by Arkady
“I cannot refrain from warning you. If some misadventure should befall you there, you will be required to present yourself before the United Council of One Hundred and Forty Worlds.”
I pushed the door ajar. Crash! Bang! W-o-o-w! A-y-i-i! Toot-toot-toot! All of my five senses were instantly traumatized. I saw a good-looking blond with an indecent tattoo between her shoulder blades, all nakedness and long legs, firing two automatics into an ugly brunette, who showered red drops with each shot. I heard the thunder of explosions and the soul-rending cries of monsters. I smelled the indescribable stench of rotting and burned nonprotein flesh. The searing wind of a proximate nuclear explosion burned my face and I felt on my tongue the repulsive taste of pulverized protoplasm scattered through the atmosphere. I shied back and shut the door in haste, almost slamming it on my head. The air now seemed sweet and the world beautiful. The boy had disappeared. I was slowly reconstituting myself and then became concerned that the pest might have run to his United Council to complain. I ran to my machine.
Once more, the dusk of dimensionless time closed over me. But I did not take my eyes off the Iron Wall, as my curiosity was aroused. In order not to lose time for nothing, I jumped a whole million years into the future in one leap. Jungles of atomic mushrooms grew behind the wall and I was overjoyed when light again glimmered on my side of it. I braked and groaned in disappointment.
The vast Pantheon-Refrigerator towered not far away. A rusty spaceship of spherical shape was descending from the sky. There was no one around; wheat fields waved. The sphere landed and the erstwhile pilot in blue came out. The girl in pink appeared at the door of the Pantheon. She was covered with the red spots of bedsores. They ran toward each other and clasped hands. I turned away, feeling ill at ease. The blue pilot and the pink girl started a dreary dialogue.
I got off the machine to flex my legs and only then noticed that the sky behind the wall was unprecedentedly clear. There were no roars of explosions nor cracks of shots. Emboldened, I went to the communications port.
A perfectly flat field extended on the other side of the wall, cleft all the way to the horizon with a deep ditch. There was not a living thing to the left and the entire area was covered with low metallic domes, not unlike bulging manhole covers. Horsemen were prancing about on the horizon on the right side. Then I noticed a squat dark-faced man in armor sitting with his legs dangling over the edge of the ditch. Something resembling an automatic rifle with a very thick barrel was hung on his chest by a leather strap. He was chewing slowly, spitting every minute, and regarded me without any particular interest. I held the door open and looked at him too, not daring to speak. His appearance was just too strange. Uncommon. Savage. Who knew what sort of man he was?
Having looked his fill, he reached under his armor and pulled out a flat flask, pulled the cork out with his teeth, took a swig, spit into the ditch again, and said in a rusty voice in English, “Hello! You from that side?”
“Da,” I said. “I mean, yes.”
“And how is it going on out there?”
“So-so,” said I, shutting the door. “And how is it going on here?”
“It’s OK,” he said phlegmatically, and was silent.
After a while I asked what he was doing there. At first, he replied reluctantly, but then gradually grew more talkative. I learned that, to the left of the ditch, humanity was living out its last days under the heel of savage robots. The machines there had become more intelligent than men, had seized power and were now basking in all the delights of life, and had driven the men underground to work on the conveyors. To the right of the ditch, on the territory guarded by him, the men were enslaved by wanderers from a neighboring galaxy. They, too, had seized power, installed a feudal order, and were making the fullest use of the right of first night. They lived quite high, these wanderers (would that everyone could do as well), and this and that goody fell to those who served them well. About twenty miles from here along the ditch, there was a region where men were enslaved by conquerors from Altair, intelligent viruses which invaded people and forced them to do what they willed. Even farther to the west there was a large colony of the Galactic Federation. The men there were also enslaved, but their lot wasn’t all that bad because His Highness the Viceroy fed them well and enlisted them into the personal guard of His Majesty and Galactic Emperor E-U 3562-nd. There were also regions enslaved by intelligent parasites, intelligent plants, and intelligent minerals. Finally, over the mountain there were areas enslaved by still others, but all sorts of fairy tales were told about them, which no serious man could accept…
Here our conversation was interrupted. Several saucer-shaped flying machines flew low over the plain. Tumbling and twisting, bombs fell out of them. “It’s started up again,” growled the man, and he lay down with his feet toward the explosions and opened fire on the horsemen prancing on the horizon. I jumped out the gate, slammed the door, and leaning on it with my back, listened for some time to the bombs whistling, roaring, and thundering. The pilot in blue and the girl in pink on the steps of the Pantheon still had not concluded their dialogue. Once more I looked behind the door cautiously: over the plain, fireballs slowly bloomed. The manhole covers opened one after another, and pale, tattered men with bearded savage faces were pouring out, brandishing iron staves. The horsemen had ridden up to my erstwhile interlocutor, and were backing him to ribbons with long swords, while he hollered and tried to parry their blows with his automatic rifle.
