Noon: 22nd Century tnu-1

by Boris Strugatsky

  “So can someone septic come in?” Pol asked again. “Or is this a bad time?”

  “The Pilgrim,” one of the people sitting on the bench said in a bored voice. “Come on in, Pilgrim. We’re all septic here.”

  Pol went in. The man with the bored voice said into space, “Peasants, I propose we look over the analyses one more time. Maybe there’s still not enough protein.”

  “There’s even more protein than we calculated,” said one of the players of this strange game. An oppressive silence reigned; only the blows rang out, and somebody said from time to time, “Liar, you guessed wrong.”

  Ha! thought Pol. All is not for the best in the surgical laboratory.

  Kostylin suddenly pushed the players apart and walked out into the middle of the room. “A proposal,” he said briskly. Everyone, even the ones poring over their notes, turned toward him. “Let’s go swimming.”

  “Let’s go,” the man with the bored voice said decisively. “We’ve got to think it all out from the beginning.”

  No one responded further to the proposal. The surgeons spread out over the room and were quiet once again.

  Kostylin went up to Pol and grasped him by the shoulders. “Let’s go, Polly,” he said sadly. “Let’s go, boy. We won’t be downhearted, right?”

  “Of course not, Lin,” said Pol. “If it doesn’t work today, it’ll work day after tomorrow.”

  They went out onto the sunny street. “Don’t hold back, Lin,” said Pol. “Don’t be afraid to cry a little on my shoulder. Don’t hold back.”

  There were about one hundred thousand stock-raising farms on the Planet. There were farms that raised cattle, farms that raised pigs, farms that raised elephants, antelope, goats, llamas, sheep. In the middle stream of the Nile there were two farms which were trying to raise hippopotamuses.

  On the Planet there were about two hundred thousand grain farms growing rye, wheat, corn, buckwheat, millet, oats, rice, kaoliang. There were specialized farms like Volga-Unicorn, and broad-based ones. Together they provided the foundation for abundance—giant, very highly automated complexes producing foodstuffs: everything from pigs and potatoes to oysters and mangoes. No accidental mishap, no catastrophe, could now threaten the Planet with crop failure and famine. The system for ample production, established once and for all, was maintained completely automatically and had developed so swiftly that it had been necessary to take special precautions against overproduction. Just as there had never been a breathing problem, now mankind had no problem eating.

  By evening Pol already had an idea, though only the most general, of what the livestock farmers did. The Volga Farm was one of the few thousand stock farms in the temperate zone. Evidently here you could busy yourself with practical genetics, embryomechanical veterinary science, the production side of economic statistics, zoopsychology, or agrological cybernetics. Pol also encountered here one soil scientist who was evidently loafing-he drank milk fresh from the cow, and courted a pretty zoopsychologist all out, continually striving to entice her off to the swamps of the Amazon, where there was still something for a self-respecting soil scientist to do.

  There were about sixty thousand head in the Volga-Unicorn herd. Pol very much liked the herd’s total autonomy—around the clock cybers and autovets cared for the cattle as a group, and each individually. The herd, in its turn, around the clock, served, on the one hand, the delivery-line processing complex and, on the other, the ever-growing scientific demands of the stock-raisers. For example, you could get in touch with the dispatch office and demand of the cowherd on duty an animal seven hundred twenty-two days old, of such-and-such a color and with such-and-such parameters, descended from the pedigreed bull Mikolaj II. In half an hour the designated animal, accompanied by a manure-smeared cyber, would be waiting for you in the receiving compartment of, say, the genetics lab.

