Noon, 22nd Century

  The machine knocked and whinnied. The noise continued a fairly long time, and Evgeny started looking to see what to push to make it stop. But then the machine gave a pleasant-sounding ring, and the red light began blinking, while the machine continued to hum and knock. Evgeny looked at his watch and said, “I’d always thought that slicing bread was easier than cooking goulash.”

  “Let’s go to a restaurant,” Sheila said timidly.

  Evgeny was silent. After three minutes he walked around the machine and then looked inside. He saw absolutely nothing there which could serve as food for thought. Nothing that could serve as food period, for that matter. He straightened up and met his wife’s eyes. In answer to her inquiring glance he shook his head. “Everything’s fine there.” He risked nothing in making that declaration. There were two buttons yet to be investigated, and also a quantity of possible permutations and combinations of the four.

  “Couldn’t you stop it?” he asked Sheila.

  Sheila shrugged, and for some time they continued to stand expectantly, watching the machine’s blinking lights—the red one and the white by turns.

  Then Sheila stretched out an arm and touched the uppermost button with her finger. There was a ring, and the machine stopped. The room became quiet.

  “Good work!” Evgeny exclaimed in spite of himself.

  Through the window they could hear grasshoppers chirring and the wind stirring the bushes.

  “Where’s the box?” Evgeny asked apprehensively.

  Sheila looked around. The box was on the floor by the dishes.

  “So?” she asked.

  “We didn’t put the box back, and now I don’t know where the sliced bread is.”

  Evgeny walked around the machine and looked into both openings—the one on the right and the one on the left. There was no bread. He looked with trepidation into the deep black slit in the machine where the box had been. The machine responded to his threatening glare with a red light. He clenched his teeth, narrowed his eyes, and stuck his arm into the slot.

  It was hot inside the machine. He felt some sort of smooth surfaces, obviously not the bread. He withdrew his arm and shrugged. “No bread.”

  Sheila bent over and looked under the machine. “There’s some sort of hose down here,” she said.

  “Hose?” he asked with horror.

  “No, no—it’s not the bread. It doesn’t look in the least like bread. It’s a real hose.” She brought a long corrugated tube with a shiny ring on the end out from under the machine. “You haven’t hooked the UKM up to the water, stupid. Think of it-no water! No wonder the goulash came out like that.”

  “Uh, yes,” said Evgeny, casting a glance at the remains of the goulash, “There certainly isn’t much water in it. But still, where’s the bread?”

  “What does it matter?” said Sheila gaily. “A mere side issue. Bread isn’t the main problem. Observe as I attach the hose to the faucet.”

  “Maybe it’s not worth the bother?” Evgeny said warily.

  “Nonsense. Research is research. We’ll make stew. There are vegetables in the bag.”

  The machine, roused into action by the top button, worked for about a minute this time. “The stew can’t really drop out into the box too, can it?” Evgeny muttered uncertainly, fingering the levers.

  “Let’s give it a try,” said Sheila.

  The box was filled to the top with odorless pink goop.

  “Borscht,” Evgeny said sadly. “Ukrainian style. It’s like—”

  “I see for myself. Good heavens, the shame of it! I’m embarrassed even to call for an instructor. Maybe Yurii?…”

  “Right,” Evgeny said mournfully. “A waste-disposal specialist is just what we need here. I’ll go call him over.” He was desperately hungry.

  “Come in!” shouted Yurii’s voice.

  Evgeny went in and stopped in the doorway, stricken.

  “I hope you haven’t brought your charming spouse along,” said Yurii. “I’m not dressed.”

  He was wearing a clumsily ironed shirt. His tanned bare legs stuck out from underneath it. Strange machine parts and pieces of paper were strewn over the floor throughout the room. He was sitting on the floor, holding in his hands a box with rays of light streaming from little openings.

  “What’s that?” asked Evgeny.

  “A tester,” Yurii answered tiredly.

  “No, no, all this!”

  Yurii looked around. “That’s a UWM-16. Universal Washing Machine with semicybernetic control. Washes, irons, and sews on buttons. Watch it! Don’t step on anything.”

  Evgeny looked under his feet and saw a pile of black rags lying in a puddle of water. Steam was rising from the rags.

