Noon, 22nd Century Read online

  “Good grief,” said Tanya, and Fokin shut up.

  “I don’t understand a thing,” he said then in a hoarse whisper.

  “Do you think, Boris, that we are capable of representing the best minds of humanity?” asked Mboga.

  Komov muttered gloomily, “We’ve sure messed things up here! We burned out a whole field, trampled crops, shot guns. And around the base!” He waved his hand.

  “But how could we know?” Ryu said guiltily.

  “Yes,” said Mboga. “We made many mistakes. But I hope they’ve understood us. They’re civilized enough for that.”

  “What sort of a civilization is this!” said Fokin. “Where are the machines? Where are the tools? Where are the cities?”

  “Shut up, Boris,” said Komov. “‘Machines, cities’—just open your eyes! Do we know how to fly on birds? Have we bred animals that produce honey? Has our last mosquito been long exterminated? ‘Machines.’…”

  “A biological civilization,” said Mboga.

  “What?” asked Fokin.

  “A biological civilization. Not machines, but selection, genetics, animal training. Who knows what forces they’ve mastered? And who can say whose civilization is superior?”

  “Imagine, Boris,” said Tanya,

  Fokin twirled his mustache furiously.

  “And we’re clearing out,” said Komov, “because none of us has the right to take upon himself the responsibility of first contact.” Oh, am I sorry to leave! he thought. I don’t want to go—I want to search them out, to meet them, to talk, to see what they’re like. Can this really have happened at last? Not some brainless lizards, not some sort of leeches, but a real human race. A whole world, a whole history… Did you have wars and revolutions? Which did you get first, steam or electricity? And what is the meaning of life? And might I perhaps have something to read? The first essay in the comparative history of intelligent species. And we have to go. Oh boy, oh boy, do I ever feel like staying! But on Earth there has already for fifty years been a Commission on Contacts, which for all those years has been studying the comparative psychology of fish and ants, and arguing over in what language to say the first “uh.” Only now you can’t laugh at them any more. I wonder whether any of them had foreseen the possibility of a biological civilization. Probably. What haven’t they foreseen?

  “Gorbovsky is a man of phenomenal penetration,” said Mboga.

  “Yes,” said Tanya. “It’s frightening to think what old Boris could have done if he’d had a gun.”

  “Why single me out?” Fokin said angrily, “What about you? Who was it that went swimming with a hacker?”

  “We’re all a fine bunch,” Ryu said with a sigh.

  Komov looked at his watch. “Takeoff in twenty minutes,” he announced. “Stations, please.”

  Mboga hesitated in the airlock and looked back. The white star EN 23 had already risen over the green plain. It smelled of moist grass, warm earth, fresh honey. “Yes,” said Mboga. “Really a planet with all the conveniences. Why did we ever think nature could have created anything like it?”

  Part Four: What You Will Be Like

  18. Defeat

  You’re going to the island of Shumshu,” Fischer announced.

  “Where is that?” Sidorov asked gloomily.

  “The northern Kurils. Your flight leaves today at twenty-two thirty. A combined cargo-passenger run from Novosibirsk to Port Provideniya.”

  They planned on testing embryomechs under varied conditions. Mostly the Institute did work for spacemen, and consequently thirty research groups out of forty-seven had been sent to the Moon and to various planets. The remaining seventeen were to work on Earth.

  “All right,” Sidorov said slowly. He had hoped that they would assign him a space group, even if only a lunar one. It seemed to him that he had a good chance, for it had been a long time since he had felt as well as he had recently. He was in excellent shape, and had continued to hope up to the last minute. But for some reason Fischer had decided otherwise, and Sidorov couldn’t even talk to him man to man, since some glum-faced strangers were sitting in the office. So this is how Pm going to grow old, thought Sidorov. “All right,” he repeated calmly.

  “Severokurilsk already knows,” Fischer said. “The exact site of the experiment will be decided in Baikovo.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “On the island of Shumshu. It’s Shumshu’s administrative center.” Fischer hooked his fingers together and started looking out the window. “Sermus is staying on Earth too,” he said. “He’s going to the Sahara.”

  Sidorov was silent.

  “So,” said Fischer. “I have already assigned you some assistants. You’ll have two of them. Good kids.”

