Noon: 22nd Century tnu-1

by Boris Strugatsky

  “What a mess!”

  “Yeah. You should’ve seen his face.”

  “What a mess, what a mess! Which section?”

  “One twenty-six oh three. Approximately. Aural associations.”

  “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.”

  “Casparo sent her off to get some sleep. She’s sitting in Room Sixteen, crying.”

  The two people in white disappeared. Zvantsev could hear them talking as they went down the staircase, but he no longer could make out the words. He closed the door and returned to the chair.

  So, some Jean had almost screwed up the aural association center. Disgraceful! Casparo had grabbed her by the arm. But what if he hadn’t grabbed her? Zvantsev folded his arms and closed his eyes. He knew almost nothing about the Great Experiment. He knew only that it was a great experiment, that it was the most complicated thing that science had ever come up against. To encode the distribution of excitations in each of billions of brain cells, to encode the linkages between the excitations, the linkages between the linkages. The smallest mistake threatened irrevocable distortions… A girl had almost annihilated a whole section… Zvantsev remembered that it was section number 12603, and he became afraid. Even if the probability of a mistake or distortion during the transfer of the code was very small… Twelve thousand sections, trillions of units of information. Casparo still hadn’t come.

  Zvantsev went out into the corridor again. He moved from candle to candle, toward the strange monotonous voice. Then he caught sight of a wide-open door, and the voice became quite loud. Beyond the door was an enormous hall, winking with hundreds of flames. Zvantsev saw panels with dials stretching along the walls. Several hundred people were sitting along the walls in front of the panels. They all wore white. The air in the hall was hot and heavy, and smelled of hot wax. Zvantsev realized that the ventilation and air-conditioning system was shut off. He went into the hall and looked around. He was searching for Casparo, but even if Casparo was here, it was impossible to pick him out among the hundreds of people in identical silvery coats with hoods pulled low.

  “Section one eighty-seven twenty-two filled,” said a voice. It was unnaturally quiet in the hall-there was only that voice and the rustle of many movements. Zvantsev spied a table with several armchairs in the center of the hall. He went over to the table.

  “Section one eighty-seven twenty-three filled.”

  A broad-shouldered man with his head propped up by his arms was sitting in one of the chairs opposite Zvantsev. He was sleeping, and he sighed heavily in his sleep.

  “Section one eighty-seven twenty-four filled.”

  Zvantsev looked at his watch. It was exactly 3:00 a.m. He saw a man in white come into the hall and disappear somewhere into the gloom, where nothing could be seen except the winking flames.

  “Section one eighty-seven twenty-five filled.”

  A man with a candle came over to the table, stood the candle in a puddle of wax, and sat down. He laid a folder full of papers on the table, turned over one page, and immediately fell asleep. Zvantsev watched his head sink lower and lower and at last come to rest on the papers.

  “Section one eighty-seven twenty-six filled.”

  Zvantsev once again glanced at his watch. It had taken little more than ninety seconds to fill two sections. The Great Encoding had been going on for ten days, and fewer than twenty thousand sections were full.

  “Section one eighty-seven twenty-seven filled.”

  And so on for ten days. Someone’s strong hand came to rest on Zvantsev’s shoulder. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”

  Zvantsev lifted his head and saw a round, tired face under a hood. Zvantsev recognized it.

  “Get to sleep. Right now.”

  “Professor Casparo,” Zvantsev said, getting up.

  “Get to sleep, get to sleep—” Casparo looked him in the eye.

  “Or if you can’t sleep, relieve somebody.”

  He walked quickly to one side, stopped, and again peered fixedly at Zvantsev. “I don’t recognize you,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter—get to sleep!”

  He turned his back and quickly walked along the rows of people sitting before the control boards. Zvantsev heard his harsh receding voice: “A half unit. Pay a little more attention, Leonid, half a unit… Good… fine… also good… A unit, Johnson, watch it more carefully… Good… also good…”

  Zvantsev got up and walked behind him, trying not to let him out of sight. Suddenly Casparo shouted, “Comrades! Everything is going beautifully! Just be a little more attentive! Everything’s going very well. Just watch the stabilizers, and everything will be fine!”

