by Kir Bulychev
“It doesn’t matter.” Gromozeka said. “No one other than me knows it’s a secret anyway.”
“You are a very strange archaeologist.” Alice said. “Doesn’t that mean there is no secret.”
“But there is a secret.” Gromozeka said. “One of the most important of all, but not in way you understood the word.”
“Gromozeka.” I said. “We don’t understand anything.”
“Nothing at all.” Alice added.
Gromozeka, in order not to waste time uselessly, finished drinking the Ex-Lax directly from the bottle, gave a sigh that made the windows shudder, and told us all about it.
The archaeological expedition with which Gromozeka was working had landed on the dead planet Coleida. Human beings had lived on Coleida once, but they had died out for some reason about a hundred years ago. Along with them had died all the planet’s animals. And the insects. And the birds. And the fish. There was not a single living thing on the planet. Nothing. Not a single cell. Just ruins. The wind howled, the rain beat down. In some places there were cars on the streets, and monuments to great people.
“Did they have a war?” Alice asked. “Did they kill each other off?”
“No where did you come across that idea?” Gromozeka was amazed.
“We re doing the history of the Middle Ages.” Alice answered.
“No, there wasn’t any war there.” Gromozeka said. “If there had been such a terrible and destructive war, even a hundred years later we would have found traces.”
“Well, maybe they used poison gas.” I asked. “Or atomic bombs? What if they started a chain reaction?”
“You are an educated person.” Gromozeka said. “But you are spouting nonsense. Why do you presume the team of experienced archaeologists, specialists in our fields, which I have the honor of heading, capable of penetrating the ground and seeing each earth worm, would have failed to detect such traces?”
Gromozeka shook his head and rolled his eyes so terribly that I sneaked a glance at Alice: had my best friend managed to frighten her yet?
But Alice wasn’t afraid of Gromozeka. She was thinking.
“We are left with but one suspicion.” Gromozeka said. “But it is a secret.”
“They were attacked.” Alice said.
“By whom?”
“By space pirates, of course. I’ve seen them.”
“Non-sense!” Gromozeka answered and burst out laughing, all his tentacles shook and he knocked one of the flower vases down of the window sill.
I pretended not to notice, and Alice did the same. We both knew that Gromozeka would have been very upset at what he had done.
“Space Pirates could not destroy an entire planet. And anyway, there are no such things as Space Pirates.”
“Then what destroyed the planet Coleida?”
“That is a question I came to Earth to answer.” Gromozeka said.
Alice and I were silent and put forward no more questions. Gromozeka was also silent. He was waiting for us to ask him, and I wanted to hold out asking him for as long as possible.
The result was that the three of us were silent or about two minutes. Finally, Gromozeka became quite angry with us.
“I see you are uninterested.” He said.
“No, certainly not.” I answered. “I’m dying to learn, but since you don’t want to talk about it I’m not asking you…”
“Why do you say I don’t want to talk about it?” Gromozeka shouted. “Who told you any such thing?”
“You did.”
“I did? Impossible!”
Then I decided to tease my friend, who was clearly dying from his desire to tell us everything.
“And anyway, Gromozeka, you’re getting ready for a good twelve hours sleep. We’ll move the dining room table to one side and you can have the rug. Alice, go do your homework.”
“Alas for me!” Gromozeka said. “That I should have such ‘friends.’ I hurry to them across the entire Galaxy to bring them the most interesting news, and them right away pack me off to bed they are so bored with me! I bore them. There is nothing to be done… Just lead me to your bath tub so I can wash off my tentacles.”
Alice looked at me pleadingly. She was desperate to ask Gromozeka.
But Gromozeka had already taken himself to the bath tub, dragging his tentacles all over the furniture and walls.
“Why aren’t you asking him, Papa?” Alice whispered when Gromozeka left. “He really does want to tell us.”