  “Those are my pants,” Yurii explained.

  “So your machine isn’t working either?” asked Evgeny. The hope of receiving advice, and dinner, evaporated.

  “It’s in perfect shape,” Yurii said angrily. “I dismantled it down to the last screw, and figured out its principle of operation. Here’s the output mechanism. Here’s the analyser. I didn’t dismantle that—it’s working as it is. Here’s the transporting mechanism and the heat-regulating system. Granted I haven’t found the sewing device yet, but the machine is in perfect shape. I think the trouble is that for some reason it has twelve programming keys, while in the brochure it said four.”

  “Four?” asked Evgeny.

  “Four,” answered Yurii, absently scratching his knee. “But why did you say ‘your machine’? Do you have a washing machine too? I just got mine an hour ago. Home Delivery.”

  “Four!” Evgeny repeated in delight. “Four, not twelve… Tell me, Yurii, have you tried putting meat into it?”

  9. Homecoming

  Sergei Kondratev returned home at noon. He had spent all morning at the Minor Informatoreum—he was looking for a profession. It was cool, quiet, and very lonely at home. Kondratev walked through all the rooms, drank some Narzan water, stood up in front of his empty desk, and set to thinking how he could kill the afternoon. Out the window the sun shone bright, some sort of bird was chirping, and a metallic rattle and clicking came from the lilac bushes. Obviously one of the efficient multilegged horrors which deprived an honest man of the opportunity to work at, say, gardening, was puttering around out there.

  The ex-navigator sighed and closed the window. Should he go see Evgeny? No, he would be sure not to catch him at home. Evgeny had loaded himself down with the latest model dictaphones and was rushing all over the Urals; he had thirty-three things to worry about, not counting the little ones. “Insufficiency of knowledge,” he would declare, “must be made up through an excess of energy.” Sheila was a wonderful person who understood everything, but she was never home except when Evgeny was. The navigator dragged himself to the dining room and drank another glass of mineral water. Perhaps he should eat dinner? Not a bad idea—he could dine carefully and tastefully. Except he wasn’t hungry.

  He went over to the delivery line cube, tapped out a number at random, and waited curiously to see what he would get. A green light flashed on over the cube—the order had been filled. With a certain wariness, the navigator opened the lid. At the bottom of the spacious cube-shaped box lay a paper plate. The navigator took it and set it on the table. On the plate were two large fresh-salted cucumbers. If only they had had cucumbers like that on the Taimyr, toward the end of the second year… Maybe he should go see Protos? Protos was one in a million. But of course he was very busy, kindly old Protos. All the good people were busy with something.

  The navigator absently picked a cucumber up off the plate and ate it. Then he ate the other one and put the plate in the garbage chute. I could go out and hang around with the volunteers for a while again, he thought. Or go to Valparaiso, I’ve never been to Valparaiso.

  The navigator’s ruminations were interrupted by the song of the door signal. The navigator was glad—he did not get many visitors. Evidently the great-great-grandchildren, out of false modesty, had not wanted to both
er him. The whole week that he had been living here, he had only been visited once, by his neighbor, a sprightly eighty-year-old woman with an old-fashioned bun of black hair. She had introduced herself as the senior technician at a bread factory, and in the course of two hours she had patiently taught him how to punch the numbers on the control panel of the delivery line. They had somehow not gotten into a serious conversation, although she was doubtless an excellent person. And a few times some very young great-great grandchildren, quite clearly innocent of any feeling of false modesty, had arrived uninvited. These visitations were dictated by purely selfish considerations. One individual had evidently come to read the navigator his ode “On the Return of the Taimyr,” of which the navigator had understood only individual words (Taimyr, kosmos), since it was in Swahili. Another was working on a biography of Edgar Allan Poe, and without any particular hope he asked for any little-known facts about the life of the great American writer. Kondratev told him the conjectures about meetings between Poe and Aleksandr Pushkin, and advised him to apply to Evgeny Slavin. Other boys and girls appeared for what Kondratev in the terminology of the twenty-first century would have called autograph hunting. But even the young autograph hunters were better than nothing, and consequently the song of the door signal gladdened Kondratev’s heart.

