Noon, 22nd Century Page 10

  “Be seeing you, classicist,” said Kondratev. “Come again. And bring your intelligent young lady. What’s her name?”

  “Sheila,” said Evgeny. “Sheila Kadar.”

  He went out. He went out into an unknown and alien world, under a limitless sky, into the green of endless gardens. Into a world where, probably, glass superhighways ran arrow-straight to the horizon, where slender buildings threw delicate shadows across the plazas. Where cars darted without drivers or passengers, or with people dressed in strange clothing-calm, intelligent, benevolent, always very busy and very pleased to be so. Evgeny had gone out to wander over a planet both like and unlike the Earth they had abandoned so long ago and so recently. He would wander with his Sheila Kadar and soon would write his book, and the book would, of course, be very good, because Evgeny was quite capable of writing a good, intelligent book.

  Kondratev opened his eyes. Next to the bed sat fat, ruddy Doctor Protos, watching him silently. Doctor Protos smiled, nodded, and said quietly, “Everything will be all right, Sergei.”

  7. The Moving Roads

  Perhaps you’ll spend the evening with us after all?” Evgeny said indecisively.

  “Yes,” said Sheila. “Let’s stay together. Where will you go by yourself with such a sad expression on your face?”

  Kondratev shook his head. “No, thank you,” he said. “I’d rather be alone.” Sheila smiled at him warmly and a little sadly, and Evgeny bit his lip and looked past Kondratev.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Kondratev said. “It bothers me when people worry about me. See you.” He stepped away from the pterocar and waved.

  “Let him go,” said Evgeny. “It’ll be all right. Let him walk by himself. Have a good walk, Sergei-and you know where to find us.”

  He offhandedly touched the keyboard on the control panel with his fingertips. He did not even look at the controls. His left arm lay behind Sheila’s back. He was magnificent. He didn’t even slam the door shut. He winked to Kondratev and jackrabbitted the pterocar from the spot in such a manner that the door slammed itself shut. The pterocar shot up into the sky and sailed off on its wings. Kondratev made his way toward the escalator.

  Okay, he thought, let’s plunge into life. Old Evgeny says it’s impossible to get lost in this city. Let’s find out.

  The escalator moved noiselessly. It was empty. Kondratev looked up. Overhead was a translucent roof. On it lay the shadows of pterocars and helicopters, belonging, no doubt, to the building’s inhabitants. Every roof in the city was a landing pad, it seemed. Kondratev looked down. Below was a wide, bright lobby. Its floor was smooth and sparkling, like ice.

  Two young girls ran past Kondratev, clicking their heels in a staccato on the steps. One of them, small, wearing a white blouse and a vivid blue skirt, glanced at his face as she ran past. She had a freckled nose and a lock of hair across her forehead. Something about Kondratev struck her. She stopped a moment, grabbing the railing so as not to fall. Then she caught up to her friend, and they ran farther, but below, already in the lobby, both of them looked back. So, thought Kondratev, it begins. Here comes the elephant parading through the streets.

  He descended to the lobby (the girls were already gone) and tested the floor with his foot to see whether it was slippery. It wasn’t. Alongside the lobby doors were enormous windows, and through one of them he could see that there was a great deal of greenery outside. Kondratev had already noticed this when flying over in the pterocar. The city was buried in greenery. Verdure filled up all the spaces between roofs. Kondratev walked around the lobby, and stood for a moment in front of a coat rack on which a solitary violet raincoat hung. After looking around cautiously, he felt the material, and then headed toward the doorway. On the steps of the porch he stopped. There was no street.

  A trampled-down path stretched directly from the porch into thick, high grass. In ten paces it disappeared amid thickets of bushes. After the bushes came a forest-tall straight pines alternating with squat oaks, obviously very old. The clean light-blue walls of buildings extended to the right and to the left. “Not bad!” Kondratev said, and sniffed the air.

  The air was very good. Kondratev put his hands behind his back and set off resolutely down the path. It led him to a fairly wide sandy walk. Kondratev hesitated, then turned right. There were many people on the walk. He even tensed up, expecting that at the sight of him the great-great-grandchildren would break off conversation, turn away from urgent problems, stop short, and start staring at him. Maybe even start asking him questions. But nothing of the sort occurred. Some elderly great-great-grandchild, overtaking him from behind, bumped into him clumsily and said, “Excuse me, please. No, I wasn’t talking to you, dear.” Kondratev smiled to be on the safe side.

