Noon, 22nd Century Page 34

  On Earth, Kostylin had gotten busy with the trophy. After a week he told the Hunter that the trophy was badly damaged and was of no special interest, save, perhaps, as a proof of the existence of higher forms of animal life in the systems of red dwarfs—and he advised him to be a little more careful with thermite cartridges in future.

  “You would almost think you’d fired at it out of fright,” Kostylin said in irritation, “as if it had attacked you.”

  “But I remember perfectly well that I shot a needle,” the Hunter objected.

  “And I see perfectly well that you hit it in the backbone with a thermite bullet,” Lin answered.

  The Hunter shrugged and did not argue. He wondered, of course, what could have caused such an explosion, but after all it was not really all that important.

  Yes, it seemed quite unimportant then, the Hunter thought. He still stood there, and kept looking at the flat head of the threefinger. I laughed a little at Crookes, argued a bit with Lin, and forgot everything. And then came doubt, and with it, grief.

  Crookes organized two major expeditions. He covered an enormous area on the planet that bore his name. And he did not find one animal there larger than a land crab the size of a little finger. Then, in the southern hemisphere, on a rocky plateau, he discovered a landing pad of unknown origin—a round plot of fused basalt about twenty meters in diameter. At first this find had aroused much interest, but then it had been discovered that Sanders’s starship had landed somewhere in that area two years before for emergency repairs, and the find was forgotten. Forgotten by everyone except the Hunter. Because by that time doubts had already formed in the Hunter’s mind.

  The Hunter had once heard a story, in the Spacers’ Club in Leningrad, about how an engineer had almost gotten burned alive on the planet Crookes. He had climbed out of the ship with a defective oxygen tank. There was a leak in it, and the Crookesian atmosphere was saturated with light hydrocarbons that react violently with free oxygen. Fortunately, they had managed to tear the burning tank off the poor fellow, and he had escaped with only minor burns. As the Hunter had listened to this story, a violet flash over a black hillcrest appeared before his eyes.

  When a strange landing pad had been discovered on Crookes, doubts turned into horrible certainty. The Hunter had run to Kostylin. “What have I killed?” he shouted. “Was it an animal or a person? Lin, what have I killed?”

  Kostylin listened to him, his eyes turning bloodshot, and then shouted, “Sit down! Cut the hysterics—you’re like a whining old woman! Where do you get off talking to me this way? Do you think that I, Aleksandr Kostylin, can’t tell the difference between an intelligent being and an animal?”

  “But the landing site!”

  “You yourself landed on that mesa with Sanders.”

  “The flash! I hit his oxygen tank!”

  “You shouldn’t have fired thermite bullets in a hydrocarbon atmosphere.”

  “Have it your way, but Crookes still didn’t find even one more threefinger! I know it was an alien spacer!”

  “Hysterical old woman!” yelled Lin. “It could be they won’t find one more threefinger on Crookes for another century! It’s an enormous planet, filled with caves like a giant Swiss cheese! You simply lucked out, you idiot, and then you didn’t manage to follow it through, so you ended up bringing me charred bones instead of an animal!”

  The Hunter clenched his hands so that his knuckles cracked. “No, Lin, I didn’t bring you an animal,” he muttered. “I brought you an alien spacer.”

  How many words you wasted, Lin old fellow! How many times you tried to convince me! How many times I thought that doubt had departed forever, that I could breathe easy again and not know myself a murderer. Could be like other people. Like the children playing Martian hide-and-seek. But you can’t kill doubt with casuistry.

  He lay his hands on the case and pressed his face to the clear plastic. “What are you?” he asked with sad yearning.

  Lin saw him from afar, and, as always, he was unbearably pained by the sight of a man once so daring and cheerful, now so fearfully broken by his own conscience. But he pretended that everything was wonderful, like the wonderful sunny Capetown day. Clicking his heels noisily, Lin went up to the Hunter, put his hand on his shoulder, and exclaimed in a deliberately cheery voice, “The meeting is over! I could eat a horse, Polly, so we’ll go to my place now and have a glorious dinner! Marta has made real Afrikaner oxtail soup in your honor today. Come on, Hunter, the soup awaits us!”

