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master of the situation'.
"I can also foretell your future," he snapped at me aloud, "and without
telepathy. Tit for tat."
"Man to man," I laughed. "But we can change the future. You mine, and I
- yours."
He raised his brows, again not getting the drift. "Okay then, let's lay
down the cards."
"You send me to the partisans today. And I'll guarantee your
immortality to the end of the month. Not a bullet or grenade will touch
you."
He was silent.
"You don't lose much. You grant me life, and you win the kitty -
yours."
"To the end of the month," he laughed.
"I'm not God almighty."
"And the guarantee?"
"My word and my documents. You saw them. And you must have guessed that
I can do something."
He pondered a long time, his eyes roaming silently and vaguely around
the room. Then he poured the rest of the cognac into our glasses. He hadn't
eaten, and the drink was already taking effect. His hands shook even more.
"All right, then," he ground out. "One for the road?"
"I'm not drinking," I said. "I'll need a clear head and a firm hand.
You give me a gun, even if it's only your Walther, and tie my hands loosely
so I can free them quickly."
"And what tale am I to use to send you off? I've got a boss, you know."
"So you're sending me to the top brass. Along some forest road."
"There'll have to be a driver and a convoy. Can you handle them?"
"I hope you won't regret the loss of the convoy?"
"I'll regret, the loss of the car," he frowned.
"So I'll return you the car and the driver. Agreed?"
He went to the telephone and began making calls. I was surprised at the
speed with which he carried everything out. In about half an hour, a Gestapo
Opel-Kapitan was already ploughing its way through the village all powdered
with snow. Beside me sat an evil-looking Fritz with a tommy-gun across his
knees. Let him stew in his bad temper. That didn't worry me any more than my
promise to Muller did. You see, / had promised, and not the Gromov who would
finally take my place. Only when would this happen and where? If in the car,
then I must do all I could so that my ill-starred Jekyll would quickly get
the hang of things. I stretched the slack bonds that tied my arms behind my
back. They loosened at once. Another jerk and I could put my free hand in my
jacket pocket and grip the butt of the blue-steel pistol. Now I had only to
wait. With a sixth or maybe sixteenth sense, I could feel the approach of
that strange lightness of my body, the head-spinning and the mist that put
out everything - light, sounds and thoughts.
And so it was. I woke up when I felt Zargaryan's hand removing the
pick-ups.
"Where were you?" he asked, still invisible.
"In the past, Ruben. Too bad."
He let out a loud and mournful sigh. Nikodimov was already holding the
tape against the light to observe it, pulling it from the container.
"Did you follow the time, Sergei Nikolaevich?" asked Nikodimov. "That
is, when you entered and left the phase?"
"Morning and evening. One day."
"It's twenty minutes to twelve midnight now. Does that agree with your
count?"
"Approximately."
"A trivial lag behind our time."
"Trivial?" I laughed. "More than twenty years."
"On a scale of a thousand years, that's almost nothing."
But I wasn't worried about thousand-year scales. I was anxious about
the fate of Sergei Gromov whom I'd left about twenty-five years ago in the
suburbs of Kolpinsk. I think, by the way, he did not waste any time.
The new experiment had become as humdrum as a visit to the polyclinic.
Now I didn't gather friends together before leaving, Zargaryan didn't come
for me, and nobody accompanied me in the morning. I took the bus to the
institute and Nikodimov at once sat me in the chair without testing the
degree of my good will and readiness for the test.
He only asked: "When did you get into difficulties in the last
experiment? Was it toward evening, in the late afternoon?"
"About then. It was already dark outside."
"The apparatus focused the sleep period, then there was an increase of
nervous strain, and finally a state of shock...."
"That's quite correct."
"I think we can now anticipate such a complication, if it should
arise," he said. "And bring your psyche back."
"That's exactly what I don't want. You already know..." I broke in.
"No, this time we aren't taking any risks."
"What risk? Who's talking about risk?" thundered Zargaryan, appearing
like a phantom, all in white against the background of the white doors.
He had been in the next room, checking the power generator.
"I'd give a year of my life for one minute of your journey," he went
on. "It isn't a science, as Nikodimov thinks. It's poetry. Do you like
Voznesensky? "
"More or less," I answered.
He recited:
In autumn time when leaves are dying
Within a dawn-lit perilous wood,
Someone's fate and name come flying
Like seeds - and in our minds intrude.
He broke off and asked: "What words stick in your memory?"
"Dawn-lit and perilous," I told him.
I could not see him now, and his voice came from the darkness. "The
main thing is 'dawn-lit'. So let's be solemn. Remember that you are at the
gateway to the future."
"You're sure of that?" came Nikodimov's voice.
"Absolutely."
I heard no more. Sounds died out until the dead silence was broken by a
monotonous, rumbling roar.
Now there was no silence, no mist. I found myself in a soft chair by a
wide, slightly concave window. Strangers sat in similar chairs beside and
opposite me. The surroundings reminded me of the interior of an airliner or
the coach of a suburban train where people sit in threes across from each
other, with a passageway running from door to door. This passageway or aisle
was probably about forty metres long. I tried to orient myself without
looking at my neighbours, slipping sidelong glances from under lowered lids.
My attention was drawn first to my hands - large, oddly white, with a dry
clean skin such as occurs after frequent and hard scrubbing. The significant
thing was that they were the hands of an old man. "How old am I and what's
my profession?" I pondered. "A lab man, doctor, scientist?" The suit I wore
provided no direct answer - it was not new but neither was it much worn, and
it was made of a smooth material with an unusual pattern. There was no use
trying to guess.
I looked out the window. No, it wasn't an airliner because we were
flying too low for an aeroplane of this size, lower than flight at zero
altitude as they call it. But it wasn't a train either, because we were
flying over the earth, over homes and small groves, almost scraping the tops
of the pine and fir trees and, incidentally, flying so fast that the
landscape outside the window ran together into a sickening blur. From want
of habit, it hurt to look at it.
I got a handkerchief from my pocket and wiped my eyes.
"Do they hurt?" grinned a passenger sitting opposite. He was a thin
grey-haired man wearing gold-framed glasses without ear-pieces - no knowing
how they stayed on. "We forget when we're older that we shouldn't look out
the window. It's not the fifties now. Gall it an observation car!"
"What, you don't like it?" asked a young fellow challengingly from an
aisle seat.
"Of course I do. And why not? Who wouldn't like it? An hour and a half
from Leningrad to Moscow. Bit of a novelty."
"Why a novelty?" said the young man with a shrug. "Even twenty years
ago they were talking of monorail roads. It's only modernization. And why
look out the window? Turn on the TV," he told me.
I felt confused, not having the faintest idea where the television was
or how to turn it on. I was anticipated by my grey-haired neighbour
opposite. He pressed some kind of lever at the side, and the window was
covered by the familiar frosty screen. The picture arose somewhere in its
depths, so that it could easily be seen by those sitting sidewise to it, as
I was. It was in stereo-colour and depicted a huge, multi-storey building
beautifully ornamented with grey and red tiles. A helicopter was landing on
its flat roof out of a pure blue sky.
"We bring you the latest news," said an unseen announcer. "Party and
Government leaders visit the three-hundredth housing-commune in the Kiev
district of the capital."
A group of well-dressed middle-aged people left the cabin of the
helicopter and disappeared under a cupola of plexiglas. Express lifts and
escalators flashed by. The eye of the camera was aimed down at the gleaming
windows of the ground floor.
"This floor is occupied by a large department store, repair shops and
dining-rooms to serve the building's occupants."
Now the guests strolled slowly from floor to floor, through rooms
furnished and decorated in shapes and colours quite new to me.
"One turn of the plastic lover and the bed goes into the wall, and out
comes a concealed book-case. And this couch may be widened or lengthened:
its metal supports and the foam-rubber surface expand to double the size."
There followed an open vista of public foyers with giant television and
cinema screens.
"This floor is wholly given over to young people who prefer living
separately," commented the announcer, sliding walls apart for us to see the
unusually-furnished rooms.
"I can't understand it. Why do they do all this?" broke in one lady,
knitting away and giving a scornful sniff as she gave me a sidelong glance.
I looked at the young man on the aisle seat, awaiting his remark, and I
wasn't left disappointed. How like he was to the young people I knew! He had
caught from them the torch of enthusiasm, almost boyish vehemence, an
uncompromising attitude to everyone who wasn't in step with the times.
"House-communes weren't just built today ... they're not new ... yet
you still don't know why..." he said.
"I certainly don't know!" insisted the lady. "Glory to God, we no
sooner get rid of shared flats, and they're back again!"
"What's 'back again'?"
"Your house-communes. We're resurrecting living in shared flats."
"Don't talk nonsense. People are not leaving separate, private flats to
go into communal flats - whatever they are, I certainly don't know. They
leave to go into house-communes! You're looking at them now. They provide a
new, wider capacity of living conveniences!"
The lady with the knitting fell silent. Nobody supported her. And on
the screen smoked the oil derricks conquering a leaden garnet sky over fir
and larch trees.
"We are with you in Third Baku," continued the announcer, "at the newly
opened section of the Yakutsk oil region in Siberia."
A Third Baku! In my time, I had only known two of them. How many years
had gone by? I gave the same silent question to the white-gowned surgeons on
the screen who were demonstrating a bloodless operation using a pencil
neutron-ray and to the inventors of a compound for sealing wounds. I
addressed my silent question to the announcer himself who finally appeared
before the viewers. "In conclusion, I want to remind our audiences of the
deficit of specialists in occupations which our economy is much in need of.
