Chekhov’s Journey Page 8

  “But we’re almost ready, Commander.”

  “Damn it, I want to look round the ship! You’ll accompany me, Sorina—that’s an order.”

  Together they floated upside-down into the control room, where Second Officer Yuri Valentin was fiddling with the Fluxtime gauges. He seemed to be having a spot of bother with the chronodyne resonometer.

  “Well, he ain’t ready.”

  Valentin grinned. “Slight imbalance, that’s all. Fix it in a jiffy.”

  Chief Engineer Anna Aksakova was busy checking the fusion-drive master switches. Screens glowed with schematics; tell-tales winked on and off. And all around Sasha Sorina’s vacated bay video screens were showing sections of starfield, and the Earth, Moon and Sun (with glare compensation). Her Deep Space Radar was up and running, tracking satellites and debris …

  “You’ve no imagination, that’s the trouble,” Anton said to Sasha. “What was it that Mayakovsky said about the bureaucrats holding back time?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know.”

  He drifted to the open hatch giving access to the upper transverse corridor. “‘Time Forward]’ That’s what his Five Year Plan proclaimed. And soon a great big time machine was invented. But all the bureaucrats got shaken out of it, and left behind…”

  “Really!” she protested, indignant.

  “Or how about Zamyatin? ‘In the name of Tomorrow, we judge Today!’ How about that for a rallying cry?” Bracing himself in the hatch, he launched off in the direction of the Phys and Chem labs. The fat steel tube of the corridor was painted a restful sky blue, and lit with fluorescent strips. Spaced evenly a metre apart on each side, hand grips were set like rungs so that personnel wouldn’t collide with one another.

  “But,” came her rational tones from behind, “we’ll be going back through time—not forwards.”

  “Aha! Do you fear we’ll be forced to recapitulate history? Do you imagine we’ll need to live through another feudal age and another capitalist era before we reach Utopia?”

  “I didn’t say anything of the sort! Imagining such things is the job of our Social Planning Officer.”

  “Imagination is a job? How neatly you prove Mayakovsky’s point.”

  Anton caught hold of the final rung, at the intersection corridor before the Chem Lab.

  “I mean, he’ll see to it that we don’t become feudal or bourgeois.”

  “Oh, old Saratov’ll give it a try. He’ll have the Hammer and Sickle up in orbit to point at, won’t he?”

  A vertical shaft descended through the decks nearby: one of the free fall ‘elevators’. Out of it popped a shuttle pilot, in her yellow serge zipper-suit. Gripping a rung, she saluted.

  “Never mind the formalities. Hurry up!” Anton turned to Sasha, now clinging close behind him. “You see? I didn’t find a mouse gumming up the works—but I found a shuttle pilot out of station.” The pilot was already floating swiftly towards Phys. “Oh, and talking of the old Hammer and Sickle up in the sky, wouldn’t it be a laugh if we kind of regressed—and ended up worshipping it, as a sign of power in the heavens? Praying to it for rain!”

  “How you ever passed screening for this command, I’ll never know,” said Sasha in amazement.

  “Maybe it takes a merry nutter to command a ship like this?” Anton patted the little box in his pocket. “My apologies, Sorina! I’m a bit nervous—like the proverbial virgin on her wedding night, eh?”

  She sniffed. “That happy event will occur some while after we establish our colony.”

  “You’d better watch out for Saratov, old girl. He might want all the women locked up in a breeding harem for the first ten generations.”

  “As though he would! You know perfectly well our colony can only function properly with active participations by all female personnel. As soon as I stop being Astrogator, I become a Land Surveyor.”

  “I didn’t think you’d become a Comedienne.” Anton pushed through into Chem, catching hold of the mass spectrometer to look round the lab for any flasks of acid poised to crash into the walls whenever acceleration surged. None were. Three chemists in cream and blue tunics were buckled in their seats.

  “Good, good,” he said vaguely. Feeling vindicated, he thrust back through the hatch, and deliberately bumped into Sonya. Gripping her momentarily, he whispered, “We must preserve the gene for humour. Other worlds, other jokes!”

