The Time Wanderers Part 3

At that moment, Toivo felt something behind him and turned sharply. A pale face with wide-open, frightened eyes peered out of the club's door. The stranger was silent for a few seconds; then his bloodless lips moved, and he said in a hoa.r.s.e voice: "A silly story, isn't it?"

"Wait, wait, wait!" Basil said kindly, moving toward the man with his hands upturned and open. "Please forgive me; you can't come in here.

Emergency squad."

The stranger nevertheless stepped across the threshold and stopped.

"I'm not trying," he said, and coughed. "But circ.u.mstances... Tell me, did Grigory and Elya come back yet?"

He looked unusual enough. He was wearing a heavy coat with fur inside and outside, and beneath its tails you could see his richly embroidered fur boots. The coat was unb.u.t.toned at the chest, revealing a colorful summer shirt of micromesh, which were popular in those days with inhabitants of the steppe zone. He looked forty or forty-five; his face was simple and nice, but too pale, either out of fear or embarra.s.sment.

"No, no," Basil replied, coming up close to him. "No one's come back.

We're examining the area, and we're not letting anyone in..."

"Wait, Basil," Toivo said. "Who are Grigory and Elya?" he asked the stranger.

"I think I'm in the wrong place again," the stranger said with despair, and looked over his shoulder into the depths of the pavilion where the zero-T-cabin glowed. "Excuse me, is this ... hm... Oh, Lord, I forgot again... Little Pesha? Or isn't it?"

"It's Little Pesha," Toivo said.

"Then you must know ... Grigory Alexandrovich Yarygin... As I understand it, he lives here every summer." Pointing, he suddenly cried out happily; 'There it is, that cottage! That's my raincoat on the veranda!"

Everything was cleared up. The stranger was a witness. His name was Anatoly Sergeyevich Krylenko, and he was a zoo technician; he did work in the steppe zone -- in the Azgir agrocomplex. Yesterday, at the annual exhibition of innovations in Arkhangelsk, he b.u.mped completely by accident into his old school friend, Grigory Yarygin, whom he hadn't seen in some ten years. Naturally, Yarygin dragged him off to his place, here, in this... ah, forgot it again... oh, yes,, to Little Pesha. They spent a lovely evening yesterday, the three of them, Yarygin, his wife Elya, and Krylenko, went out in the boat, walked in the woods, and got back around ten, to that cottage over there, had dinner, and settled down with tea on the veranda. It was still very light, children's voices carried from the river, and it was warm.

The arctic strawberries smelled terrific. And then, suddenly, Anatoly Sergeyevich Krylenko saw eyes...

In this most important part of his story, Anatoly Sergeyevich grew incomprehensible, to put it mildly. He seemed to be trying to recall a horrible, complicated dream.

The eyes were staring from the garden ... they were moving closer and stayed in the garden... Two huge, nauseating eyes... Something kept dripping on them... And on the left, to the side, was a third... or three?... And something kept falling, falling, Ailing through the railing of the veranda and was creeping up the steps... And it was impossible to move. Grigory disappeared somewhere; he couldn't see Grigory. Elya was somewhere nearby, but he couldn't see her either. He could hear her screaming hysterically...

or laughing... Then the door flew open. The room was about waist-deep in writhing jellied carca.s.ses, and the eyes of the carca.s.ses were outside, behind the bushes...

Anatoly Sergeyevich realized that the scariest part was just beginning.

He pulled his feet out of the sandals that were stuck to the floor, jumped over the table, fled into the woods, and ran around the house... No, he didn't run around the house, he had jumped into the woods but ended up in the square... He ran wherever his feet took him, and suddenly saw the club pavilion, and through the open door he saw the violet flash of zero-T, and he realized that he was saved. He burst into the cabin like a bomb and began pushing b.u.t.tons and keys at random, until the machine worked...

The tragedy ended there, and the comedy began. The zero-transporter threw Anatoly Sergeyevich out in the settlement of Roosevelt on the Island of Peter the Great. That's in the Bellingshausen Sea, 49 below, wind speed 18 meters per second, and the settlement was almost empty, winter-like.