I closed the door and carefully drew the bolt shut.
Returning to my machine, I sat in the saddle. I was tempted to fly another million years forward and view the dying earth described by Wells. But here, for the first time, something got stuck in the machine; the clutch did not seem to engage. I pressed it once, twice, then pushed the pedal with all my strength; something cracked, rang, the waving wheat fields stood on end, and I had the feeling of coming out of a profound sleep. I was sitting on the viewing stand on the stage of the small auditorium of our Institute and everyone was looking at me with awe.
“What happened to the transmission?” I asked, looking around in search of the machine. There was no machine. I had come back alone.
“That’s not important!” cried out Sedlovoi. “A big Thanks to you! You have really helped me out… Now, that was interesting: isn’t that a fact, comrades?”
The auditorium buzzed loudly to the effect that, yes, it was interesting.
“But I have read all of it somewhere,” one of the magisters in the first row said dubiously.
“And how else? How else?” cried L. Sedlovoi. “Was he not in the described future?”
“Not much adventure,” said the players of the Functional Sea Warfare game in the rear row. “Conversations, endless conversations”
“Well, I can’t help that,” Sedlovoi said forcefully.
“I like that,” I said, getting off the stand. “Just talk, eh?” I recollected how they had chopped my dark-visaged conversationalist and felt ill.
“No, after all, some interesting spots had occurred,” said one of the baccalaureates. “That machine, for instance…do you remember? With trigonic quoaters…that’s really something…”
“Now, then,” said Poopkov-Lahggard. “It seems we are already having a discussion. But then, perhaps, someone has a question for the lecturer?”
The dreary baccalaureate at once asked about the polyvelocity transmission (you see, he was interested in the coefficient of volume expansion) and I quietly withdrew.
I was experiencing a novel sensation. Everything around me seemed so real, solid, and material. People were passing by, and I could hear their shoes squeaking and feel the breeze from their motion. They were all very laconic, they were all working, thinking, and no one was prattling, reading poetry, or pouring forth bombastic speeches. Everyone knew that the laboratory was one thing and the stage of the union meeting, another, while a holiday meeting was something else again. So much so, that when Vibegallo passed me, slithering his
leather-soled felt boots, I was almost sympathetic toward him, just because he had the usual bits of cereal in his beard and was picking his teeth with a long fine nail and didn’t even say hello. He was a live, visible, and ponderable boor; he didn’t wave his arms, or strike academic poses.
I looked in at Roman’s because I wanted badly to tell someone about my adventures. Roman, chin in hand, was standing over a lab table, staring at a small green parrot lying in a petri dish. It was quite defunct its eyes covered with a dead whitish film.
“What is the matter with him?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Roman. “Just croaked, as you can see.”
“Where did you get it?”
“I don’t understand it myself,” said Roman.
“Perhaps it’s artificial,” I offered.
“Not at all; it’s a parrot-type parrot, all right”
“Probably Victor sat on the umclidet again.”
We bent over the bird and examined it attentively. It had a ring on its black stiff claw.
