Noon: 22nd Century

18. Defeat

“You’re going to the island of Shumshu,” Fischer announced.

“Where is that?” Sidorov asked gloomily.

“The northern Kurils. Your flight leaves today at twenty-two thirty. A combined cargo-passenger run from Novosibirsk to Port Provideniya.”

They planned on testing embryomechs under varied conditions. Mostly the Institute did work for spacemen, and consequently thirty research groups out of forty-seven had been sent to the Moon and to various planets. The remaining seventeen were to work on Earth.

“All right,” Sidorov said slowly. He had hoped that they would assign him a space group, even if only a lunar one. It seemed to him that he had a good chance, for it had been a long time since he had felt as well as he had recently. He was in excellent shape, and had continued to hope up to the last minute. But for some reason Fischer had decided otherwise, and Sidorov couldn’t even talk to him man to man, since some glum-faced strangers were sitting in the office. So this is how Pm going to grow old, thought Sidorov. “All right,” he repeated calmly.

“Severokurilsk already knows,” Fischer said. “The exact site of the experiment will be decided in Baikovo.”

“Where’s that?”

“On the island of Shumshu. It’s Shumshu’s administrative center.” Fischer hooked his fingers together and started looking out the window. “Sermus is staying on Earth too,” he said. “He’s going to the Sahara.”

Sidorov was silent.

“So,” said Fischer. “I have already assigned you some assistants. You’ll have two of them. Good kids.”

“Greenhorns.”

“They’ll manage,” Fischer said quickly. “They’ve had good preparation. Good kids, I tell you. One of them, incidentally, has been an Assaultman like you.”

“Fine,” Sidorov said indifferently. “Is that it?”

“That’s it. You can start off, and good luck. Your cargo and your people are in One-sixteen.”

Sidorov started walking toward the door. Fischer hesitated, then called after him, “And come back soon, Kamerad. I have an interesting topic for you.”

Sidorov closed the door behind him and stood there a moment. Laboratory 116 was five stories below, he remembered, so he headed for the elevator.

An Egg—a polished sphere half as high as a man—was standing in the righthand corner of the laboratory, and two people were sitting in the left corner. They stood up when Sidorov came in. Sidorov stopped and looked them over. They were both about twenty-five, no older. One was tall, blond, with an ugly red face. The other was a little shorter, a dark, handsome, Spanish type, wearing a suede jacket and heavy climbing boots. Sidorov stuck his hands into his pockets, stood on tiptoes, and came down again on his heels. Greenhorns, he thought, and suddenly felt the attack of irritation so strong that he surprised himself. “Hello,” he said. “My name is Sidorov.”

The dark one showed white teeth. “We know, sir.” He stopped smiling and introduced himself: “Kuzma Sorochinsky.”

“Galtsev, Viktor,” said the blond one.

I wonder which of them was the Assaultman, thought Sidorov. Probably the Spanish-looking one, Sorochinsky. He asked, “Which of you was the Assaultman?”

“I was,” answered the blond Galtsev.

“Disciplinary?” asked Sidorov.

“Yes,” said Galtsev. “Disciplinary.” He looked Sidorov in the eye. Galtsev had baby-blue eyes and fluffy, feminine lashes. Somehow they did not fit in with his coarse red face.

“Well,” said Sidorov, “an Assaultman is supposed to be disciplined. Any person is supposed to be disciplined. But that’s water under the bridge. What can you do, Galtsev?”

“I’m a biologist,” Galtsev said. “A specialist in nematodes.”

“Right,” Sidorov said, and turned to Sorochinsky. “And you?”

“Gastronomical engineer,” Sorochinsky reported loudly, again showing his white teeth.

Marvelous, thought Sidorov. A worm specialist and a pastry cook. An undisciplined Assaultman and a suede jacket. Good kids. Especially this excuse for an Assaultman. Thank you, Comrade Fischer, you always take such good care of me. Sidorov imagined Fischer carefully and carpingly picking the off-planet groups out of two thousand volunteers, then looking at the clock, looking at the lists, and saying to himself, “Sidorov’s group. The Kurils. Athos is efficient, experienced. Three people will be quite enough for him. Two, even. It’s hardly the Hot Plateau on Mercury, after all. We’ll give him this Sorochinsky and this Galtsev. All the better, Galtsev has been an Assaultman too.”

“You’ve been briefed for this work?” asked Sidorov.

“Yes,” said Galtsev.

“I’ll say we have, sir,” said Sorochinsky. “We’ve got it coming out our ears!”

Sidorov went over to the Egg and touched its cold, polished surface. Then he asked, “Do you know what this is? You, Galtsev.”

Galtsev raised his eyes to the ceiling, thought a bit, and said in a monotone, “Embryomechanical device EM-8. Embryomech Model Eight. An autonomous self-developing mechanized system including: FMC program control—the Fischer mechano-chromosome; a system of organs of perception and action; a digestive system; and a power system. The EM-8 is an embryome-chanical device which is capable under any conditions of converting any raw material into any structure given in its program. The EM-8 is intended—”

“You,” Sidorov said to Sorochinsky.

Sorochinsky rattled off, “The present prototype of the EM-8 is intended for tests under terrestrial conditions. The program is standard program number sixty-four: the conversion of the embryo into an airtight residential dome for six persons, with hall and oxygen filtration.”

Sidorov looked out the window and asked, “Weight?”

“Approximately one hundred and fifty kilos.” General assistants for experimental groups could really get by without knowing any of this.

“Fine,” said Sidorov. “Now I’ll tell you what you don’t know. In the first place, the Egg costs nineteen thousand man-hours of skilled labor. In the second place, it really does weigh all of one hundred and fifty kilos, and you will haul it yourselves to where we need it.”

Galtsev nodded. Sorochinsky said, “Of course, sir.”

“Wonderful,” said Sidorov. “You can start right now. Roll it to the elevator and go down to the lobby. Then go to the storeroom and take out the recording apparatus. Then you can go about your own business. Be at the airport with all the cargo by ten o’clock p.m. Try not to be late.”

He turned and left. From behind came a heavy thud. Sidorov’s group had started carrying out its first order.

At dawn a cargo-passenger stratoplane dropped a pterocar with the group over the Second Kuril Strait. Very elegantly, Galtsev brought the pterocar out of its dive, looked around, looked at the map, looked at the compass, and immediately found his way to Baikovo—several rings of two-story buildings made of red and white lithoplast, stretching in a semicircle around a small but deep bay. The pterocar, wrenching its tough wings, landed on the embankment. An early passerby, a teenage boy in a striped sailor undershirt and canvas pants, told them where the administration building was. There the current administrator of the island, an elderly round-shouldered Ainu who was a senior agronomist, welcomed them and invited them to breakfast. After he had heard Sidorov out, he offered him a choice of several low knolls on the northern shore. He spoke Russian fairly clearly, although sometimes he hesitated in the middle of a word, as if unsure where the accent went,

“The northern shore is fairly far off,” he said, “and there are no good roads going there, But you have a ptero… car. And then, I can’t suggest anything closer for you. I don’t understand experiments very well. But the greater part of the island is taken up by melon fields, seedbeds, and so forth. Schoolchil… dren are working everywhere now, and I can’t take unneces… sary risks.”

“There is no risk,” Sorochinsky said flippantly. “No risk whatsoever.”

Sidorov remembered how once he had sat on a fire escape for a whole hour, getting away from a plastic vampire that needed protoplasm in order to put the finishing touches on itself. But then it hadn’t been the Egg that time. “Thank you,” he said. “The northern shore will suit us very well.”

“Yes,” said the Ainu. “There are no melon fields or seedbeds there. Only birches. And somewhere there’s an archaeo… logical project.”

“Archaeological?” Sorochinsky said with surprise.

“Thank you,” said Sidorov. “I think we’ll set off right away.”

“First you will have breakfast,” the Ainu reminded them politely.

They breakfasted silently. As they were leaving the Ainu said, “If you need something, don’t—how do you say it?—hes… itate to call on me.”

“Thank you. We won’t—how do you say it?—hes… itate one bit,” Sorochinsky assured him.

Sidorov glared at him, and once in the pterocar said, “If you pull something like that again, punk, I’ll throw you off the island.”

“I’m sorry,” said Sorochinsky, turning beet red. The flush made his smooth, dark face still more handsome.

In truth on the northern shore there were neither melon fields nor seedbeds, only birches. Kuril birches grow “lying down,” creeping across the ground, and their wet gnarled trunks and branches form a flat, impenetrable tangle. From the air a Kuril birch thicket looks like an inoffensive green meadow, perfectly suitable for the landing of a fairly light craft. Neither Galtsev, who was driving the pterocar, nor Sidorov nor Sorochinsky had any conception of Kuril birches. Sidorov pointed out a round knoll and said, “There.” Sorochinsky looked at him timidly and said, “A good place.” Galtsev lowered the landing gear and steered the pterocar to a landing right in the middle of a broad green field at the foot of the round knoll.

