Noon, 22nd Century Page 27

  Peters got out his handkerchief, wiped his eyes, stood up, and started pacing the room. This damned nonsensical cage… Are they going to keep us here much longer? He thought that by now all hundred espers must be stirring in their individual cages. Old loud Sieverson, who contrived to be peevish and kindly at the same time. And that self-satisfied fool McCullough. Where did people like McCullough come from? Probably you found them only among the espers. And all because telepathy, whatever you thought of it, was an abnormality. At least for now. Fortunately, people like McCullough were rare even among espers. Among professional espers they were nonexistent. Take, for example, that Yura Rusakov, the long-distance esper. On the long-distance stations there were many professional espers, but they said that Yura Rusakov was the strongest of them all, the strongest esper in the world. He could even pick up direction. That was a very rare talent. He had been an esper since earliest childhood and from earliest childhood he had known it. And still he was a jolly, good boy. He had been well brought up—he hadn’t been treated from infancy like a genius and prodigy. The most frightful thing for a child was loving parents. But this one had been brought up in school, and he was a really nice kid. They said he had cried when he received the last message from the Explorer. After the accident there had been only one person left alive on the Explorer, the young midshipman Walter Saronian. A very, very talented young man, evidently. And one with a will of iron. Wounded, dying, he had started searching for the cause of the accident—and had found it!

  Peters came to alertness. Some extraneous, barely noticable, inaudible nuance had, it seemed, crept into his consciousness. No. It was only the echo off the walls. He wondered what it would be like if it existed. Georgie-boy had affirmed that theoretically it should be received as noise. But naturally he couldn’t explain what kind of noise, and when he tried, he either quickly slipped into mathematics or else put forward uncertain analogies to broken radio sets. The physicists knew theoretically what kind of noise, but they had no sensory notion of it, while the espers, not understanding the theory, perhaps were hearing this noise twenty times a day without suspecting it. What a pity there’s not one single esper physicist! Perhaps that Yura Rusakov will become the first. He or one of the kids at the long-distance stations. It’s a good thing we instinctively distinguish our thoughts from those of others and can only accidentally take an echo for an outside signal.

  Peters sat down and stretched out his legs. Still, the physicists had thought up a funny business—catching spirits from another world. It was natural science in the spirit world. He looked at his watch. Only thirty minutes had passed. Well, spirits are spirits. Let’s listen.

  At precisely seventeen hundred hours, Peters went up to the door. The heavy slab of titanium steel lifted, and into his consciousness rushed a whirlwind of excited alien thoughts. As always, he saw the strained, expectant faces of the physicists, and as always, he shook his head No. He was unbearably sorry for these young, bright fellows-many times he had imagined how wonderful it would be if right from the threshold he could smile and say, “Linkage fields do exist—I picked up your linkage field for you.” But what were you going to do if the linkage field either did not exist or was beyond the ability of espers? “Nothing,” he said aloud, and stepped into the corridor.

  “Too bad,” one of the physicists said disappointedly. He always said “too bad.”

  Peters went up to him and laid his hand on his shoulder.

  “Listen,” he said, “perhaps this is enough? Perhaps you’ve made some sort of mistake?”

  The physicist forced a smile. “Come now, Comrade Peters!” he said. “The experiments have hardly begun. We didn’t expect anything else at first. We’ll strengthen the stimulator… yes, the stimulator. If only you would agree to continue…”

  “We must gather a large statistical sample,” said the other physicist. “Only then can we draw any conclusions. We’re very much counting on you, Comrade Peters, on you personally and on your colleagues.”

  “All right,” said Peters. “Of course.” He saw very well that they were no longer counting on anything. They were just hoping for a miracle. But the miracle could happen. Anything could happen.

  16. Pilgrims and Wayfarers

  The water deep down wasn’t all that cold, but still I was frozen. I sat on the bottom just under the precipice and for a whole hour I kept cautiously turning my head, peering into the turbid greenish twilight. I had to sit motionless, for septipods are alert and suspicious creatures. The slightest sound, any quick movement, can frighten them, and then they hie off and return only at night; and it’s not a good idea to tangle with them at night.

