“Teach me, teach me,” Victor grumbled, “I’m here for the first time.”
“Okay.” Ole scowled. “Damn it, it’s not as if we’re really going to test something truly unprecedented and completely new, instead of a gadget that people developed fifty years ago.”
With these words, he opened the transparent door and stepped resolutely into the fenced-off area. Victor followed his colleague inside and turned left, to the rack of tools and materials in the corner of the compartment. Here he put the bottle on a shelf.
Ole turned off the general light, switched on the simulation of the starry sky, sat down at the table, and prepared to check the computer, optical channel, and receiving device. They carried out the final adjustment and checking in a vacuum chamber—a transparent plastic box two meters long, one meter wide, and one and a half meters high. The equipment to be tested took up only a small portion of this volume.
The chamber stood on a pedestal twenty centimeters high. To the left of Victor, closer to its bottom, there was a connector through which the equipment under test could send data to the computer on Ole’s desk and simultaneously receive the image of the artificial starry sky from a small telescope.
“I’m ready,” Victor said to his invisible colleague, already hidden behind the equipment.
On the way to the laboratory, the engineers had agreed that Victor would perform only a couple of auxiliary operations. First of all, he needed to close the chamber hermetically or, more simply, screw its cover to the housing flange. Then he would turn on the pump.
So, at first, he would create a vacuum in the chamber, as if the device were still working in space. Then, also with the signal receiving unit working, he would let air into the chamber, simulating the entry of the descent vehicle into the atmosphere of a distant world.
He closed the transparent cover, sealed it, and, as usual, leaned over to examine the situation in the chamber. Then he turned on the pump.
After two hours, having finished the first stage of testing, he unscrewed the cover’s bolts and pushed it aside. Air first hissed, and then silently poured into the chamber, filling it.
The air conditioner, despite its efforts, didn’t completely rid the laboratory of the heat. Sweat dripped down Victor’s head and body. The hat and mask absorbed this moisture, but all in all they weren’t meant to take care of the engineer. So, as he had warned his colleague, even though he’d drunk a lot of beer, he felt thirsty.
The engineer looked at the rack, and the soda bottle. Then, in doubt, he glanced over to where Ole sat behind his partition made of gadgets. After this short hesitation, he eventually headed for the water.
Walking up to the stand, the man glanced at his colleague again and at the same time held out his hand to the plastic vessel. Trying to grasp it, he pushed it off the shelf. Realizing his mistake, Victor instantly turned his gaze to the rack and tried to catch the bottle in midair, but to no avail.
Alcohol reduced the speed and precision of his movements. Instead of catching it, he awkwardly pushed the plastic cylinder. It bounced off his fingers, fell to the floor and Victor saw that immediately a lot of bubbles formed inside the bottle.
“What happened?” Sitting in his chair, Ole rolled out from behind the equipment and, seeing his friend’s troubles, said, “We’re checking the equipment, not destroying the lab.”
“It’s all right, the bottle’s not glass; there are no casualties or destruction,” Victor grinned crookedly, trying to hide his confusion.
The colleague sighed, shook his head, and went back to work. Victor pulled the mask down off his face, lifted the bottle off the floor, and unscrewed the cap. A mixture of gas and liquid instantly burst out of the vessel like a volcano explosion. He hastily closed the bottle, but it was too late. Sparkling water had splattered on him.
“Damn it,” Victor grumbled, looking irritably at the bottle in his hand. He made a second attempt. This time, he carefully, gradually unscrewed the cap and slowly released the gas.
“Still freshening up?”Ole’s voice sounded behind the partition.
“Done. The camera’s open. Let’s start the next series,” Victor replied after taking a few loud gulps.
He returned the bottle to the shelf and walked over to the already-open vacuum chamber. He bent down to see what was happening inside it. His vision slid over the device under test. At some point, he noticed a sparkling dot on one of the receiver boards. As if the weak light of an artificial night sky was reflecting off a polished object.
At first, he ignored this faint glimpse in the laboratory’s dim lighting, but a second later, it made him doubt. After a little thought, not seeing anything, he squatted down, got up, and bent down a couple more times, looking at that place from different angles, but despite all his efforts, he found nothing suspicious.
What could sparkle here? Boards with microcircuits, their coolers, mounts—they were all matte, not glossy, nothing polished. Maybe a lens. Victor examined the glass piece again. In reply it gleamed to him with its absolutely clean and transparent surface. After another short reflection, the man decided he was just imagining it; and that the beer had made him too suspicious. He chuckled.
“Did something amuse you? Did something funny happen here?” His invisible friend asked.
“Nothing. Foretasting a journey to the stars, the technique decided to imitate their radiance, he-he-he!” Victor replied light-heartedly, and glanced towards the other engineer.
Ole looked out from behind the instruments one more time. He bit his lower lip and stared thoughtfully at his colleague, who was looking into the chamber. Not seeing anything unusual, Ole returned to his monitor.
The next day, having slept enough, Victor remembered the incident, and now did not feel as careless about that glimpse as he had yesterday. He even wanted to talk about it with Ole, but then, remembering where his friend had gone, he changed his mind.
