explode next to the target. And at the sound of the explosion, sharks would move in from all sides,

Kondratev took his finger off the torpedo launch switch with regret. “Look,” he repeated.

But there was not yet anything to look at. The limit of clear vision in the clearest ocean water did not exceed eighty or a hundred feet, and only the sonar allowed them to locate targets at distances of up to a third of a mile.

“I wish it would show up,” Belov said excitedly.

“Don’t be in such a hurry.”

The minisubs of the Oceanic Guard were intended to guard plankton crops from whales, and to guard whales from sea predators. The submarines were not intended for research purposes. They were too noisy. If the squid did not feel like closer acquaintance with the submarine, it would move off before they could turn the searchlights on and look it over. To pursue it would be useless—giant cephalopods were capable of a speed twice that of the quickest minisub. Kondratev was relying only on the amazing fearlessness and cruelty of the squid, which sometimes would incite it into skirmishes with fierce sperm whales and herds of grampuses.

“Careful, careful,” Belov repeated tenderly and imploringly.

“Want some oxygen?” Kondratev asked savagely.

Akiko softly touched him on the shoulder. She had been standing bent over the screen for several minutes, her hair tickling Kondratev’s ear and cheek,

“Ika sees us,” she said,

Belov shouted, “Don’t shoot!”

The spot on the screen-now it was big and round-moved downward fairly rapidly. Kondratev smiled, pleased. The squid was coming out under the submarine in its attack position. It had no thought of fleeing. Instead, the squid was offering battle.

“Don’t let it get away,” whispered Belov.

Akiko said, “Ika is getting away.”

The trainees did not yet understand what was going on. Kondratev began to lower the nose of the submarine. The squid’s blip once again flashed in the crosshairs. He had only to push the release to blow the vermin to shreds.

“Don’t shoot,” Belov repeated. “Just don’t shoot.”

I wonder what happened to his depth sickness, thought Kondratev. He said, “The squid will be under us now. I’m going to stand the sub on its bow. Get ready.”

“Aye, aye, Comrade Captain,” said Akiko.

Without speaking a word, Belov began moving energetically, getting himself settled. The submarine slowly rotated. The blip on the screen grew larger, and took on the form of a many-pointed star with winking rays. The submarine hung motionless nose down.

Evidently the squid was puzzled by the strange behavior of its intended victim. But it only delayed a few seconds. Then it moved to the attack. Rapidly and surely, as it must have done thousands of times before in its unimaginably long life.

The blip on the screen swelled and filled the whole screen.

Kondratev immediately turned on all the searchlights, two on the hatch side and one fixed to the bottom. The light was very bright. The transparent water seemed yellow-green. Akiko sighed briefly. Kondratev looked at her out of the corner of his eye for a moment. She was squatting over the porthole, hanging onto the edge of the control panel with one hand. A bare, scratched knee was sticking out from under her arm.

“Look,” Belov said hoarsely. “Look, there it is! Just look at it!”

At first the shining haze beyond the porthole was motionless. Then some sort of shadows began to stir in it. Something long and supple showed briefly, and after a second they could see the squid. Or rather they could see a broad white body, two unwavering eyes in its lower part, and under the eyes, like a monstrous mustache, two bundles of thick, waving tentacles. In an instant all this moved over the porthole and blocked off the light from the searchlights. The submarine rocked strongly, and something repulsive-sounding, like a knife on glass, began to scrape over the plating.

“There you are,” said Kondratev. “Have you enjoyed your fill?”

“It’s enormous!” Belov breathed reverently. “Akiko-san, did you see how enormous it is?”

“O-ika,” whispered Akiko.

Belov said, “I have never come across a record of such an enormous specimen, I would estimate the distance between the eyes as something over two meters. What do you think, Kondratev?”

“About that.”

“And you, Akiko-san?”

“One and one half to two meters,” Akiko answered after a silence.

“Which with the usual proportions would give us…” Belov started counting on his fingers. “Would give us a body of at least thirty meters, and a weight—”

“Listen,” Kondratev interrupted impatiently. “Have you looked enough?”

Belov said, “No, wait. We’ve got to tear away from it somehow and photograph it whole.”

The submarine rocked again, and once again the repulsive screech of horny jaws on metal could be heard.

“We’re not a whale, dearie,” Kondratev muttered gloatingly, and said aloud, “It won’t leave us voluntarily now, and it’d crawl over the submarine for at least two hours, no less. So now I’ll shake it off, and it’ll fall under the jet of superheated water from the turbines. Then we’ll quickly turn around, photograph it, and shoot it. All right?”

The submarine began to rock violently. It was obvious that the squid was turning nasty, was trying to bend the submarine in two. For several seconds one of the squid’s arms showed in the porthole—a violet hose as fat as a telephone pole, studded with greedily waving suckers. Black hooks sticking out of the suckers kicked against the spectrolite.

“What a beauty,” Belov cooed. “Listen, Kondratev, can’t we surface with it?”

Kondratev threw back his head and, narrowing his eyes, looked up at Belov. “Surface?” he said. “Maybe. He won’t unlatch from us now. How much did you say he could weigh?”

“About seventy metric tons,” Belov said uncertainly.

Kondratev whistled and once again turned to the board.

“But that’s in air,” Belov added hurriedly. “In water—”

“Still no less than ten tons,” said Kondratev. “We couldn’t make it. Get ready—we’re going to rotate.”

Akiko hurriedly squatted down, without taking her eyes from the porthole. She was afraid of missing something interesting.

If it weren’t for the trainees, Kondratev thought, I would have finished with this vermin long ago, and would be looking for its relatives. He did not doubt that somewhere on the bottom of the depression were hiding the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the monster—potential, and perhaps already actual, pirates on the whale migration lanes.

The submarine rotated into horizontal position.

“It’s stuffy,” muttered Belov.

“Hang on tighter,” said Kondratev. “Ready? Here we go!” He turned the speed handle as far as it would turn. Full speed, thirty knots. The turbines howled piercingly. Behind, something banged, and they heard a muffled yelp. Poor Belov, thought Kondratev. He dropped the speed and swung the helm about. The submarine went around in a semicircle and again pointed toward the squid.

“Now look,” said Kondratev,

The squid hung twenty yards in front of the submarine’s bow—pale, strangely flat, with drooping, writhing tentacles and a drooping body. It looked like a spider burned by a match. Its eyes were squinting thoughtfully off below and to one side, as if it were mulling something over. Kondratev had never seen a live squid so close, and he examined it with curiosity and loathing. It really was an unusually large specimen. Perhaps one of the largest in the world. But at that moment nothing about it gave the impression of a powerful and fearsome predator. For some reason Kondratev recalled the bundles of softened whale intestines in the enormous steeping vats of the whale-butchering complex in Petropavlovsk.

Several minutes went by. Belov lay with his stomach pressing on Kondratev’s shoulders, and aimed the whirring movie camera. Akiko muttered something into the dictaphone in Japanese without taking her eyes off the squid. Kondratev’s neck started to ache, and furthermore he was afraid that the squid would regain consciousness and would clear out, or else would throw itself on the submarine again, and then they would have to start over from the beginning.

“Aren’t you about done yet?” inquired Kondratev.

“And how!” Belov answered strongly but irrelevantly.

The squid came to. A rippling shudder went through its arms.

The enormous eyes, the size of soccer balls, turned like hinges in sockets, and stared at the light from the searchlights. Then the arms stretched out ramrod straight, and contracted again, and the pale violet skin filled with dark color. The squid was scalded, stunned, but it was preparing for another pounce. No, the giant squid was not leaving. It was not even considering leaving.

“Well?” Kondratev asked impatiently.

“Okay,” Belov said with dissatisfaction. “You can do it.”

“Get off of me,” said Kondratev.

Belov got off and rested his chin on Kondratev’s right shoulder. He had obviously forgotten about depth sickness. Kondratev glanced at the screen, then laid a linger on the release lever. “Too close,” he muttered. “Oh, well. Fire one!” The submarine shuddered. “Fire two!” The submarine shuddered again. The squid was slowly opening its arms when the two pyroxilyn torpedoes exploded one after the other below its eyes. Two dull flashes and two enormous peals of thunder: boo-oom, boo-oom. A black cloud obscured the squid and then the submarine was thrown on its stern; it turned over on its port side and began to dance about in place.

When the agitation had ceased, the searchlight illuminated a gray-brown heaving mass from which spinning, formless, billowing shreds tumbled into the abyss. Some were still twisting and twitching in the beams of light, rushing into the yellow-green thickness of dusty twilight. Then they disappeared into the dark. On the sonar screen, one after another, four, five, seven blips had already appeared-unhurried, biding their time.

“Sharks,” said Kondratev. “There they are.”

“Sharks are nasty customers,” Belov said hoarsely. “But this squid… It’s a shame—such a specimen! You’re a barbarian, Kondratev. What if it was intelligent?”

Kondratev remained silent and turned on the light. Akiko was sitting hunched up to the wall, with her head tilted over on her shoulder. Her eyes were closed, her mouth half-open. Her forehead, cheeks, neck, and bare arms and legs gleamed with sweat. The dictaphone lay under her feet. Kondratev picked it up. Akiko opened her eyes and smiled with embarrassment.

“We’ll start back now,” Kondratev said. He thought, Tomorrow night I’ll dive down here and finish off the rest.

“It’s very stuffy, Comrade Captain,” said Akiko.

“You said it!” Kondratev replied angrily. “Cognac and perfume and…”

Akiko lowered her head,

“Well, never mind,” said Kondratev. “We’ll come back tomorrow. Belov!”

Belov did not answer. Kondratev turned around and saw that Belov had raised his arms and was groping at the hatch fastener. “What are you doing, Belov?” Kondratev asked calmly.

Belov turned his gray face toward him and said, “It’s stuffy in here. We have to open up.”

Kondratev punched him in the chest and he fell over backwards, his Adam’s apple thrust out sharply. Kondratev hurriedly opened up the oxygen valve, then got up, and, stepping over Belov, inspected the fastener. It was all right. Then Kondratev poked Belov under a rib with a finger. Akiko watched him with tear-filled eyes,

“Comrade Belov?” she asked.

“Roast duck,” Kondratev said angrily. “And depth sickness to boot.”

Belov sighed and sat up. His eyes were bleary, and he squinted at Kondratev and Akiko and asked, “What happened, people?”

“You practically drowned us, glutton,” said Kondratev.

He lifted the nose of the submarine toward the vertical and began to ascend. The Kunashir must already have arrived at the rendezvous point. It was becoming impossible to breathe in the cabin. Oh, well-it would all soon be over. When the light was on in the cabin, the bathymeter needle looked pink, the numbers white. Six hundred meters, five hundred eighty, five fifty…

“Comrade Captain,” said Akiko, “permission to ask a question?”

“Granted.”

“Was it just luck that we found ika so quickly?”

“It found us. It must have been trailing us for ten kilometers, looking us over. Squids are always like that.”

“Kondratev,” moaned Belov, “can’t we go a little faster?”

“No,” said Kondratev. “Be patient.”

Why doesn’t it do anything to him? thought Belov. Can he really be made of iron? Or do you get used to it? Good lord, if I could just see the sky. Just so I see the sky, and I’ll never go on another deep-water search. Just so the photos come out. I’m tired. But he’s not tired at all. He’s sitting there practically upside down, and it doesn’t do anything to him. And for me, just one look at the way he’s sitting is enough to make me sick to my stomach.

Three hundred meters.

“Kondratev,” Belov said again. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

Kondratev answered, “Han Choi and Valtsev are arriving tomorrow morning with their submarines—in the evening well comb the depression and finish off the rest.”

Tomorrow evening Kondratev was going down into that grave again. And he could say that calmly, with pleasure.

“Akiko-san.”

“Yes, Comrade Belov?”

“What are you going to do tomorrow?” he asked in English.

Kondratev glanced at the bathymeter. Two hundred meters.

Akiko sighed. “I don’t know,” she said.

They fell silent. They remained silent until the minisub had surfaced.

“Open the hatch,” Kondratev said.

The submarine rocked on a small wave. Belov raised his arms, turned the catch of the hatch fastener, and pushed on the hatch cover.

The weather had changed. There was no more wind, nor storm clouds. The stars were small and bright, and a sliver of moon hung in the sky. Small shining waves lazily swept the ocean. They splashed and murmured at the hatch turret. Belov scrambled out first. Akiko and Kondratev climbed after him. Belov said, “Nice. It’s nice.”

Akiko also said, “Nice.”

Kondratev too affirmed that it was nice, and added, after some thought, “Just wonderful.”

“Permission to go swimming, Comrade Captain,” said Akiko.

“Swim, please,” Kondratev conceded politely, and turned around.

Akiko stripped down to her swimming suit, laid her clothes on the edge of the hatch, and stuck a foot in the water. Her red suit looked almost black, and her arms and legs unnaturally white. She raised her arms and slipped noiselessly into the water.

“I think I’ll go in too,” said Belov. He undressed and climbed into the ocean. The water was warm. Belov swam to the stern and said, “It’s wonderful. You were right, Kondratev.”

Then he remembered the violet tentacle as thick as a telephone pole and he hurriedly scrambled back onto the submarine deck. Going over to the hatch on which Kondratev was sitting, he said, “The water is as warm as soup. You should have a dip.”

They sat silently while Akiko splashed in the water. The black spot of her head bobbed against a background of shining waves.

“Tomorrow we’ll finish them all off,” Kondratev said. “All of them, however many are left. We’ve got to hurry. The whales will be arriving in a week.”

Belov sighed and did not answer.

Akiko swam up and grasped the edge of the hatch. “Comrade Captain, may I go with you again tomorrow?” she asked with desperate audacity.

Kondratev said slowly, “Of course you can.”

“Thank you, Comrade Captain.”

To the south, over the horizon, the beam of a searchlight rose up, jabbing into the sky. It was the signal from the Kunashir.

“Let’s go,” said Kondratev, getting up. “Come on out, Akiko-san.”

He took her by the arm and easily lifted her from the water.

Belov said gloomily, “I’ll see how the film came out. If it’s bad, I’ll come down with you too.”

“But no cognac,” said Kondratev.

“And no perfume,” added Akiko.

“Anyhow, I’ll ask Han Choi,” said Belov. “Three’s a crowd in one of these cabins.”

13. The Mystery of the Hind Leg

“I didn’t like your first book,” said Parncalas. “There is nothing in it to stir the imagination of the serious person.”

They were sitting in lounge chairs under a faded hot awning on the veranda of Cold Creek Post—Jean Parncalas, biotechnician of the Gibson Reserve, and Evgeny Slavin, correspondent for the European Information Center. On the low table between the lounge chairs stood a sweating five-liter siphon bottle. Cold Creek Post was on the top of a hill, and an excellent view of the hot, blue-green savanna of western Australia opened up from the veranda.

“A book should always rouse the imagination,” Parncalas continued. “Otherwise it is not a real book, but merely a rotten textbook. In essence, we could put it thus: the purpose of a book is to arouse the imagination of the reader. True, your first book was intended to fulfill another, no less important function as well, namely to bring to us the viewpoint of a man of your heroic era. I expected a great deal from that book, but alas, it is obvious that in the course of the work you lost that very point of view. You are too impressionable, Evgeny mon ami!”

“It’s simpler than that, Jean,” Evgeny said lazily. “Much simpler, mon ami. I had a great horror of appearing before the human race as a sort of Campanella in reverse. But anyhow, you’re quite correct. It was a mediocre book.”

He leaned over in the lounge chair and filled a tall narrow glass with foaming coconut milk from the siphon bottle. The glass instantly started sweating.

“Yes,” said Parncalas, “you had a great horror of being Campanella in reverse. You were in too much of a hurry to change your psychology, Evgeny. You wanted very much to stop being an alien here. And that was wrong. You should have remained an alien a little longer: you could have seen much that we do not notice. And isn’t that the most important task of any writer—to notice things that others do not see? That is, rousing the imagination and making people think?”

“Perhaps.”

They fell silent. Profound quiet reigned all around, the drowsy quiet of the savanna at noon. Cicadas chirred, vying with one another. A slight breeze rose up, rustling the grass. Piercing sounds arrived from far off-the cries of emus. Evgeny suddenly sat up and craned his neck. “What’s that?” he asked.

Past the post, darting through the high grass, rushed a strange machine—a long vertical pole, evidently on wheels, with a sparkling revolving disk on the end. The machine looked extremely ridiculous. Bobbing and swinging, it went off toward the south.

Parncalas raised his head and looked. “Ah,” he said. “I forgot to tell you. That’s one of the monsters.”

“What monsters?”

“No one knows,” Parncalas said calmly.

Evgeny jumped up and ran over to the railing. The tall, ridiculous pole was quickly receding, swaying from side to side, and in a minute it had disappeared from view. He turned to Parncalas.

“What do you mean nobody knows?” he asked.

Parncalas drank his coconut milk. “No one knows,” he repeated, wiping his mouth. “It’s a very amusing story—you’ll like it. They first appeared two weeks ago—these poles on one wheel and the crawling disks. You often see them in the savanna between Cold Creek and Rollins, and the day before yesterday one pole got as far as the main street of Gibson. My emus trampled one disk. I saw it—a big scrapheap of bad plastic and the remains of a radio installation on perfectly disgusting-looking ceramic. Like a schoolchild’s model. We got in touch with the people at Gibson, but no one there knew anything. And, it became clear, no one anywhere knows anything.”

Parncalas again raised the glass to his lips.

“You’re discussing this surprisingly calmly, Jean mon ami,” Evgeny said impatiently. Pictures, were forming in his imagination, one more fantastic than the next.

Parncalas smiled. “Sit down, Evgeny. There is no reason to be alarmed. The monsters haven’t hurt anyone—even the emus and kangaroos aren’t afraid of them—and anyhow, you didn’t let me finish: the comrades in Jakoi are already investigating. They—Where are you going?”

Evgeny was hastily making ready. Into his pockets he stuffed dictaphone cartridges, microbook cases, and his tattered notebooks. “Jakoi—that’s the Australian cybernetic center, right?” he said. “They’ve built some interesting computer there, haven’t they?”

“Yes, the CODD computer,” Parncalas said in an offended tone. He was very disappointed that Slavin was leaving so soon. It was pleasant to converse with the correspondent-he very much liked listening.

“Why CODD?”

“Collector of Dispersed Data. A mechanical archaeologist, I’ve heard.”

Evgeny stopped. “So these monsters could be from there?”

“I already told you—no one knows,” Parncalas said crossly. “No one knows anything. Not in Jakoi, not in Gibson, not in the whole world… At least stay for supper, Evgeny.”

“No, thank you—I’m in a big hurry. Well, mon cher Jean, thank you for the hospitality. We’ll see each other again.” Evgeny drained his glass in one gulp, nodded cheerfully, and, jumping over the railing, ran down the hill to his pterocar.

The scientific settlement of Jakoi stood in the shade of monstrous black acacias with crowns forty or fifty yards in diameter. A little way off, on the shore of a deep lake with clear, dark blue water, the ruins of some ancient settler’s farm gleamed white. The rectangle of the landing pad stood out clearly between the settlement and the ruins. There were no vehicles on the pad, and no people either.

But the pterocar did not need a landing pad, and Evgeny flew around the acacias looking for a place closer to the settlement. A third of a mile from the settlement he suddenly noticed unusual activity. At first it seemed to him that there was a game of rugby on. A heap of intertwined black and white human bodies rolled and heaved in the grass. Up from the heap echoed heated cries. Wonderful! thought Evgeny. Well played! At that instant the pile broke up, exposing something round, black, and shiny, and one of the players spun like a top off to one side, and fell. He remained lying, contorted, holding his arms to his stomach. Or no, thought Evgeny, it’s no game after all Another three people darted out from under the acacia branches, throwing off their jackets on the run. Evgeny quickly headed for a landing.

As he jumped out of the pterocar, the man who had been twisted up with pain was already sitting up. Holding his stomach as before, he was shouting loudly, “Watch the hind leg! Hey! Watch the hind leg!”

Evgeny ran past him at a trot. Out of the heap of swarming bodies came shouts in Russian and English:

“Get the legs down! Push the legs to the ground!”

“The antennas! Don’t break the antennas!”

“Help, guys! It’s digging in!”

“Hold onto it, damn it!”

“Hey, Percy, let go of my head!”

“It’s digging in!”

Into Evgeny’s head flashed the thought, They he caught some sort of lizard, but here he caught sight of the hind leg. It was black, shiny, with sharp notches, like the leg of an enormous beetle, and it was clawing its way over the ground, leaving deep furrows behind it. There were also many other legs there-black, brown, and white, and also fidgeting, jerking, and dragging—but all these were ordinary human legs. Spellbound, Evgeny watched the hind leg for several seconds. Time after time it contracted, digging deep into the earth, and then with effort it straightened out again, and each time the shouting crowd moved another five feet or so.

“Ha!” Evgeny shouted in a blood-curdling voice, and, with both hands, he seized the hind leg by a joint and pulled it toward him.