  An eel would stir under my feet and swim back and forth a dozen times or so, and then a pompous striped perch would come back once again. And every time, it stopped and goggled at me with its empty round eyes. It had only to swim off, and a school of silvery minnows would appear and start grazing over my head. My knees and shoulders were thoroughly stiff with cold, and I was worried that Mashka might get tired of just waiting for me, and instead come into the water to find me and rescue me. Finally I had so vividly imagined her sitting alone at the edge of the water, and waiting, and being afraid, and wanting to dive in and look for me, that I was about ready to come out. But just then, the septipod finally emerged from a thicket of seaweed twenty paces to the right.

  It was a fairly large specimen. It had appeared instantly and noiselessly, like a ghost, with its round gray torso out in front. A whitish mantle pulsed softly, weakly, and automatically, taking in water and pushing it out, and the septipod rocked lightly from side to side as it moved. The tips of its tucked-up tentacles, like long strips of old rags, trailed after it, and the slit of its barely opened eyes gleamed dimly in the twilight. It swam slowly, as they all did during the daytime, in a strange eerie torpor, going who knew where or why. Probably the darkest, most primitive instincts moved them, perhaps the same instincts that direct the motion of amoebas.

  Very slowly and steadily I raised the tag gun and pointed the barrel, aiming for the swollen back. A silvery minnow suddenly darted forth and disappeared, and I thought that the eyelid over the enormous glazed eye trembled. I pulled the trigger and immediately pushed up from the bottom, getting away from the caustic ink. When I looked around again, the septipod was no longer in sight. There was just a thick blue-black cloud that was spreading through the water, obscuring the bottom. I darted toward the surface and started swimming toward shore.

  The day was hot and clear, and a bluish steamy haze hung over the water. The sky was empty and white, except for motionless blue-gray piles of clouds that rose up over the forest like castle towers.

  A strange man in brightly colored swimming trunks, was sitting in the grass in front of our tent, a headband stretched across his forehead. He was tanned and though not muscular, somehow improbably sinewy, as if he were tied together with rope under his skin. It was immediately apparent that this was an impossibly strong man. My Mashka, long-legged, dark, with a shock of sun-bleached hair falling over sharp vertebrae, wearing a navy blue bathing suit, was standing in front of him. No, she wasn’t sitting by the water pining for her daddy—she was energetically telling something to this wiry stranger, gesturing at full blast. I was a bit miffed that she hadn’t even noticed my arrival. But the stranger noticed. He quickly turned his head, took a good look, and, with a smile, brandished an open hand. Mashka turned around and yelled happily, “Ah, there you are, Daddy!”

  I climbed onto the grass, took off my mask, and wiped my face. The stranger was examining me smilingly.

  “How many did you tag?” Mashka asked in a businesslike voice.

  “One.” I had a cramp in my jaw.

  “Oh, Daddy,” Mashka said. She helped me take off the aqua-stat, and then I stretched out in the grass. “Yesterday he tagged two,” Mashka explained, “and four the day before that. If it’s going to go this way, we’d better move right on to another lake.” She took a towel and started drying my
back. “You’re like a fresh-frozen goose,” she declared. “This is Leonid Andreevich Gorbovsky. He’s an astroarchaeologist. And this, Leonid, is my daddy. His name is Stanislav Ivanov.”

  The sinewy Leonid Gorbovsky nodded, smiling. “You’re frozen,” he said. “Up here it’s very nice-the sun, the grass…”

  “He’ll be all right in a minute,” said Mashka, drying me with all her might. “He’s usually quite a merry old soul—he’s just chilled through.”

  It was clear that she had just been talking a lot about me, and was now using all her power to save face for me. Well, let her save it. I didn’t have enough time to bother with that myself—my teeth were chattering.

  “Mashka and I have been very worried about you,” Gorbovsky said. “We even wanted to dive after you, but I don’t know how. You probably can’t imagine a man who hasn’t had occasion to go diving even once in his work.” He lay down on his back, turned over onto his side, and leaned on one arm. “Tomorrow I’m shipping out,” he said confidingly. “I don’t know when I’ll have another chance to lie down on the grass by a lake and have the opportunity to go diving with an aquastat.”

