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long since exchanged his admiral's galloons and shoulder straps for a fur
jacket and polar sweater arrived to see the film. They had already heard
about the film and eagerly awaited it, expressing all manner of
suppositions. The film, even if I do say so, turned out to be exciting. Our
second cinema operator, Zhenya Lazebnikov, looked at the developed film and
howled out with envy: "That's the end. You're famous now. Not even Evans
ever dreamt of a piece like this. You've got both hands on the Lomonosov
Prize right now." Zernov did not comment, but leaving the laboratory, he
asked:
"Aren't you a little bit afraid, Anokhin?" "Why should I be?" I
countered in surprise. "You can't image the sensation this is going to
create."
I had felt something like that when we viewed the film at the base.
Everybody was there who could make it, they sat and stood till there wasn't
any more room to sit or stand. The silence was that of an empty church. Once
in a while a rumble of amazement and almost terror, when even the old-timers
of polar exploration used to quite a bit gave in. The scepticism and
disbelief that some had received our stories with disappeared on the instant
after pictures of two "Kharkovchanka" vehicles with identically dented front
windows and the rose cloud floating above them in the pale blue sky. The
frames were excellent and precisely conveyed the colour:
the "cloud" on the screen went red, violet, changed shape, turned up in
the form of a flower, boiled and gobbled up the huge machine with all its
contents. The picture of my double did not cause excitement at first and was
not convincing, for they simply took it for me myself, though I pointed out
straightway that to film myself and in motion too and from different angles
was simply impossible even for a Grand Master documentalist. But what really
compelled them to believe in duplicate human beings were the pictures of
Martin's double on the snow-I succeeded in getting him close up-and then the
real Martin and Zernov approaching the site of the catastrophe. The hall
buzzed with excitement and when the crimson flower threw out a snake-like
tentacle and the dead Martin vanished into its flared maw, somebody even
cried out in the darkness. But the most striking effect, the deepest
impression was made by the concluding part of the film, its ice symphony.
Zernov was right, 1 greatly underestimated the sensation.
But the viewers gave it its due. The showing was hardly over when
voices were heard demanding a second showing. This time the silence was
total: not a single exclamation resounded in the hall, nobody coughed, no
one exchanged a single word with his neighbour, even whispering could not be
heard. The silence continued even when the lights went on. The people were
still in the grip of events and were released only by the voice of the
oldest of the old-timers, the doyen of the corps of wintering-over men,
Professor Kedrin, who said:
"All right, now tell us, Boris, what you think about it. That will be
better because we still have to think things over."
"I've already said that we have no material witnesses," Zernov replied.
"Martin was not able to get a sample: the 'cloud' did not allow him to
approach. On the ground, too, we could not get close enough and were pressed
to the ground as if our bodies were filled with lead. This means that the
'cloud' can set up a gravitational field. Added confirmation is the ice cube
in the air that we saw. Martin's plane was probably landed and our tractor
pulled out of the crevice in the same fashion. The following inferences may
be classed as beyond question: the 'cloud' readily changes its shape and
colour. This you have seen. It creates any temperature regime needed:
hundred-metre-thick ice can be cut only by using very high temperatures. It
floats in the air like a fish in water and can change direction and speed
instantaneously. Martin claims that the 'cloud' he saw escaped from him at
hypersonic speed. His 'colleagues' obviously went slow simply to create a
gravitational barrier around the airplane. The ultimate conclusion can only
be that the rose 'clouds' have nothing whatsoever to do with meteorological
phenomena. This 'cloud' is either a living thinking organism or a bio system
with a specific programme. Its principal tasks are to remove and transport
into space enormous masses of continental ice. And incidentally for some
unknown reason and in some unknown way it synthesizes (I would rather say
duplicates or models) any thing it encounters (atomic structures such as
human beings, machines and other things) and then destroys them.
The American Admiral Thompson asked Zernov the first question:
"There is one thing that is not clear to me from your report, and that
is, whether these creatures are hostile or not towards human beings."
"I do not think so. They destroy only the copies they themselves have
created."
"Are you positive?"
"But you've just seen that yourself," Zernov replied in surprise.
"I would like to know whether you are sure that the destroyed creatures
are definitely copies and not the people themselves? If the copies are
identical with the human beings, then who will prove to me that my pilot
Martin is indeed my pilot Martin and not his atomic model?"
The exchange was in English but many in the hall understood or
translated for their neighbours. Nobody smiled, the question was indeed
terrifying. Even Zernov seemed at a loss as he searched for an answer.
I pulled down Martin who had jumped up and said:
"I can assure you, Admiral, that I am indeed I, the photography man of
the expedition, Yuri Anokhin, and not a cloud-created model. When I shot the
film, my double retreated to the Sno-Cat as if hypnotized. You could see
that on the screen. He told me that somebody or something was forcing him to
return to the cabin. Apparently he was already prepared for elimination." I
watched the glistening spectacles of the Admiral and almost burst with
anger.
"That is possible," he said, "though it is not very convincing. I have
a question for Martin. Please stand up, Martin."
The pilot rose to his full two-metre height of a veteran basketball
player.
"Yes, sir. I wiped out the copy with my own two hands."
The Admiral smiled.
"Now suppose the copy finished you off?" He moved his lips a bit before
adding: "You attempted to shoot when you thought about the aggressive
intentions of the 'cloud', right?"
"Yes, I did, sir. Two bursts with tracer bullets."
"Any results?"
"No, sir, no results. Like a shot gun against an avalanche of snow."
"Now suppose you had a different weapon? Say a flame thrower or
napalm?"
"I do not know, sir."
"Would it have refused to clash?"
"I do not think so, sir."
"Sit down, Martin. Don't be offended, I am only trying to clarify some
of the details of Mr. Zernov's report that worry me. Thank you for your
explanations, gentlemen."
The persistence of the Admiral untied all tongues. Questions followed
one another as fast as they could be answered, like at a press conference.
"You said that ice masses are being transported into space. Do you mean the
atmosphere or outer space?"
"If it is into atmospheric space, I don't see the purpose. What is
there to do with ice in the atmosphere?"
"Will humanity allow for this mass-scale plundering of ice?"
"Does anyone need glaciers here on the earth?"
"What will happen to a continent freed from ice? Will the level of the
ocean rise?"
"Will the climate change?"
"Not all at once, comrades," Zernov implored rising his arms. "One at a
time. Into what space? I assume it is cosmic space. Glaciers are only needed
in the terrestrial atmosphere for glaciologists. Generally speaking, I
thought scientists were people with higher education. But judging from the
questions, I am beginning to doubt the axiomatic nature of that proposition.
How can the water level in the ocean increase if there is no increase in
water? That's school geography, and the same goes for the climate question
too."
"What, in your opinion, is the presumed structure of the 'cloud'? To me
it seemed to be
a gas."
"A thinking gas," someone giggled. "From what textbook is that?"
"Are you a physicist?" Zernov asked.
"Well, assuming that I am."
"Suppose you write a textbook."
"Unfortunately, I have no experience in the show business. But my
question is serious."
"And I'm serious in my answer. I do not know the structure of the
'cloud'. It might even be that the physico-chemical structure is totally
unknown to our science. I think that it is more of a colloidal structure
than gaseous."
"Where do you think it came from?"
The correspondent of "Izvestia" I knew got
"P-, "In some kind of a science fiction novel I read
about visitors from Pluto. Incidentally, in the Antarctic too. Do you
really take that as a serious possibility?"
"I don't know. While I'm on the subject, I never said anything about
Pluto."
"It may not be Pluto, what I meant was from outer space as such. From
some kind of stellar system. Why should they be coming to the earth for ice?
To the outskirts of our Galaxy. There is certainly enough ice in the
Universe, one could try some place a bit closer."
"Closer to what?" Zernov asked and smiled.
I admired him. He still retained some humour and calm even under this
veritable barrage of questions. He had not made a scientific discovery, but
was only an accidental witness to a unique, unexplained phenomenon, about
which he hardly knew more than those who had seen the film. For some reason
they kept forgetting that and he patiently responded to every remark.
"Ice is water," he said in the tone of a tired teacher winding up a
lesson. "It is a compound that is not so often met with even in our own
stellar system. We do not know whether there is water on Venus, there is
very little on Mars and none whatsoever on Jupiter or Uranus. And of course
there is not so very much terrestrial ice in the Universe. If I err, the
astronomers will correct me, but it seems to me that cosmic ice is merely
frozen gases: ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen."
"Why doesn't anyone ask about duplicates, doubles?" I whispered and
immediately got myself into a lot of work.
Professor Kedrin recalled me:
"I have a question for Anokhin. Did you converse with your duplicate?
And I wonder what
about?" "Yes, we did, we talked about a variety of things," I said.
"Did you notice any difference, purely external, say, in fine points,
in hardly noticeable details? I refer to differences between the two of
you."
"None in the least. Our blood was even the same." Then I told them
about the microscope.
"How about memory? Recalling things from childhood and later. Did you
check that?"
