“You see,” said Sedlovoi, “I would like to remain here, to provide a commentary on the progress of the journey. Perhaps one of those present?”
Those present exhibited a retiring attitude. They all must have remembered the mysterious fate of the voyager to the edge of the world. One of the magisters offered to send a double. Sedlovoi replied that that would not be of interest because doubles had a low sensitivity to external excitation and would make poor transmitters of information for this reason. What sort of external excitations could be expected? they asked from the rear row. All the usual, Sedlovoi replied: visual, acoustic, odoriferous, tactile. Again someone asked from the rear row: What type of tactile sensations would be the most prevalent? Sedlovoi spread his arms in disclaimer and said that it would depend on the conduct of the traveler in the places where he would find himself. “Aha…” they said in the rear row and didn’t ask any further questions. The lecturer glanced here and there helplessly. In the auditorium everyone also looked here and there, but always to the side. The magister-academician repeated good-humoredly, “Well? How about it? My young ones! Well? Who?”
So I stood up and went to the machine. I just can’t stand an agonized lecturer; it’s a shameful, pitiful, and tortured spectacle.
The back row yelled, “Sasha! Where are you going? Come to your senses!” Sedlovoi’s eyes glittered.
“Permit me,” I said.
“Please, please, of course!” lisped Sedlovoi, seizing me by a finger and dragging me to the machine.
“Just one minute,” I said, pulling away decorously. “Will it take long?”
“Any way you like!” cried out Sedlovoi. “I’ll do just as you tell me… But you’ll be steering yourself. It’s all very simple.” He seized me again and again drew me toward the machine. “Here’s the wheel. Here is the pedal for coupling into reality. This is the brake. And this is the gas pedal. You drive a car, don’t you? Wonderful! Here is the push button… Where do you want to go? The past or the future?”
“The future,” I said.
“Ah,” he enunciated, in disappointment, it seemed to me. “Into the described future… That means all those fantastic novels and utopias. Of course, that’s interesting, too. But take into consideration that the future is probably discrete; there must be tremendous gaps, not covered by any authors. However, it’s all the same… OK, then, you will press this button twice. Once, now at the start, and the second time when you wish to return. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” I said. “And what if something should malfunction?”
“Absolutely safe!” He windmilled his arms. “The instant anything goes wrong, even a speck of dust on the contacts, you will immediately be returned here.”
“Be audacious, young man,” continued the magister-academician. “You’ll be telling us everything that is going on in the future. Ha, ha, ha…”
I climbed ponderously into the saddle, trying not to look at anyone and feeling exceedingly stupid.
“Press it, press it!” the lecturer whispered passionately.
I pressed the button. It was obviously something similar to a starter. The machine jerked, wheezed, and settled down to a regular vibration.
“The shaft is bent,” Sedlovoi whispered in disappointment, “but it’s all right, it’s nothing…put it in gear. That’s right. Now give it some gas, more gas…”
I fed it gas, at the same time smoothly letting out the clutch. The world began to darken. The last I heard in the auditorium was, “And how are we going to keep track of him…”
Everything vanished.
Chapter 2
The only difference between time and any of the three space dimensions is that our consciousness moves along it.
H. G. Wells
At first the machine moved in jumps, and I was hard put to stay in the seat, wrapping my legs around the frame and clutching the steering wheel with all my strength. Out of the corner of my eye I could see fuzzily some kind of magnificent ghostly structures, muddy green plains, and a cold luminary in a gray fog somewhere near the zenith. Then I figured out that the jerking and jumping were the consequence of my having taken my foot off the accelerator and (just as in a car) the power feed was insufficient so that the machine moved unevenly, bumping now and then into the wins of ancient and medieval utopias. I fed it more “gas,” and the motion at once became smooth, so that I could settle myself more comfortably and look around.
