Noon: 22nd Century tnu-1

by Boris Strugatsky

  The sun set, and multicolored reflections began to leap along the gray slopes of the basin. Kondratev very soon noticed that chaos did not reign unchecked in the raging, hellish kitchen. Certain regular, distinct shadows appeared now and then in the smoke and flame, sometimes unmoving, sometimes rushing headlong. It was very difficult to get a proper look at them, but once the smoke suddenly cleared for several instants, and Kondratev got a fairly clear view of a complicated machine like a daddy longlegs. The machine jumped in place, as if trying to extricate its legs from some viscous fiery mass, or else it kneaded that flaming mass with its long sparkling articulations. Then something flashed under it, and again it was covered by clouds of orange smoke.

  Over Kondratev’s head a small helicopter sputtered by. Kondratev raised his head and watched it. The helicopter flew over the covering, then suddenly turned sharply to the side and crashed down like a stone. Kondratev gave a cry, but the helicopter was already sitting on the “roof” of the covering. It seemed simply to be hanging motionless above the tongues of flame. A minute black figure got out of the helicopter, bent over, resting its hands on its knees, and looked down into hell.

  “Tell them I’ll be back tomorrow morning!” shouted someone behind Kondratev’s back.

  The navigator turned around. Nearby, buried in luxuriant lilac bushes, stood two neat one-story houses with large lit-up windows. The windows were half hidden in the bushes, and the lilac branches, swaying in the wind, stood out against a background of bright blue rectangles in delicate openwork silhouettes. He could hear someone’s steps. Then the steps stopped for a second, and the same voice shouted, “And ask your mother to tell Ahmed.”

  The windows in one of the houses went dark. From the other house came the strains of a sad melody. Grasshoppers chirred in the grass, and he could hear the drowsy chirping of birds. Anyhow, I have nothing to do at this factory, thought Kondratev.

  He got up and headed back. He floundered for a few minutes in the bushes, looking for the path, then found it and started walking among the pines. The path showed dull white under the stars. In a few more minutes Kondratev saw a bluish light in front of him—the gas lamps on the signpost—and almost at a run he came out to the moving road. It was empty.

  Kondratev, jumping like a hare and shouting “Hup! Hup!,” ran over to the strip moving in the direction of the city. The ribbons shone gently underfoot, and to the right and left the dark masses of bushes and trees rushed backward. Far in front of him in the sky was a bluish glow-the city. Kondratev suddenly felt fiercely hungry.

  He got off at a veranda with tables, the one near the sign that said YELLOW FACTORY—1 KM. From the veranda came light, noise, and appetizing smells; and all the tables were taken. Looks like the whole world eats supper here, Kondratev thought with disappointment, but all the same he went up the steps and stopped at the threshold. The great-great-grandchildren were drinking, eating, laughing, talking, shouting, and even singing.

  A long-legged great-great-grandchild from the nearest table tugged at Kondratev’s sleeve. “Sit down, sit down, comrade,” he said, getting up.

  “Thank you,” muttered Kondratev, “But what about you?”

  “Never mind! I’ve eaten, don’t worry.”

  Kondratev sat down uneasily, resting his hands on his knees. The person opposite him, an enormous dark-faced man who had been eating something very appetizing from a bowl, looked up at him suddenly and asked indistinctly, “Well, what’s going on over there? They drawing it out?”

  “Drawing what out?” asked Kondratev.

  Everyone at the table looked at him.

  The dark man, distorting his face, swallowed and said, “You from Anyudin?”

  “No,” said Kondratev.

  A thickset youth sitting on the left said happily, “I know who you are! You’re Navigator Kondratev from the Taimyrl!”

  Everyone became more lively. The dark-faced man immediately raised his right hand and introduced himself. “I am yclept Ioann Moskvichev. Or Ivan, as we say today.”

  A young woman, sitting at the right, said, “Elena Zavadskaya.”

  The thickset youth, shuffling his feet under the table, said, “Basevich. Meteorologist. Aleksandr.”

  A small pale girl, squeezed in between the meteorologist and Ivan Moskvichev, gaily chirped that she was Marina.