  “Let’s go,” the Hunter said quietly.

  “I already phoned home. Everyone is aching to see you and hear your stories.”

  The Hunter nodded and walked slowly toward the exit. Lin looked at his stooped back and turned to the exhibit. His eyes met the dead white eyes behind the clear pane. Did you have your talk? Lin asked silently.

  Yes.

  You didn’t tell him anything?

  No.

  Lin looked at the descriptive plaque. “Quadrabrachium tridactylus. Acquired by Hunter P. Gnedykh. Prepared by Doctor A. Kostylin.” He looked at the Hunter again and quickly, stealthily, after Quadrabrachium tridactylus, with his little finger he traced the word “sapiens.” Of course not one stroke remained on the plaque, but even so Lin hurriedly erased it with his palm.

  It was a burden on Doctor Aleksandr Kostylin too. He knew for sure, had known from the very first.

  20. What You Will Be Like

  The ocean was mirror smooth. The water by the shore was so calm that the dark fibers of seaweed that usually swayed on the bottom, hung motionless.

  Kondratev steered the minisub into the cove, brought it right up to shore, and announced, “We’re here.”

  The passengers began to stir.

  “Where’s my camera?” asked Slavin.

  “I’m lying on it,” Gorbovsky answered in a weak voice. “Which, I might add, is very uncomfortable. Can I get out?”

  Kondratev threw open the hatch, and everyone caught sight of the clear blue sky. Gorbovsky climbed out first. He took some uncertain steps along the rocks, stopped, and poked at a dry mat of driftwood with his foot. “How nice it is here!” he exclaimed. “How soft! May I lie down?”

  “You may,” said Slavin. He also got out of the hatch and stretched happily.

  Gorbovsky lay down immediately.

  Kondratev dropped anchor. “I personally don’t advise lying on driftwood. There are always thousands of sand fleas there.”

  Slavin, spreading his legs exaggeratedly wide, started the movie camera chattering. “Smile!” he said sternly.

  Kondratev smiled.

  “Wonderful!” shouted Slavin, sinking down on one knee.

  “I don’t quite understand about fleas,” came Gorbovsky’s voice. “What do they do, Sergei, just hop? Or can they bite you?”

  “Yes, they can bite you,” Kondratev answered. “Quit waving that camera at me, Evgeny! Go gather some driftwood and make a fire.” He climbed into the hatchway and got a bucket.

  Slavin squatted down and started digging briskly into the driftwood with two hands, picking out the larger pieces. Gorbovsky watched him with interest.

  “Still, Sergei, I don’t quite understand about the fleas.”

  “They burrow into the skin,” Kondratev explained, rinsing the pail out with industrial alcohol. “And they multiply there.”

  “Oh,” said Gorbovsky, turning over on his back. “That’s terrible.”

  Kondratev filled the pail with fresh water from the tank on the submarine, and jumped onto the shore. Without talking, he deftly gathered driftwood, lit a fire, hung the pail over it, and got a line, hooks, and a box of bait out of his voluminous pockets. Slavin came up with a handful of wood chips.

  “Look after the fire,” Kondratev directed. “I’ll catch some perch. I’ll be back in an instant.” Jumping from stone to stone, he headed toward a large moss-covered rock sticking out of the water twenty paces from the shore, moved around a bit on it, and then settled down.
The morning was quiet—the sun, just coming above the horizon, shone straight into the cove, blinding him. Slavin sat down tailor-fashion by the fire and started feeding in chips.

  “Amazing creatures, human beings,” Gorbovsky said suddenly. “Follow their history for the past ten thousand years. What an amazing development has been achieved by the productive sector, for instance. How the scope of scholarship has broadened! And new fields and new professions crop up every year. For instance, I recently met a certain comrade, a very important specialist, who teaches children how to walk. And this specialist told me that there is a very complicated theory behind this work.”

  “What’s his name?” Slavin asked lazily.