The car’s wings stood still, and in a minute the pterocar had come crackling nose first into the sparse verdure of the Kuril birches. Sidorov heard the crackling, saw a million varicolored stars, and lost consciousness.

Then he opened his eyes and first of all saw a hand. It was large, tanned, and its freshly scratched fingers seemed to be playing over the keyboard on the control panel, rather uncertainly.

The hand disappeared, and a dark-red face with blue eyes and feminine eyelashes came into view.

Sidorov wheezed and tried to sit up. His right side hurt badly, and his forehead smarted. He touched his forehead, then brought his fingers over before his eyes. The fingers were bloody. He looked at Galtsev, who was wiping his smashed mouth with a handkerchief.

“A masterly landing,” said Sidorov. “You bring joy to my heart, nematologist.”

Galtsev was silent. He pressed the crumpled handkerchief to his lips, and his face was motionless. Sorochinsky’s high trembling voice said, “It’s not his fault, sir.”

Sidorov slowly turned his head and looked at Sorochinsky.

“Honest, it’s not his fault,” Sorochinsky repeated, and moved away. “You just look where we landed.”

Sidorov opened the door a bit, stuck his head outside, and stared for several seconds at the uprooted, broken trunks which were caught in the landing gear. He extended an arm, plucked a few hard glossy leaves, crumpled them in his fingers, and tasted them with his tongue. The leaves were tart and bitter. Sidorov spat and asked, without looking at Galtsev, “Is the car in one piece?”

“Yes,” Galtsev answered through his handkerchief.

“What happened? Tooth knocked out?”

“Right,” said Galtsev. “Knocked clean out.”

“You’ll live,” promised Sidorov. “You can put this down as my fault. Try to lift the car to the knoll.”

It wasn’t easy to pull free of the thicket, but at last Galtsev landed the pterocar on top of the round knoll. Sidorov, rubbing his right side, got out and looked around. From here the island looked uninhabited, and flat as a table. The knoll was bare and rusty from volcanic slag. To the east crept thickets of Kuril birches, and to the south stretched the rectangles of melon fields. It was about four and a half miles to the western shore. Beyond it, pale violet mountain peaks jutted up into a lilac-colored haze, and still farther off, to the right, a strange triangular cloud with sharp edges hung motionless in the blue sky. The northern shore was much closer. It descended steeply into the sea. An awkward gray tower-probably an ancient defensive emplacement-jutted up over a cliff. Near the tower a tent showed white, and small human figures moved about. Evidently these were the archaeologists of whom the administrator had spoken. Sidorov sniffed. He smelled salt water and warm rocks. And it was very quiet. He could not even hear the surf.

A good spot, he thought. We’ll leave the Egg here, put the movie cameras and so forth on the slopes, and pitch camp below, in the melon fields. The watermelons must still be green here. Then he thought about the archaeologists. They’re about three miles off, but still we should warn them, so they won’t be surprised when the embryomech starts developing.

Sidorov called over Galtsev and Sorochinsky and said, “We’ll do the test here. This seems to be a good place. The raw materials are just what we need—lava, tuff. So step to it!”

Galtsev and Sorochinsky went over to the pterocar and opened up the trunk. Sunglints burst forth. Sorochinsky crawled inside and grunted a bit, and in one sudden heave he rolled the Egg out onto the ground. Making crunching sounds on the slag, the Egg rolled a few paces and stopped. Galtsev barely had time to jump out of its way. “Careful,” he said quietly. “You’ll strain yourself.”

Sorochinsky hopped out and said in a gruff voice, “Never mind—we’re used to it.”

Sidorov walked around the Egg, and tried shoving it. The Egg didn’t even rock. “Wonderful,” he said. “Now the movie cameras.”

They fussed about for a long time setting up the movie cameras: an infrared one, a stereo camera, another that registered temperature, a fourth with a wide-angle lens.

It was already around twelve when Sidorov carefully blotted his sweaty forehead with a sleeve and got the plastic case with the activator out of his pocket. Galtsev and Sorochinsky started moving back, looking over his shoulders. Sidorov unhurriedly dropped the activator into his palm—it was a small shiny tube with a sucker on one end and a red ribbed button on the other. “Let’s get started,” he said aloud. He went up to the Egg and stuck the sucker to the polished metal. He waited a second, then pressed the red button with his thumb.

Without taking his eyes off the Egg he stepped back a pace. Now nothing less than a direct hit from a rocket rifle could halt the processes that had begun under the gleaming shell. The embryomech had begun to adjust itself to the field conditions. They did not know how long this would take. But when the adjustment was finished, the embryo would begin development.

Sidorov glanced at his watch. It was five after twelve. With an effort he unstuck the activator from the surface of the Egg, returned it to its case, and put it in his pocket. Then he looked at Galtsev and Sorochinsky. They were standing behind his back and watching the Egg silently. Sidorov touched the gleaming surface one last time and said, “Let’s go.”

He ordered the observation post to be set up between the knoll and the melon field. The Egg could easily be seen from there—a silvery ball on the rust-colored slope under the dark-blue sky. Sidorov sent Sorochinsky over to the archaeologists, then sat down in the grass in the shade of the pterocar. Galtsev was already dozing, sheltered from the sun by the wing. Sidorov sucked on a fruit drop, looking sometimes at the top of the knoll, sometimes at the strange triangular cloud in the west. Finally he got out the binoculars. As he expected, the triangular cloud turned out to be the snowy peak of a mountain, perhaps a volcano. Through the binoculars he could see the narrow shadows of thawed patches, and could even make out snow patches lower than the uneven white edge of the main mass. Sidorov put down the binoculars and began to think about the embryo. It would probably hatch from the Egg at night. This was good, because daylight usually interfered with the operation of the movie cameras. Then he thought that Sermus had probably thrown a fit with Fischer, but had nonetheless started off for the Sahara. Then he thought that Mishima was now loading at the spaceport in Kirghizia, and once again he felt an aching pain in his right side. “Not getting any younger,” he muttered and glanced sidelong at Galtsev. Galtsev lay face down, with his hand under his head.

Sorochinsky returned in an hour and a half. He was shirtless, his smooth, dark skin shiny with sweat. He was carrying his foppish suede jacket and his shirt under his arm. He squatted down in front of Sidorov and, teeth agleam, related that the archaeologists thanked them for the warning and found the test very interesting, that there were four of them, that schoolchildren from Baikovo and Severokurilsk were helping them, that they were excavating underground Japanese fortifications from the middle of the century before last, and, finally, that their leader was a “ve-ry nice girl.”

Sidorov thanked him for this fascinating report and asked him to see about dinner, then sat down in the shade of the pterocar and, nibbling a blade of grass, squinted at the distant white cone. Sorochinsky woke up Galtsev, and they wandered off to the side, talking softly.

“I’ll make the soup, and you do the main dish, Viktor,” said Sorochinsky.

“We’ve got some chicken somewhere,” Galtsev said in a sleepy voice.

“Here’s the chicken,” said Sorochinsky. “The archaeologists are fun. One has let his beard grow—not a bit of bare skin left on his face. They’re excavating Japanese fortifications from the forties of the century before last. There was an underground fortress here. The guy with the beard gave me a pistol cartridge. Look!”

Galtsev muttered with displeasure, “Please, don’t shove it at me—it’s rusty.”

The odor of soup wafted up.

“That leader of theirs,” Sorochinsky continued. “What a nice girl! Blonde and slender—except she’s got fat legs. She sat me down in the pillbox and had me look through the embrasure. She says they could cover the whole northern shore from there.”

“Well?” asked Galtsev. “Did they really shoot from there?”

“Who knows? Probably. I was mostly looking at her. Then she and I started measuring the thickness of the ceiling.”

“So you were measuring for two hours?”

“Uh-huh. Then I realized she had the same last name as the guy with the beard, and I cleared out. But let me tell you, it’s really filthy in those casemates. It’s dark, and there’s mold on the walls. Where’s the bread?”

“Here,” said Galtsev. “Maybe she’s just the guy with the beard’s sister?”

“Could be. How’s the Egg coming?”

“No action.”

“Well, all right,” said Sorochinsky. “Comrade Sidorov, dinner’s ready.”

Sorochinsky talked a lot as he ate. First he explained that the Japanese word for pillbox, tochika, derived from the Russian og-nevaya tochka, “firing point,” while the Russian word for pillbox, dot, though assumed by the ignorant to be an acronym for dolgov-remennaya ognevaya tochka, “permanent firing point,” must really come from the English “dot,” which meant “point.” Then he began a very long discourse on pillboxes, casemates, embrasures, and density of fire per square meter, so that Sidorov ate quickly, refused any fruit for desert, and left Galtsev to watch the Egg. He got into the pterocar and began to drowse. It was surprisingly quiet, except that Sorochinsky, while washing the dishes in a stream, would every so often break out singing. Galtsev was sitting with the field glasses, his eyes glued to the top of the knoll.

