ourse
there is not  so  very much terrestrial ice in the Universe. If  I  err, the
astronomers will  correct me, but it seems  to me that cosmic  ice is merely
frozen gases: ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen."
     "Why  doesn't anyone  ask about duplicates,  doubles?"  I whispered and
immediately got myself into a lot of work.
     Professor Kedrin recalled me:
     "I have a question for Anokhin. Did  you converse  with your duplicate?
And I wonder what
     about?" "Yes, we did, we talked about a variety of things," I said.
     "Did  you notice any difference, purely external, say,  in fine points,
in  hardly  noticeable  details?  I  refer to differences between the two of
you."
     "None in the least. Our  blood  was even  the same."  Then I  told them
about the microscope.
     "How about  memory?  Recalling things from childhood and later. Did you
check that?"
     I related everything about memory. What I couldn't understand  was what
he was trying to get at. But he .explained himself:
     "The  question  that  Admiral  Thompson  asked,  is a  disturbing  one,
frightening even, and it should put us on our guard. If duplicates  of human
beings are going to put in appearances in the future and if, say, duplicates
appear  that are  not  destroyed,  then how are  we to distinguish between a
person and his  model?  What is more,  how will  they themselves distinguish
each other? I believe that is a matter not so much of absolute identity, but
of the confidence of  each that precisely he is the real person and not  the
synthesized one."
     I recalled my own arguments with my ill-fated double and was completely
lost. Zernov saved me.
     "A curious item," he said, "the doubles always appear following one and
the same dream. The person seems to be immersed in a  red or crimson (violet
sometimes)  cold  jelly-like substance  that  is  always  very  thick.  This
undisclosed  substance  fills  the  person up  completely,  all his internal
organs, all  vessels.  I  cannot  assert definitely  that the filling  takes
place, but the person seems to be convinced of it. He lies totally incapable
of moving, as if  paralysed,  and begins to experience  sensations  akin  to
those of  one hypnotized: as  if someone invisible  were  probing  his mind,
going through 'every cell of  his brain. Then the crimson darkness vanishes,
his mind clears and his movements come back. He believes that he has  had an
absurd and horrible dream.  In a  short time, the  double is  at large.  But
after  waking up,  the person  has  had  time  to do  something  and to  say
something, to think something.  The double  does not know this. When Anokhin
woke  up  he found two  vehicles and not one, both with the same dent in the
front window and with the same welded  piece of metal on the  tractor tread.
For  his double, this  was  a  discovery. He  only  remembered what  Anokhin
remembered prior  to immersion  in  the  crimson  work.  There were  similar
discrepancies in the other cases as well. After  waking  up, Dyachuk  shaved
and cut himself. His double appeared without the cut. Chokheli went to sleep
drunk from the glass of alcohol he  had swallowed, but he got up sober, with
a clear mind.  Now the duplicate appeared before him drunk, he  could hardly
stand  up,  his eyes  were  misty, actually  he  was  in a state of delirium
tremens. I think that  in the future it  will be  precisely  this period  of
action of the person immediately after waking up from  the  'crimson  dream'
that will help, in doubtful cases, to distinguish the original from the copy
if other ways have not been found by then."
     "Did you also have a dream of that nature?" someone asked in the hall.
     "Yes, I did."
     "But you did not have a double?"
     "That is exactly  what  is  worrying me. Why  I  turned  out to  be the
exception."
     "You were not an exception," Zernov's own voice answered him.
     The  speaker stood  behind the others,  nearly in the doorway,  dressed
somewhat differently from Zernov. The other one had on a splendid grey suit,
while this one had on  an old dark-green sweater, the one Zernov always wore
on expeditions. But Zernov's padded pants  and  Canadian  fur boots, which I
envied  during our trips,  completed the  dress of the stranger. Yet  he was
hardly a stranger, when you come to  think of  it. Even I, who  had spent so
many days alongside Zernov, could not distinguish one from the other. Zernov
was on the stage, but in the doorway stood a precise, perfect copy. That  is
definite.
     The hall  gasped, somebody stood up,  looking from  one to the other in
bewilderment, someone else stood with his mouth open.  Kedrin, with puckered
eyebrows,  concentrating, examined  the double  with interest;  a snake-like
snigger appeared  on the  lips of the  American  Admiral; he  was  obviously
pleased at the  unexpected confirmation  of his  idea.  It seemed to me that
Zernov himself was  rather pleased too, the doubts and fears  of whom had so
suddenly been brought to consummation.
     "Come over here,"  he said almost gaily,  "I've  been  waiting for just
such a meeting. Let's have a talk. It'll be of interest not only to us."
     Zernov's  double unhurriedly  walked over to the stage  accompanied  by
inquisitive eyes full of excitement and interest that are accorded only rare
celebrities. He turned around, pulled up a chair and sat down near the table
at which Zernov had been carrying  on  a running commentary of the film. The
spectacle somehow seemed very natural: here were twin brothers meeting after
a long separation. The only difference was that everyone knew that there had
been  no separation and these were no brothers. Simply one of  the two was a
miracle beyond  the  comprehension  of  human beings. But which  one? Now  I
realized what Admiral Thompson meant.
     "Why didn't you show  up  during  the trip? I  was expecting  it," said
Zernov Number One.
     Zernov Number Two, perplexed, just shrugged his shoulders.
     "I remember everything prior to that rose-coloured dream. Then there is
a hiatus,  a  gap. Then  here I  am entering  this hall,  and listening  and
watching and  it seems to  me  that I  have begun to understand things."  He
looked at Zernov and smiled ironically. "How much alike we are, after all!"
     "I foresaw that," said Zernov shrugging.
     "But I  didn't. If we  had met like Anokhin and his double, I would not
have given  away  the priority. Who would have proven that  you are the real
one and I am only a reproduction? The point is that I am you, I remember all
my (or your)-now I don't even know which-life, right down to the most minute
detail,  even better than you  perhaps: most  likely a synthesized memory is
fresher.  Anton  Kuzmich-he  turned  to  the  audience-do  you remember  our
conversation   just   before   departure?   Not   about   the   problems  of
experimentation, just the words we exchanged. Do you remember?"
     Professor Kedrin was definitely perplexed:
     "I don't remember."
     "I don't either," said Zernov.
     "You  knocked your  cigarette holder on  a packet of  cigarettes," said
Zernov Number Two without the slightest touch of superiority, " and you said
'I  want  to  give  up  smoking,  Boris.  Beginning  with  tomorrow,  that's
definite'."
     Laughter broke out  because  Professor Kedrin was munching  a cigarette
that had already died out.
     "I have a question," it was Admiral Thompson.
     "I would like to ask Mr. Zernov  in the green sweater. Do you  remember
our meeting at MacMurdo?"
     "Of course," said Zernov the Second in English.
     "And the souvenir that you liked so much?"
     "Of course," Zernov Two answered. "You presented me with a fountain pen
with your initials in gold. I have it in my room, in the pocket of my summer
jacket."
     "My summer jacket," Zernov corrected him sardonically.
     "You would not have convinced me of it if I had not seen your film. Now
I know:  I did not return with you  on  the  tractor,  I  did  not meet  the
American pilot, and the death of his double I only saw in the film. I expect
the same end for myself, I foresee it."
     "Perhaps you  are an  exception," said Zernov, "it may be that you will
be granted existence."
     Now I saw the difference between them. One spoke calmly  without losing
any of his composure, the other was all  wound up inside and tense. Even his
lips trembled, as  if it were  difficult  for him  to say what his  mind was
thinking.
     "You  yourself do  not believe in  it," he said, "we  are created as an
experiment and are eliminated as a  product of the experiment. Why,  is  not
known to anyone, you or me. I remember Anokhin's story via your  memory, via
our combined memory, that is how and why I remember it." He looked at me and
inside I shuddered as I met the so familiar look. "When the cloud started to
descend,  Anokhin told  his double to run. The double refused, he could not,
he said, for something was  ordering him  to  remain. And he returned to the
cabin to die: we all saw  that. The difference is that you can  stand up and
leave, whereas I  cannot do that. Something has  already  ordered me not  to
move."
     Zernov extended his hand and it came up against an invisible barrier.
     "Nothing can be done," sadly smiled Zernov the  Double. "It's a  field,
I'm using  your  terminology, since like you I know  no other. The field has
already been set up. I'm in it like in a spacesuit."
     Somebody  sitting nearby  also  tried to  touch the synthesized man but
couldn't because his hand encountered compressed air as hard as wood.
     "It is  terrible to know of your own end and  not to  have any  way  of
putting  it off," said Zernov's counterpart. "After  all, I am a man and not
just a biological mass. I so terribly want to live-"
     The horrible silence pressed down  on the  hall. Someone  was breathing
heavily like an asthmatic. Somebody else had covered his eyes with his hand.
Admiral Thompson had taken off his glasses. I screwed up my eyes.
     Martin's hand that had been on my knee trembled.
     "Look up!" he cried.
     I looked up and froze stiff: there  was a  violet pulsating  trunk-like
affair dropping down the ceiling to  the Zernov  sitting  perfectly still in
the green sweater.  Its funnel  widened and frothed, unhurriedly but firmly,
like an empty hood, and covered up the man beneath it. A minute later we saw
something like  a  jelly  stalactite violet in  colour  that merged  with  a
similar stalagmite. The base of the  stalagmite rested on the stage near the
table, the  stalactite flowed out of the  ceiling through  the  roof and the
almost three metres of snow covering it. In another half minute the frothing
edge of the trunk, or pipe, began to turn upwards  and in the empty rosiness
of its inside we no longer could see either chair or man. In another minute,
violet foam had gone  through the roof  as  if something immaterial, without
damaging either the plastic or the thermal insulation.
     "That's all," said Zernov rising to  his feet.  "Finis, as  the ancient
Romans used to say."



