I did not know what to answer. One thing I was sure of. As soon as Alice went to sleep, I was going into the garden to search it with a pocket torch.
“And he gave me a letter for you. Only I won’t give it to you now.”
“What letter?”
“I won’t give it to you.”
Then I noticed the piece of paper crumpled up in her fist. Alice looked at me, and I at her. And, just the same, she finally gave it to me.
On the paper, in my handwriting, was the feeding time-table for red krumci. I’d been looking for it for three days.
“Alice, where did you find my time-table?”
“You turn it over. The spectre didn’t have any paper, so I gave him yours.”
On the reverse side, something was written in English, but I did not recognize the handwriting.
“My dear Professor,
“I make bold to apply to you, because I have fallen into a very unpleasant predicament which I cannot get out of without outside help. Unfortunately, I also cannot leave this circle with a radius of one metre, the centre being the apple-tree. Only in darkness can I be seen in my pitiful predicament.
“Thanks to your daughter, a sensitive and responsive creature, I have finally been able to make contact with the outer world.
“I, Professor Kuraki, am the victim of an unsuccessful experiment. I carried out experiments in the physical transmigration of living matter over great distances. I managed to invisibly transmit two dematerialized turkeys and a cat from Tokyo to Paris. They were safely materialized by my colleagues. However, on the particular day I decided to make the experiment on myself, the fuses burnt out in the laboratory right in the middle of the experiment. There was not sufficient energy to complete it. I had melted away into space, but the more concentrated part of my body slightly materialized in the area of your cottage. I have been in this situation for two weeks, and am doubtless considered dead.
“Upon receiving my letter, I beg you to send a telegram to Tokyo immediately. Let somebody fix the fuses in my laboratory. Then I shall fully materialize.
“Thanking you in advance,
Kuraki.”
I stared for a long time into the darkness under the apple-tree. Then I left the verandah and approached the tree. A pale-blue, scarcely observable glow swayed round the trunk. Looking closer, I discerned the outlines of a man. It seemed to me that the ‘Spectre’ raised his hands in supplication to the heavens.
I wasted no more time. I ran to the monorail stop and videophoned Tokyo from the station.
All this took about ten minutes. Only on the way back did I remember that I had forgotten to put Alice to bed. I quickened my steps.
The verandah light was on.
Alice was showing her herbarium and butterfly collection to a short, emaciated Japanese. He was holding a pot and delicately eating the left-over farina, but not taking his eyes off Alice’s treasures.
Seeing me, the guest bowed low and said: “I’m Professor Kuraki, your eternal servant. You and your daughter have saved my life.”
“Yes, Daddy. This is my spectre,” said Alice. “Now, do you believe in them?”
“I do,” I answered. “Awfully glad to make your acquaintance.”
MISSING VISITORS FROM SPACE
Preparations were proceeding for the triumphant reception of the Labutsiltsians. Never before had the solar system been visited by travellers from such a distant star.
The first signals of their approach had been picked up on Pluto, and in three days’ time communications were established by the radio observatory at Londel.
The Labutsiltsians were still far away, but the cosmodrome Sheremetyevo-4 was in full readiness to receive them. Girls from the ‘Red Rose’ Factory had decorated it with flower garlands, and students of the Postgraduate Courses for Poets were rehearsing a musical-literary programme. All the embassies had reserved viewing stands on the tiered reception platform. Correspondents stayed overnight in the cosmodrome canteen.
Alice lived not far away in the cottage at Vnukovo, where she was collecting plants for her herbarium. She wanted a better one than Vanya Shpits’s — he was in a senior group at her kindergarten. So Alice took no part in the preparations for the triumphant reception. She did not even know about it.
And I myself had no direct relation to it. My work would begin later, after the Labutsiltsians landed.
Meanwhile, events ran as follows. On March 8, the Labutsiltsians advised that they were entering into circular orbit. Almost simultaneously the tragedy occurred. Instead of the Labutsiltsian ship, the radar station intersected the Swedish satellite ‘Nobel-29’ which was lost two years ago. By the time the mistake was discovered, it turned out that the Labutsiltsian ship had vanished. It was making a landing when contact was temporarily broken off.
On March 9, at 6.33 a.m. the Labutsiltsians advised that they had landed in an area of 55°20’ latitude North and 37°40’ longitude East according to the terrestrial system of coordinates, with a possible error of 15 minutes — that is, not far from Moscow.
Further contact was interrupted and not restored, with the exception of one instance which I will return to later. It seemed that terrestrial radiation had a deadly effect upon the Labutsiltsian communications system.
At the same moment, hundreds of cars and thousands of people were hurrying to the visitors’ landing-site. The roads were packed with people hoping to find them. The cosmodrome Sheremetyevo-4 was deserted: not one reporter remained in the canteen. The sky over Moscow was covered with hovercraft, helicopters, prop-wing, ornithopters and vortex-skimmers — all kinds of flying machines. It looked as if a monstrous swarm of mosquitoes hung over the earth.
