“Put out the dome light in the car!” said the man. “And quickly, please!”
Zvantsev turned, but the light in the passenger compartment was already out.
“Who’s that with you?” the man with the torch asked.
“My colleague,” Zvantsev answered shortly. “Oceanographer Kondrateva.”
The three figures in the rain capes remained silent.
“Can we go on?”
“I’m Mikhailov, technician,” said the man with the torch. “I was sent to meet you and tell you that it’s impossible to see Academician Okada.”
“I’ll speak about that with Professor Casparo,” said Zvantsev. “Take me to him.”
“Professor Casparo is very busy. We would not like him to be disturbed.”
Zvantsev would have liked to ask who “we” were, but he restrained himself, because Mikhailov had the vague monotonous voice of a man who is dead tired.
“I have news of the highest importance for the Academician,” said Zvantsev. “Take me to Casparo.”
The three remained silent, and the uneven red light played over their faces. The faces were wet, pinched.
“Well?” Zvantsev said impatiently. Suddenly he realized that Mikhailov was asleep. The hand with the torch trembled and dipped lower and lower. Mikhailov’s eyes were closed.
“Tolya,” one of his companions said quietly, poking him in the shoulder.
Mikhailov came to himself, waved the torch, and fixed his swollen eyes on Zvantsev. “What?” he asked hoarsely. “Ah, you want to see the Academician. It’s impossible to see Academician Okada. The whole area of the Institute is closed. Please, go away.”
“I have news of the highest importance for Academician Okada,” Zvantsev repeated patiently. “I am Oceanographer Zvantsev, and in the car is Oceanographer Kondrateva. We’re bringing important news.”
“I’m Technician Mikhailov,” the man with the torch said again. “It’s impossible to see Okada now. He will be dead in the next six hours or so, and we may not make it.” His lips were barely moving. “Professor Casparo is very busy and has requested not to be disturbed. Please, go away.”
He suddenly turned to his companions. “Give me another two tablets,” he said despairingly.
Zvantsev stood in the rain and thought about what else he could say to this man who was falling asleep on his feet. Mikhailov stood sideways to him and threw back his head and swallowed something. Then Mikhailov said, “Thanks, guys, I’m dead on my feet. It’s still raining here, and cool, and back there we’re just falling off our feet, one after another, getting up again, and collapsing again… Then we carry them off…” He was still speaking indistinctly.
“Oh, well. It’s the last night.”
“Yes, and the ninth one,” said Mikhailov.
“The tenth.”
“Is it really the tenth? My head is like mush.” Mikhailov turned to Zvantsev. “Excuse me, comrade…”
“Zvantsev, oceanographer,” Zvantsev said for the third time. “Comrade Mikhailov, you simply have to let us through. We’ve just flown in from the Philippines. We’re bringing information to the Academician, very important scientific information. He has been waiting for it all his life. You see, I’ve known him thirty years. I can tell better than you whether he should die without hearing this. It’s extremely important information.”
Akiko got out of the car and stood beside him. The technician was silent, shivering with cold underneath his rain cape. “Well, all right,” he said at last. “Only there are too many of you.” That was how he said it: “too many.”
“Only one of you should go.”
“Very well,” said Zvantsev.
“But if you ask me it won’t do any good,” Mikhailov said.
“Casparo won’t let you see the Academician. The Academician is in isolation. You could ruin the whole experiment if you break the isolation, and then…”
“1 will speak with Casparo myself,” Zvantsev interrupted. “Take me to him.”
“All right,” said the technician. “Let’s go.”
Zvantsev looked back at Akiko. There were many large and small drops on her face. She said, “Go on, sir.” Then she turned to the men in the rain capes. “Somebody give him a rain cape, and get in the car yourself. Park the car crosswise across the road.”
