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  “No,” I said. “Vecherovsky is still here. We’re drinking tea.”

  “Tea will get you teed off.” Weingarten laughed. “Okay. Call if there’s anything.”

  “I don’t understand, are you alone or with Zakhar?”

  “There’s the three of us,” Weingarten said. “It’s very nice. So, if there’s anything, come on over. We’re waiting for you.” And he hung up.

  I went back to the kitchen. Vecherovsky was pouring the tea.

  “Weingarten?” he asked.

  “Yes, it’s nice that some things are the same even in all this madness. The constancy of madness. I never used to think that a drunken Weingarten was such a good thing.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said ‘tea will get you teed off.’ ”

  Vecherovsky chuckled. He liked Weingarten. Very much in his own way, but he did like him. He considered Weingarten an enfant terrible—a big, sweaty, noisy enfant terrible.

  I rummaged around the refrigerator and came out with an expensive box of Queen of Spades chocolates.

  “See that?”

  “Oh-ho,” Vecherovsky said respectfully.

  We admired the box.

  “Greetings from the supercivilization,” I said. “Oh, yes! What were you saying? He mixed me up completely. Oh, I remember! You mean, after all of this, you still maintain—”

  “Mm-hmm. I still maintain. I always knew that there were no supercivilizations. And now, after all this, as you put it, I am beginning to guess why they don’t exist.”

  “Hold on.” I put down the cup. “Why, et cetera, et cetera—that’s all theoretical. You tell me this: If it isn’t a supercivilization, if it isn’t aliens, then who is it?” I was angry. “Do you know something or are you just exercising your tongue, amusing yourself with paradoxes? One man shot himself, another’s turned into a jellyfish. What are you blathering about?”

  No, even to the naked eye it was obvious that Vecherovsky wasn’t amusing himself with paradoxes or blathering. His face suddenly went gray and tired-looking, and then an enormous, carefully concealed tension surfaced. Or maybe it was stubbornness—savage, tenacious stubbornness. He stopped looking like himself. His face was usually rather wilted, with a sleepy aristocratic flabbiness—now it was rock hard. And I was frightened again. For the first time it occurred to me that Vecherovsky wasn’t sitting with me to give me moral support. And that wasn’t why he had invited me to spend the night, and earlier, to sit and work in his apartment. And even though I was very frightened, I suddenly felt a wave of pity for him, based on nothing, really, just on some vague feelings and on the change in his face.

  And then I remembered, for no reason at all, that three years ago Vecherovsky had been hospitalized, but not for long …

  Excerpt 17.…. a previously unknown type of benign tumor. And I found out about it only last fall, yet I saw him every blessed day, had coffee with him, listened to his Martian guffaws, complained that I was tired of hearing about his problems. And I didn’t suspect a single thing, not a thing.

  And now, overwhelmed by that unexpected pity, I couldn’t stop myself, and I said, knowing that it was pointless, that I would get no answer:

  “Phil, are you, are you under pressure too?”

  Of course, he paid no attention to my question. He simply didn’t hear it. The tension left his face and disappeared in the aristocratic puffiness, his reddish lids settled back down over his eyes, and he resumed puffing on his pipe.

  “I’m not blathering at all,” he said. “You’re driving yourself crazy. You invented your supercivilization, and you can’t understand that it’s too simple; that it’s contemporary mythology and nothing more.”

  My skin crawled. More complex? Worse, then? What could be worse?

  “You’re an astronomer,” he continued reproachfully. “You should know about the fundamental paradox of xenology.”

  “I know it. Any civilization in its development is very likely—”

  “And so on,” he interrupted. “It’s inevitable that we would observe traces of their activity, but we do not. Why? Because there are no supercivilizations. Because for some reason civilizations do not become supercivilizations.”

  “Yes, yes. The idea that reason destroys itself in nuclear wars. That’s a lot of nonsense.”

  “Of course it’s nonsense,” he agreed calmly. “It’s also too simplified, too primitive—in the realm of our usual way of thinking.”