  Moreover, the genetics lab conducted the most insane experiments and functioned as the continual source of a certain friction between the farm and the processing complex. The processing workers, humble but ferocious guardians of world gastronomy, would be driven to a frenzy by the discovery in the regular cattle consignment of a monstrous beast reminiscent in appearance, and, more important, in flavor, of Pacific crab. A representative of the complex would quickly appear on the farm. He would immediately go to the genetics lab and demand to see “the creator of this unappetizing joke.” All one hundred eighty staff members of the genetics lab (not counting schoolchildren doing field work) would invariably step forward to claim the title of creator. The representative of the complex would, with restraint, recall that the farm and the complex were responsible for the uninterrupted supply to the delivery line of all forms of beef, and not of frog’s legs or canned jellyfish. The one hundred eighty progressively inclined geneticists would object as one man to this narrow approach to the supply problem. To them, the geneticists, it seemed strange that such an experienced and knowledgeable worker as so-and-so should hold such conservative views and should attach no significance to advertising, which, as everyone knew, existed to alter and perfect the taste of the populace. The processing representative would remind them that not one new food product could be introduced into the distribution network without the approbation of the Public Health Academy. (Shouts from the crowd of geneticists: “The great heroes saving us from indigestion!” “The Appendix-Lovers’ Society!”) The processing representative would spread his hands and indicate by his entire appearance that he was helpless. The shouts would turn into a muted growl and soon die out: the authority of the Public Health Academy was enormous. Then the geneticists would take the processing representative through the laboratories to show him “a little something new.” The processing representative would go pale, and assert with oaths that “all this” was completely inedible. In response the geneticists would give him a formal tasting consisting of meat that did not need spices, meat that did not need salt, meat that melted in the mouth like ice cream, special meat for cosmonauts and nuclear technicians, special meat for expectant mothers, meat that could be eaten raw. The processing representative would taste, and then shout in ecstacy, “This is good! This is great!” and would demand amid oaths that all this should get through the experimental stage within the next year. Completely pacified, he would take his leave and depart, and within a month it would all start over again.

  The information gathered during the day encouraged Pol, and inspired him with a certainty that there was something to do here. For a start I’ll join the cyberneticists, I’ll herd cattle, thought Pol, sitting on the open veranda of the cafe and looking absentmin d-edly at a glass of carbonated sour milk. I’ll send half the litter robots into the fields. Let them catch flies. Evenings I’ll work with the geneticists. It’ll be neat if Irina turns out to be a geneticist. Of course they’d attach me to her. Every morning I’d send her a cyber with a bouquet of flowers. Every evening too, Pol finished the milk and looked down at the black field across the river. Young grass already showed faint green there. Very clever! thought Pol. Tomorrow the cybers will turn the herd around and drive it back. There we have it, shuttle pasture. But it’s all just routine—I see no new principles. Irina and I will develop cattle that eat dirt. Like earthworms. That will be something! If only the Public Health Academy…

  A large company, arguing noisily about the meaning of life, tumbled onto the veranda, and immediately began moving tables around. Someone muttered, “A person dies, and he doesn’t care whether he has successors or not, descendants or not.”

  “It doesn’t matter to Mikolaj II the bull, but—”

  “Stuff the bull! You don’t care either! You’re gone, dissolved, disappeared. You don’t exist, understand?”

  “Hold on, guys. There is a certain logic in that, of course. Only the living are interested in the meaning of life.”

  “I wonder where you would be if your ancestors had thought like that. You’d still be making furrows with a wooden plow.”

  “Nonsense! What has the me
aning of life got to do with anything here? It’s simply the law of the development of productive forces.”

  “What’s a law got to do with it?”

  “The fact that productive forces keep developing whether you like it or not. After the plow came the tractor, after the tractor, the cyber—”

  “Okay, leave our ancestors out of it. But do you mean there were people for whom the meaning of life consisted in inventing the tractor?”

  “Why are you talking nonsense? Why do you always talk nonsense? The question is not what any given person lives for but what the human race lives for! You don’t understand a thing, and—”

  “You’re the one who doesn’t understand a thing!”

  “Listen to me! Everybody listen! Peasants! I’ll explain everything to you-Ow!”

  “Let him talk! Let him talk!”

  “This is a complex question. There are as many people arguing about the meaning of their existence as there are people in—”

  “Shorter!”

  “—in existence. First, ancestors don’t have anything to do with it. A person is given life independently of whether he wants it or—”

  “Shorter!”

  “Well, then explain it yourself.”

