by Arkady
“‘Corpse overboard’ is a typical pirate expression,” elucidated Eddie.
“And rubidium?”
“R-rubidium! Res-erve! Tr-tremendous!” said the parrot.
“The rubidium reserves are huge,” translated Eddie. “It would be interesting to know where.”
I bent over to examine the ring.
“Could it be that it’s still not the same one?”
“And where is the one?” asked Roman.
“Well, that’s a different question,” I said. “That would be easier to explain.”
“Explain,” Roman demanded.
“Wait,” I said. “Let’s first decide the question: Is it the same one or not?”
“I think it’s the same one,” said Eddie.
“And I think it’s not the same one,” I said. “Here there’s a scratch on the ring, where the three—”
“Three!” pronounced the parrot. “Thr-ree! Hard-a-starboard! Sprout! Water-r sprout!”
Victor suddenly perked up. “I have an idea,” he said.
“What?”
“Word-association test.”
“How?”
“Wait! Everybody sit down and be quiet and don’t interfere. Roman, do you have a tape recorder?”
“I do.”
“Let’s have it. But everyone must be quiet. I’ll open him up, the rascal. He’ll tell me everything.”
Victor pulled up a chair, sat down with the recorder in his hand opposite the parrot, puffed himself up, fixed the parrot with one eye, and yelled, “R-rubidium!”
The parrot started and almost fell off the scales. Flapping his wings to regain equilibrium, he responded, “R-reserve! Cr-rater Ritchey!”
We looked at each other.
“R-reserve!” yelled Victor.
“Tr-remendous! Riches! R-riches! Ritchey is r-right! Ritchey is r-right! R-robots! R-robots!”
“Robots!”
“Cr-rashes Bur-rning! Atmospher-re bur-rning! Scr-ram! R-retreat! Scram! Dr-ramba Retr-reat!”
“Dramba!”
“R-rubidium! R-reserve!”
“Rubidium!”
“R-reserve! Cr-rater! Ritchey!”
“Short circuit,” said Roman. “Full circle.”
“Wait, wait,” Victor rattled on. “In a minute—”
“Try something different,” counseled Eddie.
“Janus!” said Victor.
The parrot opened its beak and sneezed.
“Ja-nus!” Victor repeated sternly.
The parrot gazed pensively out of the window.
“There’s no letter ‘R,’” I said.
“Possible,” said Victor. “Let’s try… Nevstr-r-uev!”
“Pr-ressing maneuver!” said the parrot. “Wizar-rd! Wizar-rd! Kr-rilo transmitting!”
“That is not a pirate’s parrot,” said Eddie.
“Ask him about the corpse,” I said.
“Corpse,” Victor said reluctantly.
“Bur-rial cer-remony! Temporal restriction! Or-ration! Or-ration! Cr-rap! Work! Work!”
“He must have had some curious owners,” said Roman. “What do we do now?”
“Victor,” said Eddie, “I think he’s using space terminology. Try something simple, routine.”
“Hydrogen bomb,” said Victor.
The parrot lowered its head and cleaned its beak with a claw.
“Tractor,” said Victor.
The parrot remained silent.
“It doesn’t work,” said Roman.
“Devil take it!” said Victor. “I can’t think of a single everyday item with an ‘R’ in it. Table, stool, ceiling, sofa…oh, translator!”
The parrot looked at Victor out of one eye. “Kor-rneev, r-request!”
“What?” asked Victor. For the first time in my life I saw Victor at a loss for words.
“Kor-rneev r-rude! R-rude! Great worker! R-rare r-rube! Dr-roll!”
We giggled. Victor looked at us and said vengefully, “Oira-Oira!”
“Elder-rly! Elder-rly!” the parrot responded readily. “Cheer-rful! R-reaching.”
“Something isn’t right,” said Roman.
“Why not right?” said Victor. “It’s very much to the point… Privalov!”
“Ar-rtles Pr-roject! Pr-rimitive! Hard wor-rker!”
“Fellows, he knows us all,” said Eddie.
“Wor-rkers!” responded the parrot. “Or-rain pepper-r! Zer-ro! Zer-ro! Gr-ravitation!”