I related everything about memory. What I couldn't understand was what
he was trying to get at. But he .explained himself:
"The question that Admiral Thompson asked, is a disturbing one,
frightening even, and it should put us on our guard. If duplicates of human
beings are going to put in appearances in the future and if, say, duplicates
appear that are not destroyed, then how are we to distinguish between a
person and his model? What is more, how will they themselves distinguish
each other? I believe that is a matter not so much of absolute identity, but
of the confidence of each that precisely he is the real person and not the
synthesized one."
I recalled my own arguments with my ill-fated double and was completely
lost. Zernov saved me.
"A curious item," he said, "the doubles always appear following one and
the same dream. The person seems to be immersed in a red or crimson (violet
sometimes) cold jelly-like substance that is always very thick. This
undisclosed substance fills the person up completely, all his internal
organs, all vessels. I cannot assert definitely that the filling takes
place, but the person seems to be convinced of it. He lies totally incapable
of moving, as if paralysed, and begins to experience sensations akin to
those of one hypnotized: as if someone invisible were probing his mind,
going through 'every cell of his brain. Then the crimson darkness vanishes,
his mind clears and his movements come back. He believes that he has had an
absurd and horrible dream. In a short time, the double is at large. But
after waking up, the person has had time to do something and to say
something, to think something. The double does not know this. When Anokhin
woke up he found two vehicles and not one, both with the same dent in the
front window and with the same welded piece of metal on the tractor tread.
For his double, this was a discovery. He only remembered what Anokhin
remembered prior to immersion in the crimson work. There were similar
discrepancies in the other cases as well. After waking up, Dyachuk shaved
and cut himself. His double appeared without the cut. Chokheli went to sleep
drunk from the glass of alcohol he had swallowed, but he got up sober, with
a clear mind. Now the duplicate appeared before him drunk, he could hardly
stand up, his eyes were misty, actually he was in a state of delirium
tremens. I think that in the future it will be precisely this period of
action of the person immediately after waking up from the 'crimson dream'
that will help, in doubtful cases, to distinguish the original from the copy
if other ways have not been found by then."
"Did you also have a dream of that nature?" someone asked in the hall.
"Yes, I did."
"But you did not have a double?"
"That is exactly what is worrying me. Why I turned out to be the
exception."
"You were not an exception," Zernov's own voice answered him.
The speaker stood behind the others, nearly in the doorway, dressed
somewhat differently from Zernov. The other one had on a splendid grey suit,
while this one had on an old dark-green sweater, the one Zernov always wore
on expeditions. But Zernov's padded pants and Canadian fur boots, which I
envied during our trips, completed the dress of the stranger. Yet he was
hardly a stranger, when you come to think of it. Even I, who had spent so
many days alongside Zernov, could not distinguish one from the other. Zernov
was on the stage, but in the doorway stood a precise, perfect copy. That is
definite.
The hall gasped, somebody stood up, looking from one to the other in
bewilderment, someone else stood with his mouth open. Kedrin, with puckered
eyebrows, concentrating, examined the double with interest; a snake-like
snigger appeared on the lips of the American Admiral; he was obviously
pleased at the unexpected confirmation of his idea. It seemed to me that
Zernov himself was rather pleased too, the doubts and fears of whom had so
suddenly been brought to consummation.
"Come over here," he said almost gaily, "I've been waiting for just
such a meeting. Let's have a talk. It'll be of interest not only to us."
Zernov's double unhurriedly walked over to the stage accompanied by
inquisitive eyes full of excitement and interest that are accorded only rare
celebrities. He turned around, pulled up a chair and sat down near the table
at which Zernov had been carrying on a running commentary of the film. The
spectacle somehow seemed very natural: here were twin brothers meeting after
a long separation. The only difference was that everyone knew that there had
been no separation and these were no brothers. Simply one of the two was a
miracle beyond the comprehension of human beings. But which one? Now I
realized what Admiral Thompson meant.
"Why didn't you show up during the trip? I was expecting it," said
Zernov Number One.
Zernov Number Two, perplexed, just shrugged his shoulders.
"I remember everything prior to that rose-coloured dream. Then there is
a hiatus, a gap. Then here I am entering this hall, and listening and
watching and it seems to me that I have begun to understand things." He
looked at Zernov and smiled ironically. "How much alike we are, after all!"
"I foresaw that," said Zernov shrugging.
"But I didn't. If we had met like Anokhin and his double, I would not
have given away the priority. Who would have proven that you are the real
one and I am only a reproduction? The point is that I am you, I remember all
my (or your)-now I don't even know which-life, right down to the most minute
detail, even better than you perhaps: most likely a synthesized memory is
fresher. Anton Kuzmich-he turned to the audience-do you remember our
conversation just before departure? Not about the problems of
experimentation, just the words we exchanged. Do you remember?"
Professor Kedrin was definitely perplexed:
"I don't remember."
"I don't either," said Zernov.
"You knocked your cigarette holder on a packet of cigarettes," said
Zernov Number Two without the slightest touch of superiority, " and you said
'I want to give up smoking, Boris. Beginning with tomorrow, that's
definite'."
Laughter broke out because Professor Kedrin was munching a cigarette
that had already died out.
"I have a question," it was Admiral Thompson.
"I would like to ask Mr. Zernov in the green sweater. Do you remember
our meeting at MacMurdo?"
"Of course," said Zernov the Second in English.
"And the souvenir that you liked so much?"
"Of course," Zernov Two answered. "You presented me with a fountain pen
with your initials in gold. I have it in my room, in the pocket of my summer
jacket."
"My summer jacket," Zernov corrected him sardonically.
"You would not have convinced me of it if I had not seen your film. Now
I know: I did not return with you on the tractor, I did not meet the
American pilot, and the death of his double I only saw in the film. I expect
the same end for myself, I foresee it."
"Perhaps you are an exception," said Zernov, "it may be that you will
be granted existence."
Now I saw the difference between them. One spoke calmly without losing
any of his composure, the other was all wound up inside and tense. Even his
lips trembled, as if it were difficult for him to say what his mind was
thinking.
"You yourself do not believe in it," he said, "we are created as an
experiment and are eliminated as a product of the experiment. Why, is not
known to anyone, you or me. I remember Anokhin's story via your memory, via
our combined memory, that is how and why I remember it." He looked at me and
inside I shuddered as I met the so familiar look. "When the cloud started to
descend, Anokhin told his double to run. The double refused, he could not,
he said, for something was ordering him to remain. And he returned to the
cabin to die: we all saw that. The difference is that you can stand up and
leave, whereas I cannot do that. Something has already ordered me not to
move."
Zernov extended his hand and it came up against an invisible barrier.
"Nothing can be done," sadly smiled Zernov the Double. "It's a field,
I'm using your terminology, since like you I know no other. The field has
already been set up. I'm in it like in a spacesuit."
Somebody sitting nearby also tried to touch the synthesized man but
couldn't because his hand encountered compressed air as hard as wood.
"It is terrible to know of your own end and not to have any way of
putting it off," said Zernov's counterpart. "After all, I am a man and not
just a biological mass. I so terribly want to live-"
The horrible silence pressed down on the hall. Someone was breathing
heavily like an asthmatic. Somebody else had covered his eyes with his hand.
Admiral Thompson had taken off his glasses. I screwed up my eyes.
Martin's hand that had been on my knee trembled.
"Look up!" he cried.
I looked up and froze stiff: there was a violet pulsating trunk-like
affair dropping down the ceiling to the Zernov sitting perfectly still in
the green sweater. Its funnel widened and frothed, unhurriedly but firmly,
like an empty hood, and covered up the man beneath it. A minute later we saw
something like a jelly stalactite violet in colour that merged with a
similar stalagmite. The base of the stalagmite rested on the stage near the
table, the stalactite flowed out of the ceiling through the roof and the
almost three metres of snow covering it. In another half minute the frothing
edge of the trunk, or pipe, began to turn upwards and in the empty rosiness
of its inside we no longer could see either chair or man. In another minute,
violet foam had gone through the roof as if something immaterial, without
damaging either the plastic or the thermal insulation.
"That's all," said Zernov rising to his feet. "Finis, as the ancient
Romans used to say."
In Moscow I had hard luck. I had got through the fierce Antarctic
winter without even having sneezed in sixty degrees below zero, but back
here in Moscow I came down with a cold in the autumn slush when the
thermometer had hardly dropped to zero outside the window. True, by next
Tuesday the doctor said I'd be up and around and my own self again, but
Sunday morning I was still lying with mustard plasters on my back and unable
to go downstairs for the newspapers. Tolya Dyachuk brought me the papers. He
was my first visitor Sunday morning. And though he did not take any part in
our fussing with the rose clouds and immediately returned to his
weather-forecast institute and his charts of the winds and cyclones, I was
sincerely happy that he did come. The anxious events that we had both gone
through just a month before were still deeply felt. And Tolya was an
easy-going convenient guest. One could be totally silent in his presence and
think one's own thoughts without any risk of offending him, and his jokes
and exaggerations would never offend his host. So the guest ensconced
himself in a chair near the window and strummed on the guitar purring to
himself one of his own compositions while the host lay patiently enduring
the stings of the mustard and recalling his last day at Mirny and the
try-out of the new helicopter that had just arrived from Moscow.
