Chekhov’s Journey

by Ian Watson

  Outside, blank white mist continued to hide everything: a thick milky haze, a host of particles suspended in an ocean…an ocean of time …

  “Commander Anton Astrov …” Sonya only realized that she had uttered the words aloud, when it was too late to recall them.

  “Ah. Yes, indeed. Hmm. The Astrov business …” Kirilenko was visibly embarrassed. “One point I ought to have emphasized earlier on is that it’s quite difficult to—how shall we put it?—articulate the future, except in a caricature-like manner. By that, I mean this …” Kirilenko chuckled with false heartiness. “Ah, what a grammatical solecism I have just perpetrated! Still, if we Russians must possess such a subtle language that we don’t even know the declensions of all our nouns …! But never mind. Let me put this question to you: What would a man of the eighteenth century make of a television set? He would have to assume that it was an ingenious camera obscura. And what would he make of the mushroom cloud from an atom bomb? Why, probably it would look like a volcanic eruption.”

  “What’s your point, man?” said Felix. “Is there one? Or are you just babbling?”

  “I never babble, Felix Moseivich. My point is that Mikhail must necessarily misinterpret the future—in terms of today. He symbolises, in other words. Hence the Hammer and Sickle starship, and the cartoon book name of the American defence system.”

  Sonya spoke impetuously. “But is there a starship of some sort? A ship that travels backwards through time and space?” She carried on pell-mell, ignoring Kirilenko’s look of reproof. “What I mean is: why this particular thing? Why this kind of starship rather than something else? He says that the American war-shield works on the same basic principle, doesn’t he? So why shouldn’t this represent a genuine precognition? A glimpse of a technique which will actually exist one day?”

  Kirilenko drummed his fingers rapidly on the arm of his chair, and when he answered it was in a quick, quiet, tight voice.

  “If he’s picking up authentic information, it’s possible that he’s milking the brains of some researcher in the present—not the future. From somewhere nearby. Maybe the Krasnoyarsk Institute of Physics—they do space research there. Or maybe further afield, somewhere secret … This might put us all in a highly embarrassing, not to say dangerous position.” Kirilenko tapped his nose meaningfully. “The less said about this possibility, the better. Thankfully it has no relevance at all to Anton Chekhov—or to the Tunguska fireworks.”

  “I thought,” said Sergey, “you were trying to get him to forecast the outcome of the bloody film? Or have we all forgotten that the film has nothing whatever to do with bloody Tunguska?”

  “He does seem to have gone a bit astray,” allowed Kirilenko.

  Sergey guffawed. “At least he’s consistent! Astray in the past, astray in the future.”

  “You must agree it’s a fascinating case.”

  “So that’s what you call it?”

  “Well, don’t blame me!” said Mikhail. “I was doing my darnedest to focus on Chekhov’s Journey. Honest! But my own personal film speeded up incredibly—and suddenly I was Anton Astrov instead. Chatting up my luscious, prosaic Astrogator.”

  “What exactly do you mean by your ‘own personal’ film?” Felix asked him.

  “It’s hard to express. As far as I’m concerned, this hypnosis business feels just like watching a film—but acting in it at the same time, if you get me. I’m watching myself act, but from inside…”

  “Nobody blames you,” Sonya assured him. How could Mike possibly regard her as prosaic? If he could only know the hot flushes of confusion which had assaulted her the night before… and which she had nobly overcome.

  ‘Hot flushes, indeed!’ She rebuked herself. ‘I’m behaving like a fatuous provincial wife, straight out of Chekhov, about to ruin herself in some idiotic love affair!’

  There was a cursory knock at the double door, and immediately Osip stepped uninvited into the room.

  “What do you want?” demanded Felix.

  “Just thought you comrades might like to know our phone’s packed up … Must be the snow, eh?”

  “And who the devil were you phoning?”

  Osip looked blank. “Eh? Just picked the phone up to dust it.”

  Fourteen

  AS SOON AS he was installed in the Zelenin residence, Anton’s health promptly picked up. No more migraine, no more itchings in the arse.