A distinct crunch rang out. The leg tore off with unexpected ease, and Evgeny fell backward.

“Don’t you dare break it!” thundered a wrathful voice. “Get that idiot out of here!”

Evgeny lay there for a while, holding the leg in his embrace, and then he slowly got up.

“A little more! Just a little bit, Joe!” boomed the same voice. “Let go of my arm… Ha! Ha!… Now we’ve got you, my pretty!”

Something gave forth a plaintive ringing sound, and then silence set in. The heap of bodies froze, and only a heavy, intermittent breathing could be heard. Then everyone at once started talking and laughing, getting up, wiping their sweaty faces. A large, motionless black mound remained in the torn-up grass.

Someone said in a disillusioned voice, “The same thing again!”

“A tortoise! A septipede!”

“You’ve really got yourself dug in, you bad girl!”

“A little more and it would’ve gotten clean away.”

“Yes, it gave us a hard time.”

“Where’s the hind leg?”

All glances turned to Evgeny. He said boldly, “The hind leg is here. It tore off. I never thought it would come off so easily.”

They surrounded him, examining him with curiosity. An enormous half-naked fellow, with a shock of tousled red hair on his head, and with a ruddy orange beard, extended a powerful, scratched hand. “Give it here, will you?”

In the other hand this brawny lad carried a fragment of shiny wire. Evgeny happily handed over the leg. “I’m Evgeny Slavin,” he said. “Correspondent for the European Information Center. I flew out because they told me things were interesting here.”

The redhead flexed the black toggle lever of a leg several times, with a thoughtful expression. The leg gave a cheep. “I’m Pavel Rudak, deputy director of the CODD project,” said the lad. “And these”—he poked the lever in the direction of the others—”these are other servants of the Great CODD. You can meet them later, after they’ve taken the tortoise away.”

“Is it worth the bother?” asked a small curly-headed Australian aborigine. “We already have two just like it. Let it sit here.”

“The other two are similar, but not exactly the same, Tappi,” said Rudak. “The hind leg on this one has only one joint.”

“Is that so?” Tappi grabbed the hind leg from Rudak and flexed it several times too. “Yes, you’re right. Too bad it’s broken off.”

“I didn’t know,” said Evgeny.

But no one was listening to him any longer. Everyone had gathered around Tappi, and then they moved in a group to the black mound in the grass, and bent over it. Rudak and Evgeny were left by themselves.

“What’s this about a septipede?” asked Zhenya.

“It’s one of the monsters of the Great CODD,” Rudak answered.

“Ah,” said Evgeny, disappointed. “So they are your monsters after all.”

“It’s not so simple, Comrade Slavin, not so simple. I didn’t say they were our monsters, I said they were the monsters of the Great CODD.” He bent over, felt around in the grass, and picked up several pebbles. “And we go hunting for them. Within the last ten days, all we’ve done is go hunting. Anyway, it must be said that you’ve made a most timely appearance, Comrade Correspondent.” He began very accurately dropping the pebbles on the unhappy tortoise, which was being dragged back to the settlement. The pebbles banged resonantly against its hard armor.

“Paul Rudak!” shouted one of the draggers, “Our burden is heavy! Where are thy strong arms?”

“O thoughtless ones!” exclaimed Rudak. “My strong arms are carrying the hind leg! Tappi, where did you put it?”

“In the grass! Look in the grass, Paul!”

“Let me carry the hind leg,” said Evgeny. “I broke it off, so I should be the one to carry it.”

“Go ahead,” Rudak conceded cheerfully. “I’ll help the others.”

In two bounds he caught up to the “thoughtless ones,” pushed them aside, crawled under the tortoise, grunted, and lifted it on his back. “Catch me if you can!” he thundered in a strained voice, and he started to run at a gallop toward the settlement.

The thoughtless ones rushed after him, whooping. Evgeny grabbed the hind leg, balanced it across the back of his neck like a yoke, and started jogging after them. The leg was serrated, and fairly heavy.

“I’m taking bets for the hind leg,” proclaimed Pavel Rudak from the doorway of the laboratory. “I’ll even bet my own hind leg that our correspondent is tormented by thirst!”

Evgeny, who was sitting by the laboratory wall, sighed quietly, and fanned himself with somebody’s straw hat. His neck burned. “You win,” he moaned.

“Where are the thoughtless servants? How dare they abandon such an honored guest? It’s an affront to the entire European Information Center!”

“Your thoughtless servants are worshiping the hind leg in the building across the way,” answered Evgeny, getting up. “They asked me to wait here for a little while. They said you would be back in a minute. That was just half an hour ago.”

“Disgraceful!” Rudak said with some embarrassment. “Let’s go, Comrade Slavin. I’ll try to make amends for their crimes. I’ll slake your thirst and throw open unto you the hatches of the coolers.”

“Get to it!”

Rudak took him by the arm and brought him at an angle across the street, to a tidy white cottage. It was clean and cool there. Rudak sat him down at the table, placed in front of him a glass, a decanter, and a bucket of ice, and set about playing host. “There’s no delivery line here,” he boomed. “We do the cooking ourselves. In cyberkitchens.”

“A UKM-207?” asked Evgeny.

“No, I have an American system.”

Evgeny did not eat. He drank and watched Rudak eating. Rudak cleaned his plate, emptied his jug, and admonished, “You don’t have to look at me that way. That’s yesterday’s supper, today’s breakfast, and today’s dinner.”

Evgeny stealthily emptied the very last out of the jugs and thought, And today’s supper.

“You’re in luck, correspondent,” Rudak continued. “Things really are interesting around here nowadays. They will be even more interesting tomorrow, when Professor Lomba, the director of the CODD project, gets back.”

“I’ve seen Professor Lomba,” said Evgeny.

Rudak stopped eating and quickly asked, “When?”

“Early this morning, in Gibson. He was consulting an acquaintance of mine. Only I didn’t know he was the director of the CODD project.”

Rudak lowered his eyes and once again set to eating. “What did you think of him?” he inquired after a moment.

“How should I put it…?” said Evgeny. “He seemed gloomy more than anything.”

“Mmm, yes,” drawled Rudak. He pushed the plate away. “This evening will be very interesting.” He sighed. “Well, Comrade Slavin, please ask your questions.”

Evgeny hurriedly loaded the dictaphone. “First of all,” he said, “what is the Great CODD?”

“One moment.” Rudak leaned against the back of his armchair and put his hands behind his head. “First I must ask you something. What sort of education have you had?”

“I graduated from the medical institute, the institute of journalism, and the training courses for a spaceflight surgeon.”

“And all that was a century and a half ago,” Rudak elaborated. “And nothing else?”

“I’ve traveled over the whole Planet as a correspondent, an old newshound. My field of scientific interest is comparative linguistics.”

“So,” said Rudak. “And you haven’t heard anything about Komatsuwara’s seven principles?”

“Nothing.”

“Nor, of course, about the algebra of information fields?”

“No.”

“Nor about the fundamental theorem of information dissipation?”

Evgeny kept silent. Rudak thought a moment and said, “All right. The court understands everything. We will do all we can. Just listen very carefully, and if I get carried away, grab me by the hind leg.”

This is what Evgeny understood: The Collector of Dispersed Data was intended primarily for the collection of dispersed data. This, to be sure, was clear enough from the name. “Dispersed data” meant traces of all events and phenomena dispersed in space and time. Komatsuwara’s first principle (the only one he could understand) stated that nothing in nature, and even more in society, ever disappeared without a trace—everything left evidence. The overwhelming majority of these traces were to be found in the form of extremely dispersed data. In the last analysis, they had the form of energy of one sort or another, and the collection problem was much complicated by the fact that over millions of years the original forms underwent repeated changes. In other words, the traces were laid one upon another, mixed up, and often were erased by traces of subsequent events and phenomena. It was theoretically possible to find and restore any trace—the trace left by the collision of a quantum of light with a molecule in the hide of a brontosaurus, or the trace of a brontosaurus tooth on a tree fern. The Great CODD had been built for the searching out, the sorting, and the comparing of these traces, and for their transformation into the original forms of data—for instance, into images.

Evgeny picked up only an extremely murky impression of how the Great CODD worked. First he imagined billions upon billions of cybernetic protozoan microinformants, which would wander in clouds throughout the whole world, climbing to the very stars, collecting dispersed traces of the distant past and dragging them to some immense mechanical memory storehouse. Then his imagination sketched for him a web of wires embracing the whole Planet, stretching between gigantic towers which were scattered in hundreds over islands and continents from pole to pole. In short, he didn’t understand a thing, but did not ask again: he decided that sometime he would listen to the dictaphone tape a few times at leisure, with the corresponding books before his eyes, and then he would understand it all. But then, when Rudak began to discuss the results of his work, Evgeny forgot even about the monsters.

“We have managed to get some very interesting pictures and even entire episodes,” Rudak said. “Of course, the overwhelming majority of materials are waste—hundreds and thousands of frames superimposed one upon another, and the data filter simply breaks down when it attempts to separate them. But still we’ve been able to see something. We have witnessed the flash of a supernova near the sun one hundred million years ago. We have seen the struggles of dinosaurs and episodes of the Battle of Poitiers, the starships of alien visitors to Earth, and something else strange, incomprehensible, to which we so far have nothing corresponding or even analogous.”

“Would it be possible to have a look?” Evgeny asked with a quiver.

“Of course. But let’s return to this afternoon’s topic.”

The Great CODD was not only a collector of dispersed data. It was an unusually complicated and highly independent logical-analytical computer. Its levels held, besides billions of memory cells and logic elements, besides every possible information transformer and filter, its own workships, which it controlled itself. It could even build onto itself, creating new elements and models, and developing its own data. This opened up wide possibilities for its use beyond its primary purpose. At present, for example, it was carrying out all calculations for the Australian economic sphere, was being used to solve many problems in general cybernetics, and was performing functions of precise diagnostics, having for this purpose branches in all the major cities of the Planet and on some off-planet bases. Besides all this, the Great CODD undertook “fortune telling.”

The Congolese Auguste Lomba, the present director for the CODD project and one-time student of Komatsuwara, had programmed several problems related to the prediction of the behavior of a living organism. CODD had coped with problems of invertebrate behavior determination fairly easily, and two years before, Lomba had programmed and fed to the machine a problem of extraordinary complexity.

“The problem received the title of ‘Buridan’s sheep.’ The biological code was taken from a young merino sheep, by the Casparo-Karpov method, at a moment when the sheep was between two feeding troughs full of mixed fodder. This code, along with additional data about sheep in general, was fed into CODD. The machine was required: a) to predict which trough the merino would choose, and b) to give the psychophysiological basis for this choice.”

“But what about free will?” Evgeny asked.

“That’s exactly what we want to find out about,” answered Rudak. “Perhaps it just doesn’t exist.” He was silent for a bit. “In the control experiment the sheep chose the right trough. Actually, the problem came down to the question of why. For two years the machine just thought. Then it began building models. Effector machines often solve problems through models. Like the time CODD solved a problem about earthworms—it built such a superb model that we swiped CODD’s idea and started building subterrenes. Amazing devices.”

Rudak fell into thought. Evgeny started fidgeting impatiently in his chair.

“Are you uncomfortable?” inquired Rudak.

“Not at all, it’s just that it was quite fascinating.”

“Ah, you found it fascinating too? Now then, how can I put it without breaking the spell?”

He’s covering something up, Evgeny thought. He said, “I must have seen one of those models you’re talking about. A sort of pole with a mirror. Only it could hardly be a model of a sheep. Not even one of Buridan’s.”

“That’s the point,” Rudak said with a sigh. “No one believes that it’s a model of a sheep. Papa Lomba, for instance, wouldn’t believe it. He gathered all the materials on the programming and went off to the center to verify them.” Rudak sighed again. “He’s due back this evening.”

“And what exactly is the problem?” asked Evgeny.

“The problem is that CODD is making poles on wheels and seven-legged beetles. And sometimes those sort of flat disks that don’t have legs, don’t have arms, but do have gyroscopes. And no one can see what that has to do with sheep.”

“And actually,” Evgeny said pensively, “why should a sheep have that many legs?”

Rudak looked at him suspiciously. “Precisely—why?” he said with unnatural enthusiasm.

They looked at each other silently for some time. He’s covering something up. Oh, that beard is a slippery one! Evgeny thought.

Gracefully, and without the help of his arms, Rudak stood up using only one leg. “And now let’s go, Comrade Slavin, and I’ll introduce you to the manager of the film library.”

“One more question,” Evgeny said while reloading the dictaphone. “Where is your Great CODD located?”

“You’re sitting on it. It’s underground, twenty-eight levels, six hectares. The brain, the workshops, the energy generators, everything. And now stand up and let’s go.”

CODD’s film library was at the other end of the settlement, in a low studio. On the roof of the building gleamed the gridded panels of a stereocinerama projector. Immediately beyond the studio began the savanna.

The studio smelled of ozone and sour milk. The manager of the film library sat at a table and studied through a binocular microscope a splendid photo of the hind-leg joint. The librarian was a pretty Tahitian woman of about twenty-five.

“Hello, girl,” Rudak rumbled tenderly.

The librarian tore herself away from the microscope, and a smile blossomed. “Hello, Paul,” she said.

“This is Comrade Slavin, correspondent for the European Center,” said Rudak. “Treat him with respect. Show him frames two-sixty-seven, three-fifteen, and seven-five-one-two.”

“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, of course,” Evgeny put in gallantly.

The librarian looked very much like Sheila. “With pleasure,” said the librarian. “But is Comrade Slavin mentally prepared?”

“Uh… how about it, Comrade Slavin, are you prepared?”

“Completely,” Evgeny answered with certainty.

“Then I’ll leave you,” said Rudak. “The monsters await me.” He turned the doorknob and left. They could hear him shouting to the whole settlement, “Akitada! Did the equipment come?” The answer was not audible.

The librarian sighed and said, “Take a folding chair, Comrade Slavin, and let’s go.”

Evgeny went out, and sat down by the studio wall. The librarian efficiently estimated the height of the sun, calculated something, her lips moving and returned to the studio. “Frame two-sixty-seven,” she announced through the open window.

The sunlight disappeared. Evgeny saw a dark-violet night sky with bright, unfamiliar stars. Low strips of clouds stretched over the horizon, and the dark silhouettes of strange trees, something like palms and something like giant sprouts of cauliflower, slowly appeared. Reflections of the stars trembled in black water. Then, over the clouds, a white patch began to glow. It burned brighter and brighter; weird shadows crept along the black oily surface, and suddenly from beyond the horizon a blinding white, pulsating luminary exploded and rushed in jerks across the sky, extinguishing the stars. A gray mist began rushing between the trunks of the strange trees, irridescent sparks flashed, and then everything disappeared. Once again the sunlit savanna lay in front of Evgeny.

“After that, there’s solid static,” said the librarian. “What was it?” asked Evgeny. He expected something big. “The rising of a supernova. More than a hundred million years ago. It gave rise to the dinosaurs. Frame three-fifteen coming up. This is our pride and joy. Fifty million years later.”

Once again the savanna disappeared. Evgeny saw a gray water-covered plain. Everywhere the pulpy stalks of some sort of vegetation stuck up out of the water. A long gray animal shuffled over the plain, knee-deep in water. Evgeny could not at first make out where the animal’s head was. A wet cylindrical-shaped trunk plastered with green grass tapered evenly at both ends and merged into a long flexible neck and tail. Then Evgeny examined the tiny flat head with its lipless toadlike mouth. There was something of the chicken about the habits of the monster—with every step it ducked its head into the water, and immediately jerked it up again, quickly grinding some sort of greenery in its teeth.

“Diplodocus,” said the librarian. “Twenty-four meters long.” Then Evgeny caught sight of another monster. It was crawling alongside the first one with a snakelike motion, leaving a stripe of muddied water behind it. At one point it barely turned aside from the pillar-shaped feet of the diplodocus, and for a minute Evgeny saw an enormous, pale, tooth-filled mouth. Something’s going to happen, he thought. It was much more interesting than the flash of a supernova. The diplodocus, evidently, had no suspicion of the presence of its toothy companion, or else it simply did not consider it worthy of any attention. But the other beast, maneuvering adroitly under the diplodocus’s legs, approached closer to its head, then jumped out of the water in a jerk, instantly bit off the head, and dived,

Evgeny closed his mouth, his teeth chattering. The picture was unusually bright and distinct. The diplodocus stopped for a second, raised its decapitated neck high and… walked on, just as evenly dipping the bleeding stump into the turbid water. Only after several paces did its front legs buckle. The hind legs continued walking, and the enormous tail waved unconcernedly from side to side. The neck shot upward to the sky one last time, and then helplessly flopped down into the water. The front part of the body began to collapse on its side, but the hind part continued to move forward. Then the hind legs collapsed too, and instantly dozens of snarling toothy mouths surfaced in the turbid foaming water and darted forward.

“Wow!” said Evgeny, wiping away sweat. “What a sight!”

“A typical scene of predatory dinosaurs hunting a large diplodocus,” the librarian said in a businesslike tone. “They ate each other all the time. Almost all the data which we receive from that epoch is uninterrupted predation. But how did you like the quality of the image, Comrade Slavin?”

“Excellent quality,” said Evgeny. “Except for some reason it’s always blinking.”

Above the tops of the acacias, a pot-bellied six-engined craft thundered by. The librarian ran out of the studio. “The equipment!” she shouted. “Let’s go, Comrade Slavin—that’s the equipment coming in.”

“But please!” yelped Evgeny. “What about the rest? You promised to show me another one!”

“You don’t want to see it, believe me,” the librarian said with conviction. She hurriedly folded up the chair. “I don’t know what got into Paul’s head. Number seven-five-one-two is the slaughter in Constantinople. Fifteenth century. The image quality is excellent, but it’s such an unpleasant scene. Really, Comrade Slavin, you don’t want to see it. Let’s go watch Paul catch the monsters instead.”

The enormous six-rotored helicopter had landed near the place where Evgeny had left his pterocar, and the unloading of equipment was in full swing. Platforms on high wheels, loaded with dull yellow boxes, rolled out of the opened holds. They took the boxes to the foot of one of the acacias, where in the space between two mighty roots the indefatigable Rudak supervised their assembly. His stentorian voice rang out far across the evening savanna.

The film librarian excused herself and ran off somewhere. Evgeny began walking in uncertain circles around Rudak. Curiosity was getting the better of him. The platforms on high wheels rolled up, unloaded, and departed, and the “servants of CODD”-guys and girls-put the yellow boxes in place and screwed them together, and soon the contours of an enormous angular construction had taken form under the acacia. Rudak rushed off somewhere into its bowels, humming, whistling, and emitting booming shouts. It was noisy and cheerful.

“Strong and Joy, get busy with the intravisors!”

“Dum-didi-dum-didi-dum-dum! Whoever’s there, hand me the contact thingie.”

“The feeders! Where did the damn feeders get to?”

“Ooh-la-la! Farther to the right! That’s good.”

“Frost, get me out of this mess!”

Someone innocently poked Evgeny in the side, and he was asked to move out of the way. At last the enormous helicopter was unloaded, and it began to roar, stirring up a wind and shreds of grass, and moved off from under the acacia over to the landing pad. Rudak crawled out from under the assembly on hands and knees, got up, brushed his hands, and said, “Well, we can get started. Stations, everyone.” He jumped up on the platform where a small control panel was set up. The platform creaked. “Pray for us, Great CODD,” yelled Rudak.

“Stanislav hasn’t come back yet!” someone shouted.

“That spells trouble!” Rudak said, and climbed down from the platform.

“Does Professor Lomba know about all this?” a slim maiden with a boyish hair cut asked timidly.

“Professor Lomba will find out,” Rudak said grandly. “But just where is Stanislav?”

The ground in the clearing in front of the acacias bulged and cracked. Evgeny jumped a full yard. It seemed to him that the pale, tooth-filled maw of a dinosaur was poking up from the grass.

“At last!” said Rudak. “I had already started worrying-his oxygen ran out a minute ago. Or two minutes, actually.”

A ringed metallic body half a yard thick drew itself out of the ground slowly and clumsily, like a giant earthworm. It kept crawling and crawling, and it was still unclear how many rings might yet be hidden underground, when its front part started turning rapidly, screwed itself off, and fell into the grass. A damp, scarlet face with a wide-gaping mouth stuck out of the black aperture.

“Aha!” Rudak roared. “Took you long enough, Stanislav!”

The face hung over the edge, spat, and declared in a strong voice, “It’s got a whole damn arsenal down there. Entire armadas of crawling disks. Get me out of this thing.”

The ringed worm kept crawling and crawling out of the ground, and rays of the red setting sun played on its metal sides.

“Let’s get going,” Rudak declared, and again climbed onto the platform. He smoothed his beard out on the left and on the right, made faces at the girls who had crowded below, and with a pianist’s gesture lay his hands on the board. The board blazed with indicator lights.

Then everything in the clearing went quiet. Evgeny, picking up his movie camera, noted worriedly that several people had scrambled into an acacia and were sitting on the branches, while the girls crowded more closely toward the platform. Just in case, Evgeny moved closer himself.