Kostya Ozhogin had arrived at Mirny with a fresh group of polar workers
and had only the faintest idea about the rose clouds. Our acquaintance began
as he begged me to show him at least a little bit of my film. I showed him a
whole reel. He responded by offering me a seat in the new high-speed
helicopter during a trial run out over the ocean. The next morning-my last
at Mirny-he came over and told me in secret about some kind of "very
terrible thing". His helicopter had been out on the ice all night, about
fifty metres from the edge, where the ship "Ob" was moored. Here is the way
he described it: "We were celebrating a bit, had been drinking, not much,
and before going to bed I went out to take a look at the machine. There were
two there, one next to the other. I figured another one had been unloaded
and went back to sleep. In the morning there was only one again. So I asked
the engineer where the other one had gone, and he burst out laughing. 'Hey,
you drank too much, you were seeing double. How much did you guys put away?'
"
I was rather suspicious about the true criminals of this splitting, but
I didn't say anything. What I did was I brought along my camera, I had a
hunch it might come in useful. Which it did. We were about three-hundred
metres above the ocean at the very edge of the ice. We could clearly see the
unloaded boxes and machines, the small pieces of broken ice at the shore and
the blue icebergs out in the pure water. The biggest towered up a few
kilometres from the coast line, but did not float or bob on the waves-it was
sitting firmly in the water fixed securely to the bottom. We called it 'The
End of the Titanic' in memory of the famous liner that collided with a
colossal iceberg at the beginning of the century. This one was even larger.
Our glaciologists calculated that it was roughly three thousand square
kilometres in area. That was the goal of the Disney characters that had
stretched out single file across the sky.
I began to film without waiting for a close approach. They were flying
at the same altitude as we were, they were rose-coloured without a single
spot and resembled dirigibles at the tail end of a column. From the front
they were like boomerangs or swept-back airplane wings. "Shall we turn
back?" said Ozhogin in a whisper. "We can put on speed." "Why?" I sniggered.
"You can't get away from them anyway." I could sense the tension in
Ozhogin's muscles, but I didn't know whether it was due to fear or
excitement. He asked: "Are they going to start splitting?" "No, they're not
going to." "How do you know?" "Because they duplicated your helicopter last
night, you yourself saw it," I replied. He didn't say anything.
Meanwhile the column had approached the iceberg. Three rosy dirigibles
hung in the air, getting redder and opening up their familiar saucer-like
stemless poppies, motionless at the corners of an enormous triangle over the
island of ice; then the swept-wing boomerangs plunged downwards. They went
into the water like fish, no splash, no sound, only white spurts of steam
encircled the iceberg. Probably the temperature gradient between the new
substance and the water was too great. Then all was calm. The poppies
flowered over the island and the boomerangs, disappeared. I waited patiently
while the helicopter slowly circled over the iceberg a bit below the poppies
hanging in the sky.
"What's going to happen now?" Ozhogin asked hoarsely. "Is this the
end?" "I don't think so," I replied cautiously. About ten minutes must have
passed. Suddenly the mountain of ice shook mightily and then slowly rose out
of the water. "Let's go," I yelled to Kostya. He understood and swung our
plane to the side, away from the dangerous orbit. The bluish hunk of ice,
scintillating in the sun, had already risen above the water. It was so large
that it was difficult to find any comparison. Imagine an enormous mountain
cut off at the base and rising upwards like a toy balloon. It gleamed and
glistened shimmering in a million colours of molten sapphires and emeralds
sprinkled all over it. This was a scene you could sell your soul to the
devil for. I was the king. Only Ozhogin and I and the astronomers of Mirny
witnessed this incomparable spectacle. A miracle of ice rose out of the
water, came to a halt over the three crimson poppies and then hurtled off
into the depths of cosmic space. The "boomerangs" slithered out of the water
in a jet of steam and turned towards the continent in regular order. The
route lay through the foam of cumulus clouds. Like horsemen they galloped.
Horsemen!
The simile came later, and it was not concocted by me but right now I
heard it from Tolya strumming on his guitar.
"Do you like it?" he asked.
"Like what?"
"The song, naturally," he explained.
"What song," I still couldn't get it all straight.
"So you weren't listening," he sighed. "Exactly what I thought. I'll
have to sing it again."
He started up in his long drawn out talk-sing voice, like a chansonnier
without a voice that hangs onto the microphone for dear life. I didn't know
then what an envious fate awaited this composition of accidental celebrity.
"Horsemen from nowhere, what's that? A dream? A myth? All of a sudden,
while awaiting a wonder ... the world froze silently still. And over the
rhythmical drone and pulse of the world, horsemen from nowhere pranced by
... True, the idea is not new and the theme of the tragedy is simple. Hamlet
again solving the eternal problem. Who are they? Human beings? Gods? The
snow melts slowly, and again the Earth is anxious, there is no breathing
spell-"
He paused for a moment and then continued in a major key.
"Who will recognize them? And will we be able to grasp them? It is
late, my friend, it is late, and there is no one we can blame. Only the
difficult thing to grasp, my friend, is that there they are again-the
horsemen from nowhere prancing by in ordered array."
He sighed and glanced in my direction waiting for some sign of
appreciation.
"Not so bad," I said, "As a song goes, but-"
"But what?" he queried guardedly.
"Where does the Spanish sadness come from? Why the pessimism?" And I
started, 'It is late, my friend, it is late,' "Why late? And what is late?
And what's this about blame? Are you sorry about the ice, or the doubles?
Better take off this mustard plaster, it's not burning any more."
Tolya peeled it off my suffering back and said:
"Incidentally, they've been seen in the Arctic too."
"That must be terrifying, those horsemen from nowhere."
"You said it. In Greenland they've been cutting up ice too. Telegrams
have come in."
"So what, it might get warmer, that's all."
"But what if they take all the ice there is on the Earth? In the
Arctic, the Antarctic, in the mountains and the oceans?"
"You ought to know, you're the climatologist. I guess we'll be able to
fish for sardines in the White Sea and plant oranges in Greenland."
"In theory," Tolya sighed. "Who can predict what will really happen?
Nobody. It's not the ice that worries me. You read what Thompson has to say.
TASS has given it in full." He pointed to a bunch of papers.
"Getting panicky?"
"That's not the word!"
"He was nervous enough there in Mirny, remember?"
"Yea, he's a tough nut. He'll keep things mixed up for quite some time.
For both sides. By the way, he was the one who used the phrase Lysov-sky
coined: 'horsemen from nowhere'."
"Horsemen from nowhere? But that's what you thought up," I recalled.
"Yes, but who multiplied it?"
Special correspondent of "Izvestia" Lysovsky, returning from Mirny, was
the author of an article dealing with the rose "clouds" that was taken up by
all the newspapers of the world. That's what he called them: horsemen from
nowhere. Tolya was the real inventor, though. He was the one who yelled out
"horsemen, really, horsemen". "Where from?" someone asked. "I don't know,
from nowhere." Then Lysovsky repeated it aloud: "Horsemen from nowhere. Not
bad for a headline."
Tolya and I looked at each other. That's exactly the way it had been.
What actually happened? Our jet liner was in flight from the ice
aerodrome of Mirny to the shores of South Africa.
Below us were white wisps of cloud like a field of snow near a railway
station: locomotive soot sprinkled about on fresh snow. The clouds moved
apart occasionally and windows would open up displaying the steel surface of
the ocean far below.
All of us who had gotten used to one another during the winter were
gathered in the cabin- geologists, pilots, glaciologists, astronomers,
aerologists. Our guests were only a few newspaper reporters, but it was soon
quite forgotten that they were guests and they gradually dissolved into a
homogeneous mass of Antarctic workers of yesterday. The talk turned to the
rose clouds, of course, but not seriously, in a bantering manner with jokes
and wisecracks most of the time. The usual excited cabin conversations of a
home-returning trip.
All of a sudden some rose-coloured "boomerangs" appeared out of the
clouds, jumping in and out like horsemen in the steppe. That was when the
"horsemen" phrase came up, though they naturally had been compared with most
anything because they were constantly changing shape, which they did
instantaneously and for reasons that we could not fathom. That is exactly
what happened this time too. Six or seven of them, I don't remember
precisely, rose up in front of us, spread out in the form of crimson
pancakes and enveloped the plane in an impenetrable crimson cocoon. To the
credit of our pilot, it must be said, he did not falter but continued to fly
as if nothing had happened: if it's got to be a cocoon, then let it be one!
An ominous silence set in in the cabin. Everyone expected something to
happen, glanced from one to the other, and feared to speak at all. The red
fog seeped through the walls. Nobody could figure out how that could be. It
would seem that no material barriers existed, or that it was nonmaterial,
illusory, existing only in one's imagination. But it soon filled the cabin
and only strange crimson spots revealed the passengers in front or behind.
