by Kir Bulychev
“You see, a real apparition finds it useful to vanish from sight with terrible curses when a cock crows at dawn.”
“I’ll ask him tonight about the cock.”
“Fine.”
“And I have to go to bed later tonight. I have to speak to the apparition.”
“As you will.” Alas, our joking had come to an end. At long last the robot removed the frozen suppers from the microwave, beaming with pride in accomplishment.
Alice started to eat and I went back to my notes on the National Parks of Guinea. There was a very interesting article on Sirian Wickers. A revolution in zoology. They had been able to breed Wickers in captivity. The offspring were born dark green, despite the shells of both parents having been blue.
It grew dark outside the windows. Alice said,
“Well, I’ll be off?”
“And where are you going?”
“To the apparition. I promised.”
“And here I was thinking that you were joking. Well, if you really have to go out into the garden, then go, only put on a jacket because it’s become cold. And don’t go any further than the apple tree.”
“But why should I go further? He’s waiting for me there.”
Alice ran out into the garden. I watched her out of the corner of my eye. I did not want to enter into her fantasy world. If she wanted, let her surround herself with apparitions and wizards and enchanted nights, good giants from the magic blue planet… Just so long as she would go to bed on time and eat normally.
I lowered the lights on the veranda so I could keep an eye on Alice better in the darkness. So I watched as she ran up to the apple tree, an old tree with mighty branches, and she stood beneath it.
And then… A blue shadow separated itself from the apple tree’s trunk and moved to meet my daughter. The shadow swam through the air, not touching the ground. The next moment, grabbing something heavy for a club I had already jumped down the three steps to the lawn. I didn’t like it at all. Either it was some sort of really dumb joke, or… It was the ‘or’ that I didn’t want to even think about…
“Be careful, papa!” Alice said in a loud whisper. She had heard my heavy steps. “You’ll frighten him!”
I grabbed Alice by the hand. In front of me a blue silhouette came apart like mist.
“Papa, what you’ve done! And I almost saved him!”
Alice howled shamefully while I carried her back to the terrace.
What was that thing beneath the apple tree? A hallucination?
“Why did you do it, Papa?” Alice howled. “You promised…”
“I didn’t do anything.” I answered. “Apparitions do not exist.”
“You saw him yourself. Why won’t you speak the truth? He can’t stand it when the air moves. Don’t you understand you have to come up to him slow so not to make a wind?”
I really did not know how to answer her. Of one thing I was certain, as soon as Alice fell asleep I was going out into the garden with a flash light to take a look.
“And he gave me a letter for you. Only now I won’t give it to you.”
“What sort of letter.”
“Can’t have it.”
I finally noticed the piece of paper she had clutched in her fist. Alice looked at me, I looked at her, and she handed over the piece of paper anyway.
On the paper were notes for the feeding of red Crooms. I had been missing the note for the last three days.
“Alice, where did you find my notes?”
“Turn it over. The apparition didn’t have any paper so I gave him some of yours.”
On the reverse side of the paper, written in English in an unknown hand, was:
“Honorable Professor!
“I have summoned my courage to appeal to you, for I have fallen into a most unpleasant situation from which I may not emerge without outside intervention. Alas, neither can I go further than one meter from the center of this apple tree. You may look upon me in my woeful condition only during darkness.
“Thanks to your daughter, so thoughtful and sympathetic a being, I am finally able to resetablish communication with the outside world. “I, the woeful Professor Kuraki, am the victim of an unsuccessful experiment. I have been conducting experiments in matter transmission. I was able to transmit two turkey hens from Tokyo to Paris. They were received without problems by my colleagues. However, on the day I decided to test the equipment myself, the fuses in my laboratory overheated precisely at the moment of transmission. And the energy for molecular re-integration was insufficient. I was dispersed in space, however, my most concentrated locus is located in the region of your honorable garden. In this vexatious condition I have found myself for two weeks, and no doubt I have been given up for dead. “I beg of you, immediately upon receipt of this letter communicate with my colleagues in Tokyo. Someone must fix the fuses in my laboratory. Only then will rematerialization be able to occur. “Thanks a million, Kuraki”
I spent forever looking around in the darkness beneath the apple tree. Then I went down from the terrace and went closer. It was whitish blue, scarcely discernable as a shine in the air around the tree’s trunk. Looking closer, I could make out the details of someone’s face. The ‘apparition’ appeared to be praying, his hands raised toward the sky.
There was no time to waste. I ran all the way to the monorail station and found a com to call Tokyo.
The entire operation took no more than five minutes.
It was only on the way back home that I remembered I had forgotten to put Alice to bed. I hurried.
The light on the terrace hadn’t been turned off.
Alice was there, showing her herbarium and collection of butterflies to a shortish, emaciated Japanese. The Japanese held a sauce pan in his hand and, not taking his eyes from Alice’s treasures, was delicately eating overdone maccaroni.
