The Time Wanderers Part 7

"That's the one," Grisha said. "In the summary, there is a phase. I quote: 'According to our information, B. Soddi suffered a personal tragedy before his metamorphosis.' If you compiled the summary, I have two questions for you. What was the tragedy? And where did you get the data?"

Toivo reached out and called up his program on the screen. The selection of information was over, and the counting was on. With unhurried movements, Toivo started clearing off his desk. Grisha waited patiently. Be was used to it.

"If it says 'according to our information,' " Toivo said, "that means I got it from Big Bug."

He fell silent. Grisha waited some more, recrossed his legs, and said, "I don't want to bother the Big Bug with these thrills. All right, I'll try to manage without... Listen, Toivo, doesn't it seem to you that our Big Bug has been kind of nervous lately?"

Toivo shrugged.

"Maybe," he said. "The President is very bad. They say Gorbovsky is near death. And he knows them all. He knows them all well."

Grisha said thoughtfully: "By the way, I know Gorbovsky too; how about that. You remember... though I guess that was before your time... Kamill had committed suicide. The last of the Devil's Dozen. The whole Devil's Dozen case was really nothing to you, either... just something that made the air tremble. For instance, I had never heard of him... Well, the fact of suicide, though it would be more accurate to say self-destruction, Kamill's suicide did not elicit any doubts. But it wasn't clear why. That is, it was clear that his life wasn't a bed of roses; the last hundred years of his life he had been completely alone. You and I can't even imagine such loneliness But that's not what I was talking about. Big Bug sent me to Gorbovsky then, because, it seemed, Gorbovsky had been close to Kamill in his day and had even tried to give him some affection... Are you listening?"

Toivo nodded several times. "Yes," he said.

"Do you know how you look?"

"I do," Toivo said. "I look like a man who is concentrating on something private. You've told me that before. Several times. A cliche.

Don't you agree?"

Instead of an answer, Grlsha pulled a pen out of his breast pocket and threw it right at Toivo's head -- like a spear -- across the room. Toivo pulled the pen out of the air with two lingers a few centimeters from his face and said, "Feeble."

"Feeble," he wrote with the pen on the piece of paper in front of him.

"You're sparing me, sire," he said. "And you shouldn't spare me. It's bad for me."

"You see, Toivo," Grisha said, "I know that you have good reflexes. Not brilliant, no, but good; the st.u.r.dy reaction of a professional. But your appearance... You must realize that as your subsksu coach I feel it is my duty from time to time to check whether you can still react to your surroundings or whether you really are in a cataleptic state."

"I'm tired today," Toivo said. "When my program is finished with the tally, I'll go home."

"What do you have there?" Grisha asked.

"I have there ... whales. I have there birds. I have lemmings, rats, field mice. I have many small creatures."

"And what are they doing there?"

"They're perishing. Or fleeing. They're dying, throwing themselves onto sh.o.r.e, drowning themselves, flying away from places where they have lived for centuries."

"Why?"

"No one knows. Two or three centuries ago, it was a usual phenomenon, even though they did not understand why it was happening. Then it did not occur for a long time. At all. And now it's started again."

"Wait," said Grisha "It's all very interesting, of course, but what do we have to do with it?"

Toivo was silent, and, without waiting for an answer, Grisha asked, "Do you think it might have something to do with the Wanderers?"

Toivo diligently examined the pen, turned it in his fingers, picked it up by one end and held it up to the light.

"Everything we can't explain might have something to do with the Wanderers."

"Ironical formula," Grisha said in awe.

"And it might not," Toivo adders "Where do you get such nice things?

You'd think it's just a pen. What could be more ba.n.a.l? But it's a pleasure to look at your pen... You know, why don't you give it to me. And I'll give it to Asya. I want to make her happy. At least in some way."

"And you'll make you happy at least in some way," Grisha said.

"And you'll make me happy."

"Take it," Grisha said. "It's yours. Give it away, present it, make up a lie. That you bought it for your beloved, that you stayed up nights making it."

"Thanks," Toivo said, and put it in his pocket.

"But bear that in mind!" Grisha raised a warning anger. "Right around the comer, on Red Maple Street, there is a vending machine from the studio of a certain F. Moran, and it chums out pens like that as fast as people can put money in."

Toivo took the pen out and examined it again.

"It doesn't matter," he said sadly. "You noticed the vending machine, but it would never occur to me to notice it..."

"But you've noticed disorder in the world of whales!"

"Whales!" Toivo wrote down.

"By the way," he said. "You're a fresh mind, unprejudiced. What do you think? What do you think must have happened to make a herd of whales -- tame, cared for, spoiled -- suddenly, just like in the bad old days, beach themselves and die? Silently, without calling for help, with their cubs...

Can you imagine any reason at all for that suicide?

"Why did they do it before?"

"Why they did it before is also unknown. But back then, one could conjecture. Whales were tormented by parasites, they were attacked by swallows and squids, they were attacked by people... There was even a theory that they were killing themselves as a protest. But today!"

"What do specialists say?"

'The specialists sent a query to COMCON-1: to determine the cause of the reactivated incidents of suicide in whales."

"Hmmm. I see. What do the shepherds say?"

"It all started with the shepherds. They maintain that it's blind horror that makes the whales kill themselves. And the shepherds just can't imagine what today's whales have to fear."

"Hmmm," Grisha said. "It looks like you really can't get by without the Wanderers in this case.

"Can't get by," wrote Tolvo, drew a box around the words, and then another one, and started filling in the s.p.a.ce between them.