They gave Zvantsev a rain cape. Akiko wanted to go back to the car and turn it around, but Mikhailov said that the engine should not be turned on. He got up and lit the way with his awkward smoking torch, while they shoved the car around and positioned it across the road manually. Then the full complement of the roadblock crew got into the passenger compartment. Zvantsev peered inside. Akiko had sat down again, curling up, in the front seat. Mikhailov’s companions were already asleep, leaning their heads on one another.
“Tell him…” said Akiko.
“Yes, of course.”
“Tell him we’ll be waiting.”
“Right,” said Zvantsev. “I’ll tell him.”
“Well, go.”
“Sayonara, Aki-tyan.”
“Go on…”
Zvantsev carefully closed the door and went up to the technician. “Let’s go.”
“Let’s go,” the technician responded in a quite new, very brisk voice. “We’ll walk fast—we’ve got to cover seven kilometers.”
They started off, taking broad steps over the rough wet concrete.
“What are you doing out there?” asked the technician.
“‘Out there’?”
“Well, out there… in the outside world. We haven’t heard anything in two weeks. What’s going on in the Council? How is the Big Shaft project coming?”
“There are a lot of volunteers,” said Zvantsev. “But not enough annihilators. Not enough cooling units. The Council is planning on transferring thirty percent of energy to the project. Practically all the specialists on deep penetration have been called back from Venus.”
“A good move,” said the technician. “There’s nothing for them to do on Venus now. Who did they choose to head up the project?”
“I haven’t the vaguest idea,” Zvantsev said angrily.
“Not Sterner?”
“I don’t know.”
They were silent for a bit.
“Real junk, right?” said the technician.
“What?”
“These torches are real junk, right? What crap! Can you smell how it stinks?”
Zvantsev sniffed and stepped two paces to the side. “Yes,” he said. The torch reeked of oil. “Why are you using them?” he asked.
“It was Casparo’s order. No electrical appliances, no electric lights. We’re trying to keep interference down to a minimum. Do you smoke, by the way?”
“Yes.”
The technician stopped. “Give me your lighter,” he said. “And your radiophone. You do have a radiophone?”
“I do.”
“Give them to me.” Mikhailov took the lighter and radiophone, removed their batteries, and threw these into a ditch. “I’m sorry, but it’s necessary. For twenty kilometers around not one electrical appliance is turned on.”
“So that’s what’s going on,” said Zvantsev.
“Yes. We’ve plundered all the apiaries around Novosibirsk to make beeswax candles. Have you heard about those?”
“No.”
They again started walking quickly in the steady rain.
“The candles are junk too, but at least they’re better than torches. Or woodsplints—have you heard about those?”
“No,” said Zvantsev.
“There’s an old song, ‘Light My Fire.’ I had always thought the metaphor involved some sort of generator.”
“Now I understand why it’s raining,” Zvantsev said after a silence. “That is, I understand why the microweather installations are shut down.”
“No, no,” said the technician. “The microweather stations are one thing, but the rain is being driven to us specially from Wind Ridge. There’s a continental
installation there.”
“What’s it for?” Zvantsev asked.
“To shield us from direct solar illumination.”
“What about discharges from the clouds?”
“The clouds arrive electrically neutral—they are discharged along the way. And in general, the experiment has turned out to be on a much grander scale than we had thought at first. We’ve got all the biocoding specialists gathered here. From the whole world. Five hundred people. And that’s still too few. And the whole Northern Ural region is working for us.”
“And so far everything’s going all right?” Zvantsev asked.
The technician was silent.
“Can you hear me?” Zvantsev asked.
“I can’t give you an answer,” Mikhailov said reluctantly. “We hope everything is going as it should. The principle has been verified, but this is the first experiment with a human being. One hundred twenty trillion megabits of information, and a mistake in any one bit can distort a good deal.”
Mikhailov fell silent, and they walked a long time without saying a word. Zvantsev did not notice at first that they were walking through a village. The village was empty. The dull walls of the cottages shone weakly, and the windows were dark. Here and there, open garage doors showed black behind lacy wet hedges.
