She showed Toivo her sketches, made from memory two hours after the panic. She and Oleg had taken an empty little house in Sula, and at first Oleg made her drink tonic and tried psychomassage. But it didn’t help. Then she grabbed a piece of paper, a disgusting marker, inflexible and clumsy, and hurriedly, line after line, shadow after shadow, began transferring onto paper what was before her eyes like a nightmare, blocking out the real world…
The drawings didn’t show anything special. A spiderweb of 1ines, familiar objects: the veranda railing, table, bushes, and, above it all, blurry shadows of vague outlines. Of course, the drawings did elicit a feeling of anxiety, discomfort… Oleg Olegovich felt that there was something in them, even though everything was much simpler and more disgusting. Of course, he didn’t know much about art. He just knew what he liked.
He asked Toivo what he bad learned. Toivo told him his suppositions: Fleming, Lower Pesha, a new form of embryophore, and so on. Pankratov nodded in agreement, and then said with sadness that the thing that grieved him most in this business… how could he put it? Well, the excessive nervousness of today’s earthier. They all ran off, all of them! At least one would have stayed, have shown a little curiosity… Toivo sprang to the defense of today’s earth-dweller and told them about Grandma Albina and the boy Kir.
Oleg Olegovich grew incredibly animated. He slapped his shovel-like hands on the armrests of the chair and on the table, looked triumphantly at Toivo and at Zosya, and, laughing, exclaimed: “Go, Kir! What a hero! I always said something would come of him… But what about our Albina! So much for hoity-toity!” Zosya pointed out that there was nothing amazing about it, that old and young were always berries from the same patch… “And space travelers, my beloved!” They parried, half-seriously, half-jokingly, when suddenly a minor incident occurred.
Oleg Olegovich; listening to his beloved with a grin from ear to ear, suddenly stopped smiling, and his expression became one of concern, as if something had shaken his very foundations. Toivo looked and saw that the inconsolable and disappointed Ernst Jurgen was standing in the doorway of his cottage number 7, no longer in his crab-catching wet suit, but in a beige outfit with a flat can of beer in one hand and a colossal sandwich with something red and white in the other, and he was bringing first one hand and then the other to his mouth, chewing and swallowing, and staring across the square at the club.
“There’s Ernst!” Zosya exclaimed. “And you said everyone left!”
“Amazing!” Oleg Olegovich said slowly with that same worried look.
“Ernst, as you see, also was not frightened off,” Zosya said, not without malice.
“I see,” Oleg Olegovich replied.
He knew something about that Ernst Jurgen, and he had never expected him to be here after last night He shouldn’t have been here now, on his own veranda, drinking beer and eating boiled crawcrabs. No, Ernst Jurgen should have hightailed it back to Titan or even farther.
And Toivo hurried to set things straight, and told them that Ernst Jurgen had not been in the village last night, that he had been fishing several kilometers upriver. Zosya was very disappointed, and Oleg Olegovich, as it seemed to Toivo Glumov, even sighed in relief.
“That’s another story!” he said. “You should have said so in the first place…” And even though no one had asked him any questions, he suddenly began explaining: he had been confused, because last night during the panic he had seen Ernst Jurgen pushing everyone aside to get to the pavilion and the zero-cabin. Now he realized that he was mistaken, that it hadn’t happened, and couldn’t have. But at first, when he saw Ernst Jurgen with a can of beer…
It’s not clear whether Zosya believed him or not, but Toivo didn’t believe a word of it. It hadn’t happened; Ernst hadn’t appeared to Oleg Olegovich during the panic. But Oleg Olegovich did know something about Jurgen, something more interesting, but apparently bad, because he was too embarrassed to tell it.