Of course, the automatic machinery was on in the polar-bear club; it was warm and cozy, and a brilliant rainbow of bottles glimmered in the bar, intended to light up the darkness of the polar nights. Anatoly Sergeyevich, in his light shirt and shorts, still wet from the tea and the horror, got the rest he needed and came to his senses. And when he came to his senses, the first thing he felt, as was to be expected, was unbearable shame. He realized that he had fled in panic like the lowliest coward... He had read about such cowards in historical novels. He remembered that he had abandoned Elya and at least one other woman, whom he had noticed in pa.s.sing in the neighboring cottage. He remembered the children's voices on the river and realized that he had abandoned those children, too. A desperate urge to action overwhelmed him. But here's the amazing part: the urge did not arise immediately, and secondly, once it did arise, he remained for a rather long time in unbearable horror at the thought of returning there, to the veranda, to the field of vision of those nightmarish dripping eyes, to the revolting jellied carca.s.ses...

A noisy group of glaciologists burst into the club and found Anatoly Sergeyevich gloomily wringing his hands: he still had not made up his mind to do anything. The glaciologists heard him our in total sympathy and immediately and enthusiastically decided to return to the horrible veranda with him. But then they discovered that Anatoly Sergeyevich not only did not know the zero-index of the village but had forgotten its name. He could tell them only that it was not far from the Barents Sea, on the banks of a small river, in the zone of arctic firs. Then the glaciologists dressed Anatoly Sergeyevich in clothes more suitable to the local climate and, through the howling blizzard and monstrous snowdrifts, led him to the settlement headquarters accompanied by gigantic beast-like hounds... And at headquarters, at the BVI terminal, one of the glaciologists had the very sobering thought that this was no joke. The monsters must have escaped from some bestiary, or -- horrible thought! -- from some lab constructing biomechanisms. In any case, amateur activity was uncalled for, boys; we have to notify the emergency squad.

And they called Central Emergency. At Central Emergency, they thanked them and said they would take the information into account. A half-hour later the duty officer called headquarters and told them that their call was confirmed and asked to speak with Anatoly Sergeyevich. Anatoly Sergeyevich described in the most general terms what had happened to him and how he came to be on the sh.o.r.es of the Antarctic. The duty officer calmed him down by telling him there had been no casualties, that the Yarygins were alive and well and that he would be able to return to Little Pesha in the morning, and that now he should take a tranquilizer and lie down.

And Anatoly Sergeyevich took a tranquilizer and lay down right at headquarters. But he had not slept an hour before he saw the dripping eyes over the veranda railing and heard Elya's hysterical laughter, and he awoke full of unbearable shame.

"No," Anatoly Sergeyevich said, "they did not stop me. They understood how I felt... I never thought something like that would happen to me. I'm no Pathfinder or Progressor, of course... but I've had acute situations in my life, and I've always behaved decently... I don't understand what happened to me. I try to explain it to myself, and nothing happens... It was like an invasion..." He started looking around. "I'm talking to you now, but I'm ice inside... Maybe we were all poisoned by something here?"

Toivo asked questions, Anatoly Sergeyevich answered, and Toivo nodded importantly and showed in every way possible how essential everything he was hearing was for the investigation. And gradually Anatoly Sergeyevich relaxed, cheered up, and they stepped onto the veranda as colleagues.

The veranda was a shambles. The table was at an angle, one of the chairs was turned over, the sugar bowl had rolled into a corner, leaving a trail of sugar crystals. Toivo felt the kettle; it was still hot. He glanced over at Anatoly Sergeyevich. He was pale again, and his muscles were twitching. He was looking at a pair of sandals huddling like orphans under the far chair. Apparently, they were his. The straps were buckled, and it seemed impossible for Anatoly Sergeyevich to have pulled his feet out. But Toivo did not see any spills on them, under them, or anywhere near them.

"I see they don't recognize domestic robots here," Toivo said to bring Anatoly Sergeyevich back from the world of the horror to the world of everyday life.

"Yes," he muttered. "That is ... Who does nowadays?.. There... see, my sandals..."

"I see," Toivo said matter-of-factly. "Were all the windows opened like this? You don't think that it was a hallucination?"