"Do you know what this's all about," I heard the voice of Lysovsky from the
other side of the aisle. "You don't happen to feel as if someone were
looking into your brain and going right through you, do you?" That was my
question in reply to his question. He was silent for a moment probably
trying to figure out whether I was going mad from fear, and then added
hesitatingly: "Nn-o, I don't think so." Then somebody next to him said:
"It's just a fog, that's all." I didn't think so either. What was happening
in the plane didn't at all resemble the sensations in the tractor and in the
tent. In the former case somebody or something peered deep inside me, probed
imperceptibly in my body as if determining the arrangement and number of
particles that make up my bioessence, in this way reproducing a model of me;
in the latter case, the process had stopped half way, as if the creator of
the model knew that my model had already been made. I was now surrounded by
a fog, crimson-like, just as opaque as turbid water in a jar, neither cold
nor warm and totally imperceptible, for it did not smart my eyes nor tickle
the nose. It coursed round me and did not even appear to touch the skin,
then it gradually melted or floated away. I soon began to see hands,
clothes, the seats and people sitting in them nearby. Then I heard a voice
from behind:
"How long did that take? Did you notice?" "No, I didn't look at my
watch, I don't know." Neither did I know, it might have been three or
perhaps ten minutes.
This was when we saw something still more bizarre. Squint, pressing
your eyes strongly on the lids, and objects will appear to double up,
producing, as it were, a copy that floats away out of the field of view.
That is what happened to all the things in the aircraft, everything in our
field of view. Not hazily, but very clearly, I saw-later I found out that
everyone saw the same thing-a duplicate of our cabin and all its contents
gradually separate itself-the floor, the windows, seats and passengers. It
rose half a meter and then floated off. I saw myself, Tolya and his guitar,
Lysovsky, and I noticed Lysovsky trying to grab his reproduction that was
floating away. All he got was the air. I saw the outside of the cabin, not
the inside; I saw the outer wall go right through the real wall, followed by
the wing that slipped through us like an enormous shadow of the aircraft.
Then all this vanished from view as if it had evaporated in the air. Yet it
did not vanish and it did not evaporate. We rushed to the windows and saw an
identical copy of our plane flying alongside, absolutely identical, just off
the production line, but it was no illusory machine because Lysovsky
collected his wits fast enough to take a photograph, which was published and
definitely showed the new plane to be a duplicate of our liner taken at a
distance of 10 metres.
Unfortunately, what happened later was not photographed. Lysovsky ran
out of film and I was late in getting to my camera, which had been stowed
away. This was the aerial wonder that was enacted before our eyes: a
familiar crimson cocoon enveloped the duplicate plane, elongated, growing
dark red, then violet and then melted away. Nothing remained-no plane, no
cocoon. Only the whitish wisps of cloud floating below us as before.
The chief pilot stepped out of the pilot's cabin a few minutes later
and asked shyly: "Perhaps someone can explain what occurred just now."
Nobody volunteered, he waited a moment and then added, with an ironical
sting: "That's scientists for you. Wonders, miracles-but we're told miracles
just don't happen." Someone put in: "I guess they do." Everybody laughed.
Then Lysovsky turned to Zernov: "Perhaps Comrade Zernov has an explanation?"
"I'm no god or oracle," Zernov replied gruffly. "The 'clouds' produced a
duplicate plane, that you all saw. I don't know any more than you do about
the how and why of it all." "Am I to write that?" asked Lysovsky. "Sure, go
ahead and write it," Zernov cut him off and fell silent.
He brought up the subject once more, after we landed in Karachi, when
we had both forced our way through the crowds of newsmen that had come to
meet us: our radio operator had sent a radiogram about the event from the
plane. While newsmen with cameras attacked the crew of our plane, Zernov and
I slipped through to the cafe for a bite and a drink. I recall asking him
something, but he did not answer. Later, as if answering anxious thoughts
and not me, he said:
"That's a totally different method of model-building, the procedure is
quite different."
"You speaking about the 'horsemen'?" I asked. "That word would stick,"
he smiled ironically. "Everywhere, both here and in the West too, I imagine.
You'll see. Yet the duplication procedure was absolutely unlike anything
ever," he added deep in thought.
I didn't get it: "The plane, you mean?" "Don't think so. The airplane
was probably duplicated in full. And in the same manner. First
nonmaterially, illusorily, and then materially- that is the entire atomic
structure with exactitude. People are handled differently: only the outer
form, the shell, the function of the passenger. What does a passenger do? He
sits in his seat, looks out the window, drinks juice and turns the pages of
a book. I hardly think the psychic workings of the human beings were
reproduced in all their complexity. Of course that is not necessary anyway.
What was needed was a living, acting model of the aircraft with living and
acting passengers. That's only a surmise naturally."
"But what's the idea of destroying the model?" "Why are duplicates
eliminated?" was Zernov's counter query. "Remember the farewell of my twin?
I still can't get it out of my mind."
He fell silent and stopped answering my questions. It was only when we
left the restaurant and were passing by Lysovsky surrounded by at least a
dozen foreign newspaper men that Zernov smiled and said:
"He's sure to serve up some 'horsemen' for them. It'll get around, you
just wait. They'll have the Apocalypse and pale horsemen and black ones
carrying death. Oh, there'll be everything. You know your Bible? Well, if
you don't, read it and compare when the time comes."
His prediction came true in every detail. I nearly jumped out of bed
when, together with telegrams about the appearance of rose utfuds in Alaska
and in the Hymalayas, Dyachuk read me a translation of an article by Admiral
Thompson from a New York paper. Even the terminology that Zernov had laughed
at coincided fully with that of the Admiral.
Wrote the Admiral: "Somebody gave them a catchy name, the 'horsemen',
but, whoever it was, failed to hit the bull's eye. They are no simple
horsemen, they are horsemen of the Apocalypse, This is no accidental
comparison. Recall the words of the prophet:
".. .and I looked, and behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on
him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given into them
over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and
with death...."
Fellow Americans will have to excuse me if I resort more to the
terminology of a Catholic Church Cardinal than to that of a retired navy
man. But I'm compelled to, for humanity is meeting these uninvited guests
with much too much complacency." The Admiral was not interested to know
where they came from, Sirius or Alpha Centauri. Neither was he worried about
the terrestrial ice that was being carried off into outer space. What he was
afraid of were the duplicates. Even back in Mirny he had doubts about
whether the duplicates or real human beings were being destroyed. Now this
same idea was expressed aggressively and with assurance:
"... the duplicates and humans would appear to be completely identical.
The same exterior, the same memory and the same thinking process. But who
will prove to me that the identity of thinking has no limits beyond which
begin subservience to the will of the creators." The more I listened the
more astonished I was at the author's fanatical bias: he even rejected a
neutral study and observation and demanded a most energetic attack on the
visitors to expel them with all the means at our disposal. The article ended
with a completely bizarre supposition: "If I suddenly betray myself by
recanting what I have just written, then I am the duplicate and I myself
have been substituted. Then you can hang me on the first street lantern."
It was not only the meaning that was remarkable, but the very tone of
the article. Those given to believing sensational news items might indeed be
thoroughly frightened by this apparently sensible but definitely prejudiced
man. What is more, it might be utilized for very unseemly purposes by
unscrupulous people in politics and in science. It is to the credit of the
Admiral that he did not seek their support and did not borrow any weapons
from the arsenal of anticommunism.
When I explained my reasoning to Tolya, he said:
"The Admiral's article is only a special problem. Something quite
different arises, if you ask me. Up till now, when scientists or
science-fiction writers touched on the probability of encounters with other
intelligence in outer space, they were interested in the problem of friendly
or hostile attitudes of such intelligence towards terrestrial humans. But it
never entered anyone's mind to ponder the possibility of a hostile attitude
of humans towards such intelligence. Yet that is precisely the problem.
Switch on your transistor at night and you'll go crazy. The whole world is
excited, it's on every wavelength. The Pope, ministers, senators,
astrologers-they're all working the waves. Flying saucers are nothing.
Parliaments are being questioned."
That was something to think about indeed. Tolya occasionally said
sensible things.
The problem that Tolya had brought up was discussed at a special
session of the Academy of Sciences, I was present as the person who filmed
the space visitors. A lot was said, but probably the most talked-about
subject was the nature of the phenomenon and its peculiarities. This again
launched me into the orbit of rose "clouds".
I arrived at the meeting about an hour before time so as to check the
projector, the screen and the sound. The film now had an accompanying text.
In the conference hall I found the stenographer Irene Fateyeva, who had been
spoken of as the future secretary of a special commission to be set up by
the session. I was also warned that she was a cobra, a polyglot and an
I-know-it-all type. You can ask her what would happen if you dipped a
solution of potassium chloride on an exposed brain and she'll give you the
answer, so they say. Or you can ask about the fourth state of matter, or
what topology does, and she has answers. But I didn't ask about anything.
All I needed was to look at her once, and I believed it.
She had on a dark blue sweater with a very strict abstract
ornamentation, and her hair was done in a tightly bound bun, though it was
not at all the fashion of the 19th century. She wore dark, narrow,
rectangular frameless eyeglasses. The eyes that peered from behind them were
clever, attentive, demanding. True, I didn't see the eyes when I came in:
she was writing in a notebook and did not lift her head.
I coughed.
"Don't cough, Anokhin, and don't stand in the middle of the room," she
said without lifting her head, "I know you, I know all about you, so we
don't have to get acquainted formally. Sit down some place and wait a few
minutes till I get this synopsis finished."
"What's a synopsis?" I asked.