Instead, he recalled that, after he’d noticed that strange glimpse, they’d run many tests in different modes. The verifying had lasted almost four hours, and during this time the instruments hadn’t registered any deviations. After the completion of the work, he and Ole had filled out the corresponding protocol and confirmed each result with their signatures.
What was the point of calling now? Because of his own phantoms? What could have been there, a drop of water? Impossible. At that moment, he had been standing far from the chamber. If a drop of his water had actually hit the surface of the equipment, so what? Wouldn’t it have evaporated without a trace in the half-day while they conducted testing?
No, it would be pointless to bother Ole. There was nothing superfluous in the equipment and, moreover, absolute sterility was unattainable. The goal was only to keep pollution within a limit in which it did no harm. Moreover, this equipment would work not only in the vacuum of space but also in the atmosphere of an unknown planet.
A week later, during tests in near-earth orbit, the device also worked without any deviations or failures. Such impeccable reliability helped Victor to finally convince himself that during these laboratory tests, he really had imagined something.
In a way, he was right. It was impossible to find a microscopic residue on the surface of the cheap device after a drop of mineral water had evaporated from there. And it was completely harmless indeed and its influence was not felt for centuries…
Chapter 12
Time only stops if you fly in a vacuum, riding on a beam of light, or if you’re sitting inside of a black hole. Otherwise it flows constantly, and one day, more than a century after Victor’s inaccuracy, it caught up with a June day, just in the middle of its huge duration. The sun sometimes peeped out from behind the scattered clouds, and sometimes, rarely, hid back behind them. Arable meadows, covered with green grass, fresh and dense, spread out around. Livestock didn’t need to go far, so the old man and his granddaughter could easily watch their herd.
Even here, beyond the Arctic Circle, the hot season of the year had already be
gun. The old man and the teenager usually hid from the scorching sunlight under gray hats with wide brims, although this time the girl had taken hers off and put it in a bag. She, reclining on a plastic film spread on the grass, was exposing her face to the nearest star. Her grandfather sat in a folding chair, which he always wore on his shoulder while pasturing their domestic animals.
The girl got up from time to time, straightened her patched old jeans and yellow shirt with long sleeves, and carefully watched the surroundings. Although the situation had recently become quieter, nevertheless the safety of their family still depended solely on them. A state didn’t exist yet, or, at least, they didn’t know anything about it.
“Mira, today I’ll tell you the story of your grandmother Margot, as I promised you.” The old man said hoarsely, as he sat comfortably in his chair.
The girl looked at him, slightly surprised, asking, “Why today, exactly? What happened?”
The man ran his hand through his short beard and, looking aimlessly into the distance, answered, “I’ll tell you, because Nico and Dorothy, hmm, finally let me do so.”
He pondered for a few more seconds before resuming, “In the beginning, we didn’t know what we had encountered.”
Having said these few words, he fell silent again and sighed heavily. The wrinkles on his angular face deepened. He stared at the child and recommenced his narration: “By then, we didn’t yet understand that not only was famine itself dangerous, but that hungry people were even more perilous to us.”
The girl knew about this; she had been familiar with this notion from her very childhood. So she just nodded silently.
“It was the lack of that knowledge that killed your grandmother,” the old man said in a colorless voice.
Miriam sighed, eyes full of concern.
“By that time, hunger was already raging in the land. One of the villainous vagrants appeared in front of our yard and, having sprawled on the ground, began to yell for help.”
Anger was admixed in his voice.
“What happened next?” his granddaughter asked anxiously.
“Margot, inexperienced, like all of us, heard his shouting, and opened the wicket to rush to his aid. As soon as she approached him, the man instantly jumped up, grabbed Margot, raised a gun to her temple and ordered her to call us.”
Towards the end of the sentence, his voice faded. He fell silent for a while, took a flask from his bag and drank some water.
“Grandpa,” Miriam said in confusion, “I… maybe we shouldn’t talk about…”
“No, dear, you’d better know in this case. It will be useful for you in this difficult time,” the old man said, resolutely rejecting her offer.
The girl sighed and examined her surroundings uneasily.
Her grandfather went on: “So, when I and your father, hearing that scream, ran outside with our machine guns in our hands, the villain ordered us to drop our weapons.”
“Was he going to freely enter our house and take what he wanted?” the girl ventured to guess.
“He wasn’t going to take anything,” the old man said in a dull voice. “He was going to kill us all and live in our homestead.”
“Oh!” the frightened child’s voice exclaimed.
“Unfortunately, Margot also understood this, and quickly decided what to do. At the very moment when Nico and I were throwing our weapons to the ground, Margot hit the bandit with her elbow in his ribs and ran toward the pasture.”
“And what? The villain—” the girl began, but didn’t dare to finish.
“Yes, this red-haired marauder with a disheveled beard and a scar on his forehead roared and shot several times at Margot. The next moment, he realized his mistake and began to turn the barrel of his rifle toward us.”
The old man’s face, as if sewn from wrinkles, had petrified. “Another instant, and the villain would have pulled the trigger, but that moment appeared to be enough for your father. Nico fell to the ground, grabbed a gun…that terrible picture stands in front of my eyes even now.”