“Strong and Joy, get ready!” Rudak thundered.

“Ready!” two voices shouted.

“I’ll start warbling on the main frequency. You sing on the flanks. And let’s have a lot of noise.”

Evgeny expected everyone to begin singing and drumming, but it got even quieter. A minute went by.

“Turn up the voltage,” Rudak ordered softly.

Another minute went by. The sun set, and the brighter stars appeared in the sky. Somewhere an emu cried sleepily. A girl standing next to Evgeny sighed heavily. Suddenly there was movement up above, on the acacia branch, and someone’s voice, trembling with excitement, shouted, “There they are! There, in the clearing! You’re looking in the wrong direction!”

Evgeny did not understand where he ought to look, nor did he know who “they” might be, or what one might expect of them. He picked up the movie camera and moved back a little more, crowding the girls toward the platform, and suddenly he saw them. At first he thought it was an illusion, that it was simply spots swimming before his tired eyes. The black starlit savanna began to stir. Indistinct gray shadows rose up on it, unspeaking and ominous; the grass rustled, something squeaked, and he could hear a solid tapping, jingling, crackling. In an instant the quiet was filled with deep indistinct rustlings.

“Light!” bellowed Rudak. “The enemy cometh!”

A joyful howl rang out from the acacia. Dry leaves and twigs rained down. In the same instant a blinding light flashed over the clearing.

Over the savanna marched the army of the Great CODD. Marched to surrender. Evgeny had never seen such a parade of mechanical monsters in his life. Obviously the servants of the Great CODD were seeing them for the first time too. Homeric laughter shook the acacia. The designers, those experienced warriors in the cause of mechanical perfection, were enraged. They toppled from the branch in bunches, and dashed into the clearing.

“No, look. You just look!”

“The seventeenth century! Watt’s linkage!”

“Where’s Robinson? Robinson, were you the one who figured that CODD was smarter than you?”

“Let’s hear it for Robinson! Yea, Robinson!”

“Guys, get a load of these wheels! They won’t even make it all the way to us!”

“Guys! Guys! Look! A steam engine!”

“Author! Author!”

Horrible scarecrows moved into the clearing. Lopsided steam-tricycles. Dish-like rattling contrivances that sparked and gave off a burning smell. The familiar tortoises, furiously kicking their famous single hind legs. Spider-shaped mechanisms on extremely long wire legs on which, now and then, they lowered themselves to the ground. In back, mournfully wobbling, came the poles on wheels with the wilted mirrors on the tips. All these dragged themselves onward, limping, pushing, knocking, breaking down on the way, and emitting steam and sparks. Evgeny aimed the movie camera like a zombie.

“I’m not a servant any longer!” yelled someone in the acacia.

“Me neither!”

“Look at those hind legs!”

The front ranks of mechanical monsters reached the clearing and stopped. The ones in back piled into them and they all collapsed into a heap, tangling up, their outlandish articulations spread wide. Above, the poles on wheels toppled over with a dull thud, breaking in two. One wheel, its springs ringing, rolled up to the platform, circled around, and fell down at Evgeny’s feet. Then Evgeny looked at Rudak. Rudak was standing on the platform, his hands resting against his sides. His beard was waving.

“There we are, guys,” he said. “I give all this to you for pillage and looting. Now we’ll find out how and why they tick—probably.”

The conquerers threw themselves upon the defeated army.

“You can’t really mean the Great CODD built all this to study the behavior of Buridan’s sheep, can you?” Evgeny asked in horror.

“And why not?” said Rudak. “It could very well be. It probably is.” He winked with unusual slyness. “Anyhow, it’s certainly clear that something is out of kilter here.”

Two strapping designers dragged a small metal beetle by its rear leg. Just opposite the platform the leg broke off, and the designers fell into the grass.

“Monsters,” muttered Rudak.

“I already told you it wasn’t fastened on well,” said Evgeny.

A sharp elderly voice roared through the merry noise: “Just what is going on here?”

Silence set in instantly. “Oh, boy,” Rudak said in a whisper, and climbed down from the platform.

It seemed to Evgeny that Rudak had suddenly shriveled.

An old gray-haired black in a white lab coat approached the platform, limping. Evgeny recognized him-it was Professor Lomba. “Where is my Paul?” he asked in an ominously affectionate voice. “Children, who can tell me where my deputy is?”

Rudak remained silent. Lomba walked straight toward him. Rudak stepped backward, knocked his back against the platform, and stopped.

“So, Paul my dear boy, just what’s going on here?” Lomba asked, looming close.

Rudak answered sheepishly, “We seized control from CODD—and rounded up all the monsters into one pile.”

“The monsters, eh?” Lomba said tersely. “An important problem! Where does the seventh leg come from? An important problem, my children! A very important problem!”

Suddenly he grabbed Rudak by the beard and dragged him through the crowd, which opened in his path, to the middle of the clearing. “Look at him, children!” he snouted ceremoniously. “We are astounded! We rack our brains! We fall into despair! We imagine that CODD has outsmarted us!” With each “we” he pulled Rudak’s beard, as if ringing a bell. Rudak’s head swung submissively.

“What happened, teacher?” a girl asked timidly. From her face it was obvious that she felt very sorry for Rudak.

“What happened, my dear little girl?” Lomba at last let go of Rudak. “Old Lomba goes to the center. He drags the best specialists away from their work. And what does he find out? Oh, the shame! What does he find out, you redheaded villain?” He again grabbed Rudak by the beard, and Evgeny hurriedly aimed his camera. “They’re laughing at old Lomba! Old Lomba has become the laughingstock of every last cyberneticist! They’re already telling jokes about old Lomba!” He let go of the beard and stuck a bony fist in Rudak’s broad chest. “I’ll get you! How many legs does an ordinary Australian merino sheep have? Or perhaps you’ve forgotten?”

Evgeny suddenly noticed that upon these words a few young men started moving back with the clear intention of losing themselves in the crowd.

“Don’t let the programmers get away,” Lomba ordered without turning his head.

There was a noise in the crowd, and the young men were pushed into the center of the circle.

“What do these intellectual pirates do?” inquired Lomba, turning sharply towards them. “They indicate in the program that a sheep has seven legs.”

The crowd began to grow noisy.

“They deprive the sheep of a cerebellum.”

Laughter—approving, as it seemed to Evgeny—spread through the crowd.

“Poor, nice, well-meaning CODD!” Lomba raised his arms to the heavens. “It piles absurdity upon absurdity! Could it suppose that its red-bearded hooligan of a master would give it a problem about a five-sided triangle?”

Rudak muttered miserably, “I won’t do it again. Honest I won’t.”

The crowd, laughing, thrashed the programmers on their resonant backs.

Evgeny spent the night at Rudak’s. Rudak bedded him down in the study, then went back to the acacias, brushing his beard carefully. An enormous orange moon, gridded with the gray squares of D-spaceports, looked into the open window. Evgeny looked at it and laughed happily, going over the events of the day in his mind.

He very much liked days like this, ones that did not go by for nothing-days when he had managed to meet new, good or merry or simply nice people. People like thoughtful Parncalas, or magnificent Rudak, or Lomba the Thunderer. I’ll have to write about this, he thought. Absolutely! About how intelligent young men, at their own risk, inserted a notoriously nonsensical program into an unusually complicated and capable machine, to see how the machine would react. And how it reacted, carefully trying to create a consistent model of a sheep with seven legs and no cerebellum. And how an army of these monster-models marched over the warm black savanna in order to surrender to a red-bearded intellectual pirate. And how the intellectual pirate got pulled by the beard—not for the first time nor, probably, for the last. Because he’s very interested in problems involving five-sided triangles and square spheres… which are detrimental to the dignity of an honest, well-intentioned computer. It could come out all right—a story about intellectual hooliganism.

Evgeny fell asleep and woke up at dawn. Dishes were quietly crashing in the dining room, and a discussion in low tones was under way:

“Now everything’s going smooth as silk—Papa Lomba has calmed down and gotten interested.”

“As well he should! Such neat data on the theory of machine error!”

“But still, guys, CODD turned out to be fairly simple-minded. I expected more inventiveness.”

Someone suddenly laughed and said, “A seven-legged sheep without the least sign of an organ of balance! Poor CODD!”

“Quiet—you’ll wake the correspondent!”

After a long pause, when Evgeny had already begun to drowse, someone suddenly said with regret, “It’s a shame that it’s all over already. It was interesting! O seven-legged sheep! We’ve seen the last of thy mystery and it’s a crying shame.”

14. Candles Before the Control Board

At midnight it started to rain. The highway got slick and Zvantsev reduced speed. It was unusually dark and bleak—the glow of city lights had disappeared behind the black hills—and it seemed to Zvantsev as if his car were going through a desert. The white beam of the headlights danced ahead on the rough wet concrete. There were no cars going the other way. Zvantsev had seen the last one before he turned onto the highway leading to the Institute. Half a mile before the gate was a housing development, and Zvantsev saw that despite the late hour almost all the windows were lit up, and the veranda of a large cafe by the road was full of people. It seemed to Zvantsev that they were keeping quiet, waiting for something.

Akiko looked back. “They’re all watching us,” she said.

Zvantsev did not answer.

“They must think we’re doctors.”

“Probably,” said Zvantsev.

It was the last village with lights. Beyond the gate began damp darkness.

“There should be an appliance factory somewhere around here,” said Zvantsev. “Did you notice it?”

“No, sir.”

“You never notice anything.”

“You’re the one driving, sir. If I were driving I would notice everything.”

“Somehow I doubt that,” said Zvantsev. He braked sharply, and the car skidded. It slipped sideways across the screeching concrete. The headlights illuminated a signpost. The sign had no light, and it looked faded: NOVOSIBIRSK INSTITUTE OF BIOLOGICAL CODING—21 KM. A warped plywood board with a clumsily written notice was nailed under the sign: ATTENTION! TURN ON ALL NEUTRALIZERS. REDUCE SPEED. ROADBLOCK AHEAD. And the same thing in French and English. The letters were large, with black blotches. “Uh-huh,” muttered Zvantsev. He bent under the wheel and turned on the neutralizers.

“What kind of roadblock?” asked Akiko.

“I don’t know what kind,” said Zvantsev, “but it’s clear you should have stayed in town.”

“No,” said Akiko.

When the car had started moving again, she asked cautiously, “Do you think they’ll let us through, sir?”

“I don’t think they’ll let you through.”

“Then I’ll wait,” Akiko said calmly.

The car glided slowly and noiselessly over the highway. Zvantsev, still looking forward, said, “Still, I wish they would let you through.”

“So do I,” said Akiko. “I want very much to say good-by to him…”

Zvantsev silently watched the road.

“We’ve rarely seen each other lately,” Akiko continued. “But I love him very much. I don’t know anyone else like him. I never loved even my father the way I love him. I even cried…”

Yes, she cried, thought Zvantsev. The ocean was blue-black, the sky was dark blue, and his face was blue and swollen when Kondratev and I led him carefully toward the convertiplane. The scorching coral sand crunched underfoot, and it was hard for him to walk, and he almost hung in our arms, but he wouldn’t let us carry him. His eyes were closed, and he mumbled guiltily, “Gokuro-sama, gokuro-sama—” The oceanographers went behind and to one side, but Akiko walked right next to Sergei, holding out the shabby white cap famous over the whole ocean with both her hands, like a tray, and crying bitterly. That was the first and most serious attack of the disease—six years ago on a nameless islet fifteen nautical miles to the west of Octopus Reef.

“… I’ve known him for twenty years. Since I was a child. I very much wish to say good-by to him.”

The gridded arch of a microweather installation swam up out of the damp darkness and passed overhead. There were no lights at the weather station. The installation’s not working, Zvantsev thought. That’s why we’re getting this crap from the sky. He looked sidelong at Akiko. She was sitting with her legs drawn up on the seat, looking straight ahead. Lights from the dashboard dials fell on her face.

“What’s going on here?” said Zvantsev. “Some sort of quiet zone?”

“I don’t know,” said Akiko. She turned, trying to make herself more comfortable, poked her knee against Zvantsev’s side, and suddenly froze, staring at him with eyes shimmering in the semi-darkness.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Perhaps he is already…”

“Nonsense,” said Zvantsev.

“And everyone has gone to the Institute…”

“Nonsense,” Zvantsev said decisively. “Rubbish.”

An uneven red light burned far ahead. It was weak and flickering, like a small star on a turbulent night. Just in case, Zvantsev again reduced speed. Now the car was moving very slowly, and they could hear the patter of rain. Three figures in shiny wet rain capes appeared in the headlight beam, standing in the middle of the highway. In front of them, a substantial-sized log lay across the road. The one standing on the right was holding a large smoking torch overhead, and slowly waving it from side to side. Zvantsev moved the car up a little closer and stopped. So here’s the roadblock, he thought. The man with the torch shouted something indistinct into the patter of the rain, and all three started quickly toward the car, moving clumsily in their enormous wet rain capes. The man with the torch once again shouted something, contorting his mouth angrily. Zvantsev turned off the headlights and opened the door. “The engine!” shouted the man. He came up close. “Turn off the engine, for God’s sake!”

Zvantsev turned off the engine and got out onto the highway, into the drizzle. “I’m Zvantsev, the oceanographer,” he said. “I’m on my way to see Academician Okada.”

“Put out the dome light in the car!” said the man. “And quickly, please!”

Zvantsev turned, but the light in the passenger compartment was already out.

“Who’s that with you?” the man with the torch asked.

“My colleague,” Zvantsev answered shortly. “Oceanographer Kondrateva.”

The three figures in the rain capes remained silent.

“Can we go on?”

“I’m Mikhailov, technician,” said the man with the torch. “I was sent to meet you and tell you that it’s impossible to see Academician Okada.”

“I’ll speak about that with Professor Casparo,” said Zvantsev. “Take me to him.”

“Professor Casparo is very busy. We would not like him to be disturbed.”

Zvantsev would have liked to ask who “we” were, but he restrained himself, because Mikhailov had the vague monotonous voice of a man who is dead tired.

“I have news of the highest importance for the Academician,” said Zvantsev. “Take me to Casparo.”

The three remained silent, and the uneven red light played over their faces. The faces were wet, pinched.

“Well?” Zvantsev said impatiently. Suddenly he realized that Mikhailov was asleep. The hand with the torch trembled and dipped lower and lower. Mikhailov’s eyes were closed.

“Tolya,” one of his companions said quietly, poking him in the shoulder.

Mikhailov came to himself, waved the torch, and fixed his swollen eyes on Zvantsev. “What?” he asked hoarsely. “Ah, you want to see the Academician. It’s impossible to see Academician Okada. The whole area of the Institute is closed. Please, go away.”

“I have news of the highest importance for Academician Okada,” Zvantsev repeated patiently. “I am Oceanographer Zvantsev, and in the car is Oceanographer Kondrateva. We’re bringing important news.”

“I’m Technician Mikhailov,” the man with the torch said again. “It’s impossible to see Okada now. He will be dead in the next six hours or so, and we may not make it.” His lips were barely moving. “Professor Casparo is very busy and has requested not to be disturbed. Please, go away.”

He suddenly turned to his companions. “Give me another two tablets,” he said despairingly.

Zvantsev stood in the rain and thought about what else he could say to this man who was falling asleep on his feet. Mikhailov stood sideways to him and threw back his head and swallowed something. Then Mikhailov said, “Thanks, guys, I’m dead on my feet. It’s still raining here, and cool, and back there we’re just falling off our feet, one after another, getting up again, and collapsing again… Then we carry them off…” He was still speaking indistinctly.

“Oh, well. It’s the last night.”

“Yes, and the ninth one,” said Mikhailov.

“The tenth.”

“Is it really the tenth? My head is like mush.” Mikhailov turned to Zvantsev. “Excuse me, comrade…”

“Zvantsev, oceanographer,” Zvantsev said for the third time. “Comrade Mikhailov, you simply have to let us through. We’ve just flown in from the Philippines. We’re bringing information to the Academician, very important scientific information. He has been waiting for it all his life. You see, I’ve known him thirty years. I can tell better than you whether he should die without hearing this. It’s extremely important information.”

Akiko got out of the car and stood beside him. The technician was silent, shivering with cold underneath his rain cape. “Well, all right,” he said at last. “Only there are too many of you.” That was how he said it: “too many.”

“Only one of you should go.”

“Very well,” said Zvantsev.

“But if you ask me it won’t do any good,” Mikhailov said.

“Casparo won’t let you see the Academician. The Academician is in isolation. You could ruin the whole experiment if you break the isolation, and then…”

“1 will speak with Casparo myself,” Zvantsev interrupted. “Take me to him.”

“All right,” said the technician. “Let’s go.”

Zvantsev looked back at Akiko. There were many large and small drops on her face. She said, “Go on, sir.” Then she turned to the men in the rain capes. “Somebody give him a rain cape, and get in the car yourself. Park the car crosswise across the road.”

They gave Zvantsev a rain cape. Akiko wanted to go back to the car and turn it around, but Mikhailov said that the engine should not be turned on. He got up and lit the way with his awkward smoking torch, while they shoved the car around and positioned it across the road manually. Then the full complement of the roadblock crew got into the passenger compartment. Zvantsev peered inside. Akiko had sat down again, curling up, in the front seat. Mikhailov’s companions were already asleep, leaning their heads on one another.

“Tell him…” said Akiko.

“Yes, of course.”

“Tell him we’ll be waiting.”

“Right,” said Zvantsev. “I’ll tell him.”

“Well, go.”

“Sayonara, Aki-tyan.”

“Go on…”

Zvantsev carefully closed the door and went up to the technician. “Let’s go.”

“Let’s go,” the technician responded in a quite new, very brisk voice. “We’ll walk fast—we’ve got to cover seven kilometers.”

They started off, taking broad steps over the rough wet concrete.

“What are you doing out there?” asked the technician.

“‘Out there’?”

“Well, out there… in the outside world. We haven’t heard anything in two weeks. What’s going on in the Council? How is the Big Shaft project coming?”

“There are a lot of volunteers,” said Zvantsev. “But not enough annihilators. Not enough cooling units. The Council is planning on transferring thirty percent of energy to the project. Practically all the specialists on deep penetration have been called back from Venus.”

“A good move,” said the technician. “There’s nothing for them to do on Venus now. Who did they choose to head up the project?”

“I haven’t the vaguest idea,” Zvantsev said angrily.

“Not Sterner?”

“I don’t know.”

They were silent for a bit.

“Real junk, right?” said the technician.

“What?”

“These torches are real junk, right? What crap! Can you smell how it stinks?”

Zvantsev sniffed and stepped two paces to the side. “Yes,” he said. The torch reeked of oil. “Why are you using them?” he asked.

“It was Casparo’s order. No electrical appliances, no electric lights. We’re trying to keep interference down to a minimum. Do you smoke, by the way?”

“Yes.”

The technician stopped. “Give me your lighter,” he said. “And your radiophone. You do have a radiophone?”

“I do.”

“Give them to me.” Mikhailov took the lighter and radiophone, removed their batteries, and threw these into a ditch. “I’m sorry, but it’s necessary. For twenty kilometers around not one electrical appliance is turned on.”

“So that’s what’s going on,” said Zvantsev.

“Yes. We’ve plundered all the apiaries around Novosibirsk to make beeswax candles. Have you heard about those?”

“No.”

They again started walking quickly in the steady rain.

“The candles are junk too, but at least they’re better than torches. Or woodsplints—have you heard about those?”

“No,” said Zvantsev.

“There’s an old song, ‘Light My Fire.’ I had always thought the metaphor involved some sort of generator.”

“Now I understand why it’s raining,” Zvantsev said after a silence. “That is, I understand why the microweather installations are shut down.”

“No, no,” said the technician. “The microweather stations are one thing, but the rain is being driven to us specially from Wind Ridge. There’s a continental installation there.”

“What’s it for?” Zvantsev asked.

“To shield us from direct solar illumination.”

“What about discharges from the clouds?”

“The clouds arrive electrically neutral—they are discharged along the way. And in general, the experiment has turned out to be on a much grander scale than we had thought at first. We’ve got all the biocoding specialists gathered here. From the whole world. Five hundred people. And that’s still too few. And the whole Northern Ural region is working for us.”

“And so far everything’s going all right?” Zvantsev asked.

The technician was silent.

“Can you hear me?” Zvantsev asked.

“I can’t give you an answer,” Mikhailov said reluctantly. “We hope everything is going as it should. The principle has been verified, but this is the first experiment with a human being. One hundred twenty trillion megabits of information, and a mistake in any one bit can distort a good deal.”

Mikhailov fell silent, and they walked a long time without saying a word. Zvantsev did not notice at first that they were walking through a village. The village was empty. The dull walls of the cottages shone weakly, and the windows were dark. Here and there, open garage doors showed black behind lacy wet hedges.