  The daughters Nastya and Masha were as chalk and cheese to each other. Nastya, the elder, was small and serious. She was a self-possessed witness of everything which went on—a sort of house spy. While her younger sister Masha was taller by a head, willowy, erratic and highly-strung.

  Presiding over these ill-matched girls were a young German governess, Olga Franzovna, who was addicted to card tricks, and Polena the fat old nursemaid, skivvy and cook. Definitely this was a woman’s household—even if the Countess and the governess were both wayward types—so Anton soon settled down into a tolerably familiar mould. He wrote to Moscow. He wrote to Borovsk. He prepared lists and tore them up. He visited local suppliers together with Jaroslav Mirek, haggled and drew up more lists. Some money began arriving from Moscow and Petersburg.

  Meanwhile, daily in the drawing room, rehearsals of The Bear took place—far more rehearsals than such a brief one-act skit could possibly require. However, the Countess was true to her promise, and Anton was not asked to involve himself in these—though he soon grew heartily sick of the sound of his own trivial lines resounding from the drawing room. The three actors seemed to have become absurdly addicted to the little play. They rehearsed it over and over with such fervent dedication that it might have been a religious Mass he had written.

  Playing opposite Lydia in the role of Popova was … Baron Nikolai Vershinin, ideally cast as the bear with the sore head. Dr Rodé took the part of the old servant Looka; and Vasily Fedotik always accompanied his two friends to act, nominally, as prompter. Since the actors soon knew their lines backwards, Fedotik was quite de trop in this capacity—which was a considerable relief to him. Too much attention to the printed word was bad for the eyesight. So while the principals shouted and rumbled to each other, he whiled away his time happily at a card table, playing patience with himself. Occasionally Olga Franzovna joined him, to show off her repertoire of card tricks.

  After a week or so Anton realized that there was more to these endless rehearsals than met the eye …

  For Lydia was indeed a dashing widow, even more liable to discharge a duelling pistol in real life than she was in art. And Vershinin was indeed an abusive, bellowing fellow—with a soft heart underneath. What was actually happening in that drawing room, under the pretext of rehearsals, was a kind of courtship ritual.

  How many more times would these two embrace each other passionately, to the astonishment of Looka-Rodé… before they embraced in reality?

  Once Anton understood this, his discomfort at hearing the silly lines so oft repeated began to fade away—together with his earlier suspicion that the Countess might make an amatory bee-line for him …

  From Olga Kundasova a package of books arrived, and Anton began to learn all about meteors, comets, asteroids and planetoids—without ever experiencing a single twinge from haemorrhoids.

  So the summer wore hotly on. Until one day when—funded by Suvorin, who had also pulled strings at Anton’s request—there arrived in Krasnoyarsk on several months’ leave of absence from his elementary school: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky himself.

  And at once Anton wondered whether he had made a serious error of judgement …

  *

  Tsiolkovsky arrived on the Zelenin doorstep late one afternoon. Polena opened the door for him, and shrieked in alarm, bringing Lydia and Olga and Anton hastening to her aid. For it seemed a moot point whether the emaciated tramp who stood there ought not to proceed onwards to the nearest hospital ward.

  Granted that Tsiolkovsky was worn out by a long and tiresome journey—and nobody could reasonably expect a traveller who
had just traversed the Siberian plain to arrive with his clothing anything other than soiled, crumpled and decorated with straw. Yet Tsiolkovsky appeared to have neglected to eat a scrap during the entire journey. His eyes peered out weakly through cheap spectacles. What’s more, it immediately became clear—in spite of the size of the man’s ears with their long dangling lobes—that he was almost deaf; certainly he seemed to have dire difficulty in communicating. This picture of misery was completed by a cheap suitcase tied together with string. In short Tsiolkovsky looked just like the most wretched type of deported exile.

  Nevertheless, once the man had succeeded in identifying himself, Lydia Zelenina drew him graciously inside—though she raised an eyebrow.

  “Most honoured Sir!” Dropping his suitcase, Tsiolkovsky blundered into Anton’s embrace, and the two men hugged each other—rather more dutifully than devotedly on Anton’s part.

  “Polena, we will eat dinner much earlier than usual.”

  The old woman nodded to her mistress, and bustled off, casting back glances of pity and contempt. What was this fellow, then: a house guest or a refugee?