  “Greenhorns.”

  “They’ll manage,” Fischer said quickly. “They’ve had good preparation. Good kids, I tell you. One of them, incidentally, has been an Assaultman like you.”

  “Fine,” Sidorov said indifferently. “Is that it?”

  “That’s it. You can start off, and good luck. Your cargo and your people are in One-sixteen.”

  Sidorov started walking toward the door. Fischer hesitated, then called after him, “And come back soon, Kamerad. I have an interesting topic for you.”

  Sidorov closed the door behind him and stood there a moment. Laboratory 116 was five stories below, he remembered, so he headed for the elevator.

  An Egg—a polished sphere half as high as a man—was standing in the righthand corner of the laboratory, and two people were sitting in the left corner. They stood up when Sidorov came in. Sidorov stopped and looked them over. They were both about twenty-five, no older. One was tall, blond, with an ugly red face. The other was a little shorter, a dark, handsome, Spanish type, wearing a suede jacket and heavy climbing boots. Sidorov stuck his hands into his pockets, stood on tiptoes, and came down again on his heels. Greenhorns, he thought, and suddenly felt the attack of irritation so strong that he surprised himself. “Hello,” he said. “My name is Sidorov.”

  The dark one showed white teeth. “We know, sir.” He stopped smiling and introduced himself: “Kuzma Sorochinsky.”

  “Galtsev, Viktor,” said the blond one.

  I wonder which of them was the Assaultman, thought Sidorov. Probably the Spanish-looking one, Sorochinsky. He asked, “Which of you was the Assaultman?”

  “I was,” answered the blond Galtsev.

  “Disciplinary?” asked Sidorov.

  “Yes,” said Galtsev. “Disciplinary.” He looked Sidorov in the eye. Galtsev had baby-blue eyes and fluffy, feminine lashes. Somehow they did not fit in with his coarse red face.

  “Well,” said Sidorov, “an Assaultman is supposed to be disciplined. Any person is supposed to be disciplined. But that’s water under the bridge. What can you do, Galtsev?”

  “I’m a biologist,” Galtsev said. “A specialist in nematodes.”

  “Right,” Sidorov said, and turned to Sorochinsky. “And you?”

  “Gastronomical engineer,” Sorochinsky reported loudly, again showing his white teeth.

  Marvelous, thought Sidorov. A worm specialist and a pastry cook. An undisciplined Assaultman and a suede jacket. Good kids. Especially this excuse for an Assaultman. Thank you, Comrade Fischer, you always take such good care of me. Sidorov imagined Fischer carefully and carpingly picking the off-planet groups out of two thousand volunteers, then looking at the clock, looking at the lists, and saying to himself, “Sidorov’s group. The Kurils. Athos is efficient, experienced. Three people will be quite enough for him. Two, even. It’s hardly the Hot Plateau on Mercury, after all. We’ll give him this Sorochinsky and this Galtsev. All the better, Galtsev has been an Assaultman too.”

  “You’ve been briefed for this work?” asked Sidorov.

  “Yes,” said Galtsev.

  “I’ll say we have, sir,” said Sorochinsky. “We’ve got it coming out our ears!”

  Sidorov went over to the Egg and touched its cold, polished surface. Then he ask
ed, “Do you know what this is? You, Galtsev.”

  Galtsev raised his eyes to the ceiling, thought a bit, and said in a monotone, “Embryomechanical device EM-8. Embryomech Model Eight. An autonomous self-developing mechanized system including: FMC program control—the Fischer mechano-chromosome; a system of organs of perception and action; a digestive system; and a power system. The EM-8 is an embryome-chanical device which is capable under any conditions of converting any raw material into any structure given in its program. The EM-8 is intended—”

  “You,” Sidorov said to Sorochinsky.

  Sorochinsky rattled off, “The present prototype of the EM-8 is intended for tests under terrestrial conditions. The program is standard program number sixty-four: the conversion of the embryo into an airtight residential dome for six persons, with hall and oxygen filtration.”

  Sidorov looked out the window and asked, “Weight?”

  “Approximately one hundred and fifty kilos.” General assistants for experimental groups could really get by without knowing any of this.