  Ex-Navigator Kondratev rose and bowed.

  “I didn’t recognize you at first either,” declared the dark-faced Moskvichev. “You’ve gotten a lot better. We people here have been sitting and waiting. We’ve got nothing left to do but sit and eat sacivi. This afternoon they offered us twelve places on a food tanker—they thought we wouldn’t take them. Like idiots we started drawing straws, and in the meantime they loaded a group from Vorkuta onto the tanker. Really great guys! Ten people barely squeezed into the twelve places, and the other five were left here.” He laughed unexpectedly. “And we sit eating sacivi… By the way, would you like a helping? Or have you already eaten?”

  “No, I haven’t,” said Kondratev.

  Moskvichev rose from the table. “Then I’ll bring you some.”

  “Please,” Kondratev said gratefully.

  Ivan Moskvichev went off, pushing his way through the tables.

  “Have some wine,” Zavadskaya said, pushing a glass over to Kondratev.

  “Thank you, but I don’t drink,” Kondratev said automatically. But then he remembered that he wasn’t a spacer, and never again would be one. “Excuse me. On second thought, I will, with pleasure.”

  The wine was aromatic, light, good. Nectar, thought Kondratev. The gods drink nectar. And eat sacivi. I haven’t tried sacivi in a long time.

  “Are you traveling with us?” squeaked Marina.

  “I don’t know,” said Kondratev. “Maybe. Where are you going?”

  The great-great-grandchildren looked at each other. “We’re going to Venus,” said Aleksandr. “You see, Moskvichev has got the urge to turn Venus into a second Earth.”

  Kondratev put down his glass. “Venus?” he asked mistrustfully. He himself remembered what Venus was like. “Has your Moskvichev ever been on Venus?”

  “He works there,” said Zavadskaya, “but that’s not the point. What is important is that he hasn’t supplied the transportation. We’ve been waiting for three days.”

  Kondratev remembered how he had once orbited Venus in a first-line interplanetary ship for thirty-three days and had decided not to land. “Yes,” he said. “That’s terrible, waiting so long.”

  Then he looked with horror at small pale Marina and imagined her on Venus. Radioactive deserts, he thought. Black storms.

  Moskvichev returned and crashed a tray covered with plates onto the table. Among the plates stuck out a pot-bellied bottle with a long neck. “Here,” he said. “Eat, Comrade Kondratev. Here is the sacivi itself—you recognize it? Here, if you like, is the sauce. Drink this—here’s ice—Pegov is talking to Anyudin again, and they promise a ship tomorrow at six.”

  “Yesterday they promised us a ship ‘tomorrow at six’ too,” said Aleksandr.

  “Well, now it’s for sure. The starship pilots are coming back. D-ships aren’t your piddling food tankers. Six hundred people a flight, and the day after tomorrow we’ll be there.”

  Kondratev took a sip from his wineglass and started in on the food. His table companions were arguing. Evidently except for Moskvichev they were all new volunteers, and they were all going to Venus. Moskvichev exemplified the present Venusian population, oppressed by the severe natural conditions. For him everything was perfectly clear. As a Venusian he gave Earth seventeen percent of its energy, eighty-five percent of its rare metals, and lived like a dog, that is, did not see the blue sky for months at a time, and waited for weeks his turn to lie for a while on greenhouse grass. Working under these conditions was of course intolerably difficult; Kondratev was in full agreement.

  The volunteers also agreed, and they were setting off for Venus with great eagerness, but by this mean
s they pursued quite various ends. Thus squeaky Marina, who turned out to be some sort of heavy-systems operator, was going to Venus because on Earth her heavy-systems work had ceased expanding. She did not want to go on moving houses from place to place or digging basins for factories any more. She yearned to build cities on swamps, and for ferocious storms, for underground explosions. And for people to say afterward, “Marina Chernyak built these cities!” There was nothing to be said against her plans. Kondratev was in full agreement with Marina too, although he would have preferred letting her grow a bit more and, by means of specialized physical training, making her more of a match for swamps, storms, and underground explosions.

