Noon: 22nd Century tnu-1

by Boris Strugatsky

  Without taking his eyes off the Egg he stepped back a pace. Now nothing less than a direct hit from a rocket rifle could halt the processes that had begun under the gleaming shell. The embryomech had begun to adjust itself to the field conditions. They did not know how long this would take. But when the adjustment was finished, the embryo would begin development.

  Sidorov glanced at his watch. It was five after twelve. With an effort he unstuck the activator from the surface of the Egg, returned it to its case, and put it in his pocket. Then he looked at Galtsev and Sorochinsky. They were standing behind his back and watching the Egg silently. Sidorov touched the gleaming surface one last time and said, “Let’s go.”

  He ordered the observation post to be set up between the knoll and the melon field. The Egg could easily be seen from there—a silvery ball on the rust-colored slope under the dark-blue sky. Sidorov sent Sorochinsky over to the archaeologists, then sat down in the grass in the shade of the pterocar. Galtsev was already dozing, sheltered from the sun by the wing. Sidorov sucked on a fruit drop, looking sometimes at the top of the knoll, sometimes at the strange triangular cloud in the west. Finally he got out the binoculars. As he expected, the triangular cloud turned out to be the snowy peak of a mountain, perhaps a volcano. Through the binoculars he could see the narrow shadows of thawed patches, and could even make out snow patches lower than the uneven white edge of the main mass. Sidorov put down the binoculars and began to think about the embryo. It would probably hatch from the Egg at night. This was good, because daylight usually interfered with the operation of the movie cameras. Then he thought that Sermus had probably thrown a fit with Fischer, but had nonetheless started off for the Sahara. Then he thought that Mishima was now loading at the spaceport in Kirghizia, and once again he felt an aching pain in his right side. “Not getting any younger,” he muttered and glanced sidelong at Galtsev. Galtsev lay face down, with his hand under his head.

  Sorochinsky returned in an hour and a half. He was shirtless, his smooth, dark skin shiny with sweat. He was carrying his foppish suede jacket and his shirt under his arm. He squatted down in front of Sidorov and, teeth agleam, related that the archaeologists thanked them for the warning and found the test very interesting, that there were four of them, that schoolchildren from Baikovo and Severokurilsk were helping them, that they were excavating underground Japanese fortifications from the middle of the century before last, and, finally, that their leader was a “ve-ry nice girl.”

  Sidorov thanked him for this fascinating report and asked him to see about dinner, then sat down in the shade of the pterocar and, nibbling a blade of grass, squinted at the distant white cone. Sorochinsky woke up Galtsev, and they wandered off to the side, talking softly.

  “I’ll make the soup, and you do the main dish, Viktor,” said Sorochinsky.

  “We’ve got some chicken somewhere,” Galtsev said in a sleepy voice.

  “Here’s the chicken,” said Sorochinsky. “The archaeologists are fun. One has let his beard grow—not a bit of bare skin left on his face. They’re excavating Japanese fortifications from the forties of the century before last. There was an underground fortress here. The guy with the beard gave me a pistol cartridge. Look!”

  Galtsev muttered with displeasure, “Please, don’t shove it at me—it’s rusty.”

  The odor of soup wafted up.

  “That leader of theirs,” Sorochinsky continued. “What a nice girl! Blonde and slender—except she’s got fat legs. She sat me down in the pillbox and had me look through the embrasure. She says they could cover the whole northern shore from there.”

  “Well?” asked Galtsev. “Did they really shoot from there?”

  “Who knows? Probably. I was mostly looking at her. Then she and I started measuring the thickness of the ceiling.”

  “So you were measuring for two hours?”

  “Uh-huh. Then I realized she had the same last name as the guy with the beard, and I cleared out. But let me tell you, it’s really filthy in those casemates. It’s dark, and there’s mold on the walls. Where’s the bread?”

  “Here,” said Galtsev. “Maybe she’s just the guy with the beard’s sister?”

  “Could be. How’s the Egg coming?”

  “No action.”

  “Well, all right,” said Sorochinsky. “Comrade Sidorov, dinner’s ready.”