“Photon,” read Roman. “And some numbers…nineteen, oh-five, seventy-three.”
“So,” said a familiar voice behind us.
We turned and stood respectfully.
“Good day,” said Janus-U, walking up to the table. He had come out of his laboratory door in the back of the room, and he somehow projected a very tired and very sad look.
“Good day, Janus Poluektovich,” we said in a chorus of utmost respect.
Janus saw the parrot and again said, “So.” He took the small bird in his hands, very gently and tenderly, stroked its bright red crest, and said softly, “What happened, little Photon?”
He wanted to say something more, but glanced at us and remained silent. We stood together and watched him, walking with an old man’s gait, slowly go to the far corner of the room, open the door of the electric furnace, and drop the little green corpse in.
“Roman Petrovich,” he said. “Be so kind, throw the switch, please.”
Roman obeyed. He had that look of having been struck with a far-out idea. Janus-U, head bowed, stood a while by the furnace, scraped out the hot ashes carefully, and opening the window ventilator, threw them out into the wind. He looked out the window for some time, then told Roman that he was expecting him in his office in half an hour, and left.
“Strange,” said Roman, following him with his eyes.
“What is strange?” I asked.
“The whole thing is strange,” said Roman.
It seemed strange to me too, both the appearance of the green parrot, apparently so well known to Janus Poluektovich, and the altogether unlikely ceremony of the fiery funeral with the scattering of ashes on the wind, but I couldn’t wait to tell about my journey into the imagined future, so I began my tale.
Roman listened inattentively, looked at me in a resigned way, nodded in the wrong places, and then suddenly said, “Go on, go on, I am listening,” crawled under the table, came out with the wastebasket, and started to paw through the crumpled paper and pieces of magnetic tape. When I finished my story he asked, “Didn’t this Sedlovoi try traveling in the described present? In my opinion that would have been much more amusing…”
While I was thinking about this suggestion and appreciating the acuity of Roman’s wits, he turned the basket over and poured its contents on the floor.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Lost your dissertation?”
“You know, Sasha,” he said, looking at me with unseeing eyes, “it’s a curious thing. Yesterday I was cleaning out the furnace and found a charred green feather in it. I threw it into the basket, but it’s not here today.”
“What feather?” I asked.
“You know very well that green bird feathers occur quite rarely in our latitudes. And the parrot we just burned was green.”
“What sort of nonsense is that?” I said. “Didn’t you find the feather yesterday?”
“That’s the point,” said Roman, putting the litter back in the basket.
Chapter 3
Verse is unnatural, no one speaks in verse… Never descend to poetry, my boy.
C. Dickens
They kept on repairing the Aldan all night. When I went to Electronics next morning, the sleepy and annoyed engineers were sitting on the floor berating Cristobal Joseevich in uninspired invective. They were calling him a Scythian, barbarian, and Hun, who had gained access to computers. Their despair was so complete that for a while they actually listened to my advice and attempted to follow it. But then the chief arrived, a certain Savaof Baalovich Uni, and I was immediately displaced from the machine. Moving out of the way, I sat down at my desk and observed how Savaof Baalovich was divining the essence of the damage.
He was very old, but strong and sinewy, sunburned with a shiny bald head and closely shaved cheeks, dressed in a blinding white tussah suit. This man was regarded with great reverence by everyone. I saw for myself once how he was reading Modest Matveevich a lecture in a soft voice, and the menacing Modest Matveevich was bowing and repeating, “I understand. My fault. It won’t happen again…” A kind of monstrous energy emanated from Savaof Baalovich. It was noted that in his presence watches gained time, and the tracks of elementary particles, curved by a magnetic field, would straighten out. All the same, he was not a magus. At least, not a practicing magus. He didn’t go through walls, never transgressed anyone, and never created his own doubles, though he worked an inordinate lot. He was the head of the Technical Maintenance Department, knew all the technology in the Institute to the finest detail, and was a consultant to the Kitezhgrad magitechnic plant. In addition, he was involved in the most unexpected matters far removed from his profession.
