‘Come — think it over! You’ll agree!’ he said.
I did agree — why not?
But all I thought was: they aren’t going to publish.
Not now, perhaps not ever. It was slowly sinking in.
‘Efraim,’ he urged me, on leaving next day, ‘forget this military application. Your achievement is very great and no resources will be spared for you to complete it — and the world one day to have it! Each one of us at the Directorate, I assure you, is absolutely aware of what you are doing. Press on with it!’
They were by no means aware of what I was doing. (For that same night I thought ‘To hell with them all!’ For everything they had an argument, and everything could be used for good or evil. Now the good must have a chance. It had come to me by chance. Now it would have another; and I embarked on the course that you know.) But we certainly pressed on!
Our lenses at the time were bulky, heavy, quite awkward in use. This our specialist soon changed, for he was already a leader in the field of thin-film layers. And soon too we were engaged on improvements to the insertion procedures, trying them out on a batch basis (the operation is quite reversible); and were still doing it at the time of the explosion.
Of our military work here I will not speak, so I say nothing of the explosion; except that it was calamitous. We lost the genetics lab. We lost the apes’ quarters — also their adjoining sick bay. Several apes were in it then recovering from operation, their eyes bandaged, and those who survived the blast we got outside as soon as possible, for a rollcall — although they were very few in number.
The situation was now altogether desperate. Those apes still alive were badly contaminated. In a few weeks, only one of them was left — as it happened the least representative one; a testimony to my own hubris, and of a line that must not be crossed.
This creature I had made myself, in a Petri dish: a non-hardy female. By then we could identify early the non-hardy and should simply have washed her away. But I was then working with the foetus and investigating what else we could draw from it.
Since the contents of the dish (now fifteen years old, by name Ludmilla) would not be hardy, there would be ‘intelligence’. I decided to discover how intelligent this cell cluster could be made by copying cerebral material from Sibir’s foetus and trying to incorporate it. And this experiment was a great success — but a frivolous one, an unforgivable one, and one that must never be repeated! For Ludmilla is neither ape nor human. (In fact she is part Sibir, part Neanderthaloid, and part ape: an animal of a kind, but with a mind that I think is human.) The apes did not accept her and she lived apart, attached only to me. I gave her lessons which, alas, she found tiresome. On these occasions she had to sleep the night in a room kept for my Directorate friend; which room by association she also disliked!
This she was doing on the night of the explosion — in safety. I rushed out myself, ordering her to stay in safety. And an ape would have done so, for they obey instructions. But she was concerned only for my safety and ran crying after me — into the secondary blast. This happened as I picked my way through the genetics lab. I had put on the mask and goggles we always wear in this lab, but the poor child was without them …
Well, but see how things turn out.
She was contaminated, of course, and also horribly blinded — her eyes requiring urgent removal for they were destroyed and infected — and thus became our first real patient. The others, remember, were experiments, still with their own eyes. Ludmilla had none; and so became the first true case of blindness in the world to be sighted by our operation.
Well, it’s quite standardised now, the operation — simple and brief. All the parts of it are here: the incisions, the junction, the graft, the fibre, the regulator chip, the lenses. And the boost — the good and the bad, you see. All here.
‘All here.’
Porter thought at first he was being offered a chocolate. The old man sat looking at it in his open palm: a gilt-wrapped dinner mint. Then he took another out of the drawer, silver-wrapped.
‘On disk. Four-centimetre disks. The silver one is by way of a history. A personal one, for you. The other has the technical information, a few hundred pages. It’s compressed — they’ll know what to do with it, the people you give it to.’
Porter looked at the fancy coins.
‘What do I do with it?’ he said.
Rogachev poked again in the drawer and withdrew two slim pouches, themselves not much wider than dinner mints.
‘They go in here. And the pouches in a belt.’ He found the belt, too, a canvas one. ‘And the belt next to your skin. The disks won’t deform or break. They’re encased, but don’t try to open the cases. It needs laboratory conditions to open them — below minus 24 °Centigrade anyway, or they’ll be erased. There’s a temperature lock. That’s the most important thing to remember. Now — it’s late. Do you want a last drink?’
It was indeed very late. It was almost three, and again they had talked the night away.
Porter went and got himself a drink, and when he came back found the old man sitting with his eyes closed, deathly tired. But the disks were in the pouches, and the pouches in the belt, and on the desk under his hand was an envelope.
‘Here’s the letter. You’ll need it to show the Evenks. It’s just blank paper — a few sheets.’
‘How about the ring — I tell them it couldn’t be found?’
‘No. It’s here.’ He opened his hand. ‘My wife’s, actually … There’s no one to send it to, and they’ll cremate me in a few weeks. You have it. You may find the inscription a little sentimental.’
He turned it over and over in his hand for a few moments, smiling rather crookedly, and offered it with a magnifying glass.
Through the glass Porter examined the gold band. The engraving was on the inside, its Russian words very worn: As our love the circle has no end.
He read them silently.
‘Her death is why I’m here,’ Rogachev said simply. ‘This is how it happened. A funny circle, life, eh? Well, that’s the ring. And here’s the book. Put the belt on.’
Porter put it on, under his clothing.
‘You’ve remembered the temperature?’
‘240 degrees.’
‘Minus 240. Even below that. Say liquid hydrogen, it’s easier. That’s to allow it to be opened. Once safely opened, no special conditions are needed. They’ll figure out how to read it. Remember, the gold one has the technical information. Now … Do I thank you again, or is it just goodbye?’
It was just goodbye, without words. And it was in the library; their four hands clasped for long seconds. Then the chair was whining out of the room, and Porter’s last view was of a single arm raised. Vale!
In ten minutes, goodbye to Stepanka too, and hello to the washroom. And soon after, to his bunk.
All done now. Everything accomplished. Under the covers he felt the belt. Just a few hours to go. And in two or three days he’d be gone for good. He thought over the arrangements, but the day had been long. Up most of last night, little rest after it, and none at all since they’d been called in from the wind and the snow. He closed his eyes, drifting into darkness.
45
At the time that Kolya Khodyan and the Evenks had been summoned from the wind and the snow to learn that a name had been chosen for the baby, another man was learning some news, far away.