The technician forgot about Zvantsev. Another six hours and it will be all over, he thought. I’ll go home and collapse into bed. The Great Experiment will be over. The great Okada will die and become immortal. Oh, how beautiful! But until the time has come, no one will even know whether the experiment was a success. Not even Casparo himself. The great Casparo, the great Okada, the Great Experiment! The Great Encoding. Mikhailov shook his head—the familiar heaviness was once again crawling onto his eyes, clouding his brain. No, you’ve got to think. Valerio Casparo said that we’ve got to start thinking now. Everyone should think, even the technicians, even though we don’t know enough. But Casparo said that everyone must think Valerio Casparo—or Valerii Konstantinovich Kasparo, in the vulgar tongue. It ‘s funny, how he works and works, and suddenly he says to the whole hall, “Enough. Let’s sit for a while, staring stupidly ahead!” He picked up that phrase from something he read. If you ask him about something during that time, he says, “Young man, you see to it yourself. Don’t bother me while I’m sitting here, staring stupidly ahead. I’m thinking about the wrong thing again. So: first off we’ll state the problem. Given: that a complex of physiological neuronic states (to put it more simply, a living brain) is hard-coded according to the third Casparo-Kaprov system onto a crystalline quasibiomass. With the proper isolation, a hard code on a crystalline quasibiomass will be preserved with a normal noise level for quite a long time—the relaxation time for the code is on the order of twelve thousand years. Time enough. Required: to find a means of transferring the biomass code onto a living brain, that is to say onto a complex of physiological functioning neurons in the null state. Of course, for this we also need a living brain in the null state, but for such a business people always have been found and will be found—me, for example… But they still wouldn’t permit it. Casparo won’t even hear of a living brain. There’s an eccentric for you. So now you sit and wait for the guys in Leningrad to build an artificial one. So. In short, we have encoded Okada’s brain onto a crystalline biomass. We have the number for Okada’s brain, the number for Okada’s thoughts, the number for his ego. And now we have to find a means of transferring the numbers to another brain. Let it be an artificial one. Then Okada will be reborn. The enciphered ego Okada will once again become a real, acting ego. Question: how is this to be done? How?… It would be nice to figure it out right now and make the old man happy. Casparo has been thinking about this for a quarter of a century. Run up to him sopping wet like Archimedes, and shout, Eureka!” Mikhailov stumbled and almost dropped the torch.

“What’s the matter?” asked Zvantsev. “Are you falling asleep again?”

Mikhailov looked at him. Zvantsev walked on, his hood raised, his arms stuck under the rain cape. In the red, flickering light his face seemed drawn and hard. “No,” said Mikhailov. “I’m thinking. I’m not sleeping.”

Some sort of dark hulk loomed ahead. They walked quickly, and soon caught up to a large truck that was slowly crawling along the highway. At first Zvantsev did not realize that the truck was moving with its engine turned off. Two good-sized camels were pulling it.

“Hey, Saka!” shouted the technician.

The door of the cab opened a bit, a head stuck out, fixed shining eyes on them, and disappeared again. “What can I do for you?” asked a voice from the cab.

“Let me have a candy bar,” Mikhailov said.

“Get it yourself—I don’t feel like getting out. It’s wet.”

“So I’ll get it myself,” Mikhailov said briskly, and disappeared somewhere along with the torch.

It got very dark. Zvantsev walked alongside the truck, matching his pace to that of the camels, which were barely moving. “Can’t they go a little faster?” he muttered.

“They don’t want to, the scoundrels,” came the voice from the cab. “I’ve tried thrashing them with a stick, but they only spit at me.” The voice was silent for a bit and then added, “Just four kilometers an hour. And they spit all over my rain cape.” The driver sighed deeply and suddenly yelled, “Hey, you weird critters! Giddap! Giddap! Or whatever they say where you come from.”

The camels snorted distainfully.

“You should move over to the side,” advised the driver. “Though I guess they’re not going to do anything right now.”

The air smelled of oil, and Mikhailov again appeared alongside. His torch smoked and crackled. “Let’s go,” he said. “It’s close now.”

They easily passed the camel team, and soon low, dark structures appeared along the sides of the road. Peering ahead in the darkness, Zvantsev made out an enormous building—a black rift in the black sky. Here and there in the windows, yellow flames flickered weakly.

“Look,” Mikhailov said in a whisper. “Do you see the buildings by the sides of the road?”

“So?” Zvantsev whispered back.

“That’s where the quasibiomass is. This is where he’ll be kept.”

“Who?”

“Well, the brain, then,” Mikhailov whispered. “His brain!”

They suddenly turned and came out right at the entrance to the Institute building. Mikhailov swung open the heavy door. “Go on in,” he said. “Just don’t make any noise, please.”

It was dark, cold, and strange-smelling in the hall. In the middle of a large table winked several fat, guttering candles, along with dishes and a large soup pot. The dishes were dirty. Dried-out pieces of bread lay in a basket. The candlelight provided only poor illumination. Zvantsev took several steps, and brushed his rain cape against a chair. The chair fell over with a crash.

“Yike!” someone shouted from behind. “Tolya, is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me,” Mikhailov said.

Zvantsev looked around. A reddish form occupied a corner of the hall, and when Mikhailov went over there with his torch, Zvantsev saw a girl with a pale face. She was lying on a sofa, wrapped up in something black.

“Did you bring something scrumptious?” the girl asked.

“Saka is bringing it,” Mikhailov answered. “Would you like a chocolate bar?”

“Please.”

Mikhailov started digging into the folds of his rain cape, waving his torch.

“Go spell Zina,” the girl said. “She can sleep in here. The boys are sleeping in Room Twelve now. Is it still raining outside?”

“Yes.”

“Good. There’s not much to go now.”

“Here’s your candy bar,” said Mikhailov. “I’m going. This comrade is here to see the Academician.”

“To see who?”

“The Academician.”

The girl whistled softly.

Zvantsev walked across the hall and looked back impatiently. Mikhailov came after him, and the girl sat down on the couch and unwrapped the candy bar. By the candlelight Zvantsev could only make out her small, pale face and a strange silvery lab coat with a hood. Mikhailov threw off his rain cape, and Zvantsev saw that he also wore a long silvery coat. In the uncertain light of the torch he looked like a ghost.

“Comrade Zvantsev,” he said, “wait here for a little bit. I’ll go bring you a lab coat. Only, in the meantime, don’t take off your rain cape.”

“All right,” Zvantsev said, and sat down on a chair.

Casparo’s study was dark and cold. The rain pattered on. Mikhailov had left, saying that he would call Casparo. He had taken the torch, and there were no candles in the study. At first Zvantsev sat in the visitors’ chair in front of the large empty desk. Then he got up, went over to the window, and started looking out into the night, leaning his forehead against the cold glass. Casparo did not come.

It’s going to be very difficult without Okada, Zvantsev thought. He could have lasted another twenty years—we should have taken better care of him. We should have stopped him from going on deep-water searches a long time ago. If a man is over a hundred, and has spent sixty of those years at a depth of five hundred fathoms… then begets blue palsy, damn him!

Zvantsev stepped back from the window, went over to the door, and looked out into the corridor. Candles burned sparsely along the long corridor walls. From somewhere came a voice repeating something over and over with the steadiness of a metronome. Zvantsev listened closely, but he could not make out a single word. Then long white figures glided out of the reddish twilight at the end of the corridor, and slipped past noiselessly, as if swimming in air. Zvantsev saw drawn dark faces under the peaks of the silvery hoods.

“Are you hungry?” one said.

“No. Sleepy.”

“I think I’ll go eat.”

“No, no. Sleep. First sleep.”

They spoke softly, but he could hear them a long way down the corridor.

“Jean almost screwed up her section. Casparo grabbed her arm just in time.”

“What a mess!”

“Yeah. You should’ve seen his face.”

“What a mess, what a mess! Which section?”

“One twenty-six oh three. Approximately. Aural associations.”

“Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.”

“Casparo sent her off to get some sleep. She’s sitting in Room Sixteen, crying.”

The two people in white disappeared. Zvantsev could hear them talking as they went down the staircase, but he no longer could make out the words. He closed the door and returned to the chair.

So, some Jean had almost screwed up the aural association center. Disgraceful! Casparo had grabbed her by the arm. But what if he hadn’t grabbed her? Zvantsev folded his arms and closed his eyes. He knew almost nothing about the Great Experiment. He knew only that it was a great experiment, that it was the most complicated thing that science had ever come up against. To encode the distribution of excitations in each of billions of brain cells, to encode the linkages between the excitations, the linkages between the linkages. The smallest mistake threatened irrevocable distortions… A girl had almost annihilated a whole section… Zvantsev remembered that it was section number 12603, and he became afraid. Even if the probability of a mistake or distortion during the transfer of the code was very small… Twelve thousand sections, trillions of units of information. Casparo still hadn’t come.

Zvantsev went out into the corridor again. He moved from candle to candle, toward the strange monotonous voice. Then he caught sight of a wide-open door, and the voice became quite loud. Beyond the door was an enormous hall, winking with hundreds of flames. Zvantsev saw panels with dials stretching along the walls. Several hundred people were sitting along the walls in front of the panels. They all wore white. The air in the hall was hot and heavy, and smelled of hot wax. Zvantsev realized that the ventilation and air-conditioning system was shut off. He went into the hall and looked around. He was searching for Casparo, but even if Casparo was here, it was impossible to pick him out among the hundreds of people in identical silvery coats with hoods pulled low.

“Section one eighty-seven twenty-two filled,” said a voice. It was unnaturally quiet in the hall-there was only that voice and the rustle of many movements. Zvantsev spied a table with several armchairs in the center of the hall. He went over to the table.

“Section one eighty-seven twenty-three filled.”

A broad-shouldered man with his head propped up by his arms was sitting in one of the chairs opposite Zvantsev. He was sleeping, and he sighed heavily in his sleep.

“Section one eighty-seven twenty-four filled.”

Zvantsev looked at his watch. It was exactly 3:00 a.m. He saw a man in white come into the hall and disappear somewhere into the gloom, where nothing could be seen except the winking flames.

“Section one eighty-seven twenty-five filled.”

A man with a candle came over to the table, stood the candle in a puddle of wax, and sat down. He laid a folder full of papers on the table, turned over one page, and immediately fell asleep. Zvantsev watched his head sink lower and lower and at last come to rest on the papers.

“Section one eighty-seven twenty-six filled.”

Zvantsev once again glanced at his watch. It had taken little more than ninety seconds to fill two sections. The Great Encoding had been going on for ten days, and fewer than twenty thousand sections were full.

“Section one eighty-seven twenty-seven filled.”

And so on for ten days. Someone’s strong hand came to rest on Zvantsev’s shoulder. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”

Zvantsev lifted his head and saw a round, tired face under a hood. Zvantsev recognized it.

“Get to sleep. Right now.”

“Professor Casparo,” Zvantsev said, getting up.

“Get to sleep, get to sleep—” Casparo looked him in the eye.

“Or if you can’t sleep, relieve somebody.”

He walked quickly to one side, stopped, and again peered fixedly at Zvantsev. “I don’t recognize you,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter—get to sleep!”

He turned his back and quickly walked along the rows of people sitting before the control boards. Zvantsev heard his harsh receding voice: “A half unit. Pay a little more attention, Leonid, half a unit… Good… fine… also good… A unit, Johnson, watch it more carefully… Good… also good…”

Zvantsev got up and walked behind him, trying not to let him out of sight. Suddenly Casparo shouted, “Comrades! Everything is going beautifully! Just be a little more attentive! Everything’s going very well. Just watch the stabilizers, and everything will be fine!”

Zvantsev bumped into a long table at which several people were sleeping. No one turned around, and none of the sleepers raised his head. Casparo had disappeared. Then Zvantsev walked at random along a yellow chain of flames in front of the control boards.

“Section one eighty-seven nine zero filled,” said a new, fresh voice.

Zvantsev realized that he was lost, and now did not know where the exit was, nor where Casparo had disappeared to. He sat on an overturned chair, his elbows resting on his knees, his chin propped on his hands, and stared at a winking candle in front of him. The candle was slowly guttering.

“Section one eighty-seven ninety-eight… Eighty-seven ninety-nine… Eighty-eight zero zero… Filled… Filled.”

“Aaaugh!” Someone shouted loudly, frightfully. Zvantsev jumped up. He saw that no one had turned around, but even so, everyone at once froze, their backs tensed. Twenty paces away, by one of the technicians’ chairs, a tall man was standing clutching his head and shouting, “Back! Back! Aaaugh!”

Casparo appeared from somewhere and darted toward the board, walking at a headlong pace. It was quiet in the hall except for the sputtering of wax.

“I’m sorry!” the tall man said. “I’m sorry… sorry…” he repeated.

Casparo straightened up and shouted, “Listen to me! Sections one eighty-seven ninety-six, eighty-seven ninety-seven, eighty-seven ninety-eight, eighty-seven ninety-nine, eighty-eight zero zero! Re-tape! Do it over!”

Zvantsev saw hundreds of people in white simultaneously raise their right hands and make some adjustment on their boards. The candle flames began to flicker.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” the man repeated.

Casparo clapped him on the back. “Get to sleep, Henry,” he said. “Get to sleep right away. Calm down, it’s no big deal.”

The man walked along the boards, repeating the same thing: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” No one turned around. Someone else already sat at his station.

“Section one eighty-seven ninety-six filled,” said the fresh voice.

Casparo stood a while, then slowly, stooping far over, he started walking past Zvantsev. Zvantsev moved toward him, and suddenly caught sight of his face. He stopped and let Cas-paro pass. Casparo went up to a small separate board, sank heavily into a chair, and sat there for several seconds. Then he roused himself, and, collapsing forward, pushed his face into the large eyepiece of a periscope which extended down through the floor.

Zvantsev stood nearby, near the long table, with his gaze fixed on the tired, hunched back. He could still see Casparo’s face as it had looked in the flickering candlelight. He remembered that Casparo was no longer young either, only, say, five or six years younger than Okada. He thought, How many years has he lost in these ten days? There will be a reckoning for this, and soon!

Two people walked up to Casparo. Instead of a hood, one of them wore a round, transparent helmet, which gleamed dimly in the candlelight. “We won’t make it,” the man in the helmet said quietly. He spoke to Casparo’s back.

“How long?” Casparo asked without turning around.

“Clinical death in two hours. Plus or minus twenty minutes.”

Casparo turned around. “But he looks good… See for yourself.” He tapped the eyepiece with a finger.

The man in the helmet shook his head.

“Paralysis of the nerves,” the second one said very quietly. He looked back, ran his bulging eyes over Zvantsev, and, bending over toward Casparo, said something in his ear.

Zvantsev recognized him. It was Professor Ivan Krasnov.

“Very well,” said Casparo. “We’ll do it this way.” The two turned together and quickly disappeared into the darkness.

Zvantsev groped for a chair, sat down, and closed his eyes. It’s over, he thought. They won’t make it. He’ll die. He’ll die completely.

“Section one nine zero zero two filled,” said the voice. “Section one nine zero zero three filled… Section one nine zero zero four…”

Zvantsev did not know anything about the encoding of nerve linkages. He imagined Okada lying on a table under a deathly white light, with a fine needle crawling slowly over the convolutions of his exposed brain, and that the code impulses were put down character after character on a long tape. Zvantsev understood perfectly well that in reality it wasn’t done like that at all, but his imagination kept sketching him the same picture: the shining needle crawling over the brain, and, recorded on an endless tape, the mysterious signs signifying memory, habits, associations, experience… And from somewhere death was creeping up, destroying cell after cell, linkage after linkage, and they had to outrace it.

Zvantsev knew almost nothing about the encoding of nerve linkages. But he did know that the boundaries of the brain areas that carried out separate thought processes were still unknown. That the Great Encoding was possible only under conditions of the most extreme isolation and with the most precise registration of all irregular fields. Hence the candles and torches, and the camels on the highway, the empty villages, and the black windows of the microweather installation, and the halting of the moving roads. Zvantsev knew that a means of monitoring the encoding that did not distort it had not yet been found. That Casparo worked half-blind and anyhow was encoding things which, perhaps, were not at all what should be encoded. But Zvantsev also knew that the Great Encoding was the road toward the immortality of the human ego, because a person wasn’t arms and legs. A person was memory, habits, associations, a brain. A brain.

“Section one ninety-two sixteen filled…”

Zvantsev opened his eyes, got up, and went over to Casparo. Casparo was sitting looking straight ahead.

“Professor Casparo,” said Zvantsev, “I am Zvantsev, the oceanographer. I must speak to Academician Okada.”

Casparo raised his eyes and looked up at Zvantsev for a long time. His eyes were dull, half-closed. “That is impossible,” he said.

They looked at each other silently for some time.

“Academician Okada has been waiting for this information all his life,” Zvantsev said quietly.

Casparo did not answer. He turned his eyes away and once again stared straight ahead. Zvantsev looked around. Darkness. Candle flames. White silvery hooded coats.

“Section one ninety-two ninety-two filled,” said the voice.

Casparo got up and said, “That’s it. The end.”

And Zvantsev saw a small red lamp winking on the board by the eyepiece of the periscope. The light, he thought. So it’s over.

“Section one ninety-two ninety-four filled…”

Out of the darkness a small girl in a fluttering lab coat came running at top speed. She darted straight to Casparo, knocking Zvantsev out of the way.

“Sir,” she said despairingly, “there’s only one free section left.”

“We won’t need any more,” Casparo said. He got up and ran into Zvantsev. “Who are you?” he asked tiredly.

“I’m Zvantsev, the oceanographer,” Zvantsev said quietly. “I had wanted to speak to Academician Okada.”

“That is impossible,” Casparo said. “Academician Okada is dead.”

He bent over the board and turned four switches, one after another. A blinding light flashed on under the ceiling of the enormous hall.

It was already light when Zvantsev went down into the lobby. The grayish light of a foggy morning poured into the enormous windows, but there was a feeling that any moment now the sun would burn through, and the day would be clear. There was no one in the lobby. A crumpled coverlet lay on the sofa. Several candles were burning down on the table between jars and dishes of food. Zvantsev looked back at the staircase. Voices sounded from above. Mikhailov, who had promised to go with Zvantsev, was somewhere up there.

Zvantsev went over to the sofa and sat down. Three young men came down the staircase. One went up to the table and started wolfing down food with his bare hands. He moved plates around, dropped a soft-drink bottle, grabbed it, and started drinking. The second was sleeping as he walked, scarcely moving his eyes. The third, holding the sleeper back by the shoulders, was saying enthusiastically, “Casparo told Krasnov. That’s all he said. And right away the old man collapsed right onto the board. We grabbed him and took him to the study, and Serezhka Kruglov was already sleeping there. So we laid the two of them together.”

“I can’t believe it,” the first one said indistinctly—he was still chewing. “Did we really have time for so much?”

“Damn it, how many times do I have to tell you! Ninety-eight percent. And some tenths—I don’t remember exactly.”

“Really ninety-eight percent?”

“I see you’re zonked out altogether. You don’t understand what people are saying to you.”

“I understand all right, but I don’t believe it.” The one who was eating suddenly sat down and grabbed a jar of preserves. “I can’t believe it. Things seemed to be going quite poorly.”

“Guys,” muttered the sleepy one. “Let’s go, huh? I’ve plain had it.”

All three suddenly made a great commotion and left. More and more people were coming down the staircase. Sleepy ones, barely dragging their legs. Excited ones, with bulging eyes and voices hoarse from long silence.

It doesn’t look like a funeral, Zvantsev thought. He knew that Okada was dead, but he didn’t believe it. It seemed as if the Academician had simply fallen asleep, except that no one knew yet how to wake him. No matter—they would find out. Ninety-eight percent, he thought. Not bad at all It was very strange, but he did not feel the grief of loss. There was no mourning. He felt only something on the order of dissatisfaction, thinking that he would have to wait, perhaps for a long time, for Okada to return. As had happened before, when Okada had gone away to the mainland for an extended stay.

Mikhailov touched him on the shoulder. He was wearing neither rain cape nor lab coat. “Let’s go, Comrade Zvantsev.”

Zvantsev got up and walked after him toward the doorway. The heavy double doors opened by themselves, easily and silently.

The sun had not yet come up, but it was light, and the clouds were rapidly disappearing from the blue-gray sky. Zvantsev saw low cream-colored buildings, streets sprinkled with red fallen leaves running between them. People were coming out of the Institute and dispersing among the streets in groups of twos or threes.

Someone shouted, “The fellows from Kostroma are relaxing in building six, floors two and three!”

Small, many-legged litter robots moved along the streets in sparse files. They left behind them dry, gray, clean concrete.

“Would you like a candy bar?” asked Mikhailov.

Zvantsev shook his head. They walked toward the highway between rows of squat yellow buildings that lacked doors and windows.

There were many buildings-a whole street of them. These were the blocks with the quasibiomass, the repository of Okada’s brain-twenty thousand sections of biomass, twenty squat buildings, each with a frontage of thirty meters, each extending six levels underground.

“Not bad for a start,” said Mikhailov. “But we can’t go on like this. Twenty buildings for one person is too much. If so much space were assigned to each of us—” He laughed and threw the candy wrapper onto the pavement.

