Escape Attempt

Chapter 3-1

Anton let the cyber navigator take control and, folding his hands over his stomach, stared pensively at the viewscreen. The Ship was travelling north along the meridian. All around was the thick violet sky of the stratosphere, and far below a turbid white shroud of clouds floated by. The shroud looked smooth and level, and only now and then was there a hint of the gaps of gigantic funnels over the macroweather stations – the weathermen, having drenched northern Europe with rain, were rounding up the clouds in traps. –

Ship Anton was reflecting on human foibles. He remembered the strange people he had known. Yakov Osonovsky, the captain of the Hercules, couldn’t stand bald men. He simply despised them. “And don’t try to convince me,” he would say. “Just show me a bald man who is a real man.” Most likely, some unpleasant association linked all bald men in his mind, but he would never say what it was. He didn’t even change his mind when he himself went billiard-ball bald during the Sarandak catastrophe. He would only exclaim, with marked bitterness, “The only one. Take note, the only one!”

Hercules, Walter Schmidt of the Matteria base behaved just as strangely toward doctors. “Doctors,” he would spit out with an indecent scorn. “Medicinemen they were, medicinemen they remain. Before there was dusty spider web and rotten snake’s blood, now there are psychodynamical fields, about which no one knows anything. Whose business is it what’s inside me!”

Volkov was called Dreadnought, and he was content: Dreadnought A. Volkov. Kaneko never ate anything hot. Ralph Pinetti believed in levitation and practised stubbornly for years. The historian Repnin is afraid of dogs and doesn’t want to live with people. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that he doesn’t want to live with people just because he’s afraid of dogs. Strange. But he’s no worse because of it.

Foibles. But not really that strange, just rough spots. The external evidence of the unfathomable tectonic activity in the depths of human nature, where reason fights to the death against prejudices, where the future fights to the death against the past. But we demand that everyone around us be smooth, as we dream them up in our feeble fantasy; we want to be able to describe them in terms of the elementary functions of childhood images: nice man, greedy man, boring man. A frightening man. A fool.

So Saul is not odd because he is afraid of dogs. And Kaneko is not odd because he can’t stand anything hot. Just like Vadim would never dream that his foolish rhymes might seem odd rather than amusing to someone. To Galka, for example.

Or take me. Here I had decided to go to Pandora. If Captain Malyshev, say, found out, he’d look at me in amazement and say, if you plan to rest, you couldn’t find a better place than Earth. And if you plan to work, take the black system EN 8742, which is next in our plan, or EN 6124, for some reason the specialists on Tagora are interested it it.” And Malyshev would be right. And for Malyshev to understand and stop looking at me in amazement, I’d have to say that I missed Vadim and that Vadim wanted to shoot takhorgs.

.Anton grinned. Why so complicated? Just about everyone is going to Pandora now, and once Galka said that she would like too. And that’s how flights are arranged. And that’s how easily plans are changed. But could I admit to Malyshev that the whole thing is Galka? Why can’t men ever learn to live simply? From somewhere in the bottomless patriarchal depths vanity, pride, wounded self-esteem keep crawling to the surface. And for some reason there is always something to hide. And always something to be ashamed of.

Anton looked at the bouquet of carnations lying in front of the screen. Ah, Galka, he thought. He breathed on the control panel and in the circle of condensed vapor started to write “Ah, Galka!” The letters quickly melted away; he didn’t even have time to put an exclamation point at the end. He breathed on the panel again and put the exclamation point, by itself. Then he leaned back in his chair and for the hundredth time attempted to solve the problem logically: “I love a woman, the woman doesn’t love me, but treats me well. What should I do?”

He visualized Galka, remembered how she spoke: her head turning slightly to the side and her lashes lowered over her eyes. Why is it all arranged so stupidly: a man can be saved from any minor ill – from sickness, indifference, death – but from the real ill, from love, no one and nothing can save him. A thousand advisers could be found, and each would give different advice. And the victim, the fool, does not want to be helped – that’s what’s crazy.

“Pardon me, but where are you going?” Saul asked loudly.

“To the control center,” Vadim answered.

“Wait a moment! You know, we’ve never had a chance to really get acquainted.”

The door to the control center was open. Anton kept hearing snatches of conversation from the lounge, about takhorgs, thickets, and the theory of historical succession. Then he began to listen carefully.

“So your name is Vadim?” Saul asked.

“As a rule,” Vadim answered seriously. “But sometimes I’m called the structuralist-est, sometimes the Flying Bull, and on special occasions, Dimochka.”

“Consequently, Vadim. And how old are you?”

“Twenty-two local Earths.”

“Local... well, of course. What did you say? Local Earths?”

“Yes. In old stellar I did not take part.”

“Quite true. That’s what I thought. And who, if you will excuse my asking, might your father be?”

“Might be? He might be a doctor or a lawyer, but he is a specialist in land improvement.”

“Ah, I see, I see. That’s what I had in mind.”