As before, we need adjusters for automatically operated shops, controllers
for tele-guided mines, operators for atomic electric stations, assemblers of
multi-purpose electronic computers. "
The screen blanked out, and from somewhere overhead came a voice that
slowly announced: "We are arriving in Moscow. The warning lights are on.
With the green light, the escalator will be turned on."
Above the door in front there was a flicker of red lights. They
darkened to blue and changed to a bright green. Entering the aisle, the
passengers were carried along on a moving floor. I joined them, so I never
noticed the monorail station. Nor did I see it from outside. The escalator
road, moving fast, swept us into the lobby of a Metro station. I didn't
recognize it and, to speak honestly, never had a chance to get a good look
at it. We were moving at almost hydrofoil speed, slowing down only at the
escalator stairs which took us down to the platform. "Where's the ticket
booth?" I wondered. "Can the Metro be free of charge?" This was answered
affirmatively by the stream of passengers pushing into the open doors of an
incoming train.
I got off at Revolution Square, which I recognized at once: below
ground where I came across the familiar bronze pieces of sculpture in the
arcade, and above where the yellow columns of the Bolshoi Theatre looked
down at me from a distance across the green sweep of the square.
And Marx's monument stood in the same spot, but in place of the Grand
Hotel there towered a gigantic white building with flashing ribs of
stainless steel; and, instead of the side wing of the Metropole Hotel and to
the right, ran a vista of noisy, multi-layered streets. But the street
movement seemed as familiar as of old, almost unchanged. Along the wide
pavement, as tightly-packed and unhurried as always, went the varicoloured
droplets of the human current, more colourful than ever under the high
summer sun. And along the asphalted canal road, skirted by buildings and
squares, rumbled another current of motor cars, also colourful. By careful
observation, I could easily make out the diversities. Different styles and
trends in clothing, the changed lines and shapes of cars. Most of the latter
rode on air-cushions rather than wheels, and reminded you of the bulging
brows of whales or dolphins as they moved soundlessly on a violet haze of
air. "How many years have passed?" I asked myself, and again could find no
answer. Impossible to cross the square: an iron tracery of grilles ran along
the pavement, openings for passengers were only at stops of cigar-shaped
buses. I walked down toward the Alexandrovsky Gardens, passed the Historical
Museum, glanced fleetingly at the Red Square. Nothing there was changed -
the same tooth-tipped ancient red walls, the clock on the Spasskaya Tower,
the severe monolithic block of the Mausoleum and that miracle of
architecture - the cathedral of Vasily Blazhenny. But the huge hotel we had
built in Zaryadye wasn't there at all. A bit farther on, across the Moskva
River, rose unknown tall buildings behind the cathedral.
I went into the gardens and sat on a bench. And though the town was
tumultuous with its full-blooded impetuous life, in the morning hours here,
as in our world, the park was almost deserted. To tell the truth, I was
feeling a bit lost. Where should I go, and what for? Where was my home? Who
was I? And what experiences lay before me this day in my new life? I felt a
wallet in my pocket, very plump and compact, made of flexible, transparent
plastic. Without taking out the identification card, I could read my name,
profession and address through the plastic. Again I was a servant of
Hippocrates, some kind of director in a surgical clinic, and probably an
eminent man because the wallet contained congratulations from three foreign
scientific societies sent to Professor Gromov on his sixtieth birthday.
So twenty years had passed! For me, it was already old age; for science
- 'seven-league boots.' D'Artagnan, on his way to meet Aramis and Athos was
tormented by doubts: would it be a bitter experience to see his friends
grown old? His doubts had been dispersed, but would mine? In my mind I
imagined myself calling at the address on the card. Probably the door would
be opened by Olga, twenty years older. And what if it wouldn't be Olga? I
certainly did not want to complicate the situation. I mechanically thumbed
through the pack of money in the wallet. It was probably enough for one day
in the future. So what should I do? Perhaps simply walk along the streets,
travel around town, see it a little more, breathe the air of the future in
the literal sense? Was that such a little thing? For Zargaryan and
Nikodimov, it was. What material affirmation could I bring them from the
future? Go to the Lenin Library - it probably existed here - dig into index
files and interest myself in topics found in scientific journals? Suppose I
even managed to find something close to the work of my scientific friends.
Let's suppose. But how would I be able to grasp anything from the articles
of scientists of the eighties, if sometimes even the attempts of Zargaryan
to express things in an elementary and popular form had been hopeless to
overcome my mathematical ignorance! Memorize some kind of formula? But I
would forget it at once! And if they were in a series? And if I came across
absolutely unknown mathematical symbols? No, no, it was nonsense - nothing
would come of it.
Wrapped in such thoughts, I made my way to a taxi stand. Ahead of me
stood a woman, apparently in a hurry for she kept looking at her
wrist-watch.
"I've been waiting ten minutes, and not one car," she said. "Of course,
the bus is simpler and costs nothing. But the auto-taxi is more amusing."
"The auto-taxi?" I repeated.
"You're new here, of course," and she smiled. "That's what we call \the
driverless taxis, with automatic controls. Simply lovely to ride in!"
But the first auto-taxi gave me the shivers. There was something wild
and unnatural in this snub-nosed car without wheels or driver that
soundlessly floated up to us and discharged four spider-legs as it came to a
stop. The invisible man behind the wheel opened the door, the passenger got
in and said something into a microphone. The legs vanished as noiselessly as
they had appeared, the doors closed, and the car disappeared round a corner.
I probably stared after it rather long and stupidly, asking myself in
perplexity: 'What do you say into the microphone, and how do you pay if you
haven't enough change?' I was already thinking of taking flight when another
passenger approached the stop. There was something uniquely elegant about
his accentuated leanness and pepper-and-salt hair, even the carefully
trimmed spade-like beard gave him a sort of challenging look.
"I'm in a hurry," he admitted, impatiently looking round the square.
"Here's one coming, I think."
A snubby auto-taxi had floated up and come to a stop.
"I'll be glad to give you my turn," I said. "I'm in no hurry."
"Why? Let's go together, if you've nothing against it. First we'll
deliver you, and then me."
Something familiar flashed in his dark eyes. And he had the same high,
sloping and pure forehead, the same piercing and amused glance. Only the
beard transformed his face almost beyond recognition.
I looked into his eyes again, questioningly. It was he. My Zargaryan,
twenty years older.
But I didn't let on I knew him.
"Where do you want to go?" he asked.
I merely shrugged. Did it matter where a man goes who hasn't seen
Moscow for twenty years?
"Then off we go. Don't object, mind you. I'll be a wonderful guide. By
the way, where are you having dinner? Would you like to go to the Sofia?
With me? Honestly, I hate having dinner alone."
Even nearing fifty, he hadn't lost his boyish ardour. And he entered
hotly into the role of guide at once.
"We won't go along Gorky. It's hardly changed. We'll take Pushkin,
quite a new street. You won't know it. That will be our programming."
He fed the programme into the microphone, adding where to turn and
where to stop. The taxi, soundlessly closing its doors, floated off and
skirted the square.
"And how do you pay?" I inquired.
"Put the money here in this small box." He pointed to a slot in the
panel under the windshield.
"But if you've no change?"
"We'll see that we get change."
The taxi had already turned onto Pushkin, as much like the Pushkin
Street of my days as the Palace of Congresses is like a factory club. ,
Perhaps it was outwardly different even in the sixties - you see, similar
worlds do riot mean they are identical - but now it was different on a grand
scale. Twenty-storey buildings of glass and plastic, all different, united
into an ornamental rock canyon, along whose depths rolled a colourful stream
of cars. The two-level pavements, like in a shopping centre, ran along the
ground storeys and the upper levels, being connected by curved parabolic
bridges over the street. Bridges also joined the buildings and formed
auxiliary pathways at roof-top level. "For bicycles," explained Zargaryan,
catching my glance. "There we have swimming-pools and landing strips for
helicopters."
He played the role of guide with a conscience, smacking his lips with
satisfaction at my surprise. And our snubby dolphin had by this time crossed
the boulevard, flown along an unrecognisable Chekhov Street, and was now
floating along Sadovaya to the Sofia skyscraper. I recognized neither the
square nor the restaurant. Mayakovsky, flashing in the sun as if poured of
bronze glass, brooded over the square on a pedestal higher than the Nelson
column in London. The parallelepiped-shaped restaurant Sofia was also
flashing, dancing with reflected sunlight as if made of crystal and gold.
The restaurant inside astonished me. The usual white tables under
old-fashioned starched tablecloths stood cheek by jowl with strange
geometric figures like marquee tents made of rain-like and argon strings.
"What's this?" I said, almost struck dumb. Zargaryan smiled like a magician
anticipating an even greater effect.
"You'll see. Have a seat."
We sat at one of the ordinary starched tables.
"Would you like to be unseen and unheard to those around you?"
He raised a corner of the tablecloth, pressed something and the room
disappeared. We were separated from it by a tent of rain that had neither
moisture nor damp. Through the curtain of rain were entwined shining threads
that were neither of glass nor of wire. We were surrounded by the blessed
silence of an empty cathedral.
"Can one go through it?" I asked.
"Why, it's only air, but not transparent. Light- and sound-proof. In
our labs we use black ones. Absolute darkness."
"I know," I said.
Now it was his turn to be surprised, catching something in my answer
quite new to his ear.
I was fed up playing guessing games.
