Noon, 22nd Century Read online

  “There’s no fuel feed,” said Falkenstein, unexpectedly calmly.

  “I see,” said Gorbovsky. “Do your job.”

  “Not a drop. We’re falling. It’s jammed.”

  “I’m turning on the emergency tank, last one. Altitude forty-five kilometers… Sidorov!”

  “Yes,” Sidorov said, and started coughing.

  “Your containers are filling up.” Gorbovsky turned his long face with the dry flashing eyes toward him. Sidorov had never seen such an expression on him while he was lying on the sofa. “The compressors are working. You’re in luck, Athos!”

  “In real luck,” said Sidorov.

  Now they were hit from below. Something crunched inside Sidorov, and his mouth filled with bitter-tasting saliva.

  “The fuel’s coming through!” shouted Falkenstein.

  “Fine—wonderful! But man your own station, for God’s sake. Sidorov! Hey, Mikhail!”

  “Yes,” Sidorov said hoarsely, without unclenching his teeth.

  “Do you have a reserve rig?”

  “Um,” said Sidorov. He was thinking poorly now.

  “Um what?” shouted Gorbovsky. “Yes or no?”

  “No,” said Sidorov.

  “Some pilot,” said Falkenstein. “Some hero.”

  Sidorov gnashed his teeth and started looking at the periscope screen. Turbid orange stripes raced from right to left across the screen. It was so frightening and so sickening to look at it that Sidorov shut his eyes.

  “They landed here!” shouted Gorbovsky. “The city is there, I know it!”

  Something in the control room chimed delicately during the frightful reeling silence, and suddenly Falkenstein roared out in a heavy broken bass:

  The whirlwind thunders forth its rage

  The sky explodes in red;

  A blinding firestorm blocks your way

  But if you should turn back this day

  Then who would go on ahead?

  I would go on, thought Sidorov. Fool, jackass. I should’ve waited for Gorbovsky to decide on a landing. Not enough patience. If he had gone for a landing today, I wouldn’t give a damn about the autolab.

  And Falkenstein roared,

  The smiles like frost, the looks that stray

  Your night thoughts in your bed:

  The Assaultman funked it, people say,

  But had you not come back that day,

  Then who would go on ahead?

  “Altitude twenty-one kilometers!” shouted Gorbovsky. “I’m switching over to horizontal.”

  Now come the endless minutes of horizontal flight, thought Sidorov. The ghastly minutes of horizontal flight. Minute after minute of jerks and nausea, until they’ve enjoyed their explorations to the full. And I’ll sit here like a blind man, with my stupid smashed machine.

  The craft lurched. The blow was very strong, enough to cause a momentary vision blackout. Then Sidorov, gasping for breath, saw Gorbovsky smash his face into the control board, and Falkenstein stretch out his arms, fly over the couch, and slowly, as if in a dream, come to rest on the deck. He remained there, face down. A piece of strap, broken in two places, slid over his back evenly, like an autumn leaf. For a few seconds the craft moved by inertia, and Sidorov, seizing the clasp of his straps, felt that everything was falling. But then his body became heavy once again.

  Finally he unfastened the clasp and stood up on legs of cotton. He looked at the instruments. The needle of the altimeter was climbing upward, the yellow zigzags of the monitoring system rushed about in blue hops, leaving behind foggy traces which slowly faded out. The cybernavigator was heading the craft away from Vladislava. Sidorov jumped over Falkenstein and went up to the board. Gorbovsky was lying with his head on the control keys. Sidorov looked back at Falkenstein. He was already sitting up, propping himself up on the deck. His eyes were closed. Then Sidorov carefully lifted up Gorbovsky and laid him on the back of the seat. To hell with the autolab, he thought. He turned off the cybernavigator and rested his fingers on the sticky keys. The Skiff-Aleph began to swing about, and suddenly dropped a hundred yards. Sidorov smiled. He heard Falkenstein wheeze angrily behind him, “Don’t you dare!”

  But he didn’t even turn around.

  * * *

  “You’re a good pilot, and you made a good landing. And in my opinion you’re an excellent biologist,” said Gorbovsky. His face was all bandaged. “Excellent. A real go-getter. Isn’t that so, Mark?”

