Home at Last

by Alex Sapegin

  “Reston should have killed him when he had the chance,” the General said quietly.

  “What?”

  “There are fewer problems with the dead. I can’t imagine what he’ll do with us when he wakes up.”

  “If he wakes up.”

  “Not if, when!” Sanin clenched his fists. “Idiots! They think he’ll serve them. Igor, I’ve watched that recording a hundred times. He’ll never be their puppet.”

  “You’re probably right, Leonid. But how are we supposed to explain that to the Moscow bigwigs? The slaughterhouse is impressive, of course. Some ten minutes—and three dozen corpses. I still shudder to recall the hall leading to the transition chamber and the guys planted on the stone fragments—like butterflies! How is it possible? On Earth, there is no magic!”

  “I don’t know what secrets our fragile little planet’s hiding, but all these delights about the samples taken from the guy are getting under my skin.”

  “Oh come on, Leonid. Don’t you think you’re overdoing it?”

  “OVERDOING IT? Igor, open your eyes—the boy is not human! NOT HUMAN! Even if he looks like a younger version of Kerimov, his DNA tests shout the opposite. Have you seen his eyes? A person can’t change like that in three years. It seems to me, and I’m not the only one, that this is not Kerimov’s son. All the oohs and ahhs around his regenerative abilities and immunity, which sharks and cockroaches would envy. It bedazzles you, but the eggheads still haven’t figured out the devil’s regeneration mechanism. You read that all the functions of the ‘son’s’ organism are slowed down dozens of times, but then how do you explain the healing after he took all those bullets to the chest? And what are these bursts of brain activity, especially in the last twenty-four hours? In a month, only scars are left from the wounds. We need to think about how to approach him when he comes out of the coma, not just admire the reaction of his tissues to cancer cells and the presence of a second heart.”

  “Have you said your piece? Should I hand you a tissue? Had a good cry?”

  “Shut up!”

  “After you.”

  “Enough with the wisecracks, Igor, I’m serious! I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to wash my hands of the whole thing.”

  “A premonition, like before the capture?”

  “Yes, but then it wasn’t so bad on my nerves. I’m used to trusting my gut, and now it’s just screaming to me to drop the Center to the devil’s grandmother [SJ(S42]and run away from here without looking back.”

  “Your position is clear to me, but you’re either forgetting about the second side of the coin, or you’re deliberately saying nothing about it.”

  The general snorted. “Do you mean our colleagues from the competing entities?”

  “Yep. Admit it, you don’t like that you’ve been deprived of control of the Center, or the appearance of numerous observers from counter-intelligence and the Ministry of Defense breathing down your neck.”

  “It’s all about the information, Igor. Reston failed, and that stream of mud that was formed as a result of all this passed the critical level beyond which secrecy is kept. Instead of quietly sending Will to Siberia, Command started an uproar with an investigation, and people like Reston, if they go under, they’ll certainly pull a couple of people down with them. Someone from his team got busy and leaked information, thus buying an indulgence from sins and a place in Kolyma, not the Antarctic shelf. Soon the information will leak all the way to the cunning guys overseas, and that’ll be the end of our sitting underground. Once one or two know something, soon everyone knows.”

  Sanin fell silent. He turned to the window and rested his forehead against the cold glass. Lantsov was right as always. They’d quietly taken the reigns of real power in the scientific center away from him. Command couldn’t provide secrecy and now it was spinning, as in a skillet, trying to win back both ours and yours, which only aggravated the situation. Sanin avoided the “perestroika” a month ago, when Reston was taken by the nostrils and was able to retain the post of curator of the projects, but for how long? The harsh reality fell heavily on the elderly man’s shoulders. Command and their competitors were pressuring him from one side; on the other, there was Kerimov, who didn’t believe the story told to him about his youngest daughter getting hurt in a car accident.