  “Has something happened?” He heard a faint feminine voice, coming, it seemed, from inside the elderly great-great-grandchild.

  “No,” said the other great-great-grandchild, nodding benevolently toward Kondratev. “I’ve accidentally pushed a young man here.”

  “Oh,” said the woman’s voice. “Then do some more listening. I said that I would have nothing to do with the plan and that you would be against it too.” The elderly great-great-grandchild moved off, and the woman’s voice gradually faded out.

  Great-great-grandchildren overtook Kondratev from behind, and came toward him from the front. Many smiled at him, sometimes even nodding. But no one stared and no one was crawling with questions. True, for some time a dark-eyed lad with his hands in his pockets described a complicated trajectory around Kondratev, but at the very moment when Kondratev at last took pity and decided to nod toward him, the boy, in obvious despair, had dropped behind. Kondratev felt more at ease and started looking and listening.

  Generally, the great-great-grandchildren seemed to be very ordinary people. Young and old, short and tall, homely and beautiful. Men and women. There was no one senile or sickly. And there were no children. The great-great-grandchildren on this green street behaved quite calmly and unconstrainedly, as if they were at home, with old friends. You couldn’t say that they all radiated joy and happiness. Kondratev saw worried and tired faces, and more rarely even gloomy ones. One young fellow sat by the side of the walk among dandelions, picking them one after another and blowing on them fiercely. It was obvious that his thoughts were wandering somewhere far away, and that these thoughts were anything but happy.

  The great-great-grandchildren dressed simply and quite variously. The older men wore long pants and soft jackets with open collars; the women wore slacks or long elegant dresses. The young men and girls almost all wore loose shorts and white or colored smocks. Of course you also encountered women of fashion sporting purple or gold cloaks, thrown over short bright… shirts, Kondratev decided. These fashion plates were looked at.

  It was quiet in the city, or at least there were no mechanical sounds. Kondratev heard only voices and, sometimes, from somewhere, music. The treetops rustled too, and very occasionally there came the soft “fr-r-r-r” of a pterocar flying past. Obviously most aircraft usually traveled at high altitudes. In short, nothing here was entirely alien to Kondratev, although it was very strange to be walking down paths and sandy walks, with clothes brushing against the branches of bushes, in the middle of an enormous city. The suburban parks of a hundred years earlier had been almost the same. Kondratev could have felt entirely at home here, if only he did not feel so useless, undoubtedly more useless than any of these gold and purple fashion plates with their short hems.

  He overtook a man and woman walking arm in arm. The man was saying, “At this point the violin comes in—tra-la-la~la-a—and then the delicate and tender thread of the choriole—di-i-da-da-da… di-i-i.” His rendition was piercing but not very musical. The woman looked at him with some doubt.

  By the wayside two middle-aged men stood silently. One suddenly said gloomily, “All the same, she had no call to tell the boy about that.”

  “Too late now,” answered the other, and they again fell sil
ent.

  A threesome—a pale girl, a giant elderly black, and a pensive fellow who was smiling absentmindedly—walked slowly toward Kondratev. The girl was talking, abruptly waving about her clenched fist. “The question has to be resolved another way. As an artist, either you’re a writer or a sensationalist. There is no third possibility. But he plays games with spatial relationships. That’s craft, not art. He’s just an uncaring, self-satisfied hack.”

  “Masha, Masha!” the black droned reproachfully.

  The young fellow kept smiling absentmindedly.

  Kondratev turned onto a side path, passed a hedge mottled with big blue and yellow flowers, and stopped dead. Before him was a moving road.

  Kondratev had already heard about the amazing moving roads. Their construction had begun long ago and now they extended between many cities, forming an uninterrupted ramifying transcontinental system from the Pyrenees to the Tien Shan, and south across the plains of China to Hanoi, and in the Americas from Port Yukon to Tierra del Fuego. Evgeny had told improbable tales about the roads. He said that they did not use energy and need not fear time; if they were destroyed, they would restore themselves; they climbed mountains with ease and threw themselves across abysses on bridges. According to Evgeny, these roads would move as long as the sun shone and Earth was intact. And Evgeny also had said that the moving road was not actually a road, but a flow of something halfway between the animate and inanimate. A fourth kingdom.