“Then he shouldn’t mince words.” I said. “If we were to ask him or show interest, then he’d drag this out for two hours or more before we found out anything at all. But now he’ll tell us on his own. You can bet on it.”
“It’s a bet then.” Alice agreed. “But what do we wager? I say that Gromozeka is very angry and won’t tell us a single thing.”
“And I say that he is very angry, and precisely because he is angry he is going to tell us everything!”
“For an ice cream cone?”
“For an ice cream cone.”
So we set our wager. Before we even had a chance to shake hands on it the hallway’s walls shook. Gromozeka was coming back.
He was wet; water dripped down his shell, and the tentacles left long wet ribbons behind on the floor. The house robot walked behind our guest, wiping the floor with a mop.
“Pardon me, Professor.” Gromozeka said. “But where is your soap?”
“The soap?” I was surprised. “The soap is on the shelf. Isn’t it there?”
“It is.” Gromozeka started to laugh. “I came here especially to have a little joke on you. No doubt you thought I had rushed here for no other reason than to tell you the secret. And, no doubt, you told your daughter: there goes that idiot Gromozeka, who wants to share his secret with us so much he forgot to wipe his tentacles. Didn’t you?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
But Alice gave it all away immediately.
“We even placed a bet on it.” She said. “I said that you would keep the secret.”
“Oh well.” Gromozeka sat down again on our floor and spread out like a flower with his wet tentacles the leaves. “Now I am satisfied. You were having a joke at my expense, as I was having one on you. We’re even. So listen up, my friends. Do you remember the epidemic of Space Plague?”
2
Of course we remembered the epidemic. Or more precisely, I remembered it, and Alice had read about it. About fifteen years ago an expedition had returned to Earth from Galactic Sector Seventeen. Following the protocols then in place all long range expeditions returned, not to Earth directly, but to the base on Pluto for quarantine. That, and that alone, had saved our planet.
Two members of the crew had fallen sick with an unknown illness. They were placed in isolation. But despite the best medical science in the Solar System, they continued to decline. On the next day the rest of the crew were showing symptoms, and two days later the infection had spread to the entire base.
The whole Earth was frightened, and a specialized medical ship lifted for Pluto. For the next few days the struggle for the lives of the starship crew and the people of Pluto base continued. It ended with a defeat for the doctors. Not only had they been unsuccessful in treating those who fell ill, the medical ship’s crew had, despite the extreme measures they had taken to prevent infection, fallen ill themselves in turn.
Since that time the disease in question had been called Space Plague.
A quarantine was declared, and patrol ships kept watch in orbit around Pluto to ensure that no one landed there by accident. At the same time the best doctors on Earth and other planets attempted to decipher the secret of the illness. It turned out that there was no medicine against the disease and no means to stop it. No medicines could cure it, nor could the thick walls of an isolation lab prevent its spread.
And only after three months, at an enormous price in victims and the efforts of thousands of scientists, was the cause of the disease determined and did they learn how to
overcome it.
Finally, they concluded that the disease was so difficult to cope with because it was carried by viruses which exhibited two remarkable characteristics: in the first place they were able to mask themselves as known viruses the bodies of the infected had already developed immunity to and were thus harmless and thus it was impossible to find them in the blood stream, and, secondly, en mass they were a rational, thinking being.
Individually, none of the viruses were capable of thought or taking decisions, but, when some billions of them congregated in the blood of an infected individual, they achieved a strange, evil rationality. As a result, whenever the doctors were finally about to close in on the virus, the plague, as a rational entity, ordered all its constituent viruses to change their forms, designed a counter agent to the medicines, and found new ways to kill people.
When the scientists discovered what was going on they attempted to establish a reasoned dialogue with the virus. But the virus had no desire to communicate with people. Or it could not. All its thoughts, all its ingenuity, was directed only at destruction; it was unable to create anything.
Later, when Space Plague was long conquered, they were able to find mention of this virus in the archives of other planets.