Silence set in.

“A very elegant table,” Saul said forcedly.

Another silence.

“A good table, solid,” Vadim finally managed.

“And your mama?”

“Mama? She’s a stationmaster. Works at a mesonuclear station.”

Anton could hear Saul drumming his fingers nervously on the table.

“Please, Vadim,” Saul said. “You mustn’t pay any attention to my ways. Of course, I speak oddly, and it’s probably a little funny. But, you see there’s a reason for it. My way of living... my modus vivendi, s to speak... I’m a narrow specialist. Completely in the twentieth century. As they used to say, a bookworm. Always in museums, always with old books.”

“The influence of your environment.”

“Yes, yes, that’s precisely it. I only rarely see people. But now I have to. Do you know Professor Arnautov?”

“No”

“ A major specialist. My scholarly enemy. He asked me to verify several aspects of his new theory. I couldn’t refuse, could I? So I had to... be weaned. So... but let’s not just talk about me! You, it seems, are a structural linguist?”

“Yes”

“Interesting work?”

“Is there any uninteresting work?”

“Yes, of course there is. And what are you occupied with?”

“Structural analysis. The packing of disconnected structures.”

“Why is it needed?”

“What do you mean, why?”

why?”“I mean, who will find it useful?”

“Anyone who’s interested in it. For example, a universal translator is now being planned. A universal translator must be able to pack disconnected structures.”

“Tell me, Vadim, can you listen to music here on the Ship?”

Ship?”“Of course. What would you like? Scheer’s Trills? The Ship runs marvellously to that music.”

Trills? Ship “How about Bach?”

“Oh, Bach. I think we have some Bach, too. Listen, Saul, I really think it would be a great pleasure to listen to music with you.”

“Why?”

“I can’t say exactly. It’s always a pleasure to listen to music with a person who knows it well. Do you like Mendelssohn?”

“You know Mendelssohn?”

“Saul! Mendelssohn is the best of the old composers! I hope you like him. Of course, the Ship isn’t the right place to listen to him. Do you understand what I mean?”

Ship “I think so.... I always listen to Mendelssohn in my own study.”

They’re really warmed up to each other, Anton thought. He glanced at the clock. The Ship was entering the takeoff zone over the North Pole. On the screen the dark dots of the starships awaiting takeoff appeared against the violet depths. Anton yelled through the door, “Excuse me for interrupting. We’ll be taking off soon. Vadim, show Saul how to use the noninertial chamber.”

Ship Anton transmitted a request for a program for the flight, and thirty minutes later, during which the Ship had floated through the stratosphere with two dozen other large and small starships, he received an entrance program, and seven variants of a return-trip program, and permission to enter subspace. Then he asked the passengers to take shelter in the chambers, entered one himself, and gave the Ship the command to take off.

Ship Ship As always, Anton felt extremely nauseous. A red-hot wave passed through his entire body, his face and back broke out in a cold sweat. With a glazed stare Anton followed the red arrow jerking across the scale, marking the rapidly changing curvature of space. Two hundred riemanns, four hundred, eight hundred, sixteen hundred riemanns per second. The space around the Ship was bending tighter and tighter. Anton knew what it looked like from the outside. The distinct black cone of the Ship became blurry, slowly dissolved, and suddenly disappeared entirely, and in its place an enormous cloud of solid air blazed out. The temperature for a hundred kilometers around fell sharply five to ten degrees. Three thousand riemanns. The fiery arrow stopped. Epsilon determination was finished, and the Ship had entered subspace condition. To an observer on Earth it was now smeared out over the entire distance of one hundred and fifty parsecs between the Earth and EN 7031. Now the reverse flight would take place.

Ship Ship Ship In exiting from subspace there was always the danger of appearing too near to an attractive body, or even inside it, although the danger was purely theoretical. The probability was much less than the chance of dropping something out of a stratoplane over Leningrad and having it land in the Hermitage’s chimney. In any case, it hadn’t happened during the entire course of human history. Anton’s ship successfully leaped out into normal space at a distance of two astronomical units from the yellow dwarf EN 7031.

Anton recovered his breath, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and left the chamber. Everything was in order in the control room. he walked along the control panel, slid a glance over the view-screen, turned off the automatic flight control. The bouquet of carnations lay in the same place in front of the screen. Anton stopped. “Pitiful,” he muttered. He touched the bouquet with a finger and the flowers disintegrated into a greenish dust. “Poor things”, Anton thought. They couldn’t take it. But what can? He remembered the passengers and stepped down into the lounge.

The lounge was a large round room, with eight doors leading to the cabins and a hatch to the lower level, where the storerooms, synthesizer, kitchen, shower, and so on were located. Anton looked around at the table, the chairs, adjusted the lid on the disposal unit, and went into Vadim’s cabin. He moved the inner hermetic door aside, and Vadim collapsed onto him. He was pale and drenched with perspiration.