         * PART TWO. THE CREATION OF THE WORLD




        Chapter IX. "THE END OF THE 'TITANIC'"



     In  Moscow  I  had hard luck.  I had got through the  fierce  Antarctic
winter without even  having  sneezed in  sixty degrees  below zero, but back
here  in  Moscow  I  came  down  with  a  cold in the autumn slush when  the
thermometer had  hardly dropped  to  zero outside the window. True, by  next
Tuesday the doctor  said  I'd be  up and  around and  my own self again, but
Sunday morning I was still lying with mustard plasters on my back and unable
to go downstairs for the newspapers. Tolya Dyachuk brought me the papers. He
was my first visitor Sunday morning. And  though he did not take any part in
our  fussing   with  the  rose  clouds   and  immediately  returned  to  his
weather-forecast  institute and his charts of  the winds and cyclones, I was
sincerely happy that  he did come. The anxious events that we had  both gone
through  just  a  month  before  were still  deeply felt. And Tolya  was  an
easy-going convenient guest. One could be totally silent in his presence and
think one's own thoughts without any  risk  of offending him, and  his jokes
and  exaggerations  would never offend  his  host. So  the  guest  ensconced
himself in  a chair near the window and strummed  on  the  guitar purring to
himself one  of his own compositions  while the host lay  patiently enduring
the stings  of  the mustard  and recalling his  last day  at Mirny  and  the
try-out of the new helicopter that had just arrived from Moscow.
     Kostya Ozhogin had arrived at Mirny with a fresh group of polar workers
and had only the faintest idea about the rose clouds. Our acquaintance began
as he begged me to show him at least a little bit of my film. I showed him a
whole  reel. He  responded  by  offering me  a  seat in  the new  high-speed
helicopter  during a trial run out over the ocean. The next  morning-my last
at  Mirny-he came  over  and told  me  in secret  about  some kind  of "very
terrible thing". His  helicopter had been  out  on  the ice all night, about
fifty metres from the edge, where the ship "Ob" was moored. Here is the  way
he described it: "We  were celebrating a bit, had been  drinking,  not much,
and before going to bed I went out to take a look at the machine. There were
two there,  one next to the other.  I  figured another one had been unloaded
and went back to sleep. In  the morning there was only one again. So I asked
the engineer where the other one had gone, and he  burst out laughing. 'Hey,
you drank too much, you were seeing double. How much did you guys put away?'
"
     I was rather suspicious about the true criminals of this splitting, but
I didn't say anything.  What I did  was I brought along  my camera,  I had a
hunch  it  might come  in useful. Which it did.  We were about three-hundred
metres above the ocean at the very edge of the ice. We could clearly see the
unloaded boxes and machines, the small pieces of broken ice at the shore and
the  blue  icebergs out in the  pure water.  The  biggest  towered up  a few
kilometres from the coast line, but did not float or bob on the waves-it was
sitting firmly in the water fixed securely to the  bottom. We called it 'The
End of  the Titanic' in memory  of  the famous  liner that  collided with  a
colossal iceberg at the beginning of the  century. This one was even larger.
Our glaciologists  calculated  that it was  roughly  three  thousand  square
kilometres in area. That  was the goal of the  Disney  characters  that  had
stretched out single file across the sky.
     I began to  film without waiting for a close approach. They were flying
at the  same altitude  as we were, they were rose-coloured without  a single
spot and resembled  dirigibles at the  tail end  of a column. From the front
they  were  like  boomerangs  or swept-back  airplane wings.  "Shall we turn
back?" said Ozhogin in a whisper. "We can put on speed." "Why?" I sniggered.
"You  can't  get  away from them  anyway."  I  could sense  the  tension  in
Ozhogin's  muscles,  but  I didn't  know  whether  it  was  due to  fear  or
excitement. He asked: "Are they going to start splitting?" "No, they're  not
going  to." "How do you know?" "Because they duplicated your helicopter last
night, you yourself saw it," I replied. He didn't say anything.
     Meanwhile the column had approached  the iceberg. Three rosy dirigibles
hung  in the air, getting redder and opening  up  their familiar saucer-like
stemless poppies, motionless at the corners of an enormous triangle over the
island of ice;  then the swept-wing boomerangs plunged downwards. They  went
into the water like fish, no  splash, no  sound, only  white spurts of steam
encircled the iceberg. Probably  the temperature gradient  between  the  new
substance  and  the  water  was  too great. Then  all was calm. The  poppies
flowered over the island and the boomerangs, disappeared. I waited patiently
while the helicopter slowly circled over the iceberg a bit below the poppies
hanging in the sky.
     "What's  going  to  happen now?"  Ozhogin asked hoarsely. "Is  this the
end?" "I don't think so," I replied cautiously. About ten minutes  must have
passed. Suddenly the mountain of ice shook mightily and then slowly rose out
of the water. "Let's go," I yelled to Kostya.  He understood and  swung  our
plane to  the side,  away from the dangerous orbit. The bluish hunk of  ice,
scintillating in the sun, had already risen above the water. It was so large
that it was  difficult to find any  comparison. Imagine an enormous mountain
cut off at  the base and rising upwards like a toy  balloon. It gleamed  and
glistened shimmering in a million colours of molten  sapphires  and emeralds
sprinkled all over  it. This was  a  scene  you could sell your soul  to the
devil for. I  was the king. Only Ozhogin  and I and the astronomers of Mirny
witnessed this incomparable  spectacle. A  miracle  of ice  rose  out of the
water,  came to a  halt over the  three crimson poppies and then hurtled off
into the depths of cosmic space. The "boomerangs" slithered out of the water
in a  jet  of steam and turned towards  the continent  in regular order. The
route lay through the foam of cumulus clouds. Like horsemen they galloped.
     Horsemen!
     The simile came later, and it  was  not concocted by me but right now I
heard it from Tolya strumming on his guitar.
     "Do you like it?" he asked.
     "Like what?"
     "The song, naturally," he explained.
     "What song," I still couldn't get it all straight.
     "So you  weren't listening," he sighed.  "Exactly what I  thought. I'll
have to sing it again."
     He started up in his long drawn out talk-sing voice, like a chansonnier
without a voice that hangs onto the microphone for dear life.  I didn't know
then what an envious fate awaited this composition of accidental celebrity.
     "Horsemen from nowhere, what's that? A  dream? A myth? All of a sudden,
while  awaiting  a wonder ...  the world froze silently still.  And over the
rhythmical drone and pulse of  the world, horsemen  from nowhere pranced  by
... True, the idea is not new and the theme of the tragedy is simple. Hamlet
again  solving  the eternal problem. Who  are they? Human  beings? Gods? The
snow melts slowly,  and again the Earth is anxious,  there  is no  breathing
spell-"
     He paused for a moment and then continued in a major key.
     "Who will recognize  them?  And  will we be able to  grasp  them? It is
late, my  friend, it is late, and there is  no  one we can  blame.  Only the
difficult thing  to grasp,  my  friend,  is that  there  they are  again-the
horsemen from nowhere prancing by in ordered array."
     He sighed  and  glanced  in  my  direction  waiting for  some  sign  of
appreciation.
     "Not so bad," I said, "As a song goes, but-"
     "But what?" he queried guardedly.
     "Where does the  Spanish sadness come from?  Why the pessimism?" And  I
started, 'It  is late, my friend, it is late,' "Why  late? And what is late?
And  what's this about blame?  Are  you sorry about the ice, or the doubles?
Better take off this mustard plaster, it's not burning any more."
     Tolya peeled it off my suffering back and said:
     "Incidentally, they've been seen in the Arctic too."
     "That must be terrifying, those horsemen from nowhere."
     "You said  it. In Greenland they've been cutting up ice  too. Telegrams
have come in."
     "So what, it might get warmer, that's all."
     "But  what if  they take all  the  ice there  is on  the  Earth? In the
Arctic, the Antarctic, in the mountains and the oceans?"
     "You ought to know, you're the climatologist.  I guess we'll be able to
fish for sardines in the White Sea and plant oranges in Greenland."
     "In theory," Tolya sighed. "Who can  predict what will  really  happen?
Nobody. It's not the ice that worries me. You read what Thompson has to say.
TASS has given it in full." He pointed to a bunch of papers.
     "Getting panicky?"
     "That's not the word!"
     "He was nervous enough there in Mirny, remember?"
     "Yea, he's a tough nut. He'll keep things mixed up for quite some time.
For both sides.  By  the way,  he was the one  who used the phrase Lysov-sky
coined: 'horsemen from nowhere'."
     "Horsemen from nowhere? But that's what you thought up," I recalled.
     "Yes, but who multiplied it?"
     Special correspondent of "Izvestia" Lysovsky, returning from Mirny, was
the author of an article dealing with the rose "clouds" that was taken up by
all the newspapers  of the world. That's what he called  them: horsemen from
nowhere. Tolya was the real inventor, though. He  was the one who yelled out
"horsemen, really, horsemen". "Where  from?"  someone asked. "I  don't know,
from nowhere." Then  Lysovsky repeated it aloud: "Horsemen from nowhere. Not
bad for a headline."
     Tolya and I looked at each other. That's exactly the way it had been.