  A few steps away from Kondratev the road flowed in six even gray streams, the strips of the Big Road. The strips moved at various speeds and were separated from each other and from the outside grass by two-inch-high white barriers. On the strips people were standing, walking, sitting. Kondratev approached and placed one leg indecisively on the barrier. And then, bending and listening, he heard the voice of the Big Road: squeaking, crackling, rustling.

  The surface of the road was soft like warm asphalt. He stood for a while, and then transferred to the next strip.

  The road flowed down a hill, and Kondratev could see it stretch all the way out to the deep-blue horizon. It sparkled in the sun like a tarred highway.

  Kondratev began to look at the rooftops sailing by over the crowns of the pines. On one roof there sparkled an enormous structure made from several huge square mirrors strung on a light openwork frame. On all the roofs sat pterocars—red, green, gold, gray. Hundreds of pterocars and helicopters hung over the city. With a faint whistling sound, eclipsing the sun for a long time, a triangular airship floated along the road, and then disappeared behind the forest. The outlines of some sort of structure—not exactly masts, not exactly stereovision towers—showed far off in the foggy haze. The road flowed evenly, without jolts; the green bushes and brown pine trunks ran merrily backward; great glass buildings, bright cottages, open verandas under sparkling multicolored awnings appeared and disappeared in the spaces between the branches.

  Kondratev suddenly realized that the road was taking him to the outskirts of Sverdlovsk. Well, let it, he thought. Fine. This road must be able to take you anywhere you liked—Siberia, India, Vietnam. He sat down and clasped his knees with his arms. It wasn’t particularly soft seating, but it wasn’t hard either. In front of Kondratev three lads sat tailor-fashion, bending over multicolored squares of some sort. They must be solving a problem in geometry. Or perhaps they were playing a game. What are these roads good for? Kondratev thought. It wasn’t likely that anyone would take it into his head to ride this way to Vietnam or India. Too little speed. And too hard a seat. After all, there were stratoplanes, the enormous triangular airships, pterocars—what good was a road? And what it must have cost! He began to recall how they had built roads a century ago—not moving ones, either, but the most ordinary sort, and not especially good ones at that. The enormous semiautomatic road layers, the stench of tar, the heat, and the sweaty, tired people inside dust-powdered cabs. And of course enormously greater heaps of labor and thought had been hammered into the Big Road than into the Trans-Gobi Highway. And evidently all so that you could get on wherever you liked, sit wherever you liked, and poke along without worrying about anything, picking camomile flowers along the way. It was strange, incomprehensible, irrational…

  The stories of glass above the pine tops suddenly came to an end. Ahead rose a gigantic block of gray granite. Kondratev stood up. On top of the block, with an arm stretched out over the city, straining ever forward, stood Lenin, just as he had stood, and must still be standing now, in the square in front of Finland Station in Leningrad. Lenin held his arm out over this city and over this world, this shining and wonderful world that he had seen two centuries before. Kondratev stood and watched the enormous monument retreat into the bluish haze over the glass roofs.

  The pines grew lower and denser. For a moment a broad clearing opened up alongside the road. A group of people in coveralls were fiddling with some complicated mechanism. The road slipped under a narrow semicircular bow bridge and ran past a sign with an arrow which said, MATROSOVO—15 KM, YELLOW FACTORY—6 KM, and something else which Kondratev did not have time to read. He looked around and saw that there were few people left on the ribbons of road. The ribbons running the opposite way were almost empty. Matrosovo must be a housing development. But what about Yellow Factory? Through the pine trunks flashed a long veranda with tables. People at the tables sat eating and drinking. Kondratev felt hungry, but after hesitating, he decided to hold off for a bit. On the way back, he thought. He was very happy to feel strong, healthy hunger, and to know that he could satisfy it at any moment.

