No sooner had Gorbovsky stopped talking than Komov said:
“Did I understand you correctly, Glumov? You maintain that Wanderers are on Earth right now? As creatures, I mean. As individuals…”
“No,” Toivo said. “I am not maintaining that.”
“Did I understand you correctly, Glumov, that you maintain that conscious allies of the Wanderers are living and acting on Earth? The ‘selected,’ as you call them!”
“Yes.”
“Can you name names?”
“Yes. With some degree of certainty.”
“Go on.”
“Albert Oskarovich Tuul. That’s almost certain. Cyprian Okigbo. Martin Jan. Emile Far-Ale. Almost certain. I can name a dozen, but I’m less certain about them.”
“Have you talked to any of them?”
“I think I have. At the Institute of Eccentrics. I think there are many of them there. But who exactly, I can’t say with certainty yet.”
“You mean to say that you do not know the distinguishing marks”
“Of course not. They don’t look any different from you or me. But you can figure them out. At least, with a degree of certainty. But at the institute of Eccentrics, I’m sure that they have a special apparatus that identifies their own without error.”
Komov gave me a quick glance. Toivo noticed it and said in a challenging tone:
“Yes! I feel that this is no time to stand on ceremony! We’ll have to drop some of the achievements of higher humanism! We’re dealing with Progressors, and we’ll have to behave like Progressors!”
“To wit?” Komov asked, leaning forward.
“The entire arsenal of our operative methodics. From sending in a mole agent to forced mentoscopy, from…”
Gorbovsky groaned, and we turned to him in fear, Komov even jumped to his feet. However, nothing terrible had happened to Leonid Andreyevich. He was still lying in his former pose, but now the grimace of false courtesy was replaced by a grimace of scornful irritation.
“What are you planning around me?” he said in a whine. “You’re grown-ups, after all, not schoolboys, not college men. Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves. Really! That’s why I don’t like these conversations about Wanderers, and never have! They always end up with this terrified babble from detective novels! When will you realize that these things are mutually exclusive… Either the Wanderers are a supercivilization, and then they don’t give a fig for us, they are creatures with a different history, different interests, they don’t bother with Progressorism, and in general in the whole universe only humanity has Progressors, because our history is like that, because we weep over our past… We can’t change it and we strive to at least help .others, since we managed to help ourselves in time… That’s where our Progressorism comes from! And the Wanderers, even if their past did resemble ours, are so far from it now that they don’t even remember it, just as we don’t remember the sufferings of the first hominid struggling to turn a stone into an ax…” He was silent. “It is just as ridiculous for a supercivilization to have Progressors as it would be for us to open courses to prepare village deacons…”
He stopped talking for a long time, his gaze moving from one face to another. I glanced over at Toivo. Toivo was looking away and shrugged his shoulders several times, as if to show that he had counterarguments but did not feel it proper to use them here. Komov, knitting his thick black brows, was looking off to one side.
“Hmm, hmm, hmm.” Gorbovsky chuckled. “I haven’t convinced you. All right, then I’ll try insults. If even a green boy like our Toivo managed… uh… to ferret out those Progressors, then what the hell kind of Wanderers are they? Just think about it! Don’t you think a supercivilization could do their work so that you couldn’t notice? And if you noticed, then what the hell kind of a supercivilization is it? The whales went crazy, so it has to be the Wanderers’ fault!… Begone, let me die in peace!”
We all got up.
Komov reminded me in a low voice: “Wait in the living room.”
I nodded.
Toivo bowed to Gorbovsky in confusion. The old man paid no attention. He was staring angrily at the ceiling, his gray lips moving.
Toivo and I went out. I shut the door behind me and heard the soft slurp, the acoustic isolator going into action.
In the living room, Toivo sat on the couch under the lamp, placed his hands on his knees, and did not move. He did not look at me. He had no time for me.
This morning, I had told him: “You’ll go with me. You’ll speak before Komov and Gorbovsky.”
“Why?” he asked, stunned.
“What’s the matter, do you imagine we can do it without the World Council?”
“But why me?”
“Because I’ve already talked to them. It’s your turn.”
“All right,” he said, setting his lips in a tight line.
He was a fighter, Toivo Glumov. He never retreated. You could only push him back.
And he had been pushed back. I watched him from the corner.
For some time he sat motionless. Then he flipped through the mentoschemas, marked in different colors by doctors, lying on the low table. Then he got up and paced the dark mom ham corner to comer, hands behind his back.
Impenetrable silence reigned in the house. The voices from in the bedroom could not be heard, nor the sounds of the forest because the windows were shut. He could not hear his own footsteps.
His eyes grew accustomed to the twilight. Leonid Andreyevich’s living room had Spartan furnishings: the floor lamp (the shade was clearly homemade), the large couch, and the low table. In the far corner, several seats of non-terrestrial backsides production and meant for non-terrestrial backsides. In the other corner, either an exotic plant or an ancient hatrack. That was all the furniture. But the bar was open, and I could see that there were bottles there for every taste. And there were paintings over the bar in transparent casings, the biggest the size of an album.
Toivo went over to examine them. They were children’s drawings. Watercolors. Gauche. Pen and ink. Little houses and big girls, pine trees reaching to their knees. Dogs (or Golovans?). An elephant. A Takhorg… Some space thing — either a fantastic starship or a hangar… Toivo sighed and went back to the couch. I watched him closely.
There were tears in his eyes. He wasn’t thinking about the lost battle anymore. Gorbovsky was dying — an era was dying, a living legend was dying. Starpilot. Paratrooper. Discoverer of civilizations. Creator of Big COMCON. Member of the World Council. Grandpa Gorbovsky… Most of all: Grandpa Gorbovsky. Exactly. He was out of a fairy tale: always kind and therefore always right. That was his era, when kindness always won. “Of all possible choices, always pick the kindest” Not the most promising, not the most rational, not the most Progressorist, and certainly not the most effective — the kindest! He never said those words, and he always enjoyed taking a dig at those biographers of his who credited him with those words. He certainly never thought in those words; yet the essence of his life was in those words. And of course, those words are not a recipe; not everyone is given to be kind; it is a talent just like an ear for music or clairvoyance, only rarer. And he wanted to cry, because the kindest man in the world was dying. And on the scone will be carved: “He was the kindest…”
I think Toivo was thinking just that. Everything I was planing depended on Toivo’s thinking just that.
Forty-three minutes passed.
The door flew open. It was like in a fairy tale. Or the movies. Gorbovsky, unimaginably tall in his striped pajamas, skinny, merry, stepped unsteadily into the living room, dragging the plain behind him, for the fringe had caught on one of his buttons.
“Aha, you’re still here!” he said in a joyous satisfaction to Toivo, who sat stunned on the couch. “Everything is ahead of us, my boy! Everything is ahead! You’re right!”
And having spoken those mysterious words, he hurried, reeling slightly, to the nearest window and opened the blind. It grew blindingly bright, and we squinted, and Gorbovsky turned and stared at Toivo, frozen by the lamp at attention. I looked over at Komov. Komov was openly radiant, his sugar-white teeth gleaming, smug as a cat who swallowed a goldfish. He looked like a sociable fellow who had just drank a toast to a good thing. Which was in fact the fact.
“Not bad, not bad!” Gorbovsky said. “Even excellent!”
Cocking his head, he moved closer to Toivo, looking him over from head to toe, moved right up to him, put his hand an his shoulder, and clenched his bony fingers.
“Well, I think you’ll forgive my harshness, my lad,” he said. “Bur I was also right… And the harshness was from irritability. I’ll tell you something, dying is a really rotten business. Don’t pay any attention.”