        Chapter X. THE PHANTOM AIRCRAFT



     What  actually  happened?  Our  jet  liner was in  flight from  the ice
aerodrome of Mirny to the shores of South Africa.
     Below us were white wisps of  cloud like a field of snow near a railway
station:  locomotive soot sprinkled about on  fresh  snow. The clouds  moved
apart occasionally and windows would open up displaying the steel surface of
the ocean far below.
     All of  us  who had gotten used to one another during  the  winter were
gathered in  the  cabin-  geologists,  pilots,  glaciologists,  astronomers,
aerologists. Our guests were only a few newspaper reporters, but it was soon
quite forgotten that  they were guests and they gradually  dissolved into  a
homogeneous  mass of Antarctic workers of yesterday. The talk turned  to the
rose clouds, of course, but not seriously, in a bantering  manner with jokes
and wisecracks most of the time. The usual excited cabin conversations  of a
home-returning trip.
     All  of  a sudden  some rose-coloured "boomerangs" appeared out  of the
clouds, jumping in and out  like horsemen in the  steppe. That was when  the
"horsemen" phrase came up, though they naturally had been compared with most
anything because  they  were  constantly  changing  shape,  which  they  did
instantaneously  and for reasons that we  could not fathom. That is  exactly
what  happened  this time  too.  Six or seven  of  them,  I  don't  remember
precisely,  rose  up in front  of  us, spread out  in  the  form  of crimson
pancakes and  enveloped the plane in an impenetrable crimson cocoon.  To the
credit of our pilot, it must be said, he did not falter but continued to fly
as if nothing had happened: if it's got to be a cocoon, then let it be one!
     An ominous  silence set in in the cabin. Everyone expected something to
happen, glanced from one  to the other, and feared to speak at all.  The red
fog seeped through the walls.  Nobody could figure out how that could be. It
would  seem that no  material barriers existed, or that it was  nonmaterial,
illusory,  existing only in one's imagination. But it soon filled the  cabin
and only strange crimson spots  revealed the passengers in front or  behind.
"Do you know  what this's all about," I heard the voice of Lysovsky from the
other  side  of the aisle.  "You  don't  happen  to feel  as if someone were
looking into your brain and  going  right  through you, do you?" That was my
question  in  reply to his question.  He was  silent  for a  moment probably
trying to figure  out  whether I  was  going mad  from fear,  and then added
hesitatingly:  "Nn-o,  I don't  think so." Then somebody next to  him  said:
"It's just a  fog, that's all." I didn't think so either. What was happening
in the plane didn't at all resemble the sensations in the tractor and in the
tent. In the former case somebody or something peered deep inside me, probed
imperceptibly  in  my body as if determining the arrangement  and number  of
particles that make up my bioessence, in this way reproducing a model of me;
in  the latter case, the process had stopped half way, as if the creator  of
the model knew that my model had already been made. I was now surrounded  by
a fog, crimson-like, just as opaque as  turbid water in a jar,  neither cold
nor warm and totally imperceptible, for it did not smart my eyes nor  tickle
the nose.  It coursed round  me and did not  even appear  to touch the skin,
then  it  gradually  melted or  floated away.  I  soon  began  to see hands,
clothes, the seats and people sitting  in  them nearby. Then I heard a voice
from behind:
     "How  long did that take? Did you notice?"  "No, I  didn't look  at  my
watch,  I  don't know." Neither  did  I know,  it might have  been  three or
perhaps ten minutes.
     This  was when we  saw something still  more  bizarre. Squint, pressing
your eyes  strongly  on  the  lids,  and objects will appear  to double  up,
producing, as  it were, a  copy that floats  away  out of the field of view.
That  is what happened to all the things in the aircraft,  everything in our
field of  view.  Not hazily, but very clearly, I saw-later I  found out that
everyone  saw the same thing-a  duplicate of our cabin  and all its contents
gradually separate itself-the floor, the windows, seats and  passengers.  It
rose half a meter and then floated off.  I saw myself, Tolya and his guitar,
Lysovsky, and I  noticed Lysovsky trying to  grab his reproduction  that was
floating away. All he  got  was the air. I saw the outside of the cabin, not
the inside; I saw the outer wall go right through the real wall, followed by
the wing that slipped  through us  like an  enormous shadow of the aircraft.
Then all this vanished from view as if it  had evaporated in the air. Yet it
did not vanish and it did not evaporate. We rushed to the windows and saw an
identical copy of our plane flying alongside, absolutely identical, just off
the  production  line, but  it  was  no illusory  machine  because  Lysovsky
collected his wits fast enough to take a photograph, which was published and
definitely showed the  new plane  to  be a duplicate of our liner taken at a
distance of 10 metres.
     Unfortunately,  what happened later was not photographed. Lysovsky  ran
out  of film  and I was late in getting to  my camera, which had been stowed
away.  This  was the  aerial  wonder  that was enacted before  our  eyes:  a
familiar crimson  cocoon  enveloped the  duplicate plane, elongated, growing
dark red, then violet and then  melted away. Nothing  remained-no plane,  no
cocoon. Only the whitish wisps of cloud floating below us as before.
     The chief pilot stepped  out of  the pilot's cabin a few minutes  later
and  asked  shyly:  "Perhaps someone can  explain what  occurred just  now."
Nobody  volunteered, he  waited a  moment and then added, with  an  ironical
sting: "That's scientists for you. Wonders, miracles-but we're told miracles
just don't happen." Someone put in: "I  guess they  do." Everybody  laughed.
Then Lysovsky turned to Zernov: "Perhaps Comrade Zernov has an explanation?"
"I'm  no god or  oracle,"  Zernov replied  gruffly. "The 'clouds' produced a
duplicate plane, that you all saw. I  don't know  any more than you do about
the how and why  of it all." "Am I to write that?" asked Lysovsky. "Sure, go
ahead and write it," Zernov cut him off and fell silent.
     He brought up the subject once  more, after we  landed in Karachi, when
we had  both forced our way through the  crowds of newsmen  that had come to
meet us: our radio operator  had sent a radiogram  about  the event from the
plane. While newsmen with cameras attacked the crew of our plane, Zernov and
I slipped  through  to the  cafe for a bite and a drink. I recall asking him
something,  but he did  not answer. Later, as if answering anxious  thoughts
and not me, he said:
     "That's a totally  different method of model-building, the procedure is
quite different."
     "You speaking about the 'horsemen'?"  I asked. "That word would stick,"
he smiled ironically. "Everywhere, both here and in the West too, I imagine.
You'll  see. Yet  the duplication  procedure was absolutely unlike  anything
ever," he added deep in thought.
     I didn't get it: "The plane, you mean?"  "Don't think  so. The airplane
was  probably   duplicated   in  full.  And  in  the  same   manner.   First
nonmaterially, illusorily, and  then materially- that  is  the entire atomic
structure  with exactitude. People are handled differently:  only the  outer
form, the shell, the function of the passenger. What does a passenger do? He
sits in his seat,  looks out the window, drinks juice and turns the pages of
a  book.  I  hardly  think the  psychic workings of  the human  beings  were
reproduced in all their complexity. Of  course that is not necessary anyway.
What was needed was a living, acting model of  the  aircraft with living and
acting passengers. That's only a surmise naturally."
     "But  what's the  idea  of  destroying the model?"  "Why are duplicates
eliminated?" was Zernov's counter query.  "Remember the farewell of my twin?
I still can't get it out of my mind."
     He fell  silent and stopped answering my questions. It was only when we
left the restaurant and were  passing by Lysovsky  surrounded by  at least a
dozen foreign newspaper men that Zernov smiled and said:
     "He's sure to serve up some 'horsemen' for them. It'll get  around, you
just  wait. They'll have the Apocalypse  and  pale horsemen and  black  ones
carrying  death.  Oh, there'll be everything. You know your  Bible? Well, if
you don't, read it and compare when the time comes."
     His prediction came true  in every detail.  I nearly jumped out  of bed
when, together with telegrams about  the appearance of rose utfuds in Alaska
and in the Hymalayas, Dyachuk read me a translation of an article by Admiral
Thompson from a New York paper. Even the terminology that Zernov had laughed
at coincided fully with that of the Admiral.
     Wrote  the Admiral: "Somebody  gave them a catchy name, the 'horsemen',
but, whoever  it was,  failed to  hit the  bull's  eye.  They  are no simple
horsemen,  they  are horsemen  of  the  Apocalypse,  This  is no  accidental
comparison. Recall the words of the prophet:
     ".. .and I looked,  and behold a  pale horse; and his name  that sat on
him  was  Death, and Hell followed  with him. And power was given  into them
over the fourth part of the earth, to kill  with sword, and with hunger, and
with death...."
     Fellow Americans  will  have  to excuse  me  if  I  resort more  to the
terminology  of a Catholic Church Cardinal than  to  that of a retired  navy
man. But I'm  compelled  to, for humanity is meeting  these uninvited guests
with  much too  much complacency."  The Admiral was  not  interested to know
where they came from, Sirius or Alpha Centauri. Neither was he worried about
the terrestrial ice that was being carried off into outer space. What he was
afraid of  were  the duplicates.  Even  back  in Mirny he  had  doubts about
whether  the duplicates or real human beings were being  destroyed. Now this
same idea was expressed aggressively and with assurance:
     "... the duplicates and humans would appear to be completely identical.
The same exterior, the  same  memory and the same thinking  process. But who
will prove to me that  the identity  of thinking has no  limits beyond which
begin subservience  to the  will of the creators."  The more  I listened the
more astonished  I was  at the author's  fanatical bias: he  even rejected a
neutral study  and  observation and  demanded a most energetic attack on the
visitors to expel them with all the means at our disposal. The article ended
with  a  completely  bizarre supposition:  "If  I suddenly  betray myself by
recanting what I have  just  written, then I  am the duplicate  and I myself
have been substituted. Then you can hang me on the first street lantern."
     It was not  only the meaning that was remarkable, but the very tone  of
the article. Those given to believing sensational news items might indeed be
thoroughly frightened  by this apparently sensible but definitely prejudiced
man.  What  is  more, it might be  utilized  for  very  unseemly purposes by
unscrupulous people in politics and in science. It is  to the credit  of the
Admiral  that he did not seek their support and  did  not borrow any weapons
from the arsenal of anticommunism.
     When I explained my reasoning to Tolya, he said:
     "The  Admiral's  article  is  only  a  special problem. Something quite
different  arises,  if  you  ask  me.  Up  till  now,  when   scientists  or
science-fiction writers touched on the probability of encounters  with other
intelligence in outer space, they were interested in the problem of friendly
or hostile attitudes of such intelligence towards terrestrial humans. But it
never entered anyone's mind to ponder the  possibility of a hostile attitude
of  humans towards  such intelligence.  Yet that is precisely  the  problem.
Switch on your transistor at night  and you'll  go crazy. The whole world is
excited,  it's   on  every  wavelength.  The   Pope,  ministers,   senators,
astrologers-they're  all working  the  waves.  Flying  saucers  are nothing.
Parliaments are being questioned."
     That  was  something  to  think about indeed. Tolya  occasionally  said
sensible things.