When Sidorov awoke, the sun was setting, a dark-violet twilight was crawling up from the south, and it had gotten chilly. The mountains to the west had turned black, and now the cone of the distant volcano hung over the horizon as a gray shadow. The Egg on the hilltop shone with a scarlet flame. A blue-gray haze had crawled over the melon fields. Galtsev was sitting in the same pose listening to Sorochinsky.

“In Astrakhan,” Sorochinsky was saying, “I once had ‘Shah’s rose,’ a watermelon of rare beauty. It has the taste of pineapple.”

Galtsev coughed.

Sidorov sat for a few moments without moving. He remembered the time he and Captain Gennady had eaten watermelons on Venita. The planetological station had gotten a whole shipload of watermelons from Earth. So they ate watermelon, ate their way into the crunchy pulp, the juice running down their cheeks, and then they shot the slippery black seeds at each other.

“… lip-smacking good, and I say it as a gastronome.”

“Quiet,” said Galtsev. “You’ll wake up Athos.”

Sidorov arranged himself more comfortably, laying his chin on the back of the seat in front of him and closing his eyes. It was warm and a bit stuffy in the pterocar-the passenger compartment was slow to cool.

“Did you ever ship out with Athos?” Sorochinsky asked.

“No,” said Galtsev.

“I feel sorry for him. And I envy him at the same time. He’s lived through a life such as I’ll never have. I and most other people. But still, it’s all behind him now.”

“Why exactly is it all behind now?” asked Galtsev. “He’s just stopped spacing.”

“A bird with its wings clipped…” Sorochinsky fell silent for a moment. “Anyhow, the time of the Assaultmen is over,” he said unexpectedly.

“Nonsense,” Galtsev answered calmly.

Sidorov heard Sorochinsky start moving around. “No, it’s not nonsense,” Sorochinsky said. “There it is, the Egg. They’re going to build them by the hundreds and drop them on unexplored and dangerous worlds. And each Egg will build a laboratory, a spaceport, a starship. It’ll develop mine shafts and pits. It’ll catch your nematodes and study them. And the Assaultmen will just gather data and skim off the cream.”

“Nonsense,” Galtsev repeated. “A laboratory or a mine shaft is one thing—but an airtight dome for six people?”

“What bothers you—the airtight part?”

“No—the six people who’ll be under it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Sorochinsky said stubbornly. “It’s still the end of the Assaultmen. A dome for people is only the beginning. They’ll send automatic ships ahead to drop the Eggs, and then when everything is ready the people will come.”

He began to talk about the prospects of embryomechanics, paraphrasing Fischer’s famous report. A lot of people are talking about it, thought Sidorov. And all that is true. But when the first drone intrasystem craft had been tested, there had also been much talk about how all spacemen would have to do was skim off the cream. And when Akimov and Sermus had launched the first cyberscout system, Sidorov had even been on the point of giving up space. That had been thirty years before, and since that time more than once had had to jump into hell behind swarms of robots gone haywire, and to do what they could not. A greenhorn, he thought again about Sorochinsky. And a blabbermouth.

When Galtsev had said “Nonsense” for the fourth time, Sidorov got out of the car. Sorochinsky shut his mouth and jumped up at the sight of him. He had half an unripe watermelon, with a knife sticking out of it, in his hands. Galtsev continued sitting with his legs crossed.

“Would you like a watermelon, sir?” asked Sorochinsky.

Sidorov shook his head and, with his hands in his pockets, started looking at the top of the knoll. The red reflections from the polished surface of the Egg were dimming before his eyes. It was getting dark fast. A bright star suddenly rose out of the darkness, and slowly crawled through the black-blue sky.

“Satellite Eight,” said Galtsev.

“No,” Sorochinsky corrected with assurance. “That’s Satellite Seventeen. Or no—the Mirror Satellite.”

Sidorov, who knew that it was Satellite Eight, sighed and started walking toward the knoll. He was utterly fed up with Sorochinsky, and anyhow he had to inspect the movie cameras.

On the way back, he saw a fire. The irrepressible Sorochinsky had built a campfire and was now standing in a picturesque pose, waving his arms. “… the end is only a means,” Sidorov heard. “Happiness consists not in happiness itself, but in the pursuit of happiness.”

“Somewhere I’ve read that,” said Galtsev.

Me too, thought Sidorov. Many times. Should I order Sorochinsky to go to bed? He looked at his watch. The luminous hands showed midnight. It was quite dark.

The Egg burst at 2:53 a.m. The night was moonless. Sidorov had been drowsing, sitting by the fire, with his right side turned toward the flame. Red-faced Galtsev was nodding nearby, and on the other side of the fire Sorochinsky was reading a newspaper, leafing through the pages. And then the Egg burst, with a sharp, piercing sound like that of an extrusion machine spitting out a finished part. Then the hilltop glowed briefly with an orange light. Sidorov looked at his watch and got up. The hilltop stood out fairly sharply against a background of starry sky. When his eyes, blinded by the campfire, had adjusted to the darkness, he saw many weak orangeish flames, slowly shifting around the place where the Egg had been.

“It’s begun,” Sorochinsky said in an ominous whisper. “It’s begun! Viktor, wake up, it’s begun!”

“Maybe you’ll finally shut up now?” Galtsev snapped back. He also whispered.

Of the three, only Sidorov really knew what was going on on the hilltop. The embryomech had spent the first ten hours after activation adjusting to its surroundings. Then the adjustment process had ended, and the embryo had begun to develop. Everything in the Egg that was not needed for development had been cannibalized for the alteration and strengthening of the working organs, the effectors. Then the shell was broken open, and the embryo started to nourish itself on the feed at its feet.

The flames got bigger and bigger, and they moved faster and faster. They could hear a buzzing and a shrill gnashing—the effectors were biting into the ground and pulverizing chunks of tuff. Flash, flash! Clouds of bright smoke noiselessly detached themselves from the hilltop and swam off into the starry sky. An uncertain, trembling reflection lit up the strange, ponderously turning shapes for a second, and then everything disappeared again.

“Shall we go a little closer?” asked Sorochinsky.

Sidorov did not answer. He was remembering how the first embryomech, the ancestor of the Egg, had been tested. At that time, several years before, Sidorov had been a complete newcomer to embryomechanics. The “embryo” had been spread throughout a spacious tent near the Institute-eighteen boxes of it, like safes, along the walls-and in the middle there had been an enormous pile of cement. The effector and digestive systems were buried in the cement pile. Fischer had waved a hand and someone closed a knife switch. They had sat in the tent until late in the evening, forgetting about everything in the world. The pile of cement melted away, and by evening the features of a standard lithoplast three-room house, with steam heating and autonomous electrohousekeeping, had risen out of the steam and smoke. It was exactly like the factory model, except that in the bathroom a ceramic cube, the “stomach,” was left, along with the complicated articulations of the effectors. Fischer had looked the house over, tapped the effectors with his foot, and said, “Enough of this fooling around. It’s time to make an Egg.”

That was the first time the word had been spoken. Then had come a lot of work, many successes, and many more failures. The embryo had learned to adjust itself, to adapt to sharp changes of environment, to renew itself. It had learned to develop into a house, an excavator, a rocket. It had learned not to smash up when it fell into a chasm, not to malfunction while floating on waves of molten metal, not to fear absolute zero… No, thought Sidorov, it’s a good thing that I stayed on Earth.

The clouds of bright smoke flew off the hilltop faster and faster. The cracking, scraping, and buzzing merged into an uninterrupted jangling noise. The wandering red flames were forming chains, and the chains were twisting into queer moving lines. A pink glow settled over them, and he could already make out something enormous and bulging, rocking like a ship on waves.

Sidorov again looked at his watch. It was five to four. Obviously the lava and tuff had turned out to be eminently suitable material—the dome was rising much faster than it had on cement. He wondered what would come next. The mechanism built the dome from the top down, as the effectors dug deeper and deeper into the knoll. To keep the dome from ending up underground, the embryo would have to resort either to driving piles for support, or to moving the dome to one side of the pit dug by the effectors. Sidorov imagined the white-hot edge of the dome, to which the effectors’ scoops were molding more and more bits of lithoplast heated to malleability.

For a minute the hilltop was plunged into darkness. The din ceased, and only a vague buzzing could be heard. The embryo was readjusting the work of the energy system.

“Sorochinsky,” said Sidorov.

“Here!”

“Get over to the thermocamera and shove it up a little closer. But don’t climb the knoll.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sidorov heard him ask Galtsev for the flashlight in a whisper, and then a yellow circle of light bobbed over the gravel and disappeared.

The noise started again. The pink glow reappeared on the hilltop. Sidorov thought that the black dome had moved a little, but he was not sure about it. He thought with vexation that he should have sent Sorochinsky to the thermocamera right away, as soon as the embryo had burst from the Egg.