"Is your name Zargaryan? Ruben?" I asked, though I was absolutely sure
I wasn't mistaken.
"Caught red-handed," he laughed. "So the beard didn't help?"
"I knew you by your eyes."
"By the eyes?" He was again surprised. "The eyes don't show up well in
photos put in journals or newspapers. So where else could you have seen me?
At the cinema?"
"Are you engaged in the physics of biofields, the same as before?" I
began carefully. "Then don't be surprised at what you're going to hear. I
lied when I told you I'd not been in Moscow for twenty years. Actually, I've
never been in this Moscow. Never!"
I slowed down, waiting for his reaction, but he was silent and
continued to examine me with growing interest. "On top of that, I'm not the
person you are now looking at. I'm a phantom in his image, a visitor from
another world. The phenomenon is probably very familiar to you."
"Have you read my works?" he asked in unbelief.
"No, of course not. You haven't published them yet in our world. You
see, our time is twenty years behind yours."
Zargaryan jumped to his feet.
"Excuse me, I'm only beginning to understand. So you're from another
phase? Is that what you're trying to say?"
"Precisely."
He was silent, blinking his eyes, and stepped back. The shining shroud
of rain-air partly concealed him, ridiculously cutting off part of his head,
spine and feet. Then he again dived out of it and sat opposite me, with
great difficulty restraining his excitement. His face seemed to light up
from within, and it held the shattering surprise of a man seeing a miracle
for the first time, the joy of a scientist that the miracle had happened in
his presence, the happiness of a scientist who had the power to control such
miracles.
"Who are you, then?" he asked at last. "Name and profession."
I laughed. "Somehow it's amazing to answer for two people, but I have
to. The name is the same here that it is there - Gromov. Here I'm a
professor, there I'm without any title, a private person one might say. The
professions differ - here a doctor and surgeon, famous in fact; there a
simple newspaperman. Yes, and there I'm twenty years younger. Just as you
are in that world."
"Curious," said Zargaryan, still eyeing me with interest. "I might have
expected anything but that. I myself have sent people out of our world, but
to meet such a visitor here - I never dreamed of that! What a fool. All
matter is one - along all phase trajectories. I am here and I am there: and
now we're sending each other visitors," he laughed, suddenly asking me with
a changed intonation: "Who carried out the experiment?"
"Nikodimov and Zargaryan," I answered slyly, ready for a new explosion
of astonishment. But he only asked, "What Nikodimov?" It was my turn to be
surprised. "Pavel Nikitich. Wasn't it his discovery? Don't you work with
him?"
"Pavel died eleven years ago, and while he lived he never received the
recognition he deserved. Factually, it is his discovery. I came to it by
other ways, as a psychophysiologist." (I heard restrained grief in his
words.) "To my sorrow, the first success with biofields came only
afterwards. His son and I made the experiments." I hadn't known that
Nikodimov had a son. Incidentally, maybe that was only here.
"You're luckier than we are," said Zargaryan thoughtfully. "You began
earlier. In twenty years you will be farther ahead than ourselves. Is this
your first experiment?"
"The third. First I went into adjacent, completely identical worlds.
Then farther, into the past. And now further still - to you."
"What do you mean by 'nearer' or 'farther'? And 'adjacent'!" he
repeated sarcastically. "What naive terminology!"
"I mean to suggest," I faltered, "that worlds or, as you put it, phases
with other currents of time may be found farther away from us than the
coinciding worlds...."
He didn't conceal his laughter.
"Nearer, farther! Is that how they explained it to you? Children."
I was outraged for my friends' sake. All in all, I liked my Zargaryan
more.
"And hasn't the fourth dimension its own extension?" I asked. "Is the
theory of the infinite plurality of its phases a mistaken one?"
"Why the fourth?" seethed Zargaryan, flaming up as was his custom.
"What if it's the fifth? Or the sixth? Our theory doesn't define its
sequence or course in space. And who told you it was an incorrect or
mistaken theory? It is limited, and only that. The term 'infinite plurality'
simply cannot be taken literally. Any more than the infinity of space. Even
your contemporaries knew that. Even then, relativity in cosmology excluded
the absolute contraposition of the finite and the infinite. You must
understand one simple thing: the finite and the infinite do not exclude each
other, but are inwardly connected. Con-nec-ted!" He repeated the last word
in syllables, and laughed, looking into my blankly staring eyes. "Complex,
is it?
And it's just as complex to explain to you what 'nearer' and 'farther'
mean in this case. I can transfer your biofield into an adjacent world that
outstrips ours by a century, but where it is, near or far, I am unable to
define geometrically." He suddenly gave a start and stopped speaking, as if
something had broken off his train of thought.
For a second or two we were both silent.
"You know, that's an idea!" he exclaimed.
"What are you driving at?"
"I'm thinking about you. Do you want to leap even farther into the
future?"
"I don't get it."
"You will in a minute. I'll mix into your experiment. You go to my lab
with me, I'll switch off your biofield and transfer it to another phase.
What d'you say?"
"Nothing, so far. I'll think it over."
"Scared? But the risk is the same. There you are forty, and not sixty,
with a strong heart ... otherwise we wouldn't risk it. I'd be delighted to
change places with you, but I'm not a suitable subject. You know how hard it
is to find a brain-inductor with such a highly active field?"
"You found one before."
"Three in ten years. You are the fourth. And consider yourself lucky. I
promise you a trip more interesting than a flight to Mars. I'll find your
descendant of the fifth generation with the same field. A hundred-year jump,
eh? What are you worried about?"
"My biofield. What if they lose it back there?"
"They won't. First I'll send you back. Just a moment's walk in your
time and space, and then you'll wake up in another. Don't be afraid,
there'll be no explosion, no eruption, and no radiation. And your apparatus
will fixate everything that's necessary. Well now, shall we fly?"
He got up.
"And dinner?"
"We'll have dinner later. We - here, and you in the future."
Actually, I thought, I had nothing to lose.
"Let's fly," I said, and also stood up.
When I repeated Zargaryan's words, I had no suspicion that we would
really fly. First, we took the express-lift to the roof where
speedway-taxi-helicopters landed. In two or three minutes' time, we were
sailing over Moscow and headed south-west.
To my dying day I shall never forget the panorama of Moscow at the end
of the twentieth century. I kept assuring myself that it wasn't my Moscow,
not the one I'd been born and brought up in and which was separated from
this Moscow by an invisible border of space-time, as well as by twenty years
of great reforms in building practice. I stubbornly told myself this, but my
eyes convinced me that I must be wrong. You see, with us, in my world, this
same construction went on at the same speed and along similar trends: the
same forces inspired it, with the same aim in view. So, in our world, the
city was, comparatively speaking, just as beautiful and perhaps more so.
It was as if a magician with a camera was showing me an amazing picture
of the future. I viewed it avidly, searching for remembered details, happy
as a boy when I recognized the old and the new, familiar, though it had
changed as a young man does when he reaches the prime of life. All that was
familiar immediately hit me in the eye - the Palace of Congresses, the
golden cupolas of the Kremlin cathedrals, the bridges over the Moskva River,
the Bolshoi Theatre, all of them toys from this height. And there was the
Luzhniki stadium and the university. I lost sight of other tall buildings of
my day among the many-storey stone forest-like structures, and perhaps they
weren't there at all. The city had overflowed far beyond the border ring of
the circular highway: it ran in the same place, at least it followed the
same curve, but was wider or seemed wider, and the ant-like cars crawled
along it to form a similarly wide and rarely narrowing ribbon.
The traffic's monstrous scale and colourful-ness astounded me most of
all. Like rivers flowed the streets and alleys filled with iridescent
automobiles. Bicycles and motorcycles on asphalt tracks criss-crossed the
town over the roofs of the buildings. The centipede cars chased each other
along the strings of monorail trestle-roads. And over all this, from
landing-strip to landing-strip, flitted the black-and-yellow or
blue-and-white dragon-fly helicopters.
We dropped down on one such landing-strip on the roof of a huge tall
building, and alighted from the cabin. I didn't manage to see the building
itself during the flight, but the first thing that struck my eye on the flat
roof, guarded by a high metallic netting, was a large swimming pool. The
pool was filled with clear, pure water lit from below by greenish,
scintillating lights. Around the pool were deck-chairs, rubber mattresses,
tents and a canteen under a tightly stretched awning.
"It's the dinner break," said Zargaryan, his eyes searching among the
bathers and the half-naked people in swim-suits sitting in the canteen.
"We'll find him in a moment. Igor!" he yelled.
A tanned athlete in dark sun-glasses playing on the near-by tennis
court now approached us, still holding his racket.
"Is there somebody in the lab?" asked Zargaryan.
"Why should there be?" the boy answered lazily. "They're all in the
sixth sector."
"And the apparatus hasn't been switched off?"
"No. But what's up?"
"I'd like you to meet this professor to start with, Professor Gromov."
"Nikodimov," murmured the athlete removing his glasses. He was not at
all like the longhaired Faust.
"Has something happened?" he asked.
"Something unforeseen and very curious. You'll know in a minute," said
Zargaryan, not without a note of triumph in his voice.
A man with a sense of humour would doubtless have found something in
this situation that was common to my first visit to Faust's laboratory.
Zargaryan pressed the lift button with the same sly, significant look and
then turned on the escalator - before, a moving corridor had taken me to the
entrance to the laboratory, now a stair escalator ran from the roof directly
into the lab. It moved smoothly down, clicking on the turns.
