“Why be afraid of them, Grandma Albina?” Kir grumbled, trying to sidle around her.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Albina said peevishly. “But your father, for instance…”
“Father wasn’t the least bit frightened. Rather, he was afraid, but for Mama and for me. It’s just in all that excitement he didn’t see how kind they were…”
“Not kind, miserable!” Albina corrected him.
“They weren’t miserable, Grandma Albina!” Kir said indignantly, spreading his arms like an untrained tragedian. “They were merry; they wanted to play! They kept flipping around!”
Grandma Albina smiled condescendingly.
I can’t help stressing a circumstance that very accurately characterizes Toivo Glumov as a worker. If there had been a green probationer in his place, he would have decided that Duremar was trying to confuse things and that the picture in general was perfectly clear: Fleming created a new type of embryophore, his monsters had escaped, he could go off to sleep, and report in the morning.
An experienced worker — say, Sandro Mtbevari — would not have had coffee with Basil; embryophores of a new type were no joke. He would have immediately sent out twenty-five queries to every possible place, and he would have rushed down to Lower Pesha to grab the Fleming hooligans by the throat before they had a chance to come up with an alibi.
Toivo Glumov did not budge from the spot. Why not? He had smelled sulfur. Not even a smell, just a whiff. An unusual embryophore! Yes, of course, that’s serious. But that’s not the smell of sulfur. Hysterical panic? Closer, much warmer. But most important — the strange old lady from cottage number 1. There! Panic, hysteria, escape, emergency squads, and she asks them to keep down the noise. Now that did not fall under traditional explanations. Toivo didn’t even try to explain it. He simply waited for her to wake up to ask her a few questions. He waited, and he was rewarded. “If I hadn’t thought of having a bite with Basil,” he later told me, “if I had rushed off to report to you right after my interview with that Tolstov, I would have remained with the impression that nothing mysterious had taken place in Little Pesha, nothing except wild panic caused by an invasion of strange animals. But along came the boy Kir and Grandma Albina, and they brought an essential dissonance to the orderly but primitive scheme…”
‘Thought of having a bite” was the way he put it. Probably so as not to waste time trying to put into words the vague and troubling sensations that had caused him to stay around.
LITTLE PESHA. THE SAME DAY. 8 AM.
Kir managed to stuff himself into the zero-cabin with the galley in his arms and vanished off to his Petrozavodsk. Basil took off his monstrous jacket, flopped down in the grass in the shade, and apparently dozed off. Grandma Albina floated off to her cottage number 1.
Toivo did not go back to the pavilion; he sat down on the grass, crossed his legs, and waited.
Nothing special was happening in Little Pesha. Cast-iron Jurgen bawled from time to time in his cottage, number 7 m-something about the weather, something about the river, and something about his vacation. Albina, still all in white, appeared on her veranda and sat down under the awning. Her voice, melodic and low, reached Toivo — she must have been talking on the videophone. “Duremar” Tolstov appeared in his field of vision several times. He was hanging around the cottages, crouching down, examining the ground, digging into the bushes, sometimes even crawling along.
At seven-thirty, Toivo got up, went into the club, and called his mother on the video. The usual check-in call. He was afraid that the day would be very busy and he wouldn’t have another time to call. They talked about this and that. Toivo told her that he had met an aged ballerina named Albina. Could it be the Albina the Great; about whom he had heard so much in his childhood? They discussed the question and decided that it was quite possible, and that there was also another great ballerina Albina, who was about fifty years older than Albina the Great… They said good-bye until the next day.
Outside came a loud roar: ‘The crawfish? Lev, what about the crawfish!”
Lev Tolstov was approaching the club at a fast pace, irritatedly waving his left arm; he was pressing a voluminous package to his chest with his right hand. At the entrance of the pavilion, he stopped, and with a squeaky falsetto called in the direction of cottage number 7: “I’ll be back! Soon!” He noticed Toivo looking at him, and explained, as if in apology; “An extraordinarily strange story. I have to get to the bottom of it.”
He went into the zero-cabin, and then nothing happened for quite some time. Toivo decided to wait until eight.
At five minutes to eight, a glider flew in over the woods, circled Little Pesha several times, gradually getting lower, and landed softly in front of cottage number 10, the one that seemed to be inhabited by an artist’s family. A tall man jumped out of the glider, ran up the steps lightly, and, turning back to the glider, called: “Everything’s all right! Nothing and no one!” While Toivo walked over across the square, a young woman with short hair in a violet dress above her knees got out of the glider. She did not go up to the porch; she stayed near the glider, holding the door with her hand.
As it turned out, the artist in the family was the woman, named Zosya Lyadova, and it was her self-portrait that Toivo had seen in the Yarygin cottage. She was twenty-five or twenty-six. She was a student at the Academy, in Komovsky Korsakov’s studio, and had not created anything significant yet. She was beautiful — much more beautiful than in her self-portrait. In some way, she reminded Toivo of his Asya. Of course, he had never seen his Asya that scared.
The man’s name was Oleg Olegovich Pankratov, and he was a lecturer in the Syktyvkar School District; before that, for almost thirty years, he had been an astroarchaeologist, working in Fokine’s group, taking part in the expedition to Kala-i-Moog (a.k.a. the “paradoxical planet Morokhasi”), and in general had seen the world in all its shades. He was a very calm man, even phlegmatic, with hands like shovels. Dependable, sturdy, substantial, you couldn’t budge him with a bulldozer. His face was white and rosy-cheeked, with blue eyes, a potato nose, and reddish hair, like the mythic warrior Ilya Muromets…
And there was nothing strange in the fact that during the events of the night the spouses had behaved quite differently. The sight of living sacks trying to crawl into the bedroom window surprised Oleg Olegovich, but naturally did not scare him. Perhaps because he immediately thought of the branch institute in Lower Pesha, where he had been more than once, and the sight of monsters did not make him feel endangered. Disgusted, yes, but not threatened. Disgust and revulsion, but not fear. He barred the way and did not let the sacks into the bedroom. He pushed them back out into the garden, and they were slimy, sticky, and yucky. They were unpleasantly soft and spongy under his hands, and they reminded him of the innards of some huge animal. Then he moved around the bedroom trying to figure what to wipe his hands on, but Zosya began screaming on the veranda and he didn’t have time to be fastidious…
Oh, none of us behaved very well, but still, you can’t let yourself go like some people. Some of them are still in shock. Frolov had to be hospitalized right in Sula. They had to pull him out of the glider part by part; he had really lost it… Grigorian and family didn’t even stay in Sula; they rushed into the zero-cabin, all four of them, and headed straight for Mirza-Charle. Grigorian shouted in farewell: “Anywhere, as long as it’s far and forever!”
Zosya understood Grigorian very well. She had never experienced anything so horrible in her life. And it wasn’t a question of whether the animals were dangerous or not. “If we were moved by horror… Don’t interrupt, Oleg, I’m talking about us simple unprepared people, not thunder throwers like you… If we were all moved by terror, then it wasn’t because we were afraid of being eaten, suffocated, and digested alive and so on… No, it was a different feeling!” Zosya was hard put to characterize that sensation more precisely. The closest she could get was that it wasn’t horror but a feeling of total incompatibility, the impossibility of being in the same space with these creatures. But the most interesting part of her story was something else.
They were beautiful, the creatures! They were so horrible-looking and revolting that they represented a kind of perfection — the perfection of ugliness. An esthetic clash between ideal ugliness and ideal beauty. Somewhere it was said that ideal ugliness should elicit the same esthetic sensations as ideal beauty. That had always seemed paradoxical to her until last night. But it wasn’t a paradox! Or was she simply so perverse?..