        Chapter XI. THEY SEE, HEAR AND SENSE



     The  problem that  Tolya had  brought  up  was discussed  at  a special
session  of the Academy  of Sciences, I was present as the person who filmed
the  space visitors. A  lot  was said, but  probably  the most  talked-about
subject was the nature of the  phenomenon and  its peculiarities. This again
launched me into the orbit of rose "clouds".
     I arrived at the meeting about an hour  before time so as  to check the
projector, the screen and the sound. The film now had an  accompanying text.
In the conference hall I found the stenographer Irene Fateyeva, who had been
spoken  of as the future secretary of a special commission to  be  set up by
the session. I was  also  warned that  she was a cobra, a  polyglot  and  an
I-know-it-all  type.  You  can  ask her what  would  happen if you  dipped a
solution of potassium chloride on an exposed brain  and she'll give  you the
answer, so they  say. Or you can  ask about the fourth  state of  matter, or
what  topology  does, and she has answers. But I didn't ask about  anything.
All I needed was to look at her once, and I believed it.
     She  had  on   a  dark  blue  sweater  with  a  very  strict   abstract
ornamentation, and her hair was done in  a  tightly bound bun, though it was
not  at  all  the  fashion  of the  19th  century.  She wore  dark,  narrow,
rectangular frameless eyeglasses. The eyes that peered from behind them were
clever, attentive,  demanding. True, I didn't  see the eyes when I came  in:
she was writing in a notebook and did not lift her head.
     I coughed.
     "Don't cough, Anokhin, and don't stand in  the middle of the room," she
said  without lifting her head,  "I know you,  I know all about  you, so  we
don't have to get  acquainted formally. Sit down some  place and wait a  few
minutes till I get this synopsis finished."
     "What's a synopsis?" I asked.
     "Don't try to be more ignorant than you  already are. You don't have to
know the synopsis of the session, since you weren't invited."
     "To what?" I asked again.
     "To the Council of Ministers. We showed your film there yesterday."
     I knew about  that  but didn't  say anything.  The  rectangular glasses
turned in my direction. I thought she would be prettier without spectacles.
     She removed her glasses.
     "Now's when I'm beginning to believe in telepathy," I said.
     She rose. She was really tall, like a basketball player.
     "So you've  come to  check up on the apparatus, Anokhin, the tension of
the screen and the volume control for sound? That's all been done."
     "Listen, what's topology any way?" I asked.
     The eyes behind the  glasses  did  not have time to  reduce me to ashes
because some  of  the conferees had come in.  No one was going to be late to
the  show.  The quorum was  there  in  a quarter of  an hour.  There was  no
preamble. The chairman asked Zernov whether  there would  be an introductory
word? "What for?" was the  question in reply. Then the lights went  out  and
the blue sky of the Antarctic came on the screen and a crimson bell began to
swell up.
     This time I did not need to  give  the commentary because it  had  been
recorded.  Unlike the showing at Mirny that  was watched in a tense silence,
this meeting  more resembled a group of friends watching TV. Time and  again
remarks came right on the heels of the announcer, some humorous, others only
comprehensible to the initiated of the  particular science; at other  times,
they were  like the piercing  thrusts of a fencer. Then  again, light banter
came in.  I remembered a bit. When the crimson flower swallowed my duplicate
together with the tracked vehicle, somebody's gay bass voice exclaimed:
     "Who claims man as the crown of creation, raise your hand!"
     There was laughter. The same voice continued:
     "Bear  in  mind one  undebatable  thing: no model-building  system  can
construct a model of a structure that is more complicated than itself."
     When the edge of the flower turned up and frothed, I heard:
     "Foam,  isn't  it? What  are the  components? Gas?  Liquid? What's  the
foam-forming substance?"
     "Are you sure that that is foam?"
     "I'm not sure of anything."
     "Maybe it's plasma at low temperature?"
     "Plasma's a gas, so what would contain it?"
     "A magnetic trap. A magnetic field can generate the needed walls."
     "Nonsense,   colleague.   Why  doesn't  a   dispersed   aphemeral   gas
disintegrate or drift  away under the action of  a field?  The point is that
it's  not a forceless field in the sense that it  does not strive to  change
its form."
     "How do you think clouds of interstellar gas form magnetic fields?"
     Another voice in the dark said:
     "The field pressure is variable. Hence the variability of form."
     "The form, yes, but the colour?"
     I was sorry I  had not brought along a tape recorder. But then the hall
was silent for  a few  moments:  the screen  displayed another giant  flower
eating up  an  aircraft, and a violet snake-like  tentacle  was tackling the
senseless model of  Martin. It was still pulsating above the snow when, from
the dark, a voice called out:
     "I have a question  to ask the authors of the plasm hypothesis.  So you
think both the airplane and the man burnt up in the gas jet, in the magnetic
trap?"
     Laughter from in front. Again I regretted forgetting the tape-recorder.
"Fire" was being exchanged again.
     "Mystical, if you ask me. Improbable."
     "No mysticism is needed to  recognize a possibility as improbable.  All
you need is mathematics."
     "Paradox. And yours?"
     "Mathematics  is what we need  here more  than physics. A mathematician
would do more."
     "Just what do you picture him doing?"
     "He doesn't need any samples, just more pictures. And what will he see?
Geometric  figures  distorted  in  all  manner of ways, no  tearing  and  no
folding. Strictly problems in topology."
     "Excuse me,  but who's going to solve the problem of the composition of
the rose-coloured bio-mass?"
     "So you consider it a mass?"
     "I cannot, on the basis of these coloured pictures, consider it to be a
thinking organism."
     "Processing of information is obvious."
     "Processing of information does not yet make it a synonym of thinking."
     This  tit-for-tat continued. The  hall  got really excited when the ice
symphony came on-clouds sawing, huge bars of ice rising in the blue sky.
     "Look at them  stretch, will you!  A kilometre-long  pancake out  of  a
three-metre cloudlet."
     "That's not a pancake, it's a knife."
     "I don't get it."
     "Why?  Only  one gram  of  substance  in  a  colloidal  dispersed state
possesses a vast surface area."
     "So it's a substance?"
     "It's hard  to make a  definite statement.  What kind of  data have we?
What do they say about the biosystem? How does it react  to the environment?
Only via a field? And what controls it?"
     "And to that  the  question of where  it gets  its power. Where does it
store the energy? What kind of transformers ensure conversion?"
     "Then there's the ..."
     That was the end of  the film, no more commentary, the  lights  went up
and there was  total silence, the  light seeming  to  call for the customary
cautiousness in  judgements. The chairman,  Academician  Osovets, caught the
mood immediately:
     "This is not a symposium, comrades, and not a meeting of academicians,"
he  reminded them  in calm  tones.  "We  who  are gathered here  represent a
special committee  set  up by the  Government  with the  following aims:  to
determine  the nature of the  rose 'clouds', their purpose in coming to  the
earth,  the aggressiveness  or friendliness  of  their  intentions,  and  to
contact  them  in some  way  if they turn out to  be  intelligent,  thinking
creatures. However, what we have seen does not yet permit us to  come to any
definite conclusions or decisions."
     "Why?" came a voice  from  the hall, a  familiar bass voice. "How about
the  film? The  first  conclusion  is  that  it  is  an  excellent piece  of
scientific  filming. Invaluable material to start the work. And also a first
decision: show the film here and in the West."
     All this, I must admit, was very pleasant to hear. And just as pleasant
was the Chairman's reply:
     "The film was appraised in like manner by the Government as well. And a
similar  resolution  has already  been  passed. Colleague Anokhin  has  been
included  in the working group of our  committee. Still  and  all, the  film
fails  to  answer many  of our  questions: whence, from what  corner  of the
universe did these  creatures come,  what forms  of life are they  (they can
hardly be protein-based), what  is their physico-chemical structure, and are
they  living  beings,  intelligent  creatures  or  bio-robots with  specific
programmes of action? Many more questions might be asked,  some of them will
not get answers. Now, at least. But we can conjecture and construct  certain
working  hypotheses,  and  publish  them,  and  not only in  the  scientific
journals-in  all  countries of the world people want  to know about the rose
'clouds'  not  from  fortune-tellers  but  in the form of  solid  scientific
information,  at  least  within the limits of what we  already  know and can
safely conjecture. We  could, say,  speak  of the possibilities of  contact,
about changes  in the terrestrial climate associated with  the  loss of ice,
and,  what is most important, we might find counter-arguments to the idea of
the  aggressive nature of this  as  yet unknown civilization in the form  of
facts and proof of its loyalty to human civilization."
     "Incidentally,"  began a  scientist sitting next  to Zernov, "one thing
might  be added to  what has  been said in the press.  There is very  little
deuterium in ordinary water, but ice and melted snow contain a still smaller
percentage, which means they are biologically more active. It is also a fact
that   water  acted  upon  by  a  magnetic  field  changes  its  fundamental
physico-chemical  properties. Now terrestrial  glaciers represent water that
has already been subjected to the earth's magnetic  field. It might possibly
be-who knows -that this will shed some light on the aims of the new-comers."
     "Actually,  I'm  interested  more  in their  other  aim,  though  I'm a
glaciologist," Zernov remarked.  "Why  they  construct models of  everything
they see  is understandable; such specimens would be useful in the study  of
terrestrial life. But why do they destroy them?"
     "I'll risk an  explanation,"  Osovets let his eyes stray over the hall.
Like  a lecturer who  is asked  a question, he did not answer  Zernov alone.
"Suppose that they carry with them not a  model but only the notation of its
structure. And to obtain such, let  us say it is required to break the model
down, to decompose it  into its molecular constituents, perhaps even down to
the atomic level. They do not wish to  harm human beings and destroy them or
the creatures they construct. Hence the synthesis and subsequent elimination
(after a trial) of the model."
     "That  makes them friends and  not  aggressors,  doesn't  it?"  someone
asked.
     "Yes,  that's what  I think,"  the Academician  answered with  caution.
"We'll just have to live and see."
     There were  a lot of questions, some I understood, others I forgot. But
one of Irene's questions posed to Zernov I did remember.
     "Professor,  you said  that they  construct  models of all things. That
they see. Where are their eyes? How do they see?"
     The answer came not from Zernov but from a physicist next to him.
     "Eyes are not obligatory," he explained. "They can reproduce any object
via photography. Say, create a light-sensitive  surface just as  they create
any field, and then focus light on it reflected from the object. That's all.
Of  course, that is only one  of a number of possible suppositions. We might
presume an acoustic 'tuning' of a similar kind and an  analogous 'tuning' to
odours."
     "I  am convinced  that they see everything, hear  and sense  all things
much   better   than  we   do,"   said  Zernov   with   a  strange  kind  of
ceremonious-ness.
     This time nobody even  smiled. Zernov's  remark appeared to  sum up all
that had been  seen and heard,  and revealed  to all present the  tremendous
significance of what had to be thought over and comprehended.