Then something gave a deafening roar. The hilltop blazed up in red. A crimson bolt of lightning slowly crawled down the black slope, then disappeared. The pink glow turned yellow and bright, and was immediately obscured by thick smoke. A thundering blow struck his ears, and with horror Sidorov saw an enormous shadow which had risen up in the smoke and flames which shrouded the hilltop. Something massive and unwieldy, reflecting a lustrous brilliance, started rocking on thin shaky legs. Another blow thundered out, and another glowing bolt of lightning zigzagged down the slope. The ground trembled, and the shadow which had appeared in the smoky glow collapsed.

Sidorov started running along the knoll. Inside it, something crashed and cracked, waves of hot air shimmered at his feet, and in the red, dancing light Sidorov saw the movie cameras—the sole witnesses of what was happening on the hilltop—starting to fall, taking lumps of lava with them. He stumbled over one camera. It wobbled, spreading wide the bent legs of the stand. He moved more slowly then, and hot gravel rained down the slope toward him. It quieted down above, but something still smouldered in the darkness there. Then another blow resounded, and Sidorov saw a weak yellow flash.

The hilltop smelled of hot smoke plus something unfamiliar and acrid. Sidorov stopped on the edge of an enormous pit with perpendicular edges. In the pit a nearly finished dome—the airtight dome for six people, with hall and oxygen filtration—was lying on its side. Molten slag glimmered in the pit. Against this background he could see the torn-off hemomechanical tentacles of the embryo waving weakly and helplessly. Out of the pit came hot acrid smells.

“What can the matter be?” Sorochinsky asked in a whining voice.

Sidorov raised his head and saw Sorochinsky on hands and knees at the very edge of the crater.

“I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down,” Sorochinsky said mournfully. “I’ll huff, and I’ll—”

“Shut up,” Sidorov said quietly. He sat down on the edge of the pit and started to work his way down.

“Don’t,” said Galtsev. “It’s dangerous.”

“Shut up,” Sidorov repeated. He had to find out fast what had happened here. The developmental work on the Egg, the most perfect machine created by human beings, could not be interfered with. It was the most perfect machine, the most intelligent machine…

The intense heat singed his face. Sidorov squinted and crawled down past the red-hot edge of the newborn dome. He looked around below. He caught sight of fallen concrete arches, rusty blackened reinforcement bars, a broad dark passageway which led somewhere into the depths of the knoll. Something turned ponderously underfoot. Sidorov bent over. He did not at once realize what this gray metal stump was, but when he did, he understood everything. It was an artillery shell.

The knoll was hollow. Two hundred years ago some bunch of bastards had built a dark, concrete-lined chamber inside it. They had stuffed this chamber full of artillery shells. The mechanism erecting the supporting piles for the dome had broken into the vault. The crumbling concrete had not been able to bear the weight of the dome. The piles had slipped into it as if into quicksand. Then the machine had started flooding the concrete with molten lithoplast. The poor embryomech could not know that there was an ammunition dump here. It couldn’t even know what an artillery shell was, because the people who had given life to its program had themselves forgotten what artillery shells were. It seemed that the shells were charged with TNT. The TNT had degraded over two hundred years, but not completely. Not in all the shells. And all of them that could explode, had started exploding. And the mechanism had been turned into a junkheap.

Pebbles showered down from above. Sidorov looked up and saw Galtsev descending toward him. Sorochinsky was coming down the opposite wall.

“Where are you going?” Sidorov asked.

Sorochinsky answered in a small voice, “We want to help, sir.”

“I don’t need help.”

“We only…” Sorochinsky began, and hesitated.

A crack opened up along the wall behind Sidorov.

“Look out!” yelled Sorochinsky.

Sidorov stepped to the side, tripped over the shell, and fell. He landed face down and immediately turned over on his back. The dome rocked, and ponderously collapsed, burying its scorching-hot edge deep into the black ground. The ground trembled. Hot air lashed Sidorov’s face.

A white haze hung over the knoll, where the dome, sticking up out of the crater, shone dimly. Something was still smouldering there, and from time to time it gave off muffled crackling sounds. Galtsev, his eyes red, was sitting with his arms around his knees, looking at the knoll too. His arms were wound with bandages and the entire left half of his face was black with dirt and soot. He had not yet washed it off, although the sun had risen long ago. Sorochinsky was sleeping by the campfire, the suede jacket covering his head.

Sidorov lay down on his back and placed his hands under his head. He didn’t want to look at the knoll, at the white haze, at Galtsev’s fierce-looking face. It was very pleasant lying there and staring into the blue, blue sky. You could look into that sky for hours. He had known that when he was an Assaultman, when he had jumped for the north pole of Vladislava, when he had stormed Belinda, when he had sat alone in a smashed boat on Transpluto. There was no sky at all there, just a black starry void and one blinding star—the Sun. He had thought then that he would give the last minutes of his life if only he could see a blue sky once more. On Earth that feeling had quickly been forgotten. It had been that way even before, when for years at a time he had not seen blue sky, and each second of those years could have been his last. But it did not befit an Assaultman to think about death. Though on the other hand you had to think a lot about possible defeats. Gorbovsky had once said that death is worse than any defeat, even the most shattering. Defeat was always really only an accident, a setback which you could surmount. You had to surmount it. Only the dead couldn’t fight on. But no, the dead could fight on, and even inflict a defeat.

Sidorov lifted himself up a little and looked at Galtsev, and wanted to ask him what he thought about all this. Galtsev had also been an Assaultman. True, he had been a bad Assaultman. And probably he thought that there was nothing in the world worse than defeat.

Galtsev turned his head slowly, moved his lips, and said suddenly, “Your eyes are red, sir.”

“Yours too,” said Sidorov. He should get in touch with Fischer and tell him everything that had happened. He got up and, walking slowly over the grass, headed for the pterocar. He walked with his head back, and looked at the sky. You could stare at the sky for hours—it was so blue and so astonishingly beautiful. The sky you came back to be under.

19. The Meeting

Aleksandr Kostylin stood in front of his enormous desk and examined the slick, glossy photographs.

“Hello, Lin,” the Hunter said to him.

Kostylin raised a high-browed bald head and shouted in English, “Ah! Home is the sailor, home from the sea!”

“And the hunter home from the hill,” the Hunter finished. They hugged each other.

“What have you got to delight me this time?” Kostylin asked in a businesslike tone. “Are you in from Yaila?”

“Right. Straight from the Thousand Swamps.” The Hunter sat down in an armchair and stretched out his legs. “And you’re getting fatter and balder, Lin. Sedentary life will be the death of you. Next time I’ll take you with me.”

Kostylin touched his potbelly worriedly. “Yes,” he said. “Terrible. Getting old and fat. The old soldiers are fading away. So, did you bring me anything interesting?”

“Not really, Lin. Nothing much. Ten two-headed snakes, a few new species of polyvalved mollusks. What have you got there?” He reached out a hand and took the packet of photographs from the desk.

“Some greenhorn brought that in. You know him?”

“No.” The Hunter examined the photographs. “Not bad. It’s Pandora, of course.”

“Right. Pandora. The giant crayspider. A very large specimen.”

“Yes,” said the Hunter, looking at the ultrasonic carbine propped for scale against the bare yellow paunch of the cray-spider. “A pretty good specimen for a beginner. But I’ve seen bigger. How many times did he fire?”

“He says twice. Hit the main nerve center both times.”

“He should have fired an anesthetic needle. The lad got a little riled up.” With a smile, the Hunter examined the photograph where the excited greenhorn trampled the dead monster. “Well, okay. How are things with you at home?”

Kostylin waved a hand. “Chock full of matrimony. All the girls are getting married. Marta got hitched to a hydrologist.”

“Which Marta?” asked the Hunter. “The granddaughter?”

“Great-granddaughter, Pol! Great-granddaughter!”

“Yes, we’re getting old.” The Hunter laid the photographs on the table and got up. “Well, I’m off.”

“Again?” Kostylin said in vexation. “Isn’t enough enough?”

“No, Lin. I have to do it. We’ll meet in the usual place afterward.” The Hunter nodded to Lin and left. He went down to the park and headed for the pavilions. As usual, there were many people at the museum. People walked along lanes planted with orange Venusian palms, crowded around the terrariums, and over the pools of transparent water.

Children romped in the high grass between the trees-they were playing Martian hide-and-seek. The Hunter stopped to watch. It was a very absorbing game. A long time ago the first mimicrodons—large, melancholic lizards ideally suited to sharp changes in their living conditions—had been brought from Mars to Earth. They possessed an unusually well-developed ability to change their skin color, and had the run of the museum park. Small children amused themselves by hunting for them—this required no little sharp-sightedness and agility—and then dragged them from place to place so they could watch the mimicrodons change color. The lizards were large and heavy; the little kids dragged them by the scruffs of their necks. The mimicrodons put up no resistance. They seemed to like it.