  Zvantsev bumped into a long table at which several people were sleeping. No one turned around, and none of the sleepers raised his head. Casparo had disappeared. Then Zvantsev walked at random along a yellow chain of flames in front of the control boards.

  “Section one eighty-seven nine zero filled,” said a new, fresh voice.

  Zvantsev realized that he was lost, and now did not know where the exit was, nor where Casparo had disappeared to. He sat on an overturned chair, his elbows resting on his knees, his chin propped on his hands, and stared at a winking candle in front of him. The candle was slowly guttering.

  “Section one eighty-seven ninety-eight… Eighty-seven ninety-nine… Eighty-eight zero zero… Filled… Filled.”

  “Aaaugh!” Someone shouted loudly, frightfully. Zvantsev jumped up. He saw that no one had turned around, but even so, everyone at once froze, their backs tensed. Twenty paces away, by one of the technicians’ chairs, a tall man was standing clutching his head and shouting, “Back! Back! Aaaugh!”

  Casparo appeared from somewhere and darted toward the board, walking at a headlong pace. It was quiet in the hall except for the sputtering of wax.

  “I’m sorry!” the tall man said. “I’m sorry… sorry…” he repeated.

  Casparo straightened up and shouted, “Listen to me! Sections one eighty-seven ninety-six, eighty-seven ninety-seven, eighty-seven ninety-eight, eighty-seven ninety-nine, eighty-eight zero zero! Re-tape! Do it over!”

  Zvantsev saw hundreds of people in white simultaneously raise their right hands and make some adjustment on their boards. The candle flames began to flicker.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” the man repeated.

  Casparo clapped him on the back. “Get to sleep, Henry,” he said. “Get to sleep right away. Calm down, it’s no big deal.”

  The man walked along the boards, repeating the same thing: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” No one turned around. Someone else already sat at his station.

  “Section one eighty-seven ninety-six filled,” said the fresh voice.

  Casparo stood a while, then slowly, stooping far over, he started walking past Zvantsev. Zvantsev moved toward him, and suddenly caught sight of his face. He stopped and let Cas-paro pass. Casparo went up to a small separate board, sank heavily into a chair, and sat there for several seconds. Then he roused himself, and, collapsing forward, pushed his face into the large eyepiece of a periscope which extended down through the floor.

  Zvantsev stood nearby, near the long table, with his gaze fixed on the tired, hunched back. He could still see Casparo’s face as it had looked in the flickering candlelight. He remembered that Casparo was no longer young either, only, say, five or six years younger than Okada. He thought, How many years has he lost in these ten days? There will be a reckoning for this, and soon!

  Two people walked up to Casparo. Instead of a hood, one of them wore a round, transparent helmet, which gleamed dimly in the candlelight. “We won’t make it,” the man in the helmet said quietly. He spoke to Casparo’s back.

  “How long?” Casparo asked without turning around.

  “Clinical death in two hours. Plus or minus twenty minutes.”

  Casparo turned around. “But he looks good… See for yourself.” He tapped the eyepiece with a finger.

  The man in the helmet shook his head.

  “Paralysis of th
e nerves,” the second one said very quietly. He looked back, ran his bulging eyes over Zvantsev, and, bending over toward Casparo, said something in his ear.

  Zvantsev recognized him. It was Professor Ivan Krasnov.

  “Very well,” said Casparo. “We’ll do it this way.” The two turned together and quickly disappeared into the darkness.

  Zvantsev groped for a chair, sat down, and closed his eyes. It’s over, he thought. They won’t make it. He’ll die. He’ll die completely.

  “Section one nine zero zero two filled,” said the voice. “Section one nine zero zero three filled… Section one nine zero zero four…”

  Zvantsev did not know anything about the encoding of nerve linkages. He imagined Okada lying on a table under a deathly white light, with a fine needle crawling slowly over the convolutions of his exposed brain, and that the code impulses were put down character after character on a long tape. Zvantsev understood perfectly well that in reality it wasn’t done like that at all, but his imagination kept sketching him the same picture: the shining needle crawling over the brain, and, recorded on an endless tape, the mysterious signs signifying memory, habits, associations, experience… And from somewhere death was creeping up, destroying cell after cell, linkage after linkage, and they had to outrace it.