        Chapter XII. MARTIN'S LETTER



     After Tolya had left I remained standing at  the window,  my eyes glued
to the snowed-over asphalt  driveway that connected my entrance door to  the
gates at the street.  I was  hoping that Irene might come. Theoretically she
could have,  not out  of any tenderness  of  heart,  naturally,  but  simply
because otherwise she could not give me any news or instructions since I had
no  telephone.  We  were now connected  by  a  range  of  business.  She was
secretary  of  this special  committee and I was an expert with a variety of
duties from press attache to projectionist. Then  we had a  joint assignment
to go to Paris  to an international meeting of scientists devoted  to  those
same rose  "clouds"-that impenetrable phenomenon the whole world was talking
about.  Academician Osovets was head of the delegation and Zernov and I were
going as witnesses of the fact, while Irene  was in the  more modest, though
probably even more important role of  secretary-translator with a  knowledge
of   six  languages.  Also  in  the  delegation  was  Rogovin,  world-famous
physicist-the bass voice that had so intrigued  me  during our first showing
of the film. The  assignment was getting under way, all  the  documents were
ready and only a few days  were left before our departure. There were oodles
of  things to do, all the more so since Zernov had left for Leningrad to see
his family and would be back any day now.
     But, honestly, that was  not  the reason I  wanted to see  Irene. I had
simply  grown lonely for her during my week of confinement. I wanted to hear
her  sharp ironical thrusts, even see her dark rectangular glasses that took
away some portion of her charm and femininity. I was openly drawn to her-was
it  friendship  or infatuation,  or  perhaps a vague,  almost  imperceptible
something that attracts  one  person  to another and is so acutely felt when
that person is absent. "Do you like her?" I asked myself. "Very much." "What
is it,  love?" "Don't  know." Sometimes  I have difficulty  with her  and at
times she makes me mad.  At some point the attraction turns  into repulsion,
and one wants  to say something  to hurt.  That  may  be because we  are  so
different.
     Then  the  difference sharpens to a razor-edge: as she has  put it,  my
education  is a  salad made up of Kafka, Hemingway and Bradbury; my reply to
that is that  hers is a minced pie  out of last year's "Technology  for  the
Youth" magazine. Then  again I'd just as soon compare her to a dried fish or
the Laputan experts. Her response  to that  is that she condescends to place
me with the lower primates. Still  and  all, we  have some things in common.
Then we seem to be gay and excited when together.
     This  is  a  strange, amusing friendship that was struck up just  after
that memorable film showing at the  Academy of Sciences. I continued sitting
in  the  corner until all the  big  and little  scientists had left and  the
lights were  out. I picked up all the parts and pieces of my equipment,  put
them into a bag and sat down again.
     Irene looked at me, without speaking, through her dark glasses.
     "You're not a duplicate by any chance?" she asked.
     "I certainly am," I agreed. "How did you guess?"
     "By the actions  of normal  human beings. A  normal person, not  loaded
down with a higher education, would long ago have left,  without waiting for
the meeting  to come to an  end. Now  here  you are, sitting, listening,-why
don't you get a move on?"
     "I'm studying terrestrial life," I said importantly. "We duplicates are
self-programmed systems  that vary the programme as we go along depending on
the subject, on whether it is worth studying."
     "You mean me, I'm the subject?"
     "Astounding guess work on your part."
     "The session is over. Consider that you've completed the study."
     "That's right, now I'll order a model of you with certain corrections."
     "Without glasses?"
     "That's  not  all.  Without   stuck-up   superiority   and  priest-like
magnificence. Just an  ordinary girl with your wit and face that I'd like to
invite to the movies or for a walk."
     I hoisted my bag and went to the exit.
     "I like movies and walks," she added after me.
     I turned round.
     Then the next day  I returned all spruced up like a diplomatic attache.
She was typing something. I said hello and sat down at her desk.
     "What do you want?" she asked.
     "Looking for work."
     "Haven't they assigned you to us yet?"
     "They're doing it."
     "You have to go through personnel ..."
     "Personnel  for  me  is nothing," I dismissed  the matter  curtly. "I'm
interested in the day-before-yesterday's minutes."
     "What for? You wouldn't understand anything in them any way?"
     "For one thing, the resolutions passed by the meeting," I  continued in
a  highfalutin  manner, paying no  attention to her thrusts, "insomuch as we
have information  that four expeditions are being outfitted  for the Arctic,
the Caucasus, Greenland and the Himalayas."
     "Five," she corrected me. "The fifth is the Fedchenko glacier."
     "I'd choose Greenland," I remarked rather by the way.
     Then she laughed, as  if dealing with a member of the school chess team
who is asking for a match with the world champion. I felt lost, of a sudden.
     "And where to?"
     "Nowhere."
     I missed the point.
     "Why? Every expedition needs a cameraman."
     "I don't like to disappoint you, Yuri, but we don't need one." There'll
be scientists  and technicians  of a  number of specialized institutes.  The
NIKFI for  instance. And don't look at me with those kind ram's  eyes.  Note
that I  didn't  say 'stupid'  eyes.  I simply  ask you:  can you operate  an
introscope?  No. Can  you photo from behind a  wall of  opaqueness,  say  in
infrared rays?  No. Can you convert the invisible  into the visible with the
aid  of an electronic-acoustic transducer? No, again. I  can read it on your
carefully shaven face. So you didn't have to shave, after all."
     "All  right, but how about ordinary camera work?" I still couldn't make
it out. "Just common filmus vulgaris?"
     "For filmus vulgaris all one needs is  a kid's camera. That's not  done
any more. More important is to get an image in opaque media, from  outside a
cloud cover. For example, what happens to a model inside the crimson tube?"
     I  was  silent.  For  an  ordinary  cameraman,  that  was  differential
calculus.
     "So you see, Yuri," she laughed. "You can't do anything. You don't know
the Kirlian method, do you?"
     I had never even heard of it.
     "Incidentally,   it   permits   distinguishing  the  living   from  the
nonliving."
     "I can do that without a camera."
     But she had already taken up the pose of lecturer.
     "On  film,   living   tissue  is  seen   surrounded  by  a  transparent
halo-discharges  of high-frequency currents. The more  intensive  the  vital
activities, the brighter the halo."
     "It's living tissue if it's  naked," I said angrily and got up. "Forget
about  personnel. I  don't  have  anything  to do  in that department.  Here
either."
     She laughed, but this time differently: gaily and kindly.
     "Sit down, Yuri, and don't be down-hearted, we'll go together."
     "Where to?" I was still boiling. "Moscow suburbs?"
     "No, to Paris."
     I didn't believe  that sly little devil of a girl till I saw the actual
paper  for our assignment to  the Paris conference.  And  now, here,  I  was
waiting for the same devil, waiting for the angel, and chewing match  sticks
with impatience. And I would just miss  her when I went over to the desk for
cigarettes. She  phoned  when I was already making plans to throw the  whole
thing over.
     "Jesus," I exclaimed, "finally!"
     She tossed me her raincoat and danced into the room.
     "Have you become a believer?"
     "From  this minute I believe  in the angel who  brings forgiveness from
heaven. When's it going to be? Don't keep me waiting."
     "The day  after tomorrow. Zernov returns tomorrow.  The next morning we
take off. The tickets have been ordered. By  the way, how  did  we get  to a
first-name basis so quickly?"
     Just instinctively. That's not what's worrying you."
     She thought for a moment.
     "That's true. They're  already  in the Arctic, you see what I mean. The
captain of the 'Dobrynya' icebreaker, Captain Shchetinnikov,  just back from
Archangel came over to the committee. He says that the vast area of the Kara
Sea and the  ocean north of  Franz-Joseph Land is  all  free  from ice. From
Pulkovo Observatory the  report  is that ice satellites orbit over the North
Pole several times a day."
     "And the committee rejects filming," I added disappointed.  "Now's just
the time to photograph."
     "Amateurs have  been  doing that.  We'll  soon be  getting cartloads of
film. That's not the important thing."
     "What is important?"
     "Contact."
     I whistled.
     "Don't whistle.  Attempts  at contact have already  been  made,  though
without success it seems.  But  English and Dutch scientists have proposed a
programme of contacts. All the  materials are in the hands of  Osovets. Then
there's  this Thompson group  that'll have to be dealt with at the congress.
The  American delegation is  actually divided, the majority  do not  support
Thompson, but there  are some that are in with him.  Not very solidly, true,
but they'll be hard nuts  to crack in  Paris. That's what's important,  see?
Wait a minute."  Laughing, she  grabbed her  raincoat and  pulled  from  the
pocket a bulky package covered over with foreign stamps. "I forgot about the
most important thing of all; here's a letter for you from the United States.
You're getting to be famous."
     "From Martin," I said, looking at the address.
     A strange address, to say the least:
     "Yuri Anokhin.  First observer of  the phenomenon  of the  rose clouds.
Committee for Fighting Visitors from Space, Moscow, USSR."
     "Committee  for  fighting  ..."  Irene  laughed.  "Some  programme  for
contacts. He's a Thompsonite, all right."
     "Here, I'll read it."
     Martin wrote that he had returned from the  Antarctic expedition to his
airbase near Sand City, in the southwest of the United States. On Thompson's
suggestion, he was immediately assigned to a voluntary society set up by the
Admiral for combating  the  cosmic visitors. Martin was not surprised at his
assignment.  Thompson had told him about it in  the plane  on the  way home.
Neither  was he surprised at the position he  was  offered. When the Admiral
learned that in  college Martin had published  items in student journals, he
named his press  agent. "I have  a  feeling that the old man doesn't believe
me, he thinks I'm a double, something like a fifth columnist and so he wants
to keep me close by him to see and  check for  himself. That's  why I didn't
tell him what happened to  me on the  way to our  airbase in  Sand City. But
I've got to  tell somebody, and  there's nobody but you. You're the only one
who can disentangle  this crazy house I've gotten into.  You and I know what
happened at the South Pole; here things seem to be dressed up differently."
     The letter was typed, over ten single-spaced pages.  "My first  article
is not  for the  press, only for you,"  he wrote. "You'll  see for  yourself
whether I'm fit to be a newspaper man." I went through a couple of pages and
nearly jumped.
     "Read it," I said  to  Irene, handing her the pages as I finished them.
"It looks like we're in a hot spot."


        Chapter XIII. NEW STYLE WESTERN



     Here's what Martin wrote:
     The sun had just  risen over the horizon  when I went out the gates  of
the airbase. I was in a hurry, with only 24 hours of time off, and it was at
least an hour's drive to Sand City. I waved gaily to the sleepy watchman, my
ancient two-seater  jerked forward  and I  went sailing along  the  asphalt.
Something rattled  in the back of the car, then a knock, the cylinders  were
banging- this was a real piece of junk  all right. "About time to get  a new
one,"  I thought to myself, "eight years is much too much. But  you get into
the habit, and Mary likes it too".
     That's  where I was going, to see Mary in  Sand City and spend the last
free  day  I  had  with  her before leaving for New  York  to report to  the
Admiral. The boys at the airbase introduced me to Mary the  first  day after
my  return from  Mac-Murdo. She was new at this bar,  nothing spectacular, a
girl  like  any other girl, in a starched white uniform and Elizabeth Taylor
hairdo- they all copy film  stars at the bar. There was something about  her
that attracted me from the very start, and  so every evening off I'd go over
to see  her. I even wrote Mom that I had a nice girl, and  all that  sort of
thing. You know.
     This trip I had made up my  mind  finally and was thinking  over how to
tell her. No use holding things  up, that's the  way I felt. But things were
held up,  after all.  Some  guy was  out there on the  highway, I honked the
horn, but instead of moving away he jumped about and almost landed under the
car. So I slammed down the brakes and got out:
     "Hey,  what's wrong,  can't you  see a car when it's right in front  of
you?"
     He looked at  me, then  at the sky and slowly  got to his feet, beating
the dust out of his old jeans.
     "There's something a lot worse than cars that's frightening people." He
came over to me and asked. "Going into town?"
     I nodded and he got in, just as wild-looking as before. Terribly scared
is what  I figured,  with droplets of sweat all over his forehead, with dark
damp circles around the armpits of his shirt.
     "How come you're out training so early?" I asked.
     "Much worse," he repeated putting  his hand into his pocket. Along with
his handkerchief, a 1952 Barky Jones fell out onto the seat.
     I whistled in surprise: "What's this a pursuit?"
     I was now sorry  that I had got mixed up with him. I don't like highway
encounters of that nature.
     "Crazy,"  he said  without anger.  "It's not mine, the boss's: I'm just
watching the herd at Viniccio's ranch."
     "Cowboy?"
     "No,"  he  replied  screwing up his  face and wiping  the sweat off his
forehead. "I can't even ride a horse. But I need money for college."
     I smiled  to  myself: 'escaping gangster  turns  into  vacation-working
student'.
     "My name's Mitchell Casey," he said.
     I told him my  name, hoping not without vanity that because it had been
in the papers since meeting  the dragons at MacMurdo he  might recognize it,
but  I  was mistaken.  He hadn't been reading the papers or listening to the
radio, had never heard of me,  nor of the rose clouds:  "Maybe this is a war
or men from Mars have landed, it's about the same, I don't know."
     "There's no war yet," I said. "It might be Martians all right, though."
     I told him briefly about the rose clouds. But I never expected my story
to produce the reaction that it did. He grabbed for the door as if he wanted
to jump out on the  spot, but then  he opened  his mouth and with  trembling
lips asked:
     "From the sky?"
     I nodded.
     "Long rose-coloured cucumbers. Like diving airplanes?"
     That surprised me. He  seemed to know all about them, though he said he
didn't read the papers.
     "I just saw some,"  he said, and again  wiped  his forehead, this  time
from cold  sweat most likely.  The meeting with our  acquaintances  from the
Antarctic seemed to have knocked him out completely.
     "So what?" I asked. "They fly and they dive, do a good job. And they're
like cucumbers. But no harm done. Just a fog, that's all. You're  a bit of a
coward, aren't you?"
     "Anyone would have got scared in my place," he said still all keyed up.
"I nearly went crazy when they doubled my herd."
     And, then looking around, as if afraid someone might be  listening,  he
added softly, "And me too."
     I realized then, Yuri, that  Mitchell  had  gone through the same thing
that  you and I had. These damn  clouds got  interested  in  the herd, dived
down,  doubled it and  this  plucky cowboy  tried  to drive  them  off. Then
something  totally  unexplainable  occurred.  One   of  the  rose  cucumbers
approached  him,  hovered  over  his head and ordered him to retreat. Not in
words, naturally, but like  a hypnotizer-to  go  back  and get on the horse.
Mitchell  told me that he could not do  anything  other than as he was told.
Without offering any resistance, he went back to the horse and got into  the
saddle. What I think is  that they wanted someone on horseback because  they
already had  quite a collection of people on foot. The rest was routine: the
red fog, the complete immobility-you can't move a hand or  a foot and it  is
as  if you were being examined straight  through.  A very familiar  pattern.
When  the fog dispersed and the boy came to he couldn't believe his eyes-the
herd had doubled,  and  to the side,  on a horse, was another Mitchell.  The
horse was the same, and he was the same, as if in a mirror.
     That's when he lost  his nerve; and I remember well the first time that
happened to me too. Well, it was the same thing, he ran, he just  ran to get
away  from  it.  Then  he stopped.  The  cattle weren't  his,  he  would  be
responsible. He thought a bit, and then returned. What he found was what had
been there  before  the  coming  of  the  rose  clouds.  No extra cattle, no
duplicate  horse. So he figured he must have been seeing  things, or he  was
out of his mind. He drove the cattle into the paddock,  and left for town to
see the boss.
     All of  this is by way of introduction, you understand.  I  had  hardly
quieted down the boy when I myself  got  the jitters: there they were flying
at house-top level, single file as if it were along a road. Just like Disney
characters, like our radioman at MacMurdo had suggested, not like cucumbers.
Then Mitchell saw them. Dead silence. He was breathing heavily.
     That's it again, I thought, recalling how those dirigibles  had plunged
into combat  in  our first aerial  fight.  But this time  they did  not even
descend, they simply hurtled by at sonic speed like rose-coloured flashes of
lightning in a lilac sky.
     "They're headed for town," Mitchell whispered from behind.
     I didn't say anything.
     "I wonder why they didn't pay any attention to us."
     "Not interested. Two in a car, any number about like us. And I'm tagged
as it is."
     He didn't get me.
     "We've already met," I explained. "And they remember."
     "I don't like this at all," he said and fell silent.
     And so we drove  on in silence until the town  came into sight. We were
about a mile  away but  for some  reason I didn't recognize it. It seemed so
strange in the lilac haze, like a mirage over distant shifting yellow sands.
     "What  the  hell!" I exclaimed in  surprise. "Maybe my speedometer's on
the blink. It should
     be a good dozen miles yet to town, but there it ,1
     is."
     "Look up over there!" Mitchell shouted.
     Right over the mirage of the town hung a string of rose clouds, sort of
like jellyfish or perhaps umbrellas, or a cross between them. Maybe that's a
mirage too.
     "The town's not in the right place," I said. "I don't get it."
     "We should have passed old man Johnson's motel by  this time," Mitchell
put in. "It's only a mile from town."
     I recalled the shrivelled up face of the motel owner and his stentorian
commanding  voice: "The world's gone  nuts,  Don.  I'm  already beginning to
believe  in  God."  I  seemed  ready  to believe  in God too. I  was  seeing
marvellous unfathomable miracles. Johnson,  who ordinarily sat on his  porch
and greeted all cars passing by, had vanished. That in itself was a miracle.
Never, in all  my  travelling to  town, had I ever missed  old  man  Johnson
waving us into town. A bigger enigma yet was the disappearance of his motel,
for we couldn't have passed it. There weren't even any signs of a  structure
along the road.
     On the other hand, the town was coming into full  sight. Sand City in a
lilac haze ceased to be a mirage.
     "A  town  like  any  other,"  said  Mitchell,  "but  there's  something
different here. Maybe we're on another route."
     But we  were  coming in by the usual route. The same  red-brick houses,
the same sign boards with big letters reading: 'Juiciest Beef Steak in  Sand
City', the  same gas station. Even Fritch in  a white jacket was standing as
usual near the lightning-split oak tree with his broad smile "What can I  do
for you, sir? Oil? Gas?"