The Hunter passed an enormous transparent covering, under which the terrarium “Meadow from the Planet Ruzhen” was located. There, in pale blue grass, the funny rambas—giant, amazingly varicolored insects a little like terrestrial grasshoppers—jumped and fought. The Hunter remembered how, twenty years earlier, he had first gone hunting on Ruzhen. He had stayed in ambush for three days, waiting for something, and the enormous iridescent rambas had hopped around him and sat on the barrel of his carbine. There were always a lot of people around the “Meadow,” because the rambas were very funny and very pretty.

Near the entrance to the central pavilion, the Hunter stopped by a railing surrounding a deep round tank, almost a well. In the tank, in water illuminated by violet light, a long hairy animal circled tirelessly—it was an ichthyotherion, the only warmblooded animal to breathe with gills. The ichthyotherion moved constantly—it had swum in those circles one year ago, and five years ago, and forty years ago, when the Hunter had first seen it. The famous Sallier had captured the animal with enormous difficulty. Now Sallier was long dead, and his body reposed somewhere in the jungles of Pandora, while his ichthyotherion still circled and circled in the violet water of the tank.

The Hunter stopped again in the lobby of the main pavilion and sat down in a soft armchair in the corner. The whole center of the bright hall was taken up by a stuffed flying leech—sora-tobu hiru (Martian Wildlife, Solar System, Carbon Cycle, Type—Polychordate, Class—Pneumatoderm, Order, Genus, Species—sora-tobu hiru). The flying leech was one of the oldest exhibits of the Capetown Museum of Exozoology. This loathsome monster had been holding its maw, like a multijawed power shovel, agape in the face of everyone who had come into the pavilion for a century and a half. Thirty feet long, covered with shiny hard hair, eyeless, noseless. The former master of Mars.

Yes, those were the times on Mars, thought the Hunter. Times you won’t forget. Half a century ago these monsters had been almost completely exterminated. Then suddenly they started multiplying again, and started preying on the lines of communication between the Martian bases, just like in the old days. That was when the famous global hunt was organized. I bumped along in a crawler and couldn’t see a thing through the dust clouds the crawler treads had raised. Yellow sand tanks crammed with volunteers were darting along to my left and my right Just after one tank came out onto a dune, it suddenly overturned, and people spilled out of it every which way—and just then we came out of the dust, and Elmer grabbed my shoulder and started yelling, and pointing ahead. And I saw leeches, hundreds of leeches, whirling on the saline flat in the low place between the dunes. I started firing, and other people began shooting too, and all the while Elmer was fooling with his homemade rocket launcher, and he just couldn’t get it working. Everyone was shouting and swearing at him, even threatening him, but no one could move away from his carbine. The ring of hunters closed up, and we already could see the flashes of fire from the crawlers on the other side, and right then Elmer shoved the rusty pipe of his cannon between me and the driver, and there was a terrible roar and thunder, and I collapsed onto the floor of the crawler, blinded and deafened. Thick black smoke covered the saline flat, all the vehicles stopped, and the people stopped shooting and only yelled and waved their carbines. In five minutes Elmer had used up his ammunition supply, and the crawlers pushed on across the flat, and we started wiping out anything that remained alive after Elmer’s rockets. The leeches darted between the vehicles, or got crushed under the tracks, and I kept shooting and shooting and shooting—I was young then, and I really liked shooting. Unfortunately I was always an excellent shot—I never missed. And unfortunately I didn’t confine my shooting to Mars and to disgusting predators. It would have been better if I had never seen a carbine in my life.

He got up, went around the stuffed flying leech, and plodded along the galleries. Obviously he looked bad, for many people were stopping and staring at him anxiously. Finally one girl went up to him and timidly asked whether there was something she could do.

“Come now, my girl,” said the Hunter. He forced himself to smile, and he stuck two fingers in his chest pocket and drew out a beauty of a shell from Yaila. “This is for you,” he said. “I brought it from quite a way off.”

She smiled faintly and took the shell. “You look very bad,” she said.

“I’m no longer young, child,” said the Hunter. “We old people rarely look good. Too much wear on the soul.”

Probably the girl didn’t understand him, but then he did not want her to. He stared over her head and went on. Only now he threw back his shoulders and tried to hold himself erect, so that people would not stare at him any more.

All I need is to have little girls feeling sorry for me, he thought. I’ve come completely unstuck. Probably I shouldn’t come back to Earth any more. Probably I should stay on Yaila forever, settle on the edge of the Thousand Swamps and set out traps for ruby eels. No one knows the Thousand Swamps better than I—and that would be just the place for me. There’s a lot there to keep a hunter who won’t fire a gun busy.

He stopped. He always stopped here. In an elongated glass case, on pieces of gray sandstone, stood a wrinkled, unprepossessing, grayish stuffed lizard, with its three pairs of rough legs spread wide. The gray hexapod evoked no emotions from the uninformed visitors. Few of them knew the wrinkled hexapod’s wonderful story. But the Hunter knew it, and when he stopped here he always felt a certain superstitious thrill at the mighty power of life. This lizard had been killed ten parsecs from the sun, its body had been prepared, and the dry stuffed carcass had stood for two years on this pedestal. Then one fine day, before the eyes of the museum visitors, ten tiny quick-moving hexapods had crawled from the wrinkled gray hide of their parent. They had immediately died in Earth’s atmosphere, burned up from an excess of oxygen, but the commotion had been frightful, and the zoologists did not know to this day how such a thing could have happened. Life was indeed the only thing in existence that merited worship…

The Hunter wandered through the galleries, switching from pavilion to pavilion. The bright African sun—the good, hot sun of Earth—shone down on beasts born under other suns hundreds of billions of miles away, beasts now sealed in vitriplast. Almost all of them were familiar to the Hunter-he had seen them many times, and not only in the museum. Sometimes he stopped in front of new exhibits, and read the strange names of the strange animals, and the familiar names of the hunters.

“Maltese sword,”

“speckled zo,”

“great ch’i-ling,”

“lesser ch’i-ling,”

“webbed capuchin,”

“black scarecrow,”

“queen swan”… Simon Kreutzer, Vladimir Babkin, Bruno Bellar, Nicholas Drew, Jean Sallier fils. He knew them all and was now the oldest of them, although not the most successful. He rejoiced to learn that Sallier fils had at last bagged a scaly cryptobranchiate, that Vladimir Babkin had gotten a live glider slug back to Earth, and that Bruno Bellar had at last shot that hooknose with the white webbing that he had been hunting on Pandora for several years.

In this way he arrived at Pavilion Ten, where there were many of his own trophies. Here he stopped at almost every exhibit, remembering and relishing. Here’s the flying carpet, also known as the falling leaf. I tracked it for four days. That was on Ruzhen, where it rains so seldom, where the distinguished zoologist Ludwig Porta died so long ago. The flying carpet moves very quickly and has very acute hearing. You can’t hunt it in a vehicle—it has to be tracked day and night, by searching out faint, oily traces on the leaves of trees. I tracked this one down once, and since that time no one else has, and Sallier père used to get on his high horse and say that it was a lucky accident. The Hunter ran his finger with pride across the letters cut into the descriptive plaque: “Acquired and Prepared by Hunter P. Gnedykh.” I fired four times and didn’t miss once, but it was still alive when it collapsed on the ground, breaking branches off of the green tree trunks. That was back when I still carried a gun.

And there’s the eyeless monster from the heavy-water swamps of Vladislava. Eyeless and formless. No one had any idea what form to give it when they mounted it for exhibit, and so finally they did it to match the best photograph. I chased it through the swamp to the edge, where several pitfalls were set up, and it fell into one and roared for a long time there and it took two bucketsful of beta-novocaine to put it to sleep. That was fairly recently, ten years ago, and by then I wouldn’t use a gun. Pleased to meet you again, monster.

The farther the Hunter went into the galleries of Pavilion Ten, the slower his steps became. Because he didn’t want to go farther. Because he couldn’t go farther. Because the most important meeting was coming up. And with every step he felt more keenly the familiar melancholy sense of helplessness. The round white eyes were already staring at him out of the clear plastic case…

As usual, he went up to the small exhibit with his head bowed, and first of all he read the notation on the descriptive plaque, which he already knew by heart: “Wildlife of the Planet Crookes, System of EN 92, Carbon Cycle, Type—Monochordate, Class, Order, Genus, Species—Quadrabrachium tridactylus. Acquired by Hunter P. Gnedykh, Prepared by Doctor A. Kostylin.” Then he raised his eyes.

Under the transparent plastic cover, on a polished slanting plate, lay a head—strongly flattened in the vertical plane, bare and black, with a flat, oval face. The skin on the face was smooth as a drumhead, and there were no teeth, no mouth, no nose apertures. There were only eyes. Round, white, with small black pupils, and remarkably widely spaced. The right eye was slightly damaged, and this gave a strange expression to its dead gaze. Lin was a superb taxidermist—the threefinger had had exactly that expression when the Hunter first bent over it in the fog. That had been long ago.

