“What?” asked the girl, stopping.
No, she wasn’t just attractive. She was plain beautiful. So beautiful she couldn’t fail to be smart, so smart she couldn’t fail to be nice, so nice… Pol suddenly wanted to be tall and broad-shouldered, with an unfurrowed brow and steely calm eyes. His thoughts darted in a zigzag. If nothing else, I have to be witty. He said, “My name is Pol.”
The girl answered, “I’m Irina. Did you say something to me, Pol?”
Pol broke out in a sweat. The girl waited, looking impatiently after the calf, which was moving off. The thoughts in Pol’s head darted in three layers. Let us find the square root… Cupid fires from a double-barreled carbine… Now she’ll think I’m a stutterer. Aha! A stutterer—that was a thought.
“Y-you’re in a h-hurry, I see,” he said, stuttering with all his might. “I’ll Hook you up th-this evening, if I m-may. Th-this evening.”
“Of course.” The girl was obviously pleased.
“T-till evening,” Pol said, and went on. I talked a little, he thought. We had a little c-conversation. I’m a veritable skyrocket of wit. He pictured himself at the moment of that conversation, and even moaned nasally at his awkwardness.
Somewhere nearby a loudspeaker boomed: “Will all unoccupied anesthesia specialists please stop by Laboratory Three? Potenko calling. We’ve got an idea. Will all unoccupied anesthesia specialists please stop by Laboratory Three? And don’t come crashing into the main building like last time. Laboratory Three. Laboratory Three.”
Why aren’t I a specialist in anesthesia? thought Pol. After all, I wouldn’t dream of crashing into the main building. Two fair maidens in shorts rushed past, down the middle of the street, their elbows pressed to their sides. Probably specialists.
It was quiet and empty in the village. A lonely litter robot languished in the sun at a perfectly clean intersection. Out of pity, Pol threw it a handful of leaves. The robot immediately came to life and set to work. I haven’t met so many litter robots in any city, thought Pol. But then, on a stock farm anything can happen.
A solid thunder of hoofs sounded from behind. Pol turned around in fright, and four horses galloped headlong past him, flanks foaming. On the lead horse, crouched over the mane, was a fellow in white shorts, tanned almost black and glossy with sweat. The other steeds were riderless. Near a low building twenty yards from Pol, at full gallop, the fellow jumped from the horse right onto the steps of the porch. He whistled piercingly and disappeared into the door. The horses, snorting and twisting their necks, described a semicircle and came back to the porch. Pol did not even have time to be properly envious. Three boys and a girl ran out of the low building, leaped onto the horses, and rushed back past Pol at the same mad gait. They were already turning the corner when the fellow in the white shorts jumped out onto the porch and shouted after them, “Take the samples right to the station. Aleshka!”
There was no longer anyone on the street. The fellow stood there a little while, wiped his forehead, and returned to the building. Pol sighed and went on.
He stopped and listened at the threshold to Kostylin’s laboratory. The sounds that reached him seemed strange: A muffled blow. A heavy sigh. Something sliding. A bored voice said, “Right.” Silence. Again a muffled blow. Pol looked around at the sun-flooded laboratory square. Kostylin’s voice said, “Liar. Hold it.” A muffled blow. Pol went into the entryway and saw a white door with a sign, SURGICAL LABORATORY. Behind the door the bored voice said, “Why do we always take the thigh? We could take the back.” Kostylin’s bass answered, “The Siberians tried that—it didn’t work.” Again a muffled blow.
Pol went up to the door. It opened noiselessly. There was a lot of light in the laboratory, and along the walls shined strange-looking installations frosted with white. The broad panes set in the wall showed dark. Pol asked, “Can someone septic come in?”
No one answered. There were about ten people in the laboratory. They all looked gloomy and pensive. Three sat together, silent, on a large low bench. They looked at Pol without any expression. Two others sat with their backs to the door, by the far wall, with their heads together, reading something. The rest were gathered together in a semicircle in a corner. In the center of the semicircle, his face to the wall, towered Kostylin. He was covering his eyes with his right hand. His left hand was pushed through under his right arm. Freckled Fedor, who was also standing in the semicircle, slapped him on the left palm. The semicircle stirred, and thrust forward fists with thumbs up. Kostylin silently turned and pointed to a person, who silently shook his head, and Kostylin took up his former pose.
“So can someone septic come in?” Pol asked again. “Or is this a bad time?”
“The Pilgrim,” one of the people sitting on the bench said in a bored voice. “Come on in, Pilgrim. We’re all septic here.”
Pol went in. The man with the bored voice said into space, “Peasants, I propose we look over the analyses one more time. Maybe there’s still not enough protein.”
“There’s even more protein than we calculated,” said one of the players of this strange game. An oppressive silence reigned; only the blows rang out, and somebody said from time to time, “Liar, you guessed wrong.”
Ha! thought Pol. All is not for the best in the surgical laboratory.
Kostylin suddenly pushed the players apart and walked out into the middle of the room. “A proposal,” he said briskly. Everyone, even the ones poring over their notes, turned toward him. “Let’s go swimming.”
“Let’s go,” the man with the bored voice said decisively. “We’ve got to think it all out from the beginning.”
No one responded further to the proposal. The surgeons spread out over the room and were quiet once again.
Kostylin went up to Pol and grasped him by the shoulders. “Let’s go, Polly,” he said sadly. “Let’s go, boy. We won’t be downhearted, right?”
“Of course not, Lin,” said Pol. “If it doesn’t work today, it’ll work day after tomorrow.”
They went out onto the sunny street. “Don’t hold back, Lin,” said Pol. “Don’t be afraid to cry a little on my shoulder. Don’t hold back.”
There were about one hundred thousand stock-raising farms on the Planet. There were farms that raised cattle, farms that raised pigs, farms that raised elephants, antelope, goats, llamas, sheep. In the middle stream of the Nile there were two farms which were trying to raise hippopotamuses.
On the Planet there were about two hundred thousand grain farms growing rye, wheat, corn, buckwheat, millet, oats, rice, kaoliang. There were specialized farms like Volga-Unicorn, and broad-based ones. Together they provided the foundation for abundance—giant, very highly automated complexes producing foodstuffs: everything from pigs and potatoes to oysters and mangoes. No accidental mishap, no catastrophe, could now threaten the Planet with crop failure and famine. The system for ample production, established once and for all, was maintained completely automatically and had developed so swiftly that it had been necessary to take special precautions against overproduction. Just as there had never been a breathing problem, now mankind had no problem eating.
By evening Pol already had an idea, though only the most general, of what the livestock farmers did. The Volga Farm was one of the few thousand stock farms in the temperate zone. Evidently here you could busy yourself with practical genetics, embryomechanical veterinary science, the production side of economic statistics, zoopsychology, or agrological cybernetics. Pol also encountered here one soil scientist who was evidently loafing-he drank milk fresh from the cow, and courted a pretty zoopsychologist all out, continually striving to entice her off to the swamps of the Amazon, where there was still something for a self-respecting soil scientist to do.