"But on the other hand," Grisha went on, "it's all happened before, over and over. We lose ourselves in conjectures, blame the Wanderers, twist our brains, and then we look and -- bah! -- who's that familiar figure on the horizon of events? Who's that so elegant and with the proud smile of the Lord G.o.d on the evening of the sixth day of creation? Whose familiar snow-white Van d.y.k.e beard is that? Mister Fleming, sir! Where do you come from! What are you doing here? Won't you step on the carpet, sir? To the World Council, the Extraordinary Tribunal?"

"You must agree that wouldn't be the worst thing," Toivo noted.

"Not at all! Though sometimes it seems to me that I would prefer to deal with dozens of Wanderers rather than one Fleming. Of course, that's probably because the Wanderers are almost hypothetical creatures, while Fleming with his beard is a totally real beast. Depressingly real, with his snow-white beard, his Lower Pesha, his scientific bandits, his d.a.m.ned world fame!"

"I can see that his beard really bugs you..."

"His beard is one the few things that doesn't," Grisha countered acidly. "We could grab him by that beard. But how will we grab the Wanderers, if it turns out to be them?"

Toivo neatly put away the pen, got up, and stood by the winder. Out of the comer of his eye, he could see Grisha watching him carefully, his feet firmly planted on the floor and even leaning forward. It was quiet, the display of the terminal beeping softly in rhythm co the count.

"Or are you hoping that it's not them'!" Grlsha asked.

Toivo did not answer for some time, and then he spoke without turning.

"Now I don't hope."

"What do you mean'!"

"It's them."

Grisha narrowed his eyes.

"What do you mean?"

Toivo turned to him.

"I'm certain that the Wanderers are on Earth and are active."

Grisha later said that at that moment he felt a very unpleasant shock.

He had a feeling that the whole scene was unreal. Everything here depended on the personality of Toivo Glumov. The words of Toivo Glumov were very difficult to connect to Toivo Glumov's personality. The words could not be a joke, because Toivo never joked about the Wanderers. Toivo's words could not be considered hasty, because Toivo never spoke hastily. And the words certainly could not be the truth, because they could not be the truth. Of course, Toivo could be mistaken...

Grisha asked in a tense voice: "Does the Big Bug know?"

"I've reported all the facts to him."

"And?"

"As you see, for now, nothing," Toivo said.

Grisha relaxed and leaned back in his chair.

"You're simply mistaken," he said in relief.

Toivo was silent.

"d.a.m.n you!" Grisha cried. "You frightened me to death with your gloomy fantasies! It was like being plunged into ice water!"

Toivo was silent. He turned back to the window. Grisha groaned, grabbed the tip of his nose, and, grimacing, performed circular contortions with it.

"No," he said. "I'm not like you, that's the problem. I can't do it.

It's too serious. The whole thing repulses me. It's not a personal issue; I believe, and the rest of you can do what you want. If I were to believe that, I would have to drop everything else, sacrifice everything I have, reject everything... be shriven, in effect, d.a.m.n it! But our life is multivarianted! How can you just make it fit one mold only? Though, of course, sometimes I feel ashamed and afraid, and then I regard you with special awe and delight... But sometimes -- like now, for instance -- I get mad just looking at you ... at your self-flagellation, your martyred obsession... And then I want to joke, to mock you, to laugh off everything you hold before us..."

"Listen," Toivo said, "what do you want from me?"

Grisha said nothing. "Really," he muttered at last. "What do I want from you? I don't know."

"But I do. You want everything to be good and better every day."

"Yep."

Grisha wanted to add something, something light and funny that would smooth over the awkward intimacy that had arisen between them in the last few minutes, but the computer signaled the end of the program, and the printer began pushing out the paper in short bursts.

Toivo looked at the whole thing, line by line, neatly folded it on the perforations, and stuck it in the storage memory slot.

"Anything interesting?" Grisha asked with sympathy.

"What can I say ..." Toivo muttered. He really was thinking hard about something else. "It's the spring of 81 all over again."

"What do you mean, all over again?"

Toivo ran his fingers over the terminal's sensor, starting the next top of instructions.

"In March 81," he said, "after two hundred years, was the first recorded incident of ma.s.s suicide of gray whales."

"So," Grisha said impatiently. "But why all over again?"

Toivo got up.

"It's a long story," he said. "You'll read the report later. Let's go home."

TOIVO GLUMOV AT HOME.8 May 99. Late Evening They ate dinner in a room crimson with sunset. Asya was in a bad mood.

Pashkovsky's yeast, brought to the delicatessen combine straight from Pandora (in living biocontainers, covered with terra-cotta h.o.a.rfrost and bristling with homed respirator crooks, six kilos of the precious yeast in each sack), had rioted again. The taste-smell had crossed over into Sygma cla.s.s, and the bitterness had risen to the last allowable degree. The experts were divided. The Master demanded that they cease making their alapaichiks, famous all over the planet, until they cleared things up, while Bruno, an insolent chatterbox, a boy, declared: "Why bother?" He had never dared raise his voice against the Master, and today suddenly he was giving speeches. The regular fans would simply not notice such a subtle change in flavor, and as for the gourmets, well, he bet his head that at least every fifth gourmet would be ecstatic over a taste change like that... Who needed his head? But they supported him! And now it wasn't clear what would happen...

Asya flung open the window, sat on the windowsill, and looked down into the two kilometers of blue-green expanse.

'Tm afraid I'll have to By to Pandora," she said.

"For long?" Toivo asked.

"I don't know. Maybe for long"

"Why it that?" Toivo asked carefully.

"You see... Master feels that we've checked everything possible here on Earth. That means that there's something wrong on the plantations. Maybe there's a new strain... or maybe something's happening in transit ... We don't know."

You've gone to Pandora once already," Toivo said, growing grin. "You went for a week and stayed three months."

"What can I do?"