“How long?” Casparo asked without turning around.
“Clinical death in two hours. Plus or minus twenty minutes.”
Casparo turned around. “But he looks good… See for yourself.” He tapped the eyepiece with a finger.
The man in the helmet shook his head.
“Paralysis of the nerves,” the second one said very quietly. He looked back, ran his bulging eyes over Zvantsev, and, bending over toward Casparo, said something in his ear.
Zvantsev recognized him. It was Professor Ivan Krasnov.
“Very well,” said Casparo. “We’ll do it this way.” The two turned together and quickly disappeared into the darkness.
Zvantsev groped for a chair, sat down, and closed his eyes. It’s over, he thought. They won’t make it. He’ll die. He’ll die completely.
“Section one nine zero zero two filled,” said the voice. “Section one nine zero zero three filled… Section one nine zero zero four…”
Zvantsev did not know anything about the encoding of nerve linkages. He imagined Okada lying on a table under a deathly white light, with a fine needle crawling slowly over the convolutions of his exposed brain, and that the code impulses were put down character after character on a long tape. Zvantsev understood perfectly well that in reality it wasn’t done like that at all, but his imagination kept sketching him the same picture: the shining needle crawling over the brain, and, recorded on an endless tape, the mysterious signs signifying memory, habits, associations, experience… And from somewhere death was creeping up, destroying cell after cell, linkage after linkage, and they had to outrace it.
Zvantsev knew almost nothing about the encoding of nerve linkages. But he did know that the boundaries of the brain areas that carried out separate thought processes were still unknown. That the Great Encoding was possible only under conditions of the most extreme isolation and with the most precise registration of all irregular fields. Hence the candles and torches, and the camels on the highway, the empty villages, and the black windows of the microweather installation, and the halting of the moving roads. Zvantsev knew that a means of monitoring the encoding that did not distort it had not yet been found. That Casparo worked half-blind and anyhow was encoding things which, perhaps, were not at all what should be encoded. But Zvantsev also knew that the Great Encoding was the road toward the immortality of the human ego, because a person wasn’t arms and legs. A person was memory, habits, associations, a brain. A brain.
“Section one ninety-two sixteen filled…”
Zvantsev opened his eyes, got up, and went over to Casparo. Casparo was sitting looking straight ahead.
“Professor Casparo,” said Zvantsev, “I am Zvantsev, the oceanographer. I must speak to Academician Okada.”
Casparo raised his eyes and looked up at Zvantsev for a long time. His eyes were dull, half-closed. “That is impossible,” he said.
They looked at each other silently for some time.
“Academician Okada has been waiting for this information all his life,” Zvantsev said quietly.
Casparo did not answer. He turned his eyes away and once again stared straight ahead. Zvantsev looked around. Darkness. Candle flames. White silvery hooded coats.
“Section one ninety-two ninety-two filled,” said the voice.
Casparo got up and said, “That’s it. The end.”
And Zvantsev saw a small red lamp winking on the board by the eyepiece of the periscope. The light, he thought. So it’s over.
“Section one ninety-two ninety-four filled…”
Out of the darkness a small girl in a fluttering lab coat came running at top speed. She darted straight to Casparo, knocking Zvantsev out of the way.
“Sir,” she said despairingly, “there’s only one free section left.”
“We won’t need any more,” Casparo said. He got up and ran into Zvantsev. “Who are you?” he asked tiredly.
“I’m Zvantsev, the oceanographer,” Zvantsev said quietly. “I had wanted to speak to Academician Okada.”
“That is impossible,” Casparo said. “Academician Okada is dead.”
He bent over the board and turned four switches, one after another. A blinding light flashed on under the ceiling of the enormous hall.
It was already light when Zvantsev went down into the lobby. The grayish light of a foggy morning poured into the enormous windows, but there was a feeling that any moment now the sun would burn through, and the day would be clear. There was no one in the lobby. A crumpled coverlet lay on the sofa. Several candles were burning down on the table between jars and dishes of food. Zvantsev looked back at the staircase. Voices sounded from above. Mikhailov, who had promised to go with Zvantsev, was somewhere up there.
Zvantsev went over to the sofa and sat down. Three young men came down the staircase. One went up to the table and started wolfing down food with his bare hands. He moved plates around, dropped a soft-drink bottle, grabbed it, and started drinking. The second was sleeping as he walked, scarcely moving his eyes. The third, holding the sleeper back by the shoulders, was saying enthusiastically, “Casparo told Krasnov. That’s all he said. And right away the old man collapsed right onto the board. We grabbed him and took him to the study, and Serezhka Kruglov was already sleeping there. So we laid the two of them together.”
“I can’t believe it,” the first one said indistinctly—he was still chewing. “Did we really have time for so much?”
“Damn it, how many times do I have to tell you! Ninety-eight percent. And some tenths—I don’t remember exactly.”
“Really ninety-eight percent?”
“I see you’re zonked out altogether. You don’t understand what people are saying to you.”
“I understand all right, but I don’t believe it.” The one who was eating suddenly sat down and grabbed a jar of preserves. “I can’t believe it. Things seemed to be going quite poorly.”
“Guys,” muttered the sleepy one. “Let’s go, huh? I’ve plain had it.”
All three suddenly made a great commotion and left. More and more people were coming down the staircase. Sleepy ones, barely dragging their legs. Excited ones, with bulging eyes and voices hoarse from long silence.
It doesn’t look like a funeral, Zvantsev thought. He knew that Okada was dead, but he didn’t believe it. It seemed as if the Academician had simply fallen asleep, except that no one knew yet how to wake him. No matter—they would find out. Ninety-eight percent, he thought. Not bad at all It was very strange, but he did not feel the grief of loss. There was no mourning. He felt only something on the order of dissatisfaction, thinking that he would have to wait, perhaps for a long time, for Okada to return. As had happened before, when Okada had gone away to the mainland for an extended stay.
Mikhailov touched him on the shoulder. He was wearing neither rain cape nor lab coat. “Let’s go, Comrade Zvantsev.”
Zvantsev got up and walked after him toward the doorway. The heavy double doors opened by themselves, easily and silently.
The sun had not yet come up, but it was light, and the clouds were rapidly disappearing from the blue-gray sky. Zvantsev saw low cream-colored buildings, streets sprinkled with red fallen leaves running between them. People were coming out of the Institute and dispersing among the streets in groups of twos or threes.
Someone shouted, “The fellows from Kostroma are relaxing in building six, floors two and three!”
Small, many-legged litter robots moved along the streets in sparse files. They left behind them dry, gray, clean concrete.
“Would you like a candy bar?” asked Mikhailov.