  Kondratev went out into the entryway and shouted, “Come in!” A tall man entered, wearing a full-cut gray jacket and long blue sweatsuit-style pants. He quietly closed the door behind him and, inclining his head a bit, started looking the navigator over. His physiognomy seemed to Kondratev to bear a very lively resemblance to the photographs he had once seen of the stone idols of Easter Island—narrow, long, with a high narrow forehead and powerful brows, deep-sunk eyes, and a long, sharply curved nose. His face was dark, but fair white skin showed unexpectedly from his open collar. This man bore little resemblance to an autograph hunter.

  “You wish to see me?” Kondratev asked hopefully.

  “Yes,” the stranger said quietly. “I do.”

  “Then come on in,” said Kondratev. He was moved, and a little disappointed, by the sad tone of the stranger. Looks like an autograph hunter after all, he thought. But I must receive him a little more warmly.

  “Thank you,” the stranger said still more quietly. Stooping a little, he walked past the navigator and stopped in the middle of the living room.

  “Please, have a seat,” said Kondratev.

  The stranger was standing silently, looking fixedly at the couch. Kondratev, with some worry, looked at the couch too. It was a wonderful folding couch, broad, noiseless, and soft, with a springy light green cover that was porous like a sponge.

  “My name is Gorbovsky,” the stranger said quietly, without taking his eyes off the couch. “Leonid Andreevich Gorbovsky. I came to have a talk with you, spacer to spacer.”

  “What’s happened?” Kondratev asked in fright. “Did something happen to the Taimyr? And sit down, please!”

  Gorbovsky continued to stand. “To the Taimyr? Not at all. Or rather, I don’t know,” he said. “But then the Taimyr is in the Cosmonautical Museum. What could happen to it there?”

  “Of course,” said Kondratev, smiling. “After all, it won’t likely be going anywhere.”

  “Nowhere at all,” Gorbovsky agreed, and also smiled. His smile, like that of many homely people, was kind and somehow childlike.

  “What are we standing for?” Kondratev exclaimed brightly. “Let’s sit down.”

  “You… I’ll tell you what, Navigator Kondratev,” Gorbovsky said suddenly. “Could I perhaps lie down?”

  Kondratev choked. “P-please do,” he muttered. “Don’t you feel well?”

  Gorbovsky was already lying on the couch. “Ah, Comrade Kondratev!” he said. “You’re like the rest. Why does a man have to be feeling bad to want to lie down? In classical times practically everyone used to lie down—even at meals.”

  Kondratev, without turning around, groped for the back of his chair and sat down.

  “Even in those days,” Gorbovsky continued, “they had a multistage proverb the essence of which was, ‘Why sit when you can lie down?’ I’m just back from a flight. You yourself know, Navigator Kondratev—what sort of sofas do they have on shipboard? Disgustingly hard contrivances. And is it only on ships? Those unspeakable benches in stadiums and parks! The folding, or rather self-collapsing, chairs in restaurants! Or those ghastly rocks at the seaside! No, Comrade Kondratev, any way you like, the art of creating really comfortable things to lie on has been irretrievably lost in our stern era of embryomechanics and the D-principle.”

  You don’t say! thought Kondratev. The problem of things to lie on presented itself to him in an entirely new light. “You know,” he said, “I started out at a time when what they called ‘private companies’ and ‘monopolies’ were still in business in North America. And the one that survived the longest was a small company that made a fabulous fortune on mattresses. It put out some sort of special silk mattress—not many of them, but frightfully expensive. They say billionaires used to fight over those mattresses. They were splendid things. On one of them your arm would never get pins and needles.”

  “And the secret of them perished along with imperialism?” Gorbovsky asked.

  “Probably,” Kondratev answered. “I shipped out on the Taimyr and never heard any more about it.”

  They were silent a while. Kondratev was enjoying himself. Protos and Evgeny were splendid conversationalists too, but Protos liked to talk about liver operations, and Evgeny was usually teaching Kondratev how to drive a pterocar, or scolding him for his social inertia.

  “And why?” said Gorbovsky. “We have splendid things to lie down on too. But no one is interested in them. Except me.” He turned onto his side, rested his cheek on a fist and suddenly said, “Ah, Sergei old fellow! Why did you land on Blue Sands?”