Anatoly Sergeyevich shuddered and looked in the direction of the Yarygin cottage.

'I don't know..." he said. "No, l can't say."

"All right, let's go look," Toivo suggested.

"You and I?" Basil asked.

"Not necessary," Toivo said. "I'll be going back and forth here a long time. You hold the fort."

"Do I take prisoners?" Basil asked formally.

"That is necessary," Toivo said "I need prisoners. Anyone who saw anything with his own eyes."

He and Anatoly Sergeyevich moved on across the square. Anatoly Sergeyevich looked determined and businesslike, but the closer he got to the house, the more tense his face looked and the more his tendons showed on his neck. He was biting his lip as if fighting pain. Toivo thought it wise to give him a break. About fifty paces from the living fence, he stopped -- as if to look around one more time -- and began asking questions. Was there anyone in the cottage on the right? Oh, it was dark? And on the left? The woman... Yes, yes, I remember, you mentioned her... Just one woman and no one else? Was there a glider nearby?

"I don't remember. That one was open. I jumped out there."

"I see," Toivo said, and looked out into the garden.

Yes, there were footprints here. There were many footprints: crushed and broken bushes, a destroyed flower bed, and the gra.s.s under the railings looked as if horses had trampled it. If animals had been here, then they were clumsy, awkward animals; and they hadn't crept up on the house, but pushed straight on. From the square, through the bushes at an angle, and through the open windows right inter her rooms...

Toivo crossed the veranda and pushed the door into the house. There was nothing disorderly inside. Rather, none of the disorder that one could expect from heavy, unwieldy carca.s.ses.

A couch. Three armchairs. No table in sight -- it must be built in.

Only one control panel -- in the arm of the owner's armchair. There were polycrystal service systems in the other chairs and in the couch. On the front wall hung a Levitan landscape, an old-fashioned chromophoton copy with a touching triangle in the bottom left-hand comer, so that, G.o.d forbid, some expert would not be fooled into taking it for an original. And on the left wall: a pen drawing in a handmade wooden frame, an angry woman's face. A beautiful one, incidentally...

A more careful examination revealed footprints on the floor, apparently, one of the emergency crewmen had walked from the living room to the bedroom. The foot-prints did not return; the man had climbed out the bedroom window. So, the floor in the living room was covered with a rather thick layer of very fine brown powder. And not only the floor. The chair seats. The window ledges. The couch. There was no powder on the walls.

Toivo came back out on the veranda. Anatoly Sergeyevich was sitting on the porch steps. He had tossed off the fur coat, but he had forgotten to toss off the fur boots, and consequently he had a rather incongruous air about him. He had not even touched his sandals; they were still under the chair. There were no spills nearby, but the sills and the floor were covered with the brown powder.

"Well, how are you doing?" Toivo asked from the doorway.

Anatoly Sergeyevich was startled anyway.

"Well... I'm slowly coming to terms with it."

"Fine. Pick up your raincoat and go home. Or do you want to wait for the Yarygins?"

"I don't know," Anatoly Sergeyevich said indecisively.

"As you prefer," Toivo said. "In any case, there's nothing dangerous here."

"Have you understood anything?" Anatoly Sergeyevich asked.

"A few things. There really were monsters here, but they are not dangerous. They can scare you, and nothing more."

"You mean it was lake?"

"Looks like it."

"But why? Who?"

"We'll find out."

"You'll be finding out while they scare someone else."

Anatoly Sergeyevich took his raincoat from the railing and stood around, staring at his fur boots. It seemed that he would sit down again and start pulling them off angrily. But he probably didn't even see them.

"You say they can scarce a person," he said through gritted teeth, without looking up. "Scare isn't so bad! But you know, they can break a man!"

He gave Toivo a quick look and averted his eyes and went down the steps without looking back, then down along the trampled gra.s.s, through the damaged flower bed, across the square at an angle, bent over, clumsy in his long polar fur boots and jaunty shepherd shirt, he walked on, increasing his steps, to the yellow club pavilion, but halfway there veered sharply to the left, jumped into the glider near the neighboring cottage, and flew up like a candle into the pale blue sky.