  The pines thinned out, and from somewhere a broad superhighway turned up, sparkling in the rays of the evening sun. Along the superhighway whizzed a series of monstrous vehicles-on two, three, even eight undercarriages, or without an undercarriage altogether—bluntnosed, with enormous, boxcar-sized trailers covered with bright-colored plastic. The vehicles were moving toward him, toward the city. Evidently somewhere nearby the superhighway dived underground and disappeared into multileveled tunnels. Looking closely, Kondratev noticed that the vehicles did not have cabs—there was no place for a driver. The machines moved in an unbroken stream, buzzing modestly, maintaining a distance of two or three yards between each other. Through the spaces between, Kondratev saw several of the same sort of vehicle going the other way. Then thickets once again densely lined the road, and the superhighway disappeared from view.

  “Yesterday a truck jumped off the road,” someone said behind Kondratev’s back.

  “That’s because they took off the power monitor. They’re digging new levels.”

  “I don’t like these rhinos.”

  “Never mind—soon we’ll finish the conveyer, and then we can close the whole highway.”

  “It’s about time.”

  Another veranda with tables appeared ahead.

  “Leshka! Leshka!” people at one of the tables shouted, and waved.

  A fellow and a young woman in front of Kondratev waved back, transferred to the slow belt, and jumped onto the grass opposite the veranda. A few other people jumped off here too. Kondratev was about to do the same, but he noticed a post with the sign, YELLOW FACTORY—1 KM, and he stayed on.

  He jumped off at a turn. Between the tree trunks a narrow trampled path leading up the side of a large hill could be seen. At the top of the hill the outlines of small structures stood out distinctly against the background of sunset. Kondratev moved unhurriedly along the path, feeling the springy ground under his feet with pleasure. It must get muddy when it rains, he thought. On the way he bent down and picked a large white flower from the grass. Small ants ran over the flower’s petals. Kondratev threw the flower away and walked more quickly. A few minutes later he came out onto the top of the hill and stopped at the edge of a gigantic basin that seemed to stretch to the very horizon.

  The contrast between the peaceful soft greenery under the dark-blue evening sky and what opened before him in the basin was so striking that Kondratev took a step backward. At th
e bottom of the basin seethed hell. Real hell, with ominous blue-white flashes, swirling orange smoke, and bubbling viscous liquid, red hot. There something slowly swelled and puffed up, like a purulent boil, then burst, splashing and spilling shreds of orange flame; it clouded over with varicolored smoke, threw off steam, flame, and a hail of sparks, and once again slowly swelled and puffed up. In the vortices of raging matter many-forked lightnings flashed; monstrous indistinct forms appeared and disappeared within a second; whirlwinds twisted; blue and pink ghosts danced. For a long time Kondratev watched this extraordinary spectacle, spellbound. Then he came a little more to his senses and began to notice something else.

  Hell was noiseless and bounded with strict geometry. The mighty dance of flame and smoke produced not one sound; not one tongue of flame, not one puff of smoke went beyond a certain limit, and, looking closely, Kondratev discovered that the whole vast expanse of hell stretching to the far horizon was enclosed by a barely noticeable transparent covering, the edges of which merged into the concrete—if it was concrete—that paved the bottom of the basin. Then Kondratev saw that the covering had two and even, it seemed, three layers, because from time to time flat reflections flashed in the air under the covering, probably images of sparks on the outer surface of an inner layer. The basin was deep; its round, even walls, lined with smooth gray material, plunged into the depths for hundreds of meters. The “roof” of the invisible covering soared over the bottom of the basin to a height of no less than fifty. Evidently this was the Yellow Factory of which the signs warned. Kondratev sat down on the grass, lay his arms on his knees, and began to look through the covering.

  The sun set, and multicolored reflections began to leap along the gray slopes of the basin. Kondratev very soon noticed that chaos did not reign unchecked in the raging, hellish kitchen. Certain regular, distinct shadows appeared now and then in the smoke and flame, sometimes unmoving, sometimes rushing headlong. It was very difficult to get a proper look at them, but once the smoke suddenly cleared for several instants, and Kondratev got a fairly clear view of a complicated machine like a daddy longlegs. The machine jumped in place, as if trying to extricate its legs from some viscous fiery mass, or else it kneaded that flaming mass with its long sparkling articulations. Then something flashed under it, and again it was covered by clouds of orange smoke.