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Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky. The Time Wanderers

 ⌐ Copyright Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky

BACKGROUND: Maxim Kammerer

     My name is Maxim Kammerer. I am eighty-nine years old.

     Once upon a time, long, long ago, I read  an ancient novella that began
that  way. I remember  thinking then that if I ever were to write my memoirs
in the future, I  would begin in just that way. However,  strictly speaking,
this present text cannot be considered a memoir, and it should  start with a
certain letter that I received about a year ago.

     Kammerer: You  naturally have read the notorious  "Five  Biographies of
the Age". Please help me to determine who is hiding behind the pseudonyms P.
Soroka and E. Braun. I think it will be easier for you than for me.

     M. Glumova
     13 June 125. Novgorod

     I did not reply to this letter, because I was not able to establish the
real names of the  authors of  "Five  Biographies  of  the Age".  All  I did
determine  was  that,  as  expected, P.  Soroka  and  E.  Braun  were  major
contributors  to the Luden group at  the Institute for the Research of Space
History (IRSH).

     I had no difficulty  in imagining the feelings of Maya Toivovna Glumova
as she  read the biography of her son as related by P. Soroka and  E. Braun.
And I realized that I had to speak out. Therefore, I write this memoir.

     From  the  point of view of  an unprejudiced  and  a particularly young
reader, I will be describing events that brought me to the end of the era in
cosmic self-awareness  and opened  absolutely new vistas, which  had  seemed
only theoretical previously. I was a witness, a participant in,  and in some
sense even an  initiator of these events, and therefore it is not surprising
that  the  Luden Group  has been bombarding me  with questions, official and
unofficial  requests  to  contribute,  and  reminders  of  my   civic  duty.
Originally I had understanding and sympathy for the  goals  and  aims of the
Luden group, but I never hid my skepticism about  their chances for success.
Besides, it was absolutely clear to me that the materials and information in
my  personal files could be of no help to the Luden  group,  and therefore I
have continued avoiding participating in their work.

     But now, for reasons that are more personal, I have  felt  a persistent
need to  gather up  and  present  to  the attention of anyone who  might  be
interested everything  that is known  to  me about the early days of the Big
Revelation.

     I have reread the last paragraph, and  I  must correct myself. First of
all, I am offering far from everything that is known to me,  naturally. Some
of the material is too special in nature to be  presented here. Some names I
will not  give,  out of purely ethical considerations. I will  also  refrain
from  mentioning  certain specific methods of my work then as  head  of  the
Department of Unusual Events (UEs) of the Commission on Control (COMCON-2).

     Secondly, the events of the year 99 were  not,  strictly  speaking, the
early days of the Big Revelation,  but,  on the  contrary, its last days.  I
think this is precisely  what  the Luden group people  do not understand, or
rather, do not wish co understand, despite  all my efforts to convince them.
Of course, perhaps I was not insistent enough. I'm not young anymore.

     The personality of Toivo Glumov and  the Luden group  are linked. I can
understand why, and therefore I made him the central figure in my memoir.

     For whatever  reasons I might recall  those days  and  whatever I might
remember about those days, Toivo Glumov  appears in my mind. I see his thin,
always serious young  face, his long white lashes,  always  lowered over his
transparent gray eyes, and I hear his  apparently  intentional  slow speech.
Once  again I  feel his silent,  helpless, but  inexorable  pressure, like a
wordless cry: "Well, what's the matter with  you? Why are you doing nothing?
Give me  an order!" And,  vice versa,  no sooner do I remember him  for some
reason  than the "mean  dogs  of recollection" wake  up, as if from  a swift
kick: all the  horror of those days, all the  despair of those days, all the
impotence of those days -- horror, despair, and impotence that I experienced
alone, because I had no one with whom to share them.

     This memoir is  based  on  documents.  As  a  rule,  these are standard
reports made by my  inspectors,  and  some official correspondence, which  I
cite primarily to  re-create the  atmosphere of  those  days. In  general, a
picky and competent  researcher  would have no difficulty in noticing that a
large  number  of documents  that relate to the  case are not in the memoir,
while I could  have managed without some of the documents that are included.
Responding ahead  of  time to  this rebuke, I will note that I  selected the
materials In accordance with certain  principles, which I have no desire nor
pressing need to go into.

     Further,  a  significant portion  of  the  text is made  up  of chapter
reconstructions.  These  chapters  are  written   by  me  and  in  fact  are
reconstructions  of   scenes  and  events  that  I  did  not   witness.  The
reconstructions were based on oral accounts, tape recordings, and subsequent
reminiscences by people who  took part in these scenes  and events,  such as
Toivo Glumov's  wife, Asya, his  colleagues,  acquaintances,  and  so on.  I
realize  that the value of these chapters for the Luden group people  is not
great, but what can I do? It is greatly significant for me.

     Finally, I allowed myself to dilute the information-bearing text of the
memoir with personal reminiscences that carry  information not so much about
the  events of those days as about  the Maxim Kammerer of those days, at age
58. The behavior of that man In the circumstances depicted seems to me to be
of some interest even now...

     Having made  the  final  decision  to  write  this memoir,  I faced the
question: where do I begin? When and what started the Big Revelation?

     Strictly speaking, it all began two centuries  ago, when  in the bevels
of Mars  they discovered  a deserted  tunnel city  of amberine. Mat  was the
first time that the word "Wanderers" was spoken.

     That is true. But too general. It could just as easily be said that the
Big Revelation began with the Big Bang.

     Then perhaps it was fifty years  ago?  The  affair of the "foundlings"?
When the problem of the Wanderers took on a tragic aspect,  when the vicious
rebuking epithet "Sikorski  Syndrome"  was  born and lived through  word  of
mouth? It was the complex  of uncontrollable fear of  a possible invasion by
the Wanderers. That's also true. And much more to the point... But back then
I was not yet head of the UE Department; in fact, it did not even exist. And
I am not writing a history of the problem of the Wanderers.

     For me it began in May of 93, when I, like all the heads of the UEDs of
all the sectors of COMCON-2,  received  a circular report about the incident
on  Tisse.  (Not on the Tisse  River, which flows peacefully through Hungary
and  the Carpathians,  but  on  the  planet Tisse  near  the  star EN-63061,
discovered not long  before  that  by  the  fellows from  GSP.) The circular
described the incident  as a  sudden  and unexplained  madness  in all three
members of the  research party, landing on the plateau (I can't remember the
name) two  weeks earlier.  All three  suddenly  imagined that they had  lost
communication  with  the  central base  and had  lost all  communication  in
general except with  the  orbiting  mother ship,  and  the  mother ship  was
broadcasting  an automatic  message  that Earth had  been destroyed  in some
cosmic cataclysm, and that the entire population  of  the Periphery had died
out from unexplained epidemics.

     I  don't remember all the details anymore. Two of  the  party, I think,
tried to commit suicide, and in  the end went off into the desert in despair
over the  hopelessness and total  uselessness  of further  existence.  Their
commander  was a  stronger  man. He gritted  his teeth and forced himself to
live  -- as if humanity  had  not perished,  but  only  he had  suffered  an
accident  and  had  been  cut  off  forever  from his home planet. He  later
recounted that,  on the fourteenth day of this crazed  life, someone dressed
in white  appeared  to him and  announced that  he had honorably  passed the
first round of the  trials and had  been accepted  as a candidate  into  the
society  of  Wanderers.  On the fifteenth  day, the  lifeboat came from  the
mother ship, and the atmosphere was discharged. They  found the two  men who
had  gone off into the desert, everyone  remained of sound mind, and  no one
died.  Their  testimony  was  consistent  down to the  tiniest  details. For
instance, they all  reproduced exactly the accent of the  automatic  machine
that allegedly gave the fatal announcement. Subjectively, they perceived the
incident as a vivid, unusually authentic-seeming theatrical presentation, in
which they had been unexpected and unwitting  participants.  Deep mentoscopy
confirmed  their  subjective perception and  even showed that, in  the  very
depth of  their subconscious, none  of them  suspected that  it was merely a
theatrical performance.

     As far as I know,  my colleagues in  the other sectors  took this for a
rather ordinary UE, an explainable UE, one of the many that constantly occur
beyond the Periphery. Everyone was alive  and well. Further work in the area
of the UE was not necessary; it hadn't been necessary in the first place. No
volunteers interested in  solving the mystery appeared. The  area of  the UE
was evacuated. The UE was taken into account. In the files.

     But  I  was a student of the late  Sikorski! When he was alive,  I  had
often argued with him, both mentally and out  loud, when talk turned to  the
threat  to humanity from the  outside. But  there was one thesis of his that
was hard to dispute and I didn't  want to argue with it: "We  are workers of
COMCON-2.   We   are  allowed  to   be  called  ignoramuses,  mystics,   and
superstitious fools. There is one thing we are not allowed: to underestimate
danger.  And  if there  is suddenly the odor of sulfur  in our house, we are
simply  obliged to  assume that a horned devil has appeared somewhere nearby
and to take appropriate measures right up to  organizing national industrial
production  of holy water." No sooner did I hear that  someone in white  was
speaking in the name of  the  Wanderers than I smelled  sulfur  and grew  as
agitated as an old warhorse at the sound of bugles.

     I made appropriate queries through appropriate channels. Without  great
surprise,  I learned that in  the lexicon of  instructions, directives,  and
projected plans of  our COMCON-2,  the word "Wanderer" does not exist  I had
been  received by the higher-ups and, without the least bit  of amazement, I
was convinced that  as far as  our most responsible  leaders were concerned,
the Progressorist activity  of the Wanderers in the  system of  humanity had
been lived through and survived, like  a childhood  disease. The  tragedy of
Lev Abalkin  and  Rudolf Sikorski in  some  inexplicable manner  had somehow
cleared the Wanderers forever of suspicion.

     The  only person in  whom my  anxiety  elicited a flash of sympathy was
Athos-Sidorov, the President of  my sector and my  immediate supervisor.  He
confirmed  with his authority  and affixed  with his signature  my  proposed
theme: "A Visit from an Old Lady." He allowed me to organize a special group
to develop that theme. Actually, he gave me a carte blanche in that area.

     And  I began by  organizing a  questionnaire  for a number of  the most
competent specialists in  zenosociology. My aim was to  create  a model  (as
realistic as possible) of the Progressorist activity of the Wanderers in the
system of  Earth  humanity.  Without  going  into  details: I sent  all  the
materials I gathered  to the  famous  science historian  and  erudite  Isaac
Bromberg. Now  I don't even remember why I did that,  since by then Bromberg
had not worked in  zenology in many years. It must have been because most of
the specialists to whom I had turned with my  questions had  refused to talk
seriously with  me (the  Sikorski  Syndrome! ),  while Bromberg, as everyone
knows, "always had a few words to spare," no matter the topic.

     Anyway,  Dr. L Bromberg sent me  his reply,  which  is now known as the
Bromberg Memorandum.

     It all began with it.

     I'll begin with it, too.

DOCUMENT 1: The Bromberg Memorandum

     To COMCON-2
     Sector Ural-North
     To Maxim Kammerer
     Personal and Official

     Date: 3 June 94

     FROM: I. Bromberg,  senior consultant  COMCON-1,  doctor of  historical
sciences, laureate of the Herodotus Prize (63,  69,  and  72  ),  professor,
laureate of the  Small  Prize  -- Jan  Amos  Kamensky  Prize( 57),doctor  of
xenopsychology, doctor  of  sociotopology, acting  member of the  Academy of
Sociology (Europe),  corresponding  member  of  the Laboratorium (Academy of
Sciences)  of  Great   Tagro,  master  of   the  realization  of  Parsival's
abstractions.
     THEME: "A Visit from an Old Lady."
     CONTENTS: working model of  the Progressorist activity of the Wanderers
in the system of humanity on earth.

     Dear Kammerer!

     Please do not take the heading with  which I capped this missive as  an
old man's  mockery.  l merely  wanted  to  stress  that  my  missive,  while
completely  personal, is at the same  time official. I've remembered the cap
of  your reports  from the days when  they  were  tossed  on my  desk as  an
argument (rather feeble) by your pathetic Sikorski.

     My attitude  toward your  organization has not changed in the  least. I
never hid it, and it is certainly well known to you. Nevertheless, I studied
with great interest  the materials  you  were kind enough to send me.  Thank
you. I want to assure you that in this direction of your work  (but not only
in this direction!) you will find me your most ardent ally and collaborator.

     I  do  not know  whether  this Is a coincidence,  but I  received  your
Compendium  of Models just at  the moment when  I was  about  to  embark  on
summing up my many  years of thinking about the nature of the Wanderers  and
the  inevitability of their  collision  with  the civilization  of Earth. Of
course, it is my profound belief that there are no coincidences. Apparently,
the time for this question is ripe.

     I have  neither the time nor the wish to make  a detailed  criticism of
your   document.  I  must  note,  however,  that  the   models  Octopus  and
Conquistador  brought  me   uncontrollable  laughter,  with  their  jokelike
primitivism, while the model New Air, despite its appearing to be  less than
totally trivial, is also devoid of any serious argumentation.  Eight models!
Eighteen  development  engineers,  among  whom  are  such shining  stars  as
Karibanov, Yasuda,  and Mikich!  Damn  it, you should expect  something more
significant! Say what  you  will, Kammerer, but the natural  supposition  is
that you were unable to impress these great masters with  your "anxiety over
our general unpreparedness in this area." They simply ducked the issue.

     Herein I offer to the pedestal of your attention a brief notation of my
future book, which  I plan to  call "Monocosm: Peak of First Step? Notes  on
the Evolution  of Evolution." Again, I have neither the time nor inclination
to equip my  basic  positions  with detailed argumentation. I can assure you
only  that  each  of  these  positions  even   today  can  be   argued  more
exhaustively, so if  you have any questions, I will be happy to answer them.
(Incidentally, I can't  resist noting that your request  for my consultation
was  perhaps  the  first  and  so  far  only  socially  useful act  by  your
organization in all the time it has existed.)

     And so: Monocosm.

     Any intelligence -- technological, Rousseauist, or even a heron's -- in
the  process of evolution first travels the  path  from the state of maximal
separation (savagery, mutual hostility, crude emotions, mistrust) to a state
of maximal unification  while still  retaining individuality  (friendliness,
high culture of relationships, altruism,  disdain for success). This process
is governed by  biological, biosocial, and  specifically social laws.  It is
well studied and is of interest go  us here only insofar as it brings us  to
the question: what next? Leaving aside the romantic  trills of the theory of
vertical progress, we have discovered only two real possibilities, differing
in principle. On the  one hand, a  halt, a self-soothing,  a turning off,  a
loss of interest in the physical world. Or entering on the path of evolution
of a second order, the path of planned  and controlled  evolution, the  path
toward Monocosm.

     The synthesis  of intelligences is  inevitable.  It  gives an  infinite
number of new  facets to the perception  of the world, and this leads. to an
incredible increase  in the quantity,  and more importantly, the quality  of
available information, which in its turn leads to a decrease of suffering to
a minimum and an increase in pleasure to  a maximum. The  concept  of "home"
will extend to universal scope. (This is probably why that irresponsible and
superficial  concept of  the  Wanderers appeared in  the first place.) A new
metabolism develops,  and, as a  result, life and  health become practically
eternal. The age of an individual becomes comparable with the age  of cosmic
objects -- with a total absence of  psychic  weariness. An individual of the
Monocosm does  not  need creators.  He  is  his own creator and  consumer of
culture. From a drop of water not only can he re-create  the  image  of  the
ocean, but the whole world of the creatures that inhabit  it, including  the
reasoning  ones  -- and  all this  with a  constant  unsatisfiable sense  of
hunger.

     Every  new individual  appears  as  a creation of syntectic art  he  is
created   by   physiologists,    geneticists,    engineers,   psychologists,
estheticians,  teachers,  and philosophers  of Monocosm. This  process  will
definitely take up  several  Earth decades,  and,  naturally,  is  the  most
engrossing  and respected san  of activity of  the  Wanderers.  Contemporary
humanity does  not know of any analog for this  kind of art, if one does not
count the very rare instances of Great Love.

     Create Without Destroying! That is the motto of the Monocosm.

     The  Monocosm cannot  consider its  path of  development and  its modus
vivendi  to  be  the  only  true  path. Pain and  despair elicit pictures of
separated minds  that had not  matured to  become  part of  it. It must wait
until reason within the framework of  evolution of the first order  develops
to the state of an all-planet socium. For it is only after that that you can
interfere  with biostructure,  with  the  aim  of  preparing the  bearer  of
intelligence  to  the  transformation  into  the  monocosmic  organism  of a
Wanderer. For the  intervention of the Wanderers into the fates of separated
civilizations can yield nothing worthwhile.

     A significant situation:  the Progressors  of Earth strive to speed  up
the  historical process  of  creating  more  developed social structures  in
suffering  civilizations.  Thereby,  they  are  preparing  new  reserves  of
material for the future work of Monocosm.

     We now know of three civilizations that consider themselves happy.

     The  Leonidians. An  extremely  ancient  civilization (at  least  three
hundred thousand  years old,  no matter what the late  Pak Hin  maintained).
This  is a model of a "slow" civilization;  they are frozen  in  unity  with
nature.

     The Tagorians. A civilization of hypertrophied foresight. Three-fourths
of all their  strength is directed to studying the harmful consequences that
might arise from a discovery, invention, or new technological progress. This
civilization  seems  strange to  us only  because we  cannot  understand the
interest  in avoiding  harmful consequences,  or how much  intellectual  and
emotional satisfaction it can give.  Slowing down progress  is as amusing as
creating it -- it all depends on your starting point and your upbringing. As
a result, their only transportation is public; they have no aviation at all,
and their communication lines are very well developed.

     The third civilization is ours, and now we  understand precisely in our
lives  why the  Wanderers must interfere. We are moving. We are moving,  and
therefore we might make a mistake in the direction of our movement.

     Nowadays, no one remembers the "asskickers" who tried to force progress
with  great enthusiasm  among the Tagorians  and Leonidians. By now  me know
that kicking  ass in  civilizations that are mature in their  own way is  as
meaningless and hopeless as trying to speed up  the growth  of a tree --  an
oak,  say  --  by  pulling it  up by the  branches. The  Wanderers  are  not
asskickers, and forcing  progress  is not and could not be their goal. Their
aim is the search, the selection, the preparation for communing, and finally
to  bring  individuals mature  enough  for  it  into  the  community of  the
Monocosm. I  do not know by what process the Wanderers make their selection,
and that  is a shame,  because  whether  we want  it  or  not, we must speak
plainly,  without euphemisms and scientific jargon.  This  is  what  we  are
talking about.

     First:  mankind's stepping onto  the path of evolution  of  the  second
order means the practical transformation of Homo sapiens into Wanderers.

     Second: most likely; far from every Homo  sapiens is suitable  for such
transformation.

     Summary:
     - humanity will be divided into two unequal parts;
     - humanity  will be divided into  two  unequal  parts along  parameters
unknown to us;
     -  humanity will be divided  into  two unequal parts  along  parameters
unknown to us, and  the smaller part will be  forced to surpass  the greater
half forever;
     - humanity  will  be  divided into two  unequal parts  along parameters
unknown to us, and  the smaller part will be forced  to surpass  the greater
half  forever,  and  this   will   be  done   by  the  will  and  art  of  a
supercivilization, determinedly alien to humanity.

     My dear Kammerer, as a sociopsychological experiment I  offer  you this
situation, not without innovation, for analysis.

     Now, when the bases of the Monocosm's Progressorist strategy has become
more  or  less  clear  to  you, you  will probably be better able  than I to
determine the  basic  direction of  a counterstrategy  and  the  tactics for
capturing the moments of  the Wanderers' activity.  It  goes without  saying
that  the  search,  selection,  and  preparation  for  communing  of matured
individuals must be accompanied  by  phenomena and events  accessible to the
careful  observer. For instance,  we  can  expect  the  appearance  of  mass
phobias,  new  messianic   teachings,   the   appearance   of   people  with
extraordinary abilities, the unexplained disappearance of people, the sudden
-- almost as if by witchcraft  -- development of new  talents in people, and
so on. I would definitely recommend that you keep your eyes on the Tagorians
and Golovans  accredited  on Earth  -- their  sensitivity to  the  alien and
unknown is significantly higher  than ours. (In  this sense, you should also
watch  the behavior of earth animals, especially herd animals and those with
rudimentary intellect.)

     Naturally, the sphere of your attention  should include not only Earth,
but  the  entire solar  system,  the  Periphery, and most  of all, the young
Periphery.

     I wish you luck,

     Yours, I. Bromberg

     [End of Document 1]

DOCUMENT 2: Theme: 009 "A Visit from an Old Lady"

     To the President of Sector Urals-North

     Date: 13 June 94

     FROM: M.M. Kammerer, head of UED
     THEME: 009 "A Visit from an Old Lady"
     CONTENTS: the death of A. Bromberg

     President!

     Professor Isaac Bromberg died suddenly in the Bezhin  Meadow Sanatorium
on the morning of June 11 of this year.

     We have not found  any notes on the Monocosm model or any notes at  all
on the Wanderers in  his personal  files. The search  continues. The medical
certificate on his death is appended.

     M. Kammerer

     [End of Document 2]

     It was in  this  order that  my  young probationer, Toivo Glumov,  read
these documents in  early  95,  and naturally, these documents  made a  very
definite impression on  him, gave him  very definite ideas, especially since
they  supported his most gloomy expectations. The seed fell in fertile soil.
He  immediately located the medical  death  certificate and, finding nothing
there at all to confirm his suspicions, which seemed so natural, he demanded
permission to see me.

     I remember that morning well: gray, snowy, with a real blizzard outside
my  office windows.  Perhaps  because of  the contrast, because  my body was
here, in the snowy  Urals, and  my eyes senselessly  watched the streams  of
melting water on the panes, while  my mental gaze  was on a  tropical  night
above a warm ocean, and a  dead naked body bobbed in the phosphorescent foam
that rolled up onto the sloping sandy beach. I had just received information
from the Center about the third fatal incident on the island of Matuku.

     At that moment,  Toivo Glumov appeared before me, and I chased away the
vision and asked him to sit down and speak.

     Without  any  preamble,  he  asked  me  if  the  investigation  of  the
circumstances of the death of Dr. Bromberg was considered closed.

     With a  certain amount of surprise,  I replied that there had  been  no
investigation,  in  effect,  just   as  there  had  not   been  any  special
circumstances in the death of the hundred-and-fifty-year-old man.

     Then where, in that case, were Dr. Bromberg's notes on the Monocosm?

     I  explained  that  there  probably  had  never  been  any  notes.  Dr.
Bromberg's letter,  I had to assume, was an improvisation. Dr. Bromberg  had
been a brilliant improviser.

     Then should he deem  it an accident that Dr.  Bromberg's letter and the
announcement of his  death,  sent by Maxim Kammerer to  the President,  were
next to each other?

     I looked at him, his thin lips set in a determined  line, his low  brow
with  a strand of  white hair across it, and it was perfectly  clear  to me.
What he  wanted to hear from me. "Yes, Toivo, my lad," he wanted to hear. "I
think just as you do. Bromberg had guessed  much,  and the Wanderers got rid
of him  and  stole  his precious  papers."  But  naturally,  I  didn't think
anything of the  sort and I didn't say anything of the sort to my lad Toivo.
Why  the documents  were next to  each other,  I didn't  know  myself.  Most
likely, it really was by accident. And that's what I told him.

     Then  he  asked   me  if  Bromberg's  ideas  had  gone  into  practical
development.

     I  replied  that  the question was  being examined.  All  eight models,
proposed  by  the experts,  were very open  to criticism. As  for Bromberg's
ideas, circumstances were not right for a serious attitude toward them.

     Then he  mustered his courage  and asked  me  straight on  if I,  Maxim
Kammerer, head  of the  department,  intended to  take up the development of
Bromberg's  ideas. And  here, finally, I  had  the  opportunity to make  him
happy. He heard exactly what he wanted to hear.

     "Yes, my lad," I said. "That's why I brought you into the department."

     He left  feeling ecstatic. Neither  he nor  I  had  any idea  then,  of
course, that it was at that very  moment that he  took his first step toward
the Big Revelation.

     I am a  practicing psychologist. When I am dealing with a person, I can
say without false modesty that  I feel his spiritual state at  every moment,
the direction of his thoughts, and I'm quite good at predicting his actions.
However, if I were asked to explain how I do it, and on top of that asked to
draw  or explain in words the image - that is  created  in my mind,  I would
find  myself  in  a   very  difficult   position.   Like  every   practicing
psychologist,  I would be  forced to turn to analogies from the world of art
or literature. I would refer to  the characters of Shakespeare, or  Strogov,
or Michelangelo, or Johann Sourd.

     So  Toivo Glumov  reminded me  of the  Mexican Rivers.  I mean from the
oft-anthologized   story   by  Jack  London.  Twentieth  century.   Or  even
nineteenth... I don't remember exactly.

     By profession, Toivo Glumov  was a Progressor. Specialists told me that
he could have  been  a Progressor of the highest class, a Progressor ace. He
had  brilliant  qualifications.  He   had  wonderful  self-control,  he  was
extraordinarily  cool, had truly unusually fast  reflexes,  and was  a  born
actor  and master of impersonation.  And  having  worked as a Progressor for
over three years, without any  apparent  reasons he retired  and returned to
Earth. No  sooner had he finished reconditioning than he got on the BVI  and
learned  without  any  great  difficulty that the  only organization  on our
planet that had anything to do with his new aims was COMCON-2.

     He  appeared before me in December of 94,  imbued with icy preparedness
to  answer questions over  and over:  why  he,  such a promising, absolutely
healthy, and  highly  valued  man  was  quitting his job, his  mentors,  his
comrades,  destroying  carefully worked-out  plans, squashing the hopes that
had been placed in him... Naturally, I did not ask him anything of the sort.
In general, I was not interested in why  he did not want  to be a Progressor
anymore.   I   was   interested   in  why   he   suddenly  wanted  to  be  a
Counter-Progressor, if you can put it that way.

     His  reply  was memorable.  He felt hostility  for the very  concept of
Progressorism. If possible,  he would not dwell on details. It was just that
he, a Progressor, had  negative feelings about Progressorism. And over there
(he  jerked  his thumb over his shoulder),  he had a very  trivial  thought:
while he  was tramping along the cobblestones of Arkanara's squares, shaking
his staff and brandishing his sword, here  (he pointed his  index  finger at
the  ground beneath his feet) some  trickster in a fashionable rainbow  cape
and a metavisor over his shoulder was strolling  on Sverdlov Square.  As far
as he knew, that  simple thought rarely occurs to  anyone, and if  it  does,
then as an incongruously silly or romantic one. But he, Toivo Glumov, had no
peace from  that  thought: no gods should be  allowed  to  intervene  in our
affairs;  the gods had no place on earth,  for "the good of  the gods is the
wind  --  it fills sails, but it  also raises  storms." (I  later  found the
source of this citation with great difficulty -- it's from Verbliben.)

     My naked eye  could see that before me was a Catholic who  was far more
Catholic than the Pope. Without further discussion, I took him into my group
and started him in on the theme "A Visit from an Old Lady."

     He  turned  out to  be a  marvelous  worker. He was  energetic,  he had
initiative, he  did not know the meaning  of  tired, and -- this was  a very
rare quality at his age -- he was not disappointed by failure. There were no
negative results for him. Moreover,  negative results of  his research  made
him  just as happy as the rare positive ones. He had seemed to  set his mind
from the  beginning that nothing definite would be learned in his  lifetime,
and  know  how  to  find  pleasure  horn  the  actual  (often rather dreary)
procedure of analyzing the least-bit-suspicious incident.  Amazingly, my old
workers - Grisha Serosovin,  Sandro Mbvevari, Andryusha  Kikin, and others -
shaped up around  him, stopped  wasting time, and grew  much less ironic and
much more efficient. And  it  wasn't as if they were following  his example,
there could be no  question of  that; he was too young  for them, too green.
But he seemed to have infected them with his seriousness,  his concentration
on the work, and,  most of all, I think, they were astonished by the intense
hatred  for the object  of our work that they could guess  in  him and which
they totally  lacked. Once,  I happened  to mention the  tanned youth Rivera
around  Grisha Serosovin and  soon  discovered that they had all located and
reread that story by Jack London.

     Like Rivera,  Toivo had  no friends. He  was surrounded by faithful and
trusty colleagues, and he was a faithful and  trusty partner himself for any
undertaking. But he never did develop friends. I think it was because it was
too hard to be his friend: he never was satisfied with himself  in anything,
and  therefore never  made allowances for others  in anything. He  had  this
ruthless concentration  on  his goal, which I  had seen before only in major
scientists and athletes. No room for friendship...

     Actually, he  did have one friend. I  mean his wife, Asya Stasova, name
and  patronymic Anastasiya  Pavlovna. When I met  her, she  was  a  charming
little woman,  as lively as  mercury, sharp-tongued, and  with a tendency to
make  quick judgments. Therefore, the atmosphere in their  house was  always
combat-ready, and it was sheer pleasure to observe their constantly erupting
verbal battles.

     It was  all the more amazing  because in ordinary circumstances -- that
is, at work  -- Toivo gave the impression of being a slow and  taciturn man.
He seemed to be always stuck on  some important  idea he  was thinking  over
carefully.  But  not  with  Asya.  Only  not  with Asya.  With  her  he  was
Demosthenes,  Cicero, Apostle  Paul;  he intoned, quipped, created maxims --
damn it, he even ironized!  It was difficult  to imagine just  how different
the  two men were; silent,  slow Toivo  Glumov-at-Work and animated, chatty,
philosophizing, constantly erring and  agitatedly defending his errors Toivo
Glumov-at-Home. At home, he even ate  with an  appetite and with  taste.  He
even complained about the food. Asya worked as a gastronomic degustator  and
did all  the cooking  herself.  That's the way  it  had been in her mother's
home,  and  in her grandmother's home. This tradition, which delighted Toivo
Glumov,  went back in the Stasov family to the depths of centuries, to those
unimaginable times  before molecular cuisine, when an ordinary hamburger had
to  be  cooked  by  means  of  very  complicated  and  not  very  appetizing
procedures...

     And  Toivo also had a mother. Every day, no matter how busy or where he
was, he always found  a  minute to call her on the videochannel and exchange
at least a few words. They called that their "check-in call" Many years ago,
I met Maya  Toivovna Glumova, but  the circumstances of our meeting  were so
sad that subsequently we never met again. Not through any  fault of mine. No
one's fault, really.  In brief, she had a  very bad opinion of me, and Toivo
knew it. He  never spoke of her  with  me. But  he  spoke with her  about me
frequently -- I learned that much later...

     This  duality  undoubtedly irritated and depressed  him. I  don't think
that  Maya  Toivovna said bad  things about me. It is completely  improbable
that she would have told him the terrible story of Lev Abalkin's death. Most
likely, whenever Tolvo brought up the subject of Kammerer, she simply coldly
refused to speak on that topic. But that was more than enough.

     For I was more than a boss for Toivo.  After all, I was the only person
who shared his views, the only  person in the enormous  COMCON-2 who treated
the issue  that engrossed  him totally with complete seriousness and without
any allowances. Besides which, he felt great piety  toward me. Say  what you
will, but his boss  was the legendary Marc Sim! Toivo hadn't even been  born
when Mare Sim was blowing up ray towers and fighting fascists on Saraksha...
The  peerless  White Queen! The organizer  of  Operation Virus,  after which
Excellency himself called him  Big Bug! Toivo was just a schoolboy  when Big
Bug  penetrated into  the Island Empire, into the very capital...  the first
earthling, and the  last, incidentally... Of course, these were all exploits
of a  Progressor, but it is written: a Progressor can be  vanquished only by
another Progressor! And Toivo was a fierce adherent of that simple idea.