  The unconscious girl was drugged with special medication that blocks short-term memory, and to somehow hide and justify the sudden amnesia, the dolts from Reston’s team staged an accident with a minibus, which allegedly drove the girl to the house. By then, only Olga and the driver were left inside. But instead of a fictitious accident, a real one occurred. They worked crudely and clumsily; there was no time to think up something elegant. Reston, frightened by the consequences of the destruction of the third complex, ordered the second team to somehow back out of it. But they of course screwed up, failing to take into account some weighty circumstances.

  Right near the Kerimovs’ house, the driver, who had woken up from the sleeping gas, gasped quietly, and passed away, knocking his forehead against the steering wheel. The unmanned vehicle collided with a big truck. It would have been fine, if it weren’t for the fact that at the other end of the city, at the exact same time, the grim reaper was harvesting two young employees assigned to Osadchuk’s team. The guy and girl had been scribbling reports and simply keeled over. They had never indicated that they had health problems in any way.

  “Heart attack,” the pathologist said four hours later after the autopsy. General Sanin exchanged glances with Lantsov. Both of them were sure the girl’s curse was the real cause of the young people’s demise. What a shame, since they themselves were not aware of Reston’s designs, which is why Olga sensed their deception only at the last minute when it was too late. She, with numerous injuries, broken legs, and a concussion, was taken to the First City Hospital where several employees of the Center watched her remotely. The next morning, running directly from the plane’s ramp, came her father. Kerimov left all business in China and returned to Russia two days early. Olga woke up on the third day. She didn’t remember anything about the events of that ill-fated day when she got into an accident, but she told her father that she could feel Andy...

  Enraged, Karimov broke into the territory of the scientific center, but was detained at the first-level checkpoint. For some unknown, or perhaps well-known, reason, his pass was canceled. No matter how much the scientist scolded, screamed, spat poison, and waved his pudgy fists, he couldn’t get to the truth. There was such catastrophe going on at the center that the devil himself would have broken his leg in it. The Moscow headquarters know-it-alls who stepped in to investigate the reasons for the failure of Reston’s group only exacerbated the situation. On the order of one of the “high” investigators, the scientist was rudely thrown out behind the guarded territory, and then arrested.

  Sanin tried to resolve the situation, although at that time he was not yet reinstated. The only thing he could achieve was the conclusion of Iliya Evgenevich in a guarded house, not in the military detention room. Sanin used the right connections because he knew full well that rough games with a scientist of this level were fraught with grave consequences, and personally met with Kerimov. The conversation turned out to be a difficult one. The General didn’t deny anything, except for the car accident, where he emphasized the heart attack that caused the death of the minibus driver.

  Better dosed truth than uncontrolled lies. Yes, Andy, or a creature similar to him, had been moved to Earth. Yes, the stranger was in a closed medical block at the minus-seventh level. No, until the end of the quarantine, no one would be allowed to visit him. Yes, it was better for now that he be under the supervision of doctors and biologists. Why? Because doctors are better versed in gunshot wounds and their treatment. Who shot at the boy? Well, you know, Iliya, the “boy” ended three dozen people without even breaking a sweat.[SJ(S43] Of course, the servicemen were forced to open fire. What do the tests show? Devilry! Your son is not your son. Kerimov listened t
o the General’s arguments and silently put on the table a folded sheet of paper with a statement of resignation at will.

  The Moscow command set strict deadlines for the completion of the assembly works, which were being carried out around the clock, and the launch of the restored apparatus into operation. Following the capture of the other-worldly magician, inspectors from high empyreans conducted a blamestorming session, which resulted in Reston’s being transferred to far-off pastures where penguins reside. The leadership of the disgraced Colonel quickly washed its hands and wrote the failure off on their subordinate. They also allocated additional funds for the continuation of research. The “big people” were interested in the culprit of the chaos and his paranormal abilities. Strange ideas were hovering in the air, and a lot of biologists and doctors of various profiles appeared at the Center. They collectively blew dust particles from the foreign guest and also pumped out many pints of liquid daily for various analyses.