"Don't try to be more ignorant than you already are. You don't have to
jacket and polar sweater arrived to see the film. They had already heard
about the film and eagerly awaited it, expressing all manner of
suppositions. The film, even if I do say so, turned out to be exciting. Our
second cinema operator, Zhenya Lazebnikov, looked at the developed film and
howled out with envy: "That's the end. You're famous now. Not even Evans
ever dreamt of a piece like this. You've got both hands on the Lomonosov
Prize right now." Zernov did not comment, but leaving the laboratory, he
asked:
"Aren't you a little bit afraid, Anokhin?" "Why should I be?" I
countered in surprise. "You can't image the sensation this is going to
create."
I had felt something like that when we viewed the film at the base.
Everybody was there who could make it, they sat and stood till there wasn't
any more room to sit or stand. The silence was that of an empty church. Once
in a while a rumble of amazement and almost terror, when even the old-timers
of polar exploration used to quite a bit gave in. The scepticism and
disbelief that some had received our stories with disappeared on the instant
after pictures of two "Kharkovchanka" vehicles with identically dented front
windows and the rose cloud floating above them in the pale blue sky. The
frames were excellent and precisely conveyed the colour:
the "cloud" on the screen went red, violet, changed shape, turned up in
the form of a flower, boiled and gobbled up the huge machine with all its
contents. The picture of my double did not cause excitement at first and was
not convincing, for they simply took it for me myself, though I pointed out
straightway that to film myself and in motion too and from different angles
was simply impossible even for a Grand Master documentalist. But what really
compelled them to believe in duplicate human beings were the pictures of
Martin's double on the snow-I succeeded in getting him close up-and then the
real Martin and Zernov approaching the site of the catastrophe. The hall
buzzed with excitement and when the crimson flower threw out a snake-like
tentacle and the dead Martin vanished into its flared maw, somebody even
cried out in the darkness. But the most striking effect, the deepest
impression was made by the concluding part of the film, its ice symphony.
Zernov was right, 1 greatly underestimated the sensation.
But the viewers gave it its due. The showing was hardly over when
voices were heard demanding a second showing. This time the silence was
total: not a single exclamation resounded in the hall, nobody coughed, no
one exchanged a single word with his neighbour, even whispering could not be
heard. The silence continued even when the lights went on. The people were
still in the grip of events and were released only by the voice of the
oldest of the old-timers, the doyen of the corps of wintering-over men,
Professor Kedrin, who said:
"All right, now tell us, Boris, what you think about it. That will be
better because we still have to think things over."
"I've already said that we have no material witnesses," Zernov replied.
"Martin was not able to get a sample: the 'cloud' did not allow him to
approach. On the ground, too, we could not get close enough and were pressed
to the ground as if our bodies were filled with lead. This means that the
'cloud' can set up a gravitational field. Added confirmation is the ice cube
in the air that we saw. Martin's plane was probably landed and our tractor
pulled out of the crevice in the same fashion. The following inferences may
be classed as beyond question: the 'cloud' readily changes its shape and
colour. This you have seen. It creates any temperature regime needed:
hundred-metre-thick ice can be cut only by using very high temperatures. It
floats in the air like a fish in water and can change direction and speed
instantaneously. Martin claims that the 'cloud' he saw escaped from him at
hypersonic speed. His 'colleagues' obviously went slow simply to create a
gravitational barrier around the airplane. The ultimate conclusion can only
be that the rose 'clouds' have nothing whatsoever to do with meteorological
phenomena. This 'cloud' is either a living thinking organism or a bio system
with a specific programme. Its principal tasks are to remove and transport
into space enormous masses of continental ice. And incidentally for some
unknown reason and in some unknown way it synthesizes (I would rather say
duplicates or models) any thing it encounters (atomic structures such as
human beings, machines and other things) and then destroys them.
The American Admiral Thompson asked Zernov the first question:
"There is one thing that is not clear to me from your report, and that
is, whether these creatures are hostile or not towards human beings."
"I do not think so. They destroy only the copies they themselves have
created."
"Are you positive?"
"But you've just seen that yourself," Zernov replied in surprise.
"I would like to know whether you are sure that the destroyed creatures
are definitely copies and not the people themselves? If the copies are
identical with the human beings, then who will prove to me that my pilot
Martin is indeed my pilot Martin and not his atomic model?"
The exchange was in English but many in the hall understood or
translated for their neighbours. Nobody smiled, the question was indeed
terrifying. Even Zernov seemed at a loss as he searched for an answer.
I pulled down Martin who had jumped up and said:
"I can assure you, Admiral, that I am indeed I, the photography man of
the expedition, Yuri Anokhin, and not a cloud-created model. When I shot the
film, my double retreated to the Sno-Cat as if hypnotized. You could see
that on the screen. He told me that somebody or something was forcing him to
return to the cabin. Apparently he was already prepared for elimination." I
watched the glistening spectacles of the Admiral and almost burst with
anger.
"That is possible," he said, "though it is not very convincing. I have
a question for Martin. Please stand up, Martin."
The pilot rose to his full two-metre height of a veteran basketball
player.
"Yes, sir. I wiped out the copy with my own two hands."
The Admiral smiled.
"Now suppose the copy finished you off?" He moved his lips a bit before
adding: "You attempted to shoot when you thought about the aggressive
intentions of the 'cloud', right?"
"Yes, I did, sir. Two bursts with tracer bullets."
"Any results?"
"No, sir, no results. Like a shot gun against an avalanche of snow."
"Now suppose you had a different weapon? Say a flame thrower or
napalm?"
"I do not know, sir."
"Would it have refused to clash?"
"I do not think so, sir."
"Sit down, Martin. Don't be offended, I am only trying to clarify some
of the details of Mr. Zernov's report that worry me. Thank you for your
explanations, gentlemen."
The persistence of the Admiral untied all tongues. Questions followed
one another as fast as they could be answered, like at a press conference.
"You said that ice masses are being transported into space. Do you mean the
atmosphere or outer space?"
"If it is into atmospheric space, I don't see the purpose. What is
there to do with ice in the atmosphere?"
"Will humanity allow for this mass-scale plundering of ice?"
"Does anyone need glaciers here on the earth?"
"What will happen to a continent freed from ice? Will the level of the
ocean rise?"
"Will the climate change?"
"Not all at once, comrades," Zernov implored rising his arms. "One at a
time. Into what space? I assume it is cosmic space. Glaciers are only needed
in the terrestrial atmosphere for glaciologists. Generally speaking, I
thought scientists were people with higher education. But judging from the
questions, I am beginning to doubt the axiomatic nature of that proposition.
How can the water level in the ocean increase if there is no increase in
water? That's school geography, and the same goes for the climate question
too."
"What, in your opinion, is the presumed structure of the 'cloud'? To me
it seemed to be
a gas."
"A thinking gas," someone giggled. "From what textbook is that?"
"Are you a physicist?" Zernov asked.
"Well, assuming that I am."
"Suppose you write a textbook."
"Unfortunately, I have no experience in the show business. But my
question is serious."
"And I'm serious in my answer. I do not know the structure of the
'cloud'. It might even be that the physico-chemical structure is totally
unknown to our science. I think that it is more of a colloidal structure
than gaseous."
"Where do you think it came from?"
The correspondent of "Izvestia" I knew got
"P-, "In some kind of a science fiction novel I read
about visitors from Pluto. Incidentally, in the Antarctic too. Do you
really take that as a serious possibility?"
"I don't know. While I'm on the subject, I never said anything about
Pluto."
"It may not be Pluto, what I meant was from outer space as such. From
some kind of stellar system. Why should they be coming to the earth for ice?
To the outskirts of our Galaxy. There is certainly enough ice in the
Universe, one could try some place a bit closer."
"Closer to what?" Zernov asked and smiled.
I admired him. He still retained some humour and calm even under this
veritable barrage of questions. He had not made a scientific discovery, but
was only an accidental witness to a unique, unexplained phenomenon, about
which he hardly knew more than those who had seen the film. For some reason
they kept forgetting that and he patiently responded to every remark.
"Ice is water," he said in the tone of a tired teacher winding up a
lesson. "It is a compound that is not so often met with even in our own
stellar system. We do not know whether there is water on Venus, there is
very little on Mars and none whatsoever on Jupiter or Uranus. And of course
there is not so very much terrestrial ice in the Universe. If I err, the
astronomers will correct me, but it seems to me that cosmic ice is merely
frozen gases: ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen."
"Why doesn't anyone ask about duplicates, doubles?" I whispered and
immediately got myself into a lot of work.
Professor Kedrin recalled me:
"I have a question for Anokhin. Did you converse with your duplicate?
And I wonder what
about?" "Yes, we did, we talked about a variety of things," I said.
"Did you notice any difference, purely external, say, in fine points,
in hardly noticeable details? I refer to differences between the two of
you."
"None in the least. Our blood was even the same." Then I told them
about the microscope.
"How about memory? Recalling things from childhood and later. Did you
check that?"