  Falkenstein nodded, and, parting his lips, he said, “Undoubtedly. He made a good landing. But he wasn’t the one who raised ship again.”

  “You see,” Gorbovsky said with great feeling, “I read your monograph on protozoa—it’s superb. But we have come to the parting of the ways.”

  Sidorov swallowed with difficulty and said, “Why?”

  Gorbovsky looked at Falkenstein, then at Bader. “He doesn’t understand.”

  Falkenstein nodded. He was not looking at Sidorov. Bader also nodded, and looked at Sidorov with a sort of vague pity.

  “Well? And?” Sidorov asked defiantly.

  “You’re too fond of excitement,” Gorbovsky said softly. “You know, Sturm und Drang, as Director Bader would say.”

  “Storm and stress,” Bader translated pompously.

  “Precisely,” said Gorbovsky. “Entirely too fond. And we can’t have that. It’s a rotten character trait. It’s deeply ingrained. And you don’t even understand.”

  “My lab was smashed,” said Sidorov. “I couldn’t do anything else.”

  Gorbovsky sighed and looked at Falkenstein. Falkenstein said with disgust, “Let’s go, Leonid.”

  “I couldn’t do anything else,” Sidorov repeated stubbornly.

  “You should have done something else. Something quite different,” said Gorbovsky. He turned and started down the corridor.

  Sidorov stood in the middle of the corridor and watched the three of them leave, Bader and Falkenstein each supporting Gorbovsky by an arm. Then he looked at his own hand and saw red drops on the fingers. He started for the med section, leaning against the wall because he was swaying from side to side. I wanted to do what was right, he thought. I mean, that was the most important thing, landing. And I brought back the containers of microfauna. I know that’s very valuable. It’s valuable for Gorbovsky too: after all, sooner or later he himself will have to land and carry out a sortie across Vladislava. And the bacteria will kill him if I don’t neutralize them. I did what I had to. On Vladislava, on a planet of a blue star, there is life. Of course I did what I had to. He whispered several times, “I did what I had to.” But he felt that it wasn’t quite so. He had first felt this down there, down below, when they were standing by the spaceship, waist deep in seething petroleum, with geysers on the horizon rising up in enormous columns, and Gorbovsky had asked him, “Well, what do you intend to do now, Mikhail?” and Falkenstein had said something in an unfamiliar language and had climbed back into the spaceship. He had felt it again when the Skiff-Aleph had forced her way off the surface of the fearsome planet for the third time, and once again had flopped down into the oily mud, struck back by a blow of the storm. And he felt it now.

  “I wanted to do what was right,” he said indistinctly to Dickson, who was helping him lie down on the examining table.

  “What?” said Dickson.

  “I had to land,” Sidorov said.

  “Lie down,” said Dickson. He muttered, “Primordial enthusiasm…”

  Sidorov saw a large white pear-shape coming down from the ceiling. The pear-shape hung quite close, over his very face. Dark spots swam before his eyes, his ears rang, and suddenly Falkenstein started singing in a heavy bass,

  But had you not come back that day,

  Then who would go on ahead?

  “Anybody at all,” Sidorov said stubbornly with closed eyes. “Anyone would go on ahead.”

  Dickson stood by, and watched the cybersurgeon’s delicate shining needle enter the mutilated arm. There’s sure enough blood! thought Dickson
. Oceans and oceans. Gorbovsky barely got them out of there in time. Another half hour, and the kid would never again be making excuses. Well, Gorbovsky always comes back in time. That’s the way it ought to be. Assaultmen ought to come back, or else they wouldn’t be Assaultmen. And once upon a time, every Assaultman was like Athos here.

  12. Deep Search

  The cabin was rated for one person, and now it was too crowded. Akiko sat to Kondratev’s right, on the casing of the sonar set. To keep out of the way, she squeezed herself against the wall, bracing her feet against the base of the control panel. Of course she was uncomfortable sitting like that, but the seat in front of the panel was the operator’s station. Belov was uncomfortable too. He was squatting beneath the hatch, from time to time stretching his numbed legs carefully by turns, first the right, then the left. He would stretch out his right leg, kick Akiko in the back, sigh, and in his low-pitched voice apologize in English, “Beg your pardon.” Akiko and Belov were trainees. Oceanographer trainees had to resign themselves to discomfort in the one-man minisubs of the Oceanic Guard.