"With your permission," he smiled at me, "I'll explain everything to
this child in the jargon of biophysics. It will be more accurate, and take
less time."
I tried hard to get something out of the conglomeration of unfamiliar
terms, ciphers and Greek letters. I had never been so overwhelmed by the
lexicology of my Zargaryan, even when he got carried away and forgot I was
there. A few things were clear, at least. But young Nikodimov caught it all
on the fly and looked at me with unconcealed curiosity. He didn't appear to
me to be in the mental heavyweight class, and I was surprised at the ease
with which he darted about among the 'maze of plugs, levers and handles'
that I knew so well.
Incidentally, I didn't know them so well, to tell the truth. Everything
in this duplicate-world room was bigger, greater in scale, and far more
complex than the equipment in the neat laboratory I had left somewhere in
another space-time. Where one might be compared to a doctor's surgery, this
one reminded you of the control-room of a large automated factory. Only the
blinking control lamps, the tele-screens, the haphazardly hanging wires, and
the chair in the centre of the room, of course, were somewhat familiar. Not
more so, by the way, than a new Moskvich car reminds you of an old 'Emka'. I
directed my attention to the arrangement of screens - they were built in an
arc along panels curving around the room, something like the control panels
of electronic BRAIN computers. The mobile control panel could, apparently,
slip along the line of screens according to the observer's wish. And it was
interesting to look at them, even now when they weren't in use. Now they
would light up, now go out, now flash as if reflecting some inner lighting,
now blindly freeze into a cold leadish dullness.
"Well," laughed Zargaryan, "so it's not much similar? What differences
are there, in particular?"
"The screens," I said. "We have a different arrangement. And there's no
helmet," I pointed at the chair.
There actually was no helmet. And no pickups. I sat in the chair, as if
in my own sitting-room, until Zargaryan spoke.
"If you compare your adventures with a game of chess, you are in time
trouble. You have played your opening move in the space of your world. In
ours, you begin the midgame, without any hope of winning. You understand
right away that you can't bring back any souvenirs with you except sporadic
impressions. In other words, one more failure. How many times Igor Nikodimov
and I have been in the same position. How many endless nights there were,
errors in calculations, unjustified hopes, until we finally found a
brain-inductor with mathematical development. He brought a formula back in
his memory, one that set the academicians on their ears! Now it is known as
the Janovski equation, and is used to figure out complex cosmic routes. To
our great regret, your memory won't help here. But then appeared a saving
variant - you met me. The candle of hope is lit again, a slender candle, but
it's burning. Now we have to hurry, now the endgame is ahead of you, and
you're in time trouble, friend. We are all in time trouble. The activity of
the field is at its limit, is on the point of falling. Before you realize
it, Ulysses will have to return to Ithaca. Igor!" he cried. "Finish up, it's
time." At this point he sighed and added in a faint voice: "Time to say
good-bye, Sergei Nikolaevich. Happy landings! We can't count on meeting
again, I'm afraid."
Only now the awesome thought got through to me of what was going on. A
leap across a century! Not simply into an adjacent world, but into a world
of absolutely different things-different machines, habits and relations. For
several hours, or maybe twenty-four, Hyde would own Jekyll's soul, but could
he deceive those around him if he wished to remain incognito? He would be
hidden by Jekyll's face, Jekyll's suit - but would he be given away by his
tongue, out-of-date ideas and feelings, conditional reflexes long unknown in
that world? Had the terrible risk of the jump gone to my head?
However, I said nothing to Zargaryan, did not reveal my sudden
awareness of danger, did not even start when he gave the command to turn on
the protector. Darkness, as before, again surrounded me. Darkness and
silence through which as if from a distance - to be exact, through a thick
grey fog - pierced scarcely discernible voices, also familiar but almost
forgotten as if they were already separated from me by a hundred-year leap
through time.
"I can't understand it at all. What about you?"
"It's disappeared. Something probed through, but there's no image."
"But on the sixth there is. Only the brightness is weakening. Can you
figure it out?"
"There is something showing. Again it's out of phase. Like that other
time."
"But we haven't registered any kind of shock."
"Nor did we then."
"That time the encephalograph charted sleep. The phase of a paradoxical
sleep. Remember?"
"In my opinion, this is different. Take a look at Screen Four. The
curves are pulsating."
"Raise the power, perhaps?"
"Let's wait."
"Are you worried?"
"So far there's no reason to. Check the breathing."
"As before."
"Pulse?"
"The same. And the blood pressure hasn't gone up. Perhaps some change
in the biochemical processes?"
"So far, there's no proof. But I have the impression that there is
outside interference. Either resistance from the receptor or artificial
braking."
"It's fantastic."
"I don't know. Let's wait."
"But I am waiting. Though...."
"Look! Look!"
"I don't get it. Where is that from?"
"There's no use guessing. How's the reflection?"
"In the same phase."
"In the one we need?"
And again silence, like ooze, swallowing all sound. I no longer heard,
nor saw, nor felt.
The transference from darkness to light was accompanied by a strange
state of peacefulness. As if I were swimming in transparent cool oil or was
in a state of weightlessness in milky-white space. The quiet of a
sound-proof chamber surrounded me. There were no doors, no windows - light
came from nowhere, soft and warm like sunlight through clouds. The snowy
cloud of the ceiling invisibly fused with the cloudy swirl of the walls. The
whiteness of the sheets dissolved in the whiteness of the room. I could not
feel the touch of blanket or sheets; it was as if they were woven of air
like the clothing of Andersen's naked king.
Gradually I began to make out the things around me. Suddenly I saw the
outline of a screen with white leather behind it. At first it was completely
invisible, but if you looked at it hard it took on the appearance of a metal
sheet, reflecting like a mirror the white walls, the bed and myself. It was
facing me as if it were somebody's eye or ear, and it seemed to be listening
and watching my every movement or intention. As it turned out later, I was
not mistaken.
Beside the bed floated a flat white pillow with a fine-grained surface.
When I reached out to touch it, it turned out to be the seat of a chair
resting on three legs made of thick transparent plastic material which was
quite new to me. In addition, I noticed the same kind of table, and
something like a thermometer or barometer under a glass-like dome,
apparently an apparatus for registering air fluctuations.
The snowy whiteness all around me created the feeling of peace, but
alarm and curiosity were beginning to grow inside me. Throwing back the
weightless blanket, I sat up. The underclothing I wore reminded me of a
hunting outfit: it fitted snugly yet one wasn't aware of its presence. I
gave a sudden start, though, when I noticed the blurred image of a person
sitting up in bed reflected in the dim surface of the screen. He wasn't at
all like me, seemed taller, younger and had a more athletic build.
"You may get up and walk to and fro," said a woman's voice.
I looked around involuntarily, though I realized I wouldn't see anybody
in the room.
"Don't be surprised at anything, not at anything!" I ordered myself,
and obediently walked to the wall and back.
"Once more," said the voice.
I repeated the exercise, guessing that somebody, somewhere, was
observing me.
"Raise your arms."
I obeyed.
"Lower them. Once more. Now sit down. Stand up."
I conscientiously did everything required of me, without asking
questions.
"Well, and now lie down."
"I don't want to. What for?" I said.
"One more check-up in a state of quiet."
Some strange force lightly pushed me back on the pillow, and my own
hands pulled up the blanket. Curious. How did my unseen observer manage
that? Mechanically or by suggestion? The imp of protest inside me burst
stormily out.
"Where am I?"
"At home."
"But this is some kind of hospital room."
"It's an ordinary revitalizing room. We set it up in your home."
"Who's 'we'?"
"GEMS. Of the thirty-second district."
"GEMS?" I asked blankly.
"Central Medical Service. Have you forgotten?"
I fell silent. What could I answer?
"A partial loss of memory following shock," explained the voice. "Don't
try to make yourself remember. Don't strain yourself. Just ask, if you want
to know something."
"Then I'll do just that," I agreed. "Who are you, for instance?"
"A curator on duty. Vera-seven."
"What?" I asked in surprise. "Why seven?"
"You sound odd with your 'why seven?' Because in our sector, besides
me, there is Vera-one, Vera-two, and so on."
"And your last name?"
"I still haven't done anything remarkable enough for that."
It was dangerous to ask more. A clearly risky turn of affairs had set
in.
"Can you show yourself?" I asked.
"That is not obligatory."
Probably she's an ugly, disgusting old woman. Pedantic and nagging. I
heard laughter.
"Nagging, that's true," said the voice. "Pedantic? Maybe."
"Can you read the mind?" I asked embarrassed.
"Not I, but the cogitator. A special apparatus."
I did not answer, wondering whether the devilish apparatus could be
deceived.
"It can't be," said the voice.
"It's not fair, or even respectable."
"Wha-at?"
"It's not res-pec-ta-ble!" I cried angrily. "It's not nice! Dishonest!
To look and listen in isn't honest, and to crawl into a person's skull-box
is very low."
The voice was silent. Then it spoke severely and with reproach.
"The first patient in all my practice to object to the cogitator. We do
not tune it in to a healthy, sound person. But with a patient, we observe
everything: the nervous system, the heart vessels, the breathing apparatus,
all the functions of the body."
"Then why do you use it on me? I 'm sound as a bell."
"Usually observers do not meet their patients, but I am allowed to."
Now I could see who the voice belonged to. The reflecting surface of
the screen darkened like water in a muddy pool, and faded out. Looking
straight at me was the face of a young woman with short wavy hair. She was
"I can also foretell your future," he snapped at me aloud, "and without
telepathy. Tit for tat."