I related everything about memory. What I couldn't understand was what
he was trying to get at. But he .explained himself:
"The question that Admiral Thompson asked, is a disturbing one,
frightening even, and it should put us on our guard. If duplicates of human
beings are going to put in appearances in the future and if, say, duplicates
appear that are not destroyed, then how are we to distinguish between a
person and his model? What is more, how will they themselves distinguish
each other? I believe that is a matter not so much of absolute identity, but
of the confidence of each that precisely he is the real person and not the
synthesized one."
I recalled my own arguments with my ill-fated double and was completely
lost. Zernov saved me.
"A curious item," he said, "the doubles always appear following one and
the same dream. The person seems to be immersed in a red or crimson (violet
sometimes) cold jelly-like substance that is always very thick. This
undisclosed substance fills the person up completely, all his internal
organs, all vessels. I cannot assert definitely that the filling takes
place, but the person seems to be convinced of it. He lies totally incapable
of moving, as if paralysed, and begins to experience sensations akin to
those of one hypnotized: as if someone invisible were probing his mind,
going through 'every cell of his brain. Then the crimson darkness vanishes,
his mind clears and his movements come back. He believes that he has had an
absurd and horrible dream. In a short time, the double is at large. But
after waking up, the person has had time to do something and to say
something, to think something. The double does not know this. When Anokhin
woke up he found two vehicles and not one, both with the same dent in the
front window and with the same welded piece of metal on the tractor tread.
For his double, this was a discovery. He only remembered what Anokhin
remembered prior to immersion in the crimson work. There were similar
discrepancies in the other cases as well. After waking up, Dyachuk shaved
and cut himself. His double appeared without the cut. Chokheli went to sleep
drunk from the glass of alcohol he had swallowed, but he got up sober, with
a clear mind. Now the duplicate appeared before him drunk, he could hardly
stand up, his eyes were misty, actually he was in a state of delirium
tremens. I think that in the future it will be precisely this period of
action of the person immediately after waking up from the 'crimson dream'
that will help, in doubtful cases, to distinguish the original from the copy
if other ways have not been found by then."
"Did you also have a dream of that nature?" someone asked in the hall.
"Yes, I did."
"But you did not have a double?"
"That is exactly what is worrying me. Why I turned out to be the
exception."
"You were not an exception," Zernov's own voice answered him.
The speaker stood behind the others, nearly in the doorway, dressed
somewhat differently from Zernov. The other one had on a splendid grey suit,
while this one had on an old dark-green sweater, the one Zernov always wore
on expeditions. But Zernov's padded pants and Canadian fur boots, which I
envied during our trips, completed the dress of the stranger. Yet he was
hardly a stranger, when you come to think of it. Even I, who had spent so
many days alongside Zernov, could not distinguish one from the other. Zernov
was on the stage, but in the doorway stood a precise, perfect copy. That is
definite.
The hall gasped, somebody stood up, looking from one to the other in
bewilderment, someone else stood with his mouth open. Kedrin, with puckered
eyebrows, concentrating, examined the double with interest; a snake-like
snigger appeared on the lips of the American Admiral; he was obviously
pleased at the unexpected confirmation of his idea. It seemed to me that
Zernov himself was rather pleased too, the doubts and fears of whom had so
suddenly been brought to consummation.
"Come over here," he said almost gaily, "I've been waiting for just
such a meeting. Let's have a talk. It'll be of interest not only to us."
Zernov's double unhurriedly walked over to the stage accompanied by
inquisitive eyes full of excitement and interest that are accorded only rare
celebrities. He turned around, pulled up a chair and sat down near the table
at which Zernov had been carrying on a running commentary of the film. The
spectacle somehow seemed very natural: here were twin brothers meeting after
a long separation. The only difference was that everyone knew that there had
been no separation and these were no brothers. Simply one of the two was a
miracle beyond the comprehension of human beings. But which one? Now I
realized what Admiral Thompson meant.
"Why didn't you show up during the trip? I was expecting it," said
Zernov Number One.
Zernov Number Two, perplexed, just shrugged his shoulders.
"I remember everything prior to that rose-coloured dream. Then there is
a hiatus, a gap. Then here I am entering this hall, and listening and
watching and it seems to me that I have begun to understand things." He
looked at Zernov and smiled ironically. "How much alike we are, after all!"
"I foresaw that," said Zernov shrugging.
"But I didn't. If we had met like Anokhin and his double, I would not
have given away the priority. Who would have proven that you are the real
one and I am only a reproduction? The point is that I am you, I remember all
my (or your)-now I don't even know which-life, right down to the most minute
detail, even better than you perhaps: most likely a synthesized memory is
fresher. Anton Kuzmich-he turned to the audience-do you remember our
conversation just before departure? Not about the problems of
experimentation, just the words we exchanged. Do you remember?"
Professor Kedrin was definitely perplexed:
"I don't remember."
"I don't either," said Zernov.
"You knocked your cigarette holder on a packet of cigarettes," said
Zernov Number Two without the slightest touch of superiority, " and you said
'I want to give up smoking, Boris. Beginning with tomorrow, that's
definite'."
Laughter broke out because Professor Kedrin was munching a cigarette
that had already died out.
"I have a question," it was Admiral Thompson.
"I would like to ask Mr. Zernov in the green sweater. Do you remember
our meeting at MacMurdo?"
"Of course," said Zernov the Second in English.
"And the souvenir that you liked so much?"
"Of course," Zernov Two answered. "You presented me with a fountain pen
with your initials in gold. I have it in my room, in the pocket of my summer
jacket."
"My summer jacket," Zernov corrected him sardonically.
"You would not have convinced me of it if I had not seen your film. Now
I know: I did not return with you on the tractor, I did not meet the
American pilot, and the death of his double I only saw in the film. I expect
the same end for myself, I foresee it."
"Perhaps you are an exception," said Zernov, "it may be that you will
be granted existence."
Now I saw the difference between them. One spoke calmly without losing
any of his composure, the other was all wound up inside and tense. Even his
lips trembled, as if it were difficult for him to say what his mind was
thinking.
"You yourself do not believe in it," he said, "we are created as an
experiment and are eliminated as a product of the experiment. Why, is not
known to anyone, you or me. I remember Anokhin's story via your memory, via
our combined memory, that is how and why I remember it." He looked at me and
inside I shuddered as I met the so familiar look. "When the cloud started to
descend, Anokhin told his double to run. The double refused, he could not,
he said, for something was ordering him to remain. And he returned to the
cabin to die: we all saw that. The difference is that you can stand up and
leave, whereas I cannot do that. Something has already ordered me not to
move."
Zernov extended his hand and it came up against an invisible barrier.
"Nothing can be done," sadly smiled Zernov the Double. "It's a field,
I'm using your terminology, since like you I know no other. The field has
already been set up. I'm in it like in a spacesuit."
Somebody sitting nearby also tried to touch the synthesized man but
couldn't because his hand encountered compressed air as hard as wood.
"It is terrible to know of your own end and not to have any way of
putting it off," said Zernov's counterpart. "After all, I am a man and not
just a biological mass. I so terribly want to live-"
The horrible silence pressed down on the hall. Someone was breathing
heavily like an asthmatic. Somebody else had covered his eyes with his hand.
Admiral Thompson had taken off his glasses. I screwed up my eyes.
Martin's hand that had been on my knee trembled.
"Look up!" he cried.
I looked up and froze stiff: there was a violet pulsating trunk-like
affair dropping down the ceiling to the Zernov sitting perfectly still in
the green sweater. Its funnel widened and frothed, unhurriedly but firmly,
like an empty hood, and covered up the man beneath it. A minute later we saw
something like a jelly stalactite violet in colour that merged with a
similar stalagmite. The base of the stalagmite rested on the stage near the
table, the stalactite flowed out of the ceiling through the roof and the
almost three metres of snow covering it. In another half minute the frothing
edge of the trunk, or pipe, began to turn upwards and in the empty rosiness
of its inside we no longer could see either chair or man. In another minute,
violet foam had gone through the roof as if something immaterial, without
damaging either the plastic or the thermal insulation.
"That's all," said Zernov rising to his feet. "Finis, as the ancient
Romans used to say."
In Moscow I had hard luck. I had got through the fierce Antarctic
winter without even having sneezed in sixty degrees below zero, but back
here in Moscow I came down with a cold in the autumn slush when the
thermometer had hardly dropped to zero outside the window. True, by next
Tuesday the doctor said I'd be up and around and my own self again, but
Sunday morning I was still lying with mustard plasters on my back and unable
to go downstairs for the newspapers. Tolya Dyachuk brought me the papers. He
was my first visitor Sunday morning. And though he did not take any part in
our fussing with the rose clouds and immediately returned to his
weather-forecast institute and his charts of the winds and cyclones, I was
sincerely happy that he did come. The anxious events that we had both gone
through just a month before were still deeply felt. And Tolya was an
easy-going convenient guest. One could be totally silent in his presence and
think one's own thoughts without any risk of offending him, and his jokes
and exaggerations would never offend his host. So the guest ensconced
himself in a chair near the window and strummed on the guitar purring to
himself one of his own compositions while the host lay patiently enduring
the stings of the mustard and recalling his last day at Mirny and the
try-out of the new helicopter that had just arrived from Moscow.