  Except for Belov’s sighs and the usual rumble of superheated steam in the reactor, it was quiet in the cabin. Quiet, cramped, and dark. Occasionally shrimp knocked against the spectrolite [unreadable: Sirw-riv:] porthole and rushed off in fright in a cloud of luminous slime. It was like small, soundless pink explosions. As if someone were shooting tiny bullets. During the flashes you could catch glimpses of Akiko’s flashing eyes and serious face.

  Akiko watched the screen. She had squeezed sideways to the wall and started looking from the very beginning, although she knew that they would have to search a long time, perhaps all night. The screen was under the porthole, in the center of the control board, and in order to see it she had to crane her neck. But she watched it fixedly and silently, It was her first deep-water search.

  She was a free-style swimming champion. She had narrow hips and broad muscular shoulders. Kondratev liked to look at her, and he felt like finding some pretext to turn on the light. In order to inspect the hatch fastener one last time before descent, for instance. But Kondratev did not turn on the light. He simply remembered Akiko: slender and angular like a teenager, with broad muscular shoulders, wearing loose shorts and a linen jacket with rolled-up sleeves.

  A fat, bright blip appeared on the screen. Akiko’s shoulder squeezed up to Kondratev’s. He sensed that she was craning her neck in order to see better what was happening on the screen. He could tell this by the odor of perfume-and in addition, he smelled the barely noticeable odor of salt water. Akiko always smelled of salt water: she spent two-thirds of her time in it.

  Kondratev said, “Sharks. At four hundred meters.”

  The blip trembled, broke into tiny spots, and disappeared. Akiko moved away. She did not yet know how to read the sonar signals. Belov did, since he had already spent a year’s apprenticeship on the Kunashir, but he sat in back and could not see the screen. He said, “Sharks are nasty customers.” Then he made a clumsy movement and said, “Beg your pardon, Akiko-san.”

  There was no need to speak English, since Akiko had studied in Khabarovsk for five years and understood Russian perfectly well.

  “You didn’t have to eat so much,” Kondratev said angrily. “You didn’t have to drink. You know what happens.”

  “All we had was roast duck for two,” said Belov. “And two glasses of wine apiece, I couldn’t say no. We hadn’t seen each other in ages, and his flight leaves this evening. Has already left, probably. Just two glasses… Does it really smell?”

  “It smells.”

  This is rotten, thought Belov. He stuck out his lower lip, blew out softly, and sucked in through his nose. “All I smell is perfume,” he said.

  Idiot, thought Kondratev.

  Akiko said guiltily, “I didn’t know it would be so strong, or I wouldn’t have used it.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with perfume,” Belov said. “It’s nice.”

  Taking him along was a bad move, thought Kondratev.

  Belov banged the top of his head against the hatch fastener and hissed in pain.

  “What?” asked Kondratev.

  Belov sighed, sat down tailor-fashion, and raised an arm, feeling the hatch fastener over his head. The fastener was cold, with sharp, rough corners. It fastened the heavy hatch cover to the hatchway. Over the hatch cover was water. A hundred meters of water to the surface.

  “Kondratev,” said Belov.

  “Yes?”

  “Listen, Kondratev, why are we running submerged? Let’s surface and open the hatch: fresh air and all that.”

  “It’s wind force five up there,” Kondratev answered.

  Yes, thought Belov, a wind force of five, choppy water, so an open hatch would flood. But still, a hundred meters of water over your head is uncomfortable. Fifty-five fathoms. Three hundred thirty feet. Soon the dive will begin, and it’ll be two hundred meters, three, five. Maybe down to a kilometer or even two. Pushing my way in here was a bad move, Belov thought. I should have stayed on the Kunashir and written an article.

  Still another shrimp knocked against the porthole. Like a tiny pink explosion. Belov stared into the darkness, where for an instant the silhouette of Kondratev’s close-cropped head had appeared.