     And then  there was also this: Toivo had no idea how he  would act when
at last-the  intervention  of  the  Wanderers  in  human  affairs  would  be
established and proven with absolute  reliability.  No historical  analogies
from  the centuries of activity by Earth  Progressors helped there. For  the
Duke of  Irukan,  an exposed Earth Progressor was  a demon  or  a practicing
sorcerer.  For  counterintelligence  from  the   Island   Empire,  the  same
Progressor  was  a clever spy from the  mainland.  And  what was an  exposed
Progressor Wanderer from the point of view of a worker in COMCON-2?

     An exposed sorcerer would be burned;  or he  could be placed in a stone
sack and forced  to  make gold  from  his own feces. A  clever  spy from the
mainland should be rerecruited or killed. But what do you do with an exposed
Wanderer?

     Toivo  did not  know  the  answer  to these and similar  questions. The
majority  felt  these questions  were  incorrect.  "What do you do  if  your
outboard motor catches the beard of a watersprite? Do you  untangle him? Cut
it ruthlessly? Pull the watersprite up by the sides?" Toivo did  not discuss
these things with me. And l  think  that he didn't because  he had convinced
himself  that  Big Bug, the  legendary White Queen, the clever  Marc Sim had
long ago  thought  it  out, had  analyzed all  the  possible  variants,  had
compiled detailed plans and had them confirmed by the authorities.

     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.

     1.  I  determined  that  the  Phantom-17-Penguins  spaceship  had  been
subjected to the most  thorough diagnostics, in the course  of which nothing
major in the construction  was  discovered, so that the direct cause of  the
Penguin Syndrome has remained shrouded in mist and fog. (However, wanting to
reduce  the  risk  to zero, the  Directorate of the Space Fleet removed  the
Penguins  from passenger  flights  and redesigned  them  for autopilot.) The
incidence of the Penguin Syndrome rapidly decreased, and as  far  as I know,
the last case was recorded thirteen years ago.

     However, I was not satisfied. I  was worried by the  22  percent of the
cases  reviewed  whose  relationship with  the  Phantom-17-Penguin spaceship
remained vague. Of those 22 percent, according to the figures of Dr. Mobius,
7  percent never had anything to do with the Penguins, and the remaining  15
percent  could  not say anything useful either they did not remember or they
were not interested in spaceship models and did not know which ones they had
flown in.

     Naturally, the statistical  significance of the hypothesis  of the role
of the Penguins in the appearance of the phobia is indisputable. However, 22
percent  is not  a  small  figure.  I  subjected  Mobius's  materials  to  a
multifactored analysis  of twenty additional parameters,  and selected these
parameters, I confess, rather randomly, having nothing to work from, not the
most dubious hypothesis.  For  instance, I had parameter  dates  of  takeoff
accurate to within the month, place of birth accurate to the region, hobbies
with accuracy to within the class rating... and so on.

     It turned out to be quite simple,  however,  and it was only humanity's
eternal belief in the  isotropism  of the universe that kept Dr. Mobius from
discovering  what I managed to come up  with.  Here is  what  I learned: the
Penguin Syndrome affected people who had made space flights on the routes to
Saula, Redut, and Cassandra -- in other words, through subspace sector entry
41/02.

     The Phantom-17-Penguin had nothing to do with it.  It  was simply  that
the overwhelming majority of those ships in those days ( the early 80s) went
straight    from    the    hangar   to   the   Earth-Cassandra-Zephyr    and
Earth-Redut-EN-2105 routes. That  explained Dr. Mobius's 78  percent. As for
the remaining 22 percent, 20 had flown on those routes  in other ships; that
left  only 2 percent,  who  had never flown anywhere, and so did not  play a
significant role.

     2. The  data  of Dr. Mobius is definitely incomplete. In  the  names he
collected as well the data from the archives of the Directorate of the Space
Fleet,  I  was able to determine that during the  period  in  question 4,512
people  traveled along those routes in both directions, of  which 183 people
(primarily  crew  members)  made   round  trips  several  times.  More  than
two-thirds of the reference group  did not fall into  Dr. Mobius's field  of
vision.

     The most likely conclusion  is  that they  were  immune to the  Penguin
Syndrome or that  for  various reasons  they did not  seek  medical help. In
connection with this, it seemed extremely important for me to determine:
     - whether there were people within the  reference group who were immune
to the syndrome; and
     -  if there mere  any, then  could  the  causes  of their  immunity  be
determined, or at least the biosociopsychological parameters  in which these
people differed from the patients.

     With  these questions, I turned to Dr. Mobius himself.  He replied that
this problem had never interested him, but intuitively he  tended  to assume
that the existence  of such biosociopsychological  parameters seemed  highly
unlikely.  In response to my request, he  agreed to assign this  research to
one of  his tabs, warning me that  I should not expect results before two or
three months.

     So  as not to  lose  time, I turned to the files  of  the Directorate's
Medical Center and  tried to analyze the  data on  all  124 pilots who  made
regular round trips on the routes in question during the period in question.

     Elementary  analysis  showed  that,  at  least  fog  the   pilots,  the
probability  of  being subjected  to an attack of the  Penguin Syndrome  was
approximately one-third and did not  depend on the number of flights through
the "dangerous" sector. Thus,  it becomes quite probable that (a) two-thirds
of people are  immune  to  the  Penguin Syndrome, and (b)  a  person without
immunity  is stricken by the  syndrome with a probability close to one. That
is why the question of  distinguishing the immune person from the non-immune
takes on such interest.

     3. I feel it  necessary to cite in full the notes by Dr. Mobius to  his
article, "More on the Nature of the Penguin Syndrome." Dr. Mobius writes:

     "I received a  curious missive  from  my  colleague Krivoklykov (of the
Crimean branch of the Second ISM). After my speech in Riga was published, he
wrote that for  many  months  he has been having dreams that  are incredibly
similar to  the nightmares of the sufferers of the  Penguin  Syndrome  -- he
feels suspended  in airless space far from planets  and  stars, he does  not
feel  his body but sees it, just  as many space objects, real and fantastic.
But as opposed to  those  with the Penguin Syndrome, he  does not  feel  any
negative  emotions.  On  the  contrary,  the  event  seems  interesting  and
pleasant. He imagines that  he is an independent heavenly body, moving along
a  trajectory he has chosen. The movement itself gives him  pleasure, for he
moves toward a certain goal that promises much that is interesting. The view
of stellar masses glittering  in  the abyss elicits feelings of inexplicable
rapture,  and so  on. It  occurred to me that  in the person of my colleague
Krivoklykov  I  have  an incident  of  a certain inversion  of  the  Penguin
Syndrome,  which would  be  of great theoretical  interest  in light of  the
considerations I have explicated in my article. However, I was disappointed:
it  turned  out  that  Krivoklykov  had  never  in  his  life   flown  in  a
Phantom-17-Penguin  starship.  However,  I  do  not give up  hope  that  the
inversion  of the Penguin Syndrome does exist as a psychic phenomenon, and I
will be grateful to  any physician who would  be kind enough to send  me new
data on that subject."

     Reference:

     Krivoklykov, Ivan Georgievich, replacement  physician  and psychiatrist
of Lemba base (EN 2105), in the period in question had made several trips on
the  Earth-Redut-EN-2105 route  on various spaceships. According to the data
In BVI, at the present time he is on Lemba case.

     In the course of personal  conversation with Dr. Mobius, I learned that
in the  last  few  years  he has discovered  the "positive" inversion of the
Penguin Syndrome in another two people. Our of  medical ethic, he refused to
divulge their names.

     I  am  not attempting  a  detailed  commentary on the  inversion of the
Penguin  Syndrome.  However,  it  seems  clear  to  me that there  should be
significantly more such people than are now known.

     T. Glumov

     [End of Document 3.]

     I  presented  Document 3  here not only because it was  one of the most
summarizing reports made by Toivo Glumov. As I read and  reread it, I sensed
that we had finally come across the first real clue then, even though at the
time that had not occurred  to me, that the chain of events that  would play
the decisive role in my part in the Big Revelation began with that report.

     On March 21, I read Toivo Glumov's report on the Penguin Syndrome.

     On March 25, the Wizard presented his demonstration in the Institute of
Eccentrics. (I learned about it only several days later.)

     And on March 27, Toivo turned in his report on fukamiphobia.

DOCUMENT 4: Report by T. Glumov
     Theme 009

     NARRATIVE: Little Pesha: 6 May 99. Early morning
     Little Pesha: 6 May 99. 6 AM
     Little Pesha: Same Day. 8 AM

DOCUMENT 5: Once of the UE-2
     Department: 6 May 99. Around 1 PM

     REPORT COMCON-2
     No. 013/99 Urals-North

     Date: 26 March 99

     FROM: T. Glumov, Inspector
     THEME: 009 "A Visit from an Old Lady"
     CONTENTS: Fukamiphobia, the  history of  the  Amendment to  the  Law on
Mandatory Bioblockade

     In analyzing the incidents  of  mass  phobias in  the last one  hundred
years, I have came to  the  conclusion that within the parameters  of  theme
009, the events that preceded the passage on 2/02/65 by the World Council of
the famous Amendment to the law on the Bioblockade  would be of interest  to
us.

     The following should be kept in mind:

     1.   Bioblockade,   also  known  as   the  Tokyo  Procedure,  has  been
systematically  in use on Earth and the  Periphery for about one hundred and
fifty years. Bioblockade is  not a professional term, and is  used primarily
by  journalists.  Medical  specialists call  this procedure fukamization  in
honor of the sisters Natalya and Hosiko Fukami, who were the first to give a
theoretical  basis  for  it  and  to  put  it  into  practice.  The  aim  of
fukamization is raising the natural level of adaptation of the human body to
external conditions (bioadaptation). In its  classic  form, the procedure of
fukamization is  used  exclusively  an  infants,  beginning  with the  third
trimester of  its intrauterine  development. As far  as I  have learned  and
understood, the procedure consists of two stages.

     The  introduction  of  UNBLAF serum (the  "bacteria of  life"  culture)
raises resistance by several orders  to all known infections  and viruses --
viral,  bacterial,  or  spore  --  and also to  all  organic  toxins.  (This
basically is the bioblockade.)

     Unbreaking  the  hypothalmus  with  microwave  radiation increases  the
body's ability to adapt to such physical agents of the environment as strong
radiation, toxic gas, and high temperatures. Besides which, the  ability  to
regenerate damaged organs increases the spectrum visible  to the retina, and
response to psychotherapy is heightened.

     The complete test of instruction on fukamization is appended below.

     2. The  procedure of fukamization  was used up until  85 as a mandatory
procedure  in accordance with the law on Mandatory  Bioblockade. In the year
82, a draft of an amendment was presented to the World Council, calling  for
an end to  mandatory fukamization for infants  born  on Earth. The Amendment
called for "maturity vaccination," to be given to people who reached the age
of sixteen,  to replace fukamization. In  85, the World Council (by majority
of  only  twelve  votes)  passed  the"  Amendment  to  the law on  Mandatory
Bioblockade.  According  to  this  Amendment,  fukamization  was  no  longer
mandatory,  and  its use  was  left up  to the  parents. People  who did not
undergo fukamization  in infancy had  the right to later refuse the maturity
vaccination. However, in  that case, they  could not  work  in  professional
fields involving heavy physical and psychological  stress. According to  the
BVI, at the present time there are close to a million teenagers on Earth who
have not been fukamized and close to twenty thousand people who have refused
the maturity vaccination.

     INSTRUCTION
     On antenatal and postnatal fukamization of newborns.

     1. Determine  the exact time of start of birth  by the  method  of even
integrals. (Recommended diagnostics: radioimmune assay NIMB, selectors FDH-4
and FDH-8.)

     2.  No less  than 18  hours  before  the  first  uterine  construction,
determine  the volume  of the fetus and  the volume  of  the  amniotic fluid
separately.

     Note: Lazarevich's correction is  mandatory! The  calculations must  be
made only through the  monographs of  the Institute of Bioadaptation, taking
into account racial differences.

     3.  Determine  the  necessary dose  of  UNBLAF  serum.  A full, stable,
long-term immunization to alum agents  and organic compounds of  albumen and
haptoid structures is  achieved at a dose of 6.8094 gamma  moles per gram of
lymph tissue.

     Note: a) At an index of volumes of less than 3.5, the dose is increased
by 16 percent.
     b) With  multiple fetuses, the total dose of injected serum is  reduced
by 8 percent for each fetus (twins 8 percent, triplets 16 percent, etc.).

     4. Six hours before the first uterine contraction, use the nul injector
to introduce through the anterior abdominal wall into the amniotic fluid the
calibrated dose of  UNBLAF serum. The infection is done from the  side, away
from the fetus's back.

     5. Fifteen minutes after birth, perform a  scintigraph of the newborn's
thymus. If  the  index  is under 3.8, introduce an additional  2.6750  gamma
moles of UNBLAF serum into the umbilical vein.

     6. In an increase of body temperature, immediately place the newborn in
a sterile box. The first natural feeding  is permitted no  sooner than after
12 hours of normal temperature.

     7.  The  hypothalamic  zones  of  adaptogenesis  are   irradiated  with
microwaves 72 hours after birth. The topography distribution of the zones is
calculated  by the program BINAR-1. The  volumes of the  hyporhalamic  zones
should correspond as follows:

     Zone I: 36-42 neurons
     Zones II: 178-194 neurons
     Zones III: 125-139 neurons
     Zones IV: 460-510 neurons
     Zones V: 460-510 neurons

     Note: When performing measurements, be  sure  that birth hematomas have
dissolved completely.

     The obtained data is put in the BIOFAK-PULSE.

     HAND CORRECTION OF THE PULSE IS CATEGORICALLY FORBIDDEN.

     8. Place the newborn  in the operating chamber  of the BIOFAK-PULSE. In
orienting the head, watch  especially  that the angle of  deviation  on  the
stereotaxis scale is no more than 0.0014.

     9. Microwave irradiation of the  hypothalamic zones of adaptogenesis is
done by reaching the second level of deep sleep, which corresponds to 1.8 --
2.1 alpha on an encephalogram.

     10. All data must be entered on the newborn's personal chart.

     From  the events that led to the passage of the Amendment to the Law on
Mandatory Bioblockade in February 85, I have determined:

     1.  In the century and a half of global fukamization, not a single case
is  known to cause any damage.  Therefore, it  was not surprising that until
the  spring  of 61 very few mothers  refused fukamization.  The overwhelming
majority of physicians with whom I consulted had not heard of any such cases
before  that year.  But statements  against  fukamization,  theoretical  and
propagandistic, had appeared frequently. Here is a typical one for our age:

     Pumivur, K. "Rider: Rights and Responsibilities." Bangkok, 15.

     The  author,  vice president of the World Association of Reeders, is an
adherent and propagandizer of maximally active participation  of  reeders in
the  activities  of  mankind.  He  argues against  fukamization, basing  his
argument an  the data of personal statistics. He maintains that fukamization
is allegedly harmful for the appearance of reeder potential in man, and even
though  the relative number  of reeders in the era  of fukamization  did not
decrease, during that time there  were no reeders of the power comparable to
those active  in the late twenty-first and early twenty-second centuries. He
calls for the abolition of the mandatory nature of fukamization -- at first,
at least  for the children and  grandchildren of reeders. (All the materials
of  the  books  are  hopelessly out  of  date:  in the  Thirties a brilliant
constellation of  reeders of incredible power appeared -- Alexander Solemba,
Peter Dzomny, et al.)

     Debuque, Charles. "To Build Man?" Lyon, 32.

     A posthumous edition  of the major  (and now forgotten) antieugenicist.
The  second  half  of  the  book is  devoted  wholly  to  the  criticism  of
fukamization as a "shamelessly subversive invasion into the natural state of
the human  organism." He  stresses the irreversible character of the changes
made  by  fukamization ("... no  one has  ever been  able  to  slow down  an
unbridled hypothalamus..."), but the main thrust of his argument is the fact
that this is a typical eugenic procedure, imbued with the authority of world
law, and which for many years has served as a bad and tempting precedent for
new eugenic experiments.

     Skesis, August. "The Stumbling Stone." Athens, 37.

     The famous theoretician and preacher of neophilism devoted his brochure
to harsh criticism of fukamization, but to a poetic criticism rather than  a
rational one.  Within  the  framework of the concepts of  neophilism, like a
vulgarization of the theory of Yakovits, the universe is the location of the
neocosm, in which the mental and emotional code of a human personality flows
after his  death.  Judging  by everything, Skesis  knows  absolutely nothing
about fukamization, indeed imagines it to be something like an appendectomy,
and passionately calls on  people  to reject such  a  crude procedure, which
mutilates  and  distorts the mental  and emotional  code.  (According to BVI
statistics,  after the passage of the Amendment, not a single member  of the
congregation of neophiles agreed to the fukamization of his children.)

     Toseville, G. "Insolent Man." Birmingham, 51.

     This  monograph is a typical  example of a whole library  of books  and
brochures  devoted to  the  propaganda  of putting  an end  to technological
progress.  All these  books are  characterized  by  an  apologia  for  stuck
civilizations like the  Tagorian or the biocivilization of  Leonida. Earth's
technological progress is declared to be done with. Man's expansion into the
cosmos is depicted  as a kind of  social  extravagance,  which v ill bring a
cruel disillusionment. Rational  Man  turns  into Insolent  Man, who in  his
striving for quantity of traditional and emotional  information loses in its
quality.  (The  assumption  is  that  information on  the psychocosmos is of
immeasurably higher  quality than information about the external  cosmos  in
the broadest  meaning of the word.) Fukamization does humanity a bad service
precisely  because it  furthers  the  transformation  of  Rational  Man into
Insolent Man, broadening and in fact stimulating his expansionist potential.
He proposes a first stage of refusing the unbreaking of the hypothalamus.

     Oxovu, K "Movement Along a Vertical." Calcutta, 61.

     K. Oxovu is the pseudonym for a scientist  or a group of scientists who
formulated and disseminated the unknown  idea of so-called vertical progress
of humanity. I was  unable  to learn the  real  name of the  author.  I have
reason to suspect that K. Oxovu is either G. Komov, Chairman of COMCON-1, or
someone  from the Academy  of  Social Prognosis who  shares  his views.  The
present edition is  the first  monograph of  the  "verticalists." The  sixth
chapter is devoted to a detailed examination of all aspects  of fukamization
-- biological, social, and ethical -- from the point of view of the precepts
of  vertical  progress. The basic danger of fukamization  is seen to be  the
possibility  of  uncontrolled  influence of genetics.  To support this idea,
they  give data (for the first time, as far as I can  determine) on the many
incidents of passing along to children the qualities  of fukamization. There
are over one hundred such cases where the mechanism of the fetus while still
in the  mother's  womb  began developing  antibodies,  characteristic of the
action  of  UNBLAF  serum, and  over two hundred cases of  newborns with  an
unbraked hypothalamus.  Moreover,  over  thirty  cases have been reported of
passing these qualities on to the third generation. They  stress  that while
these phenomena  pose no threat to the overwhelming majority of people, they
are an eloquent illustration of the fact that fukamization has  not  been as
thoroughly studied as its adepts claim.

     I  must say that  the  material has  been selected  with  extraordinary
thoroughness and presented very effectively. For  instance: several striking
paragraphs  are  devoted  to so-called  G-allergics,  for  whom  an unbraked
hypothalamus is contradicted G-allergy is an extremely rare condition of the
organism, easily detected in the  fetus while  still in utero and  posing no
danger to anyone; an infant like that simply does not  have the second stage
of fukamization.  However,  if an  unbraked hypothalamus is passed  on to  a
G-allergic by heredity,  medicine will be powerless, and  an  incurably sick
person will be born. K. Oxovu managed to find one such case, and he does not
hold back on color in his description.

     The  author  paints on even  more apocalyptic  picture in depicting the
world of the future, in which humanity, under the influence of fukamization,
is split into two  genotypes. This monograph  has been reprinted many rimes,
and played a not unimportant role in the discussion of the Amendment.  It is
interesting to  note that the last edition  of this  book (Los Angeles,  99)
does not contain a single word about fukamization; we are to understand that
the author  is completely satisfied with the amendment, and the fate of 99.9
percent  of  the  population, who  continue  to  subject their  children  to
fukamization, does not worry him.

     Note: In concluding  this  section, I feel it necessary  to  stress the
fact  that  the selection and annotation  of  the materials was  done on the
principle of  their lack  of triviality from  my  personal point of  view. I
apologize   in   advance  if   the  low  level   of  my   erudition   causes
dissatisfaction.

     2. Apparently, the  first  refusal to be fukamized, which began a whole
epidemic of refusals,  was recorded in the maternity home of the village  of
K'Sava (Equatorial Africa). On 17/4/81, all three women who entered the home
that day, independently of one another and in differing forms, categorically
forbid  the  personnel to  perform the procedure of  fukamization.  Mother 1
(first  child) motivated  her  refusal on  her  husband's  wishes,  and  the
slightest attempts to change  her mind made  her go into hysterics. Mother 2
(first  child)  did not  even  try to give a motivation for her refusal.  "I
don't want to, and that's that!"  she kept repeating. Mother 3 (third child,
first  protest) was very reasonable and calm, and explained her  refusal  by
not  wanting  to  decide her  child's fate without his knowledge and consent
"When he grows up, he'll decide," she announced.

     (I  cite  the  motivations because  they are  very typical. With slight
variations,  the  "refuser"  used  them  in  99  percent of  the  cases. The
literature uses three classifications. Refusal type A: totally rational, but
in principle  unverifiable,  motivation;  25 percent.  Refusal type B:  pure
phobia, hysterical, irrational behavior; 60 percent. Refusal type C: ethical
considerations;  10  percent. Refusal  type R (rate):  references  extremely
varied  in  form  and  content: religious circumstances, adherence to exotic
philosophical systems, and so on; e. 5 percent).

     On April 18, in the same hospital, there were two  more  refusals,  and
new refuses were  registered in maternity homes in the region. By the end of
the month, refusals numbered in the hundreds, registered  in  all regions of
the globe, and on May 5  came  the first  report  of a refuse outside  Earth
(Mars, the Big Syrt). The epidemic of refusals, waxing and waning, continued
right up to the year 85, so that by the time the Amendment was passed, there
were almost fifty-thousand refusers (0.1 percent of all mothers).

     The  laws of  epidemics have been  studied phenomenologically very well
and with a high degree of  veracity. Yet, they  did nor result in convincing
explanations.

     For instance, it was noted that the epidemic had two geographic centers
of  distribution:  one  in  equatorial  Africa,  the  other In  northeastern
Siberia. An analogy with the probable distribution centers of humanity comes
to mind, but this analogy, of course, explains nothing.

     A second  example. The refusals were always individual; however, within
each maternity home, each refusal seemed to continue the previous one. Hence
the term "chain  of refusals of  X number  of links." The number X could  be
quite large: in the maternity home in the Howekai Gyneclinic,  the "chain of
refusals"  began on 11/09/83 and extended until  21/09/83,  pulling  all the
mothers who came into the home, so that the  length of the "chain" contained
nineteen mothers.

     In  some  hospitals, the epidemics  of  refusals  arose and  died  down
several times.  For instance, the epidemic was  repeated twelve times in the
Berne Palace of the Child.

     For  all this, the overwhelming majority  of maternity homes  on  earth
never heard about the epidemics of refusals. Just  as most  extraterrestrial
settlements  did not  hear of  the refusals.  However,  in places where  the
epidemics broke out (Big Syrt, Saula base, Resort), they developed according
to the laws typical for Earth.

     3. A large body of literature is devoted to the causes of fukamiphobia.
I familiarized myself with the most solid works in the field, recommended to
me by Professor Derouide of the Lhasa Psychology Center. I am insufficiently
prepared to make a competent  summary of these works, but I have formed  the
opinion  that  there  is  no  generally  accepted  theory  of  fukamiphobia.
Therefore,  I  will  limit  myself  here to  a  verbatim  fragment  from  my
conversation with Professor Derouide.

     QUESTION: Do you think it possible for the phobia to arise in a healthy
and happy person?

     ANSWER: Strictly speaking, that is impossible.  In a  healthy person, a
phobia always arises as a consequence of excessive physical or psychological
overload. You  could hardly call such a person happy.  But often, especially
in our turbulent  times, a person does  not always realize that he  has been
overstrained...  Subjectively,  he might  consider  himself  happy and  even
satisfied, and  then  the  appearance of  a phobia in him, from the point of
view of a dilettante, may seem an inexplicable phenomenon...

     QUESTION: And does this apply to fukamiphobia?

     ANSWER: You know,  even today, from a certain point of view,  pregnancy
remains a mystery...  It is enough to  say that  we only recently understood
that the mind of a pregnant woman is the psyche of the binary, the result of
a devilishly  complicated interaction of  the fully formed psyche of a grown
person  and  the  antenatal  psyche  of  the  fetus,  the laws of  which are
practically unknown to us... And if you add to  this the inevitable physical
stress, the inevitable neurotic behavior... All that,  in general, creates a
rich soil for phobias. However, it would  be rash to draw  a conclusion from
this,  to think  that this sort  of discussion  has  in  any  way  explained
anything at all in this amazing business. Very rash... and not serious.

     QUESTION: Are their any differences between the "refusers" and ordinary
mothers? Physiological, psychological... Have there been studies?

     ANSWER:  Many. But nothing concrete has been  established. I personally
always  felt, and still  do, that fukamiphobia is a universal phobia,  like,
for instance, a phobia for zero-transportation. But zero-T-phobia is  a very
wide-spread phenomenon. Almost every human being experiences fear before his
first zero-T-transfer, no matter what sex or  profession, and then that fear
disappears  without  a  trace...  while  fukamiphobia  is, luckily,  a  rare
manifestation.  I  say  luckily because we have not  learned  how  to  treat
fukamiphobia.

     QUESTION: Have I understood you correctly, professor, that there is not
a single concrete cause known for fukamiphobia?

     ANSWER: Not verifiably, no. But there have been many theories, dozens.

     QUESTION: For instance?

     ANSWER: For instance --  propaganda  by opponents of  fukamization.  An
impressionable personality,  especially  in  the state of  pregnancy,  could
easily  be  influenced  by  such  propaganda. Or, say,  hypertrophy  of  the
maternal instinct,  the  instinctive  need  co  protect  her child  from any
external actions, even beneficial ones... Are  you planning to argue? Don't.
I agree with you completely. All these hypotheses explain only a very narrow
circle of facts, at best. No one could explain the phenomenon of the  "chain
of refusals," nor the geographic  peculiarities of the  phenomenon... And no
one at all understands why it all began in the spring of 81, and not only on
Earth but also very far from earth...

     QUESTION: And why did it end in 85? Can that be explained?

     ANSWER: Just imagine -- it can. Imagine  that the fact of the Amendment
passing could play a decisive role in ending the epidemic. Naturally,  there
is still much that is unclear here, but just details.

     QUESTION: What do you think --  could the epidemic have  broken  out as
the result of some careless experiments?

     ANSWER: Theoretically, that  is possible. But in  our time  we  checked
that hypothesis  out. There were no  experiments being carried  out on earth
that  could   have  caused  mass  phobias.  Besides,  do  not  forget,  that
fukamiphobia broke out beyond Earth at the same time...

     QUESTION: What sort of experiments could have caused phobias?

     ANSWER: Probably I did not make myself clear. I could name  a series of
technical methods with  which  I could create some phobia in  you, a healthy
man. Note that I said "some" phobia. For instance, if I irradiate you with a
certain regimen of neutrino  concentrates, you will  develop  a  phobia. But
what phobia will it be? Fear of heights? Fear of emptiness? Fear  of fear? I
can't  predict.  There  can  certainly be no  talk of  eliciting a  specific
phobia, like  fukamiphobia, the  fear of fukamization...  Unless  it were in
conjunction  with  hypnosis.  But  how  can you realize that  combination in
practice?.. No, that's not a serious consideration.

     4.  For  all  its  geographical (and  cosmographical) distribution, the
incidence  of  fukamiphobia  remained  a  very rare  occurrence  in  medical
practice, and on its own it would hardly have led to any changes in the law.
However, the epidemic  of  fukamiphobia  very  quickly turned from a medical
problem to an event of a social character.

     August   81.   The  first   registered   protest   of   fathers,  still
individualized  (complaints  to  local  and  regional  medical  authorities,
separate appeals to local officials).

     October  81.  The first  collective  petition  of  124 fathers  and two
obstetricians to the  Commission for the  Protection  of Mothers and Infants
under the World Council.

     December  81.  At  the  XVII  World  Congress  of  the  Association  of
Obstetricians:   physicians   and  psychologists  first  speak  out  against
mandatory fukamization.

     January  82.  An  initiative group,  VEPI (named  after  the  founder's
initials),  is   formed,  uniting   doctors,   psychologists,  sociologists,
philosophers,  and lawyers. It was VEPI that started and  brought to victory
the struggle to pass the Amendment.

     February 82. The  first protest rally  by  opponents of fukamization in
front of the World Council building.

     June 82. The formal  formation of the  opposition to the law within the
Commission on Protection of Motherhood and Infancy.

     Further chronology of events is not interesting, from my point of view.
The time  (three and a half years) necessary for the  World Council to study
the  Amendment from  all sides and  then  pass  it  is sufficiently typical.
However, what does not seem typical to me  is the  relationship between  the
number  of  mass  proponents  of  the  Amendment  and  the  numbers  of  the
professional corps.  Usually,  the number of mass proponents of a new law is
at a minimum ten million people,  while the professional corps, qualified to
represent  their  interests (lawyers, sociologists,  specialists in the give
issue) is only several dozen people. In our case, the mass proponents of the
Amendment   (the   "refusers,"   their  husbands  and  relatives,   friends,
sympathizers,  and  people  who  joined  the movement our.  of  religious or
philosophical  considerations)  were never  truly a mass  movement The total
number of participants in the movement never exceeded half a million. As for
the  professional corps, the VEPI group alone al the time of passage had 536
specialists.

     5.  After  the Amendment  was passed,  the  refusals did not stop, even
though their number diminished noticeably. Most importantly, during the year
85, the character of the epidemic changed. Actually, the phenomenon could no
longer be  called an  epidemic.  Whatever laws it had had  ("the  chains  of
refusals," geographical  concentration)  disappeared. Now, the refusals were
completely  random,  individual;  and  motivations  A and  B  were no longer
encountered. Now there were references to the Amendment. Apparently, that is
why doctors today  do not see refusals to be fukamized  as manifestations of
fukamiphobia.   Amazingly,   many   women  who  had  categorically   refused
fukamization and had played an active role in the campaign for the Amendment
now have lost  interest  completely in  the question  and don't even use the
right  granted by  the  Amendment  when they  give birth.  Of the women  who
refused fukamization  during  the years 81-85,  only  12 percent  refused  a
second time. A third referral is  very rare: only a few cases  were recorded
in fifteen years.

     6. I feel I must stress two circumstances.
     a). The almost total disappearance of fukamiphobia after the  Amendment
was  passed is usually explained by well-known psychosocial  factors. Modern
man accepts only those limitations and requirements that stem from moral and
ethical  orders of society.  Any limitation  or requirement  based  on other
considerations is  met with (unconscious) hostility and (instinctive)  inner
protest.   And   naturally,  once   they  achieved  freedom  of  choice   in
fukamization, people lost the basis for hostility and became  neutral toward
fukamization, as toward any other medical procedure.

     Taking  this  consideration  into account,  I stress, nevertheless, the
possibility of another interpretation -- one that  is of interest within the
framework  of theme 009. To  wit: the story related  above of the appearance
and disappearance of fukamiphobia can be easily explained as the result of a
concentrated, well-planned action of a certain rational will.

     b). The  epidemic of  fukamiphobia corresponds  well  in  time with the
appearance of the Penguin Syndrome. (See my report No. 011/99.)

     Sapieti sat,

     T. Glumov

     [End of Document 4.]

     Now I can  maintain with total  assurance that it  was  this report  of
Glumov's that forced the  shift in  my consciousness that  led me finally to
the Big Revelation. And, funny as it may seem now, that shift began with the
uncontrollable irritation brought on by Toivo's crude and unambivalent hints
about  the  alleged  role  of the  "verticalists"  in  the  history  of  the
Amendment.  In the original of the report, that  paragraph  is covered  with
thick marks in  my hand;  I remember quite  well that I was planning to call
Toivo on the carpet for  his overactive imagination.  But then  I  was given
information on the Wizard's visit  to the Institute of Eccentrics, I finally
got the point, and I had no time for calling people on the carpet.

