Definitely Maybe (12 page)

He concentrated on his pipe.

I rolled up into a tighter ball. So that’s how it was. The man had been squashed. He was still alive but no longer the same man. Broken flesh, broken spirit. What did they do to him that he couldn’t take it? But there must be pressures, I guess, that no man can take.

“So, you mean you condemn Snegovoi, too?” I asked.

“I don’t condemn anyone,” Vecherovsky countered.

“Well … you’re incensed by Glukhov.”

“You didn’t understand,” Vecherovsky said with some impatience. “I’m not incensed by Glukhov’s choice. What right have I to be incensed by a choice made by a man left one on one, without help, without hope. I’m annoyed by Glukhov’s behavior after his decision. I repeat: He’s ashamed of his
choice and that’s why—and only because of that—he’s trying to convert others to his faith. In other words, because of his self-image he’s adding to the already unbearable pressure he feels. Understand?”

“With my mind, yes.”

I wanted to add that Glukhov was completely understandable and if he could be understood, he could be forgiven, that Glukhov was beyond the realm of analysis, in a realm where only compassion was applicable, but I realized that I didn’t have the strength to talk. I was shivering. Without help and without hope. Without help and without hope. Why me? What for? What did I do to them? I had to hold up my end of the conversation, and I said, clenching my teeth after every word:

“After all, there are pressures that no man in the world could bear.”

Vecherovsky answered something, but I didn’t hear him or I didn’t understand it. I was realizing that just yesterday I was a man, a member of society. I had my own concerns and worries, yes, but as long as I obeyed the laws created by the system—and that had become a habit—as long as I obeyed those laws, I was protected from all imaginable dangers by the police, the army, the unions, public opinion, and my friends and family. Now, something in the world around me had gone haywire. Suddenly I became a catfish holed up in a crack, surrounded by monstrous vague shadows that didn’t even need huge looming jaws—a slight movement of their fins would grind me into a powder, squash me, turn me into zilch. And it was made clear to me that as long as I hid in that crack I would not be touched. Yet it was even more terrifying than that. I was separated from humanity the way a lamb is cut off from the herd and dragged off somewhere for some unknown reason, while the herd, unsuspecting, goes on about its
business, moving farther away into the distance. I would have felt much better if only they had been warlike aliens, some bloodthirsty, destructive aggressors from outer space, from the ocean depths, from the fourth dimension. I would have been one among many; there would have been a place for me, work for me; I would be in the ranks! But I was doomed to perish in front of everyone’s eyes. No one would see a thing, and when I was destroyed, ground to dust, everyone would be surprised and then shrug it off. Thank God Irina wasn’t around. Thank God this wasn’t affecting her! A nightmare! Unbelievable nonsense! I shook my head as hard as I could. This whole mess because I’m working on interstellar matter?

“Apparently, yes,” Vecherovsky said.

I stared at him in horror.

“Listen, Phil, it doesn’t make any sense!” I said desperately.

“From the human point of view, none at all,” Vecherovsky said. “But it’s not
people
who have something against your work.”

“Then who does?”

“There you go again—a question as good as gold,” Vecherovsky said, and it was so unlike him that I laughed. Nervously. Hysterically. And I heard his satisfied Martian guffaws.

“Listen,” I said, “the hell with them all. Let’s have some tea.”

I was afraid that Vecherovsky would say that it was time for him to go, that he had to give exams tomorrow or finish his chapter, so I hurriedly added:

“All right? I’ve got a box of candy hidden away—I figured, why feed Weingarten’s fat face with everything. Let’s indulge!”

“With pleasure,” Vecherovsky said, and he got up readily.

“You know, you think and think,” I said as we went into the kitchen and I put on the water. “You think and think until it all goes black. That’s wrong. That’s what did in Snegovoi. I know
that now. He was sitting in his apartment all alone, turning on all his lights, but what good did it do? You can’t light that kind of darkness with all the lamps in the world. He thought and thought and then something clicked and that was the end. You can’t lose your sense of humor, that’s the ticket. It really is funny, you know: All that power, all that energy—just to stop man from finding out what happens when a star falls into a dust cloud. I mean, just think about it, Phil! That’s funny, isn’t it?”

Vecherovsky was looking at me with an unusual expression.

“You know, Dmitri,” he said, “I somehow never considered the humorous aspect of the situation.”

“No? Really, when you think about it … So there they are and they start figuring things out: a hundred megawatts on research of annelid worms, seventy-five gigawatts for pushing through this project, and ten will be enough to stop Malianov. And someone objects that ten isn’t enough. After all, you have to drive him crazy with phone calls, one; give him cognac and a woman, that’s two.” I sat down with my hands tight between my knees. “No, it really is funny.”

“Yes,” Vecherovsky agreed. “It is rather funny, but not very. Your paucity of imagination is staggering. I’m surprised you managed to come up with your bubbles.”

“What bubbles!? There weren’t any bubbles. And there won’t be. Stop badgering me, mister director, sir. I saw nothing, heard nothing, I see no evil, hear no evil. I have a witness, I wasn’t there. And anyway, my official work is on the IK spectrometer. All the rest is just the hubris of intellectuals, a Galileo complex.”