"Man to man," I laughed. "But we can change the future. You mine, and I
- yours."
He raised his brows, again not getting the drift. "Okay then, let's lay
down the cards."
"You send me to the partisans today. And I'll guarantee your
immortality to the end of the month. Not a bullet or grenade will touch
you."
He was silent.
"You don't lose much. You grant me life, and you win the kitty -
yours."
"To the end of the month," he laughed.
"I'm not God almighty."
"And the guarantee?"
"My word and my documents. You saw them. And you must have guessed that
I can do something."
He pondered a long time, his eyes roaming silently and vaguely around
the room. Then he poured the rest of the cognac into our glasses. He hadn't
eaten, and the drink was already taking effect. His hands shook even more.
"All right, then," he ground out. "One for the road?"
"I'm not drinking," I said. "I'll need a clear head and a firm hand.
You give me a gun, even if it's only your Walther, and tie my hands loosely
so I can free them quickly."
"And what tale am I to use to send you off? I've got a boss, you know."
"So you're sending me to the top brass. Along some forest road."
"There'll have to be a driver and a convoy. Can you handle them?"
"I hope you won't regret the loss of the convoy?"
"I'll regret, the loss of the car," he frowned.
"So I'll return you the car and the driver. Agreed?"
He went to the telephone and began making calls. I was surprised at the
speed with which he carried everything out. In about half an hour, a Gestapo
Opel-Kapitan was already ploughing its way through the village all powdered
with snow. Beside me sat an evil-looking Fritz with a tommy-gun across his
knees. Let him stew in his bad temper. That didn't worry me any more than my
promise to Muller did. You see, / had promised, and not the Gromov who would
finally take my place. Only when would this happen and where? If in the car,
then I must do all I could so that my ill-starred Jekyll would quickly get
the hang of things. I stretched the slack bonds that tied my arms behind my
back. They loosened at once. Another jerk and I could put my free hand in my
jacket pocket and grip the butt of the blue-steel pistol. Now I had only to
wait. With a sixth or maybe sixteenth sense, I could feel the approach of
that strange lightness of my body, the head-spinning and the mist that put
out everything - light, sounds and thoughts.
And so it was. I woke up when I felt Zargaryan's hand removing the
pick-ups.
"Where were you?" he asked, still invisible.
"In the past, Ruben. Too bad."
He let out a loud and mournful sigh. Nikodimov was already holding the
tape against the light to observe it, pulling it from the container.
"Did you follow the time, Sergei Nikolaevich?" asked Nikodimov. "That
is, when you entered and left the phase?"
"Morning and evening. One day."
"It's twenty minutes to twelve midnight now. Does that agree with your
count?"
"Approximately."
"A trivial lag behind our time."
"Trivial?" I laughed. "More than twenty years."
"On a scale of a thousand years, that's almost nothing."
But I wasn't worried about thousand-year scales. I was anxious about
the fate of Sergei Gromov whom I'd left about twenty-five years ago in the
suburbs of Kolpinsk. I think, by the way, he did not waste any time.
The new experiment had become as humdrum as a visit to the polyclinic.
Now I didn't gather friends together before leaving, Zargaryan didn't come
for me, and nobody accompanied me in the morning. I took the bus to the
institute and Nikodimov at once sat me in the chair without testing the
degree of my good will and readiness for the test.
He only asked: "When did you get into difficulties in the last
experiment? Was it toward evening, in the late afternoon?"
"About then. It was already dark outside."
"The apparatus focused the sleep period, then there was an increase of
nervous strain, and finally a state of shock...."
"That's quite correct."
"I think we can now anticipate such a complication, if it should
arise," he said. "And bring your psyche back."
"That's exactly what I don't want. You already know..." I broke in.
"No, this time we aren't taking any risks."
"What risk? Who's talking about risk?" thundered Zargaryan, appearing
like a phantom, all in white against the background of the white doors.
He had been in the next room, checking the power generator.
"I'd give a year of my life for one minute of your journey," he went
on. "It isn't a science, as Nikodimov thinks. It's poetry. Do you like
Voznesensky? "
"More or less," I answered.
He recited:
In autumn time when leaves are dying
Within a dawn-lit perilous wood,
Someone's fate and name come flying
Like seeds - and in our minds intrude.
He broke off and asked: "What words stick in your memory?"
"Dawn-lit and perilous," I told him.
I could not see him now, and his voice came from the darkness. "The
main thing is 'dawn-lit'. So let's be solemn. Remember that you are at the
gateway to the future."
"You're sure of that?" came Nikodimov's voice.
"Absolutely."
I heard no more. Sounds died out until the dead silence was broken by a
monotonous, rumbling roar.
Now there was no silence, no mist. I found myself in a soft chair by a
wide, slightly concave window. Strangers sat in similar chairs beside and
opposite me. The surroundings reminded me of the interior of an airliner or
the coach of a suburban train where people sit in threes across from each
other, with a passageway running from door to door. This passageway or aisle
was probably about forty metres long. I tried to orient myself without
looking at my neighbours, slipping sidelong glances from under lowered lids.
My attention was drawn first to my hands - large, oddly white, with a dry
clean skin such as occurs after frequent and hard scrubbing. The significant
thing was that they were the hands of an old man. "How old am I and what's
my profession?" I pondered. "A lab man, doctor, scientist?" The suit I wore
provided no direct answer - it was not new but neither was it much worn, and
it was made of a smooth material with an unusual pattern. There was no use
trying to guess.
I looked out the window. No, it wasn't an airliner because we were
flying too low for an aeroplane of this size, lower than flight at zero
altitude as they call it. But it wasn't a train either, because we were
flying over the earth, over homes and small groves, almost scraping the tops
of the pine and fir trees and, incidentally, flying so fast that the
landscape outside the window ran together into a sickening blur. From want
of habit, it hurt to look at it.
I got a handkerchief from my pocket and wiped my eyes.
"Do they hurt?" grinned a passenger sitting opposite. He was a thin
grey-haired man wearing gold-framed glasses without ear-pieces - no knowing
how they stayed on. "We forget when we're older that we shouldn't look out
the window. It's not the fifties now. Gall it an observation car!"
"What, you don't like it?" asked a young fellow challengingly from an
aisle seat.
"Of course I do. And why not? Who wouldn't like it? An hour and a half
from Leningrad to Moscow. Bit of a novelty."
"Why a novelty?" said the young man with a shrug. "Even twenty years
ago they were talking of monorail roads. It's only modernization. And why
look out the window? Turn on the TV," he told me.
I felt confused, not having the faintest idea where the television was
or how to turn it on. I was anticipated by my grey-haired neighbour
opposite. He pressed some kind of lever at the side, and the window was
covered by the familiar frosty screen. The picture arose somewhere in its
depths, so that it could easily be seen by those sitting sidewise to it, as
I was. It was in stereo-colour and depicted a huge, multi-storey building
beautifully ornamented with grey and red tiles. A helicopter was landing on
its flat roof out of a pure blue sky.
"We bring you the latest news," said an unseen announcer. "Party and
Government leaders visit the three-hundredth housing-commune in the Kiev
district of the capital."
A group of well-dressed middle-aged people left the cabin of the
helicopter and disappeared under a cupola of plexiglas. Express lifts and
escalators flashed by. The eye of the camera was aimed down at the gleaming
windows of the ground floor.
"This floor is occupied by a large department store, repair shops and
dining-rooms to serve the building's occupants."
Now the guests strolled slowly from floor to floor, through rooms
furnished and decorated in shapes and colours quite new to me.
"One turn of the plastic lover and the bed goes into the wall, and out
comes a concealed book-case. And this couch may be widened or lengthened:
its metal supports and the foam-rubber surface expand to double the size."
There followed an open vista of public foyers with giant television and
cinema screens.
"This floor is wholly given over to young people who prefer living
separately," commented the announcer, sliding walls apart for us to see the
unusually-furnished rooms.
"I can't understand it. Why do they do all this?" broke in one lady,
knitting away and giving a scornful sniff as she gave me a sidelong glance.
I looked at the young man on the aisle seat, awaiting his remark, and I
wasn't left disappointed. How like he was to the young people I knew! He had
caught from them the torch of enthusiasm, almost boyish vehemence, an
uncompromising attitude to everyone who wasn't in step with the times.
"House-communes weren't just built today ... they're not new ... yet
you still don't know why..." he said.
"I certainly don't know!" insisted the lady. "Glory to God, we no
sooner get rid of shared flats, and they're back again!"
"What's 'back again'?"
"Your house-communes. We're resurrecting living in shared flats."
"Don't talk nonsense. People are not leaving separate, private flats to
go into communal flats - whatever they are, I certainly don't know. They
leave to go into house-communes! You're looking at them now. They provide a
new, wider capacity of living conveniences!"
The lady with the knitting fell silent. Nobody supported her. And on
the screen smoked the oil derricks conquering a leaden garnet sky over fir
and larch trees.
"We are with you in Third Baku," continued the announcer, "at the newly
opened section of the Yakutsk oil region in Siberia."
A Third Baku! In my time, I had only known two of them. How many years
had gone by? I gave the same silent question to the white-gowned surgeons on
the screen who were demonstrating a bloodless operation using a pencil
neutron-ray and to the inventors of a compound for sealing wounds. I
addressed my silent question to the announcer himself who finally appeared
before the viewers. "In conclusion, I want to remind our audiences of the
deficit of specialists in occupations which our economy is much in need of.
