The Girl Nothing Happens To

MISSING VISITORS FROM SPACE

Preparations were proceeding for the triumphant reception of the Labutsiltsians. Never before had the solar system been visited by travellers from such a distant star.

The first signals of their approach had been picked up on Pluto, and in three days’ time communications were established by the radio observatory at Londel.

The Labutsiltsians were still far away, but the cosmodrome Sheremetyevo-4 was in full readiness to receive them. Girls from the ‘Red Rose’ Factory had decorated it with flower garlands, and students of the Postgraduate Courses for Poets were rehearsing a musical-literary programme. All the embassies had reserved viewing stands on the tiered reception platform. Correspondents stayed overnight in the cosmodrome canteen.

Alice lived not far away in the cottage at Vnukovo, where she was collecting plants for her herbarium. She wanted a better one than Vanya Shpits’s — he was in a senior group at her kindergarten. So Alice took no part in the preparations for the triumphant reception. She did not even know about it.

And I myself had no direct relation to it. My work would begin later, after the Labutsiltsians landed.

Meanwhile, events ran as follows. On March 8, the Labutsiltsians advised that they were entering into circular orbit. Almost simultaneously the tragedy occurred. Instead of the Labutsiltsian ship, the radar station intersected the Swedish satellite ‘Nobel-29’ which was lost two years ago. By the time the mistake was discovered, it turned out that the Labutsiltsian ship had vanished. It was making a landing when contact was temporarily broken off.

On March 9, at 6.33 a.m. the Labutsiltsians advised that they had landed in an area of 55°20’ latitude North and 37°40’ longitude East according to the terrestrial system of coordinates, with a possible error of 15 minutes — that is, not far from Moscow.

Further contact was interrupted and not restored, with the exception of one instance which I will return to later. It seemed that terrestrial radiation had a deadly effect upon the Labutsiltsian communications system.

At the same moment, hundreds of cars and thousands of people were hurrying to the visitors’ landing-site. The roads were packed with people hoping to find them. The cosmodrome Sheremetyevo-4 was deserted: not one reporter remained in the canteen. The sky over Moscow was covered with hovercraft, helicopters, prop-wing, ornithopters and vortex-skimmers — all kinds of flying machines. It looked as if a monstrous swarm of mosquitoes hung over the earth.

Even if the Labutsiltsian ship had gone underground, it would have been found all the same.

But it was not found.

Not one local inhabitant had seen the ship come down. And the strangest thing of all was that at the time almost every resident of Moscow and its suburbs was watching the sky. That surely meant a mistake had been made.

By evening, as I was going to the cottage from work, all normal everyday life on Earth was fairly disrupted. People were afraid something had happened to the visitors.

“Perhaps,” they argued on the monorail train, “they are made of anti-matter and evaporated on entering the Earth’s atmosphere?”

“Without an explosion, without leaving a trace? Nonsense!”

“But how much do we know of the properties of anti-matter?”

“Then who sent the radio message that a landing had been made?”

“Maybe some joker?”

“Not bad for a joker! So you think, perhaps it was he who was talking with Pluto?”

“But perhaps they’re invisible?”

“Even so, our locators would have found them…”

Nevertheless, the version of invisible guests won the majority of supporters.

I sat on the verandah, thinking it over. What if they had landed right beside us, on the neighbouring field? Now, poor things, they were standing by their ship wondering why people wanted to ignore them. And were on the point of taking offence and flying off… I was ready to leave the verandah and head for that very field, when I saw a string of people coming out of the woods. They lived in neighbouring cottages. They were holding hands as if playing the children’s game ‘The Farmer in the Dell, The Farmer Takes a Wife’, except they weren’t in a circle, but spread out. I realized my neighbours had outguessed my thoughts, and were searching for the invisible visitors from space by the sense of touch. And at that moment all the radio stations in the world suddenly burst into a thousand tongues. They were broadcasting a taped communique picked up by an amateur radio station in northern Australia. The communique repeated the same longitude and latitude as before, followed by these words: “We are in a forest… Sent out the first group to search for people. We are tuned in to your broadcasts. There is a surprising lack of contact…” At that point, communication broke off.

The version of invisibility immediately gained a few more millions of supporters.

From the verandah I could see the chain of cottagers stop, and then swing toward the woods. And at that moment Alice came up the verandah steps carrying a basketful of wild strawberries.

“Why are they all running about?” she asked, not bothering to say ‘hello’.

“Who do you mean by ‘they’? And you should say ‘Hello’ when you haven’t seen your one and only father since morning.”

“Since last night. I was still asleep when you left this morning. Hi, Daddy. But what’s going on?”

“The Labutsiltsians are lost,” I answered.

“I don’t know them.”

“Nobody does, so far…”

“So how did they get lost then?”

“They were flying to Earth. Landed, and disappeared. ”

I felt as if I were talking nonsense. But it was the simple truth, you see.

Alice glanced at me with suspicion.

“But do things like that really happen?”

“No, they don’t. Not usually.”

“But couldn’t they find the cosmodrome?”

“I guess not.”

“And where, exactly, did they get lost?”

“Somewhere near Moscow. Perhaps, not far from our cottage.”

“And people are looking for them by helicopter and on foot?”

“That’s right.”

“But why don’t they come to us themselves?”

“Probably they’re waiting till people come to them. You see, it’s their first visit to Earth, so they don’t want to leave their spaceship.”

Alice was silent, as if satisfied with my answers. She walked along the verandah once or twice, without letting go of the basket of strawberries. Then she spoke.

“Are they in the fields or the woods?”

“In the woods.”

“And how do you know?”

“They said so themselves. Over the radio.”

“That’s good.”

“What’s good?”

“That they’re not in the fields.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I was afraid I’d seen them.”

“What’s that again?”

“Why nothing, I was joking.”

I leaped to my feet. Alice can tell some regular whoppers at times…

“I didn’t go into the woods, Daddy. Honestly, I didn’t. I was in a clearing. So I didn’t see them.”

“Alice, tell me everything, everything you know. And don’t add any embroidery of your own. Did you see in the woods any queer … people?”

“Honestly, I wasn’t in the woods.”

“Well, all right, in the clearing then.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong. And they weren’t queer at all.”

“Now, you give me a straight answer. Where was it, and whom did you see? Don’t torture me, and all mankind in my person!”

“And are you mankind?”

“Listen, Alice…”

“Well, all right. Here they are. They came with me.”

I unwittingly looked around. The verandah was empty. And if you didn’t count a buzzing bee, nobody was on it but Alice and me.

“No, no, Daddy. That isn’t the place to look.” Alice sighed, and came over beside me. “I wanted to keep them for myself. I didn’t know mankind was looking for them.”

And Alice offered me the basket of wild strawberries. She raised the basket right up to my eyes and I, in complete unbelief, could clearly make out two little figures in space-suits. They were covered with strawberry juice, both sitting astride the same berry.

“I didn’t hurt them,” said Alice, in a guilty voice. “I thought they were gnomes from fairyland.”

But I wasn’t listening to her now. Tenderly holding the basket next to my heart, I dashed to the videophone, thinking that grass to them must have looked like a great forest.

That was how we first met the Labutsiltsians.