  “Wait. Why do you keep harping on primitive? Of course, nuclear war is a primitive concept. But it needn’t be that simple. Genetic diseases, some boredom with existence, a reorientation of goals. There’s a whole literature on this. I for one feel that manifestations of supercivilizations are cosmic in nature, and we just can’t distinguish them from natural cosmic phenomena. Or take our situation, for instance, why do you say it isn’t a manifestation of a supercivilization?”

  “Hmm, too human. They’ve discovered that earthlings are on the threshold of the universe. Afraid of the competition, they decide to stop it. Is that it?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because that’s fiction. Dime-store fiction in bright, cheap covers. It’s like trying to fit an octopus into a pair of tuxedo pants. And not a plain octopus at that, but an octopus that doesn’t even exist.”

  Vecherovsky moved the cup, put his elbow on the table, and, resting his chin on his fist and raising his eyebrows high, stared above my head into space.

  “Look how it turns out. Two hours ago we seemed to have come to some decision. It doesn’t matter what force is operating on us, the important thing is how to behave under that pressure. But I see that you’re not thinking about that at all; you stubbornly keep trying to identify the force. And just as stubbornly, you return to the hypothesis about the supercivilization. You are prepared to forget—and have already forgotten—your own feeble objections to this hypothesis. I can understand why this is happening to you. Somewhere in the back of your mind you have the idea that any supercivilization is still a civilization, and two civilizations can always come to an accord, find some sort of compromise, feed the wolves and save the sheep. And if worse comes to worst, there is always sweet surrender to this hostile but imposing power, noble retreat before an enemy worthy of victory, and then—how the devil does play tricks—maybe even a reward for your reasonable docility. Don’t bug your eyes out at me, Dmitri. I said this was all subconscious. And do you think you’re the only one? It’s a very, very human trait. We’ve rejected God, but we still can’t stand on our own two feet without some myth-crutch to hold us up. But we’ll have to. We’ll have to learn. Because in your situation, not only do you not have any friends, you are so alone that you don’t have any enemies, either! That’s what you refuse to understand.”

  Vecherovsky stopped. I had tried to interrupt him, tried to find arguments to refute his point, to argue heatedly, foaming at the mouth—but to prove what? I don’t know. He was right. It’s no shame to concede to a worthy opponent. I mean, that’s not what he thought, that’s what I think, that is, what I suddenly just thought, after he said it. I’ve had this feeling all along that I’m the general of a decimated army wandering around in the fire, looking for the victorious general to hand over my sword. That I’m less bothered by my position than by the fact that I can’t find the enemy.

  “What do you mean there is no enemy?” I finally said. “Somebody wanted all of this.”

  “And who wanted it to be,” Vecherovsky drawled, “for a rock near the Earth’s surface to fall with an acceleration of nine point eight one?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “But it does fall precisely at that rate?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you don’t drag a supercivilization into the case? To explain that fact.”

  “Wait. What does that have—”

  “So who wanted the rock to fall with precisely that acceleration? Who?”

  I poured myself some tea. It seemed as though all I
had to do was add two and two, but I still didn’t understand a thing.

  “You mean that we’re dealing with some sort of elemental force? A natural phenomenon?”

  “If you like,” Vecherovsky said.

  “Well, really!” I spread out my hands, knocking over my tea and spilling it all over the table. “Damn!”

  While I cleaned up the table, Vecherovsky continued lazily: “Try to recant epicycles, and try to put the Sun, rather than the Earth, at the center of things. You’ll see how it falls into place.”

  I threw the wet rag into the sink.

  “You mean you have a theory,” I said.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Well, let’s hear it. By the way, why didn’t you tell us right away? While Weingarten was here?”

  Vecherovsky’s eyebrows wiggled.