  Such things, of course, never came into Kondratev’s mind. Kondratev was quite different, not like your average person. In the first place, he was from the last century. In the second place, he had nerves of iron. As much iron as in the damned hatch fastener. In the third place, he did not give a damn for the unknown mysteries of the deep. He was immersed in methods of precise calculation of head of livestock, and in the variation of protein content per hectare of plankton field. He was worried about the predator that had been killing young whales. Sixteen young whales in the quarter, and all the very best, as if by choice. The pride of the Pacific whale-herders.

  “Kondratev!”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t be angry.”

  “I’m not angry,” Kondratev said angrily. “Where did you get that idea?”

  “I thought you were angry. When do we start the dive?”

  “Soon.”

  Thunk… thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk… A whole school of shrimp. Just like the fireworks at New Year’s. Belov yawned convulsively and hurriedly slammed his mouth shut. That was what he would do—keep his mouth shut tight the whole mission. “Akiko-san,” he said in English, “how do you feel?”

  “Fine, thank you,” Akiko answered politely in Russian. From her voice it was clear that she had not turned around. She’s angry too, Belov decided. That’s because she’s in love with Kondratev. Kondratev’s angry, so she is too. She looks up at Kondratev and never calls him anything but “Comrade Captain. She respects him very highly, she practically worships him. Yes, she’s in love with him up to her ears, that’s clear to everyone. Probably even to Kondratev. Only so far it isn’t clear to her herself. Poor thing, she’s really had rotten luck. A man with nerves of iron, muscles of steel, and a face of bronze. That Kondratev is a monumental man. Literally. A Buddha-man. A living monument to himself. And to his century. And to the whole heroic past.

  At 2:00 a.m., Kondratev turned on the cabin light and got out the chart. The submarine hung over the center of a depression eight nautical miles southwest of the drifting Kunashir. Kondratev tapped his fingernails absentmindedly on the chart and announced, “We’re beginning the dive.”

  “At last,” muttered Belov.

  “Will we descend vertically, Comrade Captain?” asked Akiko.

  “We’re not in a bathyscaphe,” Kondratev said dryly. “We’ll go down in a spiral.”

  He did not himself know why he said it dryly. Perhaps because he had glimpsed Akiko again. He thought he had remembered her well, but it turned out that in the few hours of darkness he had endowed her with the features of other women who were not like her at all. Women whom he had liked before. Colleagues at work, actresses from various films. In the light these features disappea
red, and she seemed more slender, more angular, darker than he had imagined. She was like a small teenage boy. She sat peacefully beside him, with a lowered glance, her hands resting on her bare knees. Strange, he thought. She never used perfume before, so far as I noticed.

  He turned off the light and headed the submarine into the depths. The sub’s nose slanted sharply, and Belov braced himself with his knees against the back of the chair. Now, over Kondratev’s shoulder, he saw the illuminated dials and the sonar screen in the upper part of the panel. Trembling sparks flared up and died out on the screen: probably blips of deep-sea fish still too far away for identification. Belov ran his eyes over the dials, looking for the depth indicator. The bathymeter was at the far left. The red needle was slowly crawling to the 200-meter mark. Then it would just as slowly crawl to the 300 mark, then 400… Under the submarine was an abyssal chasm, and the minisub was a tiny mote in an inconceivable mass of water. Belov suddenly felt as if something were interfering with his breathing. The darkness in the cabin became thicker and more unrelenting, like the cold salt water outside. It’s begun, Belov thought. He took a deep breath and held it. Then he narrowed his eyes, grabbed the back of the chair with both hands, and began to count to himself. When colored spots started swimming before his narrowed eyes he exhaled noisily and ran his hand across his forehead. The hand got wet.

  The red needle crossed the 200 mark. The sight was both beautiful and ominous: the red needle and green numbers in the darkness. A ruby needle and emerald numbers: 200, 300… 1000… 3000… 5000… I can’t understand at all why I became an oceanographer. Why not a metallurgist or gardener? Ghastly stupidity. Out of every hundred people only one gets depth sickness. But this one-out-of-a-hundred is an oceanographer, because he likes to study cephalopods. He’s simply crazy out of his head about cephalopods. Cephalopods, damn them! Why don’t I study something else? Say rabbits. Or earthworms.

  Nice, fat earthworms in the wet soil under a hot sun. No darkness, no horror of a saltwater grave. Just earth and sun. He said loudly, “Kondratev!”