     I was in a cruel crisis, because I had no one to talk to. First of all,
I had no propositions. And secondly, I did not know with whom it was safe to
talk  now, and with  whom it  wasn't. Much later, I  asked my  group if they
found  anything strange about my behavior in those horrible (for me) days of
April 99. Sandra was engrossed  in  the Rip Van Winkle theme and was  bowled
over  himself  and  noticed nothing. Grisha Serosovin maintained that I  was
particularly silent then and replied  to all initiatives on  his part with a
mysterious smile. And Kikin is Kikin:  even then, "everything  was clear" to
him. Toivo Glumov must  have  been driven crazy by my behavior  then. And he
was.  However, I  really  did not  know  what to  do! One by  one I  sent my
coworkers to the Institute of Eccentrics  and waited  each time to see  what
would happen, and nothing  would happen, and I would send the  next one  and
wait some more.

     At that time, Gorbovsky died at his place in Kraslava.

     At that time, Athos-Sidorov was preparing to go back into the hospital,
and there was no certainty that he would return.

     At that time, Danya Logovenko invited himself over for a cup of tea for
the  first  time  in many  years and spent the  whole  evening  reminiscing,
chatting nonsense.

     At the time, I decided nothing.

     On the night  of May  5, the emergency service got  me out  of bed.  In
Little Pesha  (on the Pesha  River, which falls into the  Czech inlet of the
Barents  Sea),  some  sort of monsters had appeared, creating  panic in  the
villagers. The emergency squad was sent out to examine the site.

     According to the rules, I had to send one of my inspectors to the site.
I sent Toivo.

     Unfortunately,  Inspector  Glumov's  report on  the events  and on  his
actions  in Little Pesha has  apparently been lost. In any case, I  have not
been  able  to  discover it...  However, I  would  like  to show  how  Toivo
performed that study in as detailed a manner  as  possible, and  therefore I
will have  to  resort to a reconstruction of the events, basing it on my own
memory and on conversations with participants in that event.

     It is not hard  to see  that the reconstruction  being offered (and all
the  ones  that  follow) contains,  besides absolutely  reliable facts, some
descriptions, metaphors, epithets, dialogues, and other elements of fiction.
But I  need for  the  reader to see the  living Toivo before  him, the way I
remember him. Documents alone are not enough. If one cares, however, one can
examine my reconstructions as a special kind of deposition.

     LITTLE PESHA. 6 MAY 99. EARLY MORNING

     From above, Little Pesha looked  just the way that  village should look
at  'three in the  morning. Sleepy.  Peaceful.  Empty. A dozen  multicolored
roofs  in a  semicircle,  a grass-covered square, several  gliders  standing
around,  the yellow club pavilion by the  cliff  over  the  river. The river
seemed  motionless,  very  cold, and uninviting;  clumps of whitish fog hung
over the reeds on the other side.

     On the club porch, his head thrown back, a man stood watching a glider.
His face seemed familiar to Toivo, and there was nothing amazing about that:
Toivo knew many emergency-squad members -- probably every other one.

     He  landed next to the porch  and jumped out onto  the  damp grass. The
morning here  was cold. The emergency-squad  man was wearing a  huge,  comfy
jacket  with numerous special  packets, with nests for  all their cylinders,
regulators, extinguishers, igniters, and other objects for perfect emergency
work.

     "Hello," said Toivo. "Basil, isn't it'!"

     "Hello, Glumov,"  the  man responded,  offering his  hand. "Right. It's
Basil. What took you so long?"

     Toivo explained that zero-T  wasn't working  here in Little  Pesha  far
some reason, that  he  was let out at Lower Pesha and had to  take a  glider
there and fly over forty minutes above the river.

     "I understand,"  Basil said, and  looked  back at the pavilion. "That's
what  I  thought.  You  see, in  their panic  they  mutilated  their  zero-T
cabin..."

     "You mean, no one has come back yet?"

     "No one."

     "And nothing else has happened?"

     "Nothing.  Our people finished  the  examination  ninety  minutes  ago,
didn't find anything  substantial,  and went home to do  the lab  work. They
left me to keep everyone  out, and I've spent the time  repairing the zero-T
cabin."

     "Have you fixed it?"

     "More yes than no."

     The  cottages of Little Pesha were ancient,  built in the last century,
utilitarian architecture,  in toxically bright colors -- from old age.  Each
cottage was surrounded by impenetrable currant bushes, lilacs, strawberries.
And  right beyond the semicircle of houses was the forest, the yellow trunks
of gigantic  airs, the crown gray-green in the  fog, and above  them, rather
high up, the crimson disk of the sun in the northeast...

     "What lab work?" Toivo asked.

     "Well, there are a lot of clues... That disgusting stuff crawled out of
that  cottage, I  guess,  and  spread  in  all  directions..."  Basil  began
pointing.  "On the bushes, the  grass, and on some  of the verandas  there's
dried slime, scales, clumps at something..."

     "What did you see yourself?"

     "Nothing. When we got here, it was like it is now, except there was fog
on the river."

     'Then there are no witnesses?"

     "At first, we thought everyone had run off.  Then  we  learned  that in
that house there, the end  one on the bank,  there is a very  elderly  woman
doing one, thank you, who never thought about running away..."

     "Why not?" Toivo asked.

     "No  idea!" Basil replied,  raising his eyebrows and spreading  out his
hands. "Can  you imagine,  total panic, everyone scattering, the door pulled
off the hinges of the zero-cabin, and she doesn't give a  damn... We fly in,
start up our whole battle campaign,  sabers unsheathed, bayonets plugged in,
and she comes out on her porch and demands severely that we  be more  quiet,
because we're keeping her up with our noise!"

     "Had there been panic?" Toivo asked.

     "And how!" Basil  said,  palm outstretched. "There were eighteen people
here when it all began. Nine ran  off on their gliders. Five escaped through
the zero-cabin. And  three  ran off into  the woods,  and got lost;  we were
lucky  to  find them. So don't have any doubts about it, there  was panic...
There was panic, and there were monsters, and they left traces. Now, why the
old  lady didn't  get scared, that we  don't know. She's  strange, that  old
lady. I heard her tell  the commander:  'You got here too  late,  boys.  You
can't help them now. They're all dead.' "

     Toivo asked: "What did she have in mind?"

     "I don't know," Basil said grumpily. "I told you, she's strange."

     Toivo looked at the toxic pink cottage that contained the old lady. The
garden was well tended. There was a glider parked next to the cottage.

     "I don't recommend disturbing her," Basil said. "Let her wake up on her
own, and then you can talk --"

     At  that moment, Toivo felt something behind  him and turned sharply. A
pale face with wide-open, frightened eyes peered out of the club's door. The
stranger was silent for a few seconds; then his bloodless lips moved, and he
said in a hoarse voice:

     "A silly story, isn't it?"

     "Wait, wait, wait!"  Basil said kindly,  moving toward the man with his
hands  upturned  and open.  "Please  forgive  me; you can't  come  in  here.
Emergency squad."

     The stranger nevertheless stepped across the threshold and stopped.

     "I'm not trying," he  said, and coughed. "But circumstances... Tell me,
did Grigory and Elya come back yet?"

     He  looked unusual enough. He was wearing a  heavy coat with fur inside
and outside, and beneath its  tails you could see his richly embroidered fur
boots. The  coat  was unbuttoned at  the chest, revealing a  colorful summer
shirt of micromesh, which were popular in those days with inhabitants of the
steppe zone. He  looked  forty or forty-five;  his face was simple and nice,
but too pale, either out of fear or embarrassment.

     "No, no," Basil replied, coming up  close to him. "No one's come  back.
We're examining the area, and we're not letting anyone in..."

     "Wait, Basil," Toivo said.  "Who are  Grigory and  Elya?"  he asked the
stranger.

     "I think I'm in the wrong place again," the stranger said with despair,
and looked over  his  shoulder into  the depths  of the pavilion  where  the
zero-T-cabin glowed.  "Excuse me,  is  this ... hm...  Oh,  Lord,  I  forgot
again... Little Pesha? Or isn't it?"

     "It's Little Pesha," Toivo said.

     "Then  you  must  know  ...  Grigory  Alexandrovich  Yarygin...   As  I
understand it, he lives  here every summer." Pointing, he suddenly cried out
happily; 'There it is, that cottage! That's my raincoat on the veranda!"

     Everything was cleared up. The  stranger  was  a  witness. His name was
Anatoly Sergeyevich Krylenko, and he was a zoo technician;  he  did work  in
the  steppe  zone --  in  the Azgir  agrocomplex. Yesterday, at  the  annual
exhibition of innovations in  Arkhangelsk, he  bumped completely by accident
into his old school friend, Grigory Yarygin, whom he hadn't seen in some ten
years. Naturally, Yarygin dragged him off to his place, here, in this... ah,
forgot it  again... oh,  yes,, to Little Pesha. They spent a  lovely evening
yesterday, the three of them, Yarygin, his wife Elya, and Krylenko, went out
in the boat, walked in  the woods, and got back around ten,  to that cottage
over there,  had dinner,  and settled down  with tea on the  veranda. It was
still very light, children's voices carried from the river, and it was warm.
The  arctic  strawberries  smelled  terrific.  And then,  suddenly,  Anatoly
Sergeyevich Krylenko saw eyes...

     In  this most important  part  of his  story,  Anatoly Sergeyevich grew
incomprehensible, to put  it  mildly. He  seemed  to be  trying to recall  a
horrible, complicated dream.

     The  eyes  were staring from the garden ... they were moving closer and
stayed in the garden... Two huge, nauseating eyes... Something kept dripping
on them... And  on the left,  to the side,  was  a third... or three?... And
something kept  falling, falling, Ailing through the railing of the  veranda
and  was  creeping up the steps...  And it  was  impossible to move. Grigory
disappeared  somewhere; he  couldn't see Grigory. Elya was somewhere nearby,
but he couldn't see her either. He could hear her screaming  hysterically...
or laughing... Then the  door flew open.  The room was  about  waist-deep in
writhing  jellied  carcasses,  and  the eyes of  the carcasses were outside,
behind the bushes...

     Anatoly Sergeyevich realized that the scariest part was just beginning.
He  pulled  his feet out of the sandals that were stuck to the floor, jumped
over  the table, fled  into the woods,  and  ran around the house... No,  he
didn't run  around the house, he  had jumped into  the woods but ended up in
the square... He ran wherever his feet  took him, and  suddenly saw the club
pavilion,  and through the open door he saw the violet flash of zero-T,  and
he realized that he was saved. He burst into the cabin like a bomb and began
pushing buttons and keys at random, until the machine worked...

     The tragedy ended there, and  the  comedy  began. The  zero-transporter
threw Anatoly Sergeyevich out in the settlement  of  Roosevelt on the Island
of  Peter the Great.  That's in the Bellingshausen Sea, 49 below, wind speed
18 meters per second, and the settlement was almost empty, winter-like.

     Of  course, the automatic machinery was on  in the  polar-bear club; it
was warm and cozy, and a  brilliant rainbow of bottles glimmered in the bar,
intended to light up the darkness of the polar nights.  Anatoly Sergeyevich,
in his  light shirt and shorts, still wet  from  the tea and the horror, got
the rest he needed and came to  his senses.  And when he came to his senses,
the first  thing  he felt, as was to  be  expected, was unbearable shame. He
realized that he had fled in panic  like the lowliest coward... He had  read
about such cowards in historical novels. He remembered that he had abandoned
Elya and at least one  other woman, whom he had  noticed in  passing  in the
neighboring  cottage.  He remembered the children's voices on the  river and
realized  that  he  had abandoned those children, too.  A  desperate urge to
action overwhelmed him. But here's the amazing part:  the urge did not arise
immediately, and secondly, once it did arise, he remained for a  rather long
time in unbearable horror at the thought of returning there, to the veranda,
to the field of vision of those nightmarish dripping eyes, to  the revolting
jellied carcasses...

     A noisy group of  glaciologists burst into  the club  and found Anatoly
Sergeyevich gloomily wringing his hands: he still  had not made  up his mind
to  do  anything.  The glaciologists heard  him  our in  total  sympathy and
immediately and enthusiastically  decided to return to the horrible  veranda
with him. But then they discovered that Anatoly Sergeyevich not only did not
know the zero-index of the village but had forgotten its name. He could tell
them only that it was  not far from the Barents Sea, on the banks of a small
river, in  the  zone of arctic firs. Then the  glaciologists dressed Anatoly
Sergeyevich in clothes  more suitable  to the local climate and, through the
howling blizzard  and  monstrous  snowdrifts,  led  him  to  the  settlement
headquarters   accompanied  by   gigantic   beast-like   hounds...   And  at
headquarters, at  the BVI terminal, one of the glaciologists  had  the  very
sobering thought that  this was no joke. The monsters must have escaped from
some  bestiary,  or  --  horrible thought!  --  from some  lab  constructing
biomechanisms. In any case, amateur activity was uncalled for, boys; we have
to notify the emergency squad.

     And they  called Central Emergency. At Central  Emergency, they thanked
them  and said they would  take  the  information into  account. A half-hour
later the duty officer called headquarters and told them that their call was
confirmed and  asked to speak with  Anatoly Sergeyevich. Anatoly Sergeyevich
described in the most general terms what had happened to him and how he came
to be on  the shores of the  Antarctic. The duty  officer calmed him down by
telling him  there had been no casualties,  that the Yarygins were alive and
well and that he would be able to return to Little Pesha in the morning, and
that now he should take a tranquilizer and lie down.

     And Anatoly  Sergeyevich took  a  tranquilizer  and lay down  right  at
headquarters. But he  had not slept an hour before he saw  the dripping eyes
over the veranda railing and heard Elya's hysterical  laughter, and he awoke
full of unbearable shame.

     "No," Anatoly Sergeyevich said, "they did  not stop me. They understood
how I felt... I never thought something like that would happen to me. I'm no
Pathfinder or Progressor, of course... but I've had acute situations  in  my
life, and I've always  behaved decently...  I don't understand what happened
to me. I try to explain it to myself, and nothing  happens... It was like an
invasion..." He started looking around. "I'm talking to you now, but I'm ice
inside... Maybe we were all poisoned by something here?"

     Toivo asked questions,  Anatoly Sergeyevich  answered, and Toivo nodded
importantly and showed in every way possible how essential everything he was
hearing  was  for  the  investigation.  And  gradually  Anatoly  Sergeyevich
relaxed, cheered up, and they stepped onto the veranda as colleagues.

     The  veranda  was  a shambles. The table was  at an angle,  one of  the
chairs was turned  over, the sugar bowl had rolled into a corner, leaving  a
trail of sugar crystals. Toivo felt the kettle; it was still hot. He glanced
over  at  Anatoly Sergeyevich.  He  was  pale again, and  his  muscles  were
twitching. He  was  looking at a pair of sandals huddling like orphans under
the far  chair. Apparently,  they were his. The  straps were buckled, and it
seemed impossible for  Anatoly Sergeyevich to  have pulled his feet out. But
Toivo did not see any spills on them, under them, or anywhere near them.

     "I see they don't recognize domestic  robots here," Toivo said to bring
Anatoly  Sergeyevich  back  from the world  of the horror  to  the  world of
everyday life.

     "Yes,"  he muttered. "That is ... Who does nowadays?.. There... see, my
sandals..."

     "I see," Toivo said matter-of-factly. "Were all the windows opened like
this? You don't think that it was a hallucination?"

     Anatoly  Sergeyevich  shuddered  and  looked  in the  direction of  the
Yarygin cottage.

     'I don't know..." he said. "No, l can't say."

     "All right, let's go look," Toivo suggested.

     "You and I?" Basil asked.

     "Not necessary," Toivo said. "I'll be going  back and forth here a long
time. You hold the fort."

     "Do I take prisoners?" Basil asked formally.

     "That is  necessary,"  Toivo  said "I  need prisoners.  Anyone  who saw
anything with his own eyes."

     He  and  Anatoly  Sergeyevich  moved  on  across  the  square.  Anatoly
Sergeyevich looked determined and businesslike, but the closer he got to the
house, the more tense his face looked and the more his tendons showed on his
neck. He  was biting his lip as if fighting pain.  Toivo  thought it wise to
give him a break.  About fifty paces from the living fence, he stopped -- as
if to look around one more  time  -- and began asking  questions. Was  there
anyone in the cottage on the right? Oh,  it  was  dark? And on the left? The
woman... Yes,  yes, I remember,  you mentioned her... Just  one woman and no
one else? Was there a glider nearby?

     "I don't remember. That one was open. I jumped out there."

     "I see," Toivo said, and looked out into the garden.

     Yes, there were  footprints here. There  were  many footprints: crushed
and broken bushes, a destroyed  flower bed, and the grass under the railings
looked as  if horses had  trampled  it. If animals had been here, then  they
were clumsy, awkward animals; and  they hadn't crept  up on  the house,  but
pushed straight  on.  From  the  square, through the bushes at an angle, and
through the open windows right inter her rooms...

     Toivo crossed the veranda and pushed the door into the house. There was
nothing  disorderly inside. Rather,  none  of  the disorder that  one  could
expect from heavy, unwieldy carcasses.

     A couch. Three armchairs. No  table in  sight -- it  must  be built in.
Only  one control panel  -- in  the arm  of the owner's armchair. There were
polycrystal service systems in the other  chairs  and in the couch.  On  the
front wall hung a Levitan landscape, an old-fashioned chromophoton copy with
a touching triangle in the bottom left-hand comer, so that, God forbid, some
expert would not be fooled into  taking it for an original. And  on the left
wall: a  pen drawing in  a handmade wooden frame,  an angry  woman's face. A
beautiful one, incidentally...

     A  more  careful  examination  revealed   footprints  on   the   floor,
apparently, one of the emergency crewmen had walked from  the living room to
the  bedroom. The foot-prints  did not return;  the man had climbed out  the
bedroom  window. So, the floor  in the living room was covered with a rather
thick layer  of very  fine brown powder. And not only  the floor.  The chair
seats. The window ledges. The couch. There was no powder on the walls.

     Toivo came back out on  the veranda. Anatoly Sergeyevich was sitting on
the  porch  steps. He had  tossed off the fur  coat, but he had forgotten to
toss off  the  fur boots, and consequently he had a rather  incongruous  air
about him. He had not even touched  his  sandals; they were  still under the
chair. There were no spills nearby, but the sills and the floor were covered
with the brown powder.

     "Well, how are you doing?" Toivo asked from the doorway.

     Anatoly Sergeyevich was startled anyway.

     "Well... I'm slowly coming to terms with it."

     "Fine.  Pick up your raincoat and go home. Or  do you want to wait  for
the Yarygins?"

     "I don't know," Anatoly Sergeyevich said indecisively.

     "As you  prefer," Toivo  said. "In any case, there's nothing  dangerous
here."

     "Have you understood anything?" Anatoly Sergeyevich asked.

     "A few things. There  really  were  monsters here,  but  they  are  not
dangerous. They can scare you, and nothing more."

     "You mean it was lake?"

     "Looks like it."

     "But why? Who?"

     "We'll find out."

     "You'll be finding out while they scare someone else."

     Anatoly  Sergeyevich  took  his raincoat  from  the railing  and  stood
around, staring at his fur boots. It seemed that he would sit down again and
start pulling them off angrily. But he probably didn't even see them.

     "You say  they  can scarce a person," he  said  through gritted  teeth,
without  looking up.  "Scare isn't so  bad! But  you know, they can  break a
man!"

     He gave Toivo a quick look and averted his eyes and went down the steps
without  looking  back, then  down along  the  trampled grass,  through  the
damaged flower bed, across the square at an angle,  bent over, clumsy in his
long polar fur boots and jaunty shepherd shirt, he walked on, increasing his
steps, to the yellow club pavilion, but  halfway there veered sharply to the
left, jumped  into the glider near the neighboring cottage, and flew up like
a candle into the pale blue sky.

     It was after four in the morning.

     This is  my first  attempt  at a reconstruction. I tried very  hard. My
work was complicated by the  fact  that I had never  been in Little Pesha in
those bygone days, but I had numerous video-recordings made by Toivo Glumov,
the emergency squad, and Fleming's crew. So I can vouch
     at  least for the topographic accuracy. I feel it is possible to  vouch
for the accuracy of the dialogue, as well.

     Besides  everything else,  I  would  like to  demonstrate here  how the
typical  beginning of the typical  investigation looked. Incident. Emergency
squad. Arrival of the inspector from the Unexplained Event Department. First
impression (most often very right):  someone's hooliganism or a stupid joke.
And  growing disillusionment: not it again,  once again zero, why not  shrug
this off and just go  home to bed. However, that's not in my reconstruction.
I suggest you add that, reading between the lines.

     Now a few words about Fleming.

     This name will appear more than once in  my memoir,  but I want to warn
you  that this man had nothing to do with the Big Revelation. In those days,
the  name Alexander Jonathan Fleming was the  talk of COMCON-2. He  was  the
major specialist in  the construction of artificial organisms. At  his base,
the  Sydney Institute, and in the branches  of  the Institute, he cooked  up
with indescribable  industriousness and daring a great number of the wildest
creatures,  for which  Mother Nature  had  not had  enough  imagination  and
know-how. In  their eagerness, his  coworkers  were  instantly violating the
existing laws  and limitations of the World Council in  the area of frontier
experimentation. For  all  our purely  human delight and awe  for  Fleming's
genius, we could not stand him for his  mediocrity, lack of  conscience, and
pushiness, amazingly coexisting  with  his  ability to get out  of  trouble.
Every schoolboy knows now what Fleming's biocomplexes are or, say, Fleming's
living wells. In those days, he was rather more notorious than famous.

     It is important  for my narrative that one of the far-flung branches of
Fleming's  Sydney Institute was located in the  mouth of the Pesha River, in
the  scientific  community  lower  Pesha,  just forty kilometers from Little
Pesha.  Having learned about that, my Toivo naturally  grew wary and said to
himself, "Aha, so that's whose work this is!"

     Oh, by the way, the crawcrabs mentioned below are one of Fleming's most
useful creations, which first appeared when he was still a young worker in a
ash farm on Lake O'Nega. Crawcrabs turned out to be creatures astonishing in
their delicate  taste,  but for some reason they did well  only in the small
streams that fed the Pesha.

     LITTLE PESHA. 6 MAY 99 6 AM

     On 5 May, around 11 PM, in the resort village of Little Pesha (thirteen
cottages, eighteen residents),  panic  rose. The cause of  the panic was the
appearance of a certain (unknown) number of  quasibiological creatures of an
extremely  repulsive and even frightening appearance. The creatures moved on
the village from cottage number 7 in nine clearly  visible directions. These
directions can be seen from the trampled grass, damaged bushes, by stains of
dried  slime on  foliage,  paving  stone, on  the  outside walls  and window
ledges. All nine  routes ended inside living quarters;  to wit:  in cottages
numbers l, 4, 10 (on the verandas), 2, 3, 9, 12 (in the living room), 6, 11,
and 13 (in the bedroom). Cottages 4 and 9 apparently are uninhabited...

     As for cottage number 7, where  the invasion began, someone clearly was
living there, and  it remains only  to  determine  who that  was -- a stupid
practical joker or  an  irresponsible dolt! Did he activate the embryophores
on purpose, or did he miss the self-start? If  he  missed it, then was it by
criminal negligence or ignorance?

     Two things, however, bothered him. Toivo did not find any traces of the
embryophore cases. That's one. And two,  at first he could not find any data
on the person inhabiting cottage number 7. Or persons.

     Suddenly, indignant voices were  heard on the  square, and in a minute,
Toivo learned that the original inhabitant  had appeared in the midst of the
events himself, in person, and not alone, but with a guest.

     He turned  out  to be  a  stocky,  cast-iron-looking  man  in a  travel
jumpsuit and  with  a  canvas sack  from  which  came  strange rustling  and
creaking noises. The guest acutely reminded Toivo of good old Duremar, right
out of Aunt  Tortilla's  pond --  tall, long-haired, long-nosed,  skinny, in
vague rags covered with drying seaweed.

     It was instantly established that  the stocky, cast-iron inhabitant was
Ernst Jurgen, who worked as an orthomaster operator on Titan and who was  on
vacation on Earth... He had two months leave a year on Earth -- one month in
winter, one in  the summer -- and he always spent the  summer  here  on  the
Pesha in this  very cottage...  What monsters?  Who exactly did  you have in
mind, young man? What monsters could there  be in Little Pesha? Think  about
it.  And you call  yourself an  emergency-squad  member.  What's the matter,
don't you have anything else to do with your time?

     Duremar, on  the  contrary,  seemed  totally  earthbound. Moreover,  he
seemed local. His surname was Tolstov, and his name was Lev Nikolaevich. But
something else about  him was amazing,  too. He  worked and lived just forty
kilometers away from here, in Lower  Pesha, where for the last several years
Fleming's branch offices were flourishing.

     It also turned out that this Ernst Jurgen and his old pal, Lev Tolstov,
were passionate gourmets. They met here every  day, in Little Pesha, because
five kilometers upriver a little stream fell into the river, and it was full
of crawcrabs,  whatever  they  were. That  was  why Ernst  Jurgen spent  his
vacation in Little  Pesha, and that's why he and his friend Lev Tolstov left
early in the evening  by boat to catch crawcrabs, and that's  why he and Lev
would  be  very  grateful to the  emergency  squad  if they would leave them
alone,  since  the crawcrabs (Ernst Jurgen  shook the  heavy sack from which
emanated the  strange  sounds)  are fresh only briefly, and that  was  right
now...

     This  funny, noisy man could not understand that  events could occur on
Earth --  not on Titan, or Pandora, or Yaula, but on Earth! in Little Pesha!
-- that could elicit fear and panic. Typical example of a professional space
traveler.  He could see that the village was empty, he could see a member of
the emergency squad before  him, he could see a representative  of COMCON-2,
he did not deny their authority, and he was ready to seek an explanation for
all of it in anything as long  as he did not have to  admit  that  something
could go wrong on his own Earth...

     Then,  when  they  managed  to convince  him  that  there  had been  an
unexplained event,  he was insulted -- pouted like a child and  walked away,
dragging the  sack with the precious  crawcrabs, and sat down on the  porch,
his back to everyone, not wanting  to see anyone or hear anything, shrugging
from time to time and muttering to himself, "A vacation, they call it... You
come once a year, and this has to happen... How could it be!"

     Toivo, incidentally, was more interested in the reaction of his friend,
Lev  Nikolaevich  Tolstov, who worked  for  Fleming,  a  specialist  in  the
construction and activation into existence of artificial organisms. And this
was the  specialist's  reaction: at  first,  total incomprehension, goggling
eyes and uncertain smile,  befitting a man who thinks a joke is being played
on him, and  not a very  clever one at  that. Then: a perplexed frown, empty
gaze  that seemed  inward-directed, and thoughtful motion  of the  jaw.  And
finally:  an explosion of professional anger.  Do you  realize what you  are
saying?  Do you have  any knowledge  of  the subject?  Have you ever seen an
artificial  creature? Ah, only  in the newsreels? Well, let me tell you that
there aren't any and can't be  any artificial creatures  that are capable of
climbing into  people's  bedroom windows.  First of  all, they are slow  and
clumsy, and if they do move, it's away from people, not toward them, because
natural biofields are contradicted, even a cat's  biofield... Further,  what
do you mean, 'the  size of a cow'?. Have you tried to figure how much energy
is needed for an embryophore to develop to  that mass in even an hour? There
wouldn't  be  anything left  here, no  cows  left; it  would  look  like  an
explosion!..

     Did he think that there could  have been activated embryaphores here of
a type he did not know?

     Certainly not. Embryophores like that did not exist in nature.

     Then what happened here, in his opinion?

     Lev Tolstov did not understand what had happened here. He had  to  look
around before coming to any conclusion.

     Toivo led him to look around, then went with Basil  to the club to have
a snack.

     They had a cold meat sandwich, and Toivo tried to make some coffee. And
then: "Mmmmm!" Basil said with his mouth full.

     He swallowed mightily and, looking past Toivo, called out loudly: "Hold
it! Where are you headed, son?"

     Toivo  turned  around. There was a  boy of  twelve or so, lop-eared and
tan, wearing shorts and an open shirt. Basil's mighty cry had stopped him in
the pavilion exit.

     "Home," he said challengingly.

     "Come here, please!" Basil said.

     The boy moved closer and stopped, his hands behind his back.

     "Do you live here?" Basil asked ingratiatingly.

     "We used to live  here," the boy replied. "In  number six. Now we won't
live here anymore."

     "Who's we?" Toivo asked.

     "Me, Mama, and  Papa. Rather, we  were here on vacation and we  live in
Petrozavodsk."

     "And where are your parents?'

     "Sleeping. At home."

     "Sleeping," Toivo repeated. "What's your name?"

     "Kir."

     "Do your parents know you're here?"

     Kir hesitated, shuffled his feet, and said, "I came back  here just for
a minute. I had to get my galleyship. I worked on it for a whole month."

     "Your galley..." Toivo repeated, looking at the boy.

     The  boy's face expressed nothing but  patient boredom. It  was obvious
that only one thing concerned him: to get his galley and get home before his
parents awakened.

     "When did you leave here?"

     "Last night. Everyone was  leaving, and so  did we. And we  forgot  the
galley."

     "Why were they leaving?"

     "There was a panic. Didn't you  know? Wow,  what went on here! Mama got
scared and Papa said, 'Well, you know,  let's get out  of here and go home.'
We got in the glider and flew off... So, can I go?"

     "Wait a minute. Why was there a panic, do you think?"

     "Because  those  animals  came.  Out of  the  woods ...  or the  river.
Everyone got scared of  them for  some reason and started running around.  I
was asleep; Mama woke me."

     "You weren't afraid?"

     He jerked his shoulder.

     "Well, I was scared at first ... half asleep... Everyone was screaming,
shouting, running; you couldn't understand what was going on..."

     "And then?"

     "I told you: we got in the glider and left."

     "Did you see those animals?"

     The boy laughed.

     "I saw them, of course... One climbed right in  the window, with horns;
only the horns weren't hard, they were like a snail's... really cute..."

     "You weren't afraid?"

     "No,  I told you:  I was  scared at first. Why would I lie? Mama ran in
all white; I thought something terrible had happened... I thought, something
happened to Father..."

     "I see, I see. But the animals didn't scare you?"

     Kir said, "Why should I be afraid of them? They were kind  and funny...
they were  soft, silky like a  mongoose, but without fur. So what if they're
big? Tigers are  also big, so  I'm supposed to be afraid  of them? Elephants
are  big,  whales  are  big... dolphins are  sometimes big... These  animals
weren't any bigger than a dolphin, and they were just as gentle."

     Toivo  looked  at Basil. Basil, his  jaw hanging, was listening to  the
strange boy and holding his half-eaten sandwich.

     "And  they smell good!" Kir went on hotly.  "They  smell  of berries! I
think they feed on them... They  should  be domesticated.  Why should people
run from them?" He sighed. "Now they're gone, probably.  Go find them in the
taiga... Ha! Everybody shouted at them,  stamped their feet, and waved their
arms at them! Of course they got scared! And now go lure them back..."

     He lowered his head and gave in to sorrow thoughts. Toivo said, "I see.
However, your parents don't agree with you. Right?"

     Kir waved his hand.

     "Ah... Father's not so bad, but Mama is firm: not a single step, never,
no way! Now we're  leaving  for Resort. They don't have them there, do they?
Do they? What are they called, do you now?"

     "I don't know, Kir," Toivo said.

     "But there's not even one left here?"

     "Not one."

     "Just  what I thought," Kir  said. He sighed, and then asked,  "Can't I
take my galley?"