Who knows? thought Zvantsev. Maybe one suitcase will be enough for you. And for me too. The litter robot, its long legs tapping on the pavement, toddled unhurriedly over to the discarded wrapper.

“Hey, Saka!” Mikhailov shouted suddenly. A truck drew up to them and stopped, and their driver with the flashing eyes stuck his head out of the cab. They all climbed in. “Where are your camels?” Mikhailov asked.

“They’re grazing somewhere,” the driver said. “I’ve had enough of them. They spat at me again while I was unharnessing them.”

Mikhailov was already asleep, with his head on Zvantsev’s shoulder.

The driver, small and dark-eyed, drove the heavy truck fast, and sang quietly, almost without moving his lips. It was some old, half-forgotten song. At first Zvantsev listened, and then suddenly he caught sight of helicopters moving low over the highway. There were six of them. The quiet zone, so recently dead, was now teeming with life. The moving roads had started up. People were hurrying to their homes. The microweather installations had started working, as had the traffic lights on the highway. Someone was already tearing off the plywood sheet with the rough lettering. The radio would be announcing that the Great Encoding had been completed and had gone satisfactorily. The helicopters must be carrying in a press group. They would stereocast an image of the squat yellow buildings and the burned-out candles before the powered-down control boards to the whole world. And someone, of course, would creep in to wake up Casparo, and they would grab the interloper by the seat of his pants, and in the heat of the moment maybe even give him a sound thrashing. And the whole world soon would know that human beings would soon become eternal. Not humanity, but human beings, each individual human being, each personality. Well, perhaps at first only the best ones… Zvantsev looked at the driver. “Comrade,” Zvantsev said, smiling, “do you want to live forever?”

“Yes,” answered the driver, also smiling. “And I will live forever.”

“I want to too,” said Zvantsev.

15. Natural Science in the Spirit World

Kochin, the lab assistant, tiptoed up to the door and looked into the bedroom. The esper was sleeping. He was fairly elderly, and his face was very unhappy. He was lying on his side with his hand under his cheek. When Kochin opened the door, the esper made a smacking sound and said distinctly, “I haven’t got my sleep in yet. Leave me alone.”

Kochin went up to the bed and touched him on the shoulder. “It’s time, Comrade Peters. Please get up.”

Peters opened bleary eyes. “Just another half hour,” he said plaintively.

Kochin, distressed, shook his head. “It’s impossible, Comrade Peters. If you oversleep…”

“Right,” the esper said with a sigh. “I’ll be dull.” He sat up and stretched. “You know what I just dreamed about, George? I dreamed that I was at home on the farm, on the Yukon. My son had just come back from Venus and I was showing him the activated

[missing text]

glucose out of his pocket, took out one ampule, and pressed its sucker against the swollen vein on Peters’s arm. When the glucose had penetrated, Peters knocked the empty ampule off with a snap, and rolled his sleeve down. “Well, let’s go suffer,” he said with a sigh.

The Institute for Space Physics had been built about twenty years before on Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland. The old Krondstadt base had been completely demolished; there remained only the gray, moss-covered walls of the ancient forts and, in the park of the science town, the golden monument to those who had taken part in the Great Revolution. An artificial archipelago on which were located the rocketports, airports, energy receivers, and energy stations of the Institute had been created to the west of Kotlin Island. The islands furthest west in the archipelago were occupied by what were called the “loud” laboratories—from time to time explosions thundered there, and they had fires. Theoretical work and “quiet” experiments were conducted in the long, flat buildings of the Institute itself, on Kotlin Island.

The Institute worked on the leading edge of science. The range of work was extremely broad. Problems of gravity. Deritrinitation. Questions of new physical axiomatics. The theory of discrete space. And very many more specialized problems. Fairly often the Institute took on for research problems which seemed, and which in the last analysis turned out to be, hopelessly complicated and inaccessible. The experimental approach to these problems often demanded monstrous expenditures of energy. Time after time the leadership of the Institute disturbed the World Council with monotonous requests for an hour’s worth, two hours’ worth, and sometimes even a day’s worth of the energy of the Planet. In clear weather Leningraders could see on the horizon the shiny spheres of the gigantic energy receivers erected on the most distant islands of the “Kotlin Achipelago.” Some wit on the Resources Committee had called these energy receivers “Danaidian barrels,” claiming that the energy of the Planet vanished there as if into a bottomless barrel, without visible result; and many on the Council waxed wroth on the subject of the Institute’s activities, but they gave the energy unfailingly, because they considered that humanity was rich and could permit itself some expenditure on the problems of the day after tomorrow. Even at the height of work on the Big Shaft, which was digging toward the center of the Planet.

Four years earlier a group of Institute members had carried out an experiment having the aim of measuring the energy expended during sigma-deritrinitation. On the border of the Solar System, far beyond the orbit of Transpluto, a pair of drone spaceships were driven up to relativistic velocities and brought to a collision at a relative speed of 295 thousand kilometers per second, over ninety-eight percent of lightspeed. The explosion was terrific; the mass of both starships was turned almost entirely into radiation. The starships disappeared in a blinding flash, leaving after them a thin cloud of metallic vapor. On finishing their measurements, the researchers discovered an energy deficit: a part of the energy, relatively very small, but perfectly detectable, had “disappeared.” On the qualitative side, the result of the experiment had been nothing to write home about. According to the theory of sigma-deritrinitation, a certain part of the energy was, after all, supposed to disappear at a given point in space, in order to ooze out in some form in regions perhaps quite removed from the place of the experiment. This, indeed, was the very essence of the sigma-D-principle, and something similar had happened in its time in the case of the famous Taimyr. But on the quantitative side the energy deficit exceeded the predicted quantity. Part of the energy had “disappeared” to parts unknown. Two concepts had been enlisted to explain this contradiction of the conservation laws. One was the hypothesis that the energy had gotten away in an as-yet-unknown form, for example in some sort of field unknown to science for which instruments for detection and registration did not yet exist. The other was the theory of interpenetrating spaces.

The theory of interpenetrating spaces had been worked out long before this experiment. This theory regarded the world as a perhaps infinite aggregate of interpenetrating spaces with quite various physical properties. It was this difference in properties that permitted spaces to coexist physically, with no noticeable interaction with each other. It was an abstract theory, and had not led to experimentally verifiable concrete equations. However, it followed from the theory that various forms of matter possess differing abilities to penetrate from one space into a neighboring one. It was proven as well that the penetration pro-cedes the more easily the greater the energy concentration. The concentration of the energy of the electromagnetic field was enormous in the experiment with the spacecraft. This led to the proposal that the energy “leakage” could be explained as an energy transfer from our space to some neighboring space. There were few data, but the idea was so attractive that it immediately found adherents in the Institute.

Experimental work on the theory of interpenetrating spaces had been undertaken by members of the Department of the Physics of Discrete Space. They immediately turned away from the cumbersome, dangerous, and not very precise experiments connected with the swallowing up and excretion of enormous energies. Anyhow, such experiments left open the question of unknown fields. Consequently it was planned to carry out research on spatial penetrability on the most varied fields: gravitational, electromagnetic, nuclear. But the trump card and main hope was the brilliant idea of one of the members who had noticed a remarkable similarity between the psychodynamic field of the human brain and the hypothetical “linkage field,” whose general mathematical description had been established by the theory of interpenetrating spaces at a time when researchers in psychodynamics had not yet even possessed a mathematical apparatus. The hypothetical “linkage field” was a field which, according to the theory, had the maximum ability to penetrate from one space into the next. Sufficiently accurate artificial receivers for the “psychodynamic field” (and accordingly also for the “linkage field”) did not exist, and so it was up to the espers.

There were ten billion people on the Planet, and a total of one hundred twenty-two registered espers. The espers read thoughts. The mystery of this unusual ability was still apparently very far from solution. It was clear only that the espers were surprisingly sensitive to the psychodynamic radiation of the human brain and that this sensitivity was innate. Some espers could detect and decipher the thoughts of a person thousands upon thousands of kilometers away. Some received psychodynamic signals only over a distance of a few paces. The parapsychologists argued over whether the espers were the first signs heralding the appearance on the evolutionary ladder of a new kind of human being, or whether this was simply an atavism, the remnant of a mysterious sixth sense that had once helped our ancestors to orient themselves in the dense primeval forest. The more powerful espers worked in the long-distance communication stations, augmenting the usual radio link with distant expeditions. Many espers worked as doctors. And many worked in fields unrelated to thought-reading.

However that might be, the workers of the Institute for the Physics of Space hoped that the espers would be able to simply “hear” the linkage field. This would be remarkable confirmation of the theory of interpenetrating spaces. The best espers on the Planet had gathered at Kotlin Island at the invitation of the Institute. The plan of the experiment was simple. If a linkage field between neighboring spaces existed, then, according to the theory, it should be very similar to the psychodynamic field of a human brain and should accordingly be picked up by the espers. If an esper were isolated in a special chamber shielded from the outside world (including human thoughts) by a thick layer of mesomatter, then there would be left in that room only the gravitational field of the Earth, which made no difference to the psychodynamic field, and the hypothetical linkage field coming from the neighboring spaces. Of course, such an experimental arrangement was far from ideal. Only a positive result would be decisive. A negative result indicated nothing—it neither confirmed nor rejected the theory. But so far it was the only chance. The espers were stimulated with neutrino radiation, which increased the sensitivity of the brain; were placed in the chambers; and were left to “listen.”

Peters and Kochin walked unhurriedly down the main street of the science town. The morning was foggy and grayish. The sun had not yet risen, but far, far ahead the gridded towers of the energy receivers reflected a pink light at an enormous height. Peters walked with his hands clasped behind his back, and sang in an undertone a ditty in English about “Johnny coming down to Highlow, poor old man.” Kochin, with a look of independence, walked alongside and tried not to think about anything. Near one of the cottages Peters suddenly ceased singing and stopped. “We have to wait,” he said.

“Why?” asked Kochin.

“Sieverson is asking me to wait up.” Peters nodded in the direction of the cottage. “He’s putting on his overcoat.”

One-two-three / Pioneers are we, Kochin thought. Two espers—that’s twice as… five times five is eleven—or something like that. “Is Sieverson really by himself? Doesn’t he have a guide?”

“Five times five is twenty-five,” Peters said querulously. “And I don’t know why Sieverson wasn’t assigned a guide.”

Sieverson appeared at the door of the cottage. “Don’t swear, young man,” he said to Kochin sternly. “When we were your age we were more polite.”

“Now, now, Sieverson old chap,” said Peters. “You yourself know you don’t think that—Thank you, I slept very well. And you know, I dreamed about beavers. And that my Harry had come back from Venus.”

Sieverson came down to the sidewalk and took Peters’s arm. “Let’s go,” he said. “Beavers—I’ve felt like a beaver myself these past few days. You, at least, have dreams, but I-did I tell you that I’ve just had a granddaughter born, Peters?… Oh, I did tell you. Well, I can’t see her even in a dream, because I haven’t seen her even once in real life. And I feel ashamed, Peters. To spend my old age on nonsense like this… Of course it’s nonsense—don’t you contradict me.”

Kochin trudged behind the pair of venerable espers and repeated to himself, The integral from zero to infinity of e to the minus-x-squared power, radical pi over two… A circle is a geometric locus of points equidistant…

Old Sieverson grumbled, “I’m a doctor, and in my village I know everyone unto the seventh generation backward and forward, and everyone knows me. I’ve listened to people’s thoughts all my life. Every day I’ve been able to be of help to someone because I heard his thoughts. Now I’m ashamed and stifled. Ashamed and stifled from sitting in total loneliness in these stupid casemates and listening to—what?—the whisperings of ghosts! The whisperings of imaginary spirits springing from someone’s delirious imagination! Don’t you contradict me, Peters! I’m twice as old as you!”

The unwritten code of the espers forbade them to converse mentally in the presence of a non-esper. Kochin was a non-esper, and he was present. He repeated to himself, The mathematical expectation of a sum of random quantities is equal to the sum of their mathematical expectations… Or to put it another way… uh, the sum of their mathematical expectations… mathematical expectations…

“They drag us away from our regular work,” Sieverson continued grumbling. “They drive us into this gray fog. Don’t argue, Peters, they do drive us! They drove me! I couldn’t refuse when they asked me, but nothing prevents me from looking upon this request as an attack on my person… Don’t argue, Peters, I’m older than you! Never in my life have I had cause to regret being an esper… Oh, you have had cause? Well, that’s your business. Of course beavers don’t need an esper, But people, sick and suffering people, they need—”

“Hold on, old chap,” said Peters. “As you see, even healthy people need espers. Healthy but suffering—”

“Who is healthy here?” exclaimed Sieverson. “These physicists, or should I say alchemists? Why do you think I haven’t left up to now? I can’t very well disappoint them, damn them all! No, young man—” He broke off and turned to Kochin. “There are few people like me. Espers so old and so experienced! And you can stop muttering your abracadabra—I can hear perfectly well what you are sending. Peters, don’t defend the young whipper-snapper, I know what I’m saying! I’m older than all of you put together!”

Sixty-two times twenty-one, Kochin, red and damp from spite, thought stubbornly. Is… is… Six times two… You’re lying, old man, you couldn’t be that old. And anyhow… “Through the heavens at midnight an angel did fly…” Who wrote that? Lermontov.

The harsh voice of the loudspeaker rang out over the town: “Attention, comrades! We are relaying a warning from the local microweather station. From nine-twenty to ten-oh-five there will be an average-sized rainfall over the western end of Kotlin Island. The western boundary of the rain zone is the extreme edge of the park.”

“You’re foresighted, Sieverson,” said Peters. “You wore your overcoat.”

“I’m not foresighted,” muttered Sieverson. “I simply picked up the decision from the weathermen this morning at six o’clock, when they were talking it over.”

Wow! Kochin thought excitedly.

“You’re a very strong esper,” Peters said with great respect.

“Nonsense!” Sieverson retorted. “Twenty kilometers. You would have caught that thought too, but you were sleeping. I, on the other hand, am afflicted with insomnia on this fogbound island.”

When they came out to the edge of the town, a third esper caught up to them. A young one, of very presentable appearance, with a cold, self-assured face. He was draped out picturesquely in a modish gold toga. Petya Bystrov was with him.

While the espers exchanged silent greetings, Petya Bystrov, after glancing furtively at them, ran a hand over his throat and said with his lips only, “Eh, I’m having a rough time.”

Kochin spread his hands.

At first the espers walked silently.

Kochin and Bystrov, their heads hanging, followed several paces behind. Suddenly Sieverson yelled in a cracked falsetto, “Please speak aloud, McCullough! Please speak with words in the presence of young people who are non-espers!”

“Sieverson, old chap!” said Peters, looking at him reproachfully.

McCullough waved the skirt of his toga ostentatiously and said in a haughty tone, “Well, I can repeat it in words too! I have nothing to hide. I can’t pick up anything in those stupid chambers. There’s nothing to be picked up there. I’m telling you, there’s simply nothing to be picked up there.”

“That’s no concern of yours, young man!” screamed Sieverson. “I’m older than you and nonetheless I sit there without one murmur of complaint, and will continue to sit there as long as the scientists require! And if the scientists ask us to sit there, they have a reason for it.”

“Sieverson, old chap!” said Peters.

“Yes, of course it’s more boring than hanging around on street corners wrapped up in a hideous gold bathrobe and eavesdropping on other people’s thoughts! And then doing party tricks for the girls! Don’t argue with me, McCullough, you do do that!”

McCullough wilted, and for some time they all walked silently.

Then Peters said, “Unfortunately, McCullough is right. Not in eavesdropping on others’ thoughts, of course—but I can’t pick anything up in the chamber either. Neither can you, Sieverson old chap. I’m afraid that the experiment will end up a failure.” Sieverson muttered something inaudible.

The heavy slab of titanium steel covered on two sides with a shiny layer of mesomatter slowly descended; and Peters was left alone. He sat down in an armchair in front of a small, empty table, and prepared to be bored for ten straight hours. In accordance with the conditions of the experiment, neither reading nor writing was permitted. You had to sit and “listen” to the silence. The silence was total. The mesoshield did not let a single thought in from outside, and here, in this chamber, for the first time in his life Peters experienced a surprisingly unpleasant feeling of deafness. Probably the designers of this chamber had not suspected how favorable for the experiment this silence was. A “deaf” esper strained to listen, trying to catch even a whisper of a signal, whether he wanted to or not. Moreover, the designers had not known what suffering it cost an esper used to the constant clamor of human thoughts to spend ten hours in the deaf chamber. Peters called it the torture chamber, and many espers had picked up the term.

I have already sat here for one hundred ten hours, thought Peters. At the end of today it will be a hundred twenty. And nothing. No trace of the notorious “linkage field” which our poor physicists think about so much. And a hundred-some hours is a good many. Just what are they expecting? A hundred espers, each of whom has sat in one of these things for about a hundred hours—that’s ten thousand hours. Ten thousand hours down the drain. The poor, poor physicists! And the poor, poor espers! And my poor, poor beavers! Pete Ballantine is a greenhorn, a kid, out of school for only a few days, I know in my bones that he’s late with the feedings. Probably a week and a half late, I’ll have to send another radiogram this evening. But he’s stubborn as a mule, he doesn’t want to hear anything about the special conditions of the Yukon, And Winter is a greenhorn too, and wishy-washy.

Peters turned nasty. And Eugene is a green, self satisfied fool. You have to love the beavers! They need love! You have to love them with your whole heart! So that they themselves will climb up onto the bank for you and poke their noses into your hand. They have such nice cute faces. And these “fur breeders” have only got problems on their minds. Fur breeding! How to get two pelts from one beaver! And then make it grow a third! Oh, if only I had my Harry with me… Harry, my boy, how hard it is without you! If you only knew!

I remember how he came up to me… when was it? In January—no, February—of one nineteen. He came up and said that he had volunteered for Venus. He said, “I’m sorry, Pa, but that’s where they need us now.” After that he came back twice—in one twenty-one and in one twenty-five. The old beavers remembered him, and he remembered every last one of them. He always told me that he came back because he had gotten homesick, but I knew that he had come back for medical treatment. Ah, Harry, Harry, we could get all our good beavers together and set up a fine farm now, on Venus. That’s possible today. They’re taking many different animals there now… But you didn’t live to see it, my boy.

Peters got out his handkerchief, wiped his eyes, stood up, and started pacing the room. This damned nonsensical cage… Are they going to keep us here much longer? He thought that by now all hundred espers must be stirring in their individual cages. Old loud Sieverson, who contrived to be peevish and kindly at the same time. And that self-satisfied fool McCullough. Where did people like McCullough come from? Probably you found them only among the espers. And all because telepathy, whatever you thought of it, was an abnormality. At least for now. Fortunately, people like McCullough were rare even among espers. Among professional espers they were nonexistent. Take, for example, that Yura Rusakov, the long-distance esper. On the long-distance stations there were many professional espers, but they said that Yura Rusakov was the strongest of them all, the strongest esper in the world. He could even pick up direction. That was a very rare talent. He had been an esper since earliest childhood and from earliest childhood he had known it. And still he was a jolly, good boy. He had been well brought up—he hadn’t been treated from infancy like a genius and prodigy. The most frightful thing for a child was loving parents. But this one had been brought up in school, and he was a really nice kid. They said he had cried when he received the last message from the Explorer. After the accident there had been only one person left alive on the Explorer, the young midshipman Walter Saronian. A very, very talented young man, evidently. And one with a will of iron. Wounded, dying, he had started searching for the cause of the accident—and had found it!

Peters came to alertness. Some extraneous, barely noticable, inaudible nuance had, it seemed, crept into his consciousness. No. It was only the echo off the walls. He wondered what it would be like if it existed. Georgie-boy had affirmed that theoretically it should be received as noise. But naturally he couldn’t explain what kind of noise, and when he tried, he either quickly slipped into mathematics or else put forward uncertain analogies to broken radio sets. The physicists knew theoretically what kind of noise, but they had no sensory notion of it, while the espers, not understanding the theory, perhaps were hearing this noise twenty times a day without suspecting it. What a pity there’s not one single esper physicist! Perhaps that Yura Rusakov will become the first. He or one of the kids at the long-distance stations. It’s a good thing we instinctively distinguish our thoughts from those of others and can only accidentally take an echo for an outside signal.

Peters sat down and stretched out his legs. Still, the physicists had thought up a funny business—catching spirits from another world. It was natural science in the spirit world. He looked at his watch. Only thirty minutes had passed. Well, spirits are spirits. Let’s listen.

At precisely seventeen hundred hours, Peters went up to the door. The heavy slab of titanium steel lifted, and into his consciousness rushed a whirlwind of excited alien thoughts. As always, he saw the strained, expectant faces of the physicists, and as always, he shook his head No. He was unbearably sorry for these young, bright fellows-many times he had imagined how wonderful it would be if right from the threshold he could smile and say, “Linkage fields do exist—I picked up your linkage field for you.” But what were you going to do if the linkage field either did not exist or was beyond the ability of espers? “Nothing,” he said aloud, and stepped into the corridor.

