And they called Central Emergency. At Central Emergency, they thanked them and said they would take the information into account. A half-hour later the duty officer called headquarters and told them that their call was confirmed and asked to speak with Anatoly Sergeyevich. Anatoly Sergeyevich described in the most general terms what had happened to him and how he came to be on the shores of the Antarctic. The duty officer calmed him down by telling him there had been no casualties, that the Yarygins were alive and well and that he would be able to return to Little Pesha in the morning, and that now he should take a tranquilizer and lie down.
And Anatoly Sergeyevich took a tranquilizer and lay down right at headquarters. But he had not slept an hour before he saw the dripping eyes over the veranda railing and heard Elya’s hysterical laughter, and he awoke full of unbearable shame.
“No,” Anatoly Sergeyevich said, “they did not stop me. They understood how I felt… I never thought something like that would happen to me. I’m no Pathfinder or Progressor, of course… but I’ve had acute situations in my life, and I’ve always behaved decently… I don’t understand what happened to me. I try to explain it to myself, and nothing happens… It was like an invasion…” He started looking around. “I’m talking to you now, but I’m ice inside… Maybe we were all poisoned by something here?”
Toivo asked questions, Anatoly Sergeyevich answered, and Toivo nodded importantly and showed in every way possible how essential everything he was hearing was for the investigation. And gradually Anatoly Sergeyevich relaxed, cheered up, and they stepped onto the veranda as colleagues.
The veranda was a shambles. The table was at an angle, one of the chairs was turned over, the sugar bowl had rolled into a corner, leaving a trail of sugar crystals. Toivo felt the kettle; it was still hot. He glanced over at Anatoly Sergeyevich. He was pale again, and his muscles were twitching. He was looking at a pair of sandals huddling like orphans under the far chair. Apparently, they were his. The straps were buckled, and it seemed impossible for Anatoly Sergeyevich to have pulled his feet out. But Toivo did not see any spills on them, under them, or anywhere near them.
“I see they don’t recognize domestic robots here,” Toivo said to bring Anatoly Sergeyevich back from the world of the horror to the world of everyday life.
“Yes,” he muttered. “That is … Who does nowadays?.. There… see, my sandals…”
“I see,” Toivo said matter-of-factly. “Were all the windows opened like this? You don’t think that it was a hallucination?”
Anatoly Sergeyevich shuddered and looked in the direction of the Yarygin cottage.
‘I don’t know…” he said. “No, l can’t say.”
“All right, let’s go look,” Toivo suggested.
“You and I?” Basil asked.
“Not necessary,” Toivo said. “I’ll be going back and forth here a long time. You hold the fort.”
“Do I take prisoners?” Basil asked formally.
“That is necessary,” Toivo said “I need prisoners. Anyone who saw anything with his own eyes.”
He and Anatoly Sergeyevich moved on across the square. Anatoly Sergeyevich looked determined and businesslike, but the closer he got to the house, the more tense his face looked and the more his tendons showed on his neck. He was biting his lip as if fighting pain. Toivo thought it wise to give him a break. About fifty paces from the living fence, he stopped — as if to look around one more time — and began asking questions. Was there anyone in the cottage on the right? Oh, it was dark? And on the left? The woman… Yes, yes, I remember, you mentioned her… Just one woman and no one else? Was there a glider nearby?
“I don’t remember. That one was open. I jumped out there.”
“I see,” Toivo said, and looked out into the garden.
Yes, there were footprints here. There were many footprints: crushed and broken bushes, a destroyed flower bed, and the grass under the railings looked as if horses had trampled it. If animals had been here, then they were clumsy, awkward animals; and they hadn’t crept up on the house, but pushed straight on. From the square, through the bushes at an angle, and through the open windows right inter her rooms…
Toivo crossed the veranda and pushed the door into the house. There was nothing disorderly inside. Rather, none of the disorder that one could expect from heavy, unwieldy carcasses.