  When they arrived back in the control room, Yuri Valentin seemed to have satisfied himself that the resonometer was working properly in full harmony with all his other gauges: the temporal symptomometer, retardograph, horologe, horometer, isocalendar and datalscope.

  “Drive and attitude jets primed for instant firing,” reported Anna, while Anton and Sasha buckled themselves into their padded seats. Ideally, these jets shouldn’t need to be fired instantly, but there was always a microscopic chance that the ship might emerge from the Flux on collision course with something: an asteroid, the photosphere of a sun, whatever.

  “Okay, Yuri, blow the horn.”

  A klaxon hooted through the ship half a dozen times.

  “P.A. system patched in to the Motherland?”

  “Aye, aye. Now.”

  Anton flicked on his chin-mike. “This is Commander Astrov of the Flux-ship K. E. Tsiolkovsky calling Earth. Comrades, at your word we’re ready to proceed—out into the unknown cosmos.”

  Crackle-crackle …

  Ground Control in Siberia delivered a short, uplifting speech to which Anton presently replied in kind, wishing that he could lift up a glass of vodka to toast the mission. Who was the distillery specialist amongst the colonists? he wondered.

  “… You may proceed at your discretion!”

  Actually, Ground Control had controlled nothing since the last supply ship left. Anton flipped off his mike for a moment.

  “You know, folks, we’ve just become an independent state.”

  “An autonomous socialist republic,” Sasha said sternly.

  He reactivated his mike. “This is your Commander speaking. Secure yourselves! We go into the Flux in exactly five minutes from now. Our first time-jump will carry us one hundred and fifty-seven light years. This should bring us to within three light months of a target star which has already been verified from Earth by telescope as ‘promising’. According to the scientists this jump should seem quasi-instantaneous, which I gather is their way of saying that it might seem to occupy several minutes. Once we emerge, remember that it’ll take us several hours of work to confirm the presence of an Earth-type planet. And if there isn’t one, off we’ll jump again. Let’s hope it’s ‘first time lucky’. Good luck to us all!” And off with the mike.

  “Right, that’s that bit over. Departure in four minutes, twenty seconds. Hit the button on my word, Anna.”

  Anton spent the remaining time softly whistling melodies from the 1812 Overture. As it happened, when departure time arrived he was in the middle of the Czarist national anthem.

  Sixteen

  “GEE, I’M SORRY about all this,” said Mikhail. “I can’t seem to throw this Astrov guy. It’s as though I’m glued to the seat of a swing. Back I go in one direction, and I bump into Anton Pavlovich and his Tunguska cronies. Off I go the other way, and Commander Astrov grabs hold of me. I feel like a pendulum.”

  Impenetrable fog still wrapped the Retreat. Nor had the phone service been restored. Sonya Suslova stood up and stretched.

  “I feel like a walk—anybody coming?”

  Mikhail also got to his feet.

  “Don’t go too far,” cautioned Felix. “You could get lost out there. Once round the building, or just a little way down the road—do you hear?”

  As the two of them were on the point of leaving the room, Kirilenko spoke up.

  “It’s curious, you know? What Mike’s experiencing is like a ‘wave function’, stretching between past and future. In 1890 there’s one amplitude peak. There’s another one in Commander Astrov’s time. And here’s our observation point, in the present
. Neither the Tunguska past nor the Astrov future are solid realities—they can hardly be that! But now I’m starting to feel as if we’re in an uncertain state as well …”

  “You’re telling me,” said Sergey.

  Softly, Mikhail closed the double doors.

  Osip sat in his den huddled over a sports magazine, with a half-eaten sausage and a bottle of black beer before him. He looked up.

  “How’s it going, then? Doesn’t sound much like your ordinary sort of rehearsal to me!”

  “Been listening?”

  “Course I in’t. Just passing the door, once in a while.”

  “I suppose that’s why the carpet’s worn threadbare.”

  Osip shrugged and took a swig of beer.

  “We’re going out,” Sonya said impatiently. “We need our overcoats and galoshes.”

  “What you going out for?”