Even if the Labutsiltsian ship had gone underground, it would have been found all the same.
But it was not found.
Not one local inhabitant had seen the ship come down. And the strangest thing of all was that at the time almost every resident of Moscow and its suburbs was watching the sky. That surely meant a mistake had been made.
By evening, as I was going to the cottage from work, all normal everyday life on Earth was fairly disrupted. People were afraid something had happened to the visitors.
“Perhaps,” they argued on the monorail train, “they are made of anti-matter and evaporated on entering the Earth’s atmosphere?”
“Without an explosion, without leaving a trace? Nonsense!”
“But how much do we know of the properties of anti-matter?”
“Then who sent the radio message that a landing had been made?”
“Maybe some joker?”
“Not bad for a joker! So you think, perhaps it was he who was talking with Pluto?”
“But perhaps they’re invisible?”
“Even so, our locators would have found them…”
Nevertheless, the version of invisible guests won the majority of supporters.
I sat on the verandah, thinking it over. What if they had landed right beside us, on the neighbouring field? Now, poor things, they were standing by their ship wondering why people wanted to ignore them. And were on the point of taking offence and flying off… I was ready to leave the verandah and head for that very field, when I saw a string of people coming out of the woods. They lived in neighbouring cottages. They were holding hands as if playing the children’s game ‘The Farmer in the Dell, The Farmer Takes a Wife’, except they weren’t in a circle, but spread out. I realized my neighbours had outguessed my thoughts, and were searching for the invisible visitors from space by the sense of touch. And at that moment all the radio stations in the world suddenly burst into a thousand tongues. They were broadcasting a taped communique picked up by an amateur radio station in northern Australia. The communique repeated the same longitude and latitude as before, followed by these words: “We are in a forest… Sent out the first group to search for people. We are tuned in to your broadcasts. There is a surprising lack of contact…” At that point, communication broke off.
Th
e version of invisibility immediately gained a few more millions of supporters.
From the verandah I could see the chain of cottagers stop, and then swing toward the woods. And at that moment Alice came up the verandah steps carrying a basketful of wild strawberries.
“Why are they all running about?” she asked, not bothering to say ‘hello’.
“Who do you mean by ‘they’? And you should say ‘Hello’ when you haven’t seen your one and only father since morning.”
“Since last night. I was still asleep when you left this morning. Hi, Daddy. But what’s going on?”
“The Labutsiltsians are lost,” I answered.
“I don’t know them.”
“Nobody does, so far…”
“So how did they get lost then?”
“They were flying to Earth. Landed, and disappeared. ”
I felt as if I were talking nonsense. But it was the simple truth, you see.
Alice glanced at me with suspicion.
“But do things like that really happen?”
“No, they don’t. Not usually.”
“But couldn’t they find the cosmodrome?”
“I guess not.”
“And where, exactly, did they get lost?”
“Somewhere near Moscow. Perhaps, not far from our cottage.”
“And people are looking for them by helicopter and on foot?”
“That’s right.”
“But why don’t they come to us themselves?”
“Probably they’re waiting till people come to them. You see, it’s their first visit to Earth, so they don’t want to leave their spaceship.”
Alice was silent, as if satisfied with my answers. She walked along the verandah once or twice, without letting go of the basket of strawberries. Then she spoke.
“Are they in the fields or the woods?”
“In the woods.”
“And how do you know?”
“They said so themselves. Over the radio.”
“That’s good.”
“What’s good?”
“That they’re not in the fields.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I was afraid I’d seen them.”
“What’s that again?”
“Why nothing, I was joking.”
I leaped to my feet. Alice can tell some regular whoppers at times…
“I didn’t go into the woods, Daddy. Honestly, I didn’t. I was in a clearing. So I didn’t see them.”
“Alice, tell me everything, everything you know. And don’t add any embroidery of your own. Did you see in the woods any queer … people?”
“Honestly, I wasn’t in the woods.”
“Well, all right, in the clearing then.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong. And they weren’t queer at all.”
“Now, you give me a straight answer. Where was it, and whom did you see? Don’t torture me, and all mankind in my person!”
“And are you mankind?”
“Listen, Alice…”
“Well, all right. Here they are. They came with me.”
I unwittingly looked around. The verandah was empty. And if you didn’t count a buzzing bee, nobody was on it but Alice and me.
“No, no, Daddy. That isn’t the place to look.” Alice sighed, and came over beside me. “I wanted to keep them for myself. I didn’t know mankind was looking for them.”
And Alice offered me the basket of wild strawberries. She raised the basket right up to my eyes and I, in complete unbelief, could clearly make out two little figures in space-suits. They were covered with strawberry juice, both sitting astride the same berry.
“I didn’t hurt them,” said Alice, in a guilty voice. “I thought they were gnomes from fairyland.”
