In the second grade he built a portable machine, powered by a pocket
flashlight battery, which told each pupil how many good marks he
would receive during the coming week. Grown-ups considered the
machine uneducational and took it away from him.
After leaving grammar school Sergei attended the Technical School
for Electrochemistry. He paid no attention to the many pretty girls he
met there—perhaps because he saw them every day.
One fine June day he rented a boat and sailed down the Little Neva
to the Gulf of Finland. Near Volny Island he came upon a skiff with
two girls in it, strangers to him. They had run on to a sandbar and, in
attempting to float their boat, had broken the rudder. Sergei intro-
duced himself and helped them back to the dock where they had
rented the boat. After that he visited them frequently; the two friends
lived, like Sergei, on Vasilyevski Island, Svetlana on Sixth Street,
Liussia on Eleventh.
Liussia was attending a course in typewriting at the time, but
Svetlana was resting up from school; secondary school had provided
all the education she wanted. Besides, her well-off parents were
trying to persuade her that it was time to marry; she agreed in
principle, but had no intention of taking the first acceptable fellow
that came along.
In the beginning Sergei preferred Liussia, but he knew how to
behave toward her. She was so pretty, modest and easily embarrassed
that in her presence he too became embarrassed. Svetlana was quite
different: gay and quick-witted; in short, a daredevil. Though natu-
rally timid, Sergei felt happy when he was with her.
A year later, Sergei was visiting a friend in Roshdestwenka and
there met Svetlana, who was staying with relatives. A coincidence, of
course, but Sergei took it as providential. Day after day he walked in
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the woods and by the sea with her and was soon convinced that he
could not live without her.
Svetlana did not find him especially attractive. To her he was an
average fellow, and she dreamt of finding somebody unusual for her
partner through life. She went walking with Sergei in the woods and
by the sea only because she had to pass the time with someone.
One evening they were standing on the shore. On the smooth
surface of the water there lay, like a carpet woven by nymphs, a strip
of silvery moonlight. Everything was still, except for the nightingales
singing in the wild elders on the opposite shore.
‘How beautiful and quiet!’
‘Yes, it’s pretty’, answered Svetlana. ‘If only we could gather some
elder branches! But it’s too far for walking around on the shore. We
have no boat and we can’t walk on the water!’
They returned to the village and their respective lodgings. Sergei
didn’t go to bed that night. He took pencil and paper and filled page
after page with formulas and drawings. In the morning he went back
to the city and stayed there two days. When he returned he had a
bundle under his arm.
Late that evening he took his bundle with him on their walk to the
sea. At the water’s edge he opened it and took out two pairs of skates
for travelling on the water.
‘Here, put these water skates on’, he said. ‘I made them just for
you.’
They both put them on and skated easily over the water to the
other shore. The skates slid very nicely on the surface on the sea.
On the other shore Svetlana and Sergei broke off elder branches
and then, each with a bundle, went slowly over the sea in the
moonlight.
From then on they went skating every evening over the mirror-
smooth surface of the water, the skates leaving behind them only a
narrow, hardly visible trace, which immediately disappeared.
One day Sergei stopped out on the sea. Svetlana slowly approached
him.
‘Do you know something?’, asked Sergei.
‘No. What’s wrong?’
‘Do you know, Svetlana, that I love you?’
‘Of course not!’, she answered ironically.
‘Then you like me a little, too?’
‘I can’t say that. You’re a fine fellow, but I have a different ideal of a
A Modest Genius
235
husband. I can only love a really extraordinary man, but to tell you
the truth, you’re just a good average fellow.’
‘Well, you’re honest, anyway’, said a downcast Sergei.
They skated back to the shore in silence, and the next day Sergei
returned to the city. For a time he felt wretched. He lost weight and
wandered aimlessly through the streets. He often left the city to stroll
about. In the evenings he went home to his little workroom.
One day he met Liussia walking along the river. She was glad to see
him, and he noticed it immediately.
‘What are you doing here, Sergei?’
‘Nothing. Just walking. I’m on vacation.’
‘I’m just walking too. If you’d like, perhaps we could go over to
Cultural Park.’ She blushed as she made the suggestion.
They rode over to Yelagin Island and slowly walked along its
avenues. Later they met several more times to stroll around the city
and found that they were happy to be together.
One day Liussia came to Sergei’s house to take him off for a trip to
Pavlovsk.
‘What a disorganized room!’, she exclaimed. ‘All these machines
and flasks! What are they for?’
‘I go in for various little inventions in my free time.’
‘And I never suspected!’, said Liussia in amazement. ‘Could you
repair my typewriter? I bought it in a discount store; it’s old and the
ribbon keeps getting stuck.’