     Basil  finally  got hold of himself. He got  up noisily and said, "Come
on, I'll walk you. Okay?" he asked Toivo.

     "Of course."

     "Why  walk me?" Kir  asked indignantly, but Basil had  already put  his
hand on the boy's shoulder.

     "Let's go, let's go."  he said. "I've been dreaming of  seeing  a  real
galley all my life."

     "It's not real, it's a model..."

     "All  the more. All my  life I've dreamed of  seeing a model  of a real
galley..."

     They left. Toivo drank a cup of coffee and also left the pavilion.

     The sun was  noticeably  hot, and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. Blue
dragonflies flickered  over  the green  grass of  the  square.  Through  the
metallic  flickering, like a crazy daylight apparition, a majestic old woman
floated toward the  pavilion with an expression of absolute aloofness on her
narrow brown face.

     Holding, devilishly elegantly, the hem of her snowy white  dress with a
brown birdlike hand, she seemed not to  touch the ground  as  she approached
Toivo and stopped.

     Toivo   bowed  respectfully,   and  she   nodded  in   response,  quite
benevolently.

     "You may call me Albina," she said kindly in a pleasant baritone.

     Toivo hurriedly introduced himself. Her brown forehead frowned  beneath
her cap of white hair.

     "COMCON? Be  kind  enough, Toivo,  to tell me please  how you people at
COMCON explain all this?"

     "What exactly do you have in mind?"

     This question irritated her.

     "I mean  this, dear  boy," she said. "How could it happen  that in  our
day, at the end of our age, here  on Earth, living creatures that  called on
humans  for help and  pity not only did not  receive pity or help but became
the object  of badgering, hostility, and even active physical action  of the
most  barbaric kind. I do not wish to name names, but  they struck them with
rakes,  they shouted  madly at them, they even  tried to  run them over with
gliders. I would have never believed  it if I  had not seen  it  with my own
eyes.  Are  you  familiar  with  the  concept  of  savagery? Well, this  was
savagery! I am ashamed."

     She stopped  talking, never  taking the penetrating gaze  of her angry,
coal-black, and very young eyes from Toivo. She was waiting for  an  answer,
and Toivo muttered:

     "Will you permit me to bring out a chair for you?"

     "I will not,"  she said. "I  do  not  intend to sit around with  you. I
would  like to  hear your  opinion  on  what happened to  the people  in the
village.  Your professional opinion. What  are you? A sociologist?  Teacher?
Psychologist" Then please explain!  Understand that we are not talking about
sanctions. But we must understand how it could happen, how people  who  were
civilized,  well-brought-up...  I  would  even  say  marvelous  people  just
yesterday,  today  suddenly  lose  their  human  image?  Do  you  know  what
distinguishes man from the other creatures of the world?"

     "Um... reason?" Toivo suggested.

     "No, my dear! Mercy! Mer-cy!"

     "Well,  of  course," Toivo  said.  "But how does it  follow that  those
creatures needed mercy?"

     She looked at him with disgust.

     "Did you see them yourself?" she said.

     "No."

     "Then how can you judge?"

     "I'm  not  judging;" Toivo  said. "I  am trying to establish  what they
wanted..."

     "I  believe  I made it quite  clear  that those living creatures, those
poor things,  were  seeking  help  from  us!  They  were  on  the  brink  of
destruction! They  were about to  die!  They did  die, didn't you know that?
They died before my very eyes and turned to nothing, to dust, and I couldn't
do anything about it. I'm a ballerina, not a biologist or a doctor. I called
out, but who could have heard me in that  orgy,  that debauched savagery and
cruelty! And then, when help  finally did come, it was too late; no  one was
left alive. No one! And these  savages... I don't know  how to explain their
behavior... Maybe it was mass psychosis... poisoning... I was always against
using  mushrooms  as food...  Probably, when they came to their senses, they
were ashamed and ran off! Did you find them?"

     "Yes," Toivo said.

     "Did you speak with them?"

     "Yes. With some of them. Not all."

     "Then tell me, what had happened  to  them? What  are your conclusions,
even preliminary ones?"

     "You see... madam...

     "You may call me Albina."

     "Thank you. You see... the point is that as far as we can tell, most of
your neighbors perceived this incident rather differently."

     "Naturally!" Albina said haughtily. "I saw that with my own eyes!"

     "No, no, I mean to say that they were frightened. They  were frightened
to death.  They lost control in horror. They  are afraid  to come back here.
Some want to leave Earth for good, as a result. As far as I can see, you are
the only person who heard a plea for help."

     She listened imperiously, but attentively.

     "Well,"  she  said. "Apparently, they are  so ashamed they are using  a
fear as an  excuse... Don't believe them, dear  boy, don't! That's  the most
primitive, the most shameful sort of xenophobia... Like racial  prejudice. I
remember as a child I was hysterically  afraid of spiders and snakes... It's
the same thing here."

     "That's quite possible. But here's something else I would like to clear
up. They asked for help, these  creatures. They needed mercy. But how was it
expressed? As far as I know, they did not speak, they did not even moan..."

     "My  dear  man! They were sick, they  were dying! So  what if they were
dying silently? A baby  dolphin thrown onto dry  land doesn't  make  a sound
either... at least not one we can hear... But we can tell it needs help, and
we hurry to  help... Here comes a boy; you can't hear what he's  saying from
this distance, but you can tell that he is energetic, happy..."

     Kir  came  toward them from cottage number 6, and he really was clearly
energetic and happy. Basil, striding  next to him, was respectfully carrying
a big, black model of an ancient galley, and seemed to be asking appropriate
questions.   Kir  responded  by  pointing   out  sizes,  forms,  complicated
interactions. It looked as if Basil himself was a fan of ship modeling.

     "But wait," Albina said, taking a closer look. "That's Kir!"

     "Yes," Toivo said. "He came back for his model."

     "Kir  is  a  kind  boy,"  Albina  announced.  "But  his  father behaved
abominably... Hello, Kir!"

     Engrossed, Kir only noticed her now. He stopped, and meekly said, "Good
morning..." The animation disappeared from his face, as it did from Basil's.

     "How is your mother feeling?" Albina inquired.

     "Thank you. She's sleeping."

     "And your father? Where is your father, Kir? Is he here somewhere?"

     Kit silently shook his head and looked grim.

     "Did  you remain here  the  whole time?" Albina exclaimed  delightedly,
giving Toivo a triumphant look.

     "He came back for his model," Toivo reminded her.

     "That doesn't matter. You weren't afraid to come back, were you, Kir?"

     "Why be afraid of them, Grandma Albina?" Kir grumbled, trying to  sidle
around her.

     "I don't know, I don't know," Albina  said peevishly. "But your father,
for instance..."

     "Father wasn't the least bit frightened. Rather, he was afraid, but for
Mama and for  me. It's just in  all  that excitement he  didn't see how kind
they were..."

     "Not kind, miserable!" Albina corrected him.

     "They   weren't  miserable,  Grandma  Albina!"  Kir  said  indignantly,
spreading  his arms  like  an  untrained  tragedian. "They were  merry; they
wanted to play! They kept flipping around!"

     Grandma Albina smiled condescendingly.

     I   can't  help   stressing   a  circumstance   that   very  accurately
characterizes  Toivo  Glumov  as  a  worker.  If  there  had  been  a  green
probationer in his place, he would have decided  that  Duremar was trying to
confuse things and that  the picture in general was perfectly clear: Fleming
created a new type of embryophore, his monsters had escaped, he could go off
to sleep, and report in the morning.

     An  experienced  worker -- say, Sandro Mtbevari  -- would not have  had
coffee with  Basil; embryophores of a new  type were no joke.  He would have
immediately  sent out twenty-five queries to  every possible  place, and  he
would have rushed  down to Lower Pesha to grab the Fleming hooligans by  the
throat before they had a chance to come up with an alibi.

     Toivo  Glumov did not budge  from  the  spot. Why not? He  had  smelled
sulfur. Not even a  smell, just a whiff.  An unusual  embryophore!  Yes,  of
course,  that's  serious.  But that's not the smell  of  sulfur.  Hysterical
panic? Closer, much warmer. But most important -- the  strange old lady from
cottage number 1. There! Panic, hysteria,  escape, emergency squads, and she
asks them to  keep down the  noise. Now that did  not fall under traditional
explanations. Toivo didn't even try to explain it.  He simply waited for her
to wake up to ask her a few questions. He waited, and he was rewarded. "If I
hadn't thought of having a  bite with Basil," he  later  told me, "if I  had
rushed off to report to  you right after my interview  with that  Tolstov, I
would have remained  with the  impression that  nothing mysterious had taken
place in  Little Pesha, nothing except wild  panic caused  by an invasion of
strange  animals. But  along  came the boy  Kir and Grandma Albina, and they
brought an essential dissonance to the orderly but primitive scheme..."

     'Thought of having a bite" was the way he put it. Probably so as not to
waste time trying to put  into words the vague and troubling sensations that
had caused him to stay around.

     LITTLE PESHA. THE SAME DAY. 8 AM.

     Kir managed to stuff himself into the zero-cabin with the galley in his
arms and vanished off to his  Petrozavodsk. Basil  took  off  his  monstrous
jacket, flopped  down in  the  grass in the shade, and apparently dozed off.
Grandma Albina floated off to her cottage number 1.

     Toivo  did  not go back  to  the pavilion;  he  sat  down on the grass,
crossed his legs, and waited.

     Nothing special  was happening in Little Pesha. Cast-iron Jurgen bawled
from time to time in his cottage, number  7 m- something about  the weather,
something about the river, and  something about his vacation.  Albina, still
all  in white, appeared on her veranda and  sat  down under  the awning. Her
voice, melodic and low, reached Toivo -- she  must have been talking on  the
videophone. "Duremar" Tolstov appeared in his field of vision several times.
He was hanging around the cottages,  crouching down, examining  the  ground,
digging into the bushes, sometimes even crawling along.

     At  seven-thirty, Toivo  got  up,  went  into the club,  and called his
mother on  the video. The usual check-in call. He  was  afraid that  the day
would  be very busy and he wouldn't have  another time to call.  They talked
about this and that. Toivo told her that he had met  an aged ballerina named
Albina. Could it be the Albina the Great; about whom he had heard so much in
his  childhood? They discussed  the question  and decided that it was  quite
possible, and  that there was also another great  ballerina Albina,  who was
about  fifty years older than Albina the Great... They  said  good-bye until
the next day.

     Outside came a loud roar: 'The crawfish? Lev, what about the crawfish!"

     Lev Tolstov was approaching the club at a fast pace, irritatedly waving
his left arm;  he  was  pressing a voluminous package  to his chest with his
right hand. At the entrance of the pavilion, he stopped, and with  a squeaky
falsetto called in the  direction of cottage number 7: "I'll be back! Soon!"
He  noticed Toivo  looking  at  him, and explained,  as if  in apology;  "An
extraordinarily strange story. I have to get to the bottom of it."

     He went into  the  zero-cabin, and then nothing happened for quite some
time. Toivo decided to wait until eight.

     At  five minutes to eight,  a glider flew in  over  the  woods, circled
Little Pesha several  times, gradually getting lower, and  landed  softly in
front  of cottage  number  10, the  one that seemed  to be inhabited  by  an
artist's family.  A  tall  man jumped out of the glider,  ran  up  the steps
lightly, and, turning back to the glider,  called: "Everything's all  right!
Nothing and  no  one!" While Toivo  walked over across  the square,  a young
woman  with  short hair in a  violet dress above her  knees got out  of  the
glider. She did  not go up to the porch; she stayed near the glider, holding
the door with her hand.

     As it  turned out, the artist in the family  was the woman, named Zosya
Lyadova,  and it was her self-portrait  that Toivo had  seen in the  Yarygin
cottage.  She  was  twenty-five or  twenty-six.  She  was  a student at  the
Academy,  in  Komovsky Korsakov's  studio,  and  had  not  created  anything
significant yet.  She  was beautiful  --  much more  beautiful  than in  her
self-portrait.  In  some way, she reminded  Toivo of his Asya. Of course, he
had never seen his Asya that scared.

     The man's  name was Oleg Olegovich Pankratov, and he  was a lecturer in
the Syktyvkar School District; before that, for almost thirty  years, he had
been an  astroarchaeologist, working in Fokine's group,  taking  part in the
expedition to Kala-i-Moog  (a.k.a. the "paradoxical planet Morokhasi"),  and
in  general  had seen the world in  all its shades. He was  a very calm man,
even  phlegmatic, with hands like shovels.  Dependable, sturdy, substantial,
you  couldn't  budge  him   with  a  bulldozer.  His  face   was  white  and
rosy-cheeked, with blue  eyes, a potato nose,  and reddish  hair,  like  the
mythic warrior Ilya Muromets...

     And there was nothing strange in the fact that during the events of the
night the  spouses had behaved quite differently. The  sight of living sacks
trying  to crawl  into the  bedroom  window  surprised  Oleg Olegovich,  but
naturally did not  scare him. Perhaps because he immediately thought  of the
branch institute  in Lower Pesha, where he had been more  than once, and the
sight  of monsters did not make him feel endangered. Disgusted, yes, but not
threatened. Disgust and revulsion, but  not fear.  He barred the way and did
not let the sacks into the bedroom. He pushed them back out into the garden,
and they  were  slimy,  sticky, and yucky. They  were  unpleasantly soft and
spongy under his hands, and  they reminded  him  of the innards of some huge
animal. Then he moved  around the bedroom trying to  figure what to wipe his
hands on, but Zosya began  screaming on the veranda and  he didn't have time
to be fastidious...

     Oh,  none of us behaved very well, but still, you can't let yourself go
like  some people.  Some  of  them  are  still in shock.  Frolov had  to  be
hospitalized  right in Sula. They had to pull him  out of the glider part by
part;  he had  really lost  it... Grigorian  and family  didn't even stay in
Sula; they rushed into the zero-cabin, all four of them, and headed straight
for  Mirza-Charle. Grigorian shouted in farewell: "Anywhere, as long as it's
far and forever!"

     Zosya  understood  Grigorian  very  well.  She  had  never  experienced
anything so  horrible in her life.  And it wasn't  a question of whether the
animals  were  dangerous  or  not.  "If  we were  moved by  horror...  Don't
interrupt,  Oleg, I'm talking about us simple unprepared people, not thunder
throwers  like you... If we were all moved by terror, then it wasn't because
we were  afraid of being eaten, suffocated, and digested alive and so  on...
No,  it  was a  different feeling!" Zosya was hard put to characterize  that
sensation  more precisely.  The  closest she  could  get was that it  wasn't
horror but a feeling of total incompatibility, the impossibility of being in
the same space with  these creatures.  But the most  interesting part of her
story was something else.

     They were  beautiful, the creatures! They were so horrible-looking  and
revolting that  they represented a kind of  perfection  -- the perfection of
ugliness.  An  esthetic clash  between  ideal  ugliness  and  ideal  beauty.
Somewhere it  was said  that ideal ugliness should elicit  the same esthetic
sensations as ideal beauty. That  had always seemed paradoxical to her until
last night. But it wasn't a paradox! Or was she simply so perverse?..

     She showed  Toivo her  sketches,  made from  memory two hours after the
panic. She and Oleg had taken an  empty little house in  Sula, and  at first
Oleg made her drink tonic  and tried psychomassage. But it didn't help. Then
she grabbed a piece of paper, a  disgusting  marker, inflexible  and clumsy,
and hurriedly, line after line, shadow after shadow, began transferring onto
paper what  was  before  her  eyes  like a  nightmare, blocking out the real
world...

     The  drawings didn't  show  anything  special.  A  spiderweb of  1ines,
familiar objects:  the  veranda railing,  table, bushes,  and, above it all,
blurry  shadows of vague  outlines. Of  course,  the  drawings  did elicit a
feeling  of  anxiety,  discomfort...  Oleg  Olegovich  felt  that there  was
something  in  them,  even  though  everything  was  much simpler  and  more
disgusting. Of  course, he didn't know much about  art. He just knew what he
liked.

     He asked  Toivo  what he bad learned. Toivo told him  his suppositions:
Fleming, Lower Pesha, a new form of embryophore, and so on. Pankratov nodded
in agreement,  and then said with sadness  that  the thing that  grieved him
most  in  this  business...  how  could  he  put  it?  Well,  the  excessive
nervousness of today's earthier. They all ran off, all of them! At least one
would have  stayed,  have shown  a  little curiosity...  Toivo sprang to the
defense of today's  earth-dweller and told them about Grandma Albina and the
boy Kir.

     Oleg Olegovich grew incredibly  animated. He  slapped  his  shovel-like
hands on the armrests of the chair and on the table, looked  triumphantly at
Toivo and at Zosya, and,  laughing, exclaimed:  "Go,  Kir!  What  a hero!  I
always said something  would come of  him... But  what about our Albina!  So
much  for hoity-toity!"  Zosya pointed out that  there was  nothing  amazing
about it, that old and young were always berries from the same patch... "And
space  travelers,  my beloved!" They parried, half-seriously, half-jokingly,
when suddenly a minor incident occurred.

     Oleg Olegovich;  listening to his beloved with a grin from ear to  ear,
suddenly stopped  smiling, and his expression became  one of concern,  as if
something had  shaken his very foundations.  Toivo looked and  saw  that the
inconsolable  and disappointed Ernst  Jurgen was standing in  the doorway of
his  cottage number 7, no  longer  in his  crab-catching wet suit, but  in a
beige  outfit  with  a flat can of beer in one hand and a  colossal sandwich
with  something red and  white in the other,  and he  was bringing first one
hand and  then the other to his mouth, chewing  and swallowing, and  staring
across the square at the club.

     "There's Ernst!" Zosya exclaimed. "And you said everyone left!"

     "Amazing!" Oleg Olegovich said slowly with that same worried look.

     "Ernst,  as you  see,  also was not  frightened off,"  Zosya said,  not
without malice.

     "I see," Oleg Olegovich replied.

     He knew  something about that Ernst  Jurgen, and he  had never expected
him to be  here after last night He shouldn't have been here now, on his own
veranda, drinking beer  and eating boiled crawcrabs. No, Ernst Jurgen should
have hightailed it back to Titan or even farther.

     And  Toivo hurried to set  things straight,  and  told  them that Ernst
Jurgen had not been  in  the village last night,  that he  had been  fishing
several kilometers upriver. Zosya was very disappointed, and Oleg Olegovich,
as it seemed to Toivo Glumov, even sighed in relief.

     "That's another story!" he said. "You should have said so in  the first
place..." And even though no one had asked  him  any questions, he  suddenly
began explaining: he had been confused, because  last night during the panic
he had seen Ernst Jurgen  pushing everyone  aside to get to the pavilion and
the  zero-cabin. Now  he realized that  he  was  mistaken,  that  it  hadn't
happened, and  couldn't have. But at  first, when he saw Ernst Jurgen with a
can of beer...

     It's  not clear  whether  Zosya believed  him or not, but  Toivo didn't
believe  a word  of  it. It hadn't happened; Ernst  hadn't appeared to  Oleg
Olegovich  during the  panic.  But Oleg Olegovich did  know  something about
Jurgen, something more interesting, but  apparently bad, because  he was too
embarrassed to tell it.

     And  here a shadow fell on  Little Pesha, and the air was filled with a
velvety cooing, and  Basil came shooting out from behind the pavilion like a
shot, pulling  on  his jacket as  he ran, and the sun  was shining once more
aver Little Pesha, and  a pseudograf  of the  Puma class, a super  new  one,
majestically landed  on  the square, without bending  a blade  of grass, all
golden  and shiny, like a gigantic round loaf of bread, and  immediately all
its  round portholes  flew  open,  and  through  them  scattered  dozens  of
long-legged,  tanned, busy, and loud-voiced men --  they scattered and began
dragging crates with funnels,  pulled  hoses  with bizarre tips, ran around,
waving their arms,  and  the one  who bustled, ran,  and waved  his arms the
most,  dragging crates and  pulling  hoses,  was Lev-Duremar  Tolstov, still
wearing clothing covered with dried green seaweed.

     OFFICE OF THE HEAD OF THE UE DEPT. 6 MAY 99. AROUND 1:00 P.M.

     "And what did they achieve with their technology?" I asked.

     Toivo was looking drearily out the window, his gaze following the Cloud
Settlement, unhurriedly  floating  somewhere  over  the southern  suburbs of
Sverdlovsk.

     "Nothing  essentially new,"  he  replied.  "They  re-created  the  most
probable appearance of the animals. Their analyses were the same as those of
the  emergency  squad. They were  amazed that the embryophore shells had not
remained.  They were  astonished by  the energy and  insisted  that  it  was
impossible."

     "Did you send the queries?" I made myself ask.

     I have to stress here once more that by then I already saw it all, knew
it all, understood it all, but I had no idea what I could do with my vision,
knowledge,  and  understanding. I  couldn't come  up  with anything,  and my
colleagues and coworkers were simply in my way. Especially Toivo Glumov.

     More than anything  in  the  world,  I wanted to  go on vacation  right
there, without leaving my chair.  Send  them  all  on vacation,  every  last
probationer, and  then  cut off all  communications  lines,  shut  down  the
screens,  shut  my eyes,  and be completely alone at least  for  twenty-four
hours. So  that  I would not have to watch my face.  So I  would not have to
think when my words. sounded natural
     and when they sounded strange. So that I  wouldn't have to think  about
anything, so that there would be a gaping emptiness in my head, and then the
right  vision  would  appear on  its own  in  that emptiness. It was like  a
hallucination -- one of those that come when you have to bear nagging  pain.
I  had borne it  for more  than five weeks, and my  spiritual  strength  was
waning. But for the  time being I  still  could control  my face,  manage my
behavior, and ask totally appropriate questions.

     "Did you send the queries?" I asked Toivo Glumov.

     "I  sent  the  queries," he replied in a monotone.  "To Burgermayer  at
Embryomechanics. To Gorbatsky. Personally. And to Fleming. Just in case. All
in your name."

     "Fine," I said. "We'll wait."

     Now I had to let him talk it out. I could see he needed to talk. He had
to make  sure that  the  most important thing  was not  missed by the chief.
Ideally, the  chief should  have noticed and stressed  that  important thing
himself, but I didn't have the strength for that anymore.

     "Do you want to add anything?" I asked.

     "Yes, I  do."  He  flicked  an  invisible  mote of dust from  the  desk
"Unusual technology is not the main thing. The main thing is the  dispersion
of reactions."

     "That is?" 1 had to hurry him along, too!

     "You might have noticed that these events divided up the witnesses into
two uneven groups.  Strictly speaking, into three. The majority of witnesses
gave in to uncontrollable  panic. Me devil in a medieval village. Total loss
of self-control. People  ran from Little Pesha. People ran from  Earth.  Now
the second  group: zoo  technician  Anatoly  Sergeyevich  and  artist  Zosya
Lyadova,  though  frightened at first, find the strength to  return, and the
artist had even seen something charming  in the creatures. And  finally, the
elderly ballerina and Kir. And, I suppose, Pankratov, Lyadova's husband They
weren't frightened at all. On the contrary.  Dispersion  of  reactions,"  he
repeated.

     I  saw what he wanted  from me. All the conclusions  were on the space.
Someone  had run  an  experiment on  artificial selection  in  Little Pesha,
dividing up people, according to their  reactions, into those who are worthy
of something. Just as that someone made a selection fifteen years ago in the
subspace sector at entrance 41/02. And there was no  question as to who that
someone  with  the  technology unknown to us  was. The same one who for some
reason  blocked  the  path   of  fukamization...  Toivo  Glumov  could  have
formulated all that for me himself, but from his point of view it would have
been  a  violation  of  work ethics and  the  principle  of  it.  Drawing  a
conclusion  was  the prerogative  of the chief and the  senior member of the
clan.

     But I did not use my prerogative. I didn't have the strength  for that,
either.

     "Dispersions," I repeated. "That's convincing."

     I  must have sounded a false  note, because Toivo  suddenly  raised his
white lashes and stared at me.

     "Is that all?" I asked immediately.

     "Yes," he replied. "That's it."

     "Fine. Let's wait for the experts' results. What are you planning to do
now? Go to bed?"

     He sighed.  Barely perceptibly.  A less  controlled person in his place
would have been insolent. But Toivo said, "I don't know. I'll probably go do
some more work I have to finish the head count today."

     "The whales?"

     "Yes."

     "Fine," I  said.  "Whatever you want. But  tomorrow, please  leave  for
Kharkov."

     Toivo's white eyebrows went up, but he said nothing.

     "Do you know what the Institute of Eccentrics is?" I asked.

     "Yes. Kikin told me."

     Now  I raised  my brows.  Mentally. Damn them  all.  They  were  out of
control. Did I have to warn each one every time to  watch  his  tongue? This
wasn't COMCON-2 but a clubhouse...

     "And what did Kikin tell you?"

     "That  it's a branch  of  the Institute  of Metapsychic Research.  They
study  the limits and beyond the limits of the human psyche. It's chock full
of weird people."

     "Right,"  I  said.  "You're  going  there  tomorrow.   Listen  to  your
assignment."

     I formulated his assignment this  way. On March  25, the  Institute  of
Eccentrics in  Kharkov was honored by the presence of the famous Wizard from
the  planet Saraksh.  Who  was the Wizard? He was without a doubt a  mutant.
Moreover, he was the  lord  and  master of all mutants  in  the  radioactive
jungles beyond Blue Snake. He had many amazing abilities, including the fact
that he was a psychocrat. What was a psychocrat? That was the  general  term
for creatures capable of subordinating someone else's psyche. Besides which,
the Wizard was a creature of extraordinary  intellectual power, one of those
sapiens who need no more than  a drop of water to conclude the  existence of
oceans. The Wizard  came to Earth on a  private visit.  For  some reason the
thing that interested  him most was the Institute  of Eccentrics. Perhaps he
sought others like him; we don't know. The visit was planned  far four days,
but  he  left after an hour. He  went  back  to  Saraksh and vanished in his
radioactive jungles.

     Up until that point,  my introduction to Toivo Glumov was the truth and
nothing but the truth. Now came the pseudoquasi part.

     During  the last month, our Progressors on  Saraksh  at my request have
been trying to enter  into  communications with the Wizard.  They  have been
failing. Either we had  insulted the Wizard somehow here  on  Earth, without
knowing it,  or one hour was  enough for  him to get the needed  information
about us.  Or  else something happened that  was specifically 'Wizardy'  and
therefore unimaginable for us. In short, he had to go to the Institute, find
all  the  materials on the study of the  Wizard, if there were  any, talk to
everyone who dealt with him, and find out if  anything strange had  happened
to the Wizard. For instance,  did they remember  anything he might have said
about Earth  and  about people?  Did he commit any acts  that passed without
notice then but were now seen in a new light?

     "Is everything clear?" I asked.

     He gave me another quick look.

     "You did not say which theme my trip falls under."

     No, it wasn't a  flash of intuition. And I  doubt that he had caught me
pseudoquasying. He simply  could not understand how his chief, who had  such
serious information  relating to  the penetration of  his  hated  Wanderers,
could get sidetracked.

     I said, "It's the same theme. A Visit from an Old Lady."

     (Actually,  it  really was.  In  the  broad meaning  of the  word.  The
broadest.)

     For some time, he  was silent, noiselessly drumming his fingers on  the
desk Then he spoke, almost apologetically.

     "I don't see the connection..."

     "You will," I promised.

     He said nothing.

     "And if there is no connection, all the better," I said.

     "He's a Wizard, understand? A  real Wizard,  I  know him. A real Wizard
from fairy tales,  with a talking  bird on his  shoulder  and all  the other
accoutrements.  And  he's  a  Wizard from another planet, yet. I desperately
need him!"

     "A possible ally," Tolvo add with a weak interrogative intonation.

     There, he explained it  to himself. Now he  would work like the damned.
Maybe he would even find the Wizard, which, to tell the truth, I doubted.

     "Bear in mind," I said, "that in Kharkov you will represent yourself as
a worker of the Big COMCON. That's not a cover; Big COMCON really is looking
for the Wizard."

     "All right," he said.

     "Is that it? Then go. Go, go. My best to Asya."

     He left, and  at last I was alone. For several blissful  minutes. Until
the next videophone call.  And in those blissful moments I decided for sure:
I  had to go  to  Athos. Immediately, because once he went in for surgery, I
would have no one nearby to whom I could go.

     COMCON-2 Sverdlovsk To Kammerer.
     Director of the Biocenter TPO Gorbatsky.

     In answer to your query of 6 May
     You are being led by the nose. Such a thing cannot be.
     Pay it no mind.

     Gorbatsky

     [End of Document 5.]

DOCUMENT 6: Fleming to Kammerer

DOCUMENT 7: Burgermayer to Kammerer

DOCUMENT 8: Glumov Memorandum: Theme 009: "A Visit From an Old Lady"

     COMCON-2 to Kammerer.
     From Fleming

     Maxim!

     I know everything about  the incident in Little Pesha.  The case, in my
opinion, is  extraordinary  and  enviable.  Your  boys  posed  very  precise
questions, which  we  should  all  answer. That's  what I'm  doing, dropping
everything else. When something becomes dear, I'll be sure to let you know.

     Fleming

     Lower Pesha. 15:30

     P.S. Maybe you've learned something through  our channels? If you have,
let me know immediately. For the next three days, I'll be in Lower Pesha.

     P.P.S. Could  it be the Wanderers after  all? Damn it, wouldn't that be
fine!

     Kammerer

     [End of Document 6]

     The EMBRYOMECHANICS Manufacturing Society
     Directorate
     Earth, Antarctic Region, Erebus
     A 18/03/62
     Index: O/T: KK 946239
     Code: SKTs-76
     BURGERMAYER, ADOLF-ANNA,
     GENERAL DIRECTOR
     S-283, 7 May 99
     To: COMCON-2 Urals-North, EU Department
     Code: SR3-23
     CHIEF OF ACCIDENT DEPARTMENT M. KAMMERER

     Contents: Reply to your query of 6 May 99.

     Dear Kammerer!

     Regarding the characteristics of modem embryophores  that interest you,
I can report the following:

     1.  The general  mass  of exuded biomechanisms is up to 200  kg.  Their
maximum number is 8. The maximal size of a  single unit can be determined by
the program 102  ASTA/M,  R,  Rsh K/,  where M  is  the mass of the
original
material,  R the density of the material, Rsh the density of the
environment,
and 1 the number of exuded mechanisms. The correlation with high accuracy is
performed in temperature ranges between 200 and 400 K and in pressure ranges
of 0 to 200 SE.

     2.   The   time   for  the  development   of  the   embryophore  is  an
uncharacteristic  number  that depends on  many  parameters, which  are  all
totally under the control of the initiator.  However, for the fastest-acting
embryophores  there  is  a  lower limit of time  for  development,  which is
approximately one minute.

     3.  The time of existence  of now-known biomechanisms depends  on their
individual mass.  The  critical  mass  of  a  biomechanism is Mo  =  12  Kg.
Biomechanisms whose mass M does not  exceed M, theoretically  have limitless
life  spans.  The time of existence for  biomechanisms  with a  greater mass
decreases  with  the  growth  of mass on the exponent, so that  the  time of
existence of massive models (around 100 kg) cannot exceed several seconds.

     4. The goal  of creating a fully dissolving  embryophore has  existed a
long time, but unfortunately it is still far  from being  resolved. Even the
most modern technology is helpless to create  shells that could fully become
part of the development cycle.

     5. Microscopic biomechanisms in general have high mobility (up to 1,000
times their own size per minute). As for 6led models, the  record holder for
now  is model  KS-3, "Hoppity," which  can develop  directed  and stimulated
speeds of up to 5 m/sec.

     6. It can be maintained with complete accuracy that any of the existing
biomechanisms  will  react  acutely  and  unambivalently (negatively)  to  a
natural   biofield.  That  is   built  into  the  genetic  system  of  every
biomechanism -- and  not  out of ethical considerations, as one might think,
but because any natural biofield with an intensity of more than 0.63 GD (the
biofield of a kitten) creates  irreparable glitzes in the signaling  network
of a biomechanism.