  The navigator choked again. The planet Blue Sands hung before his eyes with horrifying vividness. Child of an alien sun. Itself very alien. It was covered with oceans of fine blue dust and in these oceans were tides, ferocious gales and typhoons, and even, it seemed, some sort of life. Round-dances of green flame whirled around the buried Taimyr, blue dunes shouted and howled in various voices, dust clouds crawled across the whitish sky like giant amoebas. And human beings had not solved a single one of Blue Sands’ mysteries. The navigator had broken his leg on the first sortie, they had lost every last cyberscout, and then in the middle of a total calm a real storm had set in, and good old Koenig, who had not had time to get back to the ship, was thrown along with the hoist against the reactor ring, was crushed, was flattened, was carried hundreds of miles into the desert, where among the blue waves gigantic rifts showered billions of tons of dust into the incomprehensible depths of the planet.

  “Well, wouldn’t you have landed?” Kondratev said hoarsely.

  Gorbovsky was silent.

  “You’re in fine shape today on your D-ships. One sun today, tomorrow another, a third the day after tomorrow. But for me, for us, this was the first alien sun, the first really alien planet, do you understand? We had gotten there by a miracle. I couldn’t refuse to land, because otherwise… what would it all be for then?” Kondratev stopped. Nerves, he thought. Got to be calmer. It’s all behind me now.

  Gorbovsky said thoughtfully, “The first one to land on Blue Sands after you must have been me. I started down in the landing boat and began with the pole. Ah, Sergei, what a time that was! For half a month I went around and around. Twelve probing runs! And all the machines we lost there! A quintessentially rabid atmosphere, Sergei. And you threw yourselves at her from the equator. Without reconnaissance. And in a decrepit old Tortoise. Yes.”

  Gorbovsky put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. Kondratev could not figure out whether he was approving or condemning their action. “I couldn’t do anything else, Comrade Gorbovsky,” he said. “I repeat, that was the first alien sun. Try to put yourself in my place. It’s hard to think of an analog
y you might understand.”

  “Yes,” said Gorbovsky. “No doubt. Still, it was very audacious.”

  Again, Kondratev did not know whether he was approving or condemning. Gorbovsky sneezed deafeningly and quickly sat up, taking his feet off the couch. “Pardon me,” he said, and sneezed again. “I’ve caught another cold. I lie one night on the shore, and I’ve got a cold.”

  “On the shore?”

  “Well, of course, Sergei. There’s a meadow, grass, and you watch the fish swimming to the factories—” Gorbovsky sneezed again. “Pardon me… And the moonlight on the water—’the road to happiness,’ you know?”

  “Moonlight on the water…” Kondratev said dreamily.

  “You don’t have to tell me! I’m from Torzhok myself. We have a river there—small, but very clean. And water lilies in the fish farms. Ah, marvelous!”

  “I understand,” Kondratev said, smiling. “In my time we called that ‘pining for blue sky.’”

  “We still call it that. But by the sea… So yesterday evening I was sitting by the sea at night, a wonderful moon, and girls singing somewhere, and suddenly out of the water, slowly, slowly, comes some bunch or other wearing horned suits.”

  “Who!”

  “Sportsmen.” Gorbovsky waved his arm and lay back down. “I come home a lot nowadays. I go to Venus and back, ferrying volunteers. Great people, the volunteers. Only they’re noisy, they eat a godawful lot, and they all, you know, are rushing off to some suicidal great deed.”

  Kondratev asked with interest, “What do you think about the project, Leonid?”

  “The plan is all right,” Gorbovsky said. “I was the one who made it up, after all. Not by myself, but I took part. When I was young I had a great deal to do with Venus. It’s a mean planet. But of course you know that yourself.”

  “It must be very boring to haul volunteers on a D-ship,” said Kondratev.

  “Yes, of course, the real missions of D-ships are a little different. Take me, for example, with my Tariel. When all this is over, I’m going to EN 17—that’s on the frontier, twelve parsecs out. There’s a planet Vladislava there, with two alien artificial satellites. We’re going to look for a city there. It’s very interesting, looking for alien cities, Sergei.”