        Chapter XIV. WEREWOLF CITY



     I  stopped  the car with a screech of brakes so familiar to gas station
attendants round this place.
     "Howdy, Fritch. What's doing in town?"
     It looked to me like Fritch didn't  recognize me. He approached us  but
kind of  unwillingly, no eagerness, like a person coming into a brightly lit
room from the dark. Still more  striking  were his eyes: fixed, as if  dead,
they looked through us, not at us. He stopped before reaching the car.
     "Good morning, sir," he said indifferently in a dull hollow voice.
     He didn't use my name.
     "What's happening to the city!?" I yelled. "What's it got, wings?"
     "Don't know, sir," the voice was Fritch's but in  a totally indifferent
monotone. "What would you like, sir?"
     No, this wasn't Fritch  at all. "Where's  old man Johnson's motel  gone
to?" I asked impatiently.
     He replied without a smile:
     "Old man Johnson's motel? Don't know, sir." He  took a step closer and,
now with a smile-but such an artificial smile it was that  I  was horrified.
.. Then, "What can I do for you, some oil, or gas?"
     "Okay,"  I said. "We'll figure  this out yet. Let's go, Mitchell." As I
left the  gas station, I turned  around.  Fritch was still standing there on
the roadside, watching us go, his eyes the cold, fixed eyes of a corpse.
     "What's  wrong with him?" asked  Mitchell. "Taken  a bit too  much this
morning?"
     But  I  knew that Fritch did not drink, anyway  nothing more than Pepsi
Cola. This wasn't liquor, it was something inhuman.
     "A puppet," I muttered, "a wound-up puppet.  'Don't know, sir. What can
I do for you, sir?' "
     You know I'm no coward, Yuri, but honestly I cringed from a premonition
of imminent danger. Too  many  unaccountable  accidents, and worse than down
there in Antarctica.  I even wanted to turn around and go  back, but there's
no other route to town. And there was no point in going back to the base.
     "You know where to find the boss?" I asked Mitchell.
     "In the club most likely."
     "Okay, we'll begin with the club," I sighed.
     "Since the town's right here, there's no use stopping now."
     I  turned  down  Eldorado Street  racing  the  car  past  neat  rows of
cottages, all yellow like new-born chicks. There were no pedestrians, nobody
walked-this  was  an upper-crust neighbourhood,  quiet;  the  big  shots had
already left for their offices, and their wives were still stretching in bed
or having late breakfasts in their electrified kitchenettes. Mitchell's boss
was taking  a snack in the club, which was at the cross-roads of Main Street
and State. By this time I was fairly ashamed of my unrealised fears-the blue
sky, no rose  clouds over head, the heated-up asphalt, the hot wind sweeping
bits of newspaper which  might even be carrying the rose-cloud sensation and
stating that it was the concoction of New  York  nuts. Sand  City  was fully
protected from any cosmic intruder. Everything returned us to the reality of
quiet town, the way it should be on a sultry summer morning like today.
     At least  that  is the  way  it seemed to me,  because it  was  all  an
illusion, Yuri. There was no morning in the town and it wasn't slumbering or
sleeping. We could see that at once when we turned down State Street.
     "Isn't it too early for the club?" I asked  Mitchell  still thinking by
inertia about the sleeping city.
     He  laughed-there was a crowd  at the intersection that had stopped all
traffic.  This  was no morning crowd and this was no waking-up city. The sun
shone  but  the  electric  street lights were just  as bright, as if it were
still  last  night.  Neon  lights  were still  flashing  on  and off  in the
show-windows  and on signs.  In  movie houses, cowboys were  shooting, James
Bond  was  fearlessly on the job seeking out victims to  eliminate. Billiard
balls were racing noiselessly over green tables, and the  jazz band over  at
the "Selena" Restaurant was banging away as loud as  a passing train. And on
the sidewalks, pedestrians  were walking lazily along, not hurrying to work,
because work had long since  ceased,  the city was alive with  evening life,
not  morning  duties. As if the people  together with the electric  lighting
were out to fool time and nature.
     "Why the lights? Isn't the sun enough?" Mitchell said in bewilderment.
     I pulled up at  the curb near the tobacco store. Tossing some change on
the counter I carefully asked the pretty sales girl:
     "What's it a holiday today?"
     "What holiday?"  she asked by way of reply, handing  me the cigarettes.
"An ordinary evening of a usual day?"
     The immobile blue eyes looked through me-like the dead eyes of Fritch.
     "Evening?" I repeated.  "Take a  look at the sky. What's the sun  doing
there if it's evening?"
     "Don't know." Her voice was calm and indifferent. "It's evening now and
I don't know anything."
     I slowly left  the shop. Mitchell  was waiting in the car. He had heard
the whole conversation and was probably thinking the same thoughts as I was:
who's crazy,  we  or everyone  in town? Maybe  it  really  was  evening  and
Mitchell and I were seeing things. I took another close look at the  street.
It  was part of Route  66 that passed through to New  Mexico. The cars  were
passing two lanes abreast in both directions. Ordinary United States cars on
an ordinary American highway. All of them had their headlights on.
     On an impulse, I grabbed the first passer-by.
     "Hey, take your hands off me," he exploded.
     He was a  little, thick-set but nimble man in a crazy-like bicycle cap.
His eyes were not empty and indifferent, but alive and angry. They looked at
me with revulsion.  I turned around and looked at Mitchell who mimicked that
the fat guy must  be  touched in the head.  And  the anger of  the roly-poly
stranger switched to a different direction.
     "You  say  I'm  crazy,  do you!"  he  screamed and lunged for Mitchell.
"You're  the ones that are mad,  the whole  town's gone nuts. Electricity in
the  morning, and the only answer I get  to all questions is 'I don't know'.
All right, what is it: morning or night?"
     "Morning,  of  course,"  said  Mitchell, "but something's wrong here in
town this morning, I just don't understand."
     The metamorphosis of the fat man was amazing. He  no longer screamed or
yelled,  only quietly smiled stroking Mitchell's sweaty hand. Even his  eyes
moistened.
     "Thank heavens, one  normal man in  this nut house of a  town," he said
finally still holding on to Mitchell's hand.
     "Two," I said  extending my own hand. "You're the third. Let's exchange
impressions. We might be able to figure out this number."
     We stopped  on the edge  of the curb separated  from the  highway  by a
colourful string of parked cars, nobody inside.
     "Gentlemen, explain this  to me," he  began,  "these tricks  with cars.
They ride along, disappear, vanish, into nowhere."
     To put it honestly, I didn't get what he was driving at. What  was this
"into nowhere". He explained. Only he needed a  smoke to calm down. "I don't
usually smoke, but you know it does have a calming effect."
     "My  name's  Lesley  Baker,   travelling   salesman.  Women's  apparel,
cosmetics. Always on the go, here one day, gone the  next. I arrived on  the
route  from  New Mexico, turned onto Route 66.  I was crawling along awfully
slow, like a  snail. There  was this big green van right in front,  couldn't
pass it for the life of  me. You  know how it is, going slow. A  toothache's
worse. Then this sign 'You are now entering the quietest city in the  United
States'.  Quietest, my eye, the craziest, that's more  like it. At  the city
limits, where the highway widens out-there are no sidewalks-I tried again to
get out ahead of this big van. I just  stepped on  the gas, and it vanished,
went up into nothing.  I  was flabbergasted. So  I put on the brakes, pulled
over to the side and looked here and there, no van. Evaporated like sugar in
a  cup  of coffee. I even ran  into a  barbed-wire fence, lucky I was  going
slow."
     "Why a barbed-wire fence along the road?" I asked surprised.
     "On the highway? There wasn't any highway.  It had gone  along with the
van.  All  there was a red open  space, a green  island-like something at  a
distance, and the fence and barbed wire all about. Somebody's farm, I guess.
You  don't  believe  me? Well, I  didn't myself.  The  hell with  the van, I
figured, but  where did the road  go  to? I must have  been off my rocker. I
turned  around  and  nearly died  then  and  there-a huge black  Lincoln was
heading for me right through the wire! It was doing at least a hundred miles
an hour. I  didn't even have  time to jump, I just closed my eyes. This  was
the end for sure. A minute passed, no end. I opened my eyes, no end, no car,
no nothing."
     "Maybe it passed by."
     "Where? How? On what road?"
     "So the road disappeared too?"
     He nodded.
     "So," I said, "the cars disappeared before reaching the barbed wire?"
     "That's just  it. One after the other. I stood  there some  ten minutes
and they kept on  disappearing at the edge  of the highway.  It broke off in
red clay at the  very edge of the wire. There  I stood  like Rip Van Winkle,
blinking my eyes. To all  questions, only one answer: 'Don't know.' Why  are
the cars driving with headlights on? Don't know. Where are they disappearing
to? Don't  know. Maybe  going to hell? Don't know. Where's the  highway? The
eyes are glassy like those of the dead."
     It was already clear to me what kind of city this was. All I wanted was
one  more test: to take a look with my own eyes. I looked around  and raised
my hand: one of  the cars  stopped. The driver had  glassy eyes  too. But  I
risked it.
     "I'm going to the city limits. Two blocks or so, that's all."
     "Hop in," he said indifferently.
     I got in beside him. The fat guy and Mitchell got in  behind, not quite
understanding  what  it was  all about. The  driver  turned his  head  away,
completely apathetic, stepped on the gas, and covered the two blocks in half
a minute.
     "Look," Baker from behind whispered in agitation.
     In front of us, right across the highway cut  off by the red clay  were
four rows of rusty barbed wire. One could  only  see a small portion of  the
wire  fencework, the rest was hidden  behind the houses on the roadside, and
so it seemed as if the whole city were fenced in and isolated from the world
of living human beings. I already had some idea  of this thing  from Baker's
story, but the reality was still crazier.
     "Watch  out for  the  wire," Baker  yelled grabbing at the arm  of  the
driver.
     "Where?"  was  the surprised reply and he  pushed  away  Baker's  hand.
"You're nuts."
     He obviously didn't see the wire.
     "Put on the brakes," I said, "we're getting out here."
     The driver slowed down, but I could already  see the radiator beginning
to melt  in  the air. It was  as if something invisible  were eating the car
away  inch by inch.  The windshield had gone, then the instrument panel, the
driving wheel,  the hands of the driver. This was ghastly-so terrifying that
I instinctively closed my eyes. Then a sharp blow knocked me to  the ground.
I pitched into the dust and rolled along on the asphalt roadway, which means
I was flung out at the very edge of the highway. But how did  I fly out? The
door of the car was shut, the car hadn't overturned or anything. I raised my
head and in front I saw the body of an unfamiliar grey car. Alongside in the
dust lay unconscious our friend the salesman.
     "Are you alive?"  asked  Mitchell  bending down to him.  He had a black
eye. "I was knocked right  against Baker's bus." He  nodded towards the grey
car stuck in the wire roadblock.
     "Where's ours?"
     He shrugged his shoulders. For a minute  or two we  stood silent at the
edge of the cut-off highway watching one and the same miracle that  had just
left us without a car. The  fat travelling salesman had also got to his feet
and had joined  our spectacle.  It was repeated every three seconds  when-at
full speed-a  car  crossed the  edge of  the highway. Fords and Pontiacs and
Buicks-all  kinds drove  in and vanished without a trace, like soap bubbles.
Some  of the cars  were heading right into us as  we stood there, but we did
not move because  they simply evaporated two feet in front of us. The entire
process of mysterious and inexplicable vanishings  was clearly visible right
here in the  hot  sunshine.  True enough, they did not vanish  suddenly  but
gradually, by diving,  as  it were,  into  some kind of a hole in  space and
disappearing there, beginning with the  front bumper and winding up with the
back  license  plate.  The  whole  city  seemed  to  be  fenced  round  with
transparent  glass, beyond which there was  no highway,  no cars, no city at
all.
     Probably one  and  the  same thought rankled all three of us:  What was
there to do? Return to town?  But what kind of marvels might not be awaiting
us there, some kind of weird circus perhaps? What kind of people would there
be, who would be able to speak a normal human word? So far we hadn't  met up
with a single normal person except the travelling salesman.  I suspected the
doings  of  the  rose  clouds,  but  people  hereabouts were  not  like  the
duplicates created  at the South Pole. Those  were, or  seemed  to be, human
beings, while these  resembled resurrected dead  who knew  nothing  but  the
desire to go somewhere, to drive  cars, knock billiard balls about and drink
whiskey. I recalled Thompson's version and now for the  first time got  real
scared. Had they indeed been able to  replace the entire  population  of the
city? Could it be.... No, there was still one more test to make. Only one.
     "Let's get back to town, boys,"  I said to my companions. "We've got to
rinse out heads in a big way or else the nut house is the only place for us.
Judging by the cigarettes, the whiskey here is real."
     But I was thinking about Mary.