And here a shadow fell on Little Pesha, and the air was filled with a velvety cooing, and Basil came shooting out from behind the pavilion like a shot, pulling on his jacket as he ran, and the sun was shining once more aver Little Pesha, and a pseudograf of the Puma class, a super new one, majestically landed on the square, without bending a blade of grass, all golden and shiny, like a gigantic round loaf of bread, and immediately all its round portholes flew open, and through them scattered dozens of long-legged, tanned, busy, and loud-voiced men — they scattered and began dragging crates with funnels, pulled hoses with bizarre tips, ran around, waving their arms, and the one who bustled, ran, and waved his arms the most, dragging crates and pulling hoses, was Lev-Duremar Tolstov, still wearing clothing covered with dried green seaweed.
OFFICE OF THE HEAD OF THE UE DEPT. 6 MAY 99. AROUND 1:00 P.M.
“And what did they achieve with their technology?” I asked.
Toivo was looking drearily out the window, his gaze following the Cloud Settlement, unhurriedly floating somewhere over the southern suburbs of Sverdlovsk.
“Nothing essentially new,” he replied. “They re-created the most probable appearance of the animals. Their analyses were the same as those of the emergency squad. They were amazed that the embryophore shells had not remained. They were astonished by the energy and insisted that it was impossible.”
“Did you send the queries?” I made myself ask.
I have to stress here once more that by then I already saw it all, knew it all, understood it all, but I had no idea what I could do with my vision, knowledge, and understanding. I couldn’t come up with anything, and my colleagues and coworkers were simply in my way. Especially Toivo Glumov.
More than anything in the world, I wanted to go on vacation right there, without leaving my chair. Send them all on vacation, every last probationer, and then cut off all communications lines, shut down the screens, shut my eyes, and be completely alone at least for twenty-four hours. So that I would not have to watch my face. So I would not have to think when my words. sounded natural
and when they sounded strange. So that I wouldn’t have to think about anything, so that there would be a gaping emptiness in my head, and then the right vision would appear on its own in that emptiness. It was like a hallucination — one of those that come when you have to bear nagging pain. I had borne it for more than five weeks, and my spiritual strength was waning. But for the time being I still could control my face, manage my behavior, and ask totally appropriate questions.
“Did you send the queries?” I asked Toivo Glumov.
“I sent the queries,” he replied in a monotone. “To Burgermayer at Embryomechanics. To Gorbatsky. Personally. And to Fleming. Just in case. All in your name.”
“Fine,” I said. “We’ll wait.”
Now I had to let him talk it out. I could see he needed to talk. He had to make sure that the most important thing was not missed by the chief. Ideally, the chief should have noticed and stressed that important thing himself, but I didn’t have the strength for that anymore.
“Do you want to add anything?” I asked.
“Yes, I do.” He flicked an invisible mote of dust from the desk “Unusual technology is not the main thing. The main thing is the dispersion of reactions.”
“That is?” 1 had to hurry him along, too!
“You might have noticed that these events divided up the witnesses into two uneven groups. Strictly speaking, into three. The majority of witnesses gave in to uncontrollable panic. Me devil in a medieval village. Total loss of self-control. People ran from Little Pesha. People ran from Earth. Now the second group: zoo technician Anatoly Sergeyevich and artist Zosya Lyadova, though frightened at first, find the strength to return, and the artist had even seen something charming in the creatures. And finally, the elderly ballerina and Kir. And, I suppose, Pankratov, Lyadova’s husband They weren’t frightened at all. On the contrary. Dispersion of reactions,” he repeated.
I saw what he wanted from me. All the conclusions were on the space. Someone had run an experiment on artificial selection in Little Pesha, dividing up people, according to their reactions, into those who are worthy of something. Just as that someone made a selection fifteen years ago in the subspace sector at entrance 41/02. And there was no question as to who that someone with the technology unknown to us was. The same one who for some reason blocked the path of fukamization… Toivo Glumov could have formulated all that for me himself, but from his point of view it would have been a violation of work ethics and the principle of it. Drawing a conclusion was the prerogative of the chief and the senior member of the clan.