“Too bad,” one of the physicists said disappointedly. He always said “too bad.”

Peters went up to him and laid his hand on his shoulder.

“Listen,” he said, “perhaps this is enough? Perhaps you’ve made some sort of mistake?”

The physicist forced a smile. “Come now, Comrade Peters!” he said. “The experiments have hardly begun. We didn’t expect anything else at first. We’ll strengthen the stimulator… yes, the stimulator. If only you would agree to continue…”

“We must gather a large statistical sample,” said the other physicist. “Only then can we draw any conclusions. We’re very much counting on you, Comrade Peters, on you personally and on your colleagues.”

“All right,” said Peters. “Of course.” He saw very well that they were no longer counting on anything. They were just hoping for a miracle. But the miracle could happen. Anything could happen.

16. Pilgrims and Wayfarers

The water deep down wasn’t all that cold, but still I was frozen. I sat on the bottom just under the precipice and for a whole hour I kept cautiously turning my head, peering into the turbid greenish twilight. I had to sit motionless, for septipods are alert and suspicious creatures. The slightest sound, any quick movement, can frighten them, and then they hie off and return only at night; and it’s not a good idea to tangle with them at night.

An eel would stir under my feet and swim back and forth a dozen times or so, and then a pompous striped perch would come back once again. And every time, it stopped and goggled at me with its empty round eyes. It had only to swim off, and a school of silvery minnows would appear and start grazing over my head. My knees and shoulders were thoroughly stiff with cold, and I was worried that Mashka might get tired of just waiting for me, and instead come into the water to find me and rescue me. Finally I had so vividly imagined her sitting alone at the edge of the water, and waiting, and being afraid, and wanting to dive in and look for me, that I was about ready to come out. But just then, the septipod finally emerged from a thicket of seaweed twenty paces to the right.

It was a fairly large specimen. It had appeared instantly and noiselessly, like a ghost, with its round gray torso out in front. A whitish mantle pulsed softly, weakly, and automatically, taking in water and pushing it out, and the septipod rocked lightly from side to side as it moved. The tips of its tucked-up tentacles, like long strips of old rags, trailed after it, and the slit of its barely opened eyes gleamed dimly in the twilight. It swam slowly, as they all did during the daytime, in a strange eerie torpor, going who knew where or why. Probably the darkest, most primitive instincts moved them, perhaps the same instincts that direct the motion of amoebas.

Very slowly and steadily I raised the tag gun and pointed the barrel, aiming for the swollen back. A silvery minnow suddenly darted forth and disappeared, and I thought that the eyelid over the enormous glazed eye trembled. I pulled the trigger and immediately pushed up from the bottom, getting away from the caustic ink. When I looked around again, the septipod was no longer in sight. There was just a thick blue-black cloud that was spreading through the water, obscuring the bottom. I darted toward the surface and started swimming toward shore.

The day was hot and clear, and a bluish steamy haze hung over the water. The sky was empty and white, except for motionless blue-gray piles of clouds that rose up over the forest like castle towers.

A strange man in brightly colored swimming trunks, was sitting in the grass in front of our tent, a headband stretched across his forehead. He was tanned and though not muscular, somehow improbably sinewy, as if he were tied together with rope under his skin. It was immediately apparent that this was an impossibly strong man. My Mashka, long-legged, dark, with a shock of sun-bleached hair falling over sharp vertebrae, wearing a navy blue bathing suit, was standing in front of him. No, she wasn’t sitting by the water pining for her daddy—she was energetically telling something to this wiry stranger, gesturing at full blast. I was a bit miffed that she hadn’t even noticed my arrival. But the stranger noticed. He quickly turned his head, took a good look, and, with a smile, brandished an open hand. Mashka turned around and yelled happily, “Ah, there you are, Daddy!”

I climbed onto the grass, took off my mask, and wiped my face. The stranger was examining me smilingly.

“How many did you tag?” Mashka asked in a businesslike voice.

“One.” I had a cramp in my jaw.

“Oh, Daddy,” Mashka said. She helped me take off the aqua-stat, and then I stretched out in the grass. “Yesterday he tagged two,” Mashka explained, “and four the day before that. If it’s going to go this way, we’d better move right on to another lake.” She took a towel and started drying my back. “You’re like a fresh-frozen goose,” she declared. “This is Leonid Andreevich Gorbovsky. He’s an astroarchaeologist. And this, Leonid, is my daddy. His name is Stanislav Ivanov.”

The sinewy Leonid Gorbovsky nodded, smiling. “You’re frozen,” he said. “Up here it’s very nice-the sun, the grass…”

“He’ll be all right in a minute,” said Mashka, drying me with all her might. “He’s usually quite a merry old soul—he’s just chilled through.”

It was clear that she had just been talking a lot about me, and was now using all her power to save face for me. Well, let her save it. I didn’t have enough time to bother with that myself—my teeth were chattering.

“Mashka and I have been very worried about you,” Gorbovsky said. “We even wanted to dive after you, but I don’t know how. You probably can’t imagine a man who hasn’t had occasion to go diving even once in his work.” He lay down on his back, turned over onto his side, and leaned on one arm. “Tomorrow I’m shipping out,” he said confidingly. “I don’t know when I’ll have another chance to lie down on the grass by a lake and have the opportunity to go diving with an aquastat.”

“Please, go ahead,” I suggested.

He looked carefully at the aquastat, then touched it. “Certainly,” he said, and lay down on his back. He put his hands behind his head and looked at me, slowly blinking his sparse lashes. There was something unfailingly winning about him. I couldn’t even say what exactly. Perhaps the eyes—trusting and a little sad. Or the fact that the way one of his ears stuck out from under the headband was somehow very amusing. After he had inspected me to his satisfaction, he turned his eyes and stared at a blue dragonfly swaying on a blade of grass. His lips gently puckered out in a whistle. “A dragonfly!” he said. “A little dragonfly. Blue… like the lake… a beauty. It sits so primly and looks around to see who to gobble up.” He stretched out his arm, but the dragonfly let go of the blade of grass and flew off in an arc into the reeds. He followed it with his eyes, and then lay down again. “How complicated it all is, people,” he said. Mashka immediately sat down and fastened her round eyes upon him. “I mean, this dragonfly—perfect, elegant, pleased with everything! It’s eaten a fly, it’s reproduced, and then it’s time to die. Simple, elegant, rational. And you don’t have spiritual turmoil, pangs of love, self-awareness, or bother about the meaning of life.”

“A machine,” Mashka said suddenly. “A boring old robot!” That was my Mashka! I almost laughed, but held myself back; but I must have snorted, for she looked at me with displeasure. “Boring,” Gorbovsky agreed. “Precisely. And now imagine, comrades, a dragonfly colored a venomous yellow-green, with red crossbars, a wingspan of seven meters, and a vile black slime on its mandibles. Can you imagine?” He raised his brows and looked at us. “I see you can’t. Well, I ran from them in panic, even though I had a gun. So you ask yourself, what have they got in common, these two boring robots?”

“This green one,” I said, “it must have been on another planet?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Pandora?”

‘Precisely. Pandora,” he said.

‘What do they have in common?”

‘That is the question. What?”

“Well, that’s clear enough,” I said. “An identical level of information processing. Reactions on the level of instinct.”

He sighed. “Words,” he said. “Now, don’t get angry, but it’s just words. That doesn’t help me. I have to search for evidence of intelligence in the universe, and I don’t even know what intelligence is. And they tell me about various levels of information processing. I know that the level is different in me and in the dragonfly, but that’s all intuition. You tell me: say I’ve found a termite mound. Is that evidence of intelligence, or not? On Mars and Vladislava we’ve found buildings with no windows, with no doors. Is that evidence of intelligence? What am I looking for? Ruins? Inscriptions? A rusty nail? A heptagonal nut? How do I know what sort of traces they leave? Suppose their aim in life is to annihilate atmosphere everywhere they find it. Or to build rings around planets. Or to hybridize life. Or to create life. Maybe this dragonfly itself is a self-replicating cybernetic apparatus released since time immemorial. To say nothing of the bearers of intelligence themselves. I mean, you can walk past a slimy monster grunting in a puddle twenty times and only turn your nose away. And the monster looks at you with its fine yellow eyes and thinks, ‘Curious. Undoubtedly a new species. I’ll have to come back here with an expedition and catch a specimen or two.’” He shaded his eyes with his hand and started humming a song. Mashka devoured him with her eyes and waited. I waited too, and thought sympathetically that it’s no fun working when the problem hasn’t been stated clearly. No fun at all. You stumble around in the dark and you have no joy or even satisfaction in your work. I’d heard about these astroarchaeologists. I could never take them seriously. No one takes them seriously.

“But there is intelligent life in the universe,” Gorbovsky said suddenly. “That’s beyond doubt. But it isn’t the way we think. It’s not what we’re expecting. And we’re looking in the wrong places. Or in the wrong way. And we simply don’t know what we’re looking for.”

There you are, I thought. The wrong thing, in the wrong place, in the wrong way— That’s simply frivolous, comrades. Pure childishness.

“Take for example the Voice of the Void,” he continued. “Have you heard of it? Probably not. Fifty years ago it was written up, but no one mentions it any more. Because, you see, there has been no progress, and if there’s no progress, then of course there can’t be any Voice either. After all, we have a whole flock of these birds—they don’t know much about science, out of laziness or a poor education, but they know by hearsay that man is almighty. Almighty. But he can’t decode the Voice of the Void. Good heavens, for shame, that can’t be, we won’t permit it! This cheap anthropocentrism…”

“And what is the Voice of the Void?” Mashka asked quietly.

“There’s a certain curious phenomenon. In certain directions in space. If you turn the shipboard receiver to autotuning, sooner or later it tunes in on a strange broadcast. You hear a cool, calm voice repeating the same words over and over in an unknown language. They’ve been picking it up for years, and for years it’s repeated the same thing. I’ve heard it, and lots of other people have heard it, but only a few will talk about it. It’s not very pleasant to recall. I mean, here you are, and the distance to Earth is unimaginable. The ether is empty—not even any real static, just weak whispers. And suddenly you hear this voice. And you’re on watch, alone. Everyone is asleep, it’s quiet, scary, and here comes this voice. Believe me, it’s not pleasant at all. There are recordings of the voice. A lot of people have racked their brains trying to decipher them and many are still racking them, but if you ask me it’s hopeless. There are other mysteries too.

Spacers could tell a good deal, but they don’t like to…” He was silent for a bit, then added with a certain sad insistency, “You’ve got to understand that. It’s not a simple matter. We don’t even know what to expect. They could meet us at any minute. Face to face. And, you understand, they could turn out to be immeasurably superior to us. Completely unlike us, and immeasurably superior to boot. You hear talk of collisions and conflicts, about all sorts of different understandings of humaneness and good, but that’s not what I’m afraid of. What I’m afraid of is the unparalleled humiliation of the human race, of a gigantic psychological shock. We’re so proud, after all. We’ve created such a wonderful world, we know so much, we’ve fought our way out into the wide universe, and there we discover and study and explore—what? For them, the universe is simply home. They’ve lived in it for millions of years, as we’ve lived on Earth, and they’re just surprised at us: where did these things out among the stars come from?”

He suddenly fell silent and got up with a jerk, listening intently. I even trembled.

“It’s thunder,” Mashka said quietly. She was staring at him with her mouth half open. “Thunder. There’ll be a storm.”

He was still listening intently, sweeping his eyes across the sky. “No, it’s not thunder,” he said at last, and sat down again. “It’s a liner. There, see?”

Against a background of blue-gray clouds a gleaming streak flashed and fell. And again the sky thundered weakly.

“So sit down now, and wait,” he said incomprehensibly. He looked at me, smiling, and there was sadness and strained expectation in his eyes. Then it all disappeared and his eyes became trusting as before. “And what are you working on, Comrade Stanislav Ivanov?” he asked.

I concluded that he wanted to change the subject, and I started telling him about septipods. That they belonged to the subclass of dibranchiates of the class of cephalopod mollusks, and represented a special, previously unknown tribe of the order of octopods. They were characterized by the reduction of the third left arm (the one symmetrical with the hetocotylized third right arm), by three rows of suckers on the arms, by the complete absence of a coelom, by an unusually powerful development of the venous heart, by a concentration of the central nervous system that was the maximum for all cephalopods, and by certain other less significant characteristics. The first of the septipods had been discovered recently, when individual specimens appeared off the eastern and southeastern coasts of Asia. And after a year they began to be found in the lower courses of major rivers-the Mekong, the Yangtze, the Huang Ho, and the Amur-and also in lakes like this one, fairly distant from the coastline. And that was surprising, because usually cephalopods were stenohalines to the nth degree, and they avoided even Arctic waters with their reduced salinity. And they almost never came out on dry land. But a fact was a fact: the septipods felt fine in fresh water and came out on land. They climbed into boats and onto bridges, and recently two had been discovered in the forest about thirty kilometers from here.

Mashka was not listening to me. I had already told her all this. She went into the tent, brought out a radio, and switched on the autotuning. Evidently she couldn’t wait any longer to catch the Voice of the Void.

But Gorbovsky listened very attentively. “Were those two still alive?” he asked.

“No, they were found dead. There’s an animal preserve here in the forest. Wild boars had trampled the septipods and half eaten them. But they had still been alive thirty kilometers from water! Their mantle cavities were filled with wet algae. Obviously in this way the septipods created a certain reserve of water for journeys over dry land. The algae were from a lake. The septipods had undoubtedly walked from these very lakes farther to the south, into the heart of dry land. It should also be noted that all the specimens caught up to this point have been adult males. Not one female, not one young. Probably females and young can’t live in fresh water or come out on land.

“All this is very interesting,” I continued. “As a rule marine animals change their way of life sharply only during periods of reproduction. Then instinct forces them to go off to some quite unusual places. But reproduction has nothing to do with it here. Here there is some other instinct at work, perhaps one still more ancient and powerful. Right now the important thing for us is to follow the migratory path. So here I spend ten hours a day at this lake, under water. Today I’ve tagged one so far. If I’m lucky, by evening I’ll tag another one or two. At night they become unusually active and grab anything that gets close to them. There have even been instances of attacks on people. But only at night.”

Mashka had turned the volume of the radio all the way up, and was enjoying the powerful sounds.

“A little quieter, Mashka,” I requested.

She turned it down.

“So you tag them,” said Gorbovsky. “Fascinating. With what?”

“Ultrasonic generators.” I pulled a charge from the tag gun and displayed the ampule. “Little bullets like this. Inside is a generator with a range under water of thirty kilometers.”

He cautiously took the ampule and examined it attentively. His face became sad and old. “Clever,” he muttered. “Simple and clever.” He turned the ampule all around in his fingers as if feeling it, then lay it in front of me on the grass and got up. His movements had become slow and uncertain. He stepped over to his clothes and scattered them, found his trousers, and then froze, holding them in front of him.

I watched him, feeling a vague disquiet. Mashka held the tag gun at the ready, in order to explain how it was used, and she watched Gorbovsky too. The corners of her lips sank dolefully. I had noticed long ago that this often happened with her: the expression on her face became the same as that of the person she was observing.

Gorbovsky suddenly started speaking very softly, and with a certain mocking quality in his voice: “Honestly, it’s fascinating. What a precise analogy. They stayed in the depths for ages, and now they’ve risen up and entered an alien, hostile world. And what drives them? An ancient, dark instinct, you say? Or an information-processing capacity which had risen up to the level of unquenchable curiosity? After all, it would be better for it to stay home, in salt water, but something draws it… draws it to the shore.” He roused himself and started pulling on his trousers. These were old-fashioned, long. He hopped on one leg as he put them on. “Really, Stanislav, you have to think that these are very complex cephalopods, eh?”

“In their way, of course,” I agreed.

He was not listening. He turned toward the radio set and was staring at it. Mashka and I stared too. Powerful, discordant signals, like the interference from an X-ray installation, were coming from the set. Mashka put down the tag gun. “On six point oh eight meters,” she said distractedly. “Some sort of service station, or what?”

Gorbovsky listened closely to the signals, with his eyes closed and his head leaning to one side. “No, it’s not a service station,” he said. “It’s me.”

“What?”

“It’s me. Me—Leonid Andreevich Gorbovsky.”

“H-how can—?”

He gave a mirthless laugh. “How indeed? I would very much like to know how.” He pulled on his shirt. “How can it be that three pilots and their ship, on return from a flight to EN 101 and EN 2657, have become sources of radio waves of wavelength six point oh eight three meters?”

Mashka and I, naturally, remained silent. Gorbovsky fell silent too, while he fastened his sandals.

“Doctors examined us. Physicists examined us.” He got up and brushed sand and grass from his pants. “All of them came to the same conclusion: it’s impossible. You could die laughing, to see the surprise on their faces. But honestly, it was no laughing matter to us. Tolya Obozov refused leave and shipped out for Pandora. He said he preferred to do his broadcasting a little farther from Earth. Falkenstein went off to an underwater station to work. So here I am alone, wandering and broadcasting. And I’m always expecting something. Anticipating it and fearing it. Fearing, but anticipating. Do you understand me?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and glanced sidelong at Mashka.

“You’re right,” he said. He took the receiver and pressed it thoughtfully to his protruding ear. “And no one knows. It’s been a whole month already. It doesn’t weaken, and it never stops. Whee-waa… whee-waa… day and night. Whether we’re happy or sad. Whether we’re full or hungry, working or loafing. Whee-waa… But the emission from the Tariel is falling off. The Tariel is my ship. They laid her up, just in case. Her emissions are jamming the controls of some sort of equipment on Venus, so they keep sending inquiries from there, keep getting annoyed. Tomorrow I’m taking her a little farther out.” He straightened up and slapped his thighs with his long arms. “Well, time I left. Good-by. Good luck. Good-by, little Mashka. Don’t rack your brains over this. It’s a very complicated problem, honestly.”

He raised his open hand, bowed, and started off-tall, angular. We watched him go. He stopped near the tent and said, “You know, you should be a bit more delicate with these septipods. Otherwise you just tag and tag, and it, the one with the tag, has all the hassle.”

And he left. I lay on my stomach for a long while and then looked at Mashka. She was still watching him. It was clear that Leonid Andreevich Gorbovsky had made an impression on her. But not on me. His notions about how the bearers of intelligence in the universe could turn out to be immeasurably superior to us had not moved me at all. So let them be. If you asked me, the more superior they were, the less chance we would have of meeting up with them along the way. It was like fishing for roach, where a wide-mesh net was useless. And as for pride, humiliation, shock—well, we would probably live through it. I myself would somehow live through it. And if we were discovering and were exploring for ourselves a universe they had tamed long ago, well, what of it? It wasn’t tame from our point of view! Anyhow, for us they were just a part of nature that we had to discover and explore, even should they be three times superior to us—to us they were part of the environment! Although, of course, if, say, they had tagged me the way I would tag a septipod…

I glanced at my watch and sat up hurriedly. It was time to get back to work. I noted down the number of the last ampule. I checked the aquastat. I ducked into the tent, found my ultrasonic rangefinder, and put it in the pocket of my swim trunks.

“Give me a hand, Mashka,” I said, and started to strap on the aquastat.

Mashka was still sitting in front of the radio, listening to the unfading “whee-waa.” She helped me put on the aquastat, and together we went into the water. Under water I turned on the rangefinder. Signals rang out. My tagged septipods were wandering all over the lake in their sleep. We looked knowingly at one another, and surfaced. Mashka spat, pushed her wet hair back from her forehead, and said, “There’s a difference between an interstellar ship and wet slime in a gill bag.”

I told her to return to shore and I dove again. No, in Gorbovsky’s place I wouldn’t be so worried. All this was too frivolous, like all that astroarchaeology of his. Traces of ideas! Psychological shock! There wouldn’t be any shock. Probably we wouldn’t even notice each other. They could hardly find us all that interesting.

17. The Planet with All the Conveniences

Ryu stood up to his waist in lush green grass and watched the helicopter land. Silver and dark-green shock waves from the rotors’ backwash swept over the grass. It seemed to him that the helicopter was taking its time about landing, and he shifted impatiently from foot to foot. It was very hot and close. The small, white sun was high, and moist heat rose up from the grass. The rotors started squealing more loudly, and the helicopter turned sideways to Ryu, then instantly dropped four or five feet and sank into the grass at the top of the hill. Ryu ran up the slope. The engine went quiet, the rotors turned more slowly, then stopped. Several people got out of the helicopter. The first was a lanky man in a jacket with rolled-up sleeves. He wore no helmet, and his sun-bleached hair stuck out on end over his long brown face. Ryu recognized him: it was Pathfinder Gennady Komov, the leader of the group. “Hello, landlord,” Komov said gaily, extending his hand. “Konnichi-wa!”

“Konnichi-wa, Pathfinders,” said Ryu. “Welcome to Leonida.”

He held out his hand too, but they had to cross another ten paces to make contact.