It turned out that the Sol system was not the first place this plague had appeared. The virus had managed to exterminate whole planets and entire stellar systems. And if we had not succeeded in finding a means to overcome the disease, the virus would not have rested until it had destroyed everything living on the planet. Then, having exterminated the people, plants and animals, the fish, and the bacteria, the plague viruses would either change and return to space like a swarm of bees, where they could where they could infect some passing space ship or fall on some other planet, or remain in place and enter hibernation.
The astronautical archaeologists from the expedition Gromozeka was leading had therefore decided that, most likely, the planet Coleida had died from Space Plague. The inhabitants of the planet had found no means of dealing with the epidemic.
Thus, in order to determine with absolute certainty that this is what happened, Gromozeka had flown here to Earth. Earth had the Time Institute. Its researchers could travel into the past, and Gromozeka had decided to ask the Institute to send one of its machines to Coleida, and send someone into the past to determine if indeed it was Space Plague that had exterminated the planet’s inhabitants.
3
On the next day Gromozeka left for the Time Institute early in the morning. He was there almost to supper, and Alice, who now knew everything about his plans, came home after school and remained in the house to await the archaeologist’s return. She was very curious to discover how it all turned out.
We saw Gromozeka through the window. The glass started to shake, and the house itself was rattling. Gromozeka was walking down the middle of the street, howling some sort of song and carrying such an enormous bouquet of flowers that he was leaving petals behind on the house fronts on either side of the street. Pedestrians who caught sight of my dear monster had backed up against the walls and were rather frightened, if for no other reason than they had never seen a bouquet of flowers five yards in diameter underneath which stuck out long, thick tentacles with claws on their ends. As Gromozeka passed each one he handed him or her a flower.
“Hey!” My friend shouted; he had stopped directly beneath our window.
“Hello, Gromozeka!” Alice shouted, opening the window wide. “Do you have good news?”
“I shall tell you everything, my dear ones!” Gromozeka answered, and gave a flower to an old man who had stopped and sat down on the sidewalk from amazement. “But first take this tiny bouquet from me. I’ll pass it up to you one part at a time, since I can’t go through your building doorway with it.”
Gromozeka extended a tentacle with the first portion of flowers.
After five minutes the entire apartment was filled with flowers, so much that I had even lost sight of Alice. Finally, the last armful of flowers had beenc ramed intot he rooms. I asked:
“Alice, where are you?”
Alice called back from the kitchen:
“I’m getting all the bowls, vases, cups and glasses down so we can fill them with water and put flowers in them.”
“Don’t forget about the bathtub.” I said. “Fill it with water too. We can put one of the larger bouquets in there.”
After saying this I swam, or clawed my way, through the sea of flowers to the door so I could open it and let Gromozeka into the house.
Gromozeka got a good look at what he had done to our living quarters, and he was very pleased.
“I was thinking….” He spoke as he helped us fill all the pots and pans, the vases, jars, glasses, carafes, and cups with flowers, load them into the bath tub and the kitchen sink. “I was thinking, that before now no one has brought you such a splendiferous bouquet.”
“Absolutely no one at all.” I agreed.
“This means I am your very best friend,” Gromozeka said, “and yet there isn’t a single drop of Ex-Lax in the house again.”
Having said that, Gromozeka lay down on the floor, on a rug of flowers, and told us everything he had been able to do that day.
“At first I went to the Time Institute. They were delighted to see me at the Institute. Firstly because it was Gromozeka the famous archaeologist himself who came to visit….”
Here Alice interrupted our guest and asked:
“And just how did they learn about you, Gromozeka?”
“Everyone knows about me.” Gromozeka answered. “And do not interrupt your elders. Why, when they saw me in their doorway some of them even fainted from joy.”
“That was from terror.” Alice corrected Gromozeka. “Someone who has never seen you before night get frightened.”
“Foolishness!” Gromozeka said. “Why, on our planet, I am sublimely beautiful.”