     7.   Regarding  energy  balance,   the  release   of  embryophores   or
biomechanisms with the parameters described in your  query would undoubtedly
have led to a violent release of energy (an  explosion),  if the picture you
described is at  all possible. However, that  picture, as follows from  what
was  written  above,  is  totally  fantastic  given  the  present  level  of
scientific and technological capabilities.

     Respectfully,

     General Director Burgermayer

     [End of Document 7]

     REPORT COMCON-2
     No.016/99 Urals-North

     Date: 8 May 99
     FROM: T. Glumov, Inspector
     THEME: 009 "A Visit from an Old Lady"
     RE:  The visit  of  the  Wizard (Saraksh) to the Kharkov  branch of the
Institute of Metapsychic Research (Institute of Eccentrics)

     In accordance with  your orders, yesterday  morning  I  arrived at  the
Kharkov branch of  the Institute of Eccentrics.  The deputy director of  the
branch, Logovenko, gave me an appointment at ten; however, I was not brought
into his  office immediately, but was subjected  first  to  a check up in  a
chamber  of  sliding  frequency  KSCH-S,  also  called  "How   To  Catch  an
Eccentric." It  turns  out  that every  new  visitor  to  the  institute  is
subjected to that procedure. The  aim  is  to discover the person's  "latent
metapsychic  capabilities"  --  in   other  words,   the  so-called   hidden
eccentricity.

     At 10:15, I presented myself to  the deputy director for communications
with public organizations.

     (Logovenko, Daniil Alexandrovich, doctor  of psychology,  corresponding
member  of the Academy of Medical  Sciences of Europe. Born September 18, 30
in Borispol. Education:  Institute of  Psychology, Kiev; Control Department,
Kiev U.; special course in higher and anomalous etology,  Split; Basic works
--  in the area of metapsychology, discovered the Logovenko  Impulse, a.k.a.
"t-spike  mentogram."  One  of the  founders of  the  Kharkov branch of  the
Institute of Metapsychic Research.)

     D.  Logovenko told me  that he  personally had  met the Wizard  in  the
morning of March 25  on  the cosmodrome  at Mirza-Charle and accompanied him
right into the Institute building. With them were the department head Bogdan
Gaidai and the Wizard's escort from COMCON-1, Borya Laptev, whom we know.

     Arriving  at   the  Institute,  the  Wizard  declined  the  traditional
reception and expressed a desire immediately to  begin  getting  to know the
work of  the Institute and their clients. Then D. Logovenko turned  over the
Wizard to the care of B. Gaidai and never talked to the Wizard again.

     I: What was the Wizard's goal at the Institute, in your opinion?

     LOGOVENKO: The Wizard  didn't  say  anything about  it  to  me.  COMCON
informed us that the Wizard allegedly wanted to familiarize himself with our
work, and we  were  glad to offer him that opportunity.  Not without our own
interest,  by  the way: we  hoped to study  him. We  had never  worked  on a
psychocrat of such power, and from another planet to boot.

     I: What did your study show?

     LOGOVENKO: We did not study him. The Wizard cut short his visit totally
unexpectedly.

     I: Why do you suppose he did that?

     LOGOVENKO: We are lost in conjecture.  Personally, here is what I think
He  was introduced  to  Michel Desmond, a  polymental. And  the Wizard noted
something  in Michel  that  slipped past  us. And  whatever  is  was  either
frightened him or insulted him, in a word, shocked him so much that
     he no  longer wanted to deal with us. Don't forget, he's  a psychocrat,
an intellectual, but by birth, upbringing, and worldview, if you like,  he's
a typical savage.

     I: I don't quite understand. What is a polymental?

     LOGOVENKO:  Polymentalism  is  a very  rare metapsychic phenomenon, the
existence in one human organism of two or more independent  consciousnesses.
Don't confuse it with  schizophrenia; it's  not pathological. For  instance,
our Michel  Desmond. He is an absolutely healthy, very pleasant  young  man,
manifesting  no  deviations  from  the  norm.   But  a  decade  ago,   quite
accidentally, it was discovered that  he  had a  double mentogram.  One  was
ordinary, human, simply related to the past and present life of Michel.  But
the  other one was  discovered  at  a specific,  strictly precise  depth  of
mentoscopy. This  is a mentogram  of a creature that  had nothing to do with
Michel,  living  in  a  world  which we  have  not  been able  to  identify.
Apparently,  it  is   a   world  of  incredibly  large  pressures  and  high
temperatures... But that's inessential. The important
     thing  is  that Michel has no  idea  about  that  world, or  about that
cohabiting consciousness, and that  creature has no idea about Michel or our
world. So  this is  what I  think: we  managed  to  discover  a  neighboring
existence in Michel; but what if there are others in him, beyond the  limits
of our methods of discovery, and they shocked the Wizard?

     I: This Desmond's second world doesn't shock you?

     LOGOVENKO: I get your point. No. Not at  all. But I must tell you  that
the mentoscopist  who first  looked  into  the  world experienced a profound
shock. Primarily because he thought that Michel was a  secret agent for  the
Wanderers, a Progressor from an alien world.

     I: How did you determine that this wasn't the fact?

     LOGOVENKO: You can relax on that score. There is no correlation between
Michel's  behavior  and the  functioning of  the  second consciousness.  The
neighboring consciousnesses of a  polymental do  not interact. In principle,
they cannot interact, because they  function in  different planes. Here is a
crude analogy. Imagine a shadow show.  The shadows  projected  on the screen
cannot interact. Of course, there are various fantastic ideas, but  they are
merely fantastic.

     My conversation with  D. Logovenko ended here,  and I was introduced to
B. A. Gaidai.

     (Gaidai, Bogdan Arkhipovich, master  of psychology. Born June 10, 55 in
Middle Buda. Education: Institute  of Psychology, Kiev;  special  courses in
higher  and  anomalous etology, Split; Basic  works  in the  metapsychoiogy.
Since  89 has been working in the Department of  Psychoprogaostics, since 93
head  of  the  laboratory  of  Instrument  Control,  since 94  chief  of the
Department of Intrapsychic Technology.)

     An excerpt Gem the conversation:

     I: In your opinion, what interested the Wizard most at the Institute?

     GAIDAI:  You  know,  I have the  impression  that the  Wizard had  been
misinformed.  It's  not  surprising; even here on Earth  many  people  don't
understand our work, so what can you say about the Progressors with whom the
Wizard deals in  Saraksh? I  remember that  I was immediately surprised that
the Wizard,  an extraterrestrial, wanted .to see only  our institute  out of
the whole planet Earth... I think this is why. Back on Saraksh be is king of
the  mutants, so  to speak, and he, probably has many problems  as a result:
they  degenerate,   get  sick,  they  need  treatment,  support.  While  our
"eccentrics" are also a type  of mutant, and  he imagined that he could pick
up useful information at the Institute, he probably thought we had something
like a clinic here.

     I: And seeing his mistake, he turned and left?

     GAIDAI: Exactly. He turned a bit too sharply, I guess and left a little
too fast. But alter all, maybe that's how they behave there.

     I: What did you talk about with him?

     GAIDAI: We didn't  talk about  anything. I only heard his voice once. I
asked him what he would like to see, and he replied, "Everything you'll show
me." His voice, I might add, was rather repulsive, like  that of a crotchety
witch.

     I: By the way, what language did you speak?

     GAIDAI: Just imagine, Ukrainian!

     According  to  Gaidai,  the  Wizard  met  only  three  clients  at  the
Institute. I've managed to speak with two of them.

     Ravich, Marina Sergeyevna, age 27,  a  veterinarian by education, now a
consultant to the Leningrad Embryosystem Factory,  the Lausanne Workroom  on
Realizing P-abstractions,  the Belgrade  Institute of Laminary  Positronics,
and  the chief architect of the Yakutsk  Region. A  modest, very shy and sad
woman.  She has a unique and still unexplained ability. (They  haven't  even
given  this ability a scientific name yet.) If you set a clearly  formulated
problem  that  she  can  understand  before  her,  she begins  to  solve  it
passionately  and  with pleasure,  but as  a result, completely  beyond  her
control, obtains the answer to another problem, which has absolutely nothing
to do  with the problem  at  hand  and  which,  as  a  rule,  is  beyond her
professional  interests. The  posed  problem  acts  as  a  catalyst  on  her
consciousness to solve another problem, which she either glanced  at in some
popular scientific journal or  accidentally overheard in the conversation of
specialists.  It is impossible to determine ahead of time  which problem she
will solve;  there  is something like the  Classic Uncertainty  principle in
physics at work  here. The Wizard came to her office at  the moment when she
was working. She vaguely remembers his ugly, large-headed figure, dressed in
green,  and  has  no  other  impressions of the Wizard.  No, he  didn't  say
anything. Bogdan  made the  usual noises  about her  "gift," and she  didn't
remember any other voices.  According  to Gaidai, the Wizard was  there  for
only two minutes, and she did not interest him any more than he had her.

     Michel Desmond,  41, a granular engineer by education,  a  professional
athlete, European  tunnel  hockey champion for 88. A jolly man, very pleased
with himself and the world. He treats his polymentalism with humor and total
indifference. He  was  on  his way to  the stadium when they brought in  the
Wizard. The Wizard, according  to him, looked  sickly and was silent, didn't
get jokes; he probably didn't  understand where  he was  and  what was being
said.  Of course, there was an instant -- which Michel will remember for the
rest of his life -- when the Wizard raised his huge  pale eyelids and looked
right into Michel's soul, or maybe even deeper, into the bowels of the world
where the  creature lives with whom Michel must share his mental space. That
was an unpleasant but astonishing moment.  Soon after  that the Wizard left,
without even saying a word. Or good-bye.

     Susumu Hirota, a.k.a. Senrigan,  which means  "He  who sees a  thousand
miles,"  83,  religion  historian,  professor of  the  religious  history at
Bangkok  University.  I did not  manage to speak with him. He will return to
the institute tomorrow or the day after. According to Gaidai, the Wizard did
not like chat clairvoyant at  all. At least, it  is known  that  the  Wizard
exited precisely during their meeting.

     According to all the witnesses,  the exit looked like  this. The Wizard
had  been  standing  in the middle of the  mentoscopy room, listening  while
Gaidai lectured  him  on the  extraordinary  abilities  of  Senrigan,  while
Senrigan  interrupted the lecturer  from time to time with exposure  of  the
lecturer's  personal circumstances,  and suddenly, without a word, without a
warning gesture  or glance, that  green  gomne turned sharply,  bumped  into
Borya  Laptev  with his  elbow, walked  down the  corridors at a  fast clip,
without stopping anywhere for a second, toward the exit. That was it.

     Several other people  had seen the Wizard at  the Institute: scientific
workers, lab assistants,  and a few of the administrative personnel. None of
them knew whom they were looking at. And only two newcomers to the Institute
paid any  attention to  the Wizard, stunned by  his  looks. I did not  learn
anything of significance from them.

     Then I met  with Boris Laptev.  Here  it the most important part of our
conversation:

     I:  You're the  only man  who  was with the Wizard  all the  time  from
Saraksh to Saraksh. Did you notice anything strange?

     BORIS: A fine question! You know, that's like when they asked the camel
why his neck was crooked. And he said, "What do I have that's straight?"

     I: Still. Try to  recall his behavior  for that whole period. Something
must have happened to make him kick up a fuss.

     BORIS: Listen, I've known the Wizard  for two  of our  years. He  is an
inexhaustible creature. I  gave up a long, long time  ago and don't even try
to figure him  out. What can I tell you? He had a depression that  day, as I
call it. From time to time, it comes upon him without any visible causes. He
grows  taciturn,  and  if he does open his mouth, it's only to  my something
nasty.  That's how  it was that  day. While we were flying in  from Saraksh,
everything was fine, he intoned aphorisms, joked with me, even hummed... But
by the time we reached Mirza-Charle he  grew grim, almost didn't talk at all
with Logovenko,  and when we started going around the Institute with Gaidai,
he was  blacker than  a  thundercloud.  I was afraid  that he  would  insult
someone, but he  must have felt  that he couldn't go on  like that, and fled
from temptation. He  was silent all  the  way back  to  Saraksh. He did look
around in Mirza-Charle  as if in farewell,  and in a disgusting, whiny voice
he  squeaked:  "He  sees  mountains  and forests, clouds and  skies, but  he
doesn't see what's right under his nose."

     I: What's that supposed to mean?

     BORIS: Children's verse. Ancient.

     I: How did you interpret it?

     BORIS: I didn't.  I  saw that  he was mad at the world, he was ready to
bite.  I  saw that I had to keep quiet. He and I didn't utter a word all the
way back.

     I: And that's it?

     BORIS:  That's it. Just  before landing, he muttered, "Neither fish nor
fowl. Let's  wait for the blind to see the  seeing." And when we  got out in
Blue Snake, he waved good bye and, as they say, vanished into the jungle. He
didn't thank me, by the way, or invite me to his place.

     I: You can't tell me anything more?

     BORIS: What  do you want from  me? Yes, there was something that really
displeased him on Earth. But he didn't  deign to  tell me what. I'm  telling
you  he is  an inexplicable  and  unpredictable creature.  It may  not  have
anything to do with Earth at all. Maybe he just had stomach ache that day --
in  the broad sense of the word, of course, in a very  broad sense, a cosmic
one...

     I:  You think it's  not a coincidence that someone doesn't see anything
in the child's poem and then the line about the blind and seeing?

     BORIS: You see, the stuff about the blind and the seeing is a saying on
Saraksh.  Like "on a cold day in August" or "once in a blue moon."  He  must
have wanted to say that something would never happen. And the poem came from
general nastiness. He quoted it with obvious sarcasm; I just don't know what
he was mocking. Maybe that boring, bragging Jap.

     PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS:

     l. I  could not  obtain  any data that  could help find  the  Wizard on
Saraksh.

     2. I cannot give any recommendations for continuing the search.

     T. Glumov

     [End of Document 8]

DOCUMENT 9: Narrative: Toivo Glumov and the Wanderers

     On  the evening of May 6, I was seen by our President, Athos-Sidorov. I
took along the most interesting materials, and I gave him the essence of the
matter  and my  proposals, orally.  He was very sick  by then,  his face was
sallow,  and he was short of breath. I  had put off this  visit too long: he
didn't  have  the  strength  to  be truly  amazed.  He said  that  he  would
familiarize himself with the materials, think it over, and call me tomorrow.

     I  spent all of May 7 in  my  office, waiting for  his call. He did not
call. In the evening, I was told that  he had suffered  a severe attack, had
barely been revived, and was now in the hospital. Once again, everything was
dumped on my shoulders, and so  hard that the  poor little  bones of my soul
cracked.

     On  May 8,  I received  -- among other things -- Toivo's  report on his
visit to the Institute of  Eccentrics. I checked  off his name,  entered his
report  in  the  registrator, and began cooking up  an assignment  for Petya
Siletsky. By  then, only Petya Siletsky  and Zaya  Momzova from my staff had
not been to the Institute.

     At  approximately that time in his  room,  Toivo Glumov was  talking to
Grisha Serosovin.  I bring  a  reconstruction of  their conversation  below,
primarily to demonstrate the mind-set of my coworkers at that time. But only
in terms of quality. In terms of quantity, the relationship was the same: on
one side there was only Toivo Glumov, and on the other, all the rest.

     U.E. DEPARTMENT, ROOM D. 8 May 99. EVENING.

     Grisha Serosovin walked in, as usual, without knocking, stopped in  the
doorway, and asked, "May I come in?

     Toivo put aside Vertical Progress  (the work by the anonymous K Oxovu),
bent his head, and looked over at Grisha.

     "You may. But I'm going home very soon."

     "Is Sandro out again?"

     Toivo looked at Sandro's desk. The desk was empty and impeccably clean.

     "Yes. Third day."

     Grisha sat down at Sandro's desk and crossed his legs.

     "Where were you yesterday?" he asked.

     "Kharkov."

     "Ah, so you've been to Kharkov, too!"

     "Who else?"

     "Almost  everyone.  In the last  month, almost  the entire department's
been in Kharkov.  Listen, Toivo, here's why  I dropped  by. You've worked on
'sudden geniuses,' right?"

     "Yes. A long time ago. The year before last."

     "Do you remember Soddi?"

     "I do. Bartholomew Soddi: A mathematician who became a confessor."

     "That's the one," Grisha said.  "In the  summary, there  is a phase.  I
quote:  'According to our  information, B. Soddi suffered a personal tragedy
before his metamorphosis.' If you compiled the summary, I have two questions
for you. What was the tragedy? And where did you get the data?"

     Toivo  reached  out and  called  up  his  program on  the  screen.  The
selection of information was over,  and the counting  was on. With unhurried
movements, Toivo started  clearing off his desk. Grisha waited patiently. Be
was used to it.

     "If it says 'according to our information,' " Toivo said, "that means I
got it from Big Bug."

     He fell silent. Grisha waited  some more, recrossed his legs, and said,
"I don't want to bother the Big Bug with these  thrills. All right, I'll try
to manage without... Listen, Toivo,  doesn't it seem to you that our Big Bug
has been kind of nervous lately?"

     Toivo shrugged.

     "Maybe,"  he  said. "The  President is very  bad. They say Gorbovsky is
near death. And he knows them all. He knows them all well."

     Grisha said thoughtfully: "By the way, I know Gorbovsky too; how  about
that. You remember... though I guess that was before your time... Kamill had
committed suicide. The last  of the  Devil's  Dozen. The whole Devil's Dozen
case was really nothing to  you, either... just something that  made the air
tremble. For  instance,  I  had never  heard  of him...  Well,  the fact  of
suicide, though it would be  more accurate to say self-destruction, Kamill's
suicide did not elicit any  doubts. But it wasn't clear why. That is, it was
clear  that his life  wasn't a bed  of  roses; the last hundred years of his
life he  had  been  completely  alone.  You  and I  can't  even imagine such
loneliness But  that's  not  what I was talking  about. Big Bug  sent me  to
Gorbovsky then, because, it seemed,  Gorbovsky had been close  to Kamill  in
his day and had even tried to give him some affection... Are you listening?"

     Toivo nodded several times. "Yes," he said.

     "Do you know how you look?"

     "I  do,"  Toivo said.  "I look  like  a  man  who  is  concentrating on
something  private. You've told me  that before.  Several  times.  A cliche.
Don't you agree?"

     Instead of an answer, Grlsha  pulled a pen out of his breast pocket and
threw it right at  Toivo's  head -- like a spear  -- across the  room. Toivo
pulled the  pen  out of  the air with two lingers a few centimeters from his
face and said, "Feeble."

     "Feeble," he wrote with the pen on the piece of paper in front of him.

     "You're sparing me, sire,"  he said. "And  you shouldn't spare me. It's
bad for me."

     "You see, Toivo," Grisha said, "I know that you have good reflexes. Not
brilliant,  no, but  good; the sturdy  reaction of a  professional. But your
appearance...  You must realize that  as your subsksu  coach I feel it is my
duty  from  time  to time  to  check  whether  you can still  react to  your
surroundings or whether you really are in a cataleptic state."

     "I'm tired today," Toivo said.  "When my  program  is finished with the
tally, I'll go home."

     "What do you have there?" Grisha asked.

     "I have there  ...  whales. I have there birds.  I have lemmings, rats,
field mice. I have many small creatures."

     "And what are they doing there?"

     "They're perishing. Or fleeing. They're dying, throwing themselves onto
shore,  drowning themselves, flying away  from places where they have  lived
for centuries."

     "Why?"

     "No one knows.  Two or three centuries ago, it was a  usual phenomenon,
even  though  they  did not understand why it was happening. Then it did not
occur for a long time. At all. And now it's started again."

     "Wait," said Grisha "It's all  very interesting, of course, but what do
we have to do with it?"

     Toivo was silent, and, without waiting for an answer, Grisha asked, "Do
you think it might have something to do with the Wanderers?"

     Toivo diligently examined  the pen, turned it in his fingers, picked it
up by one end and held it up to the light.

     "Everything  we can't explain  might  have something  to  do  with  the
Wanderers."

     "Ironical formula," Grisha said in awe.

     "And  it might  not," Toivo adders "Where do you get such  nice things?
You'd think it's just a  pen. What could be more banal? But  it's a pleasure
to look at your pen... You know,  why don't you give it to me. And I'll give
it to Asya. I want to make her happy. At least in some way."

     "And you'll make you happy at least in some way," Grisha said.

     "And you'll make me happy."

     "Take it," Grisha said. "It's yours. Give it away, present it, make  up
a lie. That you bought it for your beloved, that you stayed up nights making
it."

     "Thanks," Toivo said, and put it in his pocket.

     "But bear that  in mind!"  Grisha raised a warning anger. "Right around
the comer, on Red Maple  Street, there is a vending machine from the  studio
of a certain F. Moran, and it chums out pens like that as fast as people can
put money in."

     Toivo took the pen out and examined it again.

     "It doesn't matter," he said  sadly.  "You noticed the vending machine,
but it would never occur to me to notice it..."

     "But you've noticed disorder in the world of whales!"

     "Whales!" Toivo wrote down.

     "By the way," he said. "You're a fresh mind,  unprejudiced. What do you
think?  What  do you think must  have happened  to make a herd of  whales --
tame, cared for,  spoiled -- suddenly, just like in the bad  old days, beach
themselves and die?  Silently, without calling  for help, with their cubs...
Can you imagine any reason at all for that suicide?

     "Why did they do it before?"

     "Why they  did it  before is also  unknown.  But  back then, one  could
conjecture.  Whales were  tormented  by parasites,  they  were  attacked  by
swallows and squids, they were attacked by people... There was even a theory
that they were killing themselves as a protest. But today!"

     "What do specialists say?"

     'The specialists sent a  query  to COMCON-1: to determine the  cause of
the reactivated incidents of suicide in whales."

     "Hmmm. I see. What do the shepherds say?"

     "It  all  started  with  the  shepherds.  They maintain that it's blind
horror that  makes the whales kill themselves. And  the shepherds just can't
imagine what today's whales have to fear."

     "Hmmm," Grisha said. "It looks like you really can't get by without the
Wanderers in this case.

     "Can't get by,"  wrote  Tolvo, drew a  box around the  words, and  then
another one, and started filling in the space between them.

     "But  on  the  other hand," Grisha went on, "it's all  happened before,
over and over. We lose ourselves in conjectures, blame the Wanderers,  twist
our brains, and then we look and  -- bah! -- who's that familiar  figure  on
the horizon of events? Who's that so elegant and with the proud smile of the
Lord God  on  the  evening  of the  sixth  day  of creation? Whose  familiar
snow-white  Van Dyke beard is that? Mister Fleming,  sir! Where do  you come
from! What  are  you doing here? Won't  you step  on the carpet, sir? To the
World Council, the Extraordinary Tribunal?"

     "You must agree that wouldn't be the worst thing," Toivo noted.

     "Not at all!  Though sometimes it seems  to me  that  I would prefer to
deal  with dozens of  Wanderers rather than  one Fleming. Of  course, that's
probably  because the Wanderers  are almost  hypothetical  creatures,  while
Fleming with his beard is  a totally real beast. Depressingly real, with his
snow-white beard, his Lower Pesha, his  scientific bandits, his damned world
fame!"

     "I can see that his beard really bugs you..."

     "His  beard  is one  the  few  things that doesn't,"  Grisha  countered
acidly.  "We  could  grab him  by  that  beard.  But how will  we  grab  the
Wanderers, if it turns out to be them?"

     Toivo neatly put away the pen, got up, and  stood by the winder. Out of
the  comer of his  eye, he could see Grisha watching him carefully, his feet
firmly  planted on the  floor and  even leaning  forward. It was quiet,  the
display of the terminal beeping softly in rhythm co the count.

     "Or are you hoping that it's not them'!" Grlsha asked.

     Toivo did not answer for some time, and then he spoke without turning.

     "Now I don't hope."

     "What do you mean'!"

     "It's them."

     Grisha narrowed his eyes.

     "What do you mean?"

     Toivo turned to him.

     "I'm certain that the Wanderers are on Earth and are active."

     Grisha later said that at that moment he felt a  very unpleasant shock.
He had a feeling that the  whole  scene was unreal. Everything here depended
on the personality  of  Toivo Glumov. The words of  Toivo  Glumov were  very
difficult to connect to Toivo Glumov's personality. The words could not be a
joke, because Toivo never joked about the Wanderers. Toivo's words could not
be  considered hasty,  because  Toivo  never spoke  hastily.  And the  words
certainly  could not  be the  truth, because they could not be the truth. Of
course, Toivo could be mistaken...

     Grisha asked in a tense voice: "Does the Big Bug know?"

     "I've reported all the facts to him."

     "And?"

     "As you see, for now, nothing," Toivo said.

     Grisha relaxed and leaned back in his chair.

     "You're simply mistaken," he said in relief.

     Toivo was silent.

     "Damn you!" Grisha cried. "You frightened  me to death with your gloomy
fantasies! It was like being plunged into ice water!"

     Toivo was silent. He turned back to the window. Grisha groaned, grabbed
the tip of his nose, and, grimacing, performed circular contortions with it.

     "No," he said. "I'm  not like you, that's the problem. I  can't do  it.
It's  too serious. The whole thing repulses me. It's not a personal issue; I
believe,  and  the rest  of you can do what you want.  If I were  to believe
that,  I  would have to drop  everything else, sacrifice everything I  have,
reject  everything...  be shriven,  in  effect,  damn it!  But  our life  is
multivarianted!  How can  you just make  it  fit one  mold only? Though,  of
course,  sometimes I  feel ashamed  and  afraid, and then I  regard you with
special awe and delight... But sometimes -- like now, for instance  -- I get
mad  just  looking  at  you  ...  at your self-flagellation,  your  martyred
obsession... And  then I want to  joke, to mock you, to laugh off everything
you hold before us..."

     "Listen," Toivo said, "what do you want from me?"

     Grisha  said nothing.  "Really," he muttered at last. "What  do  I want
from you? I don't know."

     "But I do. You want everything to be good and better every day."

     "Yep."

     Grisha wanted  to add something, something light  and funny  that would
smooth over the awkward intimacy  that  had arisen between them in  the last
few minutes, but  the  computer signaled the end of  the  program,  and  the
printer began pushing out the paper in short bursts.

     Toivo looked at the  whole thing, line by line, neatly folded it on the
perforations, and stuck it in the storage memory slot.

     "Anything interesting?" Grisha asked with sympathy.

     "What can I say ..." Toivo  muttered. He really was thinking hard about
something else. "It's the spring of 81 all over again."

     "What do you mean, all over again?"

     Toivo ran his fingers over the terminal's sensor, starting the next top
of instructions.

     "In  March 81,"  he  said, "after  two  hundred  years,  was the  first
recorded incident of mass suicide of gray whales."

     "So," Grisha said impatiently. "But why all over again?"

     Toivo got up.

     "It's a long story," he said.  "You'll read the  report later. Let's go
home."

     TOIVO GLUMOV AT HOME.
     8 May 99. Late Evening

     They ate dinner in a room  crimson with sunset. Asya was in a bad mood.
Pashkovsky's  yeast,  brought  to the  delicatessen  combine  straight  from
Pandora  (in  living biocontainers, covered with terra-cotta  hoarfrost  and
bristling with homed respirator crooks, six  kilos of the  precious yeast in
each sack), had  rioted again.  The taste-smell had crossed over  into Sygma
class,  and the  bitterness had  risen to  the last  allowable  degree.  The
experts  were  divided.  The Master demanded  that  they  cease making their
alapaichiks, famous all over the planet, until they cleared things up, while
Bruno, an insolent  chatterbox, a boy, declared:  "Why bother?" He had never
dared raise his voice against the Master, and  today suddenly  he was giving
speeches. The regular fans would simply  not notice such a subtle  change in
flavor,  and as for the gourmets, well, he  bet his head that at least every
fifth gourmet would be ecstatic over a  taste change like that... Who needed
his  head? But  they  supported  him!  And now  it  wasn't clear what  would
happen...

     Asya flung open the window, sat on the windowsill, and looked down into
the two kilometers of blue-green expanse.

     'Tm afraid I'll have to By to Pandora," she said.

     "For long?" Toivo asked.

     "I don't know. Maybe for long"

     "Why it that?" Toivo asked carefully.

     "You see... Master feels that we've checked everything possible here on
Earth.  That means  that there's  something wrong on the  plantations. Maybe
there's  a new  strain... or maybe  something's happening in transit ...  We
don't know."

     You've gone  to Pandora  once already," Toivo said, growing grin.  "You
went for a week and stayed three months."

     "What can I do?"

     Toivo scratched his cheek and groaned.

     "I don't  know what you can do, but I do know that three months without
you is horrible."

     "And two years without me? When you were on that... whatsitsname..."

     "Really!  Bringing  that up!  I  was young, I  was  a  fool...I  was  a
Progressor then! Iron  man  -- muscles,  mask, jaw! Listen, why doesn't your
Sonya go? She's young and pretty; she can get married there. How about it?"

     "Of course Sonya's going with me. Any other ideas?"

     "Yes. Let Master go. He  started this  whole thing,  now let him go fix
it."

     Asya merely looked at him.

     "I take it back," Toivo said quickly. "A mistake. An error."

     "He's not  even allowed  to  leave Sverdlovsk! He  has taste  buds!  He
hasn't left his block in a quarter of a century!"

     "I'll keep that in mind." Toivo began berating himself. "Forever. Never
again. I blurted it out. Made a gaffe. Let Bruno go."

     Asya spent  several  seconds burning him with  an angry  stare and then
turned back to the window.

     "Bruno  won't go," she said angrily. "Bruno is going to work on the new
bouquet. He wants to capture and  standardize it... We'll see about that..."
She  gave  Toivo a  sidelong glance and laughed.  "Aha! Got you down! 'Three
months... without you.' "

     Toivo immediately  got  up, crossed the  room, and sat on  the floor at
Asya's feet, resting his head on her lap.

     "You're due for  a vacation," Asya said. "You could hunt there ... It's
Pandora, after all! You could go to the Dunes... Look at our plantations ...
You can't imagine what the Pashkovsky plantations are like!"

     Toivo was silent, and pressed his  cheek harder against her knees. Then
she stopped talking, and they were silent for a while, until Asya asked:

     "Is something going with you?"

     "What makes you think that?"

     "I don't know. I can see."

     Toivo sighed deeply, got up from the floor, and went to the windowsill.

     "You are right," he said. "Something's happening."

     "What?"

     Toivo, squinting, examined the black streaks of clouds  cutting  across
the coppery sunset. The bluish-black clusters  of forest on the horizon. The
thin black vertical of the thousand-story buildings, standing in blocks. The
gigantic  dome  of  the  Forum  on  the left,  shimmering  copper,  and  the
unrealistically smooth surface  of  the sea  on the  right. And  the  black,
creeping swifts,  darting  from  the  hanging  gardens  a  block higher  and
disappearing in the foliage of the hanging gardens a block lower.

     "What's happening?" Asya asked.

     "You  are amazingly beautiful," Toivo said. "You have sable eyebrows. I
don't know  exactly  what those words mean,  but  they were used for someone
very beautiful. You. You're  not even  beautiful, you're gorgeous. Sweet  to
look at.  And  your concerns are sweet. And  your world is sweet.  Even  yew
Bruno is sweet, if you think about it... And the world is fine, if your must
know... 'The world is fine, a pretty flower/Happiness for five hearts all in
power/For nine kidneys/and four livers...' I  don't know what  that poem is.
But it  floated  up  in  my memory, and I wanted to read it to you... Here's
what I have  to tell  you. Remember  this! It's quite possible that I'll fly
out to join you on Pandora soon. Because his patience will burst any minute,
and he will send  me  off on vacation. Or  just send me old for good. That's
what I read  in his nut-brown eyes. As  clear as on a monitor. And now let's
have some tea."

     Asya stared at him.

     "It's not working?" she asked.

     Toivo avoided her eyes and shrugged his shoulders vaguely.