“I’m very, very glad to see you,” said Ryu, smiling widely.

“Did you get lonely?”

“And how! Alone on a whole planet.”

Behind Komov’s back someone said, “Damn!” and something dropped noisily into the grass.

“That’s Boris Fokin,” Komov said without turning around. “An archaeologist equipped with full autodescent.”

“At least when there’s such lush grass,” Boris Fokin said, getting up. He had a small red mustache, a freckled nose, and a white filmiplast helmet, now knocked aslant. He wiped his green-smeared hands on his pants and introduced himself. “Fokin. Pathfinder archaeologist.”

“Welcome, Fokin,” said Ryu.

“And this is Tatyana Palei, archaeological engineer,” said Komov.

Ryu pulled himself together and inclined his head politely. The archaeological engineer had outrageous gray eyes and blinding white teeth. The archaeological engineer’s hand was strong and rough. The archaeological engineer’s coverall draped itself with devastating elegance.

“Just call me Tanya,” said the archaeological engineer.

“Ryu Waseda,” said Ryu. “Ryu is the given name, and Waseda is the surname.”

“Mboga,” said Komov. “Biologist and hunter.”

“Where?” asked Ryu. “Oh, forgive me. A thousand apologies.”

“Never mind, Comrade Waseda,” said Mboga. “Pleased to meet you.”

Mboga was a pigmy from the Congo, and only his black head, wrapped tightly in a white kerchief, could be seen over the grass. The steel-blue barrel of a carbine stuck up next to his head.

“This is Tora-Hunter,” Tanya said.

Ryu had to bend down to shake Tora-Hunter’s hand. Now he knew who Mboga was, Tora-Hunter Mboga, member of the Commission on the Preservation of the Wildlife of Alien Planets. The biologist who had discovered the “battery of life” on Pandora. The zoopsychologist who had tamed the monstrous Martian sora-tobu hiru, the “flying leeches.” Ryu was embarrassed by his faux pas.

“I see that you don’t carry a weapon, Comrade Waseda,” said Mboga.

“I do have a pistol,” Ryu said. “But not a very heavy one.”

“I understand.” Mboga nodded encouragingly and looked about, “We did end up setting the prairie on fire,” he said softly.

Ryu turned around. A flat plain covered with lush shining grass stretched from the hill to the very horizon. Two miles from the hill the grass was on fire, kindled by the landing boat’s reactor. Thick puffs of white smoke sailed through the whitish sky. The boat could be seen dimly through the smoke-a dark egg on three widespread struts. A wide burned-out patch around the boat showed black.

“It will soon go out,” said Ryu. “It’s very damp here. Let’s go—I’ll show you your estate.”

He took Komov by the arm and led him past the helicopter to the other side of the hill. The others followed. Ryu looked back several times, nodding at them with a smile.

Komov said in vexation, “It’s always a bad show when you spoil things with your landing.”

“The fire will soon go out,” Ryu repeated.

He heard Fokin behind him, fussing over the archaeological engineer. “Careful, Tanya girl, there’s a tussock here.”

“I see it,” the archeological engineer answered. “Watch your own step.”

“Here is your estate,” said Ryu.

A broad, calm river crossed the green plain. In a river bend gleamed a corrugated roof. “That’s my lab,” said Ryu. To the right of the laboratory, streams of red and black smoke rose up into the sky. “They’re building a storehouse there,” Ryu said. They could see silhouettes of some sort rushing about in the smoke. For an instant there appeared an enormous clumsy machine on caterpillar treads-a mother robot-and then something flashed in the smoke, a peal of rolling thunder rang out, and the smoke began to pour more thickly. “And there’s the city,” said Ryu. It was rather more than a kilometer from the base to the city. From the hill the buildings looked like squat gray bricks. Sixteen flat gray bricks, sticking up out of the green grass.

“Yes,” said Fokin. “A very unusual layout.”

Komov nodded silently. This city was quite unlike the others. Before the discovery of Leonida, the Pathfinders—the workers of the Commission for the Research of the Evidence of the Activity of Extraterrestrial Intelligence in Outer Space—had come across only two cities—the empty city on Mars and the empty city on Vladislava. Obviously the same architect had designed both—cylindrical buildings descending many levels underground, made of shining silicones arranged in concentric rings. But this city on Leonida was entirely different—two rows of gray boxes made of porous limestone.

“Were you there after Gorbovsky?” asked Komov.

“No,” answered Ryu. “Not even once. Actually, I had no time. After all, I’m not an archaeologist—I’m an atmosphere physicist. And then, Gorbovsky had asked me not to go there.”

A boom! boom! came from the construction site. Red puffs of smoke flew up in thick clouds. Through them the smooth walls of the storehouse could already be made out. The mother robot came out of the smoke into the grass. Next to her hopped black cyberbuilders like praying mantises. Then the cybers formed a chain and ran off to the river.

“Where are they going?” Fokin asked curiously.

“Swimming,” said Tanya.

“They’re leveling an obstruction,” Ryu explained. “The storehouse is almost ready. Now the whole cybernetic system is retiming. They’ll build a hangar and a water system.”

“A water system!” exclaimed Fokin.

“Still, it would have been better to have moved the base a little farther from the city,” Komov said doubtfully.

“This is how Gorbovsky laid it out,” said Ryu. “It’s not a good idea to get too far from base.”

“Also true,” Komov agreed. “But I wouldn’t want the cybers wrecking the city.”

“Come now! I never let them near it.”

“A planet with all the conveniences,” said Mboga.

“Yes indeed!” Ryu confirmed happily. “The river, the air, the greenery, and no mosquitoes, no harmful insects.”

“All the conveniences indeed,” Mboga repeated.

“Is it possible to go swimming?” asked Tanya.

Ryu looked at the river. It was greenish and turbid, but it was a real river with real water. Leonida was the first planet that had turned out to have real water and breathable air. “I think so,” said Ryu. “I haven’t tried it myself, though. There hasn’t been time.”

“We’ll swim every day,” said Tanya.

“I’ll say!” shouted Fokin. “Every day! Three times a day! All we’ll do is go swimming!”

“Okay,” said Komov. “What’s that?” He pointed to a ridge of low hills on the horizon.

“I don’t know,” said Ryu. “No one has been there yet. Falkenstein got sick all of a sudden, and Gorbovsky had to leave. He only had time to unload the equipment for me, and then he shipped out.”

For some time everyone stood silently, looking at the hills on the horizon. Then Komov said, “In three days or so I’m going to fly along the river myself.”

“If there are any more traces,” said Fokin, “then undoubtedly we’d find them along the river.”

“Probably,” Ryu agreed politely. “Now let’s go to my place.”

Komov looked back at the helicopter.

“Never mind, let it stay,” said Ryu. “The hippopotamuses don’t climb hills.”

“Hippopotamuses?” said Mboga.

“That’s what I call them. They look like hippopotamuses from far off, and I’ve never seen them close up.” They started down the hill. “On the other side of the river the grass is very tall, so I’ve only seen their backs.”

Mboga walked next to Ryu with a light gliding step. The grass seemed to flow around him.

“On the other hand there are birds up here,” Ryu continued. “They’re very large and sometimes they fly very low. One almost grabbed my radar set.”

Komov, without slowing down, looked into the sky, shading his eyes with a hand. “By the way,” he said. “I should send a radiogram to the Sunflower. May I use your communicator?”

“By all means,” said Ryu. “You know, Percy Dickson wanted to shoot one. A bird, I mean. But Gorbovsky wouldn’t let him.”

“Why not?” asked Mboga.

“I don’t know,” said Ryu. “But he was dreadfully angry; he even wanted to take everyone’s weapons away.”

“He did take them away from us,” Fokin said. “There was a great flap at the Council. If you ask me, it became very ugly. Gorbovsky simply ladled out his authority on top of everyone.”

“Except Tora-Hunter,” noted Tanya.

“Yes, I took a gun,” Mboga said. “But I understand Gorbovsky. You don’t feel like shooting here.”

“Still, Gorbovsky is a peculiar man,” declared Fokin.

“Possibly,” said Ryu with restraint.

They approached the low circle of the door to the spacious laboratory dome. Over the dome three gridwork radar dishes turned in various directions.

“You can pitch your tents here,” said Ryu. “And if you need it, I’ll give you a team of cybers, and they’ll build you something more substantial.”

Komov looked at the dome, looked at the puffs of red and black smoke behind the laboratory, and then looked back at the gray roofs of the city and said guiltily, “You know, Ryu, I’m afraid we’ll be in your way here. Wouldn’t it be better if we got settled in the city? Eh?”

“Besides, there’s a smell of burning here,” added Tanya. “And I’m afraid of the cybers.”

“I’m afraid of the cybers too,” Fokin said decisively.

Offended, Ryu shrugged his shoulders. “As you like,” he said. “I think it’s very nice here myself.”

“Tell you what,” said Tanya. “We’ll put up the tents and you can move in with us. You’ll like it, you’ll see.”

“Hmm,” said Ryu. “Maybe… But for now you’re all invited to my place.”

The archaeologists stooped down and walked toward the low door. Mboga went last, and he did not even have to bow his head.

Ryu hesitated at the threshold. He looked back and saw the trampled ground, the yellowed crushed grass, the dismal pile of lithoplast, and he thought that somehow there really was a smell of burning here.

The city consisted of a single street, very broad, overgrown with thick grass. The street extended almost due north and south, and stopped close to the river. Komov decided to make camp in the center of the city. The setting up started at around 3:00 p.m. local time (a day on Leonida was twenty-seven hours some minutes).

The heat seemed to grow worse as the afternoon wore on. There was no breeze, and warm air shimmered over the gray parallelepipeds of buildings. It was a bit cooler only in the southern part of the city, near the river. There was a smell of, in Fokin’s words, hay and “a touch of chlorella plantation.”

Komov took Mboga and Ryu, who had offered his help, got in the helicopter, and set off for the boat to get equipment and provisions, while Tanya and Fokin surveyed the city. There was relatively little equipment, and Komov transferred it in two trips. When he had come back the first time, Fokin, while helping with the unloading, had stated somewhat pompously that all the buildings in the city were quite similar in size.

“Very interesting,” Ryu said politely.

This showed, Fokin stated, that all the buildings had one and the same function. “All we have to do is establish what,” he added as an afterthought.

When the helicopter returned the second time, Komov saw that Tanya and Fokin had set up a high pole and had raised over the city the unofficial flag of the Pathfinders-a white field with a stylized depiction of a heptagonal nut. A long time ago, almost a century back, one prominent spaceman and fervent opponent of the study of the evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence in outer space had once said heatedly that the only evidence that he was ready to consider irrefutable would be a wheel on an axle, a diagram of the Pythagorean theorem carved onto a cliffside, or a heptagonal nut. The Pathfinders had accepted the challenge and had emblazoned their flag with a depiction of a heptagonal nut.

Komov saluted the flag gladly. Much fuel had been burned and many parsecs had been traveled since the flag had been created. It had first flown over the circular streets of the empty city on Mars. At that time the fantastic hypothesis that both the city and the Martian satellites could have a natural origin had still had currency. At that time even the most daring Pathfinders merely considered the city and the satellites to be the sole remains of a mysterious vanished Martian civilization. And many parsecs had to be traveled, and much ground had to be dug, before only one hypothesis remained unrefuted: the empty cities and the abandoned satellites had been built by visitors from an unknown distant planetary system. But this city on Leonida…

Komov got the last pack out of the helicopter cabin, jumped into the grass, and slammed the door shut. Ryu went up to him, and said while rolling down his sleeves, “And now I must leave you, Gennady. I have a sounding in twenty minutes.”

“Of course,” said Komov. “Thank you, Ryu. Come have supper with us.”

Ryu looked at his watch and said, “Thank you, but I can’t guarantee it.”

Mboga, leaning his carbine against the wall of the nearest building, inflated a tent right in the middle of the street. He watched Ryu leave and then smiled at Komov, parting the gray lips on his small wrinkled face. “This is verily a planet with all the conveniences, Gennady,” he said. “Here we walk around weaponless, pitch tents right on the grass. And this…” He nodded in the direction of Fokin and Tanya. The Pathfinder archaeologist and the archaeological engineer, having trampled down the grass around them, were fussing over the autolab in the shade of a building. The archaeological engineer wore shorts and a silk sleeveless blouse. Her heavy shoes adorned the roof of the building, and her coverall lay next to the packs. Fokin, wearing gym shorts, was tearing off his sweat-drenched jacket.

“Good grief,” Tanya was saying, “How did you connect the batteries?”

“In a minute, in a minute, Tanya,” Fokin answered vaguely.

“No,” said Komov. “This isn’t Pandora.” He dragged a second tent out of the pack and set about fitting the rotary pump to it. No, this isn’t Pandora, he thought. On Pandora they had forced their way through murky jungles wearing heavy-duty spacesuits, carrying cumbersome disintegrators with the safety catches off. It squished underfoot, and with every step multilegged vermin ran every which way, while overhead two blood-red suns shone dimly through the tangle of sticky branches. And it was not only Pandora! On every planet with an atmosphere the Pathfinders and the Assaultmen moved with the greatest caution, driving before them columns of robot scouts, self-propelled biolabs, toxicanalyzers, condensed clouds of universal virophages. Immediately after landing, a ship’s captain was required to burn out a safety zone with thermite. It was considered an enormous crime to return to a ship without a preliminary, very careful disinfection and disinfestation. Invisible monsters more terrible than the plague or leprosy lay in wait for the unwary. It had happened only thirty years back.

It could happen even now on Leonida, the planet with all the conveniences. There were microfauna here too, and very abundant they were. But thirty years ago, small Doctor Mboga had found the “battery of life” on fierce Pandora, and Professor Karpenko on Earth had discovered bioblockading. One injection a day. You could even get by with one a week. Komov wiped his damp face and started undoing his jacket.

When the sun had sunk toward the west and the sky in the east had turned from a whitish color to dark violet, they sat down to supper. The camp was ready. Three tents crossed the street, and the packs and boxes of equipment were neatly stacked along the wall of one of the buildings. Fokin, sighing, had cooked supper. Everyone was hungry, and consequently they did not wait for Ryu. From the camp they could see that Ryu was sitting on the roof of his laboratory, doing something with the antennas.

“Never mind—we’ll leave some for him,” Tanya promised.

“Go ahead,” said Fokin, starting to eat his boiled veal. “He’ll get hungry and he’ll come.”

“You picked the wrong place to put the helicopter, Gennady,” said Tanya. “It blocks off the whole view of the river.”

Everyone looked at the helicopter. It really did destroy the view.

“You get a fine river view from the roof,” Komov said calmly.

“No, really,” said Fokin, who was sitting with his back to the river. “There’s nothing tasteful around here to look at.”

“What do you mean nothing?” Komov said as calmly as before. “What about the veal?” He lay down on his back and started looking at the sky.

“Here’s what I’m thinking about,” Fokin retorted, wiping his mustache with a napkin. “How will we dig into these graves?” He tapped his finger against the nearest building. “Shall we go under, or cut into the wall?”

“That’s not quite the problem,” Komov said lazily. “How did the owners get in?—that’s the problem. Did they cut into the walls too?”

Fokin looked thoughtfully at Komov and asked, “And what in fact do you know about the owners? Maybe they didn’t need to get in there.”

“Uh-huh,” said Tanya. “A new architectural principle. Somebody sat down on the grass, put walls and a ceiling around himself, and… and…”

“And went away,” Mboga finished.

“Well, suppose they really are tombs?” Fokin insisted.

Everyone discussed this proposal for some time.

“Tatyana, what do the analyses say?” asked Komov.

“Limestone,” said Tanya. “Calcium carbonate. Plus many impurities, of course. You know what it’s like? Coral reefs. And the more so, since the building is made out of a single piece.”

“A monolith of natural origin.”

“Here we go again with that natural business!” cried Fokin. “It’s a scientific law: you have only to find new evidence of aliens, and immediately people appear to declare that it’s a natural formation.”

“It’s a natural proposition,” said Komov.

“Tomorrow we’ll put together the intravisor and have a look,” Tanya promised. “The main thing is that this limestone has nothing in common with the stuff that the city on Mars is built from. Or the amberine of the city on Vladislava.”

“So someone else is wandering among the planets,” said Komov. “It would be nice if this time they left us something a little more substantial.”

“If we could just find a library,” moaned Fokin. “Or some sort of machinery!”

They fell silent. Mboga got out a short pipe, and started filling it. He squatted, looking pensively over the tents into the bright sky. Under the white kerchief, his small face had a look of complete peace and satisfaction.

“It’s peaceful,” said Tanya.

Boom! Bang! Rat-tat-tat! came from the direction of the base.

“The devil!” muttered Fokin. “What in hell do we need that for?”

Mboga blew a smoke ring, and, watching it rise, said softly, “I understand, Boris. For the first time in my life I myself feel no joy in hearing our machines at work on an alien planet.”

“It’s somehow not alien, that’s the thing,” said Tanya.

A large black beetle flew in from somewhere or other, buzzing noisily, circled over the Pathfinders twice, and left. Fokin sniffed softly, and buried his nose in his bent elbow. Tanya got up and went into the tent. Komov got up too and stretched happily. It was so quiet and nice around that he was completely nonplussed when Mboga suddenly jumped up on his feet as if shot from a gun, and then froze, with his face turned toward the river. Komov turned his head in that direction too.

Some sort of enormous black hulk was moving toward the camp. The helicopter partly hid it, but they could see it sway as it walked, and could see the evening sun gleam on its moist shiny sides, which were puffed out like the belly of a hippopotamus. The hulk moved fairly rapidly, brushing aside the grass, and Komov saw with horror that the helicopter was swaying and had slowly started to tip over. Between the wall of a building and the belly of the helicopter a massive low forehead with two enormous bulges stuck out. Komov saw two small dull eyes, staring, as it seemed, straight at him. “Look out!” he yelled.

The helicopter tipped over, propping itself up in the grass on its rotor vanes. The monster kept moving toward the camp. It was no less than ten feet tall. Its striped sides rose and fell evenly, and they could hear measured, noisy breathing.

Behind Komov’s back, Mboga cocked the carbine with a click. Then Komov came to himself and backed toward the tent. Fokin scrambled quickly back on all fours, overtaking him. The monster was already just twenty paces away.

“Can you manage to break camp?” Mboga asked quickly.

“No,” answered Komov.

“Then I’m going to fire,” said Mboga.

“Wait a moment,” said Komov. He stepped forward, waved his arm, and shouted “Stop!”

For an instant the mountain of meat on the hoof did stop. The knobby forehead suddenly lifted up, and a mouth as capacious as a helicopter cabin, stuffed with green grass cud, gaped open.

“Gennady!” cried Tanya. “Get back at once!”

The monster emitted a prolonged screeching sound and moved forward even faster.

“Stop!” Komov shouted again, but now without much enthusiasm. “Evidently it’s herbivorous,” he stated, and moved back toward the tents.

He looked back. Mboga was standing with his carbine at his shoulder, and Tanya was already covering her ears. Next to Tanya stood Fokin, with a pack on his back. “Are you going to shoot at it today or not?” Fokin yelled in a strained voice. “It’ll make off with the intravisor or—”

Ka-thwak! Mboga’s semiautomatic hunting carbine was a .64 caliber, and the kinetic energy of the bullet at a distance of ten paces equaled nine tons. The bullet landed in the very center of the forehead between the two bulges. The monster sat down hard on its rear. Ka-thwak! The second bullet turned the monster over on its back. Its short fat legs moved convulsively through the air. A “kh-h-a-a-a” came from the thick grass. The black belly rose and fell, and then all was quiet. Mboga put the carbine down. “Let’s go have a look,” he said.

The monster was no smaller in size than an adult African elephant, but it more resembled a gigantic hippopotamus.

“Red blood,” said Fokin. “And what is this?” The monster lay on its side, and along its belly extended three rows of soft protuberances the size of a fist. A shiny thick liquid oozed from the growths. Mboga suddenly inhaled noisily, took a drop of liquid on the tip of a finger, and tasted it.

“Yuck!” said Fonin.

The same expression appeared on all their faces.

“Honey,” said Mboga.

“You don’t say!” exclaimed Komov. He hesitated, then also extended a finger. Tanya and Fokin watched his movements with disgust. “Real honey!” he exclaimed. “Lime-blossom honey!”

“Doctor Dickson had said that there are many saccharides in this grass,” said Mboga.

“A honey monster,” said Fokin. “Pity we did him in.”

“We!” exclaimed Tanya. “Good grief, go put away the intravisor.”

“Well, okay,” said Komov. “What do we do now? It’s hot here, and with a carcass like this next to the camp…”

“I’ll take care of it,” said Mboga. “Drag the tents twenty paces or so down the street. I’ll make all the measurements, look it over, and then annihilate it.”

“How?” asked Tanya.

“With a disintegrator. I have a disintegrator. And you, Tanya, get away from here. I am now going to embark on some very unappetizing work.”