  “You see, every new theory has a drawback—it always creates a lot of arguments, and I didn’t feel like arguing. I just wanted to assure you that you were faced with a choice and that each of you had to make that choice alone, on your own. Apparently, I didn’t succeed. And I guess my theory could have served as an additional argument, because its gist—in fact, the only possible conclusion that can be made from it—is that you now not only have no friends, but you also have no enemy. So perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps I should have gotten into an exhausting discussion, that would have made your position clearer. Things as I see them are like this …”

  I can’t say that I didn’t understand his theory, but I can’t say that I fully grasped it either. I can’t say that this theory convinced me fully, but on the other hand everything that had happened to us fit into it nicely. More than that, everything that ever happened, was happening, and will ever happen in the entire universe fit into it—that was the theory’s weakness. It smacked of the statement that rope was simply rope.

  Vecherovsky introduced the concept of the Homeostatic Universe. “The universe retains its structure,” that was his fundamental axiom. In his words, the laws of conservation of energy and matter were simply discrete manifestations of the law of conservation of structure. The law of nondecreasing entropy contradicts the homeostasis of the universe and therefore is a partial law and not a universal one. Complementary to this law is the law of constant reproduction of reason. The combination and conflict of these two partial laws are an expression of the universal law of the conservation of structure.

  If only the law of nondecreasing entropy existed, the structure of the universe would disappear and chaos would reign. But on the other hand, if only a constantly self-perfecting and all-powerful intelligence prevailed, the structure of the universe based on homeostasis would also be disrupted. This, of course, did not mean that the universe would become better or worse—merely different—contrary to the principle of homeostasis, since a constantly developing intelligence can have but one goal: to change nature. That is why the gist of the Homeostatic Universe consists in maintaining the balance between the increase in entropy and the development of reason. That is why there are no and can be no supercivilizations, since the term supercivilization is used for intelligence developed to such a degree that it transcends the law of nondecreasing entropy on a cosmic scale. And what was happening to us now was nothing other than the first reaction of the Homeostatic Universe to the threat of humanity becoming a supercivilization. The universe was defending itself.

  Don’t ask me, Vecherovsky said, why you and Glukhov became the first swallows of the coming cataclysm. Don’t ask me about the physical nature of the signals that disturbed the homeostasis in that corner of the universe where you and Glukhov undertook your research. In fact, don’t ask me about any of the mechanisms of the Homeostatic Universe—I know nothing about them, the way people know nothing about the functioning of the law of the conservation of energy. All processes occur in such a way as to conserve energy. All processes occur in such a way that in a billion years from now the work by you and Glukhov, when combined with the work of millions upon millions of other people, does not lead to the end of the world. Of course, it is not a question of the end of the world in general but of the end of the world as we observe it today, the world as it has existed for a billion years, the world that you and Glukhov, without even suspecting it, are threatening with your microscopic attempts to overcome entropy.

  That’s sort of what I understood, though I’m not sure I got it completely right; I could be completely wrong. I didn’t even argue with him. It was bad enough without this, but looking at it this way made everything so hopeless that I just didn’t know how to react—why go on living? God! D. A. Malianov versus the Homeostatic Universe! This isn’t even being a bug under a brick. It’s not even a virus in the center of the Sun …

  “Listen,” I said. “If that’s really the way it is, what is there to talk about? The hell with my M cavities. Choice! What kind of choice can there be?”

  Vecherovsky slowly removed his glasses and rubbed the irritated bridge of his nose with his pinkie. He was silent for a very long, exhaustingly long time. And I waited. My sixth sense told me that Vecherovsky wouldn’t just drop me like this, to be devoured by his homeostasis; he would never have told me if there wasn’t some way out, some variant, some choice, goddamn it. And when he finished rubbing his nose, he put his glasses back on and spoke in a quiet voice:

  “ ‘I was told that this road would take me to the ocean of death, and turned back halfway. Since then crooked, roundabout, godforsaken paths stretch out before me.’ ”

  “Well?” I asked.

  “Shall I repeat it?” Vecherovsky asked.

  “Well, repeat it.”

  He repeated it. I wanted to cry. I got up quickly, filled the teakettle, and put it on the range.

  “It’s a good thing tea exists. Otherwise I’d be roaring drunk under the table by now,” I said.