  “Please, go ahead,” I suggested.

  He looked carefully at the aquastat, then touched it. “Certainly,” he said, and lay down on his back. He put his hands behind his head and looked at me, slowly blinking his sparse lashes. There was something unfailingly winning about him. I couldn’t even say what exactly. Perhaps the eyes—trusting and a little sad. Or the fact that the way one of his ears stuck out from under the headband was somehow very amusing. After he had inspected me to his satisfaction, he turned his eyes and stared at a blue dragonfly swaying on a blade of grass. His lips gently puckered out in a whistle. “A dragonfly!” he said. “A little dragonfly. Blue… like the lake… a beauty. It sits so primly and looks around to see who to gobble up.” He stretched out his arm, but the dragonfly let go of the blade of grass and flew off in an arc into the reeds. He followed it with his eyes, and then lay down again. “How complicated it all is, people,” he said. Mashka immediately sat down and fastened her round eyes upon him. “I mean, this dragonfly—perfect, elegant, pleased with everything! It’s eaten a fly, it’s reproduced, and then it’s time to die. Simple, elegant, rational. And you don’t have spiritual turmoil, pangs of love, self-awareness, or bother about the meaning of life.”

  “A machine,” Mashka said suddenly. “A boring old robot!” That was my Mashka! I almost laughed, but held myself back; but I must have snorted, for she looked at me with displeasure. “Boring,” Gorbovsky agreed. “Precisely. And now imagine, comrades, a dragonfly colored a venomous yellow-green, with red crossbars, a wingspan of seven meters, and a vile black slime on its mandibles. Can you imagine?” He raised his brows and looked at us. “I see you can’t. Well, I ran from them in panic, even though I had a gun. So you ask yourself, what have they got in common, these two boring robots?”

  “This green one,” I said, “it must have been on another planet?”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “Pandora?”

  ‘Precisely. Pandora,” he said.

  ‘What do they have in common?”

  ‘That is the question. What?”

  “Well, that’s clear enough,” I said. “An identical level of information processing. Reactions on the level of instinct.”

  He sighed. “Words,” he said. “Now, don’t get angry, but it’s just words. That doesn’t help me. I have to search for evidence of intelligence in the universe, and I don’t even know what intelligence is. And they tell me about various levels of information processing. I know that the level is different in me and in the dragonfly, but that’s all intuition. You tell me: say I’ve found a termite mound. Is that evidence of intelligence, or not? On Mars and Vladislava we’ve found buildings with no windows, with no doors. Is that evidence of intelligence? What am I looking for? Ruins? Inscriptions? A rusty nail? A heptagonal nut? How do I know what sort of traces they leave? Suppose their aim in life is to annihilate atmosphere everywhere they find it. Or to build rings around planets. Or to hybridize life. Or to create life. Maybe this dragonfly itself is a self-replicating cybernetic apparatus released since time immemorial. To say nothing of the bearers of intelligence themselves. I mean, you can walk past a slimy monster grunting in a puddle twenty times and only turn your nose away. And the monster looks at you with its fine yellow eyes and thinks, ‘Curious. Undoubtedly a new species. I’ll have to come back here with an expedition and catch a specimen or two.’” He shaded his eyes with his hand and started humming a song. Mashka devoured him with her eyes and waited. I waited too, and thought sympathetically that it’s no fun working when the problem hasn’t been stated clearly. No fun at all. You stumble around in the dark and you have no joy or even satisfaction in your work. I’d heard about these astroarchaeologists. I could never take them seriously. No one takes them seriously.

  “But there is intelligent life in the universe,” Gorbovsky said suddenly. “That’s beyond doubt. But it isn’t the way we think. It’s not what we’re expecting. And we’re looking in the wrong places. Or in the wrong way. And we simply don’t know what we’re looking for.”

  There you are, I thought. The wrong thing, in the wrong place, in the wrong way— That’s simply frivolous, comrades. Pure childishness.

