I did not disillusion him. For the time being.
I must say that Toivo Glumov was a man of prejudices. (How else, with his fanaticism?) For instance, he refused to acknowledge the ties between his theme, “A Visit from an Old Lady,” and the Rip Van Winkle theme that had been worked out a long time ago in our department. The incidents of sudden and completely unexplained disappearances of people in the Seventies and Eighties and their just as sudden and unexplained return was the only part of the Bromberg Memorandum that Toivo steadfastly refused to examine or even to take into account. “That’s a typo,” he maintained. “Or we don’t understand him properly. Why would the Wanderers need people to disappear inexplicably!” And this despite the fact that Bromberg’s Memorandum had become his cathechism, the program for his work for the rest of his life… Apparently, he was unwilling and unable to endow the Wanderers with almost supernatural powers. Such an admission would have made his work valueless. Really, what would be the point of researching, seeking, trying co catch a creature that was capable at any moment of disintegrating in the air and restructuring itself in some other place?
But for all his tendency toward prejudices, he never tried to argue with established facts. I remember when he was just a green neophyte and he convinced me to join in the investigation of the tragedy on the island of Matuku.
The affair was in the jurisdiction of the Oceania sector, naturally, where they didn’t even want to hear the word Wanderer. But this was a unique case, with no precedents in the past (I sincerely hope that nothing like this will occur in the future), and Toivo and I were accepted without demur.
Since time immemorial, an ancient, half-crumbled radio telescope has stood on the island of Matuku. It has never been established who built it or why.
The island was considered uninhabited; it was visited only by herds of dolphins and random couples seeking pearls in the translucent bays of the north shore. However, as we soon learned, for the last several years a doubled family of Golovans had been living there. (Today’s generation had started forgetting what Golovans are. A reminder: they are a race of rational Canoids from the planet Saraksh, who for a time were in very close contact with earthlings. These large-headed talking dogs readily accompanied us throughout space and even had something like a diplomatic embassy on our planet. About thirty years ago, they left us and did not enter into contact with humans anymore.)
On the south of the island, there was a round volcanic harbor. It was indescribably dirty: the beach was polluted by some disgusting foam. It looked like the filth was organic in origin because it attracted innumerable flocks of sea birds. Of course, the waters of the harbors were lifeless. Even seaweed grew unwillingly.
Murders were taking place on that island. People were killing people, and it was so horrible that no one would lift his hand for several months to report these events through the mass media.
It soon became apparent that the fault, or rather, the cause of it all was a giant Silurian mollusk, a monstrous primeval cephalopod that had settled some time ago on the bottom of the volcanic harbor. It must have been swept into there by a typhoon. The biofield of this monster, which floated up to the surface from time to time, had a depressive effect on the psyche of higher animals. In particular, it elicited a catastrophic lowering of the level of motivation in humans. In that biofield man became asocial; he could kill an acquaintance who accidentally dropped his shirt into the water. And he did.
And so Toivo Glumov got it into his head that this mollusk was the individual of the Monocosm, as predicted by Bromberg, in the process of creation. I must confess that, in the beginning, when there weren’t any facts at all, his theories seemed rather convincing (if you can speak of convincing logic built en a fantastic supposition). And you had to see him retreat step by step under the onslaught of new data, which daily were obtained by shocked specialists in cephalopods and paleontology…
He was finished off by a biology student who dug up in Tokyo a thirteenth-century Japanese manuscript that contained a description of this or a similar monster (I quote from my diary): “In the Eastern seas is seen a katatsumorikado of purple color with many long thin arms. It sticks out of its round shell of thirty feet in size with pens and centilia, its eye seems rotten, and the whole thing is covered with polyps. When it surfaces, it lies on the water flat like an island, spreading a foul odor and defecating white, to lure fish and birds. When they gather, it grabs them with its arms indiscriminately and feeds on them. On moonlit nights it lies, bobbing in the eaves, staring into the low sky and thinking about the deep waters from where it was disgorged. These thoughts are so gloomy that they horrify men, and they become like tigers.”