  “For a promenade,” said Mikhail. “A saunter. An ambulation. A stroll.”

  “All those things, eh? Shouldn’t, if I were you. Can’t see to spit.”

  “Tell me, which acting academy did you attend?”

  Osip scratched his head. “Wonderful what rubs off on a chap, with all you artists around.”

  “Could we please have our things?” repeated Sonya.

  Visibility was almost zero; an arm’s length in any direction there was only cotton wool.

  “Wonder what we’d find if we hypnotised him?” Mikhail jerked a gloved thumb.

  “Who?”

  “Osip, of course.”

  “You think’s he’s …?” Sonya didn’t say what.

  Mikhail nodded. “He’s a watchdog … Wonder why he lays it on so thick: the dumb pleb bit?”

  “Maybe it’s to give us all fair warning.”

  “By parodying himself? Could be.”

  “Maybe he likes his artists.”

  “Well, I don’t wish to sound paranoid, my peachy psychiatrist, but if that’s what he is, and if I do happen to be in tune with some secret research lab, I must say this could well be a field day for our friend. As soon as the phone starts working.”

  “Goodness, you do have a serious side, after all!”

  “That’s my left side, the one next to you.”

  Hugging close to the wall, they began walking together along the snowy path surrounding the Retreat. The white-out cocooned them.

  Mikhail swept a hand through the air. “I’m beginning to believe we’re all charmed …”

  Sonya also scooped at the air, and touched the tip of a gloved finger to her tongue as though it might have picked up a curious taste.

  “What is this: a cloud that got stuck to the ground?”

  “It’s a cloud of time-flakes, that’s what it is. It’s motes of time which haven’t settled yet. Like in one of those kiddies’ snow-scenes, you know? Suppose, every time you shook it, there was a new scene in the toy? Right now I’m on my way to Sakhalin …” He jerked his wrist. “Wait for it to settle! Ah, now I’m on my way to Tunguska … Try again: oh, now I’m on my way to the stars—back through history! We’re fifty light years out, and Stalin’s still alive. A hundred light years out, and here’s the revolution.” He peered into his empty hand. “Watch out: here come the wolves!”

  “What?”

  He guffawed. She could have slapped him.

  “Idiot!”

  They had reached the third side of the building now. From here the hard-top road had to slope away invisibly downhill. It would descend gently for the first fifty metres then much more steeply. Sonya recalled that that stretch of the road was hedged with young pine trees; so there was no way of blundering off it, even though thin snow hid the tarmac …

  Together they ventured away from the building, sliding their galoshes ahead step by step as if they were pacing out onto a frozen lake.

  After what seemed a long while, Mikhail said, “Odd! We ought to be on the slope by now, but it’s still flat, ain’t it?”

  Nothing was visible except woolly snow and woolly fog. Disoriented, Sonya almost lost her balance, but Mikhail steadied her.

  “We’ll be able to follow our footprints back,” he reassured her. And they pressed on. He chewed his lip. “We must have reached the steep bit,” he said presently.

  “But we haven’t.”

  “Look, I know how far it is.”

  “Well, so do I!”

  “I’m going to try an experiment. Stay right here, Sonya. I’m going to walk off at ninety degrees till I bump into one of the trees.”

  “Oh no you don’t.”

  “You’ll be fine—just stand still. There ain’t any Abominable Snowmen in these parts.”

  “Promise that you’ll count up to… no more than twenty. Then come straight back.”

  “With a fir cone in my hand.” Setting one foot exactly in front of the other, Mikhail vanished almost immediately. Sonya counted under her breath.

  They oughtn’t to have split up! She was sure of this. She lost count. She called out. Silence …

  A second time she called his name, and strained to hear.

  A hand touched her on the shoulder. Her heart lurched wildly—and then Mikhail was holding her, while she shivered and gasped.

  “You bastard, that wasn’t funny!” But then she saw that Mikhail looked equally surprised. “Mike, you did creep up on me, didn’t you?”

  “I swear I didn’t! I counted to forty—okay, I’m sorry—and there you were just in front of me, with your back turned. No trees.”