They heard footsteps, and Ryu jumped out from behind the tent with a large automatic pistol. “What happened?” he asked, panting.

“We killed one of your hippopotamuses,” Fokin explained pompously.

Ryu quickly looked everyone over and immediately relaxed. He stuck his pistol in his belt. “Did it charge?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” Komov answered confusedly. “If you ask me, it was simply out for a stroll, but we have to stop it.”

Ryu looked at the overturned helicopter and nodded.

“Can’t we eat it?” Fokin shouted from the tent.

Mboga said slowly, “It looks like somebody has already tried eating it.”

Komov and Ryu went over to him. With his fingers, Mboga was feeling broad, deep, straight scars on the loin parts of the animal. “Powerful fangs did that,” said Mboga. “Ones sharp as knives. Someone took off slices of five or six kilos each with one swipe.”

“Some sort of horror,” Ryu said very sincerely.

A strange, prolonged cry sounded high in the sky. Everyone looked up.

“There they are!” said Ryu.

Large light-gray birds like eagles rushed headlong down on the city. One behind another, they dropped from an enormous altitude. Just over the humans’ heads they spread broad, soft wings and darted upward just as violently, pouring waves of warm air over the humans. They were enormous birds, larger than terrestrial condors or even the flying dragons of Pandora.

“Meat eaters!” Ryu said excitedly. He started to draw the pistol from his belt, but Mboga seized him firmly by the arm.

The birds rushed over the city and off into the violet evening sky to the west. When the last of them had disappeared, the same disturbing prolonged cry sounded.

“I was ready to fire,” Ryu said with relief.

“I know,” said Mboga. “But it seemed to me—” He stopped.

“Yes,” said Komov. “It seemed that way to me too.”

Upon consideration, Komov ordered the tents to be moved not merely twenty paces, but onto the flat roof of one of the buildings. The buildings were low—only seven feet or so high—so it was not difficult to climb on top of them. Tanya and Fokin put the packs with the most valuable instruments on the roof of the next building over. The helicopter was not damaged. Komov took it up and landed it neatly on the roof of a third building.

Mboga spent the whole night under the floodlights, examining the monster’s carcass. Then at dawn the street filled with a shrill hissing sound, a large cloud of white steam flew up over the city, and a short-lived orange glow flashed out. Fokin, who had never before seen an organic disintegrator at work, dashed out of a tent wearing only shorts, but all he saw was Mboga, who was unhurriedly cleaning a flood light, and an enormous cloud of fine gray dust over blackened grass. All that remained of the honey monster was its ugly head, expertly prepared, coated with transparent plastic, and destined for the Capetown Museum of Exozoology.

Fokin wished Mboga a good morning and was about to go back into the tent and finish his sleep, when he ran into Komov.

“Where are you going?” Komov inquired.

“To get dressed, of course,” Fokin replied with dignity. The morning was fresh and clear, except for scattered white clouds which floated unmoving in the violet sky to the south. Komov jumped down onto the grass and set off to fix breakfast. He planned on fixing fried eggs, but he couldn’t find the butter.

“Boris,” he called, “where’s the butter?”

Fokin was standing on the roof in a strange pose—he was doing Yoga exercises.

“I have no idea,” he said haughtily.

“You did the cooking yesterday evening.”

“Uh… yes. So the butter is where it was last evening.”

“And where was it last evening?” Komov asked with restraint.

Fokin, with a displeased look, disengaged his head from under his right knee. “How should I know?” he said. “We restacked all the boxes afterward.”

Komov sighed, and started patiently examining box after box. There was no butter. Then he went over to the building and dragged Fokin down by a leg. “Where’s the butter?” he asked.

Fokin had just opened his mouth to reply when Tanya came around the corner, wearing a sleeveless blouse and shorts. Her hair was wet.

“Morning, boys,” she said.

“Morning, Tanya my sweet,” said Fokin. “You haven’t by any chance seen the box of butter?”

“Where have you been?” Komov asked fiercely.

“Swimming,” said Tanya.

“What do you mean you’ve been swimming?” said Komov. “Who gave you permission?”

Tanya unfastened from her belt an electric hacker in a plastic sheath, and threw it onto the boxes. “Gennady, old dear,” she said, “there aren’t any crocodiles here. The water is wonderful and the bottom is grassy.”

“You haven’t seen the butter?” Komov asked.

“No, I haven’t—but has anybody seen my shoes?”

“I have,” said Fonin. “They’re on the other roof.”

“No, they’re not.”

All three turned around and looked at the roof. The shoes were gone. Komov looked at Mboga. He was lying on the grass in the shade, sleeping soundly, with his small fists under his cheek.

“Come now!” said Tanya. “What would he do with my shoes?”

“Or the butter,” added Fokin.

“Perhaps they were in his way,” muttered Komov. “Well, all right. I’ll cook something without butter.”

“And without shoes.”

“All right, all right,” said Komov. “Go work on the intravisor. You too, Tanya. Try to get it put together as soon as possible.”

Ryu came to breakfast. Before him he herded a large black machine on six hemomechanical legs. The machine left behind it a broad swath through the grass, stretching all the way back to the base. Ryu scrambled up to the roof and sat at the table, while the machine stopped in the middle of the street below.

“Tell me, Ryu,” said Komov. “Did anything ever get lost on you back at the base?”

“Like what?” asked Ryu.

“Well, say you leave something outside overnight, and you can’t find it in the morning.”

“Not that I know of.” Ryu shrugged. “Sometimes little things get lost—bits of rubbish, pieces of wire, scraps of lithoplast. But I think my cybers pick up that sort of trash. They’re very economical little comrades, and they can find a use for anything.”

“Could they find a use for my shoes?” asked Tanya.

Ryu laughed. “I don’t know,” he said. “I hardly think so.”

“And could they find a use for a box of butter?” asked Fokin.

Ryu stopped laughing. “You’ve lost your butter?” he asked.

“And a pair of shoes.”

“No,” said Ryu. “The cybers don’t go into the city.”

Deftly as a lizard, Mboga climbed onto the roof. “Good morning,” he said. “I’m late.”

Tanya poured him his coffee. Mboga always breakfasted on one cup of coffee.

“So, we’ve been robbed,” he said, smiling.

“Meaning it wasn’t you?” asked Fokin.

“No, it wasn’t me. But last night the birds we saw yesterday flew over the city twice.”

“And so much for the shoes,” said Fokin. “Somewhere I—”

“I haven’t lost anything in two months,” said Ryu. “Of course, I keep everything in the dome. And then, I have the cybers. And smoke and noise all the time,”

“Okay,” said Fokin, getting up. “Let’s get to work, Tanya girl. Imagine, a pair of shoes!”

They left, and Komov started gathering up the dishes.

“I’ll post a guard around you this evening,” said Ryu.

“As you like,” Mboga said thoughtfully. “But I’d prefer doing it myself at first. Gennady, I’m going to bed right now, and tonight I’ll set up a little ambush.”

“Very well, Doctor Mboga,” Komov said reluctantly.

“Then I’ll come too,” said Ryu.

“Do that,” Mboga agreed. “But no cybers, please.”

From the next roof came an outburst of indignation. “Good grief, I asked you to put the packs down in order of assembly!”

“I did! That is how I put them!”

“You call this order of assembly? E-7, A-2, B-16… then E again!”

“Tanya my sweet! Honest! Comrades!” Fokin called across the street in a wounded voice. “Who mixed up the packs?”

“Look!” shouted Tanya. “Pack E-9 is gone completely!”

Mboga said quietly, “Messieurs, we’re also missing a sheet.”

“What?” said Komov. He was pale. “Search everywhere!” he shouted, jumping from the roof and running toward Fokin and Tanya. Mboga watched him go and then started looking to the south, across the river. He could hear Komav say on the next roof, “What exactly is missing?”

“The HFG,” Tanya answered.

“So what are you standing there jabbering for? Put together a new one.”

“That will take two days,” Tanya said angrily.

“Then what do you suggest?”

“We’ll have to cut,” said Fokin. Then silence reigned on the roof.

“Ryu, look,” Mboga said suddenly. He stood up and, shading his eyes from the sun, looked across the river.

Ryu turned around. Across the river the green plain was dotted with black spots-hippopotamus backs, and there were very many of them. Ryu had never imagined that there could be so many. The spots were slowly moving south.

“I think they’re going away,” Mboga said.

Komov decided to spend the night under the open sky. He dragged his cot out of the tent and lay down on the roof, his hands behind his head. The sky was blue-black, and a large greenish-orange disk with fuzzy edges—Palmyra, the moon of Leonida—crawled slowly up from the eastern horizon. Muffled drawn-out cries, no doubt those of the birds, came from the dark plain across the river. Brief flashes of sheet lightning appeared over the base, and something gnashed and crackled softly.

We’ll have to put up a fence, thought Komov. Enclose the city with an electric fence, and run through a fairly weak current But then, if it’s the birds, a fence won’t help. And it probably is the birds. A huge critter like that wouldn’t have any trouble at all in dragging off a pack. It could probably even carry off a person. After all, on Pandora once a flying dragon grabbed a man in a heavy-duty spacesuit, and that was maybe one-hundred-fifty kilos. That’s the way things are going. First shoes, then a pack… and the whole expedition has only one carbine. Why was Gorbovsky so set against weapons? Of course we should have opened fire then—at least to scare them away. Why wouldn’t the doctor fire? Because it “seemed” to him… and I wouldn’t have fired myself because it had “seemed” to me too. And just exactly what had it seemed to me? Komov wiped his forehead, wet from nervousness, vigorously with his hand. Enormous birds, beautiful birds, and how they flew! What noiseless, effortless, perfect flight! Well, even hunters sometimes pity the game, and I’m no hunter.

A bright white little spot among the twinkling stars slowly went past the zenith. Komov got up on his elbows and watched it. It was the Sunflower—a kilometer-long super-long-range Assault starship. It was now orbiting Leonida at a distance of two megameters. They had only to send a distress signal, and help would come from there. But should they send a distress signal? They had lost one pair of shoes, a pack, and something had “seemed” to the chief…

The little white spot grew dim and vanished. The Sunflower had gone off into Leonida’s shadow. Komov lay down again and put his hands behind his head. Aren’t there just too many conveniences? he thought. Warm green plains, sweet-scented air, an idyllic river with no crocodiles… Maybe this is only a smokescreen that some sort of unknown forces are operating behind? Or is everything much simpler? Say Tanya lost her shoes somewhere in the grass. And everyone knows Fokin is a muddler—the lost packs could be lying somewhere under a pile of excavator parts. I mean, today he was running around all day from pile to pile, glancing around on the sly.

Komov must have dozed off. When he awoke again, Palmyra was high in the sky. From the tent where Fokin was sleeping came smacking and snoring sounds. There was whispering on the next roof:

“… As soon as the cable broke, off we flew, leaving Saburo below. He chased after us and shouted for us to stop, then named me captain and ordered me to stop. Of course right away I started steering for the relay mast. We tied up to it and hung there for the whole night. And the whole time we shouted at each other, arguing over whether Saburo should go find Teacher or not. Saburo could go, but wouldn’t, and we would, but couldn’t. Finally in the morning they saw us and got us down.”

“Well, I was a quiet girl. And I was always scared of any sort of machinery. I’m still afraid of cybers.”

“There’s no reason to be afraid of cybers, Tanya. Cybers are gentle.”

“I don’t like them. I don’t like the way they’re sort of animate and inanimate at the same time.”

Komov turned over on his side and looked. Tanya and Ryu were sitting crosslegged on the next roof. Ah, the lovebirds, thought Komov. Tomorrow they’ll be yawning all day. “Tanya,” he said in a low voice, “it’s time to go to sleep.”

“I’m not sleepy,” said Tanya. “We were walking along the bank.” Ryu started to move off in embarrassment. “It’s nice by the river. The moonlight, and the fish jumping…”

Ryu said, “Hey, where’s Doctor Mboga?”

“He’s at work,” said Komov.

“Really!” Tanya said happily, “Ryu, let’s go find Doctor Mboga!”

She’s hopeless, Komov thought, and rolled over onto his other side. The whispering on the roof continued. Komov got up decisively, took his cot, and went back into the tent. It was very noisy there—Fokin was sleeping with all his might. You muddler, you muddler, Komov thought as he settled himself in. Such a night for romance. But you grew your mustache and thought it was in the bag. He wrapped himself up in a sheet and fell asleep instantly.

A muffled roar tossed him on the cot. It was dark in the tent. Ka-thwack! Ka-thwack! thundered two more shots. “The devil!” Fokin yelled in the darkness. “Who’s there?” Komov heard a short harelike cry and a triumphant yell, “Ha! Come here, come with me!” Komov tangled himself up in the sheet and could not get up. He heard a muffled blow, Fokin’s “Ow!”, and then something small and dark showed for an instant, and disappeared through the light triangle of the doorway of the tent. Komov darted after it. Fokin did too, and they bumped heads violently. Komov clenched his teeth and at last flung himself outside. The other roof was empty. Looking around, Komov saw Mboga running through the grass down the street toward the river, and Riu and Tanya following on his heels, stumbling. And Komov noticed something else—someone was running far ahead of Mboga, parting the grass before him—was running much faster than Mboga. Mboga stopped, pointed his carbine straight up with one arm, and fired again. The wake in the grass swerved to one side and disappeared around the corner of the last building. After a second a bird, white in the moonlight, gracefully spread wide its enormous wings, and rose up from that spot.

“Shoot!” yelled Fokin.

He was already dashing down the street, stumbling at every fifth step. Mboga stood motionless, with his carbine lowered, and, craning his neck, watched the bird. It made an even, noiseless circle over the city, gaining altitude, and flew off to the south. In a moment it had disappeared. Then Komov saw more birds flying very low over the base—three, four, five—five enormous white birds shot upward over the cybers’ workplace, and disappeared.

Komov got down from the roof. The dead parallelepipeds of the buildings threw dense black shadows onto the grass. The grass looked silver. Something jingled underfoot. Komov bent over. A cartridge-case gleamed in the grass. Komov crossed over the distorted shadow of the helicopter, and heard voices. Mboga, Fokin, Ryu, and Tanya were walking unhurriedly toward him.

“I had him in my hands!” Fokin said excitedly. “But he knocked me on the head and tore away. If he hadn’t slugged me, I never would have let him go! He was soft and warm, like a child. And naked.”

“We almost caught him too,” said Tanya. “But he turned into a bird and flew away.”

“Come now!” scoffed Fokin. “Turned into a bird…”

“No, really,” Ryu insisted. “He rounded the corner, and right away a bird flew up.”

“So?” said Fokin. “He flushed a bird, and you stood there with your mouths gaping.”

“A coincidence,” said Mboga.

Komov went up to them, and they stopped.

“What exactly happened?” asked Komov.

“I had caught him,” declared Fokin, “but he knocked me over the head.”

“I heard that,” said Komov. “How did it all start?”

“I was sitting on the packs, in ambush,” said Mboga. “I saw someone creeping through the grass right in the middle of the street. I wanted to catch him, and I moved toward him, but he saw me and turned back. I saw I couldn’t catch him, and fired into the air. I’m very sorry, Gennady, but I think I frightened them off.”

Silence reigned. Then Fokin asked doubtfully, “Exactly why are you sorry, Doctor Mboga?”

Mboga did not answer at once. Everyone waited. “There were at least two of them,” he finally said. “I discovered one, and the other was in the tent with you. But when I ran past the helicopter… well, look for yourselves,” he concluded unexpectedly. “You’ll have to examine it. Probably I’m wrong.” Silently Mboga started walking toward the camp. The others, exchanging glances, moved after him. Mboga stopped near the building on which the helicopter was sitting. “Somewhere around here,” he said.

Fokin and Tanya quickly crawled into the dark shadow under the wall. Ryu and Komov looked down expectantly at Mboga. He was thinking.

“There’s nothing here,” Fokin snapped.

“Just what did I see?” muttered Mboga. “Just what did I see?”

Fokin, irritated, moved away from the wall. The black shadow of the rotor vane crept across his face.

“Aha!” Mboga said loudly. “A strange shadow!”

He threw down the carbine and with a running jump he leapt onto the wall. “Please!” he said from the roof.

On the roof, beyond the helicopter fuselage, as if in a shop window, the things were neatly arranged-the butter, pack number E-9, the shoes, a neatly folded sheet, a pocket microelectrometer in a plastic case, four neutron batteries, a ball of dried vitriplast, and a pair of sunglasses.

“Here are my shoes,” said Tanya. “And my sunglasses. I dropped them into the river yesterday.”

“Ye-es,” Fokin said, and looked around carefully.

Komov seemed to come to himself. “Ryu!” he quickly shouted. “I have to get hold of the Sunflower immediately. Fokin, Tanya, make a photograph of this display! I’ll be back in half an hour.”

He jumped off the roof and started walking quickly, then broke into a run, heading down the street toward the base. Ryu followed him without saying anything.

“What’s going on?” yelled Fokin.

Mboga squatted down, got out his small pipe, puffed at it unhurriedly, and said, “They’re people, Boris. Even animals can steal things, but only people can bring back what they have stolen.”

Fokin moved back and sat on the wheel of the helicopter.

Komov returned alone. He seemed very excited, and in a high-pitched metallic voice he ordered them to break camp immediately. Fokin started showering him with questions. He demanded explanations. Then Komov recited in the same metallic voice: “By order of the captain of the starship Sunflower: Within three hours the meteorological base and laboratory, and the archeological camp will be dismantled; all cybernetic systems will be shut down; and all personnel, including Atmosphere Physicist Waseda, will return on board the Sunflower.” Fokin submitted out of sheer surprise and set to work with unusual diligence.

In two hours the helicopter made eight trips, and the cargo robots trampled down a broad road through the grass from the base to the boat. Of the base, only empty construction sites remained—all three systems of construction robots had been herded inside the storehouse and completely deprogrammed.

At six o’clock in the morning local time, when the east had begun to glow with the green dawn, the exhausted humans gathered by the boat, and here, at last, Fokin lost patience.

“Well, all right,” he began in an irate hoarse whisper. “You relayed us orders, Gennady, and we have carried them out honestly. But I would like to find out at last how come we’re leaving here! Why?” he yelped suddenly in a falsetto, picturesquely throwing up his hands. Everyone jumped, and Mboga dropped the pipe from his teeth. “Why? We look for Brothers in Reason for three hundred years, and run off with our tails between our legs as soon as we’ve discovered them? The best minds of humanity—”

“Good grief,” said Tanya, and Fokin shut up.

“I don’t understand a thing,” he said then in a hoarse whisper.

“Do you think, Boris, that we are capable of representing the best minds of humanity?” asked Mboga.

Komov muttered gloomily, “We’ve sure messed things up here! We burned out a whole field, trampled crops, shot guns. And around the base!” He waved his hand.

“But how could we know?” Ryu said guiltily.

“Yes,” said Mboga. “We made many mistakes. But I hope they’ve understood us. They’re civilized enough for that.”

“What sort of a civilization is this!” said Fokin. “Where are the machines? Where are the tools? Where are the cities?”

“Shut up, Boris,” said Komov. “‘Machines, cities’—just open your eyes! Do we know how to fly on birds? Have we bred animals that produce honey? Has our last mosquito been long exterminated? ‘Machines.’…”

“A biological civilization,” said Mboga.

“What?” asked Fokin.

“A biological civilization. Not machines, but selection, genetics, animal training. Who knows what forces they’ve mastered? And who can say whose civilization is superior?”

“Imagine, Boris,” said Tanya,

Fokin twirled his mustache furiously.

“And we’re clearing out,” said Komov, “because none of us has the right to take upon himself the responsibility of first contact.” Oh, am I sorry to leave! he thought. I don’t want to go—I want to search them out, to meet them, to talk, to see what they’re like. Can this really have happened at last? Not some brainless lizards, not some sort of leeches, but a real human race. A whole world, a whole history… Did you have wars and revolutions? Which did you get first, steam or electricity? And what is the meaning of life? And might I perhaps have something to read? The first essay in the comparative history of intelligent species. And we have to go. Oh boy, oh boy, do I ever feel like staying! But on Earth there has already for fifty years been a Commission on Contacts, which for all those years has been studying the comparative psychology of fish and ants, and arguing over in what language to say the first “uh.” Only now you can’t laugh at them any more. I wonder whether any of them had foreseen the possibility of a biological civilization. Probably. What haven’t they foreseen?

“Gorbovsky is a man of phenomenal penetration,” said Mboga.

“Yes,” said Tanya. “It’s frightening to think what old Boris could have done if he’d had a gun.”

“Why single me out?” Fokin said angrily, “What about you? Who was it that went swimming with a hacker?”

“We’re all a fine bunch,” Ryu said with a sigh.

Komov looked at his watch. “Takeoff in twenty minutes,” he announced. “Stations, please.”

Mboga hesitated in the airlock and looked back. The white star EN 23 had already risen over the green plain. It smelled of moist grass, warm earth, fresh honey. “Yes,” said Mboga. “Really a planet with all the conveniences. Why did we ever think nature could have created anything like it?”