  Right there in the hall, Tsiolkovsky knelt down and began to unpick the string from his suitcase, as if he expected that he would have to doss down before the front door like a watchdog. Meanwhile the two young sisters had crept up behind a pillar to peer at him: Masha wide-eyed and giggling, Nastya with the narrowed gaze of a police agent.

  From amidst a jumble of dirty crushed laundry Tsiolkovsky produced a manuscript bound with a frayed blue ribbon. This he presented to Anton.

  “Thought perhaps … thought maybe … after dinner? As an entertainment?” Tsiolkovsky choked. “Better at expressing myself on paper!” Did Anton’s ears deceive him or did Tsiolkovsky speak Russian with a faint trace of a Polish accent?

  The manuscript was entitled On the Moon, and was penned in a neat, sloping copperplate hand.

  Oh well, this had to be that same piece of—what had he called it in his first letter, Science Fantasy? A glance confirmed that the pages were a first-person narrative. Undoubtedly the very same. I hold, thought Anton, an infant genre in my hands. He was careful not to drop it.

  “Olga,” said the Countess loudly, “would you kindly show this gentleman up to his room?”

  Tsiolkovsky gaped. “Room? Eh? Oh yes—”

  Rather better groomed and with his beard combed out, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky sat down at table a couple of hours later. The instruction to Polena to hurry might as well have been spoken in Chinese. But no doubt she had the welfare of the other dinner guests equally in mind. This evening, these were Mirek, and Ilya Sidorov.

  The meal commenced with kidney and cucumber soup accompanied by several glasses of vodka which presently loosened Tsiolkovsky’s tongue, though they did little to improve his powers of hearing. While Olga and Lydia quizzed Tsiolkovsky about the hazards of his journey, Anton tried to assess the man.

  He had already glanced through On the Moon, and a peculiar piece of fiction it was indeed—all about lunar latitude and longitude, and thermal conductivity and light intensity, and the joys of feeling the chains of gravity slacken; wrapped up in the form of a dream. Pleasantly enough written, on the whole, but hopelessly didactic!

  Watching the man slurp down three helpings of Polena’s soup while trying to conduct a conversation, Anton couldn’t but recognize an element of wish-fulfilment in the tale. Could its author only but cut the dash that his characters did—striding the landscape in great leaping bounds! Of course, Anton could sympathize with such a fantasy, having only recently hauled his own prematurely ageing carcase half way across Siberia, full of envy for the birds. But really, there was no irony in this Konstantin Eduardovich.

  Soup was followed by roast duck and stewed cabbage.

  “Let us imagine,” said Tsiolkovsky between mouthfuls, “a cosmic spaceship … powered by the same principle as the sun itself…! When it came to its doom it was as though a miniature sun had exploded … using up an aeon’s energy in an instant.”

  Sidorov spoke slowly and loudly, as to the deaf. “Do you mean to say this spaceship was powered by jets of gas?”

  “No, no! The sun cannot burn its fuel… in the way a gas-jet burns. Somehow the very atoms of the sun … must burst apart.”

  “An atom’s indivisible,” Mirek said. “Everybody knows that. “It’s the smallest piece of matter you can have.”

  Tsiolkovsky cupped a hand behind his ear; Mirek repeated the objection.

  “Aha, but what if it isn’t the smallest? What if it only seems to be so … because each atom is locked together with immense force? Once we can survey the true extent of the destruction, I can calculate the energy needed—it’ll be possible to estimate the strength of this ‘binding force’ … What’s more, how will these broken bits of atoms behave? Maybe they’ll fly around frantically … trying to join up again? Maybe they’ll run smack into other atoms … and split them too?”

  “If broken atoms hit a living body,” said Sidorov, excitedly, “I mean, if they burrow into living cells … I’m thinking about those scabs on the reindeer!”

  “Exactly. But medicine isn’t my province.” Tsiolkovsky nodded deferentially at Anton, and crammed more cabbage into his mouth.

  Anton smiled. “I assure you, I know nothing whatever about Broken-Atom Sickness …”

  “Equally … if we were to bombard chosen inorganic substances … in a controlled way, with broken atoms—perhaps we could deliberately transform one element into another? A bar of lead … into a bar of gold.”