        Chapter XV. PURSUIT



     At about noon we  arrived at the bar where Mary worked. The show window
and  the neon signs were ablaze with light.  The  owners were not  trying to
save on electricity even at high noon. My white duck jumper  was wet through
and  through  with sweat,  but  it was  cool and empty in  the bar. The high
stools were vacant; there were only a few couples near the window whispering
and a  half-drunk old man in  the corner  nursing his  bottle of  brandy and
orange juice.
     Mary did not hear us enter. She was standing with her back to us at the
open counter and was putting bottles on the shelves. We climbed  onto  three
stools  and exchanged expressive glances  without a word. Mitchell was  just
about to call Mary, but I stopped him and signalled for silence. I was going
to do the test myself.
     This was indeed the hardest experiment of all in this insane city.
     "Mary," I called hardly audibly.
     She swung around  as  if  frightened  by the  sound  of  my voice.  Her
squinting short-sighted eyes without glasses  and the  bright light blinding
her  from the ceiling  might have  explained  her well-mannered indifference
towards us. She did not recognize me.
     But she  wore her hairdo the way I liked  it- rather plain without  any
movie-star  effects. And  she  had on a red dress with short  sleeves that I
always preferred. All this  could account  for something else as  well.  She
knew about my visit and was expecting me.  That was a relief, for a minute I
forgot about any doubts and fears.
     "Mary," I said louder.
     The  answer  was  a  coquettish  smile,  with  head tipped to one side,
symbolically stressing the trained readiness to serve her customer, but that
typified  any girl at the bar, not  Mary.  With the boys  she knew, she  was
different.
     "What's the matter, baby?" I asked. "I'm Don!"
     "What's the  difference,  Don  or  John?" she responded with a  playful
shrug  of the  shoulders  and  a  glance with  meaning,  but she  failed  to
recognize me. "Anything I can do for you?"
     "Hey, look at me, will you?" I said rudely.
     "What for?" came her surprised respond, but she looked.
     I saw two huge bulging eyes-not hers-blue  and narrow like the girls in
pictures by Salvador Dali, and always lively, kind or angry. There  were the
cold dead  eyes of Fritch,  the eyes of  the girl in the tobacco  store, the
eyes of the  driver that  evaporated on the highway with his car-the  glassy
eyes of a doll. A puppet. Not  alive,  that was it. The test was a  failure.
There weren't any live people in  that city. Then the instantaneous decision
to  run. Anywhere, just to get  out of it all before it was too late, before
all this damned horror invaded us completely.
     "Follow me!" I shouted, jumping off the stool.
     The fat man was disappointed expecting the promised drink, but Mitchell
got  the message. A bright kid. When we were out in the street he said, "How
will I find the boss now?"
     "You won't  find your boss anywhere  here," I said.  "There aren't  any
people here, just make believe, half-people. Let's beat it."
     The  fat  man couldn't  get  anything through his head,  but obediently
followed behind from fear; he obviously didn't relish staying alone  in this
weird city.  I'm afraid that even  Mitchell wasn't fully  aware  of what was
going on, but at least  he  didn't  argue. He had seen enough bizarre events
along the road today, It was enough for him!
     "If we have to clear out, then we  will,"  he remarked philosophically.
"Do you remember where we left the car?"
     I looked around, my "corvette"  wasn't on the corner. I  must have left
it farther down the street. In  its place  near the curb, about two or three
yards from us was a black police car, headlights ablaze. There were a couple
of policemen in uniform inside, and two more-one with a broken nose, must've
been  a former boxer- stood next to the open door. On the other side of  the
street, near a sign that read "Commercial Bank" were two more. They were all
following  us with intent but hardly  alive, penetrating eyes. I didn't like
that at all.
     The sergeant said something to those in the car. The  concentrated look
on his face was ominous. They were definitely waiting for someone. Maybe us,
shot through my mind. Anything could happen in this upside-down city.
     "Hurry up, Mitch," I said looking around, "we seem to be in for it."
     "Over that way," he replied and ran, weaving through the cars parked at
the curb.
     I slipped around a truck that nearly  hit me and  got to the other side
of  the  street some distance away from  the suspicious black wagon. Just in
time, too. The sergeant stepped out onto the pavement and raised his hand.
     "Hey, you, stop!"
     But I had already  swung into the side street, a dark canyon-like alley
between houses without signs or  windows. The fat guy dashed with surprising
agility and caught up with me, grabbed my hand:
     "Look what they're doing!"
     I turned  around. The policemen had strung  out  and were crossing  the
street on the run. In front was  the sergeant breathing heavily and reaching
for his gun. Noticing me turn around, he shouted:
     "Stop or I'll shoot!"
     I didn't want to  see  how his gun worked, particularly here when I had
figured out the origin of this town and its population. I was lucky-I  heard
the whistle of bullets after  I had jumped behind an empty car.  The closely
parked  chain of cars  made  it easier for  us  to manoeuvre.  With  amazing
nimbleness spurred  on by  fear, Baker  and Mitchell  dived, crouching,  and
raced across the street.
     I  knew  this  side-street. Somewhere along here  there  should  be two
houses  with an arched gateway between them. There you  could get through to
the next  street and catch a passing car or End one: maybe our own. We  left
it somewhere nearby on the corner of just such  a  narrow side-street. Or we
might hide in the repair  shop.  A  week before when Mary and I were walking
past, the shop was empty  and there was a "To Let" sign up. I remembered the
shop when  we went  under the arched  gateway. The policemen were stuck some
distance behind.
     "This way!" I shouted to my companions and pulled on the door.
     The padlock and  sign were still hanging there and  my jerk didn't open
the door. Then I rammed it with my shoulder, it creaked but held.
     Then Mitchell tried with his whole body. The door groaned and collapsed
in a jangle of falling metal.
     But there wasn't anything behind it, it didn't lead anywhere. We  faced
a dark opening  filled with  a thick black jelly-like something. At first we
thought it was simply the  darkness of an  unlighted entrance way out of the
sunlight in  this narrow  alley.  I  pushed forward into the  darkness,  but
jumped back again: it turned out  to be elastic like rubber. Now I could see
it perfectly well-a definitely  black  something, perceptible to  the touch,
but  awfully dense and  resilient,  blown  up  like an  automobile  tire  or
compressed smoke.
     Then  Mitchell  plunged into it, he  jumped into the  darkness  like  a
wildcat and rebounded like I  had. Actually, it-the something-just threw him
back. It was most likely impenetrable even to a cannon ball. I figured-I was
convinced of this-that the whole inside of the house was the same: no rooms,
no people, darkness pure and simple with the resilience of a net.
     "What is it?" Mitchell asked horrified.
     He was scared stiff like in  the  morning on the highway. But there was
no more time to analyse impressions.  Our pursuers were getting closer. They
had probably entered the archway. But between us and the dense springy black
substance was a narrow-about  a foot  wide-space of ordinary darkness, maybe
of the same kind  but  sort of rarefied to the constituency of fog or gas. A
London smog or pea soup where you don't see more than a yard away. I put out
my hand, it disappeared in  it as if cut off. I  got  up and pressed against
the  compressed darkness in the depth of  the doorway  and  heard Baker yell
out, "Where are you guys?"
     Mitchell's hand found me and he saw at once how to get out. Together we
pulled the fat travelling salesman  through the opening and tried  to vanish
into the  darkness by pressing as hard  as possible so that the  treacherous
resilient thing beyond did not throw us out again.
     The door to the  repair shop where we were hiding was round the  corner
of  a  brick wall that jutted out at  this point. The  policemen had already
looked down the side street but could  not see us, yet even an  idiot  could
have guessed we couldn't have been able to  run the length of the street and
hide.
     "They're  some place around here," the sergeant said.  The wind carried
his words. "Try it along the wall."
     Bursts of machine-gun fire followed  one after  the other. The  bullets
did not  touch us hidden behind the jutting  portion of  the wall,  but they
whistled by and crunched into  the brick knocking out bits of  the wall. The
three of us were breathing heavily, tense with nerves at the bursting point.
I was afraid the salesman might give up,  so I held him by the throat. If he
squeaks, I thought, I'll  have to press harder. By then  shots  were ringing
out  from the other side of the street, the police were firing down entrance
ways and into indentations. I know that type and whispered to Mitchell:
     "Give me your pistol!"
     I wouldn't have done it in a reasonable city with normal policemen even
in  a similar situation, but in this backside-to town all means would do. So
I  didn't  tremble  when  I reached  in  the  dark for Mitchell's plaything.
Cautiously, I looked round the jutting wall and slowly raised the gun till I
had the big mug of  the sergeant in the sight,  then  I pressed the trigger.
There was a sharp  report and I could  clearly see the head of the policeman
jerk from the impact  of the bullet. It even  seemed to me that I saw a neat
round  hole at the bridge of the nose.  But  the  sergeant did  not fall, he
didn't even reel.
     "I've  got'em," he cried out enthusiastically.  "They're hiding  around
the corner."
     "How'd you miss him?" said Mitchell down-heartedly.
     I did  not answer.  I was positive  I'd got the policeman square in the
forehead.  I simply couldn't  have missed.  I've  shot and  won prizes. This
could  only  mean  that  these puppets  were not  afraid  of bullets.  I was
trembling all  over now so I  didn't even aim, I  just pumped the whole clip
into the  big-cheeked sergeant. I  could almost physically feel the  bullets
plump into the body.
     Nothing  happened.  He didn't even  feel  them,  didn't  jerk or try to
escape. Could it be that, inside, he was all that rubber that we were hiding
close to now?
     I threw down the useless pistol and left the hiding  place. Now nothing
mattered any more, there could be only one end.
     At  that moment something happened, not exactly sudden, I wouldn't say.
Something had been changing in the  situation all  along, simply in the heat
of the fight we  hadn't  noticed  properly. The  air about was going redder,
little by  little,  then deep crimson. I drove the last clip of bullets into
the  sergeant  without   being  able  to  see  him  properly  in  his  murky
surroundings.  And  when  the  pistol fell  to  the  ground, I looked at  it
automatically, but it wasn't there: under my feet was a thick crimson jelly.
A fog of  the same colour had enveloped everything. Only  the figures of the
policemen stood  dimly  at  a  distance  like  purple shadows.  The fog  was
thickening all the  time, finally it got as dense jam. But it did not hamper
our breathing or movements in the least.
     I don't know how long this lasted, a  minute, half an  hour or an hour,
but all of a sudden it had rapidly and unnoticeably melted away. When it was
over, a totally different  picture opened up to us. There were no policemen,
no houses, no streets, only the brick-like sun-baked desert and the sky with
ordinary  clouds  scudding along high up. Off  in the  distance was the hazy
dark  ribbon of  the highway, and in  front of  us, all entangled  in barbed
wire, was the upturned car of our fat travelling salesman.
     "What was it all about? Was it a dream?" he asked.
     His voice was so excited it came out hoarse, he could hardly speak, his
tongue wouldn't obey, like people who are regaining the capacity to speak.
     "No," and I patted him on the shoulder for encouragement. "I don't want
to console you. This was no dream but complete reality. And we are the  only
participants."
     Here I was mistaken. There was  yet  another  witness  who had  watched
events from the sidelines, so to speak. We found him a bit later. It took us
about a quarter of an  hour to get to a motel, an ancient structure but with
a nice new shiny concrete-glass-aluminium garage. And Johnson, as usual, was
sitting on the  steps of his porch. He jumped  up when he saw us  and seemed
unnaturally happy.
     "Don?" he said not quite convinced. "Where you from?"
     "From the inside of hell," I said. "From the branch office, it has here
on the earth."
     "You been in  this crazy house?"  He looked  at us  with  horror in his
eyes.
     "Yes,  I was  there all right,"  I assured him.  "I'll  give  the whole
story, only give me a drink  of something, that is,  if you yourself  are no
mirage."
     No, he wasn't. The iced whiskey wasn't either. It was a great relief to
sit down and hear what it was like from the outside of this city.
     Johnson saw it  all very  suddenly. He was sitting, dozing  and all  at
once he came to, looked around and  froze stiff: to the left where there had
never been anything, except dried up clay, was a twin city. To the right was
Sand  City and to the left was Sand City. "I  thought this was the  end, the
end  of the world!  I was not drunk, could see  straight, no doubling  up. I
went  into the house,  then came back again, but  the same  thing: me in the
middle of two twin cities, was  it a mirage? After all, it might be, this is
a desert, you know. Well, the twin city was here all right, never evaporated
and didn't melt. And worse, there wasn't a single car on the highway.
     Then all of a  sudden, it got dark and hazy, a fog  or something like a
fog, smoke or something, or like a storm cloud grazing the ground, an orange
red." As I listened to  Johnson's  story, I noticed that every  witness gave
the colours  a little differently. The fog was purple, or cherry, or crimson
or red.  But whatever it was, it lifted finally and then here we were coming
along the road.
     Later still,  Mary  had her  own  story of the fog. She had really been
waiting for me, and  the dress she had on was just like that  of the phantom
girl in the  fog.  She  also told us what had happened  in the city. I won't
relate it, since I'm sending along  a couple  of newspaper clippings. You'll
figure it all out better than I can."
     I  put down the  last page of  the  letter and  waited  until Irene had
finished reading. We looked at each  other and failed to find words. We were
probably  both  thinking  the  same  thing: is  it  really possible that our
everyday earthly life can get so close to a fairy tale?