  Aleksandr the meteorologist was in love with Marina Chernyak, but it wasn’t only that. When Marina had asked him for the third time to cut the comedy, he became very judicious and proved logically that for terrestrials there were only two ways out: since the work on Venus was so hard, we had either to abandon it entirely, or to improve the working conditions. Could we, however, desert a place where we had once set foot? No, we could not! Because there was the Great Mission of Humanity, and there was the Hour of the Earthman, with all the consequences flowing therefrom. Kondratev agreed even with this, although he strongly suspected that Aleksandr was continuing to exercise his wit.

  But Elena Zavadskaya was going to Venus with the most unexpected intentions. In the first place, she turned out to be a member of the World Council. She was categorically opposed to the conditions under which Moskvichev and twenty thousand of his comrades worked. She was also categorically opposed to cities on swamps, to underground explosions, and to new graves over which the black winds would sing the legends of heroes. In short, she was going to Venus in order to study the local conditions carefully and to take necessary measures toward Venus’s decolonization. She conceived the Earthman’s mission to be the establishment of automatic factories on alien planets. Moskvichev knew all this. Zavadskaya hung over him like the sword of Damocles, threatening all his plans. But besides that, Zavadskaya was an embryomechanical surgeon. She could work without a clinic, under any conditions, up to her waist in a swamp, and there were still very few such surgeons on Earth. On Venus they were irreplaceable. So Moskvichev held his tongue, evidently hoping that eventually everything would work out somehow. Kondratev, coming to the conclusion that Zavadskaya’s method was irrefutable, got up and quietly went out onto the porch.

  The night was moonless and clear. Above the dark, huge, formless forest, bright white Venus hung low. Kondratev looked at it a long time and thought, Maybe I should have a try there? It wouldn’t matter as what—ditchdigger, a leader of some sort, demolition man. It can’t be that I’m no good for anything at all.

  “Are you looking at it?” came a voice out of the darkness. “I am too. I’m waiting until it sets, and then I’ll go to bed.” The voice was calm and tired. “I think and think, you know. Planting gardens on Venus… drilling into the moon with an enormous anger. In the last analysis, that’s the meaning of our existence, expending energy. And, as much as possible, in such a way that it’ll be interesting to you and useful to somebody else. And it’s gotten rather difficult to expend energy on Earth. We have everything, we’re too powerful. A contradiction, if you like. Of course, even today there are many people who work at full output—researchers, teachers, doctors in preventive medicine, people in the arts. Agrotechnicians, waste-disposal specialists. And there always will be a lot of them. But what about the rest? Engineers, machine operators, doctors in curative medicine. Of course some go in for art, but the majority look in art not for escape but for inspiration. Judge for yourself—wonderful young guys. There’s too little room for them! They have to blow things up, remake things, build things. And not build just a house, but at least a world—Venus today, Mars tomorrow, something else the day after tomorrow. The interplanetary expansion of the human race is beginning—like the discharge of some giant electric potential. Do you agree with me, comrade?”

  “I agree with you too,” said Kondratev.

  8. Cornucopia

  Evgeny and Sheila were working. Evgeny was sitting at a table, reading Harding’s Philosophy of Speed. The table was piled high with books, microbook tapes, albums, and files of old newspapers. On the floor, among scattered microbook cases, sat a portable access board for the Informatoreum. Evgeny read quickly, fidgeting with impatience and making frequent notations on a scratch pad. Sheila was sitting in a deep armchair, with her legs crossed, reading Evgeny’s manuscript. The room was bright and nearly quiet—colored shadows flashed by on the stereovision screen, and the tender strains of an ancient South American melody could barely be heard.

  “This is an amazing book,” said Evgeny. “I can’t even slow down. How did he do it?”

  “Harding?” Sheila said absently. “Yes, Harding is a great craftsman.”

  “How does he do it? I don’t understand what his secret is.”

  “I don’t know, dear,” Sheila said without taking her eyes off the manuscript. “No one knows. He himself doesn’t know.”

  “You get an amazing feel of the rhythm of the thought and the rhythm of the words. Who is he?” Evgeny looked at the preface. “Professor of structural linguistics. Aha. That explains it.”