  “Fine,” said Sidorov. “Now I’ll tell you what you don’t know. In the first place, the Egg costs nineteen thousand man-hours of skilled labor. In the second place, it really does weigh all of one hundred and fifty kilos, and you will haul it yourselves to where we need it.”

  Galtsev nodded. Sorochinsky said, “Of course, sir.”

  “Wonderful,” said Sidorov. “You can start right now. Roll it to the elevator and go down to the lobby. Then go to the storeroom and take out the recording apparatus. Then you can go about your own business. Be at the airport with all the cargo by ten o’clock p.m. Try not to be late.”

  He turned and left. From behind came a heavy thud. Sidorov’s group had started carrying out its first order.

  At dawn a cargo-passenger stratoplane dropped a pterocar with the group over the Second Kuril Strait. Very elegantly, Galtsev brought the pterocar out of its dive, looked around, looked at the map, looked at the compass, and immediately found his way to Baikovo—several rings of two-story buildings made of red and white lithoplast, stretching in a semicircle around a small but deep bay. The pterocar, wrenching its tough wings, landed on the embankment. An early passerby, a teenage boy in a striped sailor undershirt and canvas pants, told them where the administration building was. There the current administrator of the island, an elderly round-shouldered Ainu who was a senior agronomist, welcomed them and invited them to breakfast. After he had heard Sidorov out, he offered him a choice of several low knolls on the northern shore. He spoke Russian fairly clearly, although sometimes he hesitated in the middle of a word, as if unsure where the accent went,

  “The northern shore is fairly far off,” he said, “and there are no good roads going there, But you have a ptero… car. And then, I can’t suggest anything closer for you. I don’t understand experiments very well. But the greater part of the island is taken up by melon fields, seedbeds, and so forth. Schoolchil… dren are working everywhere now, and I can’t take unneces… sary risks.”

  “There is no risk,” Sorochinsky said flippantly. “No risk whatsoever.”

  Sidorov remembered how once he had sat on a fire escape for a whole hour, getting away from a plastic vampire that needed protoplasm in order to put the finishing touches on itself. But then it hadn’t been the Egg that time. “Thank you,” he said. “The northern shore will suit us very well.”

  “Yes,” said the Ainu. “There are no melon fields or seedbeds there. Only birches. And somewhere there’s an archaeo… logical project.”

  “Archaeological?” Sorochinsky said with surprise.

  “Thank you,” said Sidorov. “I think we’ll set off right away.”

  “First you will have breakfast,” the Ainu reminded them politely.

  They breakfasted silently. As they were leaving the Ainu said, “If you need something, don’t—how do you say it?—hes… itate to call on me.”

  “Thank you. We won’t—how do you say it?—hes… itate one bit,” Sorochinsky assured him.

  Sidorov glared at him, and once in the pterocar said, “If you pull something like that again, punk, I’ll throw you off the island.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Sorochinsky, turning beet red. The flush made his smooth, dark face still more handsome.

  In truth on the northern shore there were neither melon fields nor seedbeds, only birches. Kuril birches grow “lying down,” creeping across the ground, and their wet gnarled trunks and branches form a flat, impenetrable tangle. From the air a Kuril birch thicket looks like an inoffensive green meadow, perfectly suitable for the landing of a fairly light craft. Neither Galtsev, who was driving the pterocar, nor Sidorov nor Sorochinsky had any conception of Kuril birches. Sidorov pointed out a round knoll and said, “There.” Sorochinsky looked at him timidly and said, “A good place.” Galtsev lowered the landing gear and steered the pterocar to a landing right in the middle of a broad green field at the foot of the round knoll.

  The car’s wings stood still, and in a minute the pterocar had come crackling nose first into the sparse verdure of the Kuril birches. Sidorov heard the crackling, saw a million varicolored stars, and lost consciousness.

  Then he opened his eyes and first of all saw a hand. It was large, tanned, and its freshly scratched fingers seemed to be playing over the keyboard on the control panel, rather uncertainly.

  The hand disappeared, and a dark-red face with blue eyes and feminine eyelashes came into view.

  Sidorov wheezed and tried to sit up. His right side hurt badly, and his forehead smarted. He touched his forehead, then brought his fingers over before his eyes. The fingers were bloody. He looked at Galtsev, who was wiping his smashed mouth with a handkerchief.