“Amperian!” Victor said hurriedly.
“Cr-rematorium! Pr-remature r-rupture!” said the parrot, thought some, and added, “Amper-re—meter!”
“Dissociated nonsense,” said Eddie.
“There is no such thing as dissociated nonsense,” Roman said pensively.
Victor snapped the catch and opened the dictaphone. “The tape has run out,” he said. “Too bad.”
“You know what,” I said. “I think it would be simpler to ask Janus. What sort of parrot this one is, where it is from, and in general—”
“And who is the one to ask?” inquired Roman.
No one responded. Victor suggested listening to the tape again. At the very first words from the dictaphone, the parrot flew to Victor’s shoulder and sat there listening with evident interest, making comments such as, “Dr-ramba ig-nor-res ur-ranium,” “Cor-rect,” and “Kor-rneev r-rude!”
When the recording was finished, Eddie said, “In principle, you could compose a lexicon and analyze it on the machine. But this and that is clear even now. In the first place, he knows us all. That’s astonishing in itself. It means that he’s heard our names many times. In the second place, he knows about robots. And about rubidium. By the way, where is rubidium used?”
“In our Institute,” said Roman, “it certainly is not used at all.”
“It’s something like sodium,” said Korneev.
“All right for rubidium,” I said. “But how does he know about lunar craters?”
“Why lunar in particular?”
“Do we call mountains ‘craters’ on the Earth?”
“Well, right off the bat there’s the Arizona crater, and also, a crater is not a mountain, but a hole.”
“Tempor-ral r-rip!” the parrot said.
“He has the strangest terminology,” said Eddie. “In no way can I classify it as general usage.”
“Yes,” agreed Victor. “If the parrot is always with Janus, then Janus busies himself with strange matters.”
“Str-range or-rbital tr-ransfer!”
“Janus is not involved in space,” said Roman. “I would know.”
“Maybe he was previously.”
“Not previously either.”
“Robots of some kind,” Victor said sorrowfully. “Craters…why craters?”
“Perhaps Janus reads science-fiction,” I offered.
“Aloud? To a parrot?”
“Mmm, yes…”
“Venera!” said Victor, addressing the parrot.
“R-ruinous cr-raze!” said the parrot. It grew thoughtful, then elucidated, “Cr-rashed. Fr-ruitlessly!”
Roman got up and paced up and down the laboratory. Eddie put his cheek down on the table and closed his eyes.
“How did he appear here?” I asked.
“Same as yesterday,” said Roman. “From Janus’s laboratory.”
“You saw it yourself?”
“Uhuh.”
“I don’t understand one thing,” I said. “Did he or didn’t he die?”
“And how would we know?” said Roman. “I’m not a veterinarian. And Victor is not an ornithologist. And, in general, this may not even be a parrot.”
“What then could it be?”
“How would I know?”
“This could be an involved hallucinatory induction,” said Eddie without opening his eyes.
“Induced how?”
“That’s what I am thinking about now,” said Eddie.
I pressed my eyeball with a finger and looked at the parrot. The par
rot image split.
“It splits,” I said. “It’s not an hallucination.”
“I said—‘an involved hallucination,’” reminded Eddie.
I pressed on both eyes and was temporarily blinded.
“Here’s what,” said Korneev. “I declare that we are dealing with a suspension of the law of cause and effect. Therefore, there is but one conclusion—it’s all an hallucination and we should all get up, get in line, and depart singing to a psychiatrist. Form a line!”
“I won’t go,” said Eddie. “I have one more idea.”
“What?”
“I won’t say.”
“Why?”
“You’ll beat me.”
“We’ll beat you if you don’t.”
“So beat me.”
“You don’t have any idea,” said Victor. “You are just imagining it. Off to the psychiatrist.”
The door creaked and Janus Poluektovich came in from the hall.
“So,” he said. “How do you do!”
We stood up. lie went around and shook each of us by the hand in turn.
“Dear Photon,” he said, seeing the parrot. “He is not bothering you, Roman Petrovich?”