  “I prefer coffee.”

  And then I heard a key turning in the lock. I must have turned white, or maybe blue, because Vecherovsky moved toward me and said quietly:

  “Easy, Dmitri, easy. I’m here.”

  I barely heard him.

  In the foyer another door opened, clothes rustled, quick footsteps, Kaliam’s wild meows, and while I was still dumbstruck, I heard Irina’s breathless “Kaliamkins.” And then:

  “Dmitri!”

  I don’t remember how I got out into the foyer. I grabbed Irina, hugged her, held her (Irina, Irina!), inhaled her familiar perfume—her cheeks were wet; she was muttering something strange: “You’re alive, thank God. And I thought … Dmitri!” Then we came to our senses. Anyway, I did. I mean, I fully realized that she was there and what she was saying. And my amorphous wooden terror was quickly replaced by a concrete everyday fear. I set her down, stepped back, looked into her tear-stained face (she wasn’t even wearing makeup):

  “What’s wrong, Irina? Why are you here? Is it Bobchik?”

  I don’t think she was listening to me. She was grabbing my hands, feverishly looking into my face with her wet eyes, and repeating:

  “I was going crazy … I thought I’d be too late … What’s going on?”

  Holding hands, we squeezed into the kitchen. I seated her on my stool, and Vecherovsky poured her some strong tea straight from the pot. She drank it greedily, spilling half of it on her coat. She looked horrible. I barely recognized her. I started shaking, and I leaned on the sink.

  “Something happen to Bobchik?” I asked, barely managing to make my tongue work.

  “Bobchik?” she repeated. “What does Bobchik have to do with this? I almost went crazy worrying about you. What’s been going on here? Were you sick?” She was shouting. “You’re as healthy as a bull!”

  I felt my jaw drop, and I shut my mouth. I didn’t understand a thing. Vecherovsky asked very calmly:

  “Did you get bad news about Dmitri?”

  She stopped looking at me and turned to him. Then she leaped up, ran into the foyer, and came back, rummaging through her purse.

  “Just look, look at what I receiv
ed.” A comb, lipstick, papers, and money spilled on the floor. “God, where is it? Here!” She threw the purse on the table, stuck her trembling hand into her pocket (she missed on the first try), and pulled out a crumpled telegram. “Here.”

  I grabbed it. Read it. Understood nothing: IN TIME SNEGOVOI. I read it again, and then, in desperation, out loud:

  “ ‘DMITRI BAD HURRY TO MAKE IT IN TIME SNEGOVOI.’ Why Snegovoi? How could it be Snegovoi?”

  Vecherovsky carefully took the telegram from me.

  “Sent this morning,” he said.

  “When?” I asked loudly, like a deaf man.

  “This morning. At nine twenty-two.”

  “God! Why would he play a trick like that on me?”

  CHAPTER 9

  Excerpt 18.… then me. She couldn’t reach me by phone. She couldn’t get a ticket at the airport. She stormed the director’s office, brandishing the telegram, and he gave her a note, but it wasn’t much help. There were no planes ready for takeoff, and the ones that arrived were going the wrong way. Finally, in desperation, she took a plane to Kharkov. Then the whole story started over again, but it was pouring rain there to boot. It was only toward evening that she managed to get to Moscow by a freight plane that was carrying refrigerators and coffins. From Domodedovo Airport she rushed over to Sheremetyevo, and she finally got to Leningrad riding in the cockpit. She hadn’t eaten a single thing since she left and spent most of the time weeping. Even as she was falling asleep, she kept threatening to go to the post office first thing in the morning with the police and find out whose work it was, what bastards were responsible. Naturally, I agreed with her, saying, of course, we won’t leave it at this; for jokes like this people should be punched out; no, more than that, they should be arrested. Of course, I didn’t tell her that nowadays, thank God, the post office wouldn’t accept a telegram like that without confirmation, that it is impossible to play practical jokes like that, and that it was most likely that no one sent the telegram, that the Teletype in Odessa just printed it out by itself.