It was after four in the morning.

This is my first attempt at a reconstruction. I tried very hard. My work was complicated by the fact that I had never been in Little Pesha in those bygone days, but I had numerous video-recordings made by Toivo Glumov, the emergency squad, and Fleming's crew. So I can vouchat least for the topographic accuracy. I feel it is possible to vouch for the accuracy of the dialogue, as well.

Besides everything else, I would like to demonstrate here how the typical beginning of the typical investigation looked. Incident. Emergency squad. Arrival of the inspector from the Unexplained Event Department. First impression (most often very right): someone's hooliganism or a stupid joke.

And growing disillusionment: not it again, once again zero, why not shrug this off and just go home to bed. However, that's not in my reconstruction.

I suggest you add that, reading between the lines.

Now a few words about Fleming.

This name will appear more than once in my memoir, but I want to warn you that this man had nothing to do with the Big Revelation. In those days, the name Alexander Jonathan Fleming was the talk of COMCON-2. He was the major specialist in the construction of artificial organisms. At his base, the Sydney Inst.i.tute, and in the branches of the Inst.i.tute, he cooked up with indescribable industriousness and daring a great number of the wildest creatures, for which Mother Nature had not had enough imagination and know-how. In their eagerness, his coworkers were instantly violating the existing laws and limitations of the World Council in the area of frontier experimentation. For all our purely human delight and awe for Fleming's genius, we could not stand him for his mediocrity, lack of conscience, and pushiness, amazingly coexisting with his ability to get out of trouble.

Every schoolboy knows now what Fleming's biocomplexes are or, say, Fleming's living wells. In those days, he was rather more notorious than famous.

It is important for my narrative that one of the far-flung branches of Fleming's Sydney Inst.i.tute was located in the mouth of the Pesha River, in the scientific community lower Pesha, just forty kilometers from Little Pesha. Having learned about that, my Toivo naturally grew wary and said to himself, "Aha, so that's whose work this is!"

Oh, by the way, the crawcrabs mentioned below are one of Fleming's most useful creations, which first appeared when he was still a young worker in a ash farm on Lake O'Nega. Crawcrabs turned out to be creatures astonishing in their delicate taste, but for some reason they did well only in the small streams that fed the Pesha.

LITTLE PESHA. 6 MAY 99 6 AM.

On 5 May, around 11 PM, in the resort village of Little Pesha (thirteen cottages, eighteen residents), panic rose. The cause of the panic was the appearance of a certain (unknown) number of quasibiological creatures of an extremely repulsive and even frightening appearance. The creatures moved on the village from cottage number 7 in nine clearly visible directions. These directions can be seen from the trampled gra.s.s, damaged bushes, by stains of dried slime on foliage, paving stone, on the outside walls and window ledges. All nine routes ended inside living quarters; to wit: in cottages numbers l, 4, 10 (on the verandas), 2, 3, 9, 12 (in the living room), 6, 11, and 13 (in the bedroom). Cottages 4 and 9 apparently are uninhabited...

As for cottage number 7, where the invasion began, someone clearly was living there, and it remains only to determine who that was -- a stupid practical joker or an irresponsible dolt! Did he activate the embryoph.o.r.es on purpose, or did he miss the self-start? If he missed it, then was it by criminal negligence or ignorance?

Two things, however, bothered him. Toivo did not find any traces of the embryoph.o.r.e cases. That's one. And two, at first he could not find any data on the person inhabiting cottage number 7. Or persons.

Suddenly, indignant voices were heard on the square, and in a minute, Toivo learned that the original inhabitant had appeared in the midst of the events himself, in person, and not alone, but with a guest.

He turned out to be a stocky, cast-iron-looking man in a travel jumpsuit and with a canvas sack from which came strange rustling and creaking noises. The guest acutely reminded Toivo of good old Duremar, right out of Aunt Tortilla's pond -- tall, long-haired, long-nosed, skinny, in vague rags covered with drying seaweed.

