“Oh, well. It’s the last night.”
“Yes, and the ninth one,” said Mikhailov.
“The tenth.”
“Is it really the tenth? My head is like mush.” Mikhailov turned to Zvantsev. “Excuse me, comrade…”
“Zvantsev, oceanographer,” Zvantsev said for the third time. “Comrade Mikhailov, you simply have to let us through. We’ve just flown in from the Philippines. We’re bringing information to the Academician, very important scientific information. He has been waiting for it all his life. You see, I’ve known him thirty years. I can tell better than you whether he should die without hearing this. It’s extremely important information.”
Akiko got out of the car and stood beside him. The technician was silent, shivering with cold underneath his rain cape. “Well, all right,” he said at last. “Only there are too many of you.” That was how he said it: “too many.”
“Only one of you should go.”
“Very well,” said Zvantsev.
“But if you ask me it won’t do any good,” Mikhailov said.
“Casparo won’t let you see the Academician. The Academician is in isolation. You could ruin the whole experiment if you break the isolation, and then…”
“1 will speak with Casparo myself,” Zvantsev interrupted. “Take me to him.”
“All right,” said the technician. “Let’s go.”
Zvantsev looked back at Akiko. There were many large and small drops on her face. She said, “Go on, sir.” Then she turned to the men in the rain capes. “Somebody give him a rain cape, and get in the car yourself. Park the car crosswise across the road.”
They gave Zvantsev a rain cape. Akiko wanted to go back to the car and turn it around, but Mikhailov said that the engine should not be turned on. He got up and lit the way with his awkward smoking torch, while they shoved the car around and positioned it across the road manually. Then the full complement of the roadblock crew got into the passenger compartment. Zvantsev peered inside. Akiko had sat down again, curling up, in the front seat. Mikhailov’s companions were already asleep, leaning their heads on one another.
“Tell him…” said Akiko.
“Yes, of course.”
“Tell him we’ll be waiting.”
“Right,” said Zvantsev. “I’ll tell him.”
“Well, go.”
“Sayonara, Aki-tyan.”
“Go on…”
Zvantsev carefully closed the door and went up to the technician. “Let’s go.”
“Let’s go,” the technician responded in a quite new, very brisk voice. “We’ll walk fast—we’ve got to cover seven kilometers.”
They started off, taking broad steps over the rough wet concrete.
“What are you doing out there?” asked the technician.
“‘Out there’?”
“Well, out there… in the outside world. We haven’t heard anything in two weeks. What’s going on in the Council? How is the Big Shaft project coming?”
“There are a lot of volunteers,” said Zvantsev. “But not enough annihilators. Not enough cooling units. The Council is planning on transferring thirty percent of energy to the project. Practically all the specialists on deep penetration have been called back from Venus.”
“A good move,” said the technician. “There’s nothing for them to do on Venus now. Who did they choose to head up the project?”
“I haven’t the vaguest idea,” Zvantsev said angrily.
“Not Sterner?”
“I don’t know.”
They were silent for a bit.
“Real junk, right?” said the technician.
“What?”
“These torches are real junk, right? What crap! Can you smell how it stinks?”
Zvantsev sniffed and stepped two paces to the side. “Yes,” he said. The torch reeked of oil. “Why are you using them?” he asked.
“It was Casparo’s order. No electrical appliances, no electric lights. We’re trying to keep interference down to a minimum. Do you smoke, by the way?”
“Yes.”
The technician stopped. “Give me your lighter,” he said. “And your radiophone. You do have a radiophone?”
“I do.”
“Give them to me.” Mikhailov took the lighter and radiophone, removed their batteries, and threw these into a ditch. “I’m sorry, but it’s necessary. For twenty kilometers around not one electrical appliance is turned on.”
“So that’s what’s going on,” said Zvantsev.
“Yes. We’ve plundered all the apiaries around Novosibirsk to make beeswax candles. Have you heard about those?”
“No.”
