“Well, naturally,” said Kondratev. “Red on white.”
“I got that the same time you got smashed up. But they promised it would go away soon. Disappear without a trace. And I believe it, because they can do anything.”
“Who are ‘they’?” Kondratev asked gravely.
“What do you mean who? People—Earthlings.”
“You mean ‘we’?”
Evgeny was silent a moment. “Of course,” he said uncertainly. “‘We.’ In one sense of the word.” He stopped smiling and looked at Kondratev attentively. “Sergei,” he said softly, “does it hurt a lot, Sergei?”
Kondratev smiled weakly and said with his eyes, No, not much. But it was still good that Evgeny had asked. “Sergei, does it hurt a lot, Sergei?”—those were good words, and he had said them well. He had said them exactly as he had on the unlucky day when the Taimyr had buried itself in the shifting dust of a nameless planet and Kondratev, during a sortie, had hurt his leg.
That had hurt a lot, although, of course, not like now. Evgeny had thrown away his movie camera and had crawled along the crumbling slope of a dune, dragging Kondratev after him and swearing furiously. And then, when at last they had managed to scramble onto the crest of the dune, Evgeny had felt Kondratev’s leg through the fabric of the spacesuit and had suddenly asked quietly, “Sergei, does it hurt a lot, Sergei?” Over the pale blue desert a hot white disk crawled into the violet sky, static hissed annoyingly in the headphones, and they sat a long time waiting for the return of the cyberscout. The cyberscout never did return—probably it had sunk into the dust—and finally they had started crawling back to the Taimyr…
“What do you want to write about?” Kondratev asked. “About our trip?”
Evgeny began to speak with animation about sections and chapters, but Kondratev was no longer listening. He looked at the ceiling and thought, It hurts, it hurts, it hurts. And as always when the pain became unendurable, an oval hatch opened in the ceiling, and a rough gray tube with tiny winking green openings slid out noiselessly. The tube came down steadily until it had almost touched Kondratev’s chest, and then stopped. Then a quiet vibrating rumble began.
“Wh-what’s that?” Evgeny asked, jumping up.
Kondratev remained silent, his eyes closed, delightedly feeling the mad pain subside, disappear.
“Perhaps I had better leave?” Evgeny said, looking around.
The pain had gone. The tube retracted noiselessly upward, and the hatch in the ceiling closed.
“No,” said Kondratev. “That’s just treatment. Sit down, Evgeny.” He tried to remember what Evgeny had been talking about. Yes—a fictionalized sketch to be called Across the Light Barrier. About the flight of the Taimyr. About the attempt to slip through the light barrier. About the accident that had brought the Taimyr across a century.
“Listen, Evgeny,” Kondratev said. “Do they understand what happened to us?”
“Yes, of course,” said Evgeny.
“Well?”
“Hmm,” said Evgeny. “They understand, of course. But that doesn’t help us any. I for one can’t understand what they understand.”
“But still?”
“I told them everything, and they said, ‘Ah, yes: Sigma deritrinitation.’”
“What?” said Kondratev.
“De-ri-tri-ni-ta-tion. With a sigma in front.”
“Trimpazation,” Kondratev muttered. “Did they happen to say anything else?”
“They told me straight out, ‘Your Taimyr came right up to the light barrier under Legen acceleration and sigma-deritrinitated the space-time continuum.’ They said that we shouldn’t have resorted to Legen accelerations.”
“Right,” said Kondratev. “So then we shouldn’t have resorted, but the fact remains that we did resort. Deri-teri—What’s that word?”
“Deritrinitation. That’s the third time I’ve told you. To put it briefly, so far as I understand it, any body approaching the light barrier under certain conditions distorts the form of worldlines extremely strongly, and pierces Riemann space, so to speak. Well… that’s about what Bykov Junior had predicted in our day.”
“Uh-huh,” said Kondratev.
“They call this penetration deritrinitation.’ All their long-range ships work on that principle. D-ships.”
“Uh-huh,” Kondratev said again.
“Under deritrinitation, those same Legen accelerations are especially hazardous. I didn’t understand at all where they come from or what they consist of. Some sort of local vibrational field, plasmatic hypertransition, or something. The fact remains that under Legen interference extraordinarily strong distortions of time scale are inevitable. That’s what happened to us in the Taimyr.”
“Deritrinitation,” Kondratev said sadly, and closed his eyes.
They fell silent. It’s a bum deal, Kondratev thought. D-ships. Deritrinitation. We’ll never get through it all. Plus a broken back.
Evgeny stroked Kondratev’s cheek and said, “Never mind, Sergei. I think we’ll understand in time. Of course, we’ll have to learn an awful lot.”
“Relearn,” Kondratev whispered without opening his eyes. “Don’t deceive yourself, Evgeny. Relearn. Relearn everything from the very beginning.”
“So all right, I’m willing,” Evgeny said brightly. “The main thing is to want to.”
“‘I want to’ means ‘I can’?” Kondratev inquired bitterly.
“That’s it.”
“That saying was invented by people who could even when they didn’t want to. Iron men.”
“Well,” said Evgeny, “you’re not made of paper either. A couple weeks back I met a certain young woman…”
“Oh?” said Kondratev. Evgeny very much liked meeting young women.
“She’s a linguist. Smart. A wonderful, amazing person.”
“Of course,” said Kondratev.
“Let me talk, Sergei. I understand everything. You’re afraid. But here there’s no need to be lonely. There are no lonely people here. Get well soon, Navigator. You’re turning sour.”
Kondratev was silent a while, and then asked, “Evgeny, do me a favor and go over to the window.”
Evgeny got up and, walking noiselessly, went over to the enormous—wall-high—blue window. Kondratev could see nothing out the window except sky. At night the window was a blue-black abyss studded with piercing stars, and once or twice the navigator had seen a reddish glow blaze up—blaze up and quickly die out.
“I’ve arrived,” said Evgeny.
“What’s there?”
“A balcony.”
“And farther?”
“Below the balcony is a pad,” Evgeny said, and looked back at Kondratev.
Kondratev frowned. Even old Evgeny was no help. Kondratev was as alone as could be. So far he knew nothing. Not a thing. He didn’t even know what sort of floor there was in his room, because footsteps made no sound on it. Last evening the navigator had tried to sit up and look the room over, and had immediately fainted. He had not tried again, because he could not stand being unconscious.
“This building where you are is a nursing home for serious cases,” said Evgeny. “The building has sixteen stories, and your room—”
“Ward,” muttered Kondratev.
“—and your room is on the ninth floor. There’s a balcony. Outside are mountains-the Urals—and a pine forest. From here I can see, first, another nursing home like this one. It’s about fifteen kilometers away. Farther in the same direction is Sverdlovsk. It’s ninety kilometers off. Second, I see a landing pad for pterocars. They’re really wonderful machines! There are four of them there now. So. What else? Third, a plaza with flowers and a fountain. Near the fountain there’s a child. By all appearances, he’s thinking about how much he would like to run away into the forest.”