… The Captain was sloshing through the swamp, together with Athos and Lin and Polly, who was wearing tattered pants. Amid the hazy exhalations flashed the quick-moving cybers, which they still had to invent.
5. Chronicle
Novosibirsk, 8 October 2021. It was announced here today that the commission of the USCR Academy of Sciences studying the results of the Taimyr-Ermak expedition has finished its work.
As is well known, in pursuance of the international program of research into deep space and into the possibility of interstellar travel, in 2017 the Academy of Sciences of the USCR sent into deep space an expedition consisting of the two first-line interplanetary craft Taimyr and Ermak. The expedition departed November 7,2017, from the international spaceport Pluto-2, in the direction of the constellation Lyra. The crew of the spaceship Taimyr consisted of captain and expedition head A. E. Zhukov, engineers K. I. Falin and G. A. Pollack, navigator S. I. Kondratev, cyberneticist P. Koenig, and physician E. M. Slavin. The spaceship Ermak served as an unmanned data collector.
The purpose of the expedition was to attempt to approach the light barrier (an absolute velocity of 300 thousand kilometers per second), and to perform research in proximity to the light barrier into the characteristics of space-time under arbitrary changes of velocity.
On 16 May 2020, the unmanned craft Ermak was detected and intercepted near the planet Pluto on its return orbit, and was brought to the international spaceport Pluto-2. The spaceship Taimyr did not appear on its planned return orbit.
A study of the data obtained by the spacecraft Ermak has demonstrated, in part, the following:
a) On the 327th day, subjective time, the Taimyr-Ermak expedition attained a velocity of 0.957 absolute relative to the sun, and turned to the execution of the research program; b) The expedition obtained, and the receiving devices on the Ermak recorded, extremely valuable data relating to the behavior of space-time under conditions of arbitrary changes of velocity in proximity to the light barrier; c) On the 342nd day, subjective time, the Taimyr initiated planned maneuvers bringing its distance from the Ermak up to 900 million kilometers. At 13 hours 09 minutes 11.2 seconds of the 344th day, subjective time, the tracking equipment on the Ermak detected, at the location of the Taimyr, a bright flash, after which the data flow from the Taimyr to the Ermak ceased, and was not resumed.
On the basis of the above-mentioned information, the commission has been obliged to conclude that the first-line interplanetary craft Taimyr has been lost with all hands (Aleksei Eduardovich Zhukov, Konstantin Ivanovich Falin, George Allen Pollack, Sergei Ivanovich Kondratev, Peter Koenig, and Evgeny Markovich Slavin) as a result of a serious accident. The cause and nature of the accident remain undetermined.
—Bulletin of the International Scientific Data Center, No. 237 (9 October 2021).
6. Two from the Taimyr
After his midday meal, Sergei Kondratev took a little nap. When he woke up, Evgeny Slavin came in. Evgeny’s red hair lit up the walls—they turned pink, as at sunset. Evgeny smelled pleasantly but powerfully of an unfamiliar cologne.
“Hello, Sergei old man!” he shouted from the threshold.
And immediately someone said, “Please, talk a little more quietly.”
Evgeny nodded readily toward the corridor, walked over to the bed on tiptoe, and sat so that Kondratev could see him without turning his head. His face was joyful, exultant. Kondratev could no longer remember when he had last seen him like that. And he saw the long reddish scar on Evgeny’s face for the first time.
“Hello, Evgeny,” Kondratev said.
Evgeny’s head of flaming hair suddenly blurred. Kondratev squinted and sobbed. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he muttered angrily.
“Sorry about that. I’ve gone all to pieces here. Well, how are you doing?”
“All right, quite all right,” Evgeny said in a choked-up voice. “Everything is simply amazing! The main thing is that they’ve brought you through. I was really worried about you, Sergei. Especially at first. All by myself, the depression, the homesickness! I rush off to see you and they won’t let me in. I swear at them, and it makes no dent at all. I start talking, arguing, trying to prove that I’m a doctor myself… though what kind of a doctor am I now, anyhow?
“All right, I believe you, I believe you,” Kondratev said affectionately.
“And suddenly today Protos himself calls me. You’re really on the mend, Sergei! In ten days or so I’ll be teaching you how to drive a pterocar. I’ve already ordered you one.”
“Oh?” said Kondratev. He had a spinal column broken in four places and a torn diaphragm, and his neck had parted from his skull. In his delirium he kept imagining himself as a rag doll that had been flattened under the caterpillar track of a truck. But you could depend on Protos. The doctor was a ruddy fat man, around fifty years old (or a hundred—who could tell these days?), very taciturn and very kind. He came every morning and every evening, sat down beside the bed, and breathed out so comfortably that Kondratev at once would begin to feel better. And he was, of course, a superb doctor, if up to now he had kept alive a rag doll flattened by a truck.
“Well, what the hell,” said Kondratev. “Could be.”
“Hey!” Evgeny shouted enthusiastically. “In ten days you’ll be driving a pterocar for me. Protos is a magician, and I say that as a former doctor!”
“Yes,” said Kondratev. “Protos is a very good man.”
“A brilliant doctor! When I found out what he was working on, I realized that I would have to change professions. So I’m changing professions, Sergei! I’m going to be a writer!”
“So,” said Kondratev. “You mean the writers haven’t gotten any better?”
“Well, you see,” said Evgeny, “one thing is clear: they’re all modernists, and I’ll be the only classicist. Like Trediakovsky the poet in the eighteenth century.”
Kondratev looked at Evgeny out of half-opened eyes. Evgeny certainly was not wasting time. Dressed in the height of fashion, no doubt-shorts and a loose soft jacket with short sleeves and an open collar. Not one single seam, everything in soft, bright colors. The hair given a light, casual trim. Smooth-shaven and co-logned. He was even trying to enunciate the way the greatgrandchildren did-firmly and resonantly, and without gesticulation. And the pterocar… and only a few weeks had gone by. “Evgeny, I’ve forgotten again what year it is here,” Kondratev said.
“Two thousand one hundred and nineteen,” Evgeny answered ceremoniously. “They just say ‘one nineteen’.”
“Well then, Evgeny,” Kondratev said very seriously. “How are redheads doing? Have they survived into the twenty-second century or have they all died out?”
Evgeny answered just as ceremoniously, “Yesterday I had the honor of conversing with the secretary of the Northwest Asian Economic Counciclass="underline" a most intelligent man, and quite infrared.”
They laughed and looked at each other. Then Kondratev asked, “Listen, Evgeny, where did you get that slash across your face?”
“That?” Evgeny fingered the scar. “You mean you can still see it?” he asked, distressed.