It was instantly established that the stocky, cast-iron inhabitant was Ernst Jurgen, who worked as an orthomaster operator on t.i.tan and who was on vacation on Earth... He had two months leave a year on Earth -- one month in winter, one in the summer -- and he always spent the summer here on the Pesha in this very cottage... What monsters? Who exactly did you have in mind, young man? What monsters could there be in Little Pesha? Think about it. And you call yourself an emergency-squad member. What's the matter, don't you have anything else to do with your time?

Duremar, on the contrary, seemed totally earthbound. Moreover, he seemed local. His surname was Tolstov, and his name was Lev Nikolaevich. But something else about him was amazing, too. He worked and lived just forty kilometers away from here, in Lower Pesha, where for the last several years Fleming's branch offices were flourishing.

It also turned out that this Ernst Jurgen and his old pal, Lev Tolstov, were pa.s.sionate gourmets. They met here every day, in Little Pesha, because five kilometers upriver a little stream fell into the river, and it was full of crawcrabs, whatever they were. That was why Ernst Jurgen spent his vacation in Little Pesha, and that's why he and his friend Lev Tolstov left early in the evening by boat to catch crawcrabs, and that's why he and Lev would be very grateful to the emergency squad if they would leave them alone, since the crawcrabs (Ernst Jurgen shook the heavy sack from which emanated the strange sounds) are fresh only briefly, and that was right now...

This funny, noisy man could not understand that events could occur on Earth -- not on t.i.tan, or Pandora, or Yaula, but on Earth! in Little Pesha!

-- that could elicit fear and panic. Typical example of a professional s.p.a.ce traveler. He could see that the village was empty, he could see a member of the emergency squad before him, he could see a representative of COMCON-2, he did not deny their authority, and he was ready to seek an explanation for all of it in anything as long as he did not have to admit that something could go wrong on his own Earth...

Then, when they managed to convince him that there had been an unexplained event, he was insulted -- pouted like a child and walked away, dragging the sack with the precious crawcrabs, and sat down on the porch, his back to everyone, not wanting to see anyone or hear anything, shrugging from time to time and muttering to himself, "A vacation, they call it... You come once a year, and this has to happen... How could it be!"

Toivo, incidentally, was more interested in the reaction of his friend, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstov, who worked for Fleming, a specialist in the construction and activation into existence of artificial organisms. And this was the specialist's reaction: at first, total incomprehension, goggling eyes and uncertain smile, befitting a man who thinks a joke is being played on him, and not a very clever one at that. Then: a perplexed frown, empty gaze that seemed inward-directed, and thoughtful motion of the jaw. And finally: an explosion of professional anger. Do you realize what you are saying? Do you have any knowledge of the subject? Have you ever seen an artificial creature? Ah, only in the newsreels? Well, let me tell you that there aren't any and can't be any artificial creatures that are capable of climbing into people's bedroom windows. First of all, they are slow and clumsy, and if they do move, it's away from people, not toward them, because natural biofields are contradicted, even a cat's biofield... Further, what do you mean, 'the size of a cow'?. Have you tried to figure how much energy is needed for an embryoph.o.r.e to develop to that ma.s.s in even an hour? There wouldn't be anything left here, no cows left; it would look like an explosion!..

Did he think that there could have been activated embryaph.o.r.es here of a type he did not know?

Certainly not. Embryoph.o.r.es like that did not exist in nature.

Then what happened here, in his opinion?

Lev Tolstov did not understand what had happened here. He had to look around before coming to any conclusion.

Toivo led him to look around, then went with Basil to the club to have a snack.

They had a cold meat sandwich, and Toivo tried to make some coffee. And then: "Mmmmm!" Basil said with his mouth full.

He swallowed mightily and, looking past Toivo, called out loudly: "Hold it! Where are you headed, son?"

Toivo turned around. There was a boy of twelve or so, lop-eared and tan, wearing shorts and an open shirt. Basil's mighty cry had stopped him in the pavilion exit.

"Home," he said challengingly.

"Come here, please!" Basil said.

The boy moved closer and stopped, his hands behind his back.

"Do you live here?" Basil asked ingratiatingly.

"We used to live here," the boy replied. "In number six. Now we won't live here anymore."

"Who's we?" Toivo asked.

"Me, Mama, and Papa. Rather, we were here on vacation and we live in Petrozavodsk."