By profession, Toivo Glumov was a Progressor. Specialists told me that he could have been a Progressor of the highest class, a Progressor ace. He had brilliant qualifications. He had wonderful self-control, he was extraordinarily cool, had truly unusually fast reflexes, and was a born actor and master of impersonation. And having worked as a Progressor for over three years, without any apparent reasons he retired and returned to Earth. No sooner had he finished reconditioning than he got on the BVI and learned without any great difficulty that the only organization on our planet that had anything to do with his new aims was COMCON-2.
He appeared before me in December of 94, imbued with icy preparedness to answer questions over and over: why he, such a promising, absolutely healthy, and highly valued man was quitting his job, his mentors, his comrades, destroying carefully worked-out plans, squashing the hopes that had been placed in him… Naturally, I did not ask him anything of the sort. In general, I was not interested in why he did not want to be a Progressor anymore. I was interested in why he suddenly wanted to be a Counter-Progressor, if you can put it that way.
His reply was memorable. He felt hostility for the very concept of Progressorism. If possible, he would not dwell on details. It was just that he, a Progressor, had negative feelings about Progressorism. And over there (he jerked his thumb over his shoulder), he had a very trivial thought: while he was tramping along the cobblestones of Arkanara’s squares, shaking his staff and brandishing his sword, here (he pointed his index finger at the ground beneath his feet) some trickster in a fashionable rainbow cape and a metavisor over his shoulder was strolling on Sverdlov Square. As far as he knew, that simple thought rarely occurs to anyone, and if it does, then as an incongruously silly or romantic one. But he, Toivo Glumov, had no peace from that thought: no gods should be allowed to intervene in our affairs; the gods had no place on earth, for “the good of the gods is the wind — it fills sails, but it also raises storms.” (I later found the source of this citation with great difficulty — it’s from Verbliben.)
My naked eye could see that before me was a Catholic who was far more Catholic than the Pope. Without further discussion, I took him into my group and started him in on the theme “A Visit from an Old Lady.”
He turned out to be a marvelous worker. He was energetic, he had initiative, he did not know the meaning of tired, and — this was a very rare quality at his age — he was not disappointed by failure. There were no negative results for him. Moreover, negative results of his research made him just as happy as the rare positive ones. He had seemed to set his mind from the beginning that nothing definite would be learned in his lifetime, and know how to find pleasure horn the actual (often rather dreary) procedure of analyzing the least-bit-suspicious incident. Amazingly, my old workers – Grisha Serosovin, Sandro Mbvevari, Andryusha Kikin, and others – shaped up around him, stopped wasting time, and grew much less ironic and much more efficient. And it wasn’t as if they were following his example, there could be no question of that; he was too young for them, too green. But he seemed to have infected them with his seriousness, his concentration on the work, and, most of all, I think, they were astonished by the intense hatred for the object of our work that they could guess in him and which they totally lacked. Once, I happened to mention the tanned youth Rivera around Grisha Serosovin and soon discovered that they had all located and reread that story by Jack London.
Like Rivera, Toivo had no friends. He was surrounded by faithful and trusty colleagues, and he was a faithful and trusty partner himself for any undertaking. But he never did develop friends. I think it was because it was too hard to be his friend: he never was satisfied with himself in anything, and therefore never made allowances for others in anything. He had this ruthless concentration on his goal, which I had seen before only in major scientists and athletes. No room for friendship…
Actually, he did have one friend. I mean his wife, Asya Stasova, name and patronymic Anastasiya Pavlovna. When I met her, she was a charming little woman, as lively as mercury, sharp-tongued, and with a tendency to make quick judgments. Therefore, the atmosphere in their house was always combat-ready, and it was sheer pleasure to observe their constantly erupting verbal battles.
It was all the more amazing because in ordinary circumstances — that is, at work — Toivo gave the impression of being a slow and taciturn man. He seemed to be always stuck on some important idea he was thinking over carefully. But not with Asya. Only not with Asya. With her he was Demosthenes, Cicero, Apostle Paul; he intoned, quipped, created maxims — damn it, he even ironized! It was difficult to imagine just how different the two men were; silent, slow Toivo Glumov-at-Work and animated, chatty, philosophizing, constantly erring and agitatedly defending his errors Toivo Glumov-at-Home. At home, he even ate with an appetite and with taste. He even complained about the food. Asya worked as a gastronomic degustator and did all the cooking herself. That’s the way it had been in her mother’s home, and in her grandmother’s home. This tradition, which delighted Toivo Glumov, went back in the Stasov family to the depths of centuries, to those unimaginable times before molecular cuisine, when an ordinary hamburger had to be cooked by means of very complicated and not very appetizing procedures…
And Toivo also had a mother. Every day, no matter how busy or where he was, he always found a minute to call her on the videochannel and exchange at least a few words. They called that their “check-in call” Many years ago, I met Maya Toivovna Glumova, but the circumstances of our meeting were so sad that subsequently we never met again. Not through any fault of mine. No one’s fault, really. In brief, she had a very bad opinion of me, and Toivo knew it. He never spoke of her with me. But he spoke with her about me frequently — I learned that much later…
This duality undoubtedly irritated and depressed him. I don’t think that Maya Toivovna said bad things about me. It is completely improbable that she would have told him the terrible story of Lev Abalkin’s death. Most likely, whenever Tolvo brought up the subject of Kammerer, she simply coldly refused to speak on that topic. But that was more than enough.
For I was more than a boss for Toivo. After all, I was the only person who shared his views, the only person in the enormous COMCON-2 who treated the issue that engrossed him totally with complete seriousness and without any allowances. Besides which, he felt great piety toward me. Say what you will, but his boss was the legendary Marc Sim! Toivo hadn’t even been born when Mare Sim was blowing up ray towers and fighting fascists on Saraksha… The peerless White Queen! The organizer of Operation Virus, after which Excellency himself called him Big Bug! Toivo was just a schoolboy when Big Bug penetrated into the Island Empire, into the very capital… the first earthling, and the last, incidentally… Of course, these were all exploits of a Progressor, but it is written: a Progressor can be vanquished only by another Progressor! And Toivo was a fierce adherent of that simple idea.
And then there was also this: Toivo had no idea how he would act when at last-the intervention of the Wanderers in human affairs would be established and proven with absolute reliability. No historical analogies from the centuries of activity by Earth Progressors helped there. For the Duke of Irukan, an exposed Earth Progressor was a demon or a practicing sorcerer. For counterintelligence from the Island Empire, the same Progressor was a clever spy from the mainland. And what was an exposed Progressor Wanderer from the point of view of a worker in COMCON-2?
An exposed sorcerer would be burned; or he could be placed in a stone sack and forced to make gold from his own feces. A clever spy from the mainland should be rerecruited or killed. But what do you do with an exposed Wanderer?
Toivo did not know the answer to these and similar questions. The majority felt these questions were incorrect. “What do you do if your outboard motor catches the beard of a watersprite? Do you untangle him? Cut it ruthlessly? Pull the watersprite up by the sides?” Toivo did not discuss these things with me. And l think that he didn’t because he had convinced himself that Big Bug, the legendary White Queen, the clever Marc Sim had long ago thought it out, had analyzed all the possible variants, had compiled detailed plans and had them confirmed by the authorities.