As before, we need adjusters for automatically operated shops, controllers
for tele-guided mines, operators for atomic electric stations, assemblers of
multi-purpose electronic computers. "
The screen blanked out, and from somewhere overhead came a voice that
slowly announced: "We are arriving in Moscow. The warning lights are on.
With the green light, the escalator will be turned on."
Above the door in front there was a flicker of red lights. They
darkened to blue and changed to a bright green. Entering the aisle, the
passengers were carried along on a moving floor. I joined them, so I never
noticed the monorail station. Nor did I see it from outside. The escalator
road, moving fast, swept us into the lobby of a Metro station. I didn't
recognize it and, to speak honestly, never had a chance to get a good look
at it. We were moving at almost hydrofoil speed, slowing down only at the
escalator stairs which took us down to the platform. "Where's the ticket
booth?" I wondered. "Can the Metro be free of charge?" This was answered
affirmatively by the stream of passengers pushing into the open doors of an
incoming train.
I got off at Revolution Square, which I recognized at once: below
ground where I came across the familiar bronze pieces of sculpture in the
arcade, and above where the yellow columns of the Bolshoi Theatre looked
down at me from a distance across the green sweep of the square.
And Marx's monument stood in the same spot, but in place of the Grand
Hotel there towered a gigantic white building with flashing ribs of
stainless steel; and, instead of the side wing of the Metropole Hotel and to
the right, ran a vista of noisy, multi-layered streets. But the street
movement seemed as familiar as of old, almost unchanged. Along the wide
pavement, as tightly-packed and unhurried as always, went the varicoloured
droplets of the human current, more colourful than ever under the high
summer sun. And along the asphalted canal road, skirted by buildings and
squares, rumbled another current of motor cars, also colourful. By careful
observation, I could easily make out the diversities. Different styles and
trends in clothing, the changed lines and shapes of cars. Most of the latter
rode on air-cushions rather than wheels, and reminded you of the bulging
brows of whales or dolphins as they moved soundlessly on a violet haze of
air. "How many years have passed?" I asked myself, and again could find no
answer. Impossible to cross the square: an iron tracery of grilles ran along
the pavement, openings for passengers were only at stops of cigar-shaped
buses. I walked down toward the Alexandrovsky Gardens, passed the Historical
Museum, glanced fleetingly at the Red Square. Nothing there was changed -
the same tooth-tipped ancient red walls, the clock on the Spasskaya Tower,
the severe monolithic block of the Mausoleum and that miracle of
architecture - the cathedral of Vasily Blazhenny. But the huge hotel we had
built in Zaryadye wasn't there at all. A bit farther on, across the Moskva
River, rose unknown tall buildings behind the cathedral.
I went into the gardens and sat on a bench. And though the town was
tumultuous with its full-blooded impetuous life, in the morning hours here,
as in our world, the park was almost deserted. To tell the truth, I was
feeling a bit lost. Where should I go, and what for? Where was my home? Who
was I? And what experiences lay before me this day in my new life? I felt a
wallet in my pocket, very plump and compact, made of flexible, transparent
plastic. Without taking out the identification card, I could read my name,
profession and address through the plastic. Again I was a servant of
Hippocrates, some kind of director in a surgical clinic, and probably an
eminent man because the wallet contained congratulations from three foreign
scientific societies sent to Professor Gromov on his sixtieth birthday.
So twenty years had passed! For me, it was already old age; for science
- 'seven-league boots.' D'Artagnan, on his way to meet Aramis and Athos was
tormented by doubts: would it be a bitter experience to see his friends
grown old? His doubts had been dispersed, but would mine? In my mind I
imagined myself calling at the address on the card. Probably the door would
be opened by Olga, twenty years older. And what if it wouldn't be Olga? I
certainly did not want to complicate the situation. I mechanically thumbed
through the pack of money in the wallet. It was probably enough for one day
in the future. So what should I do? Perhaps simply walk along the streets,
travel around town, see it a little more, breathe the air of the future in
the literal sense? Was that such a little thing? For Zargaryan and
Nikodimov, it was. What material affirmation could I bring them from the
future? Go to the Lenin Library - it probably existed here - dig into index
files and interest myself in topics found in scientific journals? Suppose I
even managed to find something close to the work of my scientific friends.
Let's suppose. But how would I be able to grasp anything from the articles
of scientists of the eighties, if sometimes even the attempts of Zargaryan
to express things in an elementary and popular form had been hopeless to
overcome my mathematical ignorance! Memorize some kind of formula? But I
would forget it at once! And if they were in a series? And if I came across
absolutely unknown mathematical symbols? No, no, it was nonsense - nothing
would come of it.
Wrapped in such thoughts, I made my way to a taxi stand. Ahead of me
stood a woman, apparently in a hurry for she kept looking at her
wrist-watch.
"I've been waiting ten minutes, and not one car," she said. "Of course,
the bus is simpler and costs nothing. But the auto-taxi is more amusing."
"The auto-taxi?" I repeated.
"You're new here, of course," and she smiled. "That's what we call \the
driverless taxis, with automatic controls. Simply lovely to ride in!"
But the first auto-taxi gave me the shivers. There was something wild
and unnatural in this snub-nosed car without wheels or driver that
soundlessly floated up to us and discharged four spider-legs as it came to a
stop. The invisible man behind the wheel opened the door, the passenger got
in and said something into a microphone. The legs vanished as noiselessly as
they had appeared, the doors closed, and the car disappeared round a corner.
I probably stared after it rather long and stupidly, asking myself in
perplexity: 'What do you say into the microphone, and how do you pay if you
haven't enough change?' I was already thinking of taking flight when another
passenger approached the stop. There was something uniquely elegant about
his accentuated leanness and pepper-and-salt hair, even the carefully
trimmed spade-like beard gave him a sort of challenging look.
"I'm in a hurry," he admitted, impatiently looking round the square.
"Here's one coming, I think."
A snubby auto-taxi had floated up and come to a stop.
"I'll be glad to give you my turn," I said. "I'm in no hurry."
"Why? Let's go together, if you've nothing against it. First we'll
deliver you, and then me."
Something familiar flashed in his dark eyes. And he had the same high,
sloping and pure forehead, the same piercing and amused glance. Only the
beard transformed his face almost beyond recognition.
I looked into his eyes again, questioningly. It was he. My Zargaryan,
twenty years older.
But I didn't let on I knew him.
"Where do you want to go?" he asked.
I merely shrugged. Did it matter where a man goes who hasn't seen
Moscow for twenty years?
"Then off we go. Don't object, mind you. I'll be a wonderful guide. By
the way, where are you having dinner? Would you like to go to the Sofia?
With me? Honestly, I hate having dinner alone."
Even nearing fifty, he hadn't lost his boyish ardour. And he entered
hotly into the role of guide at once.
"We won't go along Gorky. It's hardly changed. We'll take Pushkin,
quite a new street. You won't know it. That will be our programming."
He fed the programme into the microphone, adding where to turn and
where to stop. The taxi, soundlessly closing its doors, floated off and
skirted the square.
"And how do you pay?" I inquired.
"Put the money here in this small box." He pointed to a slot in the
panel under the windshield.
"But if you've no change?"
"We'll see that we get change."
The taxi had already turned onto Pushkin, as much like the Pushkin
Street of my days as the Palace of Congresses is like a factory club. ,
Perhaps it was outwardly different even in the sixties - you see, similar
worlds do riot mean they are identical - but now it was different on a grand
scale. Twenty-storey buildings of glass and plastic, all different, united
into an ornamental rock canyon, along whose depths rolled a colourful stream
of cars. The two-level pavements, like in a shopping centre, ran along the
ground storeys and the upper levels, being connected by curved parabolic
bridges over the street. Bridges also joined the buildings and formed
auxiliary pathways at roof-top level. "For bicycles," explained Zargaryan,
catching my glance. "There we have swimming-pools and landing strips for
helicopters."
He played the role of guide with a conscience, smacking his lips with
satisfaction at my surprise. And our snubby dolphin had by this time crossed
the boulevard, flown along an unrecognisable Chekhov Street, and was now
floating along Sadovaya to the Sofia skyscraper. I recognized neither the
square nor the restaurant. Mayakovsky, flashing in the sun as if poured of
bronze glass, brooded over the square on a pedestal higher than the Nelson
column in London. The parallelepiped-shaped restaurant Sofia was also
flashing, dancing with reflected sunlight as if made of crystal and gold.
The restaurant inside astonished me. The usual white tables under
old-fashioned starched tablecloths stood cheek by jowl with strange
geometric figures like marquee tents made of rain-like and argon strings.
"What's this?" I said, almost struck dumb. Zargaryan smiled like a magician
anticipating an even greater effect.
"You'll see. Have a seat."
We sat at one of the ordinary starched tables.
"Would you like to be unseen and unheard to those around you?"
He raised a corner of the tablecloth, pressed something and the room
disappeared. We were separated from it by a tent of rain that had neither
moisture nor damp. Through the curtain of rain were entwined shining threads
that were neither of glass nor of wire. We were surrounded by the blessed
silence of an empty cathedral.
"Can one go through it?" I asked.
"Why, it's only air, but not transparent. Light- and sound-proof. In
our labs we use black ones. Absolute darkness."
"I know," I said.
Now it was his turn to be surprised, catching something in my answer
quite new to his ear.
I was fed up playing guessing games.