Seeing me, our ghost bowed quite low, and said.
“Professor Kuraki, your humble servant. You and your daughter have saved my life…”
“See, Papa. This is my parition.” Alice said. “Now do you believe me?”
“I certainly do.” I answered. “Delighted to make your acquaintance.”
The Missing Guests
The preparations for the meeting with the Labucillians were an enormous public spectacle. Never before had the Solar System hosted guests from so far away in space.
The Labucillians’ first signals were received by the station on Pluto, and three days later the Londel Radio Observatory established contact with them.
The Labucillians were still far out but the Sheremetevo Spaceport was ready to greet them. Girls from the “Red Rose” Nursery had decorated it with garlands of flowers, and students from an arts college were practicing a show for their arrival. All the embassies had reserved seats on the reviewing stands and the reporters were spending their nights in the space ports restaurants.
Alice was living not far from there, in our country house in Vnukovo, and was gathering flowers and plants for her herbarium. She wanted to have a collection far better than the one Vanya Spitz in the senior group had made. Therefore, Alice took no part in the preparations for the big meeting. She did not even know about it. Nor did I have any direct connection to the First Contact. My work would only begin when the Labucillians landed.
But in the mean time events developed in the following manner.
On March 8 the Labucillians advised us that they had made Earth orbit. At exactly that moment a tragic accident occurred. Instead of the Labucillian ship the station had locked onto a lost Swedish satellite, the “Nobel-29. When the error was finally noticed it turned out the Labucillian ship had vanished. It had gone on to its landing, and contact with it was temporarily lost.
On March 9 at 6:33 the Labucillians advised us they had landed in the area of 55 minutes 20 seconds north latitude and 37 minutes forty seconds east longitude in the terrestrial system of coordinates, with a possible error of 15 seconds. That is, not far from Moscow.
Further communicat
ion was cut off and with one exception about which I will say later, could not be re-established. It turned out that terrestrial radiation had seriously damaged the Labucillian’s communications equipment.
Immediately hundreds of machines and thousands of people rushed to our guests’ presumed landing area. The roads were clogged with those desiring to find the Labucillians. The spaceport at Sheremetevo emptied; not a single correspondent remained in the restaurants. The sky over Moscow was cluttered with helicopters and other rotary wing aircraft, ornithopers, whirlagons and anything else that could be up into the sky. It looked like thousands of enormous bugs were hovering over the city.
Had the Labucillians’ ship crashed and embedded itself in the ground the people in the air would have observed the crater.
No one found it.
Not a single local inhabitant saw the ship come down. And this was passing strange; at that moment a nearly all the inhabitants of Moscow and the surrounding countryside were looking up at the sky.
This indicated there had been an error. Somewhere.
Toward evening when I returned from my work to the country house the entire work-a-day life of the planet had been altered. People were afraid that something untoward had happened to our guests.
“Maybe they were antimatter?” Someone argued on the monorail. “When they entered Earth’s atmosphere they would have gone poof!”
“Without a visible explosion, or any trace at all? Idiot!”
“And just how much do we know about the nature of antimatter?”
“Then who radioed their landing coordinates?”
“Maybe a practical joker?”
“Not a chance! How did they fake the communications with Pluto station?”
“Well, they could have….”
But it was the version about the invisibility of our guests that won the most adherents.
I was sitting on the veranda, looking over my overgrown lawn, and thinking as well; what if they had landed close by, in the next field? Could the poor aliens be standing around now outside their ship, wondering why people were paying them no attention. Might they get angry and depart? I was wanting already to go down and set out for the that very field when I saw a file of people exiting the forest. It was my neighbors from the next house over. They were holding hands like children playing a game. I realized they had reached the same conclusion I had, but earlier, and were trying to locate our presumably invisible visitors by touch.
At that moment there was more, unexpected, information came over NewsNet; they rebroadcast a transmission received by old style radio hams in Northern Australia. The transmission repeated the coordinates and then added the following words: “We are located in a forest. The first group has gone out in search of people. We continue to receive your broadcasts. We are astonished by the lack of contact….” At that moment contact was broken off entirely.
The idea that the visitors were invisible was immediately accepted by several score million more people.
I could see from my perch on the terrace the chain of people stop, turn, and head back again toward the forest. And at that moment Alice came up the steps with a small basket of strawberries in her hands.
“Why are they all running around?” She said before even saying hello.
“Who are ‘they?’ And one says ‘Hello’ if you haven’t yet seen your only paterfamilias since this morning.”
“Since last night. I was still sleeping when you left for work. Hello, papa. What’s going on?”
“The Labucillians have vanished.” I answered.
“I don’t know them.”
“No one knows them, yet.”
“Then how did they get lost?”
“They were flying to Earth. They flew here and got lost.”
I felt like I was talking nonsense. Alas, it was the simple truth.
Alice looked at me with suspicion.
“Does that happen all the time?”
“No, it doesn’t. Not usually.”