  The third complex acquired additional generators manufactured in Germany, made according to a new technology, stolen from one of the worlds (why hide it?). The Germans paid good money for the patent of the miracle of engineering and design ideas and promised to build a factory in Yekaterinburg to produce engines and generators of a new type. Another “hit” in terms of real impact from the secret Center’s work was the construction of a microprocessor equipment factory in Komsomolsk-on-Amur. The plant was built by the Chinese for the construction of several portals in China, which were supposed to link the Asian country with the nearest world, rich in resources and arable land. The fact that predators the size of a bull chased the herds of hooved animals in those lands, and that the woods were swarming with deadly creatures, worried their Eastern neighbors only a little. Perhaps the party leadership had already decided to consider the animal the next ingredient in traditional oriental medicine, who knows? The factory walls grew faster than the engineers and scientists of the Center could translate and bring to Earth the technology standards for producing information crystals and holographic projectors. It wasn’t anything too complicated, but the appearance on the market of high-tech gadgets that outdid the latest achievements by a couple of decades went to show that the Russians weren’t just baking bread.

  The General continued to sway slowly and think about something. Colonel Lantsov leafed through the pages of a coated paper and tried to systematize the Commander’s statements, but his conclusions very often did not coincide with Sanin’s logical conclusions. He had strange, perverted thinking, which combined things that were sometimes hard to imagine together, but... but in ninety-five cases out of a hundred, it turned out he was right. Gradually, the General’s anxiety spread to his subordinate. The Colonel cast a frown at the imperturbable face of his comrade of senior rank. He would give a lot for the chance to find out what he was thinking about, but there was no magic wand he could wave that would let him know. Although that had ceased to be an axiom. Kerimov’s “son” clearly demonstrated the opposite, so much so that in some places, their electronics were still malfunctioning. Gradually, the Colonel’s thoughts jumped to the gray-haired young man, whom his colleague was also thinking about at the moment.

  Sanin’s thoughts didn’t want to assemble into a harmonious logical stream. Nothing about the boy could be explained logically. The General stopped acting like a pendulum and froze in place, recalling his difficult conversation with the father of an involuntary traveler in parallel worlds. He tirelessly reproached himself for yielding to the scientist’s pressure and promising admission to the medical unit where Andy lay. Sanin, seized by life’s unexpected twists of fate, got what seemed at that time an excellent idea during the conversation with Kerimov.

  In order to keep the scientist under his thumb and partially restore the ingenious physicist’s position, which was flushed down the toilet by Reston, the General offered Iliya the role of nurse to his son, and to make his schedule round-the-clock, he cautiously hinted that it might be possible to allow the mother or elder sister of the violent youth into the center. During his long career in the state security agencies, he was accustomed to acting according to strict plans, thought out hundreds of times. He usually built several backup plans and calculated every possible development of events. But sometimes an adventurous vein awoke in the cold, logical mind, making it necessary to break verified schemes and build this or that action, hoping for luck.

  On that ill-fated day, the man’s concrete reasoning crumbled from the thought that Reston’s failure never would have happened if the boy in the transition cell was met by one of his own relatives. Obeying this mental and emotional inspiration, the General assumed a favorable outcome when the youngest Kerimov woke up from her coma, and in no way doubted that this would happen.

  The end of the historic conversation went according to the dictation of a senior puppet master from the state security agencies—Kerimov Sr. fell into an improvised trap. The father loved his son, and totally ignored his offspring’s bloody actions in the third block. Meanwhile, the biologists had figured out that the cause of the boy’s burning fury was the sleeping gas that affected him not as planned. Who would have known that the idea, brilliantly implemented, would turn out like cellulite on buttocks for the originator of the ingenious thought? The sneaky individual forgot about the numerous corners of the globe and the fact that initiative can be punished. [SJ(S44]