     "Because  from the very  beginning,  you  were  operating on  the wrong
theory," Asya said hotly. "Because you  set  up the problem incorrectly. You
can't set up a problem so that no result satisfies you. Your hypothesis  was
flawed to begin with -- remember, I  told you  that. If the Wanderers really
were discovered,  would that make you  happy? And  now you're  beginning  to
realize that they  don't exist, and you're not happy either. You were wrong,
you expressed the wrong hypothesis, feel as if you're losing,  when actually
you haven't lost anything."

     I've never argued  with you."  Toivo said  meekly. "It's all my  fault,
that's my fate."

     "You see, now he's disillusioned  in that idea of yours, too. Of course
I  know  he  won't  fire  you; you're  just  blabbering.  He  like  you  and
appreciates  you, and everyone knows that... But really, you can't waste all
these years -- and for what,  really? After all, you two don't have anything
but  the  naked idea. No one's arguing. The idea is rather  curious, it  can
tickle  the nerves  of anyone at all; but it's nothing more! Basically, it's
simply  the  inversion  of  a  longtime  custom  of  humanity...  it's  just
Progressorism in  reverse,  and nothing more... If we intervene in someone's
history,  then someone could intervene in ours... Wait, listen to me!  First
of all,  you two  forget that not every inversion  is  expressed in reality.
Grammar  is  one  thing,  and reality  is  another.  So at  first  it seemed
interesting, and now it seems simply...  well,  indecent, I guess... Do  you
know what one big shot said to me yesterday? He said, "We're not COMCONites,
you know', those COMCONites are enviable. When they  come up against a truly
serious mystery, they quickly attribute it to the work of the Wanderers, and
they're done!"

     "Who said that, I wonder'!" Toivo asked grimly.

     "What  difference  does it make! Now our fermenters are rebelling.  Why
should we  seek  the  causes?  It's  perfectly  clear  its  the work  of the
Wanderers! The  bloody hand of  a supercivilization!  Don't get mad, please.
Don't  get mad! You don't  like jokes like that,  but you almost  never hear
them. But I hear  them all the time.  You  don't know how much trouble I get
just  from the Sikorski Syndrome alone... And  it's not  even a joke. It's a
sentence, my dear people! It's a diagnosis!"

     Toivo had gotten himself under control.

     "Well, actually, the yeast is a thought," he said. "It's an unexplained
event! Why didn't you report it?"  he demanded severely. "Don't you know the
regulations? I'm calling Master on the carpet!"

     "It's all a joke to you," Asya said angrily. "Everybody's joking around
here!"

     "And that's fine!" Toivo  said.  "You should be  happy. When  it really
starts, you won't feel like joking."

     Asya struck her fist on her knee.

     "Oh, God!  What are you pretending for? You don't feel like joking, you
don't have  time  for  joking, and that's  what  irritates people  about you
COMCONites. You've built  this  grim,  gloomy world  around you,  a world of
threats,  fear, and  suspicion... Why? Where did you get  it? Where did that
cosmic misanthropy come from?"

     Toivo said nothing.

     "Maybe it's because all  your unexplained events are tragedies? But all
UEs are  tragedies!  Whether they're mysterious or  ordinary,  they're  UEs!
Right?"

     "Wrong," Toivo said.

     "What, are there happy Ues?"

     "Sometimes."

     "For instance?" Asya demanded, filling with venom.

     "Let's have some tea instead," Toivo suggested.

     "Oh   no,  you  please   give  me  an  example  of  a  happy,   joyous,
life-affirming UE."

     "All right," Toivo said. "But then we'll have tea. Is it a deal?"

     "The hell with you," Asya said.

     They were  silent.  Below,  through the thick foliage  of  the gardens,
through  the  silvery blue twilight, multicolored lights  went  on.  And the
black  columns of the  thousand-story buildings were covered with the sparks
of lights.

     "Do you know the name Guzhon?" Toivo asked.

     "Naturally."

     "And Soddi?"

     "Of course!"

     "What, in your opinion, makes these people special?"

     "'My  opinion!' It's not my opinion. Everyone knows  that Guzhon  is  a
marvelous composer and Soddi a great confessor... And in your opinion?"

     "In my opinion,  they  are special for  a completely different reason,"
Toivo said. "Albert Guzhon, until  he  was fifty,  was an ordinary -- but no
more  than  that  --  agrophysicist  without  any  talent  for   music.  And
Bartholomew  Soddi  studied  shadow  functions  for  forty  years and  was a
pedantic,  unsociable man. That's  what makes these  people special,  in  my
opinion."

     "What  are you trying to  say? You found  intervention in  that? People
with hidden talents worked long  and hard... and  then quantity  turned into
quality..."

     "There  wasn't any quantity, Asya, that's the  point: Only the  quality
changed suddenly. Radically. In an hour. Like an explosion."

     Asya was  silent, chewing her  lip,  and  then asked sarcastically, but
uncertainly:

     "So in your opinion, the Wanderers inspired them, right?"

     "I   didn't  say  that.  You  asked  me  to  cite  examples  of  happy,
life-affirming UEs. There you are. I can list another dozen names  -- not as
famous, though."

     "All right. But  why are you dealing with this? What business  is it of
yours, really?"

     "We deal with any unexplained events."

     "That's what  I'm  asking: what was  unexplained or extraordinary about
them?"

     "Within the parameters of current concepts, they are inexplicable."

     "Well,  lots  of things  are inexplicable  in the world!"  Asya  cried.
"Reeders are inexplicable; we're just used to them."

     "We don't consider things we're used to as  unexplained events, Asya We
deal with  incidents, events. Something hasn't  happened  ever in a thousand
years,  and then  it happens.  Why did it  happen? Unclear. How  can  it  be
explained! Specialists  are confounded. Then we  take note of it. See, Asya,
you're not classifying UEs the right way. We  don't divide  them into  happy
and tragic ones, we divide them into explicable and inexplicable ones."

     "Well, do you think that any inexplicable event carries a threat?"

     "Yes. Including happy ones."

     "What  threat  can there  be in the  unexplained  transformation  of  a
run-of-the-mill agrophysicist into a genius musician?"

     "I  didn't express  myself accurately  enough. The threat  isn't in the
event.  The most  mysterious  events, as a  rule,  are  the  most  harmless.
Sometimes  even  funny.  The  cause  of  the event  may  be  the threat. The
mechanism that gave rise to the event You can put the question this way: why
did someone need to turn an agrophysicist into a musician?"

     "Maybe it's just a statistical fluctuation!"

     "Maybe.  That's the  point,  that we don't know...  Incidentally,  note
where you have arrived. Tell me, please, why is your  explanation any better
than   ours?  Statistical  fluctuation,  by   definition  unpredictable  and
uncontrollable, or the Wanderers, who of course are no bowl of cherries, but
who at  least in principle can be caught red-handed. Of course, 'statistical
fluctuation'  sounds  much more  solid, scientific,  objective --  not those
corny, cheap-romantic, banally legendary --"

     "Wait, don't be spiteful, please," Asya said. "No one  is  denying your
Wanderers.  That's  not what I'm  talking  about.  You've confused me... you
always get me off  the track! Both me and your Maxim, and then you go around
with  your nose  drooping, and  want to be consoled...  Yes,  here's what  I
wanted to say. All right, let's assume that the Wanderers are interfering in
our  lives. That's nor the issue. Why is it bad? That's what I'm asking! Why
are you turning them into bugbears? That's what I  can't understand! And  no
one can understand... Why, when you  were changing the course of history  in
other  worlds that was all  right, but when  someone wants  to  change  your
history... Today, every child knows that super-reason is always good!"

     "Super-reason is supergood," Toivo said.

     "Well, all the more, then!"

     "No," Toivo said.  "Not all  the more. We know what good is, though not
very firmly. But as for supergood --"

     Asya struck her knees with her fists again.

     "I don't understand! I can't understand this! Where do you get all this
presumption of a threat? Tell me. Explain it!"

     "None of you  understands the premise here," Toivo said, angry now. "No
one thinks that the Wanderers are planning to do evil to earthlings. That is
really  very  unlikely. We're  afraid of  something  else altogether.  We're
afraid that they'll start doing good here, as they understand it!"

     "Good is always good!" Asya said.

     "You know perfectly well that  that isn't so. Or maybe you really don't
know? But I've explained it to you. I was a Progressor for only three years;
I brought  good, only  good, nothing but good, and Lord,! how they hated me,
those  people! And they were right. Because the gods had come without asking
permission. No  one had called them in, and there they were, doing good. The
good that is always good. And they were doing it secretly, because they know
that mortals  would not  understand  their aims, and if they did  understand
them, they wouldn't accept them... That's the moral and ethical structure of
that  damn situation! A feudal  slave in Arkanara  could not understand what
communism  is,  while  a smart bourgeois three  hundred  years  later  would
understand and recoil from communism in  horror... Those are the ABCs, which
we however don't know  how  to apply  to ourselves.  Why?  Because we  can't
imagine what  the Wanderers could have  in mind for us. The analogy  doesn't
work! But I do know  two  things. They  came without an invitation -- that's
one.  And  they are certain that we will either not understand or not accept
their goals -- that's two. And I don't know about you, but I don't want that
I do not! That's it!"  he said  with  determination. "Enough. I'm  a  tired,
unkind,  careworn   man  who   has  shouldered  a  burden  of  indescribable
responsibility.  I have the  Sikorski  Syndrome,  I'm  a  psychopath  and  a
paranoid. I don't love anyone; I'm a monster, a martyr, a monoman; I have to
be  cuddled and  soothed... You have  to tiptoe around me, kiss my shoulder,
cajole  me with jokes... and  tea.  My God, aren't I  going to get  any  tea
around here today at all?"

     Without a word, Asya jumped up and went off to make tea. Toivo lay down
on the couch. Through the window, just on the threshold of hearing, came the
buzz  of some  exotic musical instrument.  An  enormous  butterfly  flew in,
circled the table, and settled on the visor  screen, spreading its patterned
black wings. Toivo, without get  ting  up,  started to reach for the service
console, but didn't reach it and dropped his hand.

     Asya came in with a tray, poured  tea  into  the glasses, and sat  down
next to him.

     "Look," Toivo whispered, indicating the butterfly with his eyes.

     "How beautiful," Asya replied, in a whisper, too.

     "Maybe it'll want to live with us here?"

     "No, it won't."

     "Why not? Remember, the Kazaryans had a dragonfly --"

     "It didn't live with them. It just visited --"

     "So this one can visit, too. We'll call her Martha."

     "Why Martha?"

     "What else?"

     "Cynthia," said Asya.

     "No," said Toivo firmly. "No Cynthias. She's Martha. Martha Posadnitsa.
And the screen well call Posadnik."

     ***

     I am not planning to maintain that this was the exact conversation they
had late on  the  evening of May 8. But then, I do know  for sure that  they
spoke an this topic often, argued, did  not agree.  And that neither of them
could convince the other -- I know that for sure, too.

     Asya,  naturally, was incapable of transmitting  her universal optimism
to her husband. Her optimism fed on the atmosphere itself, on the people she
worked with, the essence of her work,  tasty and kind. Toivo had been beyond
the limits  of this optimistic world,  in the world of constant  anxiety and
tension, where optimism  is  passed from person  to  person only with  great
difficulty, under a confluence of proper circumstances, and not for long.

     And  Toivo was unable to convert  his wife into an  ally, to infect her
with his sensation of pending doom.  His arguments lacked concreteness. They
were too  speculative. They were a worldview, unconfirmed for Asya. He never
did  "horrify  her,"  infect  her   with  his  revulsion,  indignation,  and
hostility...

     That is why,  when the storm broke, they were so unprepared, as if they
bad never  had  these  arguments  and  lights, these  ferocious attempts  to
convince each other.

     On  the morning  of  May 9,  Toivo  left for Kharkov to  meet with  the
clairvoyant Hirota and  to close  the case on  the visit  of the  Wizard for
good.

     [End of Document 9]

DOCUMENT 10: T. Glumov: Theme 009 "A Visit from an Old Lady"
     Addendum to Report 061/99

DOCUMENT 11: T. Glumov: Memorandum on The Institute of Eccentrics

DOCUMENT 12: T. Glumov: A Working Phonogram

DOCUMENT 13: T. Glumov: Information on the Events at Little Pesha.

DOCUMENT 14: Glumov Requests a Leave of Absence to visit Pandora.
     Permission Denied.

     REPORT COMCON-2
     No.017/99 Urals-North

     Date: 9 May 99

     FROM: T. Glumov, Inspector
     THEME: 009 "A Visit from an Old Lady"
     CONTENTS: Addendum to report No.016/99

     Susumu Hirota, a.k.a. Senrigan, received me in his  office at 10:45. He
is a short,  well-built old man  who  looks much  older than his age. He  is
quite  taken with his  "gift," and uses any opportunity  to  demonstrate the
gift: your wife is having problems at  work... she  will  definitely  fly to
Pandora;  don't hope that it  will be settled  without her... this pen was a
present  from a friend, and you forgot to give it to your wife... And so on,
in the same manner.  Rather unpleasant, I  might  add.  The  Wizard's  Exit,
according to him, looked like this:  "He must have  been afraid that I would
learn  something secret about  him, and he turned to flee. It never occurred
to  him that I saw him as an empty  whitish screen  with a  single  contrast
detail. After all, he is a creature from another world..."

     T. Glumov

     [End of Document 10.]

     IMPORTANT! REPORT COMCON-2
     No.018/99 Urals - North

     Date: 9 May 99

     FROM: T. Glumov, Inspector
     THEME: 009 "A Visit from an Old Lady"
     CONTENTS: The Institute of Eccentrics is interested in the witnesses to
the incident in Little Pesha.

     During my conversation with the dispatcher  on duty at the Institute of
Eccentrics, on May 9 at 11:50 the following incident took place.

     In  talking to  me, the duty dispatcher, Temirkanov, was simultaneously
transferring  data from  the display  terminal into  the main  computer very
quickly  and  professionally.  The data  appeared on the control display and
were  in this format:  surname,  name,  patronymic; (apparently)  age:  town
(place of birth? place of residence; place of work?);profession;  a  certain
six-digit index. I had  not been  paying  attention to  the display until it
read:

     KUBOTIEVA ALBINA MILANOVNA 96 BALLERINA ARKHANGELSK 001507

     Then two surnames that said nothing to me, and then:

     KOSTENETSKY KIR 12 SCHOOLBOY PETROZAVODSK 001507

     A reminder: these two are witnesses of the incident in Little Pesha, of
my report No.015/99 of 7 May.

     Apparently,  I must have lost self-control for  a few  seconds, because
Temirkanov asked  what was so amazing. I got out of  it by saying that l was
surprised to see Albina Kubotieva,  a ballerina my parents had always talked
about, being wild balletomanes; it seemed strange to see  her name here; was
the Great  Albina a metapsychological talent,  too? Temirkanov  laughed  and
said  that it wasn't ruled  out. According to him,  all  the branches of the
Institute receive a  steady list of  people who  theoretically  could  be of
interest  to the metapsychotogists.  The majority of the  information  comes
from  the  terminals  of clinics, hospitals,  first-aid  stations, and other
medical  establishments  equipped  with  standard  psychoanalyzers.  In  the
Kharkov  branch  alone,   hundreds   of  candidates   are  listed   over   a
twenty-four-hour  period, but they're almost all  useless: "eccentrics" make
up only one hundred-thousandth of a percent of all the candidates.

     In the situation at hand, I felt it was proper to change the topic.

     T. Glumov

     [End of Document 11.]

     WORKING PHONOGRAM

     Date: 10 May 99

     INTERLOCUTORS: M. Kammerer, head of UE department; T. Glumov, inspector
     THEME: 009 "A Visit from an Old Lady"
     CONTENTS: Institute of Eccentrics is a possible object for theme 009.

     KAMMERER:  Curious. You notice things, though, fellow. What an eye! But
you have a theory ready, I'm sure. Go on.

     GLUMOV: The final conclusion or the reasoning?

     KAMMERER: The reasoning, please.

     GLUMOV: It's easiest to assume that the names  of Albina and  Kit  were
sent  to  Kharkov  by  some enthusiast of metapsychology. If  he had  been a
witness to the  event  in Little  Pesha, he could  have  been amazed by  the
anomalous reaction of those two, and reported his observations to  competent
authorities.  I thought  about  it: at least three people  could  have that.
Basil Neverov, the emergency-squad man.  Oleg Pankratov, lecturer and former
astroarchaeologist.  And his  wife  Zosya Lyadova,  artist.  Of course, they
weren't  witnesses  in  the narrow meaning  of the word,  but in the present
situation it  doesn't matter...  Without your  permission,  I did  not  risk
talking to them, even though I consider it a possibility -- to just clear it
with them, did they give information to the Institute or not...

     KAMMERER: There's an even simpler way...

     GLUMOV: Yes, the index. Ask the Institute. But that way is no good, and
here's why. If it was a volunteer enthusiast, it'll be cleared up, and there
won't be anything to talk about. But I'd like to look at another version. To
wit: there were no volunteer informants,  but there was a  special  observer
from the Institute of Eccentrics.

     GLUMOV:  Let's  assume that  there  was  a special  observer  from  the
Institute  of  Eccentrics  at  Little  Pesha.  That  would  mean  that  some
psychological  experiment was  going on there, with the aim of sorting  out,
say, normal  people from extraordinary  people.  For Instance, to then  seek
"eccentricity"  among  the  extraordinary people. In that  case,  one of two
things. Either the Institute of Eccentrics  is an ordinary  research center,
where ordinary researchers work and set  up  ordinary experiments -- however
dubious  morally, but  in  the  final analysis intended  for the  benefit of
science. But then it is  not  clear where they  get  the technology that far
surpasses even  the prospective capabilities of our embryomechanics and  our
bioconstruction.

     (Pause)

     GLUMOV: Or the experiment  in Little Pesha was organized not by people,
as we had assumed before.  Then in  what  light do we see  the Institute  of
Eccentrics?

     (Pause)

     GLUMOV:  Then the  Institute is no  institute, the  eccentrics  are  no
eccentrics at  all,  and the personnel is  not  working on metapsychology at
all.

     KAMMERER: On what, then? What are they doing and who are they?

     GLUMOV: You mean you don't consider my arguments convincing again?

     KAMMERER:  On the  contrary,  my boy.  On  the contrary!  They  are too
convincing,  your  arguments.  But I  would like  you to formulate your idea
directly, dryly, and unambiguously. As if in a report.

     GLUMOV: All right. The so-called Institute  of Eccentrics is actually a
weapon of the Wanderers to sort out people according to a sign unknown to me
for now. That's it.

     KAMMERER: And consequently, Danya Logovenko, the deputy director there,
my longtime friend --

     GLUMOV: (interrupting) No! That would  be too  fantastic.  But  perhaps
your Danya Logovenko had been sorted out a long, long time ago. His longtime
acquaintance with you doesn't guarantee against it. He's been sorted out and
works with  the Wanderers.  Like all the personnel at  the Institute, not to
mention the "eccentrics."...

     GLUMOV: They'  been  sorting  for a least twenty  years. When  they had
enough sorted  ones, they organized  the Institute, put in their chambers of
sliding  frequencies, and  under the  excuse of searching  for  "eccentrics"
check  out ten thousand  people a year...  And we don't  even know how  many
other institutions like that there are under the most varied labels.

     (Pause)

     GLUMOV: And the Wizard  ran  off back  to Saraksh  not because  he  was
insulted or had a stomach ache. He sensed the Wanderers! Like our whales and
the  lemmings... "When the  blind see  the seeing" -that's about you and me.
"Me sees the mountains and  forests and doesn't see a thing" --  that's also
about us, Big Bug!

     (Pause)

     GLUMOV: So we can be the first people in history to catch the Wanderers
red-handed.

     KAMMERER: Yes. And it all began with two names  which  you accidentally
noticed  on the  display. By  the way, are  you  sure  it  was no accident'!
(quickly) All right, all right, let's skip it. What do you suggest?

     GLUMOV: Me?

     KAMMERER: Yes, you.

     GLUMOV: We-ell, if you want my opinion... The first steps, I think, are
obvious. First of all, we  must  determine  if the  Wanderers are there  and
figure out the sorted ones. Organize  hidden mentoscopic observation and, if
necessary, do enforced extra-deep  mentoscopy on  everyone there... I assume
they're prepared for that and will  block out memory...  That's not  so bad,
that would be evidence... It would be worse if  they know how to paint false
memory...

     KAMMERER: All  right. Enough. You're a fine  boy. Congratulations,  you
did good  work.  And now, listen to my orders. Prepare  for me lists  on the
following people. First: people with  the inversion of the Penguin Syndrome,
everyone  registered with doctors  to  this day.  Second: people who did not
undergo fukamization --

     GLUMOV: (interrupting) That's more than a million people!

     KAMMERER: No, I  mean the  people who refused the "maturity injection."
That's  twenty thousand people.  You'll have to work, but we must  be  fully
armed. Third: Collect all our  data on people  who vanished without a  trace
and put it all into one list.

     GLUMOV: Including those who returned later?

     KAMMERER: Especially those. Sandro is working on that;  I'll put him on
this with you. That's it.

     GLUMOV:  A list of inverts,  a  list of  refusers,  and a  list of  the
reappeared. Fine. But still, Big Bug...

     KAMMERER: Go on.

     GLUMOV: Still allow me to talk with Neverov and that couple from Little
Pesha.

     KAMMERER: For the sake of your conscience?

     GLUMOV: Yes. What if it's just an ordinary volunteer enthusiast...

     KAMMERER:  Permission granted.  (after  a  brief pause)  I wonder  what
you'll do if it does turn out to be an ordinary volunteer enthusiast...

     [End of Document 12.]

     I've just  played that phonogram over  again. My voice  then was young,
important, confident, the voice of a man who  determined people's fates, for
whom there were no mysteries  in the past, the present, or the future, a man
who knew what he was  doing  and who  was right all  around. Now I am simply
astounded at what a marvelous actor and hypocrite  I was  then.  Actually, I
was on the last  of my nerves and willpower  then. I had a plan of action, I
was  waiting  and couldn't  wait  for the President's  sanctions, and I  was
trying to build up the nerve to go to Komov without the sanctions.

     And  for  all  that,   I  remember  clearly  the  enormous  pleasure  I
experienced listening to  Toivo Glumov and watching him. For this really was
his  hour of triumph. He  had  looked  for  them  for  E  ordinary volunteer
enthusiast five years -- those non-humans who had secretly invaded his Earth
-- looked  for them,  despite  constant  failure, almost alone, unsupported,
tormented by his beloved wife's disbelief, looked  for them and found  them.
He  was right. He  was  more persistent than the rest -- more  patient, more
serious  --  than all  those wise guys, those  lightweight philosophers, the
intellectual ostriches.

     Actually, I am ascribing that feeling  of triumph to him. I don't think
that he felt anything at  that moment except  pathological  impatience -- to
grab the  enemy by the  throat at last. For  having  proved incontrovertibly
that his enemy was  on Earth and acting,  he still  had  no idea  how he had
proved it.

     But I  did. And still, looking at him that morning,  I was so proud  of
him, so delighted in him, he could have been my son. And I would have wanted
a son like him.

     I loaded him up with work primarily because I wanted to keep him in his
office  at  his desk. There was  still no reply from the Institute, and  the
work on the lists had to be done anyway.

     REPORT COMCON-2
     No.019/99 Urals-North

     Date: 10 May 99

     FROM: T. Glumov, Inspector
     THEME: 009 "A Visit from an Old Lady"
     CONTENTS: Information  on the events  in Little Pesha  was  sent to the
institute of Eccentrics by O. O. Pankratov.

     In  accordance with your requests, I  conducted conversations  with  B.
Neverov and O. Pankratov  and Z.  Laydova with the object  of determining if
any  of  them  sent information  to  the Institute  of  Eccentrics about the
anomalous behavior of certain people during the incident at Little  Pesha on
the night of 6 May of this year.

     1.  The conversation  with Basil Neverov,  emergency-squad member, took
place  by  videochannel  yesterday  around  noon. The conversation  held  no
operative  interest.  B. Neverov had  certainly never heard of the Institute
before I mentioned it.

     2. Oleg Olegovich Pankratov and his wife,  Zosya Lyadova, I met in  the
corridors of  the  regional  conference  of amateur  astroarchaeologists  in
Syktyvkar. Over  a  casual cup of coffee,  Oleg  Olegovich actively and with
pleasure picked up the conversation I  began on the marvels of the Institute
of  Eccentrics  and,  on  his own initiative, without  any  forcing from me,
conveyed the following facts:
     -- For many years  now he  has been a steady  activist of the Institute
and even has his own index as a separate and steady source of information;
     -- It  was  thanks  to efforts that  such  marvelous phenomena as  Tira
Glazuzskaya  ("Black  Eye"),  Lebey Malang (psychoparamorph), and Konstantin
Movzon  ("Lord   of   the  Flies   V")   came   to  the  attention  of   the
metapsychologists;
     -- He was very grateful to me for the information on the amazing Albina
and the fantastic Kir,  which t had  given him so kindly that day in  Little
Pesha, and which he immediately sent on to the Institute;
     --  He  had  been  to  the  Institute  three  times --  at  the  annual
conferences of  activists;  he did  not personally know Daniil Alexandrovich
Logovenko, but he had great respect for him as an outstanding scientist.

     3. In connection with the above, I feel that my report No.018/99 has no
interest for theme 009.

     T. Glumov

     [End of Document 13.]

     REPORT To Head of UE Dept -- M. Kammerer
     From Inspector T. Glumov

     Please give me a leave  of  absence  for  six months because I  need to
accompany my wife on a long business trip to Pandora.

     10/5/99

     T. Glumov

     RESOLUTION: Permission denied. Continue your assignment.

     10 May 99

     M. Kammerer

     [End of Document 14.]

DOCUMENT 15: Unusual Events Department: 11 May.

DOCUMENT 16: Theme 101 "Rip Van Winkle." Mtbevari, Inspector.

DOCUMENT 17: The Head of the UE Department from the President

DOCUMENT 18: Charles Laboraut to Mac!

DOCUMENT 19: Memorandum from 17; Interlocutors 13 May 99.

DOCUMENT 20: T. Glumov: Theme 009 "A Visit from an Old Lady"

     UNUSUAL EVENTS DEPARTMENT. ROOM "D."

     11 MAY 99

     On the  morning of  May 11,  a  grim  Toivo  came  to  work and  saw my
resolution. He  must  have calmed down  overnight.  He did  not  protest  or
insist,  but hunkered down in room  D  and  started working  on the  list of
inverts, soon coming  up with seven, only two of whom  were named,  the rest
given as "patient Z., servomechanic,"  "Theodore P.,  ethnolinguist," and so
on.

     Around noon, Sandro Mtbevari  showed up in room D, haggard, yellow, and
frazzled. He  sat down  at his desk and, without any  preamble  or the usual
jokes (when he  came back from long trips),  told  Toivo  that  on Big Bug's
orders he was reporting to him, but would first like to finish his report on
his trip. "What's the  holdup?" Toivo asked  warily, rather surprised by the
man's  appearance.  "The   holdup,"  Sandro  answered  irritably,  "is  that
something happened to him and he wasn't  sure whether it  should be included
in the report or not, and if so, then in what light."

     And  he began  to tell him, choosing his words with difficulty, getting
the details confused, and laughing convulsively at himself throughout.

     This  morning  he  got  out  of  the  zero-cabin  at the resort town of
Rosalinda (not  far from Biarritz),  covered some  five kilometers  down  an
empty, rocky path  through vineyards, and  appeared  at  his goal around ten
o'clock: there was  the Valley of  Roses. The path led down to the Bon Vent,
whose  pointed roof  stuck  out through  the  thick  foliage  below.  Sandro
automatically  noted the time -- it was ten to ten, just as he had  planned.
Before  starting  the descent to  the  house, he sat  down on a round  black
boulder and shook the pebbles from his sandals. It was already very hot, and
the sun-warmed boulder burned through his shorts, and he was very thirsty.

     Apparently, at just  that moment he felt sick. There was ringing in his
ears, and the sunny  day grew dark.  He thought  that he was going down  the
path, walking,  without sensing his legs, past  a cheery  gazebo that he had
not noticed from above, past a  glider with  an  open top  and a topsy-turvy
engine (as if entire sections had been removed), past a huge shaggy dog that
lay in the shade and indifferently watched him, its red tongue lolling. Then
he  went up the steps to the veranda, entwined in roses. He definitely heard
the steps creaking, but he still did not feel his legs. In the depths of the
veranda there stood a table covered with strange objects, and at the foot of
the table leaning on widespread arms, was the man he needed.

     The man raised his tiny eyes, hidden beneath gray eyebrows, and a  look
of  regret  crossed  his face. Sandro  introduced  himself  and,  almost not
hearing his  own voice, told him his  cover  story. But  before he got out a
dozen sentences, the man wrinkled up his face and said, "I can't believe it,
you're really here at the wrong time!" Sandro came to his  senses, surfacing
from semiconsciousness, covered in sweat and holding his right sandal in his
hand. He was sitting on the boulder, the hot granite was burning through his
shorts, and the time was still ten to ten. Well,  maybe  fifteen seconds had
passed, no more.

     He put  on  the  sandal, wiped his  sweaty  bee,  and  then had another
attack, apparently. He was going down  the path again,  not  feeling his own
legs; the world looked  as if he was seeing it  with a neutral filter on his
eyes, and  only one thought was going though his mind: "I  can't believe it,
how I'm really here at  the wrong  time!" And once again on his left was the
cheery gazebo (a doll without arms  and only one  leg lay on the floor), and
he passed the glider (a lively imp was drawn on the  side),  and there was a
second glider, farther back,  also with the hood  up, and the dog had pulled
in its  tongue and was dozing, its heavy head on its  paws. (What  a strange
dog; was it a dog at all?)  The creaky steps.  The coolness  of the veranda.
And  once more  the man looked at  him from beneath his brows,  wrinkled his
face, and  spoke in a fake threatening  tone,  the way you talk to a naughty
child: "What did I tell you? Inconvenient!  Shoo!" And Sandro woke up again.
But now he wasn't on  the boulder, but  next to it on the dry prickly grass,
and he was nauseated.

     What's the matter with me today? he thought with fear and sadness,  and
tried to get himself in hand. The world was still subdued and his ears still
rang, but at the same time Sandro had himself in full control. It was almost
exactly ten o'clock, and  he was  very thirsty; but  he no longer felt weak,
and he had to complete his mission. He got up and  saw that the man had come
out on the  path  and stopped, looking in Sandro's direction,  and then  the
shaggy dog came  out of  the bushes and stood at the  man's  feet  and  also
looked  at Sandro,  and Sandro  realized that it wasn't  a dog  but a  young
Golovan. And  Sandro  raised  his arm, not knowing why,  either as a sign of
greeting or to get their attention, but the  man turned  his  back,  and the
world grew black before Sandro's eyes and went off obliquely down and to the
left.

     When he regained consciousness yet again,  he was sitting on a bench in
the midst of the reset Rosalinda, next to the zero-cabin he had arrived  in.
He was  still  nauseated and thirsty, but the world was clear and welcoming.
It  was  10:42.  Insouciant,  festive people passed  by, then looked  at him
anxiously  and slowed down, and a robot waiter rolled over and brought him a
beaded glass of something...

     Hearing him out, Toivo  was silent for a while and then spoke, choosing
his words carefully.

     "That has to be included in the report, for sure."

     "Let's assume so," Sandro said. "But in what accent?"

     "Write it the way you told me."

     "I told you it as if I got sick in  the heat and the whole thing was  a
delirium."

     "You're not sure it was a delirium?"

     "How  should  I  know?  But I  could  have  told it  as  if I had  been
hypnotized, as if it had been an induced hallucination..."

     "Do you think the Golovan induced the hallucination?"

     "I don't know. Maybe. But probably  not He was too far from me -- about
seventy meters, at least -- and he was too young for those tricks. And then:
what for?"

     They were silent. Then Toivo asked: "What did Big Bug say?"