“Bothering?” said Roman. “Me? Why would he bother me? He is not bothering me, just the opposite…”
“Still, it’s every day—” Janus started to say something and suddenly stopped. “What did we discuss yesterday?” he asked, wiping his forehead.
“Yesterday you were in Moscow,” said Roman, with a strange submissive tone in his voice.
“Ah-h…yes, yes. Well, all right. Photon—come here.”
The parrot flew up, perched on Janus’s shoulder, and said in his ear, “Gr-rain, gr-rain! Sugar-r!”
Janus Poluektovich smiled tenderly and went into his laboratory.
We looked stupidly at each other.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Roman.
“To the psychiatrist! To the psychiatrist,” mumbled Korneev ominously, while we walked along the corridor toward his sofa. “Into crater Ritchey! Dr-ramba! Sugar-r!”
Chapter 5
Facts are always in plenty—it’s phantasy we lack.
D. Blokhintzev
Victor put the containers with the water-of-life down on the floor and we all flopped down on the sofa-translator and lighted up. After some time Roman asked, “Victor, did you turn off the sofa?”
“Yes.”
“I keep having this or that nonsense popping into my head.”
“I switched it off and blocked it,” said Victor.
“No, my good man,” said Eddie. “And why not hallucination, after all?”
“Who said that it’s not an hallucination?” asked Victor. “Didn’t I suggest a psychiatrist?”
“When I was courting Maika,” said Eddie, “I induced such hallucinations that I was frightened myself.”
“What for?” asked Victor.
Eddie thought. “I don’t really know,” he said. “Probably out of high feelings.”
“I ask: Why would anyone induce hallucinations in us?” said Victor. “And then, we are not Maika, either. We are, thank God, magisters. Who can best us? Maybe Janus, maybe Kivrin or Junta. Perhaps Giacomo, too.”
“But our Alexander is in the weak side,” said Eddie in a diffident tone.
“So what?” I asked. “Am I the only one who is seeing things?”
“As a general proposition, we could run a test,” said Victor, in deep thought. “If we had Sasha…you know—”
“No, no,” said I. “You will forget that for me. Aren’t there other methods? Press on the eyeball. Or give the tape recorder to an uninvolved person. Let him listen, and discover whether there is a recording or not.”
The magisters smiled pityingly.
“You make a good programmer, Sasha” said Eddie.
“Sprat!” said Korneev. “An embryo!”
“Yes, my dear Sashenka,” sighed Roman, “I can see you can’t even imagine what a really detailed, thoroughly induced hallucination is like.”
Dreamy expressions suffused the faces of the magisters—evidently sweet memories were evoked in them. I looked at them with envy. They were smiling, shutting their eyes in concentration. They were winking at an imaginary someone.
Then Eddie said suddenly, “Orchids bloomed for her all winter. They smelled of the sweetest scent I could think of.”
Victor came out of his trancelike state. “Berkeleyans!” he said. “Unwashed solipsists! ‘How awful is my perception!’”
“Yes,” said Roman. “An hallucination is not a fit object of discussion. It’s too simple. We are not children or old wives. I don’t wish to be an agnostic. What was that idea you had, Eddie?”
“I had? Ah, yes, there was one. Also a primitive one, basically. Matrixats.”
“Hmm,” Roman said dubiously.
“And how’s that?” I asked.
Eddie explained reluctantly that besides the doubles with which I was familiar, there also were matrixats—absolutely accurate copies of people and objects. In contradistinction to the doubles, the matrixat was identical with the original in structural detail. It was impossible to distinguish one by the usual methods. Special equipment was required and, in general, that was a highly complicated and demanding undertaking. In his own time Balsamo received his magister-academician degree for the proof of the matrixat nature of Philippe Bourbon, known popularly as the “Iron Mask.” This matrixat of Louis XIV was created in the secret laboratories of the Jesuits with the aim of seizing the French throne. In our time, matrixats were made by the biostereographic method à la Richard Segure.
I didn’t know then who this Richard Segure was, but I said at once that the matrixat concept could only explain the extraordinary similarity of the parrots. And that’s all. For example, it continued to be incomprehensible where yesterday’s dead parrot had gone.
“That’s true enough,” said Eddie. “And I don’t insist. Especially since Janus has no connection whatsoever with biostereography.”
