The Time Wanderers Part 11

I turned away and looked in the other direction, across the river, at the other sh.o.r.e, 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 pa.s.sed 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 s.p.a.ce 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 ent.i.tled. 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.

"h.e.l.lo," I said, and Toivo bowed silently.

"h.e.l.lo, h.e.l.lo," Komov said impatiently. "Come in, sit down. He's sleeping. Fell asleep. That Triple-d.a.m.ned 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 refres.h.i.+ng... 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... d.a.m.n 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, hoa.r.s.e 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 ma.s.s 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, f.u.kamization 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 Inst.i.tute 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 a.n.a.logies."

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 Inst.i.tute 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 distinguis.h.i.+ng 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 inst.i.tute 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 a.r.s.enal 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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l 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.