  Sorochinsky talked a lot as he ate. First he explained that the Japanese word for pillbox, tochika, derived from the Russian og-nevaya tochka, “firing point,” while the Russian word for pillbox, dot, though assumed by the ignorant to be an acronym for dolgov-remennaya ognevaya tochka, “permanent firing point,” must really come from the English “dot,” which meant “point.” Then he began a very long discourse on pillboxes, casemates, embrasures, and density of fire per square meter, so that Sidorov ate quickly, refused any fruit for desert, and left Galtsev to watch the Egg. He got into the pterocar and began to drowse. It was surprisingly quiet, except that Sorochinsky, while washing the dishes in a stream, would every so often break out singing. Galtsev was sitting with the field glasses, his eyes glued to the top of the knoll.

  When Sidorov awoke, the sun was setting, a dark-violet twilight was crawling up from the south, and it had gotten chilly. The mountains to the west had turned black, and now the cone of the distant volcano hung over the horizon as a gray shadow. The Egg on the hilltop shone with a scarlet flame. A blue-gray haze had crawled over the melon fields. Galtsev was sitting in the same pose listening to Sorochinsky.

  “In Astrakhan,” Sorochinsky was saying, “I once had ‘Shah’s rose,’ a watermelon of rare beauty. It has the taste of pineapple.”

  Galtsev coughed.

  Sidorov sat for a few moments without moving. He remembered the time he and Captain Gennady had eaten watermelons on Venita. The planetological station had gotten a whole shipload of watermelons from Earth. So they ate watermelon, ate their way into the crunchy pulp, the juice running down their cheeks, and then they shot the slippery black seeds at each other.

  “… lip-smacking good, and I say it as a gastronome.”

  “Quiet,” said Galtsev. “You’ll wake up Athos.”

  Sidorov arranged himself more comfortably, laying his chin on the back of the seat in front of him and closing his eyes. It was warm and a bit stuffy in the pterocar-the passenger compartment was slow to cool.

  “Did you ever ship out with Athos?” Sorochinsky asked.

  “No,” said Galtsev.

  “I feel sorry for him. And I envy him at the same time. He’s lived through a life such as I’ll never have. I and most other people. But still, it’s all behind him now.”

  “Why exactly is it all behind now?” asked Galtsev. “He’s just stopped spacing.”

  “A bird with its wings clipped…” Sorochinsky fell silent for a moment. “Anyhow, the time of the Assaultmen is over,” he said unexpectedly.

  “Nonsense,” Galtsev answered calmly.

  Sidorov heard Sorochinsky start moving around. “No, it’s not nonsense,” Sorochinsky said. “There it is, the Egg. They’re going to build them by the hundreds and drop them on unexplored and dangerous worlds. And each Egg will build a laboratory, a spaceport, a starship. It’ll develop mine shafts and pits. It’ll catch your nematodes and study them. And the Assaultmen will just gather data and skim off the cream.”

  “Nonsense,” Galtsev repeated. “A laboratory or a mine shaft is one thing—but an airtight dome for six people?”

  “What bothers you—the airtight part?”

  “No—the six people who’ll be under it.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Sorochinsky said stubbornly. “It’s still the end of the Assaultmen. A dome for people is only the beginning. They’ll send automatic ships ahead to drop the Eggs, and then when everything is ready the people will come.”

  He began to talk about the prospects of embryomechanics, paraphrasing Fischer’s famous report. A lot of people are talking about it, thought Sidorov. And all that is tru
e. But when the first drone intrasystem craft had been tested, there had also been much talk about how all spacemen would have to do was skim off the cream. And when Akimov and Sermus had launched the first cyberscout system, Sidorov had even been on the point of giving up space. That had been thirty years before, and since that time more than once had had to jump into hell behind swarms of robots gone haywire, and to do what they could not. A greenhorn, he thought again about Sorochinsky. And a blabbermouth.

  When Galtsev had said “Nonsense” for the fourth time, Sidorov got out of the car. Sorochinsky shut his mouth and jumped up at the sight of him. He had half an unripe watermelon, with a knife sticking out of it, in his hands. Galtsev continued sitting with his legs crossed.

  “Would you like a watermelon, sir?” asked Sorochinsky.

  Sidorov shook his head and, with his hands in his pockets, started looking at the top of the knoll. The red reflections from the polished surface of the Egg were dimming before his eyes. It was getting dark fast. A bright star suddenly rose out of the darkness, and slowly crawled through the black-blue sky.

  “Satellite Eight,” said Galtsev.