“There you are,” I said more boldly. “In that event it would be better to suggest a trip into the described future. You know? The way Louis Sedlovoi does it.”
“And then?” said Korneev, without any special interest.
“Janus simply flies into a science-fiction novel, takes a parrot there, and brings him back here. When the parrot dies, he flies to the same page and again…it then becomes understandable why the parrots are similar. It is one and the same parrot and you can see why it has this science-fiction vocabulary. And furthermore,” I continued, feeling that I wasn’t doing so badly, “This could also explain why Janus asks the same questions all the time: each time he fears that he has returned on the wrong day… I think I have explained it all quite nicely, no?”
“And is there such a science-fiction novel?” asked Eddie with a show of curiosity. “With a parrot in it?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly, “but there are all kinds of animals in those starships. Cats and dogs and children…and, anyway, there is a vast science-fiction literature in the West. You can’t read it all…”
“Well, to begin with, a parrot out of Western science-fiction would hardly speak Russian,” said Roman. “But the main point is that it’s altogether incomprehensible how these cosmic parrots—even granted they come from Soviet S-F—could be acquainted with Korneev, Privalov, and Oira-Oira…”
“I won’t even mention,” Victor said lazily, “that it is one thing to transport a real material body into a world of ideas, but quite another to transport an idea-world body into the real world. I doubt that there is an author who created a parrot image suitable for transference into the material world.”
I was reminded of the semitransparent inventors and couldn’t find a rejoiner.
“However,” Victor continued charitably, “our Sasha here is exhibiting definite signs of promise. One feels a certain noble madness in his ideas.”
“Janus wouldn’t incinerate an ideal
parrot,” said Eddie with conviction. “An ideal parrot cannot even rot.”
“And why, anyway,” Roman said suddenly, “why are we so inconsistent? Why Sedlovoi? Why should Janus repeat Sedlovoi’s activities? Janus has a line of investigation. Janus has his own area of problems. Janus involves himself in the investigation of parallel dimensions. Let’s take that as a point of departure.”
“Let’s,” I said.
“Do you think that Janus was successful in establishing communications with some parallel dimension?” asked Eddie.
“Communications—he established them some time ago. Why not suppose that he has gone further? Why not suppose that he is now working on the transfer of material bodies? Eddie is right. There must be matrixats, because the guarantee of complete identity is absolutely necessary. The transfer conditions are selected on the basis of the experimental situation. The first two transfers were unsuccessful: the parrots died. Today the experiment was apparently successful…”
“Why do they speak Russian?” asked Eddie. “And why, again, does the parrot have such a vocabulary?”
“It means that a Russia exists there, too,” said Roman. “But there they are already mining rubidium in Ritchey crater.”
“It’s all too farfetched,” said Victor. “Why parrots in particular? Why not dogs or guinea pigs? Why not just tape recorders, in the final analysis? Also, how do these parrots know that Oira-Oira is old, and that Korneev is an excellent worker?”
“Rude,” I prompted.
“Rude, but excellent. And where, after all, did the dead parrot disappear?”
“You know what?” said Eddie. “This won’t do. We are working like dilettantes. Like the authors of amateur letters: ‘Dear scientists—it is now two years that there are underground thumps in my basement. Please explain how they originate.’ We need a systematic approach. Where is your paper, Victor? We’ll write it down at once.”
So we wrote it all down in Eddie’s beautiful handwriting.
In the first place we took it as a postulate that what was happening was not an hallucination; otherwise the whole thing would be dull. Next we formulated questions which the sought-for-hypotheses would have to answer. The questions were divided into two groups: the “parrot” group and the “Janus” group. The latter was introduced at the insistence of Roman and Eddie, who declared that they sensed, with their innermost innards, a connection between the idiosyncrasies of the parrot and of Janus. They could not answer Korneev’s question as to the physical meaning of the concepts “innards” and “sensed,” but underlined that Janus himself presented a most curious subject for investigation, and, also, that an apple does not fall far from the apple tree. Inasmuch as I had no opinion of my own, they were in the majority and the final list of questions looked like this.
