Noon, 22nd Century Read online

… The Captain was sloshing through the swamp, together with Athos and Lin and Polly, who was wearing tattered pants. Amid the hazy exhalations flashed the quick-moving cybers, which they still had to invent.

  5. Chronicle

  Novosibirsk, 8 October 2021. It was announced here today that the commission of the USCR Academy of Sciences studying the results of the Taimyr-Ermak expedition has finished its work.

  As is well known, in pursuance of the international program of research into deep space and into the possibility of interstellar travel, in 2017 the Academy of Sciences of the USCR sent into deep space an expedition consisting of the two first-line interplanetary craft Taimyr and Ermak. The expedition departed November 7,2017, from the international spaceport Pluto-2, in the direction of the constellation Lyra. The crew of the spaceship Taimyr consisted of captain and expedition head A. E. Zhukov, engineers K. I. Falin and G. A. Pollack, navigator S. I. Kondratev, cyberneticist P. Koenig, and physician E. M. Slavin. The spaceship Ermak served as an unmanned data collector.

  The purpose of the expedition was to attempt to approach the light barrier (an absolute velocity of 300 thousand kilometers per second), and to perform research in proximity to the light barrier into the characteristics of space-time under arbitrary changes of velocity.

  On 16 May 2020, the unmanned craft Ermak was detected and intercepted near the planet Pluto on its return orbit, and was brought to the international spaceport Pluto-2. The spaceship Taimyr did not appear on its planned return orbit.

  A study of the data obtained by the spacecraft Ermak has demonstrated, in part, the following:

  a) On the 327th day, subjective time, the Taimyr-Ermak expedition attained a velocity of 0.957 absolute relative to the sun, and turned to the execution of the research program; b) The expedition obtained, and the receiving devices on the Ermak recorded, extremely valuable data relating to the behavior of space-time under conditions of arbitrary changes of velocity in proximity to the light barrier; c) On the 342nd day, subjective time, the Taimyr initiated planned maneuvers bringing its distance from the Ermak up to 900 million kilometers. At 13 hours 09 minutes 11.2 seconds of the 344th day, subjective time, the tracking equipment on the Ermak detected, at the location of the Taimyr, a bright flash, after which the data flow from the Taimyr to the Ermak ceased, and was not resumed.

  On the basis of the above-mentioned information, the commission has been obliged to conclude that the first-line interplanetary craft Taimyr has been lost with all hands (Aleksei Eduardovich Zhukov, Konstantin Ivanovich Falin, George Allen Pollack, Sergei Ivanovich Kondratev, Peter Koenig, and Evgeny Markovich Slavin) as a result of a serious accident. The cause and nature of the accident remain undetermined.

  —Bulletin of the International Scientific Data Center, No. 237 (9 October 2021).

  6. Two from the Taimyr

  After his midday meal, Sergei Kondratev took a little nap. When he woke up, Evgeny Slavin came in. Evgeny’s red hair lit up the walls—they turned pink, as at sunset. Evgeny smelled pleasantly but powerfully of an unfamiliar cologne.

  “Hello, Sergei old man!” he shouted from the threshold.

  And immediately someone said, “Please, talk a little more quietly.”

  Evgeny nodded readily toward the corridor, walked over to the bed on tiptoe, and sat so that Kondratev could see him without turning his head. His face was joyful, exultant. Kondratev could no longer remember when he had last seen him like that. And he saw the long reddish scar on Evgeny’s face for the first time.

  “Hello, Evgeny,” Kondratev said.

  Evgeny’s head of flaming hair suddenly blurred. Kondratev squinted and sobbed. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he muttered angrily.

  “Sorry about that. I’ve gone all to pieces here. Well, how are you doing?”

  “All right, quite all right,” Evgeny said in a choked-up voice. “Everything is simply amazing! The main thing is that they’ve brought you through. I was really worried about you, Sergei. Especially at first. All by myself, the depression, the homesickness! I rush off to see you and they won’t let me in. I swear at them, and it makes no dent at all. I start talking, arguing, trying to prove that I’m a doctor myself… though what kind of a doctor am I now, anyhow?

  “All right, I believe you, I believe you,” Kondratev said affectionately.