I learned about his past only recently. In olden times, S.B. Uni was the leading magus on Earth. Cristobal Junta and Gian Giacomo were pupils of his students. Evil was exorcised with his name. Jinn bottles were sealed with his name. King Solomon wrote him letters of passionate admiration and erected temples in his honor. He seemed to be all-powerful. And then, sometime in the middle of the sixteenth century, he did become all-powerful. Having achieved a numerical solution of the integro-differential Equation of Perfection, which was postulated by some titan before the Ice Age, he acquired the ability to perform any miracle. Each of the magi had his own limits. Some were unable to rid themselves of the growth on their ears. Others were in possession of the generalized Lomonosov-Lavoisier law, but were powerless before the second law of thermodynamics. Still others—and they were very few—could stop time, but only in Riemann space and only for a short period. Savaof Baalovich was omnipotent He could do anything. And he could do nothing. Because the limiting boundary of the Equation of Perfection proved to be the condition that the miracle must not harm anyone. Not one intelligent being. On Earth or anywhere in any other part of the universe. But no one could envisage such a miracle, not even Savaof Baalovich himself. And so, S.B. Uni renounced forever the practice of magic and became the Head of the Department of Technical Maintenance at SRITS…
With his arrival, the affairs of the engineers quickly got on the mend. Their movements became purposeful and their nasty comments withered away. I got out the folder with my current assignments and was about to go to work, when Stellotchka, that very sweet, gray-eyed, and retroussé-nosed undergraduate witch in Vibegallo’s lab, came in and invited me to join her in the composition of the Institute gazette.
Stella and I were on the editorial staff, and we wrote satirical verses, fables, and captions for the illustrations. In addition to all this, I also drew clever pictures of a mailbox for notices, with winged letters converging on it from all sides. In general, the gazette artist was my namesake, Alexander Ivanovich Drozd, cinephotographer, who had successfully infiltrated the Institute. He was also our specialist on headlines. The editor-in-chief was Roman Oira-Oira, and Volodia Pochkin was his assistant.
“Sasha,” said Stellotchka, gazing at me out of her honest gray eyes. “Let’s go.”
“Where to?�
�� I said. I knew where.
“Make up the issue.”
“Why?”
“Roman is asking for it, very insistently, because Cerberus is complaining. He says there are only two days left and there’s nothing ready.”
Cerberus Curovich Demin, comrade Personnel Director, was the curator of our paper and its chief expeditor and censor.
“Listen,” I said. “Let’s do it tomorrow, OK?”
“I can’t, tomorrow,” said Stellotchka. “Tomorrow I’m flying to Sukhumi, to tape baboons. Vibegallo says that we should make records of the leader, as the most responsible of the baboons… He himself is afraid to go near the leader because he is jealous of him. What do you say, Sasha? Let’s go.”
I sighed, put away my worksheets, and followed Stellotchka, since I couldn’t compose verse alone. I needed Stellotchka. She always suggested the first line and the basic idea and, in my view, that was the main thing in poetry.
“Where are we going to work?” I asked on the way. “Over at the local committee room?”
“That’s taken, for putting Alfred on the carpet. On account of his tea. As for us, Roman has made room in his lab.”
“So what do we write about this time? About the steam-baths again?”
“About the steambaths, too. About that, about Bald Mountain, and, also, we have to roast Homa Brutus.”
“Homa Brutus—how badly you treat us.”
“Et tu, Brutus,” said Stella.
“That’s a thought,” I said. “I’ll have to work on that.”
On the table in Roman’s laboratory the paper was laid out—a huge, virginally clean sheet of drafting paper. Reclining next to it, among the gouache containers, atomizers, and notes, was our artist and cinephotographer Alexander Drozd, a cigarette hanging from his lip. As usual, his cute shirt was open, displaying a hairy potbelly through the crack.
“Greetings,” he said.
“Hello,” I said.
There was loud music—Sanya was exercising his portable receiver.