  “Right, Alan, make it shorter.”

  “Shorter? Here you go: Life is interesting, ergo we live. And as for those who don’t find it interesting, well, right in Snegirevo there’s a fertilizer factory.”

  “‘Ataway, Allan!”

  “No, guys. There’s also a certain logic to this.”

  “It’s cracker-barrel philosophy! What does ‘interesting’ or ‘uninteresting’ mean? What do we exist for? That’s the question!”

  “So what does displacement of the perihelion exist for? Or Newton’s law?”

  “‘What for’ is the stupidest question there is. What does the sun rise in the east for?”

  “Bah! One fool brings that question up to lead a thousand sages astray.”

  “Fool? I’m as much a fool as you are sages.”

  “Forget the whole thing! Let’s talk about love instead!”

  “‘What is this thing called love?’”

  “What does love exist for-there’s the question! Well, Zhora?”

  “You know, peasants, pretend somebody is looking at you in a laboratory—people are just people. As to how philosophy begins… love, life…”

  Pol took his chair and squeezed into the company. They recognized him.

  “Ah! The Pilgrim! Pilgrim, what is love?”

  “Love,” said Pol, “is a characteristic property of highly organized matter.”

  “What’s the ‘organized’ for and what’s the matter for—there’s the question!”

  “So then will you—”

  “Pilgrim, know any new jokes?”

  “Yes,” said Pol, “but not any good ones.”

  “We aren’t very good ourselves.”

  “Have him tell one. Tell me a joke and I’ll tell you who you are.”

  Pol began, “A certain cyberneticist—” (laughter) “—invented a prognosticator, a machine that could foretell the future—a great, huge complex a hundred stories tall. For a start he asked the prognosticator the question, ‘What will I be doing in three hours?’ The prognosticator hummed away until morning, and then answered, ‘You’ll be sitting here waiting for me to answer your question.’”

  “Ye-es,” someone said.

  “What do you mean ‘ye-es’?” Pol said coolly. “You asked for it yourselves.”

  “Hey peasants, why are all these cyberjokes so dumb?”

  “Not just ‘why’ but to what end, what for? There’s the real question!”

  “Pilgrim! What’s your name, Pilgrim?”

  “Pol,” Pol muttered.

  Irina came onto the veranda. She was more beautiful than the girls sitting at the table. She was so beautiful that Pol stopped listening. She smiled, said something, waved to someone, and sat down next to long-nosed Zhora. Zhora immediately bent over to her and asked her something, probably “what for?” Pol exhaled and noticed that his neighbor on the right was crying on his shoulder: “We simply can’t do it—we haven’t learned how. There’s no way Aleksandr can get that through his head. Such things can’t be done in bursts.”

  Pol finally recognized his neighbor—it was Vasya, the man with the bored voice, the same Vasya they had gone swimming with at noon.

  “Such things can’t be done in bursts. We aren’t even adjusting Nature—we’re smashing her to pieces.”

  “Ah… just what is the topic here?” Pol asked cautiously. He had absolutely no idea when and from where Vasya had appeared.

  “I was saying,” Vasya repeated patiently, “that a living organism that does not change its genetics outlives its time.”

  Pol’s eyes were glued to Irina. Long-nosed Zhora was pouring her champagne. Irina was saying something rapidly, tapping the glass with dark fingers.

  Vasya said, “Aha! You’ve fallen in love with Irina! Such a pity.”

  “With what Irina?” muttered Pol.

  “That girl there—Irina Egorovna. She worked for us in general biology.”

  Pol felt as if he had fallen on his face. “What do you mean ‘worked’?”

  “As I was saying, it’s a pity,” Vasya said calmly. “She’s leaving in a few days.”

  Pol saw only her profile, lit up by the sun. “For where?” he asked.

  “The Far East.”

  “Pour me some wine, Vasya,” said Pol. Suddenly his throat had become dry.

  “Are you going to work here?” asked Vasya. “Aleksandr said you had a good head on your shoulders.”