I was immersed in a ghostly world. Huge structures of multicolored marble, embellished with colonnades, towered over small houses of rural aspect. All around wheat fields swayed in the complete calm. Herds of plump, transparent cattle grazed on the grass and handsome gray-haired herdsmen sat on hillocks. Everyone, without exception, was reading books and ancient manuscripts.
After a time two translucent individuals appeared nearby, assumed poses, and began to converse. Both were barefooted, draped in chitons, and crowned with wreaths. One held a spade in his left hand and a parchment scroll in his right The other leaned on a mattock, and absentmindedly toyed with a vast copper inkwell hung on his belt. They talked strictly in turn and to each other, as it first appeared to me. However, I quickly realized that they were really addressing me, although neither one of them even glanced in my direction. I listened hard. The one with the spade expounded monotonously and at length on the foundations of the political order of the beautiful country of which he was a citizen. The arrangement was unimaginably democratic, there could be no possibility of any constraint on the citizens (he underlined this several times with special emphasis), everyone was rich and free of care, and even the lowliest farmer had at least three slaves. When he stopped for breath, and to lick his lips, the one with the inkwell would pick up his part. He bragged that he had just finished his three hours as a ferry man, hadn’t taken a penny from anyone because he did not know what money was, and was now on his way to enjoy rest and recreation.
They talked for a long time—for several years, judging by the odometer—and suddenly disappeared, and all was empty again. The motionless sun shone through the transparent buildings. Unexpectedly, some heavy flying machines with membranous pterodactyl wings swam slowly across at a low height. For a moment I thought they were on fire, but then I noticed that the smoke issued from large conical funnels. They flew overhead, ponderously flapping their wings. Some ashes fell and someone dropped a knobby log on me… Subtle alterations began in the magnificent buildings around me. The number of columns did not diminish and the architecture remained as magnificent and unique as before, but new coloration appeared and the marble seemed to be replaced with some other, more modern material. Instead of blind busts and statues, glittering arrangements resembling antennas and radio telescopes arose on the roofs. There were more people in the streets, and huge numbers of cars. The herds and herdsmen vanished, but the wheat continued to wave, though as before there was no wind. I pressed on the brake and stopped.
Looking about, I discovered that I stood with my machine on the surface of a moving sidewalk. The people swarmed around me, and it was a most variegated crowd. Mostly, however, the people were rather unreal, much less real than the powerful, complex, and almost silent mechanisms. Consequently, when one of these machines collided with a person, there was no crash. I had little interest in the machines, probably because on top of each one sat, inspired to semitransparency, its individual inventor, engaged in voluminous exposition of the configuration and purpose of his brainchild. No one listened to anyone else and no one seemed to be addressing anyone, either.
The pedestrians were more fun to watch. I saw big fellows in union suits walking about arm-in-arm and belting out some unmelodious songs in bad verse. Over and over strange people appeared dressed only partially: say, in a green hat and red jacket and nothing else; or in yellow shoes and a loud tie (but no pants, shirt, or even underwear); or in elegant footwear on bare feet. The others reacted calmly to them, but I was embarrassed until I remembered that certain authors have the habit
of writing something like “…The door opened and an erect muscular man in a furry cap and dark glasses stood on the threshold.”
Fully clothed people also appeared, though in rather strangely cut clothes, and here and there a sunburned bearded male would push through the crowd, dressed in a spotless white chlamys with a horse collar or some implement in one hand and a palette or pencil box in the other. The chlamys wearers had a lost look, and they shied from the many machines and kept glancing about like hunted animals. Disregarding the mumbling of the inventors, it was reasonably quiet. Most people were generally keeping their mouths shut.
On the corner, two youths were struggling with a mechanical contrivance. “The developer’s thought cannot stand still. That’s a law of societal evolution. We will invent it. We will definitely invent it. Despite bureaucrats such as Ingrade or conservatives such as Hardbrau.” The other youth carried on with his own line. “I found out how to apply nonwearing tires here, made of polystructural fibers with denatured amino-bonds and incomplete oxygen groups. But I don’t know as yet how to employ the regenerative subthermal neutrons, Misha Mishok! What to do with the reactor?” After a closer look at the contrivance, I easily recognized a bicycle.