I remember how Toivo read this and then was silent for several minutes, and then sighed — it seemed to me with relief — and said: “Yes. That’s not it. And a good thing, because it’s too vile.” According to his lights, the Monocosm had to be a totally disgusting creature, but not that bad. The Monocosm in the form of a Silurian octopus — with its poisonous biofield, its extensible shell, and its personal age of over four hundred million years — did not lit into any concepts of the specialists.
Thus the first serious affair that Toivo Glumov took on came to naught. He had quite a few such zeros later; and in the middle of the year 98 he asked permission to do some work on the materials on mass phobias. I gave permission.
DOCUMENT 3: A Report from T. Glumov
REPORT COMCON-2
No. 011/99 Urals-North
Date: 20 March 99
FROM: T. Glumov, Inspector
THEME: 009 “A Visit from an Old Lady”
CONTENTS: Cosmophobia, “the Penguin Syndrome”
In analyzing the incidents of cosmic phobias in the last hundred years, I’ve come to the conclusion that, within the parameters of theme 009, the materials from the so-called Penguin Syndrome could be of interest to us.
Sources:
A. Mobius, paper at the XIV Conference of Cosmopsychologist Riga, 84
A. Mobius, “The Penguin Syndrome,” PCP (Problems of Cosmic Psychology),
42, 84
A. Mobius, “More on the Nature of the Penguin Syndrome,” PCP, 44, 85
Reference:
Mobius, Asmodeus-Matvei, doctor of medicine, corresponding member of the Academy of Medical Sciences of Europe, director of the branch of the World Institute of Cosmic Psychopathology (Vienna). Born 26/04/36, Innsbruck. Education: Psychopathology Department, Sorbonne; Second Institute of Space Medicine, Moscow; Higher Courses of Equipment-free Aquanautics, Honolulu. Basic areas of scientific interest: non-industrial space and aquaphobias. From 81 to 91, deputy chairman of the Main Medical Commission of the Directorate of the Space Fleet. Now generally recognized founder and head of the school known as Polymorphous cosmopsychopathology.
On October 7, 84, at a conference of cosmopsychologists in Riga, Dr. Asmodeus Mobius reported on a new type of space phobia, which he called the Penguin Syndrome. This phobia was a non-dangerous psychic deviation, expressed in persistent nightmares that came to the patient in his sleep. No sooner does the patient fall asleep than he discovers himself hanging in airless space, absolutely helpless and weak, alone and abandoned, given up to the whims of soulless and potent powers. He physically feels the suffocation: he feels his being burned by destructive rays, his bones thinning and melting, his brain boiling and evaporating, an incredible intense despair overwhelms him, and he wakes up.
Dr. Mobius did not consider this disease dangerous because, first of all, it is not accompanied by any psychic damage, and secondly, it responds successfully to ambulatory psychotherapy. The Penguin Syndrome attracted the attention of Dr. Mobius primarily because it is a completely new phenomenon, never before described by anyone. It was amazing that this disease struck people irrespective of sex, age, and profession, and no less amazing was the fact that there was no connection between the syndrome and gene index of the patient.
Interested in the etiology of the phenomenon, Dr. Mobius subjected the material he gathered (close to twelve hundred cases) to a multifactor analysis on eighteen parameters and to his satisfaction discovered that in 78 percent of the incidents, the syndrome arose in people who had made long-distance space flights on the Phantom-17-Penguin Spaceship. “I had expected something like that,” Dr. Mobius announced. “In my memory this is not the first time that construction engineers have offered us technology that has not been sufficiently tested. That is why I called the syndrome I discovered after the type of ship, and let that be a lesson and warning.”
On the basis of Dr. Mobius’s speech, the conference in Riga passed a resolution to ban the use of spaceships of the Phantom-17-Penguin type until all the construction flaws creating the phobia had been repaired.