Seventeen years ago. Why did it happen? thought the Hunter. I hadn’t even planned on going hunting there, Crookes had said that there was no life there, except bacteria and land crabs. And still, when Sanders asked me to take a look around the area, I grabbed my carbine.

Fog hung over the rocky screes. A small red sun—the red dwarf EN 92—was rising, and the fog looked reddish. Rocks crunched under the rover’s soft treads, and low crags swam out of the fog one after another. Then something started rustling on the crest on the top of one of the crags, and the Hunter stopped his vehicle. It was impossible to get a good look at the animal at this distance. Furthermore, the fog and the murky illumination lowered the visibility. But the Hunter had an experienced eye. Some sort of large vertebrate was of course stealing along the crest of the crag, and the Hunter was glad that he had brought his carbine along after all. We’ll show up old Crookes, he thought gaily. He raised the hatch, stuck the barrel of his carbine out carefully, and started to aim. At a moment when the fog had gotten a little thinner and the hunched-up silhouette of the animal showed up distinctly against a background of reddish sky, the Hunter fired. Immediately a blinding violet flash rose up from the place where the animal had been. Something made a loud crash, and a long hissing sound could be heard. Then clouds of gray smoke rose up over the crest and mixed with the fog.

The Hunter was greatly surprised. He remembered loading the carbine with anesthetic needles, and the last thing you would expect from them would be an explosion like this one. He climbed out of the rover and started looking for his kill. He found it where he had expected, under the crag on the rocky scree. It really was a four-legged or four-armed animal, the size of a large Great Dane. It was frightfully burned and mutilated, and the Hunter was amazed by what horrible effect an ordinary anesthetic needle had had. It was hard even to imagine the original appearance of the animal. Only the forepart of the head—a flattened oval, covered with smooth black skin, with lifeless white eyes—remained relatively intact.

On Earth, Kostylin had gotten busy with the trophy. After a week he told the Hunter that the trophy was badly damaged and was of no special interest, save, perhaps, as a proof of the existence of higher forms of animal life in the systems of red dwarfs—and he advised him to be a little more careful with thermite cartridges in future.

“You would almost think you’d fired at it out of fright,” Kostylin said in irritation, “as if it had attacked you.”

“But I remember perfectly well that I shot a needle,” the Hunter objected.

“And I see perfectly well that you hit it in the backbone with a thermite bullet,” Lin answered.

The Hunter shrugged and did not argue. He wondered, of course, what could have caused such an explosion, but after all it was not really all that important.

Yes, it seemed quite unimportant then, the Hunter thought. He still stood there, and kept looking at the flat head of the threefinger. I laughed a little at Crookes, argued a bit with Lin, and forgot everything. And then came doubt, and with it, grief.

Crookes organized two major expeditions. He covered an enormous area on the planet that bore his name. And he did not find one animal there larger than a land crab the size of a little finger. Then, in the southern hemisphere, on a rocky plateau, he discovered a landing pad of unknown origin—a round plot of fused basalt about twenty meters in diameter. At first this find had aroused much interest, but then it had been discovered that Sanders’s starship had landed somewhere in that area two years before for emergency repairs, and the find was forgotten. Forgotten by everyone except the Hunter. Because by that time doubts had already formed in the Hunter’s mind.

The Hunter had once heard a story, in the Spacers’ Club in Leningrad, about how an engineer had almost gotten burned alive on the planet Crookes. He had climbed out of the ship with a defective oxygen tank. There was a leak in it, and the Crookesian atmosphere was saturated with light hydrocarbons that react violently with free oxygen. Fortunately, they had managed to tear the burning tank off the poor fellow, and he had escaped with only minor burns. As the Hunter had listened to this story, a violet flash over a black hillcrest appeared before his eyes.

When a strange landing pad had been discovered on Crookes, doubts turned into horrible certainty. The Hunter had run to Kostylin. “What have I killed?” he shouted. “Was it an animal or a person? Lin, what have I killed?”

Kostylin listened to him, his eyes turning bloodshot, and then shouted, “Sit down! Cut the hysterics—you’re like a whining old woman! Where do you get off talking to me this way? Do you think that I, Aleksandr Kostylin, can’t tell the difference between an intelligent being and an animal?”

“But the landing site!”

“You yourself landed on that mesa with Sanders.”

“The flash! I hit his oxygen tank!”

“You shouldn’t have fired thermite bullets in a hydrocarbon atmosphere.”

“Have it your way, but Crookes still didn’t find even one more threefinger! I know it was an alien spacer!”

“Hysterical old woman!” yelled Lin. “It could be they won’t find one more threefinger on Crookes for another century! It’s an enormous planet, filled with caves like a giant Swiss cheese! You simply lucked out, you idiot, and then you didn’t manage to follow it through, so you ended up bringing me charred bones instead of an animal!”

The Hunter clenched his hands so that his knuckles cracked. “No, Lin, I didn’t bring you an animal,” he muttered. “I brought you an alien spacer.”

How many words you wasted, Lin old fellow! How many times you tried to convince me! How many times I thought that doubt had departed forever, that I could breathe easy again and not know myself a murderer. Could be like other people. Like the children playing Martian hide-and-seek. But you can’t kill doubt with casuistry.

He lay his hands on the case and pressed his face to the clear plastic. “What are you?” he asked with sad yearning.

Lin saw him from afar, and, as always, he was unbearably pained by the sight of a man once so daring and cheerful, now so fearfully broken by his own conscience. But he pretended that everything was wonderful, like the wonderful sunny Capetown day. Clicking his heels noisily, Lin went up to the Hunter, put his hand on his shoulder, and exclaimed in a deliberately cheery voice, “The meeting is over! I could eat a horse, Polly, so we’ll go to my place now and have a glorious dinner! Marta has made real Afrikaner oxtail soup in your honor today. Come on, Hunter, the soup awaits us!”

“Let’s go,” the Hunter said quietly.

“I already phoned home. Everyone is aching to see you and hear your stories.”

The Hunter nodded and walked slowly toward the exit. Lin looked at his stooped back and turned to the exhibit. His eyes met the dead white eyes behind the clear pane. Did you have your talk? Lin asked silently.

Yes.

You didn’t tell him anything?

No.

Lin looked at the descriptive plaque. “Quadrabrachium tridactylus. Acquired by Hunter P. Gnedykh. Prepared by Doctor A. Kostylin.” He looked at the Hunter again and quickly, stealthily, after Quadrabrachium tridactylus, with his little finger he traced the word “sapiens.” Of course not one stroke remained on the plaque, but even so Lin hurriedly erased it with his palm.

It was a burden on Doctor Aleksandr Kostylin too. He knew for sure, had known from the very first.

20. What You Will Be Like

The ocean was mirror smooth. The water by the shore was so calm that the dark fibers of seaweed that usually swayed on the bottom, hung motionless.

Kondratev steered the minisub into the cove, brought it right up to shore, and announced, “We’re here.”

The passengers began to stir.

“Where’s my camera?” asked Slavin.

“I’m lying on it,” Gorbovsky answered in a weak voice. “Which, I might add, is very uncomfortable. Can I get out?”

Kondratev threw open the hatch, and everyone caught sight of the clear blue sky. Gorbovsky climbed out first. He took some uncertain steps along the rocks, stopped, and poked at a dry mat of driftwood with his foot. “How nice it is here!” he exclaimed. “How soft! May I lie down?”

“You may,” said Slavin. He also got out of the hatch and stretched happily.

Gorbovsky lay down immediately.

Kondratev dropped anchor. “I personally don’t advise lying on driftwood. There are always thousands of sand fleas there.”

Slavin, spreading his legs exaggeratedly wide, started the movie camera chattering. “Smile!” he said sternly.

Kondratev smiled.

“Wonderful!” shouted Slavin, sinking down on one knee.

“I don’t quite understand about fleas,” came Gorbovsky’s voice. “What do they do, Sergei, just hop? Or can they bite you?”

“Yes, they can bite you,” Kondratev answered. “Quit waving that camera at me, Evgeny! Go gather some driftwood and make a fire.” He climbed into the hatchway and got a bucket.

Slavin squatted down and started digging briskly into the driftwood with two hands, picking out the larger pieces. Gorbovsky watched him with interest.

“Still, Sergei, I don’t quite understand about the fleas.”

“They burrow into the skin,” Kondratev explained, rinsing the pail out with industrial alcohol. “And they multiply there.”

“Oh,” said Gorbovsky, turning over on his back. “That’s terrible.”

Kondratev filled the pail with fresh water from the tank on the submarine, and jumped onto the shore. Without talking, he deftly gathered driftwood, lit a fire, hung the pail over it, and got a line, hooks, and a box of bait out of his voluminous pockets. Slavin came up with a handful of wood chips.

