“Undesirable applications?” inserted Noonan.
“Exactly. For example, applications of spacells in the defense industry… Let’s not get off track. The behavior of each useful object has been more or less studied and more or less explained. Right now we’re held back by technology, but in fifty years or so we will learn how to manufacture these sledgehammers ourselves, and then we’ll crack nuts with them to our hearts’ content. The story’s more complicated with another group of objects—more complicated precisely because we can’t find any application for them, and yet their properties, given our current theories, are completely inexplicable. For example, take the magnetic traps of various types. We know they are magnetic traps, Panov gave a very witty proof of that. But we don’t know where the generator of such a strong magnetic field could be nor understand the reason for its amazing stability; we don’t understand a thing. We can only make up fantastic conjectures about properties of space which we’ve never even suspected before. Or the K-twenty-three… What do you call those pretty black beads that are used for jewelry?”
“Black sparks,” said Noonan.
“Right, right, black sparks. Good name. Well, you know their properties. If you shine a light at such a bead, the light will be emitted after a pause, and the length of the pause depends on the weight of the ball, its size, and a number of other parameters, while the frequency of the emitted light is always less than its original frequency. What does this mean? Why? There’s an insane idea that these black sparks are actually vast expanses of space—space with different properties from our own, which curled up into this form under the influence of our space…” Valentine took out a cigarette and lit it. “In short, the objects in this group are currently completely useless for human purposes, yet from a purely scientific point of view they have fundamental significance. These are miraculously received answers to questions we don’t yet know how to pose. The aforementioned Sir Isaac mightn’t have made sense of the microwave emitter, but he would have at any rate realized that such a thing was possible, and that would have had a very strong effect on his scientific worldview. I won’t get into details, but the existence of such objects as the magnetic traps, the K-twenty-three, and the white ring instantly disproved a number of recently thriving theories and gave rise to some entirely new ideas. And then there’s also a third group…”
“Yes,” said Noonan. “Hell slime and other shit.”
“No, no. All those belong either to the first or the second group. I meant objects about which we either know nothing or have only hearsay information, objects which we’ve never held in our hands. Ones that were carried off by stalkers from under our noses—sold to God knows who, hidden. The ones they don’t talk about. The legends and semilegends: the wish machine, Dick the Tramp, happy ghosts…”
“Wait, wait,” said Noonan. “What’s all this? I understand the wish machine.”
Valentine laughed. “You see, we also have our work jargon. Dick the Tramp—that’s the same hypothetical windup doll which is causing havoc in the ruins of the factory. And happy ghosts are a kind of dangerous turbulence that can happen in certain regions of the Zone.”
“First time I’ve heard of them,” said Noonan.
“You see, Richard,” said Valentine, “we’ve been digging through the Zone for two decades, but we don’t even know a thousandth part of what it contains. And if you count the Zone’s effect on man… By the way, we’re going to have to add another, fourth group to our classification. Not of objects, but of effects. This group has been outrageously badly studied, even though, in my opinion, we’ve gathered more than enough data. And you know, Richard, I’m a physicist and therefore a skeptic. But sometimes even I get goose bumps when I think about this data.”
“Living corpses…” muttered Noonan.
“What? Oh… No, that’s mysterious, but nothing more. How can I put it? It’s conceivable, maybe. But when, for no reason at all, a person becomes surrounded by extraphysical, extrabiological phenomena—”
“Oh, you mean the emigrants?”
“Exactly. You know, statistics is a very precise science, despite the fact that it deals with random variables. And furthermore, it’s a very eloquent science, very visual…”
Valentine had apparently become tipsy. He was speaking louder, his cheeks had turned rosy, and the eyebrows above the dark glasses had risen high in his forehead, wrinkling his brow. “Rosalie!” he barked. “More cognac! A large shot!”
“I like nondrinkers,” said Noonan with respect.
“Don’t get distracted!” said Valentine strictly. “Listen to what I’m telling you. It’s very strange.” He picked up his glass, drank off half in one gulp, and continued, “We don’t know what happened to the poor people of Harmont at the very moment of the Visit. But now one of them has decided to emigrate. Some ordinary resident. A barber. The son of a barber and the grandson of a barber. He moves to, say, Detroit. Opens a barbershop, and all hell breaks loose. More than ninety percent of his clients die in the course of a year; they die in car accidents, fall out of windows, are cut down by gangsters and hooligans, drown in shallow places, and so on and so forth. Furthermore. The number of municipal disasters in Detroit increases sharply. The number of gas pump explosions jumps by a factor of two. The number of fires caused by faulty wiring jumps by a factor of three and a half. The number of car accidents jumps by a factor of three. The number of deaths from flu epidemics jumps by a factor of two. Furthermore. The number of natural disasters in Detroit and its environs also increases. Tornadoes and typhoons, the likes of which haven’t been seen in the area since the 1700s, make an appearance. The heavens open, and Lake Ontario or Michigan, or wherever Detroit is, bursts its banks. Well, and more to that effect. And the same cataclysms happen in any town, any region, where an emigrant from the neighborhood of a Zone settles down, and the number of cataclysms is directly proportional to the number of emigrants that settle in that particular place. And note that this effect is only observed with emigrants who lived through the Visit. Those who were born after the Visit have no impact on the accident statistics. You’ve lived in Harmont for ten years, but you moved here after the Visit, and you could safely move to the Vatican itself. How do we explain this? What do we have to give up—statistics? Or common sense?” Valentine grabbed the shot glass and drained it in one gulp.