  “Elena something. I’ve forgotten her last name. But that’s not the point. What I mean is that here we have the sciences and the means of production always developing, while our amusements, our means of recreation, are the same as in ancient Rome. If I get tired of being a spacer, I can be a biologist, a builder, an agronomist—lots of things. But suppose I get tired of lying around, then what is there to do? Watch a movie, read a book, listen to music, or watch other people running. In stadiums. And that’s it! And that’s how it always has been—spectacles and games. In short, all our amusements come down in the last analysis to the gratification of a few sensory organs. And not even all of them, you’ll note. So far no one has, say, figured out how to amuse oneself gratifying the organs of touch and smell.”

  “There’s the thing!” said Slavin. “We have public spectacles, so why not public tactiles? And public, uh, olfactiles?”

  Gorbovsky chortled quietly. “Precisely,” he said. “Olfactiles. And there will be, Evgeny! There inevitably will be, some day!”

  “But seriously, it’s all what you should expect, Leonid. A human being strives in the last analysis not so much for the perception itself as for the processing of these perceptions. He strives to gratify not so much the elementary sensory organs as his chief organ of perception, the brain.”

  Slavin picked out some more chips of driftwood and threw them onto the fire. “My father told me that in his time someone had prophesied the extinction of the human race under conditions of material abundance. Machines would do everything, no one would have to work for his bread and butter, and people would become parasites. The human race would be overrun with drones. But the fact is that working is much more interesting than resting. A drone would just get bored.”

  “I knew a drone once,” Gorbovsky said seriously. “But the girls didn’t like him at all and he just became extinct as a result of natural selection. But I still think that the history of amusements is not yet over, I mean amusement in the ancient sense of the word. And we absolutely will have to have some sort of olfactiles. I can easily imagine—”

  “Forty thousand people in the stadium,” put in Slavin, “and all sniff as one. The ‘Roses in Ketchup Symphony.’ And the critics—with enormous noses—will write, ‘In the third movement, with an impressive dissonance, into the tender odor of two rose petals bursts the brisk fragrance of a fresh onion.’”

  When Kondratev returned with a string of fresh fish, the spacer and the writer were guffawing in front of a dying fire.

  “What’s so funny?” Kondratev inquired curiously.

  “It’s just joie de vivre, Sergei,” Slavin answered. “Why don’t you ornament your own life with some merry jape?”

  “All right,” said Kondratev. “Right now I’ll clean the fish, and you take the guts and stick them over under that rock. I always bury them there.”

  “The ‘Gravestone Symphony,’” said Gorbovsky. “First movement, allegro ma non troppo.”

  Slavin’s face grew long, and he fell silent, staring glumly at the fatal rock. Kondratev took a flounder, slapped it down on a flat stone, and took out a knife. Gorbovsky followed his every movement with absorption. Kondratev cut off the flounder’s head slantwise in one blow, deftly stuck his hand under the skin, and swiftly skinned the flounder whole, as if he were peeling off a glove. He threw the skin and the intestines over to Slavin.

  “Leonid,” Kondratev said, “fetch the salt, please.” Without saying a word, Gorbovsky got up and climbed into the submarine. Kondratev quickly dressed the flounder and started in on a perch. The pile of fish intestines in front of Slavin grew.

  “And just where is the salt?” called Gorbovsky from the hatch.

  “In the provisions box,” Kondratev shouted back. “On the right.”

  “And she won’t start off?” Gorbovsky asked cautiously.

  “Who is ‘she’?”

  “The sub. The control board is what is on the right down here.”

  “To the right of the board is a box,” said Kondratev.

  They could hear Gorbovsky moving around in the cabin.

  “I found it,” he said happily. “Should I bring all of it? There must be over five kilos of the stuff.”

  Kondratev raised up his head. “What do you mean, five kilos? There should be a little packet.”

  After a minute’s pause, Gorbovsky said, “Yes, you’re right. Coming up.” He got out of the hatch, holding the packet of salt in one hand. His hands were covered with flour.

  Putting the packet down near Kondratev, he groaned, “Ah, universal entropy!” He was preparing to lie down when Kondratev said, “And now, Leonid, fetch a bay leaf, please.”