“Look after the fire,” Kondratev directed. “I’ll catch some perch. I’ll be back in an instant.” Jumping from stone to stone, he headed toward a large moss-covered rock sticking out of the water twenty paces from the shore, moved around a bit on it, and then settled down. The morning was quiet—the sun, just coming above the horizon, shone straight into the cove, blinding him. Slavin sat down tailor-fashion by the fire and started feeding in chips.

“Amazing creatures, human beings,” Gorbovsky said suddenly. “Follow their history for the past ten thousand years. What an amazing development has been achieved by the productive sector, for instance. How the scope of scholarship has broadened! And new fields and new professions crop up every year. For instance, I recently met a certain comrade, a very important specialist, who teaches children how to walk. And this specialist told me that there is a very complicated theory behind this work.”

“What’s his name?” Slavin asked lazily.

“Elena something. I’ve forgotten her last name. But that’s not the point. What I mean is that here we have the sciences and the means of production always developing, while our amusements, our means of recreation, are the same as in ancient Rome. If I get tired of being a spacer, I can be a biologist, a builder, an agronomist—lots of things. But suppose I get tired of lying around, then what is there to do? Watch a movie, read a book, listen to music, or watch other people running. In stadiums. And that’s it! And that’s how it always has been—spectacles and games. In short, all our amusements come down in the last analysis to the gratification of a few sensory organs. And not even all of them, you’ll note. So far no one has, say, figured out how to amuse oneself gratifying the organs of touch and smell.”

“There’s the thing!” said Slavin. “We have public spectacles, so why not public tactiles? And public, uh, olfactiles?”

Gorbovsky chortled quietly. “Precisely,” he said. “Olfactiles. And there will be, Evgeny! There inevitably will be, some day!”

“But seriously, it’s all what you should expect, Leonid. A human being strives in the last analysis not so much for the perception itself as for the processing of these perceptions. He strives to gratify not so much the elementary sensory organs as his chief organ of perception, the brain.”

Slavin picked out some more chips of driftwood and threw them onto the fire. “My father told me that in his time someone had prophesied the extinction of the human race under conditions of material abundance. Machines would do everything, no one would have to work for his bread and butter, and people would become parasites. The human race would be overrun with drones. But the fact is that working is much more interesting than resting. A drone would just get bored.”

“I knew a drone once,” Gorbovsky said seriously. “But the girls didn’t like him at all and he just became extinct as a result of natural selection. But I still think that the history of amusements is not yet over, I mean amusement in the ancient sense of the word. And we absolutely will have to have some sort of olfactiles. I can easily imagine—”

“Forty thousand people in the stadium,” put in Slavin, “and all sniff as one. The ‘Roses in Ketchup Symphony.’ And the critics—with enormous noses—will write, ‘In the third movement, with an impressive dissonance, into the tender odor of two rose petals bursts the brisk fragrance of a fresh onion.’”

When Kondratev returned with a string of fresh fish, the spacer and the writer were guffawing in front of a dying fire.

“What’s so funny?” Kondratev inquired curiously.

“It’s just joie de vivre, Sergei,” Slavin answered. “Why don’t you ornament your own life with some merry jape?”

“All right,” said Kondratev. “Right now I’ll clean the fish, and you take the guts and stick them over under that rock. I always bury them there.”

“The ‘Gravestone Symphony,’” said Gorbovsky. “First movement, allegro ma non troppo.”

Slavin’s face grew long, and he fell silent, staring glumly at the fatal rock. Kondratev took a flounder, slapped it down on a flat stone, and took out a knife. Gorbovsky followed his every movement with absorption. Kondratev cut off the flounder’s head slantwise in one blow, deftly stuck his hand under the skin, and swiftly skinned the flounder whole, as if he were peeling off a glove. He threw the skin and the intestines over to Slavin.

“Leonid,” Kondratev said, “fetch the salt, please.” Without saying a word, Gorbovsky got up and climbed into the submarine. Kondratev quickly dressed the flounder and started in on a perch. The pile of fish intestines in front of Slavin grew.

“And just where is the salt?” called Gorbovsky from the hatch.

“In the provisions box,” Kondratev shouted back. “On the right.”

“And she won’t start off?” Gorbovsky asked cautiously.

“Who is ‘she’?”

“The sub. The control board is what is on the right down here.”

“To the right of the board is a box,” said Kondratev.

They could hear Gorbovsky moving around in the cabin.

“I found it,” he said happily. “Should I bring all of it? There must be over five kilos of the stuff.”

Kondratev raised up his head. “What do you mean, five kilos? There should be a little packet.”

After a minute’s pause, Gorbovsky said, “Yes, you’re right. Coming up.” He got out of the hatch, holding the packet of salt in one hand. His hands were covered with flour.

Putting the packet down near Kondratev, he groaned, “Ah, universal entropy!” He was preparing to lie down when Kondratev said, “And now, Leonid, fetch a bay leaf, please.”

“Why?” Gorbovsky asked with great astonishment. “Do you mean that three mature, nay, elderly people, three old men, cannot get along without bay leaf? With their enormous experience, with their endurance—”

“Oh, come now,” said Kondratev. “I promised you that you would have some proper relaxation, Leonid, but I didn’t mean you could fall asleep on me. We can’t have this! The bay leaf, on the double!”

Gorbovsky fetched the bay leaf, and then fetched the pepper and sundry other spices, and then, on another trip, the bread. In token of protest, along with the bread he dragged out a heavy oxygen tank and said venomously, “I brought this at the same time. Just in case you needed it.”

“Many thanks,” said Kondratev. “I don’t. Take it back.”

Gorbovsky dragged the tank back with curses. When he returned, he did not even try to lie down. He stood next to Kondratev and watched him cook fish soup. Meanwhile, the gloomy correspondent for the European Information Center, with the help of two bits of driftwood, was burying the fish intestines under the “gravestone.”

The soup was boiling. From it wafted a stunning aroma, seasoned with the odor of smoke. Kondratev took a spoon, tasted, and considered.

“Well?” asked Gorbovsky.

“A pinch more salt,” Kondratev answered. “And perhaps some pepper, eh?”

“Perhaps,” said Gorbovsky, his mouth watering.

“Yes,” Kondratev said firmly. “Salt and pepper.”

Slavin finished interring the fish guts, put the stone on top, and went off to wash his hands. The water was warm and clear. He could see small yellow-gray fish scurrying among the seaweeds. Slavin sat down on a rock and looked around. A shining wall of ocean rose up beyond the cove. Blue peaks on the neighboring island hung motionless over the horizon. Everything was deep blue, shining, and motionless, except for large black and white birds which sailed over the rocks in the cove without crying out. A fresh salt odor came from the water. “A wonderful planet, Earth,” he said aloud.

“It’s ready!” Kondratev announced. “We will now have fish soup. Leonid, be a good lad and bring the bowls, please.”

“Okay,” said Gorbovsky. “And I’ll bring the spoons while I’m at it.”

They sat down around the steaming pail, and Kondratev dished out the fish soup. For some time they ate silently. Then Gorbovsky said, “I just love fish soup. And it’s so seldom that I get a chance to eat it.”

“There’s still half a bucket left,” Kondratev said.

“Ah, Sergei!” Gorbovsky said with a sigh. “I can’t eat enough to hold me for two years.”

“So there won’t be fish soup on Tagora,” said Kondratev.

Gorbovsky sighed again. “Quite possibly not. Although Tagora isn’t Pandora, of course, so there’s still hope. If only the Commission lets us go fishing.”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Those are stern and harsh men on the Commission. Like Gennady Komov. He’s sure to not even let me lie down. He will demand that all my actions coincide with the interests of the aboriginal population of the planet. And how should I know what their interests are?”

“You are an incredible whiner, Leonid,” Slavin said. “Taking you on the Contact Commission was a terrible mistake. Can you see it, Sergei—Leonid, our anthropocentrist par excellence, representing the human race to the civilization of another world!”

“And why not?” Kondratev said judiciously. “I greatly respect Comrade Gorbovsky.”

“I respect him too,” said Gorbovsky.

“Oh, I even respect him myself,” said Slavin. “But I don’t like the first question he’s planning to ask the Tagorans.”

“What question?” asked Kondratev, surprised.

“The very first: ‘Could I perhaps lie down?’”

Kondratev snorted into his soup spoon, and Gorbovsky looked reproachfully at Slavin.

“Ah, Evgeny!” he said. “How can you joke like that? Here you are laughing, while I’m shaking in my shoes, because the first contact with a newly discovered civilization is a historic occasion, and the slightest blunder could bring harm down on our descendants. And our descendants, I must say to you, trust us implicitly.”

Kondratev stopped eating and looked at him.

“No, no,” Gorbovsky said hurriedly. “I can’t vouch for our descendants as a whole, of course, but take Petr Petrovich—he expressed himself quite explicitly on the question of his trust in us.”