The technician forgot about Zvantsev. Another six hours and it will be all over, he thought. I’ll go home and collapse into bed. The Great Experiment will be over. The great Okada will die and become immortal. Oh, how beautiful! But until the time has come, no one will even know whether the experiment was a success. Not even Casparo himself. The great Casparo, the great Okada, the Great Experiment! The Great Encoding. Mikhailov shook his head—the familiar heaviness was once again crawling onto his eyes, clouding his brain. No, you’ve got to think. Valerio Casparo said that we’ve got to start thinking now. Everyone should think, even the technicians, even though we don’t know enough. But Casparo said that everyone must think Valerio Casparo—or Valerii Konstantinovich Kasparo, in the vulgar tongue. It ‘s funny, how he works and works, and suddenly he says to the whole hall, “Enough. Let’s sit for a while, staring stupidly ahead!” He picked up that phrase from something he read. If you ask him about something during that time, he says, “Young man, you see to it yourself. Don’t bother me while I’m sitting here, staring stupidly ahead. I’m thinking about the wrong thing again. So: first off we’ll state the problem. Given: that a complex of physiological neuronic states (to put it more simply, a living brain) is hard-coded according to the third Casparo-Kaprov system onto a crystalline quasibiomass. With the proper isolation, a hard code on a crystalline quasibiomass will be preserved with a normal noise level for quite a long time—the relaxation time for the code is on the order of twelve thousand years. Time enough. Required: to find a means of transferring the biomass code onto a living brain, that is to say onto a complex of physiological functioning neurons in the null state. Of course, for this we also need a living brain in the null state, but for such a business people always have been found and will be found—me, for example… But they still wouldn’t permit it. Casparo won’t even hear of a living brain. There’s an eccentric for you. So now you sit and wait for the guys in Leningrad to build an artificial one. So. In short, we have encoded Okada’s brain onto a crystalline biomass. We have the number for Okada’s brain, the number for Okada’s thoughts, the number for his ego. And now we have to find a means of transferring the numbers to another brain. Let it be an artificial one. Then Okada will be reborn. The enciphered ego Okada will once again become a real, acting ego. Question: how is this to be done? How?… It would be nice to figure it out right now and make the old man happy. Casparo has been thinking about this for a quarter of a century. Run up to him sopping wet like Archimedes, and shout, Eureka!” Mikhailov stumbled and almost dropped the torch.
“What’s the matter?” asked Zvantsev. “Are you falling asleep again?”
Mikhailov looked at him. Zvantsev walked on, his hood raised, his arms stuck under the rain cape. In the red, flickering light his face seemed drawn and hard. “No,” said Mikhailov. “I’m thinking. I’m not sleeping.”
Some sort of dark hulk loomed ahead. They walked quickly, and soon caught up to a large truck that was slowly crawling along the highway. At first Zvantsev did not realize that the truck was moving with its engine turned off. Two good-sized camels were pulling it.
“Hey, Saka!” shouted the technician.
The door of the cab opened a bit, a head stuck out, fixed shining eyes on them, and disappeared again. “What can I do for you?” asked a voice from the cab.
“Let me have a candy bar,” Mikhailov said.
“Get it yourself—I don’t feel like getting out. It’s wet.”
“So I’ll get it myself,” Mikhailov said briskly, and disappeared somewhere along with the torch.
It got very dark. Zvantsev walked alongside the truck, matching his pace to that of the camels, which were barely moving. “Can’t they go a little faster?” he muttered.
“They don’t want to, the scoundrels,” came the voice from the cab. “I’ve tried thrashing them with a stick, but they only spit at me.” The voice was silent for a bit and then added, “Just four kilometers an hour. And they spit all over my rain cape.” The driver sighed deeply and suddenly yelled, “Hey, you weird critters! Giddap! Giddap! Or whatever they say where you come from.”
The camels snorted distainfully.
“You should move over to the side,” advised the driver. “Though I guess they’re not going to do anything right now.”