We sat in silence. The teapot started to wheeze softly and make a “pf-pf-pf” noise as it got ready to boil.

“Well, all right,” I said. “Paucity of imagination. Agreed. But you must admit that if you forget the fiendish details, the
whole thing is fascinating. It looks like they really do exist. People gabbed so much, guessed so much, lied so much, inventing those idiotic saucers, mysterious explanations for the Baalbek terrace … and they really do exist. But, of course, not at all the way we had thought. I was always sure, by the way, that when they announced themselves, they would be completely different from everything we had invented about them.”

“Who are ‘they’?” Vecherovsky asked distractedly. He was lighting up his pipe.

“The aliens,” I said. “Or to use the scientific term, the supercivilization.”

“Aha,” Vecherovsky said. “I get it. Nobody’s ever suggested that they might be like policemen with aberrant behavior patterns.”

“All right, all right,” I said. I got up and set out two tea settings. “I may have a paucity of imagination, but you have none at all.”

“Probably,” Vecherovsky agreed. “I am totally incapable of imagining something that I think cannot exist. Phlogiston, for instance, a thermogen, or, say, the universal ether. No, no, please brew some fresh tea. And don’t skimp.”

“I know how to make it,” I grumbled. “What were you saying about phlogiston?”

“I never believed in phlogiston. And I never believed in supercivilizations. Both phlogiston and supercivilizations are too human. Like in Baudelaire. Too human, therefore animal. Not a product of reason, a product of nonreason.”

“Just a minute!” I said, with the teapot in one hand and a box of Ceylon tea in the other. “But you yourself admitted that we’re dealing with a supercivilization.”

“Not at all,” Vecherovsky replied unflappably. “You were the ones who admitted that. I merely took advantage of the circumstances to set you straight.”

The phone rang in my room. I shuddered, dropping the cover of the teapot.

“Damn,” I muttered, looking back and forth between Vecherovsky and the door.

“Go on,” Vecherovsky said calmly. “I’ll make the tea.”

I didn’t pick up the phone right away. I was frightened. There was nobody who would be calling, especially at this hour. Maybe it was a drunken Weingarten? He was all alone. I picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

Weingarten’s drunken voice said: “Well, of course he’s not asleep. Greetings, victim of the supercivilization! How are you doing there?”

“Okay,” I said with great relief. “And you?”

“Everything is shipshape,” Weingarten announced. “We dropped by the Astoria. The Austeria, get it? We got a half-liter bottle, but it didn’t seem like enough. So we got another one. And we took the two half-liters, that is a liter, home, and now we feel just dandy. Want to come over?”

“No,” I said. “Vecherovsky is still here. We’re drinking tea.”

“Tea will get you teed off.” Weingarten laughed. “Okay. Call if there’s anything.”

“I don’t understand, are you alone or with Zakhar?”

“There’s the three of us,” Weingarten said. “It’s very nice. So, if there’s anything, come on over. We’re waiting for you.” And he hung up.

I went back to the kitchen. Vecherovsky was pouring the tea.

“Weingarten?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s nice that some things are the same even in all this madness. The constancy of madness. I never used to think that a drunken Weingarten was such a good thing.”

“What did he say?”

“He said ‘tea will get you teed off.’ ”

Vecherovsky chuckled. He liked Weingarten. Very much in his own way, but he did like him. He considered Weingarten an
enfant terrible
—a big, sweaty, noisy
enfant terrible
.

I rummaged around the refrigerator and came out with an expensive box of Queen of Spades chocolates.

“See that?”

“Oh-ho,” Vecherovsky said respectfully.

We admired the box.

“Greetings from the supercivilization,” I said. “Oh, yes! What were you saying? He mixed me up completely. Oh, I remember! You mean, after all of this, you still maintain—”

“Mm-hmm. I still maintain. I always knew that there were no supercivilizations. And now, after all this, as you put it, I am beginning to guess why they don’t exist.”

“Hold on.” I put down the cup. “Why, et cetera, et cetera—that’s all theoretical. You tell me this: If it isn’t a supercivilization, if it isn’t aliens, then who is it?” I was angry. “Do you know something or are you just exercising your tongue, amusing yourself with paradoxes? One man shot himself, another’s turned into a jellyfish. What are you blathering about?”

No, even to the naked eye it was obvious that Vecherovsky wasn’t amusing himself with paradoxes or blathering. His face suddenly went gray and tired-looking, and then an enormous, carefully concealed tension surfaced. Or maybe it was stubbornness—savage, tenacious stubbornness. He stopped looking like himself. His face was usually rather wilted, with a sleepy aristocratic flabbiness—now it was rock hard. And I was frightened again. For the first time it occurred to me that Vecherovsky wasn’t sitting with me to give me moral support. And that wasn’t why he had invited me to spend the night, and earlier, to sit and work in his apartment. And even though I was very frightened, I suddenly felt a wave of pity for him,
based on nothing, really, just on some vague feelings and on the change in his face.

And then I remembered, for no reason at all, that three years ago Vecherovsky had been hospitalized, but not for long …

Excerpt 17
.