The sidewalk carried me out on a huge plaza, packed with people and liberally emplaced with spacecraft of the most varied designs. I walked off the sidewalk and hauled the time machine after me. In the beginning I couldn’t comprehend what was transpiring. Music played, speeches were made, here and there rosy-cheeked, curly-headed youths—barely managing to control their unruly locks, which constantly kept falling on their foreheads—were reading verses soulfully. The verses were either familiar or plain bad, but tears flowed abundantly from the eyes of the listeners. The tears were hard to extract from the men, bitter from the women, and pure from the children. Stern-looking men embraced each other, and, playing their jaw muscles, slapped each other on the back. Inasmuch as many were not dressed, the slaps sounded like hand-clapping. Two spare lieutenants, with tired but kind eyes, dragged by me a dandy of a man, twisting his arm behind him. The man thrashed about and yelled something in broken English. I thought he was exposing everybody and recounting how and for whose money he had put a bomb in the starship’s power plant. A few youngsters, clutching small volumes of Shakespeare and glancing around stealthily, were sneaking up to the exhaust port of the nearest astroplane. The crowd did not notice them.
Soon I understood that one half of the crowd was saying good-bye to the other half. It was total mobilization. From the speeches and conversation it became clear that the men were departing into the cosmos—some to Venus, some to Mars, and some, with completely hopeless faces, were getting ready to go to other stars, and even to the galactic center. The women were staying to await their return. Many took their place in a line to a vast, ugly building, which some called the Pantheon, and the others, the Refrigerator. I thought that I’d arrived at a good point in time. Had I been even one hour later, there would be none but the women left in the city, frozen for a thousand years. Later my attention was attracted by a high gray wall, fencing off the plaza to the west. Billows of black smoke rose behind it.
“What is that over there?” I asked a beautiful woman ambling listlessly to the Pantheon-Refrigerator.
“It’s the Iron Curtain,” she replied without stopping.
With each passing minute I was becoming more and more tired of the whole thing. Everyone was crying; the orators had grown hoarse. Next to me a young man in a light blue one-piece suit was saying good-bye to a girl in a pink dress. The girl monotonously intoned, “I would like to become a cloud of stardust. As a cosmic mist I would embrace your ship…” The youth harkened. Then orchestral music broke out over the crowd, and my nerves could not stand any more and I jumped onto the seat and fed the machine some “gas.” I still caught the sight and the roar of the planetary ships, the starships, the ion ships, the astroplanes, the photon flyers, and the astromats leaping up over the city, and then everything but the gray wall was enveloped in a luminescent fog. After the year 2000, rifts in time started to appear. I flew through times devoid of matter. In such spots it was dark, and only occasionally explosions flared and fires cast a glow into the sky behind the gray wall. Now and again the city crowded back around me, and each time, the buildings were taller, its rounded domes more transparent, its parked spaceships fewer in number. Smoke rose from behind the wall without interruption.
I stopped for the second time when the last astromat disappeared from the plaza. The sidewalks were moving. There were no noisy stalwarts in union suits. No one swore. Some colorless individuals diffidently strolled about the streets in twos and threes, dressed either weirdly or poorly. As far as I could tell, they were all talking science. Someone was about to be revived and the professor of medicine—an athletic intellectual, looking most uncommon in his lonely vest—was explaining the procedure to a giant of a biophysicist, who was introduced to all comers as the author, initiator, and main implementer of this undertaking. Somewhere they were going to bore a hole right through the earth. The project was being discussed right on the street with a considerable gathering of people, drawings being made with chalk on the sidewalks and walls. I thought I might listen in, but it became so boring, including sallies against an unknown conservative, that I heaved the machine on my shoulders and moved away. I was not surprised that the discussion of the project stopped at once and everyone got down to business. But as soon as I stopped, some citizen of indefinite profession began a discourse. For no apparent reason he carried on about music. Listeners converged from all sides. They looked totally absorbed and asked questions attesting to a hoary ignorance. Suddenly, a man ran screaming down the street. He was being pursued by a spiderlike mechanism. Judging by the cries of the pursued, it was an “…autoprogramming cybernetic robot with trigonic quoators with inverse feedback, which were malfunctioning, and…oi-oi, he is going to dismember me…” Strange, no one as much as lifted an eyebrow. Obviously no one believed in machine mutiny.