A couch. Three armchairs. No table in sight — it must be built in. Only one control panel — in the arm of the owner’s armchair. There were polycrystal service systems in the other chairs and in the couch. On the front wall hung a Levitan landscape, an old-fashioned chromophoton copy with a touching triangle in the bottom left-hand comer, so that, God forbid, some expert would not be fooled into taking it for an original. And on the left wall: a pen drawing in a handmade wooden frame, an angry woman’s face. A beautiful one, incidentally…
A more careful examination revealed footprints on the floor, apparently, one of the emergency crewmen had walked from the living room to the bedroom. The footprints did not return; the man had climbed out the bedroom window. So, the floor in the living room was covered with a rather thick layer of very fine brown powder. And not only the floor. The chair seats. The window ledges. The couch. There was no powder on the walls.
Toivo came back out on the veranda. Anatoly Sergeyevich was sitting on the porch steps. He had tossed off the fur coat, but he had forgotten to toss off the fur boots, and consequently he had a rather incongruous air about him. He had not even touched his sandals; they were still under the chair. There were no spills nearby, but the sills and the floor were covered with the brown powder.
“Well, how are you doing?” Toivo asked from the doorway.
Anatoly Sergeyevich was startled anyway.
“Well… I’m slowly coming to terms with it.”
“Fine. Pick up your raincoat and go home. Or do you want to wait for the Yarygins?”
“I don’t know,” Anatoly Sergeyevich said indecisively.
“As you prefer,” Toivo said. “In any case, there’s nothing dangerous here.”
“Have you understood anything?” Anatoly Sergeyevich asked.
“A few things. There really were monsters here, but they are not dangerous. They can scare you, and nothing more.”
“You mean it was lake?”
“Looks like it.”
“But why? Who?”
“We’ll find out.”
“You’ll be finding out while they scare someone else.”
Anatoly Sergeyevich took his raincoat from the railing and stood around, staring at his fur boots. It seemed that he would sit down again and start pulling them off angrily. But he probably didn’t even see them.
“You say they can scarce a person,” he said through gritted teeth, without looking up. “Scare isn’t so bad! But you know, they can break a man!”
He gave Toivo a quick look and averted his eyes and went down the steps without looking back, then down along the trampled grass, through the damaged flower bed, across the square at an angle, bent over, clumsy in his long polar fur boots and jaunty shepherd shirt, he walked on, increasing his steps, to the yellow club pavilion, but halfway there veered sharply to the left, jumped into the glider near the neighboring cottage, and flew up like a candle into the pale blue sky.
It was after four in the morning.
This is my first attempt at a reconstruction. I tried very hard. My work was complicated by the fact that I had never been in Little Pesha in those bygone days, but I had numerous video-recordings made by Toivo Glumov, the emergency squad, and Fleming’s crew. So I can vouch
at least for the topographic accuracy. I feel it is possible to vouch for the accuracy of the dialogue, as well.
Besides everything else, I would like to demonstrate here how the typical beginning of the typical investigation looked. Incident. Emergency squad. Arrival of the inspector from the Unexplained Event Department. First impression (most often very right): someone’s hooliganism or a stupid joke. And growing disillusionment: not it again, once again zero, why not shrug this off and just go home to bed. However, that’s not in my reconstruction. I suggest you add that, reading between the lines.
Now a few words about Fleming.
This name will appear more than once in my memoir, but I want to warn you that this man had nothing to do with the Big Revelation. In those days, the name Alexander Jonathan Fleming was the talk of COMCON-2. He was the major specialist in the construction of artificial organisms. At his base, the Sydney Institute, and in the branches of the Institute, he cooked up with indescribable industriousness and daring a great number of the wildest creatures, for which Mother Nature had not had enough imagination and know-how. In their eagerness, his coworkers were instantly violating the existing laws and limitations of the World Council in the area of frontier experimentation. For all our purely human delight and awe for Fleming’s genius, we could not stand him for his mediocrity, lack of conscience, and pushiness, amazingly coexisting with his ability to get out of trouble. Every schoolboy knows now what Fleming’s biocomplexes are or, say, Fleming’s living wells. In those days, he was rather more notorious than famous.