  “No,” Sorochinsky corrected with assurance. “That’s Satellite Seventeen. Or no—the Mirror Satellite.”

  Sidorov, who knew that it was Satellite Eight, sighed and started walking toward the knoll. He was utterly fed up with Sorochinsky, and anyhow he had to inspect the movie cameras.

  On the way back, he saw a fire. The irrepressible Sorochinsky had built a campfire and was now standing in a picturesque pose, waving his arms. “… the end is only a means,” Sidorov heard. “Happiness consists not in happiness itself, but in the pursuit of happiness.”

  “Somewhere I’ve read that,” said Galtsev.

  Me too, thought Sidorov. Many times. Should I order Sorochinsky to go to bed? He looked at his watch. The luminous hands showed midnight. It was quite dark.

  The Egg burst at 2:53 a.m. The night was moonless. Sidorov had been drowsing, sitting by the fire, with his right side turned toward the flame. Red-faced Galtsev was nodding nearby, and on the other side of the fire Sorochinsky was reading a newspaper, leafing through the pages. And then the Egg burst, with a sharp, piercing sound like that of an extrusion machine spitting out a finished part. Then the hilltop glowed briefly with an orange light. Sidorov looked at his watch and got up. The hilltop stood out fairly sharply against a background of starry sky. When his eyes, blinded by the campfire, had adjusted to the darkness, he saw many weak orangeish flames, slowly shifting around the place where the Egg had been.

  “It’s begun,” Sorochinsky said in an ominous whisper. “It’s begun! Viktor, wake up, it’s begun!”

  “Maybe you’ll finally shut up now?” Galtsev snapped back. He also whispered.

  Of the three, only Sidorov really knew what was going on on the hilltop. The embryomech had spent the first ten hours after activation adjusting to its surroundings. Then the adjustment process had ended, and the embryo had begun to develop. Everything in the Egg that was not needed for development had been cannibalized for the alteration and strengthening of the working organs, the effectors. Then the shell was broken open, and the embryo started to nourish itself on the feed at its feet.

  The flames got bigger and bigger, and they moved faster and faster. They could hear a buzzing and a shrill gnashing—the effectors were biting into the ground and pulverizing chunks of tuff. Flash, flash! Clouds of bright smoke noiselessly detached themselves from the hilltop and swam off into the starry sky. An uncertain, trembling reflection lit up the strange, ponderously turning shapes for a second, and then everything disappeared again.

  “Shall we go a little closer?” asked Sorochinsky.

  Sidorov did not answer. He was remembering how the first embryomech, the ancestor of the Egg, had been tested. At that time, several years before, Sidorov had been a complete newcomer to embryomechanics. The “embryo” had been spread throughout a spacious tent near the Institute-eighteen boxes of it, like safes, along the walls-and in the middle there had been an enormous pile of cement. The effector and digestive systems were buried in the cement pile. Fischer had waved a hand and someone closed a knife switch. They had sat in the tent until late in the evening, forgetting about everything in the world. The pile of cement melted away, and by evening the features of a standard lithoplast three-room house, with steam heating and autonomous electrohousekeeping, had risen out of the steam and smoke. It was exactly like the factory model, except that in the bathroom a ceramic cube, the “stomach,” was left, along with the complicated articulations of the effectors. Fischer had looked the house over, tapped the effectors with his foot, and said, “Enough of this fooling around. It’s time to make an Egg.”

  That was the first time the word had been spoken. Then had come a lot of work, many successes, and many more failures. The embryo had learned to adjust itself, to adapt to sharp changes of environment, to renew itself. It had learned to develop into a house, an excavator, a rocket. It had learned not to smash up when it fell into a chasm, not to malfunction while floating on waves of molten metal, not to fear absolute zero… No, thought Sidorov, it’s a good thing that I stayed on Earth.

  The clouds of bright smoke flew off the hilltop faster and faster. The cracking, scraping, and buzzing merged into an uninterrupted jangling noise. The wandering red flames were forming chains, and the chains were twisting into queer moving lines. A pink glow settled over them, and he could already make out something enormous and bulging, rocking like a ship on waves.