  “A good head,” muttered Pol. “A lofty unfurrowed brow and steely-calm eyes.”

  Vasya started to laugh. “Don’t go pine away,” he said. “We must both be all of twenty-five.”

  “No,” said Pol, shaking his head in despair. “What is there to hold me here? Of course I’m not staying here… I’ll go to the Far East.”

  A heavy hand came to rest on his shoulder, and Kostylin’s powerful bass inquired, “Just who is going to the Far East? Huh?”

  “Lin, listen, Lin,” Pol said plaintively. “How come I never have any luck?”

  “Irina,” said Vasya, getting up.

  Lin sat down in his place and drew over to himself a plate of cold meat. His face looked tired.

  Pol looked at him with fear and hope, just as in the old days when their neighbors on the floor would arrange a school-wide manhunt to catch the clever Lieber Polly and teach him not to be quite so clever.

  Kostylin wolfed down an enormous piece of meat and said in a bass that overcame the noise on the veranda, “Peasants! The new catalogue of publications in Russian has arrived. If you want it, ask at the club.”

  Everyone turned toward him.

  “What have they got?”

  “Is there any Mironov, Aleksandr?”

  “Yes,” said Kostylin.

  “How about The Iron Tower?”

  “Yes. I already ordered it.”

  “Pure as Snow?”

  “Yes. Look, there are eighty-six titles—I can’t remember everything.”

  The veranda began to empty quickly. Allan left. Vasya left. Irina left with long-nosed Zhora. She didn’t know anything. She hadn’t even noticed. And, of course, she didn’t understand. Nor would she remember. She’ll remember Zhora. She’ll remember the two-headed calf. But she won’t remember me.

  Kostylin said, “Unhappy love churns a person up. But it’s short-lived, Polly. You stay here. I’ll look after you.”

  “Maybe I’ll go to the Far East anyhow,” said Pol.

  “What for? You’ll only bother her and get underfoot. I know Irina and I know you. You’re fifty years stupider than her Prince Charming.”

  “Still…”

  “No,” said Kostylin. “Stay with me. Really, has your old buddy Lin ever led you astray?”

  Pol gave in. He patted Kostylin’s immense back affe
ctionately, got up, and went over to the railing. The sun had set, and a warm pellucid dusk had settled over the farm. Somewhere nearby a piano was playing and two voices were singing beautifully in harmony. Eh, thought Pol. He bent over the railing and quietly let out the yelp of a giant crayspider that has just lost its trail.

  11. The Assaultmen

  The satellite was enormous. It was a torus a mile and a quarter in diameter, divided inside into numerous chambers by massive bulkheads. The corridor rings were empty and bright, and the triangular hatchways leading into the bright empty rooms stood wide open. The satellite had been abandoned an improbably long time ago, perhaps even millions of years earlier, but the rough yellow floor was clean, and August Bader had said that he hadn’t seen even one speck of dust here.

  Bader walked in front, as befitted the discoverer and master. Gorbovsky and Falkenstein could see his big protruding ears, and the blondish tuft of hair on the top of his head.

  “I had expected to see signs of neglect here,” Bader said unhurriedly. He spoke in Russian, painstakingly enunciating each syllable. “This satellite interested us most of all. That was ten years ago. I saw that the outer hatches were open. I said to myself, ‘August, you will see a picture of horrifying disaster and destruction.’ I told my wife to stay on the ship. I was afraid of finding dead bodies here, you see.” He stopped before some sort of hatch, and Gorbovsky almost ran into him. Falkenstein, who had fallen a bit behind, caught up to them and stopped alongside, knitting his brows.

  “Aber here it was empty,” said Bader. “It was light here, very clean, and completely empty. Please, look around.” He made a smooth gesture with his arm. “I am inclined to think that this was the traffic control room of the satellite.”

  They pushed through to a chamber with a dome-shaped ceiling, and with a low semicircular stand in the middle. The walls were bright yellow, translucent, and they shone from within. Gorbovsky touched the wall. It was smooth and cool.

  “Like amber,” he said. “Feel it, Mark.”