“And whose descendant is this Petr Petrovich?” asked Kondratev.

“I can’t tell you any more than that. It’s clear from his patronymic, however, that he is the direct descendant of someone named Petr. We didn’t discuss it with him, you see. Would you like me to tell you about what we did discuss with him?”

“Hmm,” said Kondratev. “What about washing the dishes?”

“No, I will not. It’s now or never. People should lie down for a while after a meal.”

“Right!” exclaimed Slavin, turning over on his side. “Go ahead and tell us, Leonid.”

And Gorbovsky began to tell them. “We were traveling on the Tariel to EN 6—an easy flight and not a very interesting one—taking Percy Dickson and seventy-seven tons of fine food to the astronomers there, and then the concentrator blew up on us. God alone knows why—these things happen sometimes even now. We hung in space two parsecs from the nearest base and quietly began to prepare for entry into the next world, because without the plasma concentrator you can’t even think about anything else. In this spot, as in any other, there were two ways out: open the hatches immediately, or first eat the seventy-seven tons of the astronomers’ groceries and then open the hatches. Mark Falkenstein and I held a meeting over Percy Dickson in the wardroom, and started making up our minds. Dickson had it easy—he had been conked on the head and was still unconscious. Falkenstein and I quickly came to the conclusion that there was no need to hurry. It was the greatest task that we had ever set ourselves—the two of us (there was no hope for Dickson) would annihilate seventy-seven tons of provisions. We could stretch it out for thirty years, anyhow, and after that would be time enough for opening the hatches if we had to. The water and oxygen regeneration systems were in perfect shape, and we were moving with a velocity of two hundred fifty thousand kilometers per second, and we still had the prospect of seeing all sorts of unknown worlds before we got around to the Next One.

“I want to make sure you understand our situation—it was two parsecs to the nearest inhabited point, and there was hopeless void around us, and on board there were two of us alive and one half-dead—three people, note; precisely three, and I say that as ship’s captain. And then the door opens, and into the wardroom walks a fourth. At first we weren’t even surprised. Falkenstein asked rather impolitely, ‘What are you doing here?’ And then suddenly it sank in, and we jumped up and stared at him. And he stared at us. Average height, thin, pleasant face, didn’t have all that frizzy hair that, say, Dickson has got. Only his eyes were unusual—they had the look of a pediatrician’s. And another thing—he was dressed like a spacer during a mission, but his jacket buttoned from right to left. Like a woman’s. Or, according to rumor, like the Devil’s. That surprised me most of all. And while we were looking at each other, I blinked, and looked again, and now his jacket buttoned the proper way. So I sat down.

“‘Hello,’ said the stranger. ‘My name is Petr Petrovich. And I know your names, so let’s not waste time on that. Instead we’ll see how Doctor Percy Dickson is doing.’ He shoved Falkenstein aside rather unceremoniously and sat down next to Dickson. ‘Excuse me,’ I say, ‘but are you a doctor?’ ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘you could say that.’ And he starts undoing the bandage around Dickson’s head. Laughing and joking, you know, like a kid undoing a candy wrapper. A chill actually ran across my skin. I looked at Falkenstein—he’s turned pale and is just opening and shutting his mouth. Meanwhile, Petr Petrovich had taken off the bandage and exposed the wound. The wound, I should tell you, was horrible, but Petr Petrovich kept his cool. He spread his fingers wide and started massaging Dickson’s skull. And, can you imagine, the wound closed up! Right before our eyes. There was no trace of it left. Dickson turned over on his right side and started snoring as if nothing had happened to him.

“‘Let him get his sleep now,’ says Petr Petrovich. ‘And meanwhile you and I will go see what things are like in the engine room.’ And he took us to the engine room. We walked after him like sheep. Except that, in contradistinction to sheep, we didn’t even bleat. As you can imagine, we were simply speechless. We hadn’t gotten any words ready for such an encounter. Petr Petrovich opens the hatch to the reactor and crawls right into the concentration chamber. Falkenstein gave a cry, and I shouted, ‘Be careful! Radiation!’ He looked at us thoughtfully, then said, ‘Oh, yes, right. Leonid and Mark,’ he says, ‘you go straight to the control room, and I’ll be along in a minute.’ And he closed the hatch behind him. Mark and I went to the control room and started pinching each other. We pinched silently, fiercely, cruelly. But neither of us woke up. And two minutes later the instruments come on, and the concentrator board shows the contraption is in a number-one state of readiness. Then Falkenstein stopped pinching and said in a low voice, ‘Leonid, do you know how to perform an exorcism?’ He had just said that when in came Petr Petrovich. ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘some starship you have here, Leonid. And some coffin. I admire your daring, comrades.’ Then he suggests that we sit down and ask him questions.

“I started to think furiously about what would be the smartest question to ask him while Falkenstein, a profoundly practical man, inquired, ‘Where are we now?’ Petr Petrovich smiled sadly, and at the same instant the walls of the control room became transparent. ‘There,’ says Petr Petrovich, and he points. ‘Right there is our Earth. Four and a half parsecs. And there is EN 6, as you call it. Change course by six-tenths of a second and go straight into deritrinitation. Or maybe,’ he says, ‘I should throw you right over to EN 6?’ Mark answered touchily, ‘Thanks just the same, but don’t bother, we’d rather do it ourselves.’ And he took the bull by the horns and started orienting the ship. Meanwhile I had been thinking about a question, and all the time into my head came something about ‘the eternal silence of the infinite spaces.’ Petr Petrovich laughed and said, ‘Well, all right, you’re too shaken up now to ask questions. And I must be on my way. They’re expecting me back in those infinite spaces. I think I had better explain briefly.

“‘You see, I am your remote descendant,’ he says. ‘We, the descendants, very much like to drop in on you, our ancestors, every now and then. To see how things are going, and to show you what you will be like. Ancestors are always curious about what they will be like, and descendants, about how they got that way. But I’ll tell you frankly that such excursions are not exactly encouraged. We’ve got to watch what we’re doing with you ancestors. We could goof something up and turn history head over heels. And sometimes it’s very hard to refrain from intervening in your affairs. It’s all right to intervene the way I’m doing now. Or like another friend of mine. He ended up in one of the battles near Kursk and took it upon himself to repel a German tank attack. He got himself killed, chopped into kindling. Terrible even to think about. Of course he didn’t repel the attack by himself, so nobody noticed. And another colleague of mine tried to wipe out the army of Genghis Khan. They hardly even slowed down… Well, that’s it, more or less. I’ve got to go now—they’re probably worrying about me already.’

“Here I yelled out, ‘Wait, one question! So you people are omnipotent now?’ He looked at me with a sort of kindly condescension and said, ‘Oh, come now, Leonid. We can do a few things, but there’s still enough work left for hundreds of millions of years. For instance,’ he says, ‘not long ago one of our children accidentally grew up spoiled. We brought him up—brought him up, and gave up on him. Threw up our hands and sent him off to put out galaxies. There are,’ he says, ‘ten too many in the next megasystem over. And you, comrades,’ he says, ‘are on the right track. We like you. We believe in you,’ he says. ‘Just remember: if you are what you plan on being, then we’ll become what we are. And what you, accordingly, will be.’ And he waved and left. And that’s the end of my tale.”

Gorbovsky propped himself up on his elbows and looked around at his audience. Kondratev was drowsing, basking in the sun.

Slavin lay on his back, staring thoughtfully at the sky. “‘We get up out of bed for the future,’” he slowly recited.” ‘We mend blankets for the future. We marshal our thoughts for the future. We gather strength for the future… We will hear the approaching footsteps of the element of fire, but we will already be prepared to loose waves upon the flame.’” Gorbovsky listened to the end and said, “That has to do with something about the form?”

Gorbovsky listened to the end and said, “That has to do with the content. But what about the form?”

“A good beginning,” Slavin said professionally, “but it turned sour toward the end. Is it really so difficult to think of something besides that spoiled child of yours?”

“Yes, it’s difficult,” Gorbovsky said.

Slavin turned over on his stomach. “You know, Leonid,” he said, “Lenin’s idea about the development of the human race in spirals has always struck me. From the primitive communism of the destitute, through hunger, blood, and wars, through insane injustices, to the communism of endless material and spiritual wealth. I strongly suspect that this is just theory for you, but I come from a time when the turn of the spiral was not yet completed. It was only in movies, but I did see rockets setting fire to villages, people in flames, covered with napalm. Do you know what napalm is? Or a grafter—do you know about that? You see, the human race began with communism and it returned to communism, and with this return a new turn of the spiral begins, a completely fantastic one.”

Kondratev suddenly opened his eyes, stretched, and sat up. “Philosophers,” he said. “A bunch of Aristotles. Let’s hurry up and wash the dishes, and then go swimming, and I’ll show you the Golden Grotto. You haven’t seen anything like it, you many-traveled old men.”