The Girl Nothing Happens To ас-1

by Kirill Bulychev

  The Girl Nothing Happens To

  ( Алиса Селезнева - 1 )

  Kirill Bulychev

  The Girl Nothing Happens To

  (Adventures of 21st-century Alice — Told by Her Father)

  by Kirill Bulychev

  INSTEAD OF A FOREWORD

  Tomorrow Alice starts school. It should be a very interesting day. From early morning her friends and acquaintances have been calling her on the videophone to wish her a good beginning. But for three months now, Alice herself has talked only of going to school — giving nobody any peace.

  The Martian Buce sent her a really remarkable pencil-box which nobody has been able to open, so far. Not I, nor my colleagues either, though two of them are Doctors of Science and one the chief engineer of the zoo.

  Shusha said he would go to school with Alice and ascertain whether her teacher is sufficiently experienced and worthy of my daughter.

  A surprising amount of fuss. When I went to school for the first time, I can’t remember anybody making such a hubbub over it.

  The turmoil has quieted down a bit now. Alice has gone to the zoo to say good-bye to Bronty.

  And while the house is quiet, I’ve decided to tape-record a number of stories about Alice and her friends. I shall pass on the tapes to Alice’s teacher. It will be useful for her to know what a flighty creature she has to deal with. Maybe the tapes will help the teacher educate my daughter.

  At first Alice was just like any other child. Until she was three. The first story I’m going to tell will prove my contention. But a year later, when she met Bronty, the knack of doing everything she was not supposed to do suddenly appeared in her character: she got lost at a most inappropriate time and made chance discoveries beyond the powers of the most eminent scientists of our modern age. Alice has a positive talent for taking advantage of those she is on friendly terms with but, none the less, she has droves of real friends. It makes it difficult, sometimes, for us — her parents. You see, we cannot stay home all the time. I work at the zoo and her mother builds houses, sometimes on other planets.

  I want to warn Alice’s teacher beforehand — it won’t be easy for her, either. To prove my point, I shall relate some perfectly true stories about what happened to Alice in different places on Earth and in space, over the last three years.

  I VIDEOPHONE A NUMBER AT RANDOM

  Alice is not asleep. Ten o’clock, and she is not asleep. So then I said: ” Alice , go to sleep at once, or else…”

  “What’s ‘or else’, Daddy?”

  “Or else I’ll call Baba-Yaga[1] on the videophone.”

  “And who’s Baba-Yaga?”

  “Why, all children ought to know that! Baba-Yaga, pegleg hag-o, is a terribly wicked old woman who eats up little children. Disobedient ones.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, because she’s wicked and hungry.”

  “And why is she hungry?”

  “Because her hut is not equipped with a food supply pipe.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because her hut is an old rack-and-ruin, far away in the forest.”

  Alice became so interested, she even sat up in bed.

  “Does she work in a forest reserve?”

  “ Alice , go to sleep at once.”

  “But, Daddy, you promised to call Baba-Yaga. Please, Daddy dear, call Baba-Yaga.”

  “I’ll call her. But you’ll be very sorry I did.”

  I went to the videophone and pressed a few buttons at random. I was sure no connection would be made, and Baba-Yaga would be ‘not at home’.

  But I was mistaken. The videophone screen lit up, shone brightly, and a click sounded — somebody had pushed the receiving button at the end of the line and, before his image appeared on the screen, a sleepy voice spoke: “This is the Martian Embassy.”

  “D’you suppose she’ll come, Daddy?” cried Alice from the bedroom.

  “She’s already gone to sleep,” I snapped angrily-

  “This is the Martian Embassy,” the voice repeated.

  I turned back to the videophone. A young Martian was looking at me. He had green eyes with no eyelashes.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Apparently, I pushed the wrong number.”

  The Martian smiled. He was not looking at me, but at something behind my back. Why, of course. Alice had got out of bed and stood behind me, bare-foot.

  “Good evening,” she said to the Martian.

  “Good evening, little girl.”

  “Does Baba-Yaga live in your house?”

  “You see,” I said. ” Alice wouldn’t go to sleep, and I wanted to videophone Baba-Yaga to punish her. But I got the wrong number.”

  The Martian smiled again.

  “Good night, Alice ,” he said. “You’d better go to sleep, or else your Dad will call Baba-Yaga.”

  The Martian said good-bye and switched off.

  “Well. Now will you go to sleep?” I asked. “You heard what the man from Mars told you?”

  “I’m going. And will you take me to Mars?”

  “If you behave yourself, we’ll fly there next summer.”

  Finally Alice fell asleep, and I sat down again to work. I worked till one in the morning. And at one o’clock, the videophone suddenly gave a muffled whirr. I pushed the button. It was the Martian from the embassy.

  “I beg your pardon for disturbing you so late,” he said. “But your videophone wasn’t turned off, and I decided you weren’t asleep yet.”

  “That’s quite all right.”