  “That explains nothing,” said Sheila. “I’m a structural linguist too.”

  Evgeny glanced at her, and then immersed himself again in his reading. The twilight was thickening outside the open window. Tiny lightning-bug sparks flashed in the dark bushes. Late birds called to one another sleepily.

  Sheila gathered up the pages. “Wonderful people!” she said loudly. “Such daring!”

  “Really?” Evgeny exclaimed happily, turning toward her.

  “Did you people really endure all that?” Sheila looked at Evgeny with eyes wide. “You went through all that and still remained human. You didn’t die of fear. You didn’t go crazy from loneliness. Honestly, Evgeny, sometimes I think you really are a hundred years older than I.”

  “Precisely,” said Evgeny.

  He got up, crossed the room, and sat down by Sheila’s feet. She ran her fingers through his red hair, and he pressed his cheek to her knee.

  “You know what was the most frightening part of all?” he said. “After the second ether bridge. When Sergei lifted me out of the acceleration cradle and I started to go to the control room, and he wouldn’t let me.”

  “You didn’t write about that,” said Sheila.

  “Falin and Pollack were still in the control room,” said Evgeny. “Dead,” he added after a silence.

  Sheila stroked his head silently.

  “You know,” he said, “in a certain sense ancestors are always richer than descendants. Richer in dreams. The ancestors dream about things that will be mere routine for the descendants. Oh, Sheila, that was a dream—to get to the stars! We had given everything for that dream. But you flit off to the stars the way we flew home to Mother for summer vacation. You people are poor, poor!”

  “Each age has its dream,” said Sheila. “Your dream took man to the stars, while ours is returning him to Earth. But it will be a completely different person.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Evgeny.

  “We ourselves don’t understand it properly yet. It is a dream, after all. Homo omnipotens. Master of every atom in the universe. Nature has too many laws. We discover them and use them, but still they get in our way. You can’t break a law of nature. You can only obey it. And that’s very boring, when you stop to think about it. But Homo omnipotens will just change the laws he doesn’t like. Just up and change them.”

  Evgeny said, “In the old days such people were called magicians. And they chiefly inhabited fairy tales.”

  “Homo omnipotens will inhabit the universe. The way you and I do this room.”

  “No,” said Evgeny. “That I don’t understand. That is somehow beyond me. Probably I’m a very prosaic thinker. Somebody even told me yesterday that I was boring to talk to. And I didn’t ta
ke offense. I really don’t understand everything yet.”

  “Who was it that said you were boring?” Sheila asked angrily.

  “Well, somebody. It doesn’t matter—I really wasn’t up to my usual form. I was in a great hurry to get home.”

  Sheila took him by the ears and looked him straight in the eyes. “The person who said that to you,” she muttered, “is a jackass and an ingrate. You should have looked down your nose at him and said, ‘I gave you the road to the stars, and my father gave you the road to everything you have today.’”

  Evgeny grinned. “Well, people forget that. Ingratitude to ancestors is the ordinary thing. Take my great-grandfather. He died in the siege of Leningrad, and I don’t even remember his name.”

  “Well, you should,” said Sheila.

  “Sheila, my dear, Sheila, my sweet,” Evgeny said lightly, “the reason descendants are forgetful is that ancestors aren’t touchy. Take me for example—the first person ever born on Mars. Who knows about that?” He took her in his arms and started to kiss her. There was a knock at the door and Evgeny said with annoyance, “Wouldn’t you know it!”

  “Come in!” called Sheila.

  The door opened a bit, and the voice of their neighbor Yurii the waste-disposal engineer asked, “Am I interrupting something?”

  “Come in, Yurii, come on in,” said Sheila.

  “Well, if I’m interrupting, I’ve already interrupted,” Yurii said, and came in. “Let’s go into the garden,” he requested.

  “What is there new to see in the garden?” asked Evgeny, surprised. “Let’s watch stereovision instead.”

  “I have a stereovision set of my own at home,” said Yurii. “Come on, Evgeny, tell Sheila and me something about Louis Pasteur.”