  Sidorov again looked at his watch. It was five to four. Obviously the lava and tuff had turned out to be eminently suitable material—the dome was rising much faster than it had on cement. He wondered what would come next. The mechanism built the dome from the top down, as the effectors dug deeper and deeper into the knoll. To keep the dome from ending up underground, the embryo would have to resort either to driving piles for support, or to moving the dome to one side of the pit dug by the effectors. Sidorov imagined the white-hot edge of the dome, to which the effectors’ scoops were molding more and more bits of lithoplast heated to malleability.

  For a minute the hilltop was plunged into darkness. The din ceased, and only a vague buzzing could be heard. The embryo was readjusting the work of the energy system.

  “Sorochinsky,” said Sidorov.

  “Here!”

  “Get over to the thermocamera and shove it up a little closer. But don’t climb the knoll.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sidorov heard him ask Galtsev for the flashlight in a whisper, and then a yellow circle of light bobbed over the gravel and disappeared.

  The noise started again. The pink glow reappeared on the hilltop. Sidorov thought that the black dome had moved a little, but he was not sure about it. He thought with vexation that he should have sent Sorochinsky to the thermocamera right away, as soon as the embryo had burst from the Egg.

  Then something gave a deafening roar. The hilltop blazed up in red. A crimson bolt of lightning slowly crawled down the black slope, then disappeared. The pink glow turned yellow and bright, and was immediately obscured by thick smoke. A thundering blow struck his ears, and with horror Sidorov saw an enormous shadow which had risen up in the smoke and flames which shrouded the hilltop. Something massive and unwieldy, reflecting a lustrous brilliance, started rocking on thin shaky legs. Another blow thundered out, and another glowing bolt of lightning zigzagged down the slope. The ground trembled, and the shadow which had appeared in the smoky glow collapsed.

  Sidorov started running along the knoll. Inside it, something crashed and cracked, waves of hot air shimmered at his feet, and in the red, dancing light Sidorov saw the movie cameras—the sole witnesses of what was happening on the hilltop—starting to fall, taking lumps of lava with them. He stumbled over one camera. It wobbled, spreading wide the bent legs of the stand. He moved more slowly then, and hot gravel rained down the slope toward him. It quieted down above, but something still smoulde
red in the darkness there. Then another blow resounded, and Sidorov saw a weak yellow flash.

  The hilltop smelled of hot smoke plus something unfamiliar and acrid. Sidorov stopped on the edge of an enormous pit with perpendicular edges. In the pit a nearly finished dome—the airtight dome for six people, with hall and oxygen filtration—was lying on its side. Molten slag glimmered in the pit. Against this background he could see the torn-off hemomechanical tentacles of the embryo waving weakly and helplessly. Out of the pit came hot acrid smells.

  “What can the matter be?” Sorochinsky asked in a whining voice.

  Sidorov raised his head and saw Sorochinsky on hands and knees at the very edge of the crater.

  “I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down,” Sorochinsky said mournfully. “I’ll huff, and I’ll—”

  “Shut up,” Sidorov said quietly. He sat down on the edge of the pit and started to work his way down.

  “Don’t,” said Galtsev. “It’s dangerous.”

  “Shut up,” Sidorov repeated. He had to find out fast what had happened here. The developmental work on the Egg, the most perfect machine created by human beings, could not be interfered with. It was the most perfect machine, the most intelligent machine…

  The intense heat singed his face. Sidorov squinted and crawled down past the red-hot edge of the newborn dome. He looked around below. He caught sight of fallen concrete arches, rusty blackened reinforcement bars, a broad dark passageway which led somewhere into the depths of the knoll. Something turned ponderously underfoot. Sidorov bent over. He did not at once realize what this gray metal stump was, but when he did, he understood everything. It was an artillery shell.

  The knoll was hollow. Two hundred years ago some bunch of bastards had built a dark, concrete-lined chamber inside it. They had stuffed this chamber full of artillery shells. The mechanism erecting the supporting piles for the dome had broken into the vault. The crumbling concrete had not been able to bear the weight of the dome. The piles had slipped into it as if into quicksand. Then the machine had started flooding the concrete with molten lithoplast. The poor embryomech could not know that there was an ammunition dump here. It couldn’t even know what an artillery shell was, because the people who had given life to its program had themselves forgotten what artillery shells were. It seemed that the shells were charged with TNT. The TNT had degraded over two hundred years, but not completely. Not in all the shells. And all of them that could explode, had started exploding. And the mechanism had been turned into a junkheap.