They again started walking quickly in the steady rain.
“The candles are junk too, but at least they’re better than torches. Or woodsplints—have you heard about those?”
“No,” said Zvantsev.
“There’s an old song, ‘Light My Fire.’ I had always thought the metaphor involved some sort of generator.”
“Now I understand why it’s raining,” Zvantsev said after a silence. “That is, I understand why the microweather installations are shut down.”
“No, no,” said the technician. “The microweather stations are one thing, but the rain is being driven to us specially from Wind Ridge. There’s a continental installation there.”
“What’s it for?” Zvantsev asked.
“To shield us from direct solar illumination.”
“What about discharges from the clouds?”
“The clouds arrive electrically neutral—they are discharged along the way. And in general, the experiment has turned out to be on a much grander scale than we had thought at first. We’ve got all the biocoding specialists gathered here. From the whole world. Five hundred people. And that’s still too few. And the whole Northern Ural region is working for us.”
“And so far everything’s going all right?” Zvantsev asked.
The technician was silent.
“Can you hear me?” Zvantsev asked.
“I can’t give you an answer,” Mikhailov said reluctantly. “We hope everything is going as it should. The principle has been verified, but this is the first experiment with a human being. One hundred twenty trillion megabits of information, and a mistake in any one bit can distort a good deal.”
Mikhailov fell silent, and they walked a long time without saying a word. Zvantsev did not notice at first that they were walking through a village. The village was empty. The dull walls of the cottages shone weakly, and the windows were dark. Here and there, open garage doors showed black behind lacy wet hedges.
The technician forgot about Zvantsev. Another six hours and it will be all over, he thought. I’ll go home and collapse into bed. The Great Experiment will be over. The great Okada will die and become immortal. Oh, how beautiful! But until the time has come, no one will even know whether the experiment was a success. Not even Casparo himself. The great Casparo, the great Okada, the Great Experiment! The Great Encoding. Mikhailov shook his head—the familiar heaviness was once again crawling onto his eyes, clouding his brain. No, you’ve got to think. Valerio Casparo said that we’ve got to start thinking now. Everyone should think, even the technicians, even though we don’t know enough. But Casparo said that everyone must think Valerio Casparo—or Valerii Konstantinovich Kasparo, in the vulgar tongue. It ‘s funny, how he works and works, and suddenly he says to the whole hall, “Enough. Let’s sit for a while, staring stupidly ahead!” He picked up that phrase from something he read. If you ask him about something during that time, he says, “Young man, you see to it yourself. Don’t bother me while I’m sitting here, staring stupidly ahead. I’m thinking about the wrong thing again. So: first off we’ll state the problem. Given: that a complex of physiological neuronic states (to put it more simply, a living brain) is hard-coded according to the third Casparo-Kaprov system onto a crystalline quasibiomass. With the proper isolation, a hard code on a crystalline quasibiomass will be preserved with a normal noise level for quite a long time—the relaxation time for the code is on the order of twelve thousand years. Time enough. Required: to find a means of transferring the biomass code onto a living brain, that is to say onto a complex of physiological functioning neurons in the null state. Of course, for this we also need a living brain in the null state, but for such a business people always have been found and will be found—me, for example… But they still wouldn’t permit it. Casparo won’t even hear of a living brain. There’s an eccentric for you. So now you sit and wait for the guys in Leningrad to build an artificial one. So. In short, we have encoded Okada’s brain onto a crystalline biomass. We have the number for Okada’s brain, the number for Okada’s thoughts, the number for his ego. And now we have to find a means of transferring the numbers to another brain. Let it be an artificial one. Then Okada will be reborn. The enciphered ego Okada will once again become a real, acting ego. Question: how is this to be done? How?… It would be nice to figure it out right now and make the old man happy. Casparo has been thinking about this for a quarter of a century. Run up to him sopping wet like Archimedes, and shout, Eureka!” Mikhailov stumbled and almost dropped the torch.