  “You walked in a circle.”

  “I tell you I went straight.”

  “You must have heard me call your name.”

  “I heard someone call out ‘Anton’, twice. That ain’t my name—I wasn’t answering to that… well, I got scared. Sonya, the voice was coming from ahead of me. And I was going to run back, then there you were.”

  ‘Did I really call “Anton”?’ wondered Sonya. ‘Perhaps I did…’ She clutched hold of his arm. “What’s happening to us, Mike? Where are we?”

  “We’re about seventy-five metres from the building. Maybe a bit more.”

  “But which way’s that?” Where they stood was quite trampled in several directions. Soon, by cautious scouting around they confirmed three distinct routes: the one by which they had both come, the one Mikhail had taken on his own when he left her, and the one by which he had returned. These last two stretched in a straight line at ninety degrees to the first, forming a T-junction.

  “Right,” said Sonya. “We’re going back.”

  “No.” Mikhail pulled her round. “Not yet. I want to know where the hill starts. It has to start! We’ll walk that way, where the snow’s still smooth. Please, Sonya.”

  She hesitated. “Only thirty paces—and I’ll do the counting.”

  “Sure. If we aren’t heading downhill by then, well there just ain’t no hill any more …”

  They linked arms. “One,” she began. “Two …”

  By the time she reached eight in her count she could no longer see the ground; the fog was even denser, hiding her legs and his. When she reached twelve, she couldn’t even make out Mikhail’s face.

  “Mike?”

  “None other.” He squeezed her arm. “It’s easy enough to walk. No trouble breathing.”

  When she reached twenty, though, she could see his features emerging once again.

  “Peekaboo!” he said; he didn’t sound too confident.

  “Twenty-one … Twenty-two …”

  “Look, footsteps!”

  The snow was indeed trampled—in a hauntingly familiar fashion. And by now the fog was as it had been earlier. Only a couple of paces more, and they were back-tracking along a twin row of footsteps leading in their direction.

  “Those can’t be ours! Come on.”

  Again Sonya had lost count. But they followed the trail of footsteps onward … and now a wall loomed ahead of them. Mikhail ran a wondering hand over it.

  “It can’t be the Retreat. The Retreat’s back that wa
y”

  “We walked in a circle.”

  “You know damn well we didn’t.”

  “Look, any psychologist could tell you … I mean, it’s so disorienting, this fog.”

  “The front door must be along here, round the corner.”

  Which it was. They hunched inside the log-pillared porch, before entering.

  “What do we tell them, Mike?”

  “To send Osip out, to sweep the snow.”

  “Be serious!”

  “I mean it! With a long cord tied round his waist. We pay the string out slowly, keeping it taut…”

  “We’d have to say why.”

  “True … In that case, there’s no way we can explain.”

  “Isolation? Sensory deprivation?”

  Mikhail squeezed Sonya round the waist. “Since you mention it, Sasha …”

  “I am not Sasha Sorina.” To prove this, she pecked Mikhail quickly on the cheek. Disengaging herself, she thrust the door open.

  “Hang on—”

  “What is it?”

  “It just occurred to me, if we walk in a straight line and end up back where we started—well, do you think we could possibly phone ourselves, too?”

  “Come again?”

  “If a straight line leads back here, maybe the phone line does as well? Let’s dial the number of the Retreat and see what happens.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “So was our walk.”

  They surrendered their coats and galoshes to Osip who was chewing the last bite of sausage; his breath smelled of sweaty socks.

  He swallowed. “Enjoy your walk, then?”

  “Splendid. You should take a walk, yourself.”

  “Catch me, Mister!”

  Mikhail grinned. “I want to use the phone.”

  “I told you, it isn’t working.”

  “So maybe my magic touch will cure it?”

  “Suit yourself. It’s through there.”

  He trailed after them and hung around while Mikhail dialled; Mikhail heard a lot of clicks followed by a ringing tone.

  “Hey, that’s our number you dialled!”

  “It’s ringing, too.” Mikhail held the hand-set for Sonya to hear.