"Is your name Zargaryan? Ruben?" I asked, though I was absolutely sure
I wasn't mistaken.
"Caught red-handed," he laughed. "So the beard didn't help?"
"I knew you by your eyes."
"By the eyes?" He was again surprised. "The eyes don't show up well in
photos put in journals or newspapers. So where else could you have seen me?
At the cinema?"
"Are you engaged in the physics of biofields, the same as before?" I
began carefully. "Then don't be surprised at what you're going to hear. I
lied when I told you I'd not been in Moscow for twenty years. Actually, I've
never been in this Moscow. Never!"
I slowed down, waiting for his reaction, but he was silent and
continued to examine me with growing interest. "On top of that, I'm not the
person you are now looking at. I'm a phantom in his image, a visitor from
another world. The phenomenon is probably very familiar to you."
"Have you read my works?" he asked in unbelief.
"No, of course not. You haven't published them yet in our world. You
see, our time is twenty years behind yours."
Zargaryan jumped to his feet.
"Excuse me, I'm only beginning to understand. So you're from another
phase? Is that what you're trying to say?"
"Precisely."
He was silent, blinking his eyes, and stepped back. The shining shroud
of rain-air partly concealed him, ridiculously cutting off part of his head,
spine and feet. Then he again dived out of it and sat opposite me, with
great difficulty restraining his excitement. His face seemed to light up
from within, and it held the shattering surprise of a man seeing a miracle
for the first time, the joy of a scientist that the miracle had happened in
his presence, the happiness of a scientist who had the power to control such
miracles.
"Who are you, then?" he asked at last. "Name and profession."
I laughed. "Somehow it's amazing to answer for two people, but I have
to. The name is the same here that it is there - Gromov. Here I'm a
professor, there I'm without any title, a private person one might say. The
professions differ - here a doctor and surgeon, famous in fact; there a
simple newspaperman. Yes, and there I'm twenty years younger. Just as you
are in that world."
"Curious," said Zargaryan, still eyeing me with interest. "I might have
expected anything but that. I myself have sent people out of our world, but
to meet such a visitor here - I never dreamed of that! What a fool. All
matter is one - along all phase trajectories. I am here and I am there: and
now we're sending each other visitors," he laughed, suddenly asking me with
a changed intonation: "Who carried out the experiment?"
"Nikodimov and Zargaryan," I answered slyly, ready for a new explosion
of astonishment. But he only asked, "What Nikodimov?" It was my turn to be
surprised. "Pavel Nikitich. Wasn't it his discovery? Don't you work with
him?"
"Pavel died eleven years ago, and while he lived he never received the
recognition he deserved. Factually, it is his discovery. I came to it by
other ways, as a psychophysiologist." (I heard restrained grief in his
words.) "To my sorrow, the first success with biofields came only
afterwards. His son and I made the experiments." I hadn't known that
Nikodimov had a son. Incidentally, maybe that was only here.
"You're luckier than we are," said Zargaryan thoughtfully. "You began
earlier. In twenty years you will be farther ahead than ourselves. Is this
your first experiment?"
"The third. First I went into adjacent, completely identical worlds.
Then farther, into the past. And now further still - to you."
"What do you mean by 'nearer' or 'farther'? And 'adjacent'!" he
repeated sarcastically. "What naive terminology!"
"I mean to suggest," I faltered, "that worlds or, as you put it, phases
with other currents of time may be found farther away from us than the
coinciding worlds...."
He didn't conceal his laughter.
"Nearer, farther! Is that how they explained it to you? Children."
I was outraged for my friends' sake. All in all, I liked my Zargaryan
more.
"And hasn't the fourth dimension its own extension?" I asked. "Is the
theory of the infinite plurality of its phases a mistaken one?"
"Why the fourth?" seethed Zargaryan, flaming up as was his custom.
"What if it's the fifth? Or the sixth? Our theory doesn't define its
sequence or course in space. And who told you it was an incorrect or
mistaken theory? It is limited, and only that. The term 'infinite plurality'
simply cannot be taken literally. Any more than the infinity of space. Even
your contemporaries knew that. Even then, relativity in cosmology excluded
the absolute contraposition of the finite and the infinite. You must
understand one simple thing: the finite and the infinite do not exclude each
other, but are inwardly connected. Con-nec-ted!" He repeated the last word
in syllables, and laughed, looking into my blankly staring eyes. "Complex,
is it?
And it's just as complex to explain to you what 'nearer' and 'farther'
mean in this case. I can transfer your biofield into an adjacent world that
outstrips ours by a century, but where it is, near or far, I am unable to
define geometrically." He suddenly gave a start and stopped speaking, as if
something had broken off his train of thought.
For a second or two we were both silent.
"You know, that's an idea!" he exclaimed.
"What are you driving at?"
"I'm thinking about you. Do you want to leap even farther into the
future?"
"I don't get it."
"You will in a minute. I'll mix into your experiment. You go to my lab
with me, I'll switch off your biofield and transfer it to another phase.
What d'you say?"
"Nothing, so far. I'll think it over."
"Scared? But the risk is the same. There you are forty, and not sixty,
with a strong heart ... otherwise we wouldn't risk it. I'd be delighted to
change places with you, but I'm not a suitable subject. You know how hard it
is to find a brain-inductor with such a highly active field?"
"You found one before."
"Three in ten years. You are the fourth. And consider yourself lucky. I
promise you a trip more interesting than a flight to Mars. I'll find your
descendant of the fifth generation with the same field. A hundred-year jump,
eh? What are you worried about?"
"My biofield. What if they lose it back there?"
"They won't. First I'll send you back. Just a moment's walk in your
time and space, and then you'll wake up in another. Don't be afraid,
there'll be no explosion, no eruption, and no radiation. And your apparatus
will fixate everything that's necessary. Well now, shall we fly?"
He got up.
"And dinner?"
"We'll have dinner later. We - here, and you in the future."
Actually, I thought, I had nothing to lose.
"Let's fly," I said, and also stood up.
When I repeated Zargaryan's words, I had no suspicion that we would
really fly. First, we took the express-lift to the roof where
speedway-taxi-helicopters landed. In two or three minutes' time, we were
sailing over Moscow and headed south-west.
To my dying day I shall never forget the panorama of Moscow at the end
of the twentieth century. I kept assuring myself that it wasn't my Moscow,
not the one I'd been born and brought up in and which was separated from
this Moscow by an invisible border of space-time, as well as by twenty years
of great reforms in building practice. I stubbornly told myself this, but my
eyes convinced me that I must be wrong. You see, with us, in my world, this
same construction went on at the same speed and along similar trends: the
same forces inspired it, with the same aim in view. So, in our world, the
city was, comparatively speaking, just as beautiful and perhaps more so.
It was as if a magician with a camera was showing me an amazing picture
of the future. I viewed it avidly, searching for remembered details, happy
as a boy when I recognized the old and the new, familiar, though it had
changed as a young man does when he reaches the prime of life. All that was
familiar immediately hit me in the eye - the Palace of Congresses, the
golden cupolas of the Kremlin cathedrals, the bridges over the Moskva River,
the Bolshoi Theatre, all of them toys from this height. And there was the
Luzhniki stadium and the university. I lost sight of other tall buildings of
my day among the many-storey stone forest-like structures, and perhaps they
weren't there at all. The city had overflowed far beyond the border ring of
the circular highway: it ran in the same place, at least it followed the
same curve, but was wider or seemed wider, and the ant-like cars crawled
along it to form a similarly wide and rarely narrowing ribbon.
The traffic's monstrous scale and colourful-ness astounded me most of
all. Like rivers flowed the streets and alleys filled with iridescent
automobiles. Bicycles and motorcycles on asphalt tracks criss-crossed the
town over the roofs of the buildings. The centipede cars chased each other
along the strings of monorail trestle-roads. And over all this, from
landing-strip to landing-strip, flitted the black-and-yellow or
blue-and-white dragon-fly helicopters.
We dropped down on one such landing-strip on the roof of a huge tall
building, and alighted from the cabin. I didn't manage to see the building
itself during the flight, but the first thing that struck my eye on the flat
roof, guarded by a high metallic netting, was a large swimming pool. The
pool was filled with clear, pure water lit from below by greenish,
scintillating lights. Around the pool were deck-chairs, rubber mattresses,
tents and a canteen under a tightly stretched awning.
"It's the dinner break," said Zargaryan, his eyes searching among the
bathers and the half-naked people in swim-suits sitting in the canteen.
"We'll find him in a moment. Igor!" he yelled.
A tanned athlete in dark sun-glasses playing on the near-by tennis
court now approached us, still holding his racket.
"Is there somebody in the lab?" asked Zargaryan.
"Why should there be?" the boy answered lazily. "They're all in the
sixth sector."
"And the apparatus hasn't been switched off?"
"No. But what's up?"
"I'd like you to meet this professor to start with, Professor Gromov."
"Nikodimov," murmured the athlete removing his glasses. He was not at
all like the longhaired Faust.
"Has something happened?" he asked.
"Something unforeseen and very curious. You'll know in a minute," said
Zargaryan, not without a note of triumph in his voice.
A man with a sense of humour would doubtless have found something in
this situation that was common to my first visit to Faust's laboratory.
Zargaryan pressed the lift button with the same sly, significant look and
then turned on the escalator - before, a moving corridor had taken me to the
entrance to the laboratory, now a stair escalator ran from the roof directly
into the lab. It moved smoothly down, clicking on the turns.