  “Take for example the Voice of the Void,” he continued. “Have you heard of it? Probably not. Fifty years ago it was written up, but no one mentions it any more. Because, you see, there has been no progress, and if there’s no progress, then of course there can’t be any Voice either. After all, we have a whole flock of these birds—they don’t know much about science, out of laziness or a poor education, but they know by hearsay that man is almighty. Almighty. But he can’t decode the Voice of the Void. Good heavens, for shame, that can’t be, we won’t permit it! This cheap anthropocentrism…”

  “And what is the Voice of the Void?” Mashka asked quietly.

  “There’s a certain curious phenomenon. In certain directions in space. If you turn the shipboard receiver to autotuning, sooner or later it tunes in on a strange broadcast. You hear a cool, calm voice repeating the same words over and over in an unknown language. They’ve been picking it up for years, and for years it’s repeated the same thing. I’ve heard it, and lots of other people have heard it, but only a few will talk about it. It’s not very pleasant to recall. I mean, here you are, and the distance to Earth is unimaginable. The ether is empty—not even any real static, just weak whispers. And suddenly you hear this voice. And you’re on watch, alone. Everyone is asleep, it’s quiet, scary, and here comes this voice. Believe me, it’s not pleasant at all. There are recordings of the voice. A lot of people have racked their brains trying to decipher them and many are still racking them, but if you ask me it’s hopeless. There are other mysteries too.

  Spacers could tell a good deal, but they don’t like to…” He was silent for a bit, then added with a certain sad insistency, “You’ve got to understand that. It’s not a simple matter. We don’t even know what to expect. They could meet us at any minute. Face to face. And, you understand, they could turn out to be immeasurably superior to us. Completely unlike us, and immeasurably superior to boot. You hear talk of collisions and conflicts, about all sorts of different understandings of humaneness and good, but that’s not what I’m afraid of. What I’m afraid of is the unparalleled humiliation of the human race, of a gigantic psychological shock. We’re so proud, after all. We’ve created such a wonderful world, we know so much, we’ve fought our way out into the wide universe, and there we discover and study and explore—what? For them, the universe is simply home. They’ve lived in it for millions of years, as we’ve lived on Earth, and they’re just surprised at us: where did these things out among the stars come from?”

  He suddenly fell silent and got up with a jerk, listening intently. I even trembled.

  “It’s thunder,” Mashka said quietly. She was staring at him with her mo
uth half open. “Thunder. There’ll be a storm.”

  He was still listening intently, sweeping his eyes across the sky. “No, it’s not thunder,” he said at last, and sat down again. “It’s a liner. There, see?”

  Against a background of blue-gray clouds a gleaming streak flashed and fell. And again the sky thundered weakly.

  “So sit down now, and wait,” he said incomprehensibly. He looked at me, smiling, and there was sadness and strained expectation in his eyes. Then it all disappeared and his eyes became trusting as before. “And what are you working on, Comrade Stanislav Ivanov?” he asked.

  I concluded that he wanted to change the subject, and I started telling him about septipods. That they belonged to the subclass of dibranchiates of the class of cephalopod mollusks, and represented a special, previously unknown tribe of the order of octopods. They were characterized by the reduction of the third left arm (the one symmetrical with the hetocotylized third right arm), by three rows of suckers on the arms, by the complete absence of a coelom, by an unusually powerful development of the venous heart, by a concentration of the central nervous system that was the maximum for all cephalopods, and by certain other less significant characteristics. The first of the septipods had been discovered recently, when individual specimens appeared off the eastern and southeastern coasts of Asia. And after a year they began to be found in the lower courses of major rivers-the Mekong, the Yangtze, the Huang Ho, and the Amur-and also in lakes like this one, fairly distant from the coastline. And that was surprising, because usually cephalopods were stenohalines to the nth degree, and they avoided even Arctic waters with their reduced salinity. And they almost never came out on dry land. But a fact was a fact: the septipods felt fine in fresh water and came out on land. They climbed into boats and onto bridges, and recently two had been discovered in the forest about thirty kilometers from here.