  “Why?” Gorbovsky asked with great astonishment. “Do you mean that three mature, nay, elderly people, three old men, cannot get along without bay leaf? With their enormous experience, with their endurance—”

  “Oh, come now,” said Kondratev. “I promised you that you would have some proper relaxation, Leonid, but I didn’t mean you could fall asleep on me. We can’t have this! The bay leaf, on the double!”

  Gorbovsky fetched the bay leaf, and then fetched the pepper and sundry other spices, and then, on another trip, the bread. In token of protest, along with the bread he dragged out a heavy oxygen tank and said venomously, “I brought this at the same time. Just in case you needed it.”

  “Many thanks,” said Kondratev. “I don’t. Take it back.”

  Gorbovsky dragged the tank back with curses. When he returned, he did not even try to lie down. He stood next to Kondratev and watched him cook fish soup. Meanwhile, the gloomy correspondent for the European Information Center, with the help of two bits of driftwood, was burying the fish intestines under the “gravestone.”

  The soup was boiling. From it wafted a stunning aroma, seasoned with the odor of smoke. Kondratev took a spoon, tasted, and considered.

  “Well?” asked Gorbovsky.

  “A pinch more salt,” Kondratev answered. “And perhaps some pepper, eh?”

  “Perhaps,” said Gorbovsky, his mouth watering.

  “Yes,” Kondratev said firmly. “Salt and pepper.”

  Slavin finished interring the fish guts, put the stone on top, and went off to wash his hands. The water was warm and clear. He could see small yellow-gray fish scurrying among the seaweeds. Slavin sat down on a rock and looked around. A shining wall of ocean rose up beyond the cove. Blue peaks on the neighboring island hung motionless over the horizon. Everything was deep blue, shining, and motionless, except for large black and white birds which sailed over the rocks in the cove without crying out. A fresh salt odor came from the water. “A wonderful planet, Earth,” he said aloud.

  “It’s ready!” Kondratev announced. “We will now have fish soup. Leonid, be a good lad and bring the bowls, please.”

  “Okay,” said Gorbovsky. “And I’ll bring the spoons while I’m at it.”

  They sat down around the steaming pail, and Kondratev dished out the fish soup. For some time they ate silently. Then Gorbovsky said, “I just love fish soup. And it’s so seldom that I get a chance to eat it.”

  “There’s still half a bucket left,” Kondratev said.

  “Ah, Sergei!” Gorbovsky said with a sigh. “I can’t eat enough to hold me for two years.”

  “So there won’
t be fish soup on Tagora,” said Kondratev.

  Gorbovsky sighed again. “Quite possibly not. Although Tagora isn’t Pandora, of course, so there’s still hope. If only the Commission lets us go fishing.”

  “Why wouldn’t they?”

  “Those are stern and harsh men on the Commission. Like Gennady Komov. He’s sure to not even let me lie down. He will demand that all my actions coincide with the interests of the aboriginal population of the planet. And how should I know what their interests are?”

  “You are an incredible whiner, Leonid,” Slavin said. “Taking you on the Contact Commission was a terrible mistake. Can you see it, Sergei—Leonid, our anthropocentrist par excellence, representing the human race to the civilization of another world!”

  “And why not?” Kondratev said judiciously. “I greatly respect Comrade Gorbovsky.”

  “I respect him too,” said Gorbovsky.

  “Oh, I even respect him myself,” said Slavin. “But I don’t like the first question he’s planning to ask the Tagorans.”

  “What question?” asked Kondratev, surprised.

  “The very first: ‘Could I perhaps lie down?’”

  Kondratev snorted into his soup spoon, and Gorbovsky looked reproachfully at Slavin.

  “Ah, Evgeny!” he said. “How can you joke like that? Here you are laughing, while I’m shaking in my shoes, because the first contact with a newly discovered civilization is a historic occasion, and the slightest blunder could bring harm down on our descendants. And our descendants, I must say to you, trust us implicitly.”

  Kondratev stopped eating and looked at him.

  “No, no,” Gorbovsky said hurriedly. “I can’t vouch for our descendants as a whole, of course, but take Petr Petrovich—he expressed himself quite explicitly on the question of his trust in us.”