  “And suddenly today Protos himself calls me. You’re really on the mend, Sergei! In ten days or so I’ll be teaching you how to drive a pterocar. I’ve already ordered you one.”

  “Oh?” said Kondratev. He had a spinal column broken in four places and a torn diaphragm, and his neck had parted from his skull. In his delirium he kept imagining himself as a rag doll that had been flattened under the caterpillar track of a truck. But you could depend on Protos. The doctor was a ruddy fat man, around fifty years old (or a hundred—who could tell these days?), very taciturn and very kind. He came every morning and every evening, sat down beside the bed, and breathed out so comfortably that Kondratev at once would begin to feel better. And he was, of course, a superb doctor, if up to now he had kept alive a rag doll flattened by a truck.

  “Well, what the hell,” said Kondratev. “Could be.”

  “Hey!” Evgeny shouted enthusiastically. “In ten days you’ll be driving a pterocar for me. Protos is a magician, and I say that as a former doctor!”

  “Yes,” said Kondratev. “Protos is a very good man.”

  “A brilliant doctor! When I found out what he was working on, I realized that I would have to change professions. So I’m changing professions, Sergei! I’m going to be a writer!”

  “So,” said Kondratev. “You mean the writers haven’t gotten any better?”

  “Well, you see,” said Evgeny, “one thing is clear: they’re all modernists, and I’ll be the only classicist. Like Trediakovsky the poet in the eighteenth century.”

  Kondratev looked at Evgeny out of half-opened eyes. Evgeny certainly was not wasting time. Dressed in the height of fashion, no doubt-shorts and a loose soft jacket with short sleeves and an open collar. Not one single seam, everything in soft, bright colors. The hair given a light, casual trim. Smooth-shaven and co-logned. He was even trying to enunciate the way the greatgrandchildren did-firmly and resonantly, and without gesticulation. And the pterocar… and only a few weeks had gone by. “Evgeny, I’ve forgotten again what year it is here,” Kondratev said.

  “Two thousand one hundred and nineteen,” Evgeny answered ceremoniously. “They just say ‘one nineteen’.”

  “Well then, Evgeny,” Kondratev said very seriously. “How are redheads doing? Have they survived into the twenty-second century or have they all died out?”

  Evgeny answered just as ceremoniously, “Yesterday I had the honor of conversing with the secretary of the Northwest Asian Economic Council: a most intelligent man, and quite infrared.”

  They laughed and looked at each other. Then Kondratev asked, “Listen, Evgeny, where did you get that slash across your face?”

  “That?” Evgeny fingered the scar. “You mean you can still see it?” he asked, distressed.

  “Well, naturally,” said Kondratev. “Red on white.”

  “I got that the same time you got smashed up. But they promised it would go away soon. Disappear without a trace. And I believe it, because they can do anything.”

  “Who are ‘they’?” Kondratev asked gravely.

  “What do you mean who? People—Earthlings.”

  “You mean ‘we’?”

  Evgeny was silent a moment. “Of course,” he said uncertainly. “‘We.’ In one sense of the word.” He stopped smiling and looked at Kondratev attentively. “Sergei,” he said softly, “does it hurt a lot, Sergei?”

  Kondratev smiled weakly and said with his eyes, No, not much. But it was still good that Evgeny had asked. “Sergei, does it hurt a lot, Sergei?”—those were good words, and he had said them well. He had said them exactly as he had on the unlucky day when the Taimyr had buried itself in the shifting dust of a nameless pl
anet and Kondratev, during a sortie, had hurt his leg.

  That had hurt a lot, although, of course, not like now. Evgeny had thrown away his movie camera and had crawled along the crumbling slope of a dune, dragging Kondratev after him and swearing furiously. And then, when at last they had managed to scramble onto the crest of the dune, Evgeny had felt Kondratev’s leg through the fabric of the spacesuit and had suddenly asked quietly, “Sergei, does it hurt a lot, Sergei?” Over the pale blue desert a hot white disk crawled into the violet sky, static hissed annoyingly in the headphones, and they sat a long time waiting for the return of the cyberscout. The cyberscout never did return—probably it had sunk into the dust—and finally they had started crawling back to the Taimyr…

  “What do you want to write about?” Kondratev asked. “About our trip?”