"With your permission," he smiled at me, "I'll explain everything to
this child in the jargon of biophysics. It will be more accurate, and take
less time."
I tried hard to get something out of the conglomeration of unfamiliar
terms, ciphers and Greek letters. I had never been so overwhelmed by the
lexicology of my Zargaryan, even when he got carried away and forgot I was
there. A few things were clear, at least. But young Nikodimov caught it all
on the fly and looked at me with unconcealed curiosity. He didn't appear to
me to be in the mental heavyweight class, and I was surprised at the ease
with which he darted about among the 'maze of plugs, levers and handles'
that I knew so well.
Incidentally, I didn't know them so well, to tell the truth. Everything
in this duplicate-world room was bigger, greater in scale, and far more
complex than the equipment in the neat laboratory I had left somewhere in
another space-time. Where one might be compared to a doctor's surgery, this
one reminded you of the control-room of a large automated factory. Only the
blinking control lamps, the tele-screens, the haphazardly hanging wires, and
the chair in the centre of the room, of course, were somewhat familiar. Not
more so, by the way, than a new Moskvich car reminds you of an old 'Emka'. I
directed my attention to the arrangement of screens - they were built in an
arc along panels curving around the room, something like the control panels
of electronic BRAIN computers. The mobile control panel could, apparently,
slip along the line of screens according to the observer's wish. And it was
interesting to look at them, even now when they weren't in use. Now they
would light up, now go out, now flash as if reflecting some inner lighting,
now blindly freeze into a cold leadish dullness.
"Well," laughed Zargaryan, "so it's not much similar? What differences
are there, in particular?"
"The screens," I said. "We have a different arrangement. And there's no
helmet," I pointed at the chair.
There actually was no helmet. And no pickups. I sat in the chair, as if
in my own sitting-room, until Zargaryan spoke.
"If you compare your adventures with a game of chess, you are in time
trouble. You have played your opening move in the space of your world. In
ours, you begin the midgame, without any hope of winning. You understand
right away that you can't bring back any souvenirs with you except sporadic
impressions. In other words, one more failure. How many times Igor Nikodimov
and I have been in the same position. How many endless nights there were,
errors in calculations, unjustified hopes, until we finally found a
brain-inductor with mathematical development. He brought a formula back in
his memory, one that set the academicians on their ears! Now it is known as
the Janovski equation, and is used to figure out complex cosmic routes. To
our great regret, your memory won't help here. But then appeared a saving
variant - you met me. The candle of hope is lit again, a slender candle, but
it's burning. Now we have to hurry, now the endgame is ahead of you, and
you're in time trouble, friend. We are all in time trouble. The activity of
the field is at its limit, is on the point of falling. Before you realize
it, Ulysses will have to return to Ithaca. Igor!" he cried. "Finish up, it's
time." At this point he sighed and added in a faint voice: "Time to say
good-bye, Sergei Nikolaevich. Happy landings! We can't count on meeting
again, I'm afraid."
Only now the awesome thought got through to me of what was going on. A
leap across a century! Not simply into an adjacent world, but into a world
of absolutely different things-different machines, habits and relations. For
several hours, or maybe twenty-four, Hyde would own Jekyll's soul, but could
he deceive those around him if he wished to remain incognito? He would be
hidden by Jekyll's face, Jekyll's suit - but would he be given away by his
tongue, out-of-date ideas and feelings, conditional reflexes long unknown in
that world? Had the terrible risk of the jump gone to my head?
However, I said nothing to Zargaryan, did not reveal my sudden
awareness of danger, did not even start when he gave the command to turn on
the protector. Darkness, as before, again surrounded me. Darkness and
silence through which as if from a distance - to be exact, through a thick
grey fog - pierced scarcely discernible voices, also familiar but almost
forgotten as if they were already separated from me by a hundred-year leap
through time.
"I can't understand it at all. What about you?"
"It's disappeared. Something probed through, but there's no image."
"But on the sixth there is. Only the brightness is weakening. Can you
figure it out?"
"There is something showing. Again it's out of phase. Like that other
time."
"But we haven't registered any kind of shock."
"Nor did we then."
"That time the encephalograph charted sleep. The phase of a paradoxical
sleep. Remember?"
"In my opinion, this is different. Take a look at Screen Four. The
curves are pulsating."
"Raise the power, perhaps?"
"Let's wait."
"Are you worried?"
"So far there's no reason to. Check the breathing."
"As before."
"Pulse?"
"The same. And the blood pressure hasn't gone up. Perhaps some change
in the biochemical processes?"
"So far, there's no proof. But I have the impression that there is
outside interference. Either resistance from the receptor or artificial
braking."
"It's fantastic."
"I don't know. Let's wait."
"But I am waiting. Though...."
"Look! Look!"
"I don't get it. Where is that from?"
"There's no use guessing. How's the reflection?"
"In the same phase."
"In the one we need?"
And again silence, like ooze, swallowing all sound. I no longer heard,
nor saw, nor felt.
The transference from darkness to light was accompanied by a strange
state of peacefulness. As if I were swimming in transparent cool oil or was
in a state of weightlessness in milky-white space. The quiet of a
sound-proof chamber surrounded me. There were no doors, no windows - light
came from nowhere, soft and warm like sunlight through clouds. The snowy
cloud of the ceiling invisibly fused with the cloudy swirl of the walls. The
whiteness of the sheets dissolved in the whiteness of the room. I could not
feel the touch of blanket or sheets; it was as if they were woven of air
like the clothing of Andersen's naked king.
Gradually I began to make out the things around me. Suddenly I saw the
outline of a screen with white leather behind it. At first it was completely
invisible, but if you looked at it hard it took on the appearance of a metal
sheet, reflecting like a mirror the white walls, the bed and myself. It was
facing me as if it were somebody's eye or ear, and it seemed to be listening
and watching my every movement or intention. As it turned out later, I was
not mistaken.
Beside the bed floated a flat white pillow with a fine-grained surface.
When I reached out to touch it, it turned out to be the seat of a chair
resting on three legs made of thick transparent plastic material which was
quite new to me. In addition, I noticed the same kind of table, and
something like a thermometer or barometer under a glass-like dome,
apparently an apparatus for registering air fluctuations.
The snowy whiteness all around me created the feeling of peace, but
alarm and curiosity were beginning to grow inside me. Throwing back the
weightless blanket, I sat up. The underclothing I wore reminded me of a
hunting outfit: it fitted snugly yet one wasn't aware of its presence. I
gave a sudden start, though, when I noticed the blurred image of a person
sitting up in bed reflected in the dim surface of the screen. He wasn't at
all like me, seemed taller, younger and had a more athletic build.
"You may get up and walk to and fro," said a woman's voice.
I looked around involuntarily, though I realized I wouldn't see anybody
in the room.
"Don't be surprised at anything, not at anything!" I ordered myself,
and obediently walked to the wall and back.
"Once more," said the voice.
I repeated the exercise, guessing that somebody, somewhere, was
observing me.
"Raise your arms."
I obeyed.
"Lower them. Once more. Now sit down. Stand up."
I conscientiously did everything required of me, without asking
questions.
"Well, and now lie down."
"I don't want to. What for?" I said.
"One more check-up in a state of quiet."
Some strange force lightly pushed me back on the pillow, and my own
hands pulled up the blanket. Curious. How did my unseen observer manage
that? Mechanically or by suggestion? The imp of protest inside me burst
stormily out.
"Where am I?"
"At home."
"But this is some kind of hospital room."
"It's an ordinary revitalizing room. We set it up in your home."
"Who's 'we'?"
"GEMS. Of the thirty-second district."
"GEMS?" I asked blankly.
"Central Medical Service. Have you forgotten?"
I fell silent. What could I answer?
"A partial loss of memory following shock," explained the voice. "Don't
try to make yourself remember. Don't strain yourself. Just ask, if you want
to know something."
"Then I'll do just that," I agreed. "Who are you, for instance?"
"A curator on duty. Vera-seven."
"What?" I asked in surprise. "Why seven?"
"You sound odd with your 'why seven?' Because in our sector, besides
me, there is Vera-one, Vera-two, and so on."
"And your last name?"
"I still haven't done anything remarkable enough for that."
It was dangerous to ask more. A clearly risky turn of affairs had set
in.
"Can you show yourself?" I asked.
"That is not obligatory."
Probably she's an ugly, disgusting old woman. Pedantic and nagging. I
heard laughter.
"Nagging, that's true," said the voice. "Pedantic? Maybe."
"Can you read the mind?" I asked embarrassed.
"Not I, but the cogitator. A special apparatus."
I did not answer, wondering whether the devilish apparatus could be
deceived.
"It can't be," said the voice.
"It's not fair, or even respectable."
"Wha-at?"
"It's not res-pec-ta-ble!" I cried angrily. "It's not nice! Dishonest!
To look and listen in isn't honest, and to crawl into a person's skull-box
is very low."
The voice was silent. Then it spoke severely and with reproach.
"The first patient in all my practice to object to the cogitator. We do
not tune it in to a healthy, sound person. But with a patient, we observe
everything: the nervous system, the heart vessels, the breathing apparatus,
all the functions of the body."
"Then why do you use it on me? I 'm sound as a bell."
"Usually observers do not meet their patients, but I am allowed to."
Now I could see who the voice belonged to. The reflecting surface of
the screen darkened like water in a muddy pool, and faded out. Looking
straight at me was the face of a young woman with short wavy hair. She was