Two more spiderlike mechanisms of smaller size suddenly jumped out of an alley. Before I could begin to react, one of them quickly shined my shoe and the other washed and pressed my handkerchief. A large white tank on treads drew up and, blinking with numerous lights, sprayed me with perfume. I was about ready to move on when a thunderous crash sounded in the plaza as an enormous rusty rocket fell from the sky. At once the crowd started commenting.
“It’s the Star of Hope.”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“Of course it is. That’s the one that left two hundred and eighteen years ago, and has been all but forgotten. But due to the Einstein time-contraction brought on by sublight speeds, the crew is only two years older!”
“Due to what? Oh, Einstein… Yes, yes, I recollect I covered that in my second year at school.”
A one-eyed man, without his, right leg and left arm, struggled out of the rocket.
“Is this Earth?” he asked irritably.
“Earth! Yes!” responded the crowd.
Smiles began to bloom on their faces.
“Thank God,” said the man, and everyone exchanged glances. Either they did not understand him or pretended that they didn’t understand.
The amputee astronaut took up a pose and launched into a speech in which he called on all humanity, each and every man, to go to the planet Willy-Nilly in the Aeolian star system, in the Minor Magellanic Cloud, in order to free their brothers in reason, groaning under a bondage to a fierce cybernetic dictator. (He said this groaning with emphasis.) The roar of exhausts drowned him out. Two more rockets, also rusty, were descending on the plaza. Frosted women ran out of the Pantheon-Refrigerator. A crush ensued. I knew I had landed in the epoch of returns and hurriedly pressed the gas pedal.
The city vanished and did not reappear for a long time. Behind the wall, blinding flashes and sky-lighting fires continued with depressing regularity. Then, finally, the world became brightly illuminated and I stopped immediately.
br /> A blooming, unpeopled landscape stretched around me. Wheat fields waved. Fatted herds grazed, but cultured herdsmen were not in evidence. Familiar transparent cupolas, viaducts, and helical ramps glimmered on the horizon. Quite nearby, to the west, the wall continued to tower over me.
Someone touched me on the knee and I jumped. A small boy with deep-set eyes stood alongside.
“What is it, little boy?” I asked.
“Apparatus busted?” he inquired in a melodious voice.
“You should address your elders politely,” I said tutorially.
He was very astonished, then his face cleared.
“Ah, yes, I remember. If my memory does not betray me, that was customary in the Epoch of Compulsory Politeness. If to tutoyer is disharmonious to your emotional rhythm, I am prepared to address you in any manner you find in consonance with your inner equilibrium.”
I was at a loss to answer, so he squatted by my machine and touched it here and there, commenting in terminology with which I was totally unfamiliar. A nice youngster, very clean, very well groomed, healthy, but a bit too serious for his age in my opinion.
“Listen, young one,” said I. “What wall is that?”
He turned his attentive, shy eyes on me.
“It’s called the Iron Curtain,” he replied. “Unhappily, I am not versed in the etymology of both these words, but I am informed that it divides two worlds—the World of Humanist Imagination and the World of Fear of the Future.” He was quiet and then added, “The etymology of the word ‘fear’ is also unknown to me.”
“Curious,” I said. “Would it be possible to see? What is that World of Fear?”
“Of course it’s possible. Here is the communication port. You may quench your curiosity.”
The communication port had the appearance of a low arch closed with an armored door. I approached and grasped the bolt with some trepidation. The boy followed up on his comments.