  “A masterly landing,” said Sidorov. “You bring joy to my heart, nematologist.”

  Galtsev was silent. He pressed the crumpled handkerchief to his lips, and his face was motionless. Sorochinsky’s high trembling voice said, “It’s not his fault, sir.”

  Sidorov slowly turned his head and looked at Sorochinsky.

  “Honest, it’s not his fault,” Sorochinsky repeated, and moved away. “You just look where we landed.”

  Sidorov opened the door a bit, stuck his head outside, and stared for several seconds at the uprooted, broken trunks which were caught in the landing gear. He extended an arm, plucked a few hard glossy leaves, crumpled them in his fingers, and tasted them with his tongue. The leaves were tart and bitter. Sidorov spat and asked, without looking at Galtsev, “Is the car in one piece?”

  “Yes,” Galtsev answered through his handkerchief.

  “What happened? Tooth knocked out?”

  “Right,” said Galtsev. “Knocked clean out.”

  “You’ll live,” promised Sidorov. “You can put this down as my fault. Try to lift the car to the knoll.”

  It wasn’t easy to pull free of the thicket, but at last Galtsev landed the pterocar on top of the round knoll. Sidorov, rubbing his right side, got out and looked around. From here the island looked uninhabited, and flat as a table. The knoll was bare and rusty from volcanic slag. To the east crept thickets of Kuril birches, and to the south stretched the rectangles of melon fields. It was about four and a half miles to the western shore. Beyond it, pale violet mountain peaks jutted up into a lilac-colored haze, and still farther off, to the right, a strange triangular cloud with sharp edges hung motionless in the blue sky. The northern shore was much closer. It descended steeply into the sea. An awkward gray tower-probably an ancient defensive emplacement-jutted up over a cliff. Near the tower a tent showed white, and small human figures moved about. Evidently these were the archaeologists of whom the administrator had spoken. Sidorov sniffed. He smelled salt water and warm rocks. And it was very quiet. He could not even hear the surf.

  A good spot, he thought. We’ll leave the Egg here, put the movie cameras and so forth on the slopes, and pitch camp below, in the melon fields. The watermelons must still be green here. Then he thought about the archaeol
ogists. They’re about three miles off, but still we should warn them, so they won’t be surprised when the embryomech starts developing.

  Sidorov called over Galtsev and Sorochinsky and said, “We’ll do the test here. This seems to be a good place. The raw materials are just what we need—lava, tuff. So step to it!”

  Galtsev and Sorochinsky went over to the pterocar and opened up the trunk. Sunglints burst forth. Sorochinsky crawled inside and grunted a bit, and in one sudden heave he rolled the Egg out onto the ground. Making crunching sounds on the slag, the Egg rolled a few paces and stopped. Galtsev barely had time to jump out of its way. “Careful,” he said quietly. “You’ll strain yourself.”

  Sorochinsky hopped out and said in a gruff voice, “Never mind—we’re used to it.”

  Sidorov walked around the Egg, and tried shoving it. The Egg didn’t even rock. “Wonderful,” he said. “Now the movie cameras.”

  They fussed about for a long time setting up the movie cameras: an infrared one, a stereo camera, another that registered temperature, a fourth with a wide-angle lens.

  It was already around twelve when Sidorov carefully blotted his sweaty forehead with a sleeve and got the plastic case with the activator out of his pocket. Galtsev and Sorochinsky started moving back, looking over his shoulders. Sidorov unhurriedly dropped the activator into his palm—it was a small shiny tube with a sucker on one end and a red ribbed button on the other. “Let’s get started,” he said aloud. He went up to the Egg and stuck the sucker to the polished metal. He waited a second, then pressed the red button with his thumb.

  Without taking his eyes off the Egg he stepped back a pace. Now nothing less than a direct hit from a rocket rifle could halt the processes that had begun under the gleaming shell. The embryomech had begun to adjust itself to the field conditions. They did not know how long this would take. But when the adjustment was finished, the embryo would begin development.

  Sidorov glanced at his watch. It was five after twelve. With an effort he unstuck the activator from the surface of the Egg, returned it to its case, and put it in his pocket. Then he looked at Galtsev and Sorochinsky. They were standing behind his back and watching the Egg silently. Sidorov touched the gleaming surface one last time and said, “Let’s go.”