  “That isn’t science,” protested Mirek. “That’s alchemy. Look, the atom is called an atom—from the Greek—because you can’t divide it. We might find a lot of iron and nickel and tin buried under the taiga, but I can guarantee we aren’t going to find gold.”

  “Eh?”

  “I said—”

  “I heard what you said, Mr Mirek. I didn’t say there was any gold—aren’t you listening? What I said was, we might find evidence of a spaceship from another world, powered by a form of propulsion … undreamed of at present. With respect, I’m afraid your attitude’s all too typical. Too many scientists are bound by mental chains.”

  “Quite!” Sidorov nodded sagely. “All your conventional professors—I’ve said it before: Lord Nelson’s blind eye!”

  “I myself have the dubious privilege of being self-educated…” Tsiolkovsky tried to scrape some more duck flesh from a bare bone. “I taught myself in isolation from professors, laboratories and universities … Of course this can lead to ignorance of the latest scientific progress, but I also believe it yields a freshness of approach … a willingness to look at phenomena from a new viewpoint—provided, always, that the mathematics is correct! My dear Sir, just because science tells us that an atom can’t be divided and uses a Greek word to say so, doesn’t make it a fact for ever more.”

  “Bravo!” applauded Sidorov.

  “We need to keep our minds open, gentlemen. And ladies. If the evidence discredits my hypothesis of a spaceship, I’ll be the first one to discard it. With regret, true … Yet without defending it blindly to the death, as is so often the case.”

  “If we do find broken bits of a spaceship from another world,” began Lydia.

  “No, no!” Tsiolkovsky interrupted her. “There won’t be any broken bits.”

  “I thought you said—”

  “I said broken atoms—that’s different. This isn’t like an artillery shell exploding, showering pieces of metal around. The ship would be totally evaporated.”

  This touched Lydia’s heart. “Alas, what sort of brave creatures can have been in it?”

  Perhaps because her voice was higher in pitch, Tsiolkovsky heard her perfectly. “Creatures possessed of noble intentions, I promise you! Only the nobly-minded will heed the call of the cosmos.”

  As the conversation proceeded, and as duck was succeeded by stewed gooseberries with cream, Anton decided with relief that he hadn’t made such an
error of judgement after all. Vagabond though he looked, and blunt though his manners were at times, this Tsiolkovsky was a man of vision and endurance and honest rationality. Perhaps it was unfair to expect him to have insight into the human heart as well …

  They repaired to the drawing room after dinner. With Lydia’s nodded consent, Mirek commandeered a bottle of vodka en route. Olga Franzovna seated herself promptly at the piano and proceeded to butcher a transcription of the first movement of Peter Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. In despair at her heavy-handedness—compared with her legerdemain at cards—Anton fled upstairs to fetch Tsiolkovsky’s manuscript.

  Returning, he passed this over to its author before the governess could commence murdering the second movement; fortunately Olga took the hint, and retired from the piano.

  “Konstantin Eduardovich would like to entertain us with a short shory he’s written—with your permission, Countess?”

  “With your stamp of approval on it, Anton Pavlovich, how could anyone possibly refuse …?”

  Tsiolkovsky adopted a pedagogic stance in front of the fireplace. In the stilted style of a teacher dictating out of a Chemistry textbook, he at once began to read his tale of science fantasy. Fortunately, once the narrative moved on to the heady delights of flying through the air under one’s own steam, freed from the oppressive pull of Earth, his delivery improved markedly. His voice thrilled; he seemed intoxicated, like a religious ecstatic. Sidorov watched him devotedly all the while, wearing the expression of a loyal hound whose master has just returned home after a six months absence …

  Afterwards, and it was quite a long while afterwards, everyone applauded the unusual story. Olga Franzovna jumped up and pirouetted around. Casting discretion to the winds, Lydia joined her, and together the two women whirled around the room like a swiftly rotating planet and its attendant moon.

  Fifteen

  “TIME FOR ONE last tour of inspection, Sorina!”

  If a common house fly could have sneaked into the observation pod, what else might be lying around which oughtn’t to be?