  “Would you mind helping us out?” said the Martian. “The whole embassy cannot sleep. We’ve gone through all the encyclopaedias, searched the videophone directory, but we can’t find out who Baba-Yaga is or where she lives…”

  BRONTY

  A brontosaurus egg was brought to us at the Moscow zoo. The egg was found by Chilean tourists in a landslide on the shores of the Enisei river. It was almost round in shape and wonderfully preserved in the permafrost. When specialists began examining it, they discovered the egg was absolutely fresh. And so they decided to put it in the zoo’s incubator.

  Naturally, there were not many who believed it would hatch successfully, but after a week’s time X-ray plates showed that the brontosaurus embryo was developing. As soon as the news went out over intervision, scientists and reporters began flying in to Moscow from all directions. We had to engage all the rooms in the eighty-storey Venus hotel on Gorky Street . And even then, there was not enough room for everybody. Eight Turkish palaeontologists slept in my dining-room, I moved into the kitchen with a journalist from Ecuador , while two women reporters from the magazine Women of the Antarctic were settled in Alice’s bedroom.

  When my wife videophoned that night from Nukus where she was building a stadium, she thought she had the wrong number.

  All the Earth teletransmission satellites beamed photographs of the egg. Side view, front view, the brontosaurus skeleton, and the egg…

  A congress of cosmophilologists arrived in full strength to visit the zoo. But by that time, we had already stopped all entry into the incubator room, and they had to be satisfied with viewing the polar bears and the Martian praying mantis.

  On the forty-sixth day of this lunatic way of life, the egg quivered. At that moment my friend, Professor Yakata, and I were sitting beside the armoured glass shelter, where we kept the egg, drinking tea. By then we had stopped believing that anything would hatch from the egg. We didn’t X-ray it any more, d’you see, for fear of harming our “baby”. And we could not make any predictions, because nobody but ourselves had ever tried hatching out a brontosaurus.

  And so, the egg quivered, gav
e another crack and split — through its thick, leathery shell, a black snake-like head began pushing its way out. A whirring sound came from the automatic cinecameras. I realized the red lamp over the incubator doors had flashed on. Something very much like a panic broke out all through the grounds of the zoo.

  In five minutes, we were surrounded by everybody whose job it was to be here and many who had no business to be but wanted to see. And in such a crowd, it grew very hot.

  Finally the little brontosaurus crawled out of the egg.

  “What’s his name, Daddy?” I suddenly heard a familiar voice.

  “ Alice !” I cried in surprise. “How did you get in here?”

  “I’m with the reporters.”

  “But children aren’t allowed in here.” “But I am! I told everybody I was your daughter. And they let me in.”

  “You realize it’s not nice to use people you know for personal aims?”

  “But Daddy, little Bronty might be bored without children. That’s why I came.”

  I threw up my hands in despair. I didn’t have a minute to spare to take Alice out of the incubator. And there was nobody around who would agree to do it for me.

  “You stand right here, and don’t go away,” I told her. Then I ran to the glass shelter that held the new-born brontosaurus.

  That whole evening Alice and I weren’t on speaking terms. We had quarrelled. I forbade her to go into the incubator, but she said that she couldn’t obey me because she was sorry for Bronty. And the next day she stole into the incubator again. She came with the astronauts from the spaceship Jupiter-8. They were heroes, and nobody could refuse them anything.

  “Good morning, Bronty,” she said, going over to the shelter.

  The brontosaurus looked sidewise at her.

  “Whose child is this?” asked Prof. Yakata, strictly.

  I almost wished the earth would swallow me up.

  But Alice was never at a loss for words.

  “Don’t you like me?” she asked.

  “What a question, on the contrary… I simply thought you were lost, perhaps…” The professor had no gift at all in talking with little girls.

  “All right,” said Alice . “Bronty, I’ll come and see you tomorrow. Don’t you feel lonely now.”

  And Alice really did come the next day. And kept coming almost every day. Everyone got used to her and let her in without question. I washed my hands of it. After all, our house stood next to the zoo, there was no road to cross, and besides she always found someone to bring her in.

  The brontosaurus grew very fast. In a month’s time he was over two and a half yards long, and we moved him into a pavilion specially built for him. The brontosaurus wandered along the railed-in enclosure and chewed young shoots of bamboo and bananas. The bamboo was brought in by freight jet planes from India , and the bananas came from the “Irrigation-Field” state farm. A warm salt-water pool shone in the centre of the enclosure. Everything to please a brontosaurus.

  But suddenly he lost his appetite. For three days, the bamboo and bananas lay untouched. On the fourth day, the brontosaurus lay on the bottom of the pool, his small black head resting on the plastic rim. Everything indicated he intended to die. We could not permit it. You see, he was the only brontosaurus we had. The best doctors in the world tried to help us, but all in vain. Bronty refused grass, vitamins, oranges, milk — everything.

  Alice did not know of the tragedy. I had sent her to her grandmother’s in Vnukovo. But on the fourth day, she turned on the television at the very moment they were giving the news about the failing health of the brontosaurus. I still don’t know how she persuaded her grandmother, but that same morning Alice ran into the pavilion.

  “Daddy!” she cried. “How could you keep it from me? How could you?…”

  “Later, Alice , later,” I answered. “We are having a meeting.”