        Chapter XVI. MOSCOW TO PARIS



     The clipping Martin sent from the Sand City Tribune read:
     "A curious meteorological phenomenon occurred yesterday in our city. At
half past seven yesterday evening, when the bars and stores and movie houses
all along  State  Street were  lighted  up brightly, a strange  reddish  fog
descended on the city. Some say the colour was violet. Actually, this was no
ordinary  fog  because  visibility  over  considerable  distances   was  not
impaired, all things were clearly discernible like on a  summer morning of a
cloudless day. True,  the fog did thicken to  the consistency of an ordinary
Los  Angeles smog.  They say it's worse  than the  London fog. No one  knows
exactly  how  long it thickened. Probably  not for long because most  of the
witnesses we questioned claim that the fog remained transparent all the time
and that  it was only the environment-houses, people and  even  the air-that
took on a deep purple or almost crimson  hue, as if one were looking through
red glasses. At first, the people stopped, looked at the sky and since there
was  nothing to be seen,  calmly  continued on  their way.  The  fog did not
affect  amusement shows, movies and the  like because it wasn't even noticed
there.  The event persisted for about an hour and then the fog, if  you  can
call it a fog, dispersed and the city became its evening self again.
     "Meteorologist James Backley,  who comes from Sand City and is visiting
here at  present,  explained  that  this  phenomenon  cannot  be  classed as
meteorological. He described  it  rather  as an enormous  rarefied  cloud of
minute particles of an artificial dye dispersed in the air, probably brought
in by the wind from some  dye works within an area of 100-150 miles  radius.
Such a  highly  atomized  and  nondispersible  accumulation  of  minute  dye
particles is a rare event indeed, but not exceptional and  may be carried  *
by the wind for many miles.
     "The  editors  believe that  the  rumours started about  some  kind  of
rose-coloured clouds are completely  groundless. The rose  clouds are  to be
sought in polar and not subtropical  regions of  the continent.  As for  the
statement made by Mr. Johnson, the owner of a  motel on the federal highway,
that he saw two identical cities on either side of his motel, it comes as no
surprise to the  editors  or  to people acquainted  with  Mr.  Johnson.  The
tourist season has not yet started and the motel is empty most of  the time.
It seems obvious  that  a drink or  two of whiskey produced these two cities
that eventful day.
     "Quite another explanation of these events comes  from our sharpshooter
Lammy  Cochen,  owner of the 'Orion'  bar and leader  of the 'Wild' Club. He
says  it's the work of the Reds.  'Look out for the Reds, for  they not only
colour politics, but even the air we breathe.' Doesn't that link up with New
York  lawyer Roy Desmond being beaten up  as he  emerged  from  a bar in our
city?  He  refused  to  answer  certain  questions  relating  to  the coming
presidential  elections.  There  might  be  some  connection. The police who
immediately came to the site  of the disturbance were unable to identify any
of the participants."
     Admiral Thompson gave an interview to  the "Time  and People" magazine:
'PLAGUE GRIPS SAND CITY, SAYS ADMIRAL, ROSE CLOUDS TO BLAME.'
     "During the past few days, a little  southern town on Route 66 has been
the focus of attention of the whole country. Papers have already * published
reports of the red fog that so suddenly enveloped  the city and the story of
the  travelling  salesman Lesley Baker about the bizarre events  in the twin
city. Our  reporter interviewed retired  Admiral Thompson, a  member of  the
United States  Antarctic  expedition and the  first eye  witness of the rose
clouds in action."
     "What do you think about the events in Sand City, sir?"
     "Well, I believe that it is  the  deep concern of  the ordinary citizen
about the future of human society."
     "You believe that there are grounds for concern?"
     "Yes, I do. The 'clouds' are not confining themselves to the copying of
individuals, but  they are synthesizing whole strata of society. I will give
only the  latest  cases:  the  ocean  liner  'Alamade'  with  its  crew  and
passengers in toto, the big store in Buffalo on a particularly busy day, the
plastics works in Evansville. It cannot be that  all witnesses had the  same
dream  as  if they  had lived  together for years,  and then  the  duplicate
factory  that  vanished.  No one  can convince  me  that it was all merely a
mirage caused by a  temperature gradient in different layers of air. And  it
is not  of the slightest importance that it  persisted for only minutes. The
important thing is that nobody can convincingly demonstrate which one of the
factories disappeared and which remained!"
     "When speaking  of the  events in Sand  City at  the Apollo  Club,  you
mentioned the plague. Now in what sense was that?"
     "Oh,  the  most  direct.  The  city  must  be  isolated,  subjected  to
systematic tests and unabated observations in the future. The problem is the
same:  are these  real people  or are they  all  duplicates?  Unfortunately,
neither the authorities nor society  at  large are paying anywhere near  the
necessary attention to this problem."
     "You  couldn't  be exaggerating a bit, could you,  sir?"  our  reporter
objected. "Do you really  accuse  the  country of indifference to the cosmic
visitors?"
     The Admiral replied with irony:
     "Well, not if one speaks of rose-cloud skirts and horsemen-from-nowhere
hairdos. Or, say, the congress of spiritualists that  declared the clouds to
be the spirits of the dead returning to the world with a gift from  almighty
God. That's not indifference! Or take the twelve-hour filibustering speeches
of senators about the  'horsemen' in Congress so as to kill a bill on taxing
big  incomes.  Or  stock brokers using the