  Zvantsev knew almost nothing about the encoding of nerve linkages. But he did know that the boundaries of the brain areas that carried out separate thought processes were still unknown. That the Great Encoding was possible only under conditions of the most extreme isolation and with the most precise registration of all irregular fields. Hence the candles and torches, and the camels on the highway, the empty villages, and the black windows of the microweather installation, and the halting of the moving roads. Zvantsev knew that a means of monitoring the encoding that did not distort it had not yet been found. That Casparo worked half-blind and anyhow was encoding things which, perhaps, were not at all what should be encoded. But Zvantsev also knew that the Great Encoding was the road toward the immortality of the human ego, because a person wasn’t arms and legs. A person was memory, habits, associations, a brain. A brain.

  “Section one ninety-two sixteen filled…”

  Zvantsev opened his eyes, got up, and went over to Casparo. Casparo was sitting looking straight ahead.

  “Professor Casparo,” said Zvantsev, “I am Zvantsev, the oceanographer. I must speak to Academician Okada.”

  Casparo raised his eyes and looked up at Zvantsev for a long time. His eyes were dull, half-closed. “That is impossible,” he said.

  They looked at each other silently for some time.

  “Academician Okada has been waiting for this information all his life,” Zvantsev said quietly.

  Casparo did not answer. He turned his eyes away and once again stared straight ahead. Zvantsev looked around. Darkness. Candle flames. White silvery hooded coats.

  “Section one ninety-two ninety-two filled,” said the voice.

  Casparo got up and said, “That’s it. The end.”

  And Zvantsev saw a small red lamp winking on the board by the eyepiece of the periscope. The light, he thought. So it’s over.

  “Section one ninety-two ninety-four filled…”

  Out of the darkness a small girl in a fluttering lab coat came running at top speed. She darted straight to Casparo, knocking Zvantsev out of the way.

  “Sir,” she said despairingly, “there’s only one free section left.”

  “We won’t need any more,” Casparo said. He got up and ran into Zvantsev. “Who are you?” he asked tiredly.

  “I’m Zvantsev, the oceanographer,” Zvantsev said quietly. “I had wanted to speak to Academician Okada.”

  “That is impossible,” Casparo said. “Academician Okada is dead.”

  He bent over the board and turned four switches, one after another. A blinding light flashed on under the ceiling of the enormous hall.

  It was already light when Zvantsev went down into the lobby. The grayish light of a foggy morning poured into the enormous windows, but there was a feeling that any moment now the sun would burn through, and the day would be clear. There was no one in the lobby. A crumpled coverlet lay on the sofa. Several candles were burning down on the table between jars and dishes of food. Zvantsev looked back at the staircase. Voices sounded from above. Mikhailov, who had promised to go with Zvantsev, was somewhere up there.

  Zvantsev went over to the sofa and sat down. Three young men came down the staircase. One went up to the table and started wolfing down food with his bare hands. He moved plates around, dropped a soft-drink bottle, grabbed it, and started drinking. The second was sleeping as he walked, scarcely moving his eyes. The third, holding the sleeper back by the shoulders, was saying enthusiastically, “Casparo told Krasnov. That’s all he said. And right away the old man collapsed right onto the board. We grabbed him and took him to the study, and Serezhka Kruglov was already sleeping there. So we laid the two of them together.”

  “I can’t believe it,” the first one said indistinctly—he was still chewing. “Did we really have time for so much?”

  “Damn it, how many times do I have to tell you! Ninety-eight percent. And some tenths—I don’t remember exactly.”

  “Really ninety-eight percent?”

  “I see you’re zonked out altogether. You don’t understand what people are saying to you.”

  “I understand all right, but I don’t believe it.” The one who was eating suddenly sat down and grabbed a jar of preserves. “I can’t believe it. Things seemed to be going quite poorly.”

  “Guys,” muttered the sleepy one. “Let’s go, huh? I’ve plain had it.”