But I wasn’t listening to her now. Tenderly holding the basket next to my heart, I dashed to the videophone, thinking that grass to them must have looked like a great forest.
That was how we first met the Labutsiltsians.
OUR MAN IN THE PAST
The time machine test was to take place in the small auditorium at the House of Sciences. I had gone to pick up Alice at the kindergarten, and only then realized that if I saw her home I should be late for the test. So I made Alice promise faithfully to be on her best behaviour, and we went to the House of Sciences.
The lecturer from the Time Institute, very large and very bald, stood before the time machine explaining its design to the scientific-minded audience, who listened with all attention.
“The first experiment, as you all know, was a failure,” he said. “The kitten we sent materialized in the beginning of the twentieth century and exploded in the region of the River Tunguska, giving birth to the legend of the Tunguska meteorite. Since that time we have had no serious failures. True, in conformity with certain regularities — anyone interested may acquaint himself with them by reading the brochures of our institute — we can, up to the present, send people and objects only as far back as the seventies of the twentieth century. I should like to point out that several of our working colleagues have been there, in absolute secrecy of course, and returned safely. The procedure itself of transference through time is comparatively simple, though many years of work done by hundreds of people lie behind it. All one has to do is don this chromocine belt… I should like a volunteer to come up from the audience, and I shall demonstrate the method of preparing a traveller through time.
There was an awkward silence. Nobody could bring himself to be the first to mount the platform. At this point, as you might expect, Alice appeared on the stage. Alice! Who had promised five minutes earlier to be well-behaved.
“Alice,” I cried out. “Come back at once.”
“Don’t worry,” said the lecturer. “Nothing will happen to the child.”
“Nothing will happen to me, Daddy!” cried Alice merrily.
All the audience began to laugh, and crane their necks to search for the stern father.
I pretended it had nothing to do with me.
The lecturer fastened the belt on Alice and attached something resembling ear-phones to her temples.
“That’s all there is to it,” he said. “Now the person is ready to travel through time. He has only to enter the cabin, and he’ll find himself in the year 1975.”
What did he have to say that for! And a feeling of panic drowned my thoughts. Alice won’t pass that chance up!
But it was too late to warn him.
“Where are you going, child? Stop!” cried the lecturer.
But Alice was already in the cabin, and right before the eyes of the audience — vanished. They all gasped in unison.
Turning pale, the lecturer waved his arms in an attempt to quiet the uproar. Seeing me running up the aisle, he grabbed the mike in order to be heard.
“Nothing will happen to the child. In three minutes, she will again be with us. I give you my word, the machine is absolutely safe and has come through every test. Please don’t be alarmed!”
It was all very well for him to be so sure. But I stood on the stage and thought about the fate of the kitten which became the Tunguska meteorite. I neither believed nor disbelieved the learned Doctor. But judge for yourself — how would you feel if you knew that your child was on her way to a hundred years ago in time? … And if she ran away from the machine? And got lost?
“Is it impossible for me to follow her?” I asked.
“Quite impossible. In just a minute… Now don’t you worry. You see, our man there will meet her.”
“You have an associate there?”
“Not exactly, he’s not quite an associate. Simply we found a man who understood our problems perfectly, and a second cabin stands in his flat. He lives there, in the twentieth century, but because of his special profession…”
At that moment, Alice appeared in the cabin. She came out on the stage with the look of a person who has done a good job well. And under her arm, she carried a thick, old-fashioned book.
“There, you
see…” began the lecturer.
The audience gave him a friendly round of applause.
“Now, little girl, tell us what you saw,” said the Doctor, not letting me even approach Alice.
“It’s very interesting back there,” she replied. “Bam! And I’m in another room. A man was sitting at a desk, writing something or other. Then he asked me: ‘Are you from the twenty-first century, child?’ I said I probably was, but I couldn’t count to our century because I can’t count very well yet. That I only go to kindergarten, and am in the middle or junior group. Then the man said that it was very nice to see me, and that I should have to go back. ‘Would you like to see what Moscow was like before your grandfather was even born?’ he asked. I said I would. And he showed me. A most amazing town … the buildings weren’t very tall. Then he said that he was a writer who wrote science-fiction books about the future. It seems he doesn’t invent everything, because people from our time visit him and tell him all about it. Only he mustn’t tell anyone, because it’s terribly secret. He gave me a book of his… And then I came back.”
The audience met Alice’s story with stormy applause.
Then a highly esteemed academician stood up and said: “My dear girl, you are holding a very unique book — a first edition of the science-fiction novel Spots on Mars. Would you mind presenting it to me? After all, you can’t read yet.”
“No, sir,” said Alice. “You see, I’ll soon learn to, and then I’ll read it myself.”
Footnotes
1
Baba-Yaga — a witch in Russian folk tales. — Tr.
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Document ID: fbd-bbd7a6-600e-bb49-299b-011f-c656-a08e6c
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Document creation date: 21.09.2010
The Girl Nothing Happens To ас-1 Page 3