He reached his hand toward the flask, but changed his mind and continued, “Even now I can still see how the robber had begun to bend his finger, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the barrel aimed directly at me. Even now, I can’t understand the kind of power that lurked in a movement that could have instantly ceased my existence, but be that as it may, it absolutely paralyzed me!”
“It must have been very scary; it was probably fear that bound you,” Miriam said in an unnaturally lifeless voice.
“I doubt it.” The old man looked thoughtfully at his granddaughter. “You know, based on my feelings at that moment, I can say that the reason was the incomprehensibility, the great secret of parting with life. Hah, do you understand what I’m saying? After all, there is no one who can tell us how it happens.”
“Maybe,” the teenager said, frowning.
“Your father didn’t give me the opportunity to share in that mystery, but if I say that I am dissatisfied, it would be a lie,” her grandfather said, grinning.
Miriam also smiled, obviously relieved. Meanwhile, her grandfather finished his story: “A swarm of bullets came from Nico’s gun, piercing this bastard. Then I and your mother, who’d come running when she heard the noise of the shooting, contributed to turning the killer’s face into a mess.”
Miriam just stared at him with widened eyes.
“Yes,” the old man’s voice became muffled again. “We could not help her. She died, because in those days we still didn’t have the experience. Then the robberies had barely begun. We were just lucky that your father was a military man, and he’d prepared our estate before the looters reached our location.”
“Yes, I know that,” the girl said in a low voice.
The old man fell silent. Seeing this, the girl also sat speechless, sunk in thought. Their quiet mourning lasted until the moment when the girl, having come to herself, took up the binoculars which lay on the grass between them. She jumped to her feet and began to carefully examine their surroundings.
Deserted fields extended south and east. On the western side, halfway to the horizon, stood a hill fenced with metal sheets and crowned with their two-story house.
In the north, a couple of hundred meters away, there were bushes that she knew were formerly the border of their farm. Suddenly Miriam froze and stared at something with her mouth open.
Then she exclaimed in alarm, “Look, grandfather!” With these words, she pointed to the bushes.
Chapter 13
The man in his nineties struggled to his feet, took the binoculars from the child, and put the gadget to his eyes. Turning in the indicated direction, he adjusted the focus. A man and a woman came into his view. It seemed that they had just appeared from behind the bushes.
“Um,” he grumbled discontentedly. “Where did they come from, eh? It seems that over the past three months we haven’t seen any homeless people—I even felt happy, hoping that they had finally become extinct, yet here they are again! Dear, cock your weapon, but leave your safety on.”
"It seems they’re a man and a woman," the girl said, as she jerked the breech-block on her machine-gun. Her grandfather merely nodded.
He didn’t want to meet them, and even less talk to them. All of the previous conversations had ended in shooting. That was why the first time they’d driven their cattle into the pasture had been just a month ago; until then, they’d made only quick forays for haymaking.
And now strangers were here again! The old man waved his gun, gesturing for them to leave. Though he doubted that, at their distance and with the naked eye, they could easily read his movements. Miriam aimed her weapon at them.
Nevertheless, the new arrivals stopped and stood motionless. Then the man held out his hand to his fellow traveler as if introducing her. She raised her blue t-shirt, revealing a bloody, gray shirt-turned-bandage wrapped around her stomach.
“Ahem,” the old man muttered looking through the binoculars.
“What is happ
ening?” his granddaughter asked tensely. “Do I have to shoot at them, or just into the air?”
“I don’t know. The woman is injured,” her grandfather said slowly.
“So what?” The girl didn’t understand his indecision.
“They don’t look like robbers. I’ve seen a lot of them in my time. Maybe we let them come? But what if it’s a trap? While the wounded woman distracts us, the others, hiding in the bushes, attack us. Eh?”
“How do you know that someone else is hiding in the bushes? Have you noticed anyone?” The child’s voice gave away her fear. She looked helplessly at their house, seemingly trying to judge the distance.
“No, calm down, dear. I’m reasoning just in case,” the old man reassured her.
Both of them kept silent for quite a while. Then he resolutely said, “Okay. Let’s see.”
“What shall we see, grandfather?” Miriam said, not understanding the situation.
Instead of an answer, the old man ordered her, “Release the safety and carefully examine the vicinity. I’ll let them come.” Seeing the teenager’s surprised expression, he explained: “Don’t be scared, Mira. They really don’t look like the typical hungry vagabonds. And you know what? We’ve kept aloof for a long time. Maybe it’s time to find out what’s happening in the rest of the world. Maybe these two know something and would tell us? What do you think?”
“Grandpa, a minute ago you were telling me about Grandma Margot. How—”
“I remember that, but those tricks were dated long ago. Who, planning an attack today, would rely on them?”
“I don’t know, Grandfather. I’ve never talked with other people… Why do we need to know what is happening in other places?”
The old man looked thoughtfully at her before saying, “Well, dear, since you’ve asked such a question, we definitely need to talk to them! But let’s be careful!”
“Okay,” the girl reluctantly agreed. “What kind of weapons do they have?”
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