  All three suddenly made a great commotion and left. More and more people were coming down the staircase. Sleepy ones, barely dragging their legs. Excited ones, with bulging eyes and voices hoarse from long silence.

  It doesn’t look like a funeral, Zvantsev thought. He knew that Okada was dead, but he didn’t believe it. It seemed as if the Academician had simply fallen asleep, except that no one knew yet how to wake him. No matter—they would find out. Ninety-eight percent, he thought. Not bad at all It was very strange, but he did not feel the grief of loss. There was no mourning. He felt only something on the order of dissatisfaction, thinking that he would have to wait, perhaps for a long time, for Okada to return. As had happened before, when Okada had gone away to the mainland for an extended stay.

  Mikhailov touched him on the shoulder. He was wearing neither rain cape nor lab coat. “Let’s go, Comrade Zvantsev.”

  Zvantsev got up and walked after him toward the doorway. The heavy double doors opened by themselves, easily and silently.

  The sun had not yet come up, but it was light, and the clouds were rapidly disappearing from the blue-gray sky. Zvantsev saw low cream-colored buildings, streets sprinkled with red fallen leaves running between them. People were coming out of the Institute and dispersing among the streets in groups of twos or threes.

  Someone shouted, “The fellows from Kostroma are relaxing in building six, floors two and three!”

  Small, many-legged litter robots moved along the streets in sparse files. They left behind them dry, gray, clean concrete.

  “Would you like a candy bar?” asked Mikhailov.

  Zvantsev shook his head. They walked toward the highway between rows of squat yellow buildings that lacked doors and windows.

  There were many buildings-a whole street of them. These were the blocks with the quasibiomass, the repository of Okada’s brain-twenty thousand sections of biomass, twenty squat buildings, each with a frontage of thirty meters, each extending six levels underground.

  “Not bad for a start,” said Mikhailov. “But we can’t go on like this. Twenty buildings for one person is too much. If so much space were assigned to each of us—” He laughed and threw the candy wrapper onto the pavement.

  Who knows? thought Zvantsev. Maybe one suitcase will be enough for you. And for me too. The litter robot, its long legs tapping o
n the pavement, toddled unhurriedly over to the discarded wrapper.

  “Hey, Saka!” Mikhailov shouted suddenly. A truck drew up to them and stopped, and their driver with the flashing eyes stuck his head out of the cab. They all climbed in. “Where are your camels?” Mikhailov asked.

  “They’re grazing somewhere,” the driver said. “I’ve had enough of them. They spat at me again while I was unharnessing them.”

  Mikhailov was already asleep, with his head on Zvantsev’s shoulder.

  The driver, small and dark-eyed, drove the heavy truck fast, and sang quietly, almost without moving his lips. It was some old, half-forgotten song. At first Zvantsev listened, and then suddenly he caught sight of helicopters moving low over the highway. There were six of them. The quiet zone, so recently dead, was now teeming with life. The moving roads had started up. People were hurrying to their homes. The microweather installations had started working, as had the traffic lights on the highway. Someone was already tearing off the plywood sheet with the rough lettering. The radio would be announcing that the Great Encoding had been completed and had gone satisfactorily. The helicopters must be carrying in a press group. They would stereocast an image of the squat yellow buildings and the burned-out candles before the powered-down control boards to the whole world. And someone, of course, would creep in to wake up Casparo, and they would grab the interloper by the seat of his pants, and in the heat of the moment maybe even give him a sound thrashing. And the whole world soon would know that human beings would soon become eternal. Not humanity, but human beings, each individual human being, each personality. Well, perhaps at first only the best ones… Zvantsev looked at the driver. “Comrade,” Zvantsev said, smiling, “do you want to live forever?”

  “Yes,” answered the driver, also smiling. “And I will live forever.”

  “I want to too,” said Zvantsev.

  15. Natural Science in the Spirit World

  Kochin, the lab assistant, tiptoed up to the door and looked into the bedroom. The esper was sleeping. He was fairly elderly, and his face was very unhappy. He was lying on his side with his hand under his cheek. When Kochin opened the door, the esper made a smacking sound and said distinctly, “I haven’t got my sleep in yet. Leave me alone.”