“Has something happened?” He heard a faint feminine voice, coming, it seemed, from inside the elderly great-great-grandchild.
“No,” said the other great-great-grandchild, nodding benevolently toward Kondratev. “I’ve accidentally pushed a young man here.”
“Oh,” said the woman’s voice. “Then do some more listening. I said that I would have nothing to do with the plan and that you would be against it too.” The elderly great-great-grandchild moved off, and the woman’s voice gradually faded out.
Great-great-grandchildren overtook Kondratev from behind, and came toward him from the front. Many smiled at him, sometimes even nodding. But no one stared and no one was crawling with questions. True, for some time a dark-eyed lad with his hands in his pockets described a complicated trajectory around Kondratev, but at the very moment when Kondratev at last took pity and decided to nod toward him, the boy, in obvious despair, had dropped behind. Kondratev felt more at ease and started looking and listening.
Generally, the great-great-grandchildren seemed to be very ordinary people. Young and old, short and tall, homely and beautiful. Men and women. There was no one senile or sickly. And there were no children. The great-great-grandchildren on this green street behaved quite calmly and unconstrainedly, as if they were at home, with old friends. You couldn’t say that they all radiated joy and happiness. Kondratev saw worried and tired faces, and more rarely even gloomy ones. One young fellow sat by the side of the walk among dandelions, picking them one after another and blowing on them fiercely. It was obvious that his thoughts were wandering somewhere far away, and that these thoughts were anything but happy.
The great-great-grandchildren dressed simply and quite variously. The older men wore long pants and soft jackets with open collars; the women wore slacks or long elegant dresses. The young men and girls almost all wore loose shorts and white or colored smocks. Of course you also encountered women of fashion sporting purple or gold cloaks, thrown over short bright… shirts, Kondratev decided. These fashion plates were looked at.
It was quiet in the city, or at least there were no mechanical sounds. Kondratev heard only voices and, sometimes, from somewhere, music. The treetops rustled too, and very occasionally there came the soft “fr-r-r-r” of a pterocar flying past. Obviously most aircraft usually traveled at high altitudes. In short, nothing here was entirely alien to Kondratev, although it was very strange to be walking down paths and sandy walks, with clothes brushing against the branches of bushes, in the middle of an enormous city. The suburban parks of a hundred years earlier had been almost the same. Kondratev could have felt entirely at home here, if only he did not feel so useless, undoubtedly more useless than any of these gold and purple fashion plates with their short hems.
He overtook a man and woman walking arm in arm. The man was saying, “At this point the violin comes in—tra-la-la~la-a—and then the delicate and tender thread of the choriole—di-i-da-da-da… di-i-i.” His rendition was piercing but not very musical. The woman looked at him with some doubt.
By the wayside two middle-aged men stood silently. One suddenly said gloomily, “All the same, she had no call to tell the boy about that.”
“Too late now,” answered the other, and they again fell silent.
A threesome—a pale girl, a giant elderly black, and a pensive fellow who was smiling absentmindedly—walked slowly toward Kondratev. The girl was talking, abruptly waving about her clenched fist. “The question has to be resolved another way. As an artist, either you’re a writer or a sensationalist. There is no third possibility. But he plays games with spatial relationships. That’s craft, not art. He’s just an uncaring, self-satisfied hack.”
“Masha, Masha!” the black droned reproachfully.
The young fellow kept smiling absentmindedly.
Kondratev turned onto a side path, passed a hedge mottled with big blue and yellow flowers, and stopped dead. Before him was a moving road.
Kondratev had already heard about the amazing moving roads. Their construction had begun long ago and now they extended between many cities, forming an uninterrupted ramifying transcontinental system from the Pyrenees to the Tien Shan, and south across the plains of China to Hanoi, and in the Americas from Port Yukon to Tierra del Fuego. Evgeny had told improbable tales about the roads. He said that they did not use energy and need not fear time; if they were destroyed, they would restore themselves; they climbed mountains with ease and threw themselves across abysses on bridges. According to Evgeny, these roads would move as long as the sun shone and Earth was intact. And Evgeny also had said that the moving road was not actually a road, but a flow of something halfway between the animate and inanimate. A fourth kingdom.
A few steps away from Kondratev the road flowed in six even gray streams, the strips of the Big Road. The strips moved at various speeds and were separated from each other and from the outside grass by two-inch-high white barriers. On the strips people were standing, walking, sitting. Kondratev approached and placed one leg indecisively on the barrier. And then, bending and listening, he heard the voice of the Big Road: squeaking, crackling, rustling.
The surface of the road was soft like warm asphalt. He stood for a while, and then transferred to the next strip.
The road flowed down a hill, and Kondratev could see it stretch all the way out to the deep-blue horizon. It sparkled in the sun like a tarred highway.
Kondratev began to look at the rooftops sailing by over the crowns of the pines. On one roof there sparkled an enormous structure made from several huge square mirrors strung on a light openwork frame. On all the roofs sat pterocars—red, green, gold, gray. Hundreds of pterocars and helicopters hung over the city. With a faint whistling sound, eclipsing the sun for a long time, a triangular airship floated along the road, and then disappeared behind the forest. The outlines of some sort of structure—not exactly masts, not exactly stereovision towers—showed far off in the foggy haze. The road flowed evenly, without jolts; the green bushes and brown pine trunks ran merrily backward; great glass buildings, bright cottages, open verandas under sparkling multicolored awnings appeared and disappeared in the spaces between the branches.
Kondratev suddenly realized that the road was taking him to the outskirts of Sverdlovsk. Well, let it, he thought. Fine. This road must be able to take you anywhere you liked—Siberia, India, Vietnam. He sat down and clasped his knees with his arms. It wasn’t particularly soft seating, but it wasn’t hard either. In front of Kondratev three lads sat tailor-fashion, bending over multicolored squares of some sort. They must be solving a problem in geometry. Or perhaps they were playing a game. What are these roads good for? Kondratev thought. It wasn’t likely that anyone would take it into his head to ride this way to Vietnam or India. Too little speed. And too hard a seat. After all, there were stratoplanes, the enormous triangular airships, pterocars—what good was a road? And what it must have cost! He began to recall how they had built roads a century ago—not moving ones, either, but the most ordinary sort, and not especially good ones at that. The enormous semiautomatic road layers, the stench of tar, the heat, and the sweaty, tired people inside dust-powdered cabs. And of course enormously greater heaps of labor and thought had been hammered into the Big Road than into the Trans-Gobi Highway. And evidently all so that you could get on wherever you liked, sit wherever you liked, and poke along without worrying about anything, picking camomile flowers along the way. It was strange, incomprehensible, irrational…