Then he broke into laughter, and the flower petals whirled in the air.
“Do not think that I am so naive, Alice.” He said, when the fit of laughter had ended and he had control over his breath again. “I know when someone is frightened of me, and when someone is delighted. Therefore I always nock on the door and ask if I frighten them. If they answer “No,” then I enter and tell them that I am the famous archaeologist Gromozeka from the planet Chumaroz. Satisfied, now?”
“Satisfied.” Alice answered. She was sitting, her feet crossed, on a tangle of Gromozeka’s tentacles. “Continue. This means, first of all, they are delighted Gromozeka has come to visit them. But doesn’t this imply a ‘secondarily?’“
“Secondarily,” Gromozeka said, because they had just finished experiments with a new machine at the Time Institute. You will recall that all the earlier machines were only capable of operating on the Institute’s premises, but the new time machine can be transported to other localities. They power it with atomic batteries. They were just about ready to transport the machine to Miracle Lake…”
“Where?” I was surprised.
“Gromozeka said, to ‘Lake Chudskoe.’ Right?” Alice said. “Gromozeka has the right not to know all the details of Earth history.”
“And I was about to say,” Gromozeka said, “Chudskoe Lake. And anyone who heard otherwise has deficient ears… They wanted to look at how Alexander the Great defeated the Tattletale Knights.”
“That’s right,” Alice said, “They would want to watch Alexander Nevsky defeat the Teutonic Knights.”
“Oh, them.” Gromozeka sighted. “I always get those two confused! But when I discovered at they had a machine ready for travel already, I told them: ‘What’s just one lake, when I can put an entire planet at your disposal? And you will always be able to go back to the lake if you want and confirm what every school child knows, that Alexander Nevsky defeated the Teutonic Order in the famous Battle on the Ice on April Fifth, 1242 AD, and saved Russia from conquest, but as to what happened on the planet Coleida, not even I, the great and glorious archaeologist Gromoze
ka, know, although I do suspect they were wiped out by Space Plague.’“
“And they agreed?” Alice asked.
“Not right away.” Gromozeka admitted. At first they said that the time machine was still not fully tested under such extreme conditions, such as space, and it might not work properly, or else an accident might happen. Then, when I said that conditions on Coleida were not at all more difficult than at the Chudsky lake, they said that the atomic batteries and other apparatus were so heavy that it would need ten space ships to convey everything to Coleida. But by then I already knew that they had all but agreed. And anyway, they themselves were tempted to test their time machine on another planet. And I told them how we could start up the main power station on Coleida, and even more we of the expedition have a very powerful mass conversion reactor, and even gravity engines. And if they wanted to send a whole group of investigators along with their machine, we could feed and house them all and even provide them with excursions to the main tourist traps. So of course they agreed. Pretty smart of me, if I don’t say so myself, eh?”
“You’re a genius, Gromozeka.” I said.
“And now I shall have to get some sleep, for tomorrow we begin loading. Even without the atomic batteries we shall require at least three ships for the loading of the machine. And I still have to find the ships.”
And Gromozeka promptly leaned his large, soft, rather balloon-like head against the wall and fell asleep..
4
All the following day Gromozeka rushed around Moscow, flew to Prague, called back and forth to the Moon constantly, acquired ships, negotiated about freight and cargo space and only in the evening arrived back at our house. On this occasion he came without flowers, not but alone.
Gromozeka brought with him two temporalists, as the researchers at the Institute of Time were known. One temporalist was young, lanky, and very lean, and perhaps because of that appeared rather morose. He had thick, kinky black hair in an Afro, and Gromozeka, astonished that such thing creatures could even exist, spent all his time poking and prodding at the poor fellow with the claw at the end of one tentacle. The second temporalist was a short, thickset, middle aged man with small, penetrating grey eyes. From time to time he hiccoughed; he was dressed in the latest fashion.