  Evgeny began to speak with animation about sections and chapters, but Kondratev was no longer listening. He looked at the ceiling and thought, It hurts, it hurts, it hurts. And as always when the pain became unendurable, an oval hatch opened in the ceiling, and a rough gray tube with tiny winking green openings slid out noiselessly. The tube came down steadily until it had almost touched Kondratev’s chest, and then stopped. Then a quiet vibrating rumble began.

  “Wh-what’s that?” Evgeny asked, jumping up.

  Kondratev remained silent, his eyes closed, delightedly feeling the mad pain subside, disappear.

  “Perhaps I had better leave?” Evgeny said, looking around.

  The pain had gone. The tube retracted noiselessly upward, and the hatch in the ceiling closed.

  “No,” said Kondratev. “That’s just treatment. Sit down, Evgeny.” He tried to remember what Evgeny had been talking about. Yes—a fictionalized sketch to be called Across the Light Barrier. About the flight of the Taimyr. About the attempt to slip through the light barrier. About the accident that had brought the Taimyr across a century.

  “Listen, Evgeny,” Kondratev said. “Do they understand what happened to us?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Evgeny.

  “Well?”

  “Hmm,” said Evgeny. “They understand, of course. But that doesn’t help us any. I for one can’t understand what they understand.”

  “But still?”

  “I told them everything, and they said, ‘Ah, yes: Sigma deritrinitation.’”

  “What?” said Kondratev.

  “De-ri-tri-ni-ta-tion. With a sigma in front.”

  “Trimpazation,” Kondratev muttered. “Did they happen to say anything else?”

  “They told me straight out, ‘Your Taimyr came right up to the light barrier under Legen acceleration and sigma-deritrinitated the space-time continuum.’ They said that we shouldn’t have resorted to Legen accelerations.”

  “Right,” said Kondratev. “So then we shouldn’t have resorted, but the fact remains that we did resort. Deri-teri—What’s that word?”

  “Deritrinitation. That’s the third time I’ve told you. To put it briefly, so far as I understand it, any body approaching the light barrier under certain conditions distorts the form of worldlines extremely strongly, and pierces Riemann space, so to speak. Well… that’s about what Bykov Junior had predicted in our day.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Kondratev.

  “They call this penetration deritrinitation.’ All their long-range ships work on that principle. D-ships.”

  “Uh-huh,” Kondratev said again.

  “Under deritrinitation, those same Legen accelerations are especially hazardous. I didn’t understand at all where they come from or what they consist of. Some sort of local vibrational field, plasmatic hypertransition, or something. The fact remains that under Legen interference extraordinarily strong distortions of time scale are inevitable. That’s what happened to us in the Taimyr.”

  “Deritrinitation,” Kondratev said sadly, and closed his eyes.

  They fell silent. It’s a bum deal, Kondratev thought. D-ships. Deritrinitation. We’ll never get through it all. Plus a broken back.

  Evgeny stroked Kondratev’s cheek and said, “Never mind, Sergei. I think we’ll understand in time. Of course, we’ll have to learn an awful lot.”

  “Relearn,” Kondratev whispered without opening his eyes. “Don’t deceive yourself, Evgeny. Relearn. Relearn everything from the very beginning.”

  “So all right, I’m willing,” Evgeny said brightly. “The main thing is to want to.”

  “‘I want to’ means ‘I can’?” Kondratev inquired bitterly.

  “That’s it.”

  “That saying was invented by people who could even when they didn’t want to. Iron men.”

  “Well,” said Evgeny, “you’re not made of paper either. A couple weeks back I met a certain young woman…”

  “Oh?” said Kondratev. Evgeny very much liked meeting young women.

  “She’s a linguist. Smart. A wonderful, amazing person.”

  “Of course,” said Kondratev.

  “Let me talk, Sergei. I understand everything. You’re afraid. But here there’s no need to be lonely. There are no lonely people here. Get well soon, Navigator. You’re turning sour.”

  Kondratev was silent a while, and then asked, “Evgeny, do me a favor and go over to the window.”

  Evgeny got up and, walking noiselessly, went over to the enormous—wall-high—blue window. Kondratev could see nothing out the window except sky. At night the window was a blue-black abyss studded with piercing stars, and once or twice the navigator had seen a reddish glow blaze up—blaze up and quickly die out.