The air smelled of oil, and Mikhailov again appeared alongside. His torch smoked and crackled. “Let’s go,” he said. “It’s close now.”
They easily passed the camel team, and soon low, dark structures appeared along the sides of the road. Peering ahead in the darkness, Zvantsev made out an enormous building—a black rift in the black sky. Here and there in the windows, yellow flames flickered weakly.
“Look,” Mikhailov said in a whisper. “Do you see the buildings by the sides of the road?”
“So?” Zvantsev whispered back.
“That’s where the quasibiomass is. This is where he’ll be kept.”
“Who?”
“Well, the brain, then,” Mikhailov whispered. “His brain!”
They suddenly turned and came out right at the entrance to the Institute building. Mikhailov swung open the heavy door. “Go on in,” he said. “Just don’t make any noise, please.”
It was dark, cold, and strange-smelling in the hall. In the middle of a large table winked several fat, guttering candles, along with dishes and a large soup pot. The dishes were dirty. Dried-out pieces of bread lay in a basket. The candlelight provided only poor illumination. Zvantsev took several steps, and brushed his rain cape against a chair. The chair fell over with a crash.
“Yike!” someone shouted from behind. “Tolya, is that you?”
“Yes, it’s me,” Mikhailov said.
Zvantsev looked around. A reddish form occupied a corner of the hall, and when Mikhailov went over there with his torch, Zvantsev saw a girl with a pale face. She was lying on a sofa, wrapped up in something black.
“Did you bring something scrumptious?” the girl asked.
“Saka is bringing it,” Mikhailov answered. “Would you like a chocolate bar?”
“Please.”
Mikhailov started digging into the folds of his rain cape, waving his torch.
“Go spell Zina,” the girl said. “She can sleep in here. The boys are sleeping in Room Twelve now. Is it still raining outside?”
“Yes.”
“Good. There’s not much to go now.”
“Here’s your candy bar,” said Mikhailov. “I’m going. This comrade is here to see the Academician.”
“To see who?”
“The Academician.”
The girl whistled softly.
Zvantsev walked across the hall and looked back impatiently. Mikhailo
v came after him, and the girl sat down on the couch and unwrapped the candy bar. By the candlelight Zvantsev could only make out her small, pale face and a strange silvery lab coat with a hood. Mikhailov threw off his rain cape, and Zvantsev saw that he also wore a long silvery coat. In the uncertain light of the torch he looked like a ghost.
“Comrade Zvantsev,” he said, “wait here for a little bit. I’ll go bring you a lab coat. Only, in the meantime, don’t take off your rain cape.”
“All right,” Zvantsev said, and sat down on a chair.
Casparo’s study was dark and cold. The rain pattered on. Mikhailov had left, saying that he would call Casparo. He had taken the torch, and there were no candles in the study. At first Zvantsev sat in the visitors’ chair in front of the large empty desk. Then he got up, went over to the window, and started looking out into the night, leaning his forehead against the cold glass. Casparo did not come.
It’s going to be very difficult without Okada, Zvantsev thought. He could have lasted another twenty years—we should have taken better care of him. We should have stopped him from going on deep-water searches a long time ago. If a man is over a hundred, and has spent sixty of those years at a depth of five hundred fathoms… then begets blue palsy, damn him!
Zvantsev stepped back from the window, went over to the door, and looked out into the corridor. Candles burned sparsely along the long corridor walls. From somewhere came a voice repeating something over and over with the steadiness of a metronome. Zvantsev listened closely, but he could not make out a single word. Then long white figures glided out of the reddish twilight at the end of the corridor, and slipped past noiselessly, as if swimming in air. Zvantsev saw drawn dark faces under the peaks of the silvery hoods.
“Are you hungry?” one said.
“No. Sleepy.”
“I think I’ll go eat.”
“No, no. Sleep. First sleep.”
They spoke softly, but he could hear them a long way down the corridor.
“Jean almost screwed up her section. Casparo grabbed her arm just in time.”
“What a mess!”