     "Oh, he  didn't even let me  open my mouth, he didn't even  look at me.
'I'm busy. You're working for Glumov now.' "

     "Tell  me,"  Toivo  said,  "are you sure that you didn't go down to the
house even once?"

     "I'm not sure of anything. I am sure that  there's something very dirty
going  on  with  these Val  Winkles. I've been  working on  them  since  the
beginning  of the  year, and  nothing's  clear.  On the contrary, things get
darker  with every  incident...  Well, there hasn't been anything like today
before, that was extra special..."

     Toivo spoke through  gritted teeth. "But don't you see  what  it smells
of, if it really  happened?" He had a sudden thought. "Wait! How about  your
registrator? What does your registrator say?"

     Sandra replied with a look of total  submission to fate:  "Nothing's on
my registrator. It wasn't turned on."

     "Really, now!"

     "I  know. Except I remember distinctly recharging it and  turning it on
before I left."

     [End of Document 15.]

     No.047/99 Urals-North

     Date: 4 -- 11 May 99

     FROM: S. Mtbevari, Inspector
     THEME: 101 "Rip Van Winkle"
     CONTENTS: Result of the inspection on "Group of 80."

     I received  your orders  on  the  inspection  the morning of  May 4.  I
started immediately.

     4 May at 22:40.

     Astangov, Yuri  Nikolaevich. Not at registered address. No new  address
left in the BVI.  Questioned relatives, friends, and business associates, to
no avail. General response: can't tell you anything, haven't been in contact
the  last few years. After his  return in 95 he became even more of a hermit
than  before  his disappearance. Checked with  the  cosmodrome network,  the
circumterrestrial zero-Ts, the system of HD enterprises (heightened danger):
nothing. Suggestion: Yuri Astangov, like last time, has "secluded himself in
the debris of the Amazon Basin to polish his new  philosophical system." (It
would  be  interesting  to  talk  to  someone  familiar  with  his  previous
philosophical system. Doctors deny it, but I think he's a psycho.)

     6 May, at 23:30

     Lehair, Fernand. He saw  me at his registered address at  11:05. I gave
him my cover story,  after which we chatted until 12:50. Lehair told me that
he  feels  wonderful,  is  not  experiencing any  symptoms  of  illness,  no
consequences  of his  amnesia during the years 89-91,  and therefore sees no
need  to be  mentoscoped.  He  can  add nothing new to what he said  in  91,
because  he  still  remembers  nothing.   Transmantle  engineering  has  not
interested  him  in a  long time, and  for the  last few yeas  he  has  been
inventing and researching multimeasure games. He spoke in a kindly but vague
manner.  Then   he  grew  animated:  he  decided  to   teach  me  the   game
"snip-snap-snurre." We parted on that (I later learned that F. Lehair really
has become a major specialist  in multimeasure games; he's  been dubbed "the
joker for academicians.")

     Tuul, Albert Oskarovich. Not at registered address.  New address in the
BVI: Venusborg (Venus). Not at that address either. The data on his Venerian
registration: A. Tuul never showed  up on Venus. In  97, he told his  mother
that he wanted to work. with the Pathfinders in the Hius camp (on the planet
Kala-i-Moog). Since  then,  she has  been receiving  cards  from him  rather
regularly (the  last  this  March).  These  are  actually long letters  with
detailed  and rather artistic descriptions of his searches for traces of the
civilization of "werewolves." Data from Hius  camp: A. Tuul was never there,
but he  regularly  calls on  the zero-communicator the  grounddigger  of the
group, E. Kapustin, who is absolutely certain  that his good pal A.  Tuul is
living, on Earth at his registered address. Kapustin last spoke with Tuul on
January 1. Check on the cosmodrome  network reveals that since 96 (the  year
he reappeared)  he's  gone into Deep Space several times, and returned  from
Resort the last  time in October 98.  Check on circumterrestrial zero-T: has
visited  the moon several times,  also the "Greenhouses," and  BOP. Check on
systems of HD enterprises: since December 96  through October  97 worked  at
the abyssal laboratory Tuskarora-16 as a gastronome. Supposition: A. Tuul is
a  very  lighthearted person, with a  low level of civic responsibility; the
incident in 89 taught him  nothing,  and he still does not wish to admit the
importance of such a trifle as precise personal address.

     8 May 99, at 22:10.

     Bagration, Mavrikii  Amazaspovich. Not  at registered address.  No  new
address in the BVI. Due to his advanced age, he has no near living relatives
with  whom  he  is  in  steady  contact.  His  business  ties  broke  off  a
quarter-century ago.  His two old friends,  known  horn the investigation of
this disappearance in 81, are not at their registered  addresses, and I have
not yet been able  to determine  their whereabouts. Checks on the cosmodrome
network,  the circumterrestrial  zero-T, and  the  HD  enterprises  systems:
nothing.  Data from the  gerontological center: they haven't  been  able  to
catch  the  object  of  this  investigation  for  years...  Supposition:  an
unregistered fatal  accident. I would consider it proper to find his friends
and let them know.

     Jan, Martin. Not at registered address. New  address in the BVI: Matrix
base (Second, EN  7113).  Sent to Matrix in  January 93  by the Institute of
Bioconfigurations (London) as an interpreter. At the present (since 98), has
been  on  a long  vacation; location unknown. Checks on cosmodrome  network,
circumterrestrial zero-T, and HD enterprises systems: nothing since December
98. A curiosity: S. Van,  a neighbor of M.  Jan's at the registered address,
maintains that he saw  Jan in  March of  this year; Jan appeared  before his
very  eyes in his yard in a  glider and without going into  the house  began
taking the glider apart;  he replied casually to Jan's greeting and  avoided
conversation; Van went off and  when he returned  several hours later,  both
Jan  and  the  glider  were  gone,  never  to  reappear.  This  story  seems
interesting, since the mystery  of Jan's first disappearance was in the fact
that  the  registrator of  the cosmodrome  network  did not have either  his
departure or his arrival. Question: are  there  organisms whose genetic code
is not perceived or registered by existing registration?

     TO THE HEAD OF THE UE DEPARTMENT FROM THE PRESIDENT

     Dear Big Bug!

     Can't do anything  about it.  They're  putting me  in  the hospital for
surgery.  However, every  cloud has a  silver lining. G. Komov is  adding my
responsibilities to  his own  (starting tomorrow, I  think).  I passed  your
materials along to him. I won't hide the fact that he was skeptical.  But he
knows me, and he knows you. Now he is prepared, so that you have a chance to
convince him, especially if  you have been able to obtain the materials  you
were hoping to get. And then you will be dealing not only with the president
of Secor CC-2, but  also with an influential member of the  World Council. I
wish you success, and you wish me success, too.

     Athos. 11/05/99

     [End of Document 17.]

     Mac!

     1.  Glumov,  Toivo  Alexandrovich   was  taken   into   control  today.
(Registered 8/05).

     2. Also taken under control today:

     -- Kaskazi, Artek 18 student Tehran 7/05
     -- Mauki, Charles 63 mari-technician Odessa 8/05

     Laborant

     11 May 99

     [End of Document 18.]

     This must  be strange, but I can hardly remember my feelings when I got
that amazing  missive from Laborant. I do remember one sensation --  like an
unexpected and vile slap in the face, for no reason, for nothing, out of the
blue, when  you  don't expect it, when  you're  expecting  something else. A
childish hurt,  tearful - that's all I  remember, and that's all that's left
from what  must have been an hour that I  spent with my  mouth wide open and
staring straight ahead.

     I  must have had  thoughts of betrayal and treason.  I  must  have been
enraged, embittered,  and disappointed because I  had worked  out a definite
plan of action,  with a part for  everyone, and  now there was a hole in the
plan  and no way  of  plugging it up. And bitterness, of  course,  there was
desperate bitterness, of loss, the loss of a friend, an ally, a son.

     And most probably there was a temporary blackout, chaos not of feelings
but of the debris of feelings.

     Then gradually I regained control and went back to reasoning --  coldly
and methodically, the way I had to reason in my position.

     The wind of the gods raises storms but it also fills sails.

     Reasoning  coldly  and  methodically,  I found a new place  for the new
Toivo Glumov in my plan on  that muggy morning. And that new place seemed to
me then to be incomparably more important than the old one. My plan acquired
a long-range prospect, and now we could attack instead of defend ourselves.

     On that  same day, I reached Komov, and he  gave me an appointment  for
the next day, the twelfth of May.

     On May 12, early in the morning he saw me in the President's office.  I
gave him all the materials  I  had gathered by then. The conversation lasted
five  hours.  My plan  was approved  with  insignificant changes. (I  cannot
maintain that  I  managed  to  fully overcome Komov's skepticism, but  I did
manage to interest him without any doubt.)

     On May 12, when I came back to my office, I sat for a few  minutes with
the tips of my index fingers at  my temples, in the manner of Honti  scouts,
thinking lofty thoughts, and then called in Grisha Serosovin and gave him an
assignment. At 18:05, he told me that the assignment  was completed. Now all
we had to do was wait.

     On the morning of the thirteenth, Danya Logovenko called.

     WORKING PHONOGRAM

     Date: 13 May 99

     INTERLOCUTORS: M. Kammerer, head of UE Department; D. Logovenko, deputy
director of the Kharkov Branch, IMI
     THEME X X X
     CONTENTS X X X

     LOGOVENKO: Hello, Maxim, it's me.

     KAMMERER: Greetings. What do you have to say?

     LOGOVENKO: I say that it was cleverly done.

     KAMMERER: I'm glad you like it.

     LOGOVENKO: I can't say that  I like, it much, but  I have to credit  an
old  friend. (pause) I understood it  all to mean that you want to meet with
me and speak openly.

     KAMMERER: Yes. But not I. And maybe not with you.

     LOGOVENKO: You'll have to talk to me. But if not you, who, then?

     KAMMERER: Komov.

     LOGOVENKO: Aha! So, you've made the decision...

     KAMMERER: Komov is my direct boss now.

     LOGOVENKO: Ah, so that's it, . All right. When and where?

     KAMMERER: Komov wants Gorbovsky to be part of the conversation.

     LOGOVENKO: Leonid Andreyevich? But he's on his deathbed...

     KAMMERER: Precisely. Let him hear it all. From you.

     LOGOVENKO: (after a pause) Yes. I see the time has come to talk.

     KAMMERER: Tomorrow at 15:00 at Gorbovsky's. Do you know his house? Near
Kraslava, on the Daugava River.

     LOGOVENKO: I know it. Until tomorrow. You have everything?

     KAMMERER: Everything. Till tomorrow.

     (The conversation lasted from 9:02 until 9:04.)

     [End of Document 19.]

     It's amazing that for all its pushy energetic scrupulousness, the Luden
group never bothered me about Daniil Alexandrovich  Logovenko. Yet Danya and
I go back a  long way, to the blessed Sixties, when  I,  a young, devilishly
energetic COMCONite, was taking a special course in psychology  at Kiev  U.;
where  Danya, then a young and devilishly energetic metapsychologist, was my
practicum  teacher,  and in the  evenings we  dated  charming and devilishly
spoiled Kiev girls. He obviously thought more of me than the other students;
we became friends and  saw each  other regularly for years. Then our studies
separated us, we saw each other less frequently, and in the Eighties stopped
seeing each other completely  (until the tea  at my house just  before these
events).  He was very unhappily married, and now  I know why. He was unhappy
in general, which I can't say about myself.

     In  general,  everyone  who  seriously  studies  the  era  of  the  Big
Revelation  tends  to  believe  that  he knows  perfectly  well  who  Daniil
Logovenko was. What a delusion! What does someone who has read even the most
complete collection of Newton's  works know about Newton? Yes, Logovenko had
played an extremely  important role  in the  Big  Revelation. The  Logovenko
Impulse, Logovenko's  T-program,  the  Logovenko Declaration, the  Logovenko
Committee...

     But what was the fate of Logovenko's wife; do you know that?

     And how did he end up in the courses of higher and anomalous etology in
the city of Split?

     And why in  the year 66 did he zero  in on  M.  Kammerer, energetic and
promising COMCONite, of all his students?

     And what did D.  Logovenko think of the  Big Revelation -- not lecture,
or declare, or proselytize, but think and feel in the depths  of his inhuman
soul?

     There are many such questions. I can answer some  of them accurately. I
can make suppositions about some. And for the rest, there are no answers and
never will be.

     REPORT COMCON-2
     No.020/99 Urals-North

     Date: 13 May 99

     FROM: T. Glumov, Inspector
     THEME: 009 "A Visit from an Old Lady"
     CONTENTS:  Comparison of  the lists of people with the inversion of the
Penguin Syndrome with the Theme List.

     On your orders I made up  a list from all available sources of cases of
the  inversion of the  Penguin Syndrome. I  found only twelve  cases, and  I
managed to identify  ten. Comparison of the list of identified inverts  with
the T-List gave cross-reference on the following:

     1.  Krivoklykov,  Ivan  Georgievich, 65  psychiatrist, Lemba  base  (EN
2105).

     2. Pakkala, Alf-Christian, 31 builder operator, Anchorage, Alaska.

     3. Io, Nika, 48 fabric designer, Irawadi factory, Phyapown.

     4. Tuul, Albert  Oskarovich, 59 gastronome,  whereabouts  unknown. (See
report No.047/99, S. Mtbevari.)

     The percentage of cross-references of the list seems incredibly high to
me.  The  fact  that Tuul,  A.0.,  belongs  on  three  lists  is  even  more
astonishing.

     I  feel it necessary to call  your attention to the full list of people
with the Penguin Syndrome inversion. The list is attached.

     T. Glumov

     [End of Document 20.]

DOCUMENT 21: Kraslava, Latvia

     "LEONID'S HOUSE" (KRASLAVA, LATVIA).

     14 MAY 99. 15:00

     The Daugava River near Kraslava was narrow, fast,  and clean. The sandy
strip of beach showed yellow near the water and  led to  a steep sandy slope
that reached the  fir  forest. On the gray-and-white-checked landing  square
overhanging the water,  multicolored flyers parked carelessly baked  in  the
sun. All three of them were  old-fashioned machines now used only by old men
born in the last century.

     Toivo reached for the glider's door, but I said. "Don't. Wait"

     I was looking up to where amid the  firs stood the cream-colored little
house  from  which the  stairs, made  to  look like  silvery weathered wood,
zigzagged along  the cliff.  Someone dressed in white  was slowly descending
the stairs  --  a stout, almost cubic  man, clearly very old, clutching  the
railing with  his  right  hand,  going step by step, one foot at  a time,  a
sunspot flickering  on  his  large  smooth  pate. I recognized him.  It  was
August-Johann Bader, Paratrooper and Pathfinder. A ruin of a heroic era.

     "Let's wait for him to go down," I said. "I don't want to meet him."

     I turned  away and looked in  the other direction, across the river, at
the other shore, and Toivo also turned  away tactfully. So  we sat until  we
could hear the heavy creak of the steps and the heavy,  whistling wheeze and
other inappropriate sounds; something  like sobbing,  and the old man passed
the glider, scuffing his feet along the plastic, and appeared in my field of
vision. Reluctantly, I looked at his face.

     Up dose, his face seemed totally unfamiliar to  me.  It was deformed by
grief.  The  soft  cheeks  sagged and shook,  the mouth hung open, and teats
flowed from the puffy eyes.

     Hunched over,  Bader approached the ancient yellow-green flyer  --  the
most ancient of the three, with idiotic protuberances on the hood, with ugly
visor slits for the old-fashioned autopilot, with dented sides and tarnished
chrome handles -- he approached, threw open the door, and with a grunt  or a
sob climbed in.

     Nothing happened for a  long time. The flyer stood with the  open door,
and  the old  man was either preparing himself  for  a  flight or weeping in
there, his bald  head  on  the chipped oval steering wheel. Then, at last, a
brown hand  came out  of a  white cuff and slammed  the  door.  The  ancient
machine  lifted off with unexpected lightness and in total silence  and went
off over the river between the cliffs.

     "That was Bader," I said. "Saying good-bye... Let's go."

     We got out of the glider and started up the stairs.

     I  said  without turning around, "No emotions. You're on  your way to a
report.  This  will be a  very  important business  conversation. Don't.  go
soft."

     "A  business conversation is wonderful," Toivo said  to my back. "But I
have this feeling that now is not the time for business talks."

     "You're wrong This is the very time. As for Bader... don't think  about
that now. Think about the work."

     "All right," Toivo said obediently.

     Gorbovsky's place;  "Leonid's House," was  a  standardized house of the
turn-of-the-century   architecture  --  the  favorite  of  space  travelers,
deepwater men;  and transmantle  explorers who  had grown  nostalgic for the
bucolic -- without a workroom, cattle yard, or kitchen..: but with an energy
supply to serve  the personal  zero-installation to  which  Gorbovsky., as a
member of the World Council, was entitled.  And all around were the firs and
heather,  the  air  was  redolent  of  warm   evergreens,  and  bees  buzzed
somnolently in the still air.

     We  reached the veranda  and stepped into  the house  through the  open
doors. In the living room, where the windows were  tightly shut and the only
light came  from a  floor  lamp near  the couch, sat  a  man  with  his legs
crossed,  examining in the lamplight either a map  or a mentoscheme.  It was
Komov.

     "Hello," I said, and Toivo bowed silently.

     "Hello,  hello,"  Komov said  impatiently.  "Come  in,  sit  down. He's
sleeping.  Fell asleep.  That  Triple-damned Bader wore him  out...  Are you
Glumov?"

     "Yes," Toivo said.

     Komov  looked at him closely,  curiously.  I gave a  little cough,  and
Komov stopped.

     "Your mother wouldn't happen to be Maya Toivovna Glumova?" he asked.

     "Yes," Toivo said.

     "I had the honor of working with her," Komov said.

     "Yes?" Toivo said.

     "Yes. Didn't she tell you? Operation Ark --"

     "Yes, I know the story," Toivo said.

     "What is Maya Toivovna doing now?"

     "Xenotechnology."

     "Where? With whom?"

     "At the Sorbonne. I think with Saligny."

     Komov nodded. He kept  looking at Toivo. His eyes were  glistening. You
have to realize that the  sight  of Maya  Glumov's grown son stirred  tender
memories in him. I coughed again, and Komov turned to me.

     "Incidentally, if  you need  refreshing...  The drinks are  here in the
bar.  We'll  have to wait.  I don't want to  wake him.  He's smiling in  his
sleep. Seeing something good... Damn that Bader with his sniveling!"

     "What do the doctors say?" I asked.

     "The  same  thing. No desire to live.  There's no medicine for  that...
Actually, there  is, but he doesn't want to take it. He's  lost interest  in
living -- that's the  problem. We can't understand  that...  After all, he's
over  one  hundred fifty... Tell me, please, Glumov, what  does  your father
do?"

     "I almost never see him," Toivo said. "I think he's a hybridizer now. I
think on Yayla."

     "And you  --" Komov began,  but stopped because from back in the  house
came a weak, hoarse voice.

     "Gennady! Who's there? Bring them in..."

     "Let's go;" Komov said, leaping up.

     The windows in the bedroom were  wide open. Gorbovsky was lying on  the
couch  covered with a  plaid  coverlet  up  to his  armpits,  and he  seemed
unbelievably long, thin, and  pathetic.  His cheeks  were hollow, his famous
ski nose was bony,  the sunken eyes  were sad and dull. They did not seem to
want to see anymore, but they had to see, and see they did.

     "Ah, Maxie..."  Gorbovsky said. "You're still the same. Handsome.  Glad
to see you, I am..."

     That wasn't  true. He wasn't  glad to  see Maxie. He  wasn't glad about
anything. Probably  he  thought he  was  giving  me a welcoming  smile,  but
actually his  face was in a  grimace of bored courtesy. I could feel admire,
condescending patience  in  it.  As if Leonid Andreyevich were  thinking: so
someone else is here  now... well, it can't  be for  long ... they'll leave,
like all the rest, and give me some peace.

     "And  who's this?"  Gorbovsky  inquired,  overcoming  his  apathy  with
visible effort.

     "This is  Toivo  Glumov," Komov said. "COMCONite, an  inspector. I told
you --"

     "Yes, yes, yes,." Gorbovsky said wanly.. "I remember. You did. 'A Visit
from an Old Lady.'... Sit down, Toivo, sit, my lad. I'm listening to you."

     Toivo sat down and looked questioningly at me.

     "Tell him your point of view," I said. "And give your reasons."

     Toivo began:

     "I am formulating a certain theory now. The formulation does not belong
to me. Dr. Bromberg formulated it five years ago. Here it is, the theory. In
the  early  Eighties,  a  certain  supercivilization,   which  we  call  the
Wanderers, to be brief, began actively progressorizing on our planet. One of
the  goals of that activity is selection. By  various methods  the Wanderers
are selecting from  the mass of  humanity those individuals who,  by certain
Wanderer criteria, are  suitable  for... well, suitable for contact. Or  for
further  improvement  of  the  species.  Or  even  for  transformation  into
Wanderers.  The Wanderers must certainly.  have other  goals  as well, about
which we  cannot even  guess, but it is perfectly clear to me  that they are
making selections, pulling us, and I will try to prove that now."

     Toivo stopped. Komov was staring at him. Gorbovsky seemed to be asleep,
but  his  fingers;  clasped upon his  chest,  kept moving,  tracing  complex
patterns  in  the air.  Then  he suddenly asked,  without  opening his eyes:
"Gennady, bring my guests something to drink... They must be hot."

     I jumped up, but Komov stopped me.

     "I'll get it," he mumbled, and left.

     "Go on, my boy," Gorbovsky said.

     Toivo  went on. He told about  the  Penguin Syndrome: with the aid of a
"net" the  Wanderers  set  up on  sector  41/02;  they could  reject  people
suffering  from  hidden cosmophobia and  select latent  cosmophiles. He told
about  the  incident  in  Little  Pesha:  there  with  the  aid  of  clearly
non-terrestrial biotechnology the Wanderers set up an experiment in locating
xenophobes  and  selecting  xenophiles.  He  told  of  the  battle  for  the
Amendment.  Apparently,  fukamization  either  interfered  in the Wanderers'
selection process or threatened to extinguish in future generation qualities
needed by the Wanderers, and they  somehow, organized and waged a successful
campaign to  do away with the mandatory aspect  of the  procedure.  Over the
years, the number of the  selected kept growing. It  could not go unnoticed;
we  could  not help noticing  the "selected"  and we  did notice  them.  The
disappearances  of the  Eighties...  the sudden  transformation of  ordinary
people into geniuses... the people Sandro Mtbevari just found with fantastic
abilities... and finally, the so-called Institute of Eccentrics  in Kharkov,
the undoubted  center of the Wanderer activity in discovering candidates for
selection.

     "They're not even hiding too hard," Toivo said.  "Apparently, they feel
so secure now that they're not afraid of exposure. Perhaps they feel that we
cannot  change anything  now. I don't know... Actually, I'm finished. I want
to add that only a minuscule portion  of the spectrum of their activity fell
within  our field  of vision. We must bear that in mind. And I feel bound in
conclusion  to mention kindly  Dr. Bromberg, who  five  years  ago,  with no
positive  information to go on, calculated the whole phenomenon that we have
now discovered: the appearance of  mass phobias and the sudden appearance of
talent  in people,  and even irregularities  in  the  behavior  of  animator
instance, the whales."

     Toivo turned to me.

     "I'm done," he said.

     I nodded. Everyone was silent.

     "Wanderers, Wanderers." Gorbovsky almost sang the words:  He  was lying
down with the coverlet  pulled up to his nose. "What else? As long as  I can
remember, from  my  childhood, there has been  talk about those Wanderers...
You really dislike them for something, Toivo, my boy. Why?"

     "I  don't  like Progressors,"  Toivo replied coolly, and added, "Leonid
Andreyevich, I used to be a Progressor myself..."

     "No  one likes  Progressors,"  Gorbovsky  muttered,  "even  Progressors
themselves." He sighed deeply and shut his eyes again. "To tell the truth, I
don't see a  problem here. It's all  just  clever  interpretations,  nothing
more. If  you were to pass along your materials to,  say,  pedagogues,  they
would have their  own, no less clever,  interpretations. Deepwater men, they
have  their own myths,  their own Wanderers... Don't be insulted, Toivo, but
the very mention of Bromberg made me wary."

     "Incidentally,   all  of   Bromberg's  works  on   the   Monocosm  have
disappeared," Komov said softly.

     "He  never  had any works, of course!"  Gorbovsky giggled  weakly. "You
didn't  know  Bromberg.  He was  an  acidulous  old  man  with  a  fantastic
imagination.  Maxie  sent  him his anxious query. Bromberg,  who  had  never
thought about the issue in his life, sat down in a comfortable chair, stared
at his index finger, and sucked  the  hypothesis of the Monocosm out of  it.
That took an evening. And the next day he forgot all about it... He not only
had a wild imagination, he was a specialist in forbidden arts, and he had in
his head an unimaginable number of unimaginable analogies."

     No sooner had Gorbovsky stopped talking than Komov said:

     "Did I  understand you correctly,  Glumov?  You maintain that Wanderers
are on Earth right now? As creatures, I mean. As individuals..."

     "No," Toivo said. "I am not maintaining that."

     "Did  I  understand  you  correctly,  Glumov,  that you  maintain  that
conscious  allies  of  the Wanderers are  living and  acting  on Earth?  The
'selected,' as you call them!"

     "Yes."

     "Can you name names?"

     "Yes. With some degree of certainty."

     "Go on."

     "Albert  Oskarovich Tuul. That's almost certain. Cyprian Okigbo. Martin
Jan. Emile Far-Ale. Almost certain. I can name a dozen, but I'm less certain
about them."

     "Have you talked to any of them?"

     "I think I have. At the Institute of Eccentrics. I think there are many
of them there. But who exactly, I can't say with certainty yet."

     "You mean to say that you do not know the distinguishing marks"

     "Of course not.  They don't look any different from  you or me. But you
can  figure  them  out. At least,  with a degree of certainty.  But  at  the
institute of Eccentrics,  I'm sure that they  have  a special apparatus that
identifies their own without error."

     Komov  gave  me  a  quick  glance.  Toivo noticed  it  and  said  in  a
challenging tone:

     "Yes! I  feel that this is no time to stand on ceremony! We'll have  to
drop  some of  the achievements  of  higher  humanism!  We're  dealing  with
Progressors, and we'll have to behave like Progressors!"

     "To wit?" Komov asked, leaning forward.

     "The  entire arsenal of our operative methodics. From sending in a mole
agent to forced mentoscopy, from..."

     Gorbovsky  groaned, and we turned to him in  fear, Komov even jumped to
his  feet. However, nothing terrible had happened to  Leonid Andreyevich. He
was still lying in  his former pose,  but now the  grimace of false courtesy
was replaced by a grimace of scornful irritation.

     "What  are  you  planning  around  me?" he  said  in a  whine.  "You're
grown-ups, after all, not schoolboys, not college men. Aren't you ashamed of
yourselves. Really! That's  why  I  don't  like  these  conversations  about
Wanderers, and  never  have!  They always end  up with this terrified babble
from detective novels! When will you  realize that these things are mutually
exclusive...  Either the Wanderers are  a supercivilization, and  then  they
don't give  a fig  for us,  they  are creatures  with  a  different history,
different interests, they don't bother with Progressorism, and in general in
the  whole universe  only humanity has Progressors,  because  our history is
like that, because we weep over our past... We can't change it and we strive
to  at least help  .others, since we  managed  to  help ourselves in time...
That's where our Progressorism comes from! And  the Wanderers, even if their
past did resemble ours, are so far from it now that they don't even remember
it, just as we don't remember the sufferings of the first hominid struggling
to turn a stone into an ax..." He was silent.  "It is just as ridiculous for
a  supercivilization  to have  Progressors  as  it would be for  us  to open
courses to prepare village deacons..."

     He stopped  talking  for  a long time, his gaze moving from one face to
another. I glanced  over at Toivo. Toivo was  looking away and shrugged  his
shoulders several  times, as if to show that he had counterarguments but did
not feel  it proper to use them here. Komov, knitting his thick black brows,
was looking off to one side.

     "Hmm,  hmm,  hmm." Gorbovsky  chuckled. "I  haven't convinced  you. All
right, then I'll try  insults. If even a green boy like our Toivo managed...
uh... to ferret  out those Progressors, then what the hell kind of Wanderers
are they? Just think about it! Don't you think a supercivilization could  do
their work so  that you couldn't notice? And  if you noticed, then what  the
hell kind of a supercivilization is it? The whales  went crazy, so it has to
be the Wanderers' fault!... Begone, let me die in peace!"

     We all got up.

     Komov reminded me in a low voice: "Wait in the living room."

     I nodded.

     Toivo bowed to Gorbovsky in confusion.  The old man paid no  attention.
He was staring angrily at the ceiling, his gray lips moving.

     Toivo and  I went out.  I  shut  the door  behind me and heard the soft
slurp, the acoustic isolator going into action.

     In the living room,  Toivo sat on the couch under the  lamp, placed his
hands on his knees, and did not move. He did not  look at me. He had no time
for me.

     This  morning, I had told him: "You'll go with  me. You'll speak before
Komov and Gorbovsky."

     "Why?" he asked, stunned.

     "What's  the matter,  do  you imagine we can do it  without  the  World
Council?"

     "But why me?"

     "Because I've already talked to them. It's your turn."

     "All right," he said, setting his lips in a tight line.

     He was a fighter, Toivo Glumov. He never retreated. You could only push
him back.

     And he had been pushed back. I watched him from the corner.

     For  some  time  he  sat  motionless.  Then  he  flipped  through   the
mentoschemas, marked in different colors by doctors, lying on the low table.
Then he got up and paced the dark mom ham  corner to comer, hands behind his
back.

     Impenetrable  silence reigned  in the  house. The  voices  from  in the
bedroom could not be heard, nor the sounds of the forest because the windows
were shut. He could not hear his own footsteps.

     His eyes  grew accustomed to the  twilight. Leonid Andreyevich's living
room  had  Spartan  furnishings:  the  floor lamp  (the  shade  was  clearly
homemade), the  large couch, and  the low  table. In the far corner, several
seats of non-terrestrial backsides production and meant for  non-terrestrial
backsides.  In the  other  corner, either  an  exotic plant  or  an  ancient
hatrack.  That was all the furniture. But  the bar was open, and I could see
that there were bottles there for every taste. And there were paintings over
the bar in transparent casings, the biggest the size of an album.

     Toivo  went  over  to  examine  them.  They  were  children's drawings.
Watercolors.  Gauche. Pen and ink. Little houses and  big girls,  pine trees
reaching to their knees. Dogs (or Golovans?). An elephant. A Takhorg... Some
space thing -- either a fantastic starship or a hangar...  Toivo sighed  and
went back to the couch. I watched him closely.

     There were  tears in his eyes. He wasn't thinking about the lost battle
anymore. Gorbovsky was dying -- an era was dying, a living legend was dying.
Starpilot. Paratrooper. Discoverer of civilizations. Creator  of Big COMCON.
Member  of  the  World Council. Grandpa Gorbovsky...  Most  of all:  Grandpa
Gorbovsky. Exactly. He was out of a  fairy tale:  always  kind and therefore
always right. That  was his era, when kindness always won.  "Of all possible
choices, always  pick the kindest" Not  the  most promising,  not  the  most
rational, not the most  Progressorist, and certainly not the most  effective
--  the kindest! He never said those words,  and he always  enjoyed taking a
dig  at those  biographers  of his  who  credited  him with those words.  He
certainly never thought in those words; yet the  essence of his  life was in
those  words. And of course, those  words are not a recipe;  not everyone is
given to be kind; it is a talent just like an ear for music or clairvoyance,
only  rarer. And he wanted to cry, because the kindest  man in the world was
dying. And on the scone will be carved: "He was the kindest..."

     I think Toivo was thinking just that. Everything I was planing depended
on Toivo's thinking just that.

     Forty-three minutes passed.