Kostya Ozhogin had arrived at Mirny with a fresh group of polar workers
and had only the faintest idea about the rose clouds. Our acquaintance began
as he begged me to show him at least a little bit of my film. I showed him a
whole reel. He responded by offering me a seat in the new high-speed
helicopter during a trial run out over the ocean. The next morning-my last
at Mirny-he came over and told me in secret about some kind of "very
terrible thing". His helicopter had been out on the ice all night, about
fifty metres from the edge, where the ship "Ob" was moored. Here is the way
he described it: "We were celebrating a bit, had been drinking, not much,
and before going to bed I went out to take a look at the machine. There were
two there, one next to the other. I figured another one had been unloaded
and went back to sleep. In the morning there was only one again. So I asked
the engineer where the other one had gone, and he burst out laughing. 'Hey,
you drank too much, you were seeing double. How much did you guys put away?'
"
I was rather suspicious about the true criminals of this splitting, but
I didn't say anything. What I did was I brought along my camera, I had a
hunch it might come in useful. Which it did. We were about three-hundred
metres above the ocean at the very edge of the ice. We could clearly see the
unloaded boxes and machines, the small pieces of broken ice at the shore and
the blue icebergs out in the pure water. The biggest towered up a few
kilometres from the coast line, but did not float or bob on the waves-it was
sitting firmly in the water fixed securely to the bottom. We called it 'The
End of the Titanic' in memory of the famous liner that collided with a
colossal iceberg at the beginning of the century. This one was even larger.
Our glaciologists calculated that it was roughly three thousand square
kilometres in area. That was the goal of the Disney characters that had
stretched out single file across the sky.
I began to film without waiting for a close approach. They were flying
at the same altitude as we were, they were rose-coloured without a single
spot and resembled dirigibles at the tail end of a column. From the front
they were like boomerangs or swept-back airplane wings. "Shall we turn
back?" said Ozhogin in a whisper. "We can put on speed." "Why?" I sniggered.
"You can't get away from them anyway." I could sense the tension in
Ozhogin's muscles, but I didn't know whether it was due to fear or
excitement. He asked: "Are they going to start splitting?" "No, they're not
going to." "How do you know?" "Because they duplicated your helicopter last
night, you yourself saw it," I replied. He didn't say anything.
Meanwhile the column had approached the iceberg. Three rosy dirigibles
hung in the air, getting redder and opening up their familiar saucer-like
stemless poppies, motionless at the corners of an enormous triangle over the
island of ice; then the swept-wing boomerangs plunged downwards. They went
into the water like fish, no splash, no sound, only white spurts of steam
encircled the iceberg. Probably the temperature gradient between the new
substance and the water was too great. Then all was calm. The poppies
flowered over the island and the boomerangs, disappeared. I waited patiently
while the helicopter slowly circled over the iceberg a bit below the poppies
hanging in the sky.
"What's going to happen now?" Ozhogin asked hoarsely. "Is this the
end?" "I don't think so," I replied cautiously. About ten minutes must have
passed. Suddenly the mountain of ice shook mightily and then slowly rose out
of the water. "Let's go," I yelled to Kostya. He understood and swung our
plane to the side, away from the dangerous orbit. The bluish hunk of ice,
scintillating in the sun, had already risen above the water. It was so large
that it was difficult to find any comparison. Imagine an enormous mountain
cut off at the base and rising upwards like a toy balloon. It gleamed and
glistened shimmering in a million colours of molten sapphires and emeralds
sprinkled all over it. This was a scene you could sell your soul to the
devil for. I was the king. Only Ozhogin and I and the astronomers of Mirny
witnessed this incomparable spectacle. A miracle of ice rose out of the
water, came to a halt over the three crimson poppies and then hurtled off
into the depths of cosmic space. The "boomerangs" slithered out of the water
in a jet of steam and turned towards the continent in regular order. The
route lay through the foam of cumulus clouds. Like horsemen they galloped.
Horsemen!
The simile came later, and it was not concocted by me but right now I
heard it from Tolya strumming on his guitar.
"Do you like it?" he asked.
"Like what?"
"The song, naturally," he explained.
"What song," I still couldn't get it all straight.
"So you weren't listening," he sighed. "Exactly what I thought. I'll
have to sing it again."
He started up in his long drawn out talk-sing voice, like a chansonnier
without a voice that hangs onto the microphone for dear life. I didn't know
then what an envious fate awaited this composition of accidental celebrity.
"Horsemen from nowhere, what's that? A dream? A myth? All of a sudden,
while awaiting a wonder ... the world froze silently still. And over the
rhythmical drone and pulse of the world, horsemen from nowhere pranced by
... True, the idea is not new and the theme of the tragedy is simple. Hamlet
again solving the eternal problem. Who are they? Human beings? Gods? The
snow melts slowly, and again the Earth is anxious, there is no breathing
spell-"
He paused for a moment and then continued in a major key.
"Who will recognize them? And will we be able to grasp them? It is
late, my friend, it is late, and there is no one we can blame. Only the
difficult thing to grasp, my friend, is that there they are again-the
horsemen from nowhere prancing by in ordered array."
He sighed and glanced in my direction waiting for some sign of
appreciation.
"Not so bad," I said, "As a song goes, but-"
"But what?" he queried guardedly.
"Where does the Spanish sadness come from? Why the pessimism?" And I
started, 'It is late, my friend, it is late,' "Why late? And what is late?
And what's this about blame? Are you sorry about the ice, or the doubles?
Better take off this mustard plaster, it's not burning any more."
Tolya peeled it off my suffering back and said:
"Incidentally, they've been seen in the Arctic too."
"That must be terrifying, those horsemen from nowhere."
"You said it. In Greenland they've been cutting up ice too. Telegrams
have come in."
"So what, it might get warmer, that's all."
"But what if they take all the ice there is on the Earth? In the
Arctic, the Antarctic, in the mountains and the oceans?"
"You ought to know, you're the climatologist. I guess we'll be able to
fish for sardines in the White Sea and plant oranges in Greenland."
"In theory," Tolya sighed. "Who can predict what will really happen?
Nobody. It's not the ice that worries me. You read what Thompson has to say.
TASS has given it in full." He pointed to a bunch of papers.
"Getting panicky?"
"That's not the word!"
"He was nervous enough there in Mirny, remember?"
"Yea, he's a tough nut. He'll keep things mixed up for quite some time.
For both sides. By the way, he was the one who used the phrase Lysov-sky
coined: 'horsemen from nowhere'."
"Horsemen from nowhere? But that's what you thought up," I recalled.
"Yes, but who multiplied it?"
Special correspondent of "Izvestia" Lysovsky, returning from Mirny, was
the author of an article dealing with the rose "clouds" that was taken up by
all the newspapers of the world. That's what he called them: horsemen from
nowhere. Tolya was the real inventor, though. He was the one who yelled out
"horsemen, really, horsemen". "Where from?" someone asked. "I don't know,
from nowhere." Then Lysovsky repeated it aloud: "Horsemen from nowhere. Not
bad for a headline."
Tolya and I looked at each other. That's exactly the way it had been.
What actually happened? Our jet liner was in flight from the ice
aerodrome of Mirny to the shores of South Africa.
Below us were white wisps of cloud like a field of snow near a railway
station: locomotive soot sprinkled about on fresh snow. The clouds moved
apart occasionally and windows would open up displaying the steel surface of
the ocean far below.
All of us who had gotten used to one another during the winter were
gathered in the cabin- geologists, pilots, glaciologists, astronomers,
aerologists. Our guests were only a few newspaper reporters, but it was soon
quite forgotten that they were guests and they gradually dissolved into a
homogeneous mass of Antarctic workers of yesterday. The talk turned to the
rose clouds, of course, but not seriously, in a bantering manner with jokes
and wisecracks most of the time. The usual excited cabin conversations of a
home-returning trip.
All of a sudden some rose-coloured "boomerangs" appeared out of the
clouds, jumping in and out like horsemen in the steppe. That was when the
"horsemen" phrase came up, though they naturally had been compared with most
anything because they were constantly changing shape, which they did
instantaneously and for reasons that we could not fathom. That is exactly
what happened this time too. Six or seven of them, I don't remember
precisely, rose up in front of us, spread out in the form of crimson
pancakes and enveloped the plane in an impenetrable crimson cocoon. To the
credit of our pilot, it must be said, he did not falter but continued to fly
as if nothing had happened: if it's got to be a cocoon, then let it be one!
An ominous silence set in in the cabin. Everyone expected something to
happen, glanced from one to the other, and feared to speak at all. The red
fog seeped through the walls. Nobody could figure out how that could be. It
would seem that no material barriers existed, or that it was nonmaterial,
illusory, existing only in one's imagination. But it soon filled the cabin
and only strange crimson spots revealed the passengers in front or behind.