‘Sure, I’ll take a look at it.’
‘What’s this?’, she asked. ‘What an odd camera! I’ve never seen one
like it.’
‘It’s a very ordinary FED camera but it has an accessory that I built
just recently. With it you can photograph the future. You aim the
camera at a place whose future appearance you’d like to know, and
take the picture. But my machine isn’t perfected yet. You can
photograph things only three years ahead, no more than that as yet.’
‘Three years! That’s a lot. What a wonderful invention!’
‘Wonderful? Not at all’, said Sergei with a disdainful gesture. ‘It’s
very imperfect.’
‘Have you taken any pictures?’
‘Yes. A short time ago I went out to the suburbs and shot some film
there.’ He took several prints from his desk.
‘Here I photographed a birch in a meadow, without using the
accessory. Then here is the same tree in two years’ time.’
‘It’s grown a bit and has more branches.’
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Vadim Shefner
‘And here it is three years from now.’
‘But there’s nothing there!’, cried the astonished Liussia. ‘Just a
stump and next to it a pit, like a shell hole. And over there are a pair
of soldiers running along stooped. What strange uniforms they’re
wearing! I can’t understand the picture at all.’
‘Yes, I was surprised too, when I developed the picture. It looks to
me as though there are some kind of manoeuvres going on there.’
‘Sergei, you’d better burn that photo. It looks too much like a
military secret. That picture might fall into the hands of a foreign spy!’
‘You’re right, Liussia. I never thought of that.’ He tore up the
picture and threw it into the stove with a pile of other rubbish; then
he set fire to it.
‘Now I feel better’, said Liussia, obviously relieved. ‘But now take
my picture as I’ll be a year from now. In this chair over by the
window.’
‘But the accessory will only photograph a certain sector of space
and whatever is in it. So, if you’re not sitting in that chair a year from now, you won’t be in the picture.’
‘Take me anyway. Who knows, maybe I will be sitting in this chair
this day and hour next year!’
‘All right’, Sergei agreed. ‘I still have one picture left on this roll.’ He took the picture. ‘Come on, I’ll develop the film immediately and
make some prints. The bathroom is free today; no one is doing any
wash.’
He went into the bathroom and developed the film, then brought it
back to his room and hung it up near the window to dry.
Liussia took the film by the edges and peered at the last exposure. It
seemed to her that someone else was in the chair. At the same time
she was secretly wishing that she might be sitting there in a year’s
time. It’s probably me, she concluded, only I didn’t come out too well.
Once the film was dry, they went into the bathroom where the red
light was still on. Sergei put the strip of film into the enlarger, turned the machine on, and projected the image on to photographic paper.
He then quickly put the picture into the developer. On the paper the
features of a woman appeared. She sat in the chair and was
embroidering a large cat on a piece of cloth. The cat was almost
finished, all but the tail.
‘That’s not me sitting there!’ Liussia was disillusioned. ‘It’s a
different woman entirely.’
‘No, it’s not you’, Sergei agreed. ‘I don’t know who it is; I never saw
the woman before.’
A Modest Genius
237
‘Sergei, I think I’d better be going’, said Liussia. ‘You needn’t stop
by; I can have the typewriter repaired at the store.’
‘But at least let me bring you home!’
‘No, Sergei, there’s no need. I don’t want to get mixed up in this
business.’ She left.
My inventions bring me no luck, thought Sergei to himself. He took
a hammer and smashed the accessory.
2
About two months later, as Sergei was walking along Bolshoi Avenue,
he saw a young woman sitting on a bench and recognized her as the
unknown woman of the fateful photograph.
She turned to him: ‘Can you tell me the time?’
Sergei told her and sat down next to her. They chatted about the
weather and got acquainted. Sergei learned that her name was
Tamara. He saw her often and soon married her. They had a son,
whom Tamara named Alfred.
Tamara proved to be a very boring wife. Nothing roused much
interest from her. Day in and day out she sat in the chair by the
window and embroidered cats, swans and stags on little strips of cloth
which she then hung proudly on the wall. She didn’t love Sergei; she
had married him only because he had a room of his own and because
after her examinations at the Horse Trainers’ Institute she didn’t want
to work in the provinces. No one had authority to send a married
woman away.
Herself a boring person, she regarded Sergei too as boring, un-
interesting and insignificant. He was always spending his leisure time
inventing something; she didn’t approve, and thought it a senseless
waste of time. She was constantly scolding him for filling the room
with his machines and apparatuses.