  “I’ve arrived,” said Evgeny.

  “What’s there?”

  “A balcony.”

  “And farther?”

  “Below the balcony is a pad,” Evgeny said, and looked back at Kondratev.

  Kondratev frowned. Even old Evgeny was no help. Kondratev was as alone as could be. So far he knew nothing. Not a thing. He didn’t even know what sort of floor there was in his room, because footsteps made no sound on it. Last evening the navigator had tried to sit up and look the room over, and had immediately fainted. He had not tried again, because he could not stand being unconscious.

  “This building where you are is a nursing home for serious cases,” said Evgeny. “The building has sixteen stories, and your room—”

  “Ward,” muttered Kondratev.

  “—and your room is on the ninth floor. There’s a balcony. Outside are mountains-the Urals—and a pine forest. From here I can see, first, another nursing home like this one. It’s about fifteen kilometers away. Farther in the same direction is Sverdlovsk. It’s ninety kilometers off. Second, I see a landing pad for pterocars. They’re really wonderful machines! There are four of them there now. So. What else? Third, a plaza with flowers and a fountain. Near the fountain there’s a child. By all appearances, he’s thinking about how much he would like to run away into the forest.”

  “Is he a serious case too?” the navigator asked with interest.

  “It’s possible. Though it doesn’t look like it. So. He’s not going to manage his getaway, because a certain barefoot woman has caught him. I am already acquainted with the woman because she works here. A very charming individual. She’s around twenty. Recently she asked me whether I had happened to know Norbert Wiener and Anton Makarenko. Now she’s dragging the serious case off, and, I think, edifying him en route. And here another pterocar is landing. Or no, it’s not a pterocar. You should ask the doctor for a stereovision, Sergei.”

  “I did,” the navigator said gloomily. “He won’t let me have one.”

  “Why not?”

  “How should I know?”

  Evgeny turned toward the bed. “All this is sound and fury, signifying nothing,” he said. “You’ll see everything, learn everything, and stop feeling strange. Don’t be so impressionable. Do you remember Koenig?”

  “Yes?”

  “Remember when I told him about your broken leg, and he shouted out loud in his magnificent accent, ‘Ach, how impressionable I am!
Ach!’”

  Kondratev smiled.

  “And the next morning I came to see you,” Evgeny continued, “and asked how things were, and you answered with a touch of spite that you had spent ‘a variegated night’.”

  “I remember,” said Kondratev. “And I’ve spent many variegated nights right here. And there are a lot of them coming up.”

  “Ach, how impressionable I am!” Evgeny quickly shouted.

  Kondratev closed his eyes again and lay silent for some time. “Listen, Evgeny,” he said without opening his eyes. “What did they say to you on the subject of your skill in piloting spaceships?”

  Evgeny laughed merrily. “It was a great big scolding, although very polite. It seems I smashed through some enormous telescope, but I didn’t even notice at the time. The head of the observatory almost slugged me, but his upbringing wouldn’t permit it.”

  Kondratev opened his eyes. “Well?” he said.

  “But later, when they learned I wasn’t a pilot, it all cleared up. They even congratulated me. The observatory head, in an access of good feeling, even invited me to help with the rebuilding of the telescope.”

  “Well?” said Kondratev.

  Evgeny sighed. “Nothing came of it. The doctors wouldn’t let me.

  The door opened a bit, and a dark girl wearing a white coat tightly belted at the waist looked into the room. She looked sternly at the patient, then at the visitor, and said, “It’s time, Comrade Slavin.”

  “I’m just leaving,” said Evgeny.

  The girl nodded and closed the door. Kondratev said sadly, “Well, here you are leaving me.”

  “But not for long!” exclaimed Evgeny. “And don’t go sour, I beg you. You’ll be flying again, you’ll make a first-class D-spacer.”

  “D-spacer—” The navigator smiled crookedly. “Okay, be on your way. They are now going to feed the D-spacer his porridge. With a baby spoon.”

  Evgeny got up. “I’ll be seeing you, Sergei,” he said, carefully shaking Kondratev’s hand, which lay on top of the sheet. “Get well. And remember that the new world is a very good world.”