"Do you know what this's all about," I heard the voice of Lysovsky from the
other side of the aisle. "You don't happen to feel as if someone were
looking into your brain and going right through you, do you?" That was my
question in reply to his question. He was silent for a moment probably
trying to figure out whether I was going mad from fear, and then added
hesitatingly: "Nn-o, I don't think so." Then somebody next to him said:
"It's just a fog, that's all." I didn't think so either. What was happening
in the plane didn't at all resemble the sensations in the tractor and in the
tent. In the former case somebody or something peered deep inside me, probed
imperceptibly in my body as if determining the arrangement and number of
particles that make up my bioessence, in this way reproducing a model of me;
in the latter case, the process had stopped half way, as if the creator of
the model knew that my model had already been made. I was now surrounded by
a fog, crimson-like, just as opaque as turbid water in a jar, neither cold
nor warm and totally imperceptible, for it did not smart my eyes nor tickle
the nose. It coursed round me and did not even appear to touch the skin,
then it gradually melted or floated away. I soon began to see hands,
clothes, the seats and people sitting in them nearby. Then I heard a voice
from behind:
"How long did that take? Did you notice?" "No, I didn't look at my
watch, I don't know." Neither did I know, it might have been three or
perhaps ten minutes.
This was when we saw something still more bizarre. Squint, pressing
your eyes strongly on the lids, and objects will appear to double up,
producing, as it were, a copy that floats away out of the field of view.
That is what happened to all the things in the aircraft, everything in our
field of view. Not hazily, but very clearly, I saw-later I found out that
everyone saw the same thing-a duplicate of our cabin and all its contents
gradually separate itself-the floor, the windows, seats and passengers. It
rose half a meter and then floated off. I saw myself, Tolya and his guitar,
Lysovsky, and I noticed Lysovsky trying to grab his reproduction that was
floating away. All he got was the air. I saw the outside of the cabin, not
the inside; I saw the outer wall go right through the real wall, followed by
the wing that slipped through us like an enormous shadow of the aircraft.
Then all this vanished from view as if it had evaporated in the air. Yet it
did not vanish and it did not evaporate. We rushed to the windows and saw an
identical copy of our plane flying alongside, absolutely identical, just off
the production line, but it was no illusory machine because Lysovsky
collected his wits fast enough to take a photograph, which was published and
definitely showed the new plane to be a duplicate of our liner taken at a
distance of 10 metres.
Unfortunately, what happened later was not photographed. Lysovsky ran
out of film and I was late in getting to my camera, which had been stowed
away. This was the aerial wonder that was enacted before our eyes: a
familiar crimson cocoon enveloped the duplicate plane, elongated, growing
dark red, then violet and then melted away. Nothing remained-no plane, no
cocoon. Only the whitish wisps of cloud floating below us as before.
The chief pilot stepped out of the pilot's cabin a few minutes later
and asked shyly: "Perhaps someone can explain what occurred just now."
Nobody volunteered, he waited a moment and then added, with an ironical
sting: "That's scientists for you. Wonders, miracles-but we're told miracles
just don't happen." Someone put in: "I guess they do." Everybody laughed.
Then Lysovsky turned to Zernov: "Perhaps Comrade Zernov has an explanation?"
"I'm no god or oracle," Zernov replied gruffly. "The 'clouds' produced a
duplicate plane, that you all saw. I don't know any more than you do about
the how and why of it all." "Am I to write that?" asked Lysovsky. "Sure, go
ahead and write it," Zernov cut him off and fell silent.
He brought up the subject once more, after we landed in Karachi, when
we had both forced our way through the crowds of newsmen that had come to
meet us: our radio operator had sent a radiogram about the event from the
plane. While newsmen with cameras attacked the crew of our plane, Zernov and
I slipped through to the cafe for a bite and a drink. I recall asking him
something, but he did not answer. Later, as if answering anxious thoughts
and not me, he said:
"That's a totally different method of model-building, the procedure is
quite different."
"You speaking about the 'horsemen'?" I asked. "That word would stick,"
he smiled ironically. "Everywhere, both here and in the West too, I imagine.
You'll see. Yet the duplication procedure was absolutely unlike anything
ever," he added deep in thought.
I didn't get it: "The plane, you mean?" "Don't think so. The airplane
was probably duplicated in full. And in the same manner. First
nonmaterially, illusorily, and then materially- that is the entire atomic
structure with exactitude. People are handled differently: only the outer
form, the shell, the function of the passenger. What does a passenger do? He
sits in his seat, looks out the window, drinks juice and turns the pages of
a book. I hardly think the psychic workings of the human beings were
reproduced in all their complexity. Of course that is not necessary anyway.
What was needed was a living, acting model of the aircraft with living and
acting passengers. That's only a surmise naturally."
"But what's the idea of destroying the model?" "Why are duplicates
eliminated?" was Zernov's counter query. "Remember the farewell of my twin?
I still can't get it out of my mind."
He fell silent and stopped answering my questions. It was only when we
left the restaurant and were passing by Lysovsky surrounded by at least a
dozen foreign newspaper men that Zernov smiled and said:
"He's sure to serve up some 'horsemen' for them. It'll get around, you
just wait. They'll have the Apocalypse and pale horsemen and black ones
carrying death. Oh, there'll be everything. You know your Bible? Well, if
you don't, read it and compare when the time comes."
His prediction came true in every detail. I nearly jumped out of bed
when, together with telegrams about the appearance of rose utfuds in Alaska
and in the Hymalayas, Dyachuk read me a translation of an article by Admiral
Thompson from a New York paper. Even the terminology that Zernov had laughed
at coincided fully with that of the Admiral.
Wrote the Admiral: "Somebody gave them a catchy name, the 'horsemen',
but, whoever it was, failed to hit the bull's eye. They are no simple
horsemen, they are horsemen of the Apocalypse, This is no accidental
comparison. Recall the words of the prophet:
".. .and I looked, and behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on
him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given into them
over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and
with death...."
Fellow Americans will have to excuse me if I resort more to the
terminology of a Catholic Church Cardinal than to that of a retired navy
man. But I'm compelled to, for humanity is meeting these uninvited guests
with much too much complacency." The Admiral was not interested to know
where they came from, Sirius or Alpha Centauri. Neither was he worried about
the terrestrial ice that was being carried off into outer space. What he was
afraid of were the duplicates. Even back in Mirny he had doubts about
whether the duplicates or real human beings were being destroyed. Now this
same idea was expressed aggressively and with assurance:
"... the duplicates and humans would appear to be completely identical.
The same exterior, the same memory and the same thinking process. But who
will prove to me that the identity of thinking has no limits beyond which
begin subservience to the will of the creators." The more I listened the
more astonished I was at the author's fanatical bias: he even rejected a
neutral study and observation and demanded a most energetic attack on the
visitors to expel them with all the means at our disposal. The article ended
with a completely bizarre supposition: "If I suddenly betray myself by
recanting what I have just written, then I am the duplicate and I myself
have been substituted. Then you can hang me on the first street lantern."
It was not only the meaning that was remarkable, but the very tone of
the article. Those given to believing sensational news items might indeed be
thoroughly frightened by this apparently sensible but definitely prejudiced
man. What is more, it might be utilized for very unseemly purposes by
unscrupulous people in politics and in science. It is to the credit of the
Admiral that he did not seek their support and did not borrow any weapons
from the arsenal of anticommunism.
When I explained my reasoning to Tolya, he said:
"The Admiral's article is only a special problem. Something quite
different arises, if you ask me. Up till now, when scientists or
science-fiction writers touched on the probability of encounters with other
intelligence in outer space, they were interested in the problem of friendly
or hostile attitudes of such intelligence towards terrestrial humans. But it
never entered anyone's mind to ponder the possibility of a hostile attitude
of humans towards such intelligence. Yet that is precisely the problem.
Switch on your transistor at night and you'll go crazy. The whole world is
excited, it's on every wavelength. The Pope, ministers, senators,
astrologers-they're all working the waves. Flying saucers are nothing.
Parliaments are being questioned."
That was something to think about indeed. Tolya occasionally said
sensible things.
The problem that Tolya had brought up was discussed at a special
session of the Academy of Sciences, I was present as the person who filmed
the space visitors. A lot was said, but probably the most talked-about
subject was the nature of the phenomenon and its peculiarities. This again
launched me into the orbit of rose "clouds".
I arrived at the meeting about an hour before time so as to check the
projector, the screen and the sound. The film now had an accompanying text.
In the conference hall I found the stenographer Irene Fateyeva, who had been
spoken of as the future secretary of a special commission to be set up by
the session. I was also warned that she was a cobra, a polyglot and an
I-know-it-all type. You can ask her what would happen if you dipped a
solution of potassium chloride on an exposed brain and she'll give you the
answer, so they say. Or you can ask about the fourth state of matter, or
what topology does, and she has answers. But I didn't ask about anything.
All I needed was to look at her once, and I believed it.
She had on a dark blue sweater with a very strict abstract
ornamentation, and her hair was done in a tightly bound bun, though it was
not at all the fashion of the 19th century. She wore dark, narrow,
rectangular frameless eyeglasses. The eyes that peered from behind them were
clever, attentive, demanding. True, I didn't see the eyes when I came in:
she was writing in a notebook and did not lift her head.
I coughed.
"Don't cough, Anokhin, and don't stand in the middle of the room," she
said without lifting her head, "I know you, I know all about you, so we
don't have to get acquainted formally. Sit down some place and wait a few
minutes till I get this synopsis finished."
"What's a synopsis?" I asked.
"Don't try to be more ignorant than you already are. You don't have to