To get more freedom of movement in the room, Sergei built his
LEAG or Local Effect Anti-Gravitation machine. With the aid of this
machine he could do his work on the ceiling of the room. He laid
flooring on the ceiling, set his desk on it, and brought up his
instruments and tools. In order not to dirty the wall on which he
walked up to the ceiling, he glued a narrow strip of linoleum on it.
From now on the lower part of the room belonged to his wife, and the
upper became his workroom.
Tamara was still dissatisfied: she was now afraid that the super-
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intendent might find out about the expansion of the room space and
demand double rent. Furthermore, it displeased her that Sergei
should walk so nonchalantly along the ceiling. It just didn’t seem
right.
‘At least have respect for my superior education and don’t walk
around that way with your head hanging down’, she cried up to him
from her chair. ‘Other women have normal husbands, but here I am,
stuck with a bird of ill omen.’
When Sergei came home from work (he worked at the Transenergy
Authority as a technical control officer), he ate quickly and went off
up the wall to his preserve. He frequently went for walks through the
city and its environs so as not to have to listen to Tamara’s constant
nagging. He became so used to hiking that he could have walked to
Pavlovsk with no difficulty.
One day he met Svetlana at the corner of Eighth Street and Sredni
Avenue.
‘I’ve married an extraordinary man since we last met’, were her
opening words. ‘My Petya is a real inventor. He’s working just now as
a beginning inventor at the Everything Everyday Research Institute,
but he’ll soon be promoted to the intermediate class. Petya has
already invented something all by himself: Don’t Steal soap.’
‘What kind of soap is that?’, asked Sergei.
‘The idea behind it is quite simple—but then every work of
genius is simple, of course. Don’t Steal is an ordinary toilet soap,
but its core is a piece of solidified, water-resistant, black India ink. If someone, let’s say your neighbour in the community house, steals
the soap and washes with it, he dirties himself physically as well as
morally.’
‘And if the soap isn’t stolen?’
‘Don’t ask silly questions!’, Svetlana flashed back angrily at him.
‘You’re just jealous of Petya!’
‘Do you ever see Liussia? How is she getting along?’
‘Oh, she’s the same as ever. I keep telling her to look for a suitable
extraordinary man and marry him, but she says nothing. She seems
bent on becoming an old maid.’
Soon afterwards the war began. Tamara and Alfred were evacuated;
Sergei went to the front. He began the war as a second lieutenant of
infantry and ended as a first lieutenant. He returned to Leningrad,
exchanged his uniform for civilian clothes and went back to his old
work at the Transenergy Authority. Shortly afterward, Tamara and
Alfred also returned, and life went on as before.
A Modest Genius
239
3
Years passed.
Alfred grew up, finished school, and went through the minimal
course requirements for the training of hotel personnel. Then he went
south and got a job in a hotel.
Tamara continued to embroider cats, swans and stags on wall
hangings. She had grown duller and more quarrelsome with the
years. She had also made the acquaintance of a retired director, a
bachelor, and was constantly threatening Sergei that, if he didn’t
finally come to his senses and give up inventing things, she would
leave him and go off with the director.
Svetlana was still quite satisfied with her Petya. Yes, he was going
places. He’d been promoted to intermediate inventor and had now
invented four-sided wheel spokes to replace the old-fashioned round
ones! She could really be proud of him.
Liussia still lived on Vasilyevski Island and worked as a secretary in
the office of Klavers, which designed and built replacement parts for
pianos. She hadn’t married and often thought of Sergei. She’d seen
him once from a distance but hadn’t approached him. He was walking
with his wife along Seventh Street on his way to the Baltika Cinema;
Liussia immediately recognized his wife as the woman in the photo-
graph.
Sergei thought often of Liussia, too; he tried to distract himself by
concentrating on new inventions. The things he made never seemed
to him quite perfect and therefore he thought he had no right to get
involved with more difficult ones. Recently he had invented a Quarrel
Measurer And Ender and installed it in the kitchen of the community
house where he lived. The apparatus had a scale with twenty
divisions, which measured the mood of the lodger and the intensity
of a quarrel that might be going on. The needle trembled at the first
unfriendly word and slowly approached the red line. If it reached the
line, the Quarrel Ender went into action. Soft, soothing music filled
the room; an automatic atomizer emitted a cloud of valerian and
White Night perfume; and on the screen of the machine appeared a
fellow who leaped about in a comical way, bowed low to the viewers
and kept repeating: ‘Bet at peace with one another, citizens!’
Due to the machine people would make up in the early stages of a
quarrel, and all the lodgers in the house were quite grateful to Sergei
for his modest invention.
View from Another Shore : European Science Fiction Page 38