  And so we were having a meeting. It had been going on for the last three days.

  Alice said nothing, and went away. But the next moment I heard somebody beside me gasp. I turned and saw that Alice had already climbed over the guard-rail, slipped into the enclosure and started running toward the brontosaurus’s head. She had a bun in her hand.

  “Eat it, Bronty,” she said, “or else they’ll leave you here to die of hunger. In your place, I’d be fed up with bananas, too.”

  And before I managed to reach the guardrail, something unbelievable happened. Something which made Alice famous, but had an awful effect on our reputation, as biologists.

  The brontosaurus raised his head, looked at Alice , and carefully took the bun from her hand.

  “Quiet, Daddy.” Alice threatened me with her finger, on seeing that I wanted to leap over the railing. “Bronty’s afraid of you.”

  “He’s not going to harm her,” said Prof. Yakata.

  I could see that for myself. But what if her grandmother was watching the scene?

  Afterwards, scientists argued over it for a long time. They are still arguing to this day.

  Some say that Bronty needed a change of food, others that he trusted Alice more than he did us. But, one way or another, the crisis was over.

  Now Bronty has become completely tame.

  Though he is about thirty yards long, nothing gives him greater delight than to let Alice ride on his back. One of my assistants made a special step ladder and, when Alice enters the pavilion, Bronty reaches his long neck into the corner and picks up the step ladder standing there with his triangular teeth, setting it deftly against his shining black side.

  Then he gives Alice a ride round the pavilion or swims in the pool with her on his back.

  TUTEKSI

  As I’d promised Alice , I took her to Mars with me when I flew there to attend a conference.

  We landed safe and sound. True, I don’t tolerate weightlessness too well, so I kept my seat during the trip, but my daughter flitted about the spaceship all the time. Once we had to pull her off the ceiling in the control deck because she wanted to push the red button, namely, the button for emergency braking. But the pilots weren’t very angry with her.

  On Mars, we went sightseeing in town, travelled with tourists into the desert and visited the Great Caves . But after that I had no time for Alice and installed her in a boarding-school for a week. Many of our specialists work on Mars, and the Martians helped us build a huge cupola over a miniature Kinder-town. There are real earth trees growing there — it is a fine place. Sometimes the children go on excursions. Then they wear small space-suits and come out into the big city streets walking in double rows.

  The school-mistress, Tatyana Petrovna was her name, said I wasn’t to worry. Alice told me the same, too. And we parted for a week.

  The third day, Alice disappeared.

  It was a perfectly extraordinary occurrence. To begin with, in all the history of the boarding-school, not one inmate had ever disappeared, or even been lost, for more than ten minutes. On Mars, it is simply impossible to get lost in town. And all the more so for an Earth-child, dressed in a space-suit. The very first Martian who met the child would bring him or her back. And the robots? And the Security Service? Why, it’s impossible to get lost on Mars.

  But Alice got lost.

  She hadn’t been seen for about two hours, when they called me away from the conference and took me to the boarding-school on a Martian Cross-Country Hopper. When I appeared under the cupola, I probably looked rather upset, because everybody gathered there fell silent in sympathy. And who wasn’t there, though! All the teachers and workers at the boarding-school, ten Martians in space-suits (they had to wear them under the cupola because of the heavier Earth air pressure), interstellar pilots, Chief Nazaryan of the Life-Saving Service, archaeologists…

  Apparently, for over an hour the city television centre had been broadcasting the news, every three minutes, that a little girl from Earth had disappeared. All videophones on Mars gave out alarm signals. Lessons were stopped in Martian schools while the pupils, in groups, combed all
the city and its environs.

  Alice’s disappearance had been discovered only when her group had returned from a walk. Two hours had passed since then. And the air in her space-suit tank was sufficient to last only three hours.

  Knowing my daughter, I asked if they had looked for her in all secluded nooks in the school or near it. Perhaps she had found a Martian praying mantis, and was absorbed in watching it…

  I was told there were no cellars in town, and all secluded spots had been searched by the pupils and by the Martian university students who knew such places like the palms of their hands.

  I was angry at Alice . Why, of course, any second she would come round the corner wearing the most innocent expression in the world. And, really, her behaviour had caused more trouble in the city than a sand storm. All the Martians and all the Earthmen living in town had had to drop all their affairs, all the life-saving personnel had been called in to help. At the same time I was beginning to be seriously alarmed. This adventure of hers might end badly.

  News from the search parties kept pouring in: “Pupils of the Second Martian Grammar School inspected the stadium. No Alice “, “The Martian Sweets Factory reports that no child has been found on its territory…”

  “Maybe she has actually managed to get into the desert?” I thought. “She would be found by now if she were in the city. But the desert… The Martian deserts have not yet been fully explored, and you could get lost there and not be found for ten years or more. But the nearest desert vicinities have already been searched on cross-country hoppers…”

  “They’ve found her!” suddenly cried a Martian in a blue tunic, as he stared into a pocket television set.

  “Where? How? Where?” came excited cries from everybody under the domed cupola in Kinder-town.

  “In the desert, one hundred and fifty miles away.”