“What’s that?” asked Evgeny.
“A tester,” Yurii answered tiredly.
“No, no, all this!”
Yurii looked around. “That’s a UWM-16. Universal Washing Machine with semicybernetic control. Washes, irons, and sews on buttons. Watch it! Don’t step on anything.”
Evgeny looked under his feet and saw a pile of black rags lying in a puddle of water. Steam was rising from the rags.
“Those are my pants,” Yurii explained.
“So your machine isn’t working either?” asked Evgeny. The hope of receiving advice, and dinner, evaporated.
“It’s in perfect shape,” Yurii said angrily. “I dismantled it down to the last screw, and figured out its principle of operation. Here’s the output mechanism. Here’s the analyser. I didn’t dismantle that—it’s working as it is. Here’s the transporting mechanism and the heat-regulating system. Granted I haven’t found the sewing device yet, but the machine is in perfect shape. I think the trouble is that for some reason it has twelve programming keys, while in the brochure it said four.”
“Four?” asked Evgeny.
“Four,” answered Yurii, absently scratching his knee. “But why did you say ‘your machine’? Do you have a washing machine too? I just got mine an hour ago. Home Delivery.”
“Four!” Evgeny repeated in delight. “Four, not twelve… Tell me, Yurii, have you tried putting meat into it?”
9. Homecoming
Sergei Kondratev returned home at noon. He had spent all morning at the Minor Informatoreum—he was looking for a profession. It was cool, quiet, and very lonely at home. Kondratev walked through all the rooms, drank some Narzan water, stood up in front of his empty desk, and set to thinking how he could kill the afternoon. Out the window the sun shone bright, some sort of bird was chirping, and a metallic rattle and clicking came from the lilac bushes. Obviously one of the efficient multilegged horrors which deprived an honest man of the opportunity to work at, say, gardening, was puttering around out there.
The ex-navigator sighed and closed the window. Should he go see Evgeny? No, he would be sure not to catch him at home. Evgeny had loaded himself down with the latest model dictaphones and was rushing all over the Urals; he had thirty-three things to worry about, not counting the little ones. “Insufficiency of knowledge,” he would declare, “must be made up through an excess of energy.” Sheila was a wonderful person who understood everything, but she was never home except when Evgeny was. The navigator dragged himself to the dining room and drank another glass of mineral water. Perhaps he should eat dinner? Not a bad idea—he could dine carefully and tastefully. Except he wasn’t hungry.
He went over to the delivery line cube, tapped out a number at random, and waited curiously to see what he would get. A green light flashed on over the cube—the order had been filled. With a certain wariness, the navigator opened the lid. At the bottom of the spacious cube-shaped box lay a paper plate. The navigator took it and set it on the table. On the plate were two large fresh-salted cucumbers. If only they had had cucumbers like that on the Taimyr, toward the end of the second year… Maybe he should go see Protos? Protos was one in a million. But of course he was very busy, kindly old Protos. All the good people were busy with something.
The navigator absently picked a cucumber up off the plate and ate it. Then he ate the other one and put the plate in the garbage chute. I could go out and hang around with the volunteers for a while again, he thought. Or go to Valparaiso, I’ve never been to Valparaiso.
The navigator’s ruminations were interrupted by the song of the door signal. The navigator was glad—he did not get many visitors. Evidently the great-great-grandchildren, out of false modesty, had not wanted to bother him. The whole week that he had been living here, he had only been visited once, by his neighbor, a sprightly eighty-year-old woman with an old-fashioned bun of black hair. She had introduced herself as the senior technician at a bread factory, and in the course of two hours she had patiently taught him how to punch the numbers on the control panel of the delivery line. They had somehow not gotten into a serious conversation, although she was doubtless an excellent person. And a few times some very young great-great grandchildren, quite clearly innocent of any feeling of false modesty, had arrived uninvited. These visitations were dictated by purely selfish considerations. One individual had evidently come to read the navigator his ode “On the Return of the Taimyr,” of which the navigator had understood only individual words (Taimyr, kosmos), since it was in Swahili. Another was working on a biography of Edgar Allan Poe, and without any particular hope he asked for any little-known facts about the life of the great American writer. Kondratev told him the conjectures about meetings between Poe and Aleksandr Pushkin, and advised him to apply to Evgeny Slavin. Other boys and girls appeared for what Kondratev in the terminology of the twenty-first century would have called autograph hunting. But even the young autograph hunters were better than nothing, and consequently the song of the door signal gladdened Kondratev’s heart.
Kondratev went out into the entryway and shouted, “Come in!” A tall man entered, wearing a full-cut gray jacket and long blue sweatsuit-style pants. He quietly closed the door behind him and, inclining his head a bit, started looking the navigator over. His physiognomy seemed to Kondratev to bear a very lively resemblance to the photographs he had once seen of the stone idols of Easter Island—narrow, long, with a high narrow forehead and powerful brows, deep-sunk eyes, and a long, sharply curved nose. His face was dark, but fair white skin showed unexpectedly from his open collar. This man bore little resemblance to an autograph hunter.
“You wish to see me?” Kondratev asked hopefully.
“Yes,” the stranger said quietly. “I do.”
“Then come on in,” said Kondratev. He was moved, and a little disappointed, by the sad tone of the stranger. Looks like an autograph hunter after all, he thought. But I must receive him a little more warmly.
“Thank you,” the stranger said still more quietly. Stooping a little, he walked past the navigator and stopped in the middle of the living room.
“Please, have a seat,” said Kondratev.
The stranger was standing silently, looking fixedly at the couch. Kondratev, with some worry, looked at the couch too. It was a wonderful folding couch, broad, noiseless, and soft, with a springy light green cover that was porous like a sponge.
“My name is Gorbovsky,” the stranger said quietly, without taking his eyes off the couch. “Leonid Andreevich Gorbovsky. I came to have a talk with you, spacer to spacer.”
“What’s happened?” Kondratev asked in fright. “Did something happen to the Taimyr? And sit down, please!”
Gorbovsky continued to stand. “To the Taimyr? Not at all. Or rather, I don’t know,” he said. “But then the Taimyr is in the Cosmonautical Museum. What could happen to it there?”
“Of course,” said Kondratev, smiling. “After all, it won’t likely be going anywhere.”
“Nowhere at all,” Gorbovsky agreed, and also smiled. His smile, like that of many homely people, was kind and somehow childlike.
“What are we standing for?” Kondratev exclaimed brightly. “Let’s sit down.”
“You… I’ll tell you what, Navigator Kondratev,” Gorbovsky said suddenly. “Could I perhaps lie down?”