     The  door  flew  open. It  was like in  a  fairy tale.  Or  the movies.
Gorbovsky, unimaginably  tall in his striped pajamas, skinny, merry, stepped
unsteadily into  the living room, dragging the  plain  behind  him, for  the
fringe had caught on one of his buttons.

     "Aha, you're still  here!"  he said in a joyous satisfaction  to Toivo,
who sat stunned on the couch. "Everything is ahead of us, my boy! Everything
is ahead! You're right!"

     And having spoken those mysterious words, he hurried, reeling slightly,
to the  nearest  window and opened the blind. It grew blindingly bright, and
we squinted, and Gorbovsky turned and stared at Toivo, frozen by the lamp at
attention. I looked over at Komov. Komov was openly radiant, his sugar-white
teeth gleaming, smug  as  a cat who swallowed a goldfish.  He  looked like a
sociable  fellow who  had just drank a  toast to a good thing. Which was  in
fact the fact.

     "Not bad, not bad!" Gorbovsky said. "Even excellent!"

     Cocking  his head, he moved closer to Toivo, looking him over from head
to toe, moved right  up to him, put his hand  an his shoulder, and  clenched
his bony fingers.

     "Well, I think you'll  forgive my  harshness,  my lad," he said. "Bur I
was also  right... And  the harshness was from  irritability. I'll  tell you
something, dying is a really rotten business. Don't pay any attention."

     Toivo was silent.  Of course, he didn't understand a  thing.  Komov had
thought it all up and arranged it. Gorbovsky knew only as much as Komov felt
he should be told. I could imagine the conversation they had in the bedroom.
But Toivo Glumov understood nothing.

     I took him by the elbow and  told Gorbovsky, "Leonid Andreyevich, we're
leaving."

     Gorbovsky nodded.

     "Go,  of course.  Thanks. You  were a  big help. We'll  be  seeing each
other, and more than once."

     When we got out on the porch, Toivo said, "Perhaps you will explain the
meaning of this?"

     "You see, he's changed his mind about dying," I said.

     "Why?"

     "That's a stupid question, Toivo. Forgive me, please..."

     Toivo paused  and  then said, "I am a fool. That is, I never felt  like
such a fool in my life... Thanks for your concern, Big Bug."

     I grinned.  We  went down the stairs to the  landing square in silence.
Some man was going up the stairs slowly.

     "All right," Toivo said. "But should I continue work on the theme?"

     "Of course."

     "But they laughed at me!"

     "On the contrary. You were a hit"

     Toivo muttered something to  himself.  At the  first landing,  we found
ourselves  with the man  who had  been  going up  the stairs. It was  deputy
director of the Kharkov branch of IMI,  Daniil Alexandrovich Logovenko, rosy
and very worried.

     "Greetings," he said. "I'm not too late?"

     "Not too," I replied. "He's waiting for you."

     And  here D. A. Logovenko gave Toivo Glumov  a  conspiratorial wink and
then hurried up the stairs, now in a rush.  Toivo, squinting meanly, watched
him go.

     [End of Document 21.]

DOCUMENT 22: A Confidential Memorandum

     CONFIDENTIAL:
     FOR MEMBERS OF THE PRESIDIUM OF THE WORLD COUNCIL!
     No. 115

     CONTENTS: Transcript  of the  conversation which took place at Leonid's
house (Kraslava, Latvia) 14 May 99.
     PARTICIPANTS: L.  A.  Gorbovsky, member  of  the World  Council; G. Yu.
Komov, member of the  World Council, Acting President of Urals-North Section
of COMCON-2; D. A. Logovenko, Deputy Director, Kharkov Branch IMI.

     KOMOV:  You mean  to  say  that you  do not differ in  any  way from an
ordinary man?

     LOGOVENKO:  The difference is enormous, but... Now, when I  am  sitting
here talking to you, I differ from you only in the  awareness that I  am not
like  you. That is one of my levels... rather wearying,  incidentally. It is
hard to do, but I'm used to it, but the majority of us have grown accustomed
to that level forever... But on this level, my differences can be discovered
only with the aid of special apparatus.

     KOMOV: You want to say that on other levels...

     LOGOVENKO:  Yes.  On other levels,  everything is  different. Different
consciousness, different physiology... different image, even...

     KOMOV: You mean, on other levels you are no longer human?

     LOGOVENKO:  We aren't  human. Don't let it confuse you that we are born
human from humans...

     GORBOVSKY: Forgive me, Daniil Alexandrovich. Could

     LOGOVENKO: ... interfere. And not only because of that. We assumed that
the secret  should  be  kept  first of  all in  your own  interests,  in the
interests of humanity. I would  like you to be fully clear on that issue. We
are not people. We are Ludens. Do not fall into error. We are not the result
of biological evolution. We appeared because humanity  has reached a certain
level of  sociotechnological organization.  We  could  have  discovered  the
third-impulse system in the human organism even a hundred years  ago, but it
only became possible to initiate it at the beginning of this century,  while
keeping a Luden on the spiral  of psychophysiological development,  to  lead
him  from level  to level to the very end... that is, in  your concepts,  to
bring up a Luden, only became possible quite recently --

     GORBOVSKY: Just  a minute! Does that mean that the third impulse exists
in every human organism?

     LOGOVENKO: Unfortunately not, Leonid  Andreyevich.  That's the tragedy.
The  third  impulse  is  found  with  a probability  of  no  more  than  one
one-hundred-thousandth. We still don't  know where it came from or why. Most
likely, it is the result of some ancient mutation.

     KOMOV:  One   one-hundred-thousandth...  that's  not   so  little  when
translated to our billions. So, it means a schism?

     LOGOVENKO: Yes.  And  that's why  it was  secret. Don't  get  me wrong.
Ninety percent of Ludens are totally uninterested in the fate of humanity or
in humanity. But there is a group of those like me. We do not want to forget
that we are flesh of our flesh and that we  have one homeland,  and for many
years we  have  been  working  on  how to  soften  the consequences  of  the
inevitable schism...  For it looks as if humanity is  being  divided  into a
higher  and  a  lower race.  What could  be more  revolting?  Of course, the
analogy is superficial  and at  its root incorrect,  but you can't avoid the
feeling of  humiliation at the thought that one of  you has gone  far beyond
the limits that  are impassable  for a  hundred thousand. And  that  one can
never lose the guilt over it. And incidentally, the  worst part is that this
schism goes through families, through friendships...

     KOMOV: Does that mean that the metagom loses his former ties?

     LOGOVENKO:  That varies. It's not as  simple  as  you  think.  The most
typical  model  of the  Ludens' attitude toward man  is  the attitude  of an
experienced and very busy adult for a cute but terminally annoying kid. Then
picture the  relationship:  Luden and his father, Luden and his best friend,
Luden and his teacher...

     GORBOVSKY: Luden and his girlfriend...

     LOGOVENKO: It's a tragedy, Leonid Andreyevich. A real tragedy...

     KOMOV: I see you take the  situation to heart. Then perhaps it would be
easier to stop all this? After all, it's in your hands.

     LOGOVENKO: Doesn't it seem amoral to do that?

     KOMOV: Doesn't it seem amoral to subject humanity to a shock like that?
To create an inferiority complex in mass psychology, to give youth knowledge
of the limits of its possibilities?

     LOGOVENKO: That's why I came to you -- to seek a way out.

     KOMOV; There is only one way. You must leave Earth.

     LOGOVENKO: Excuse me. Who exactly is "we"?

     KOMOV: You metagoms.

     LOGOVENKO: Gennady Yurevich, I repeat: in the great  majority of cases,
Ludens do not live on Earth.  All  their  interests; their lives, are beyond
Earth.  Damn it, you don't live in  bed!  Only the midwives like  me and the
homopsychologists  have permanent ties with Earth... and a few dozen  of the
most miserable of us, those who  cannot tear themselves away from family and
loved ones!

     GORBOVSKY: Ah!

     LOGOVENKO: What did you say?

     GORBOVSKY: Nothing, nothing. I'm listening to you attentively.

     KOMOV: Then you mean to say  that interests of metagoms and  earthlings
do not coincide?

     LOGOVENKO: Yes.

     KOMOV: Is cooperation possible?

     LOGOVENKO: In what area?

     KOMOV: That's for you to say.

     LOGOVENKO:  I'm afraid  that you cannot be of help to  us. As for us...
you know, there's an old joke. In  our circumstances it sounds rather cruel,
but  I'll tell it. You can teach a bear to ride a bicycle, but will the bear
derive any benefit  or pleasure from it?  Sorry about that. But you yourself
said that our interests do not coincide. (Pause) Of  course, if there were a
threat to Earth  and humanity, we  would come to your  aid without a  second
thought and with all our power.

     KOMOV: Thank you for that at least.

     (A long pause, with gurgling of liquid,  glass tinkling  against glass,
gulps, sighs)

     GORBOVSKY: Yes, this is a serious challenge to our optimism. But if you
think  about  it, humanity has accepted more frightening challenges.  And  I
don't understand you, Gennady. You were such a serious  adherent of vertical
progress! Well, here it is, vertical progress! In the purest form! Humanity,
spread out on the flowering plain beneath the clear skies, has  made a surge
upward. Of course, not the whole crowd, but why does that upset you so? It's
always been that way. And always will, probably... Humanity always went into
the future with  the shoots  of  its best  representatives. And as  for what
Daniil Alexandrovich tells us, that he is not a man but a Luden,  that's all
terminology... You're still people and,  moreover, earthlings, and you can't
get away from that. It's too soon.

     KOMOV: You, Leonid Andreyevich, sometimes astonish me with your lack of
seriousness.  It's  schism! Understand, schism!  And you're just  blathering
kindly, forgive me for saying so...

     GORBOVSKY: You're so... hot-tempered, dear fellow. Well, of course it's
schism! I wonder where you've  seen progress  without schism? Where have you
seen  progress  without  stock,  without  bitterness,  without humiliations?
Without those who move far ahead and those who stay behind?

     KOMOV: Well,  really!  "And those who will  destroy  me  I greet with a
welcoming hymn!"

     GORBOVSKY:  That's  not  quite  opposite...  How above: "And those  who
surpass me, I see off with a welcoming hymn."

     LOGOVENKO:  Gennady Yurevich, permit  me to try to console you. We have
very serious reasons for supposing  that this schism will not  be the  final
one.  Beside  the third impulse  in the human organism, we have discovered a
fourth low-frequency one and a fifth -- for now unnamed.
     We -- even we! -- cannot imagine what the  initiation  of those systems
could bring. And we cannot imagine how much more there is in man... And more
than that,  Gennady Yurevich. There is a  schism  beginning among us!  It is
inevitable.  Artificial  evolution is a scattered process. (Pause)  What can
you  do? There are six scientific and technological  revolutions behind  us,
two technological counterrevolutions, two  gnoseological crises -- you  come
to evolution willy-nilly...

     GORBOVSKY:  Precisely. If we sat  around quietly  like the Tagorians or
Leonidians, we'd know no sorrow. Going into technology was our own choice.

     KOMOV: All right, all right. But just what is a metagom, in  fact? What
are  his goals, Daniil  Alexandrovich? His stimuli? Interest? Or  is that  a
secret?

     LOGOVENKO: No secrets.

     (the  phonogram ends here.  All the rest - 34  minutes  11 seconds been
erased.)

     15/05/99 M. Kammerer

     [End of Document 22.]

     I'm ashamed  to  admit it  but  I spent the  last  few days  in a state
bordering  on  euphoria.  It was  as if an unbearable  physical  strain  had
ceased.  Probably  Sisyphus  experienced something  similar  when  the  rock
finally leaped out of his hands, and he had the blessed relief of sitting at
the top of the mountain before starting all over.

     Every  earthling  experienced the  Big Revelation in his own way. But I
swear that I had it worse than anyone else.

     I've reread everything l  had written, and I  now fear that my feelings
in relation to the Big Revelation could  be misunderstood. It may create the
impression that I was afraid for the fate of mankind. Naturally,  there were
fears -- for back then I knew absolutely nothing about Ludens except for the
fact that they  existed. So  there  was fear. And  there were brief howls of
panic:  "That's  it, the game is over!" And a  feeling of a catastrophically
sharp turn, when  the  wheel is going to fly  out of your hands  and  you're
going to fly off into nowhere,  helpless like a savage during an earthquake.
But  above  all  this  prevailed  the  humiliating  awareness  of  my  total
professional  failure.  We  missed  the  boat.  Blew  it.  Flopped.  Useless
dilettantes...

     And  then  the  whole  wave  receded.  And  not because  Logovenko  had
convinced me of anything or made me believe him. It was something else.

     I had gotten used to the feeling of professional failure over the month
and  a  half.  ("Pangs  of  conscience  are  tolerable" is one of  the small
unpleasant discoveries you make with age.)

     The wheel wasn't  being pulled out of my hands  anymore -- I had handed
it over to someone else. And now, with a kind of distance, I noted to myself
that  Komov  was exaggerating  and  Leonid  Andreyevich, as usual,  was  too
certain of a happy ending for any cataclysm...

     I  was back in my  own place,  and once more I  was in the thrall of my
usual cares. For instance: getting a steady flow of information to those who
had to make the decisions.

     On the evening of the fifteenth, I  received an order from Komov to act
as I saw fit.

     On the morning of the  sixteenth, I called in Toivo Glumov. Without any
explanation,  I let  him read  the record  of  the conversation  at Leonid's
House. Amazingly, I was practically certain of success.

     Why should I have had any doubts?

DOCUMENT 23: Working Phonogram: T. Glumov and M. Kammerer

DOCUMENT 24: Fear of being transformed into a Luden

DOCUMENT 25. Sverdlovsk: Topol II, Apt. 9716 to M. Kammerer
     S. Mtbevari: The Waves Extinguish the Wind

DOCUMENT 26: M. Kammerer: Theme 060 T. Glumov, Metagom

     WORKING PHONOGRAM

     Date: 16 May 99

     INTERLOCUTORS:  M.  Kammerer,  head   of  UE  Department;   T.  Glumov,
Inspector.

     THEME: X X X

     CONTENTS: X X X

     GLUMOV: What was in the gaps?

     KAMMERER: Bravo. What self-control you have, kid. When I realized  what
was what, I chewed the walls for a half-hour.

     GLUMOV: So what was in the gaps?

     KAMMERER: No one knows.

     GLUMOV: What do you mean no one knows?

     KAMMERER: Just that. Komov and Gorbovsky don't remember what was in the
gaps.  They  didn't  notice  any  gaps.  And  it's impossible to restore the
phonogram. It's not simply  erased, it's destroyed.  The molecular structure
is changed on the parts of the grid with gaps.

     GLUMOV: A strange manner of negotiating.

     KAMMERER: We'll have to get used to it.

     (Pause)

     GLUMOV: Well, and now what?

     KAMMERER: For now we  don't know  enough.  In  general,  I see only two
possibilities. Either we learn to coexist with them, or we don't.

     GLUMOV: There's a third possibility.

     KAMMERER: Don't go off half-cocked. There is no third possibility.

     GLUMOV: There is! They don't pussyfoot around us!

     KAMMERER: That's not a conclusion.

     GLUMOV: It is! They didn't ask permission of the World Council! They've
been working  secretly  for many years transforming people into  non-people!
They're  performing experiments  on people! And  even now, when they've been
exposed, they come to negotiations and allow themselves to --

     KAMMERER: (interrupting) What you want to suggest  can  be done  either
openly -- and then  humanity will be witness to a totally disgusting violent
act -- or secretly, vilely, behind the back of public opinion?

     GLUMOV:  (interrupting)  That's all talk! The point  is  that  humanity
should not be the incubator for non-humans and certainly not a testing field
for their damned experiments! Excuse  me, Big  Bug, but you made a  mistake.
You should not have let Komov or Gorbovsky know about this. You've put  them
in  a stupid  position. This is  COMCON-2 business; it's  fully  within  our
competence. I think  that  it's still not too late. Let's take this sin upon
our souls.

     KAMMERER: Listen, where did you  develop  this xenophobia? It's not the
Wanderers, not the Progressors you hate.

     GLUMOV:  I have the feeling  that  they're  worse than the Progressors.
They're traitors. They're parasites. Like those wasps that lay their eggs in
caterpillars.

     (Pause)

     KAMMERER: Go on, go on. Let it all out.

     GLUMOV: I won't say any  more. It's  useless. I've been working on this
case for  five years under your supervision, and I've  been blundering about
like  a blind puppy  all those  years. Could you at least tell me now: where
did  you  learn the truth? When did you realize  that they're not Wanderers?
Six months ago? Eight?

     KAMMERER: Less than two.

     GLUMOV: Doesn't matter... Several  weeks ago. I can understand that you
had your  own  considerations, and you did  not  want to let  me  in on  the
details; but how could you hide  the  fact that  your objective had changed?
How could you let me make a fool of  myself? Before Gorbovsky and Komov... I
get a chill whenever I think of it!

     KAMMERER: Can't you accept that there might have been a reason for it?

     GLUMOV: I can. But it doesn't make me feel any better. I don't know the
reason and can't even imagine it... And  I don't see that you're planning to
ever tell  me that reason. No, Big Bug, I've had enough. I'm not good enough
to work with you. Let me go, because I'll leave anyway.

     (Pause)

     KAMMERER: I  couldn't tell you the truth. At first I  couldn't tell you
the truth because  I don't know what we could do with it. I don't  know what
to do  with it  now either,  but now all the decisions are someone else's to
make...

     GLUMOV: Don't justify yourself, Big Bug.

     KAMMERER: Be  quiet. You won't  get  me mad. Do you love  the  truth so
much? Then you'll get it. All of it.

     (Pause)

     KAMMERER: Then  I  sent you to the Institute  of Eccentrics and  had to
wait some more --

     GLUMOV: (interrupting) What does --

     KAMMERER: (interrupting)  I said be  quiet!  It's not easy to tell  the
truth, Toivo. Not cutting up the truth, the way young people like to do, but
serving it  up to  someone like you...  green,  confident, all-knowing,  and
all-understanding. Be quiet and listen.

     (Pause)

     KAMMERER: Then I got a reply from the Institute. The answer floored me.
I had thought  that I was  showing routine forethought, but it turned out...
Listen, you just read the  transcript. Didn't anything seem strange in it to
you?

     GLUMOV: Everything is strange in it.

     KAMMERER:  Come on, pay  attention.  Read it again, but carefully, from
the very beginning, from the heading. Well?

     (Pause)

     GLUMOV: "Only for members of the Presidium..." What does that mean?

     KAMMERER: Well? Well?

     GLUMOV: You let me read a document that was top security... Why?

     KAMMERER: (slowly and almost ingratiatingly) As you have noticed, there
are gaps in this document. So, I'm  nurturing the  hope that when your  time
comes, out of friendship, and  for  the old times' sake,  you'll fill  those
gaps in for me.

     (Long pause)

     KAMMERER:  That's how the whole  truth looks.  In the part  of it  that
concerns you. As soon  as I  learned that they were sorting at the Institute
of Eccentrics,  I  sent all  of you there, one after  the  other, on various
idiotic excuses. It was simply a measure of  elementary caution, understand?
So as not to leave the enemy the slightest chance. To be sure... no, I still
wasn't  sure... To  know  for  sure:  that  among my  staff there  were only
humans...

     (Pause)

     KAMMERER:  They  have  the  machine  there  --  allegedly  for  finding
"eccentrics".  They  have all the visitors pass through  it.  Actually,  the
contraption looks for the so-called  T-tooth of  the  mentogram,  a.k.a. the
Logovenko Impulse. If a  person has a third-impulse system worth initiating,
this three-pronged tooth appears in his mentogram. So, you have this tooth.

     (Long pause)

     GLUMOV: That's all nonsense, Big Bug.

     (Pause)

     GLUMOV: They're tricking you!

     (Pause)

     GLUMOV: It's a provocation! They're just trying to knock  me out of the
game!  Apparently  I've learned  something very important, but I still don't
know  myself  what  it  is, and  they  want  to  get  rid of  me...  It's so
elementary!

     (Pause)

     GLUMOV: You've  known me  since childhood!  I've  passed  thousands  of
mentoscopies. I'm an ordinary human! Don't believe  them, Big Bug! Who gives
you your  information?... No,  I 'm not  asking the name...  Just think, who
could know all that?  He must be one of them himself... How  can you believe
him? (Shouts) I'm not the issue! I'm leaving anyway! But in just that way he
can destroy COMCON without firing  a  single shot!  Have you  thought  about
that?

     (Pause)

     GLUMOV: (in a low voice) What should I do! You've probably decided what
I'm to do now...

     KAMMERER: Listen.  Don't  be upset. Nothing terrible has  happened yet.
What are you  shouting  for  as if they're creeping  up on you  with knives?
After  all, it's all  in your hands! If  you  don't  want  it,  nothing will
change!

     GLUMOV: How do you know that?

     KAMMERER: I don't know anything. I know as much as  you do. You've just
read that  thing...  The third impulse  is  only a potential. It  has  to be
initiated... and then that... rising from level to level begins. I'd like to
see them try to do it without you wanting it!

     GLUMOV: Yes. (Laughs hysterically) You sure scared me, chief!

     KAMMERER: You simply weren't thinking.

     GLUMOV: I'll just run oft! Let  them find  me! And if they do and start
bothering me... tell them I don't recommend that!

     KAMMERER: I doubt they'll want to talk to me.

     GLUMOV: What do you mean?

     KAMMERER: You see, we've no authority in their eyes. Now we have to get
used to a  totally new  situation.  We're not the ones who  set the time for
talks or the  topic...  We've  lost control  over events.  The situation  is
unheard  of! Here on Earth, among us,  is a force -- not  just  a  force,  a
megaforce! And  we  don't know anything about it. Rather,  we knew only what
we're permitted  to know, and  that,  you  must agree; is almost  worse than
total ignorance. Not very  cozy,  eh? Well, I  can't say anything bad  about
these Ludens, but I don't know anything good about them either!

     (Pause)

     KAMMERER: They know everything about us and we know nothing about them.
It's humiliating. Every one of us privy to the situation feels humiliated...
Now we have to expose two members of the World Council to keep mentoscopy --
only  to  restore  the conversation  at  the historic  meeting  at  Leonid's
House... And you realize of course  that neither the members of the  Council
nor we want this mentoscopy. It humiliates us  all, but what can we do. Even
though the  chances  of success, as  you yourself must  know,  are less than
problematic --

     GLUMOV: But you have your own agents among them!

     KAMMERER: Not among,  near  them.  Among is simply a pipe  dream.  Mast
likely unattainable...  Which of them would  want to help us? What for? What
do they care about us? Eh? Toivo!

     (Long pause)

     GLUMOV: No. Maxim. I don't want to. I understand, but I don't want to!

     KAMMERER: Afraid?

     GLUMOV: I don't  know. I just don't want to.  I'm a human, and I  don't
want  to be  anything else.  I don't want to  look down at you I don't  want
people  I respect and love  to seem like children to me. I know  that you're
hoping  that the human  will remain in  me... Maybe you even have reason for
hoping. But I don't want to take the risk. I don't.

     (Pause)

     KAMMERER: Well... in the final analysis, that's even commendable.

     [End of Document 23.]

     I was certain of success. I was wrong.

     I didn't know you well enough, Toivo Glumov, my boy. You seemed harder,
more protected, more fanatical,. if you will.

     And finally, a few words about the real goal of my memoir.

     My reader familiar with the book "Five Biographies of the Century" will
have guessed that the goal  is to overturn the  sensational hypothesis of P.
Soroka and E. Braun, that Toivo Glumov, while still a Progressor on Giganda,
fell into the  field  of vision of the Ludens and  was recognized as  one of
their  own.  Allegedly,  he  was  transformed  by  them,  moved  up  to  the
appropriate  level,  and  sent to  me  to  COMCON-2  as  a  disinformer  and
misinterpreter.  Allegedly,  for  five  years he did nothing but heat up the
atmosphere in COMCON against the Wanderers, interpreting  every  wrong step,
every miscalculation, every careless act of the Ludens as a manifestation of
the activity of the hated supercivilization. For five years he led us by the
nose,  the  entire leadership  of  COMCON-2,  and especially his  chief  and
patron,  Maxim Kammerer. And when the  Ludens  were exposed nevertheless, he
played  out one last  tearjerker scene  for the trusting Big Bug and dropped
out of the game.

     I  think that any  unprejudiced reader, unfamiliar with the conjectures
of  Soroka  and  Braun,  who has  read this far will  shrug and  say:  "What
nonsense; what  a strange idea. It contradicts everything I've read." As for
the prejudiced reader, the  reader who  knows  Toivo Glumov  only from  Five
Biographies,  I  can  make  only  one  recommendation: try  to  look. at the
material  dispassionately; don't sprinkle  spices  into the  Luden  problem,
which has become rather bland by now.

     I  have  no argument that the story of the Big Revelation contains many
blanks, but I maintain with full responsibility that the blanks have nothing
to do with Toivo Glumov. And with full responsibility I maintain that all of
Soroka and Braun's clever theories are simply  nonsense, yet another attempt
to scratch the left ear with the right hand from beneath the left knee.

     As for the "final tearjerker scene," there  is  only  one  thing that I
regret and  for which I  berate myself m this day. I did not realize  -- old
thick-skinned rhino that I am  -- I did  not sense  that  I was seeing Toivo
Glumov for the last time.

     [End of Document 24.]

     SVERDLOVSK, TOPOL II, Apt. 9716
     TO M. KAMMERER

     Big Bug!

     I was visited by Logovenko today. The conversation lasted from 12:15 to
14:05. Logovenko was convincing. Essence:  it's not as  simple as we imagine
it  all.  For  instance: it  is  maintained  that  the period  of stationary
development in  humanity is coming to an end, the epoch of shocks (biosocial
and psychosocial) is coming, and the main goal of  Ludens in retaliation  to
humanity  is, it turns out, to be  on guard (like "the catcher in the rye").
At the present time, 432 Ludens live and play on Earth and in the cosmos.  I
was  offered  the chance to  become  the 433rd, for which  I must  appear in
Kharkov at the Institute  of Eccentrics the day after tomorrow,  May 20,  at
10:00.

     The enemy of the human race whispers to me that only a real idiot would
refuse a chance to develop superconsciousness  and power  over the universe.
This whisper  I can quell without great effort, since I am a man  who is not
interested  in prestige, as  you well know,  and cannot  bear elitism in any
form. I won't hide that  our last conversation fell deeper into my soul than
I  would have liked.  I do  not  like feeling myself a deserter. I would not
have hesitated in my choice for  a second, but I am absolutely  certain that
as soon as they turn me into a Luden,  nothing (nothing!) human will remain.
Admit it, deep in your heart you think the same thing.

     I will not go to Kharkov. I have thought everything over these last few
days. I will not go to Kharkov first of all because that would be a betrayal
of Asya. Secondly, because I love my mother and honor her.  Thirdly, because
I love  my  comrades  and my past. Transformation into a Luden  would be the
death of me. It is much worse than death,  because for  those who love me, I
would   remain   alive,   but  unrecognizably   different.   Haughty,  smug,
self-confident. And on top of that, eternal, probably.

     Tomorrow I am going off after Asya to Pandora.

     Farewell, and I wish you luck.

     Yours, T. Glumov 18 May 99

     REPORT COMCON-2
     No.086/99 Urals-North

     Date: 14 November 99

     FROM: S. Mtbevari, Inspector
     THEME: 081 "The Waves Extinguish the Wind"
     CONTENTS: Conversation with T. Glumov.

     According to our instructions, I am reconstructing my conversation with
former inspector T. Glumov,  which occurred  in  the middle of  July of this
year. Around 17  o'clock, when I was in my office, I  received  a videophone
call,  and  T. Glumov's  face  appeared  on  the  screen.  He was  merry and
animated, greeting me boisterously. He had gained a little weight since  the
last time I had seen him. The conversation went approximately like this:

     GLUMOV: Where's the  chief  gone to? I've  been trying to reach him all
day, to no avail.

     I: The chief's away on business. He won't be back for a while.

     GLUMOV: That's too bad. I need him desperately. I'd really like to talk
to him.

     I: Send a letter. They'll forward it.

     GLUMOV: (after some thought) It's a long story. (I remember that phrase
exactly.)

     I: Then tell me what  to  tell  him. Or how to reach you. I'll write it
down.

     GLUMOV: No. It is personal.

     Nothing else substantial was said. Rather, I don't remember anything.

     I want to stress that at  the  time all I knew about T. Glumov was that
he had quit for  personal  reasons and had gone to join his wife on Pandora.
That was why it did not occur to me to do the most elementary things such as
recording the conversation, determining the call line, letting the President
know, and so on. I can only add that I had the impression that T. Glumov was
in a room lit with natural sunlight. Apparently, at the time he was on Earth
in the Eastern Hemisphere.

     Sandro Mtbevari

     [End of Document 25.]

     TO THE PRESIDENT OF SECTOR URALS-NORTH OF CC-2

     Date: 23 January 101

     FROM: M. Kammerer, head of UE Department
     THEME: 060 T. Glumov, metagom

     President!

     I have  nothing to report. The meeting did not take place. I waited for
him at Red Beach until dark He did not show up.

     Of course, it would not have been difficult to go to his house and wait
for him there, but I feel  that would have been a tactical error. His aim is
not to harass us. He simply forgets. Let's wait some more.

     M. Kammerer

     [End of Document 26]

DOCUMENT 27: A Letter from the Elusive Glumov
     LAST: Glumov as an "historical fact"

     COMCON-I
     TO THE CHAIRMAN OF THE METAGOM COMMISSION KOMOV, G. YU.

     My Captain!
     I'm  sending over two curious  texts  that have a direct bearing on the
subject of your new passion.

     TEXT I. (A note from T. Glumov to M. Kammerer)

     Dear Big Bug!

     It's  all  my  fault. But I'm prepared to  make amends.  The  day after
tomorrow, the second, exactly at 20:00 I will definitely be home. Waiting. I
guarantee good food and promise to explain everything. Even though, as I see
it, there is no great urgency for that now.

     TEXT II. (Letter  from A. Glumova, addressed to M.  Kammerer along with
T. Glumov's note)

     Dear Maxim!

     He asked  me to send this note to  you. Why  didn't he send it himself?
Why  didn't  he just  call you to  make  a date? I don't understand a thing.
Lately,  I  don't  understand  him at  all, even  when  we're talking  about
seemingly simple things. But I do know that he is unhappy. Like all of them.
When he is with me,  he's terribly bored. When he's back home, he misses me,
or he wouldn't come back. He can't go on living this way, and  he'll have to
make a choice. I know what he will choose. lately he's been coming back less
and less.  I  know some  of  his  brothers  who  have  stopped  coming  back
completely. There's nothing more for them on Earth.

     As  for his invitation, naturally I will be happy to see you, but don't
count on his being there. I don't.

     Yours, A. Glumova

     Naturally, Kammerer went to the meeting, and  naturally,  T. Glumov did
not show up.

     They are leaving, my captain. They are leaving, the miserable ones, and
leaving miserable ones behind them. Humaneness. This is serious.

     This is  all so  different from the apocalyptic pictures we painted for
each  other four years  ago!  Remember how old  Gorbovsky, smiling cleverly,
groaned:  "The  waves  extinguish  the  wind..."  We  all   nodded   as   if
understanding, and you  even continued the  quote with a look so significant
it bordered on criticism. But did we understand him then? None of us did.

     Your Athos 13/11/102

     [End of Document 27.]

     Maxim!

     I can't do anything. They bow and scrape apologetically before me, they
assure me of total respect and sympathy, but nothing changes. They've turned
Toivo into a "historical fact."

     I know why Toivo is silent -- he doesn't care about  all this, and then
where  is  he,  in  which  worlds?  I  can guess  why Asya is silent -- it's
horrible to say, but I think they' convinced her.

     But why are you silent? You loved him, I know that, and he loved you!

     M. Glumova
     30 June 126
     Ust-Narva

     As  you see, I am  no longer  silent,  Maya  Toivovna.  I have  spoken.
Everything that I could any and everything that I knew how to say.
Last-modified: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 21:26:47 GMT
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