“And they couldn’t find the space port?”
“Evidently.”
“And where were they lost?”
“Somewhere in the area of Moscow. Maybe not very far from here.”
“And everyone’s looking for them on foot and from the air?”
“Yes.”
“And why don’t they just come themselves?”
“Then they must be waiting until people find them. It’s their first time on Earth. So they wouldn’t go very far from their ship.”
Alice was silent for a moment, as though she were content with my answer. She walked around the porch about two times, not letting the basket with strawberries out of her hands. Then she asked:
“Are they in the field or in the forest?”
“In the forest.”
“How do you know that?”
“They told us themselves. By radio.”
“That’s good.”
“What’s good?”
“That they’re not in the field.”
“Why?”
“I was afraid that I saw them.”
“How so?”
“It’s nothing, I was just joking…”
I got up from my chair. In general, Alice can be a great fabulator…
“I didn’t go walking in the forest, Papa. Word of honor, I didn’t. I was in the meadow. That means I didn’t see them.”
“Alice, I want you to tell me everything, in detail, all that you know. I’m not going to add anything myself. You saw strange…people, in the fore st?”
“Word of honor, cross my heart, I wasn’t in the forest.”
“All right, all right. In the meadow.”
“I didn’t do anything bad. And really, they’re not all that strange.”
“I want a decent answer from you, an adult answer: who did you see and where were they? Don’t torment me and the rest of the human race….”
“Is the rest of the human race here, Papa?”
“Listen to me, Alice…”
“Oh, all right. They’re here. They came with me.”
I looked around involuntarily. The terrace was empty. If you didn’t count the buzzing bee, there was no one here but Alice and myself.
“No, not there. You’re not looking in the right place.” Alice sighed, walked up closer to me, and said. “I wanted to keep them. I really didn’t know the human race was looking for them.”
She stretched out the basket with the strawberries. She raised the basket right in front of my eyes, and I made out, not really believing what I saw myself, two figures in space suits. They were covered with strawberry juice and sitting together on a single berry.
“I didn’t do them any harm.” Alice said guiltily. “I thought they might be gnomes, from the fairy tales.”
But I wasn’t listening to anything else she said. Carefully clutching the little basket to my heart I was running for the videophone. All I could think was, for our visitors, our uncut lawn must have seemed like an immense forest.
And that how we made our First Contact with the Labucillians.
Our Man In The Past
The ordeal with the time machine took place in the Little Hall of Science House. I had picked Alice up from the kindergarten and realized that if I took her home I would miss the demonstration. So I made Alice swear that she would behave herself and we went to Science House together.
The Head of the Temporal Institute, a very large and very bald person, stood in front of the time machine and explained the scientific principles of its construction and operation. The scientific community listened eagerly.
“Our first experiment, as you all know, was rather unsuccessful.” He said. “The cat we sent back to the beginning of the twentieth century exploded in the region of the Tungus river, giving rise to the legend of the Tungus meteorite. Since then we have not experienced serious failure. True, in accordance with certain natural laws with which anyone may become acquainted by perusing our Institute’s brochures, for the moment we can send
people and objects back only to the seventh decade of the twentieth century. One has to say that some of our co-workers have spent time there, obviously in the utmost secrecy, and returned home successfully. The temporal transmission procedure is comparatively uncomplicated, in as much as it is the results of the labors of some hundreds of our people over many years. One need only put on the Time Belt… If I could be so fortunate as to have a volunteer from the hall, and I will demonstrate the procedure for preparing to move through time on him…”
There was an awkward silence. No one wanted to be the first to go onto the stage. So obviously, who else should be the first to step forward but Alice, who only five minutes before had sworn up and down that she would behave herself.
“Alice!” I shouted. “Get back down here!”
“Oh don’t be alarmed.” The Institute Head said. “Nothing at all will happen to the child.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me, Papa!” Alice said happily.
The people in the hall began to laugh, heads turned in my direction, in search of the strict father.
I tried to appear nothing of the sort.
The Institute’s Head put a belt around Alice’s waist and attached something like earmuffs to her head.
“And this is all there is.” He said. “Now the person is ready to travel through time. All he has to do is enter the time cabinet here and he will appear in the year One Thousand Nine Hundred and Seventy-Five…”
What has he said!? The panicky thought exploded through my head. If Alice was listening….
But it was too late. Of course she was going to take advantage of the opportunity.
“Little girl, what are you doing? Stop!” The Institute’s director shouted.
But Alice had already climbed into the Time Cabinet and, in the eyes of everyone, vanished. The hall gasped in chorus.
The Temporal Institute’s director, white as a sheet, waved his arms back and forth, trying to lower the din. And, seeing that I had started to run toward him down the aisle, started to speak, bent over the microphone so he could be heard over the other noise:
“Nothing at all will happen to the child. After three minutes she will re-appear in this very hall. I give you my word that the apparatus is completely reliable and tested! Don’t worry a bit!