  Kerimov, after being released from custody and spouting colorful apologies, waited for Sanin to be reinstated as curator of the center (he had been temporarily suspended due to the whole affair with Reston and the information leak) in order to “register” with his eldest daughter in the medical unit, torn between the Center and the third ward of the trauma department of the First City Hospital. Two out of three kids in comas. The scientist and his daughter [SJ(S45]spent day and night near the bullet-proof glass, transparent from the outside, which fenced off the son’s room from theirs, which was assigned especially for the caring parent’s exclusive use. The scientist’s wife did not leave Olga’s side, who was fortunate enough not to be sandwiched between the body of the minibus and the seat, thus earning two broken legs, one of which was open[SJ(S46]. It’s just a miracle the girl didn’t die from loss of blood...

  Everything was good until the moment the high-level authorities realized what was in their hands and what it promised. It was then that the General’s initiative turned against him, causing him to regret his own actions. The command didn’t appreciate what he’d done. It blamed Sanin for admitting civilians to a valuable object. He listened and nodded, but continued to quietly sabotage orders and go against policy. The General received reports on the status of the “object” several times a day and couldn’t help but note his increased number of bursts of cerebral activity. The splashes recorded by the shielded devices suggested the “guest” could wake up at any moment.

  The former KGB member believed in his intuition more than ever, which was also telling him not to remove the boy’s relatives from the unit. As a result, they started scrutinizing him. Kerimov flatly refused to put himself in the General’s shoes, exercising all the authority he’d held among the brotherhood of scientists on the General—which couldn’t be ignored. Kerimov remained in the medical block, and Sanin felt the floor wobbling beneath his feet. Somewhere inside, he agreed and supported the scientist, but if the kid didn’t wake up in the next month, the General would be replaced. Quietly or loudly, but it would happen...

  The Colonel, once again closing the folder with a selection of reports on the status of the valuable object, looked at the General who approached the computer terminal and pressed a few keys to display the image of the medical block.

  “I’d like to know what he’s thinking, and if he’s thinking at all,” Sanin said, enlarging the image and looking at the young man’s hands, tattered with thin white scars.

  “Me, too…” Lantsov agreed. “Maybe you’re right...”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “They shou
ld have killed him...”

  * * *

  Andy was swimming in the void. The funniest thing is that the boundless emptiness was created by his consciousness, slipping into the depths of settage, [SJ(S47]when the inner gaze falls through the walls and fences of the inner self. He was inside himself, the periphery of his senses hindering his ordinary biological processes and directing the energy that freed up to the treatment of his gunshot wounds and the restoration of the heart. All attempts to attach to some source of mana or break through to the astral failed, so he had to follow the path of least resistance, but it was a long way. He was redistributing the energy flows in his body. In the absence of a magical reserve, the work was difficult and laborious. If he came out of his trance, the “tuning” of his body would immediately be destroyed. He had to endure the numerous scientists poking his frail body with needles and taking various samples. To others, he was a corpse, a cross between a vegetable and a sausage loaf.

  Andy still realized that he had been moved to Earth. What for? Once he dreamed of returning, but gradually his dreams became just an oath to himself to find a way to tell his parents that everything was fine with him. After three years of life in the foreign worlds, one of which had become his home, he finally realized that the Earth was no longer for him. But his future child, Ania, Tyigu, Lilly, the dwarfs, the orcs, the miur, and the elves all chained him to Ilanta with stronger ties. He was a dragon and would never be a human again.

  Andy felt he was an integral part of the new world; he felt he was needed by his new big family, which, literally and figuratively, he’d taken under his wing. After relocation to his native valley he was happy and felt one with that world, but all this was taken away in one fell swoop, leaving only the pain and bitterness of loss. WHAT FOR? WHY? Why was the world taken away from him? Why was he given only emptiness in return? It seemed he would perish in the bottomless depths of his mind forever, while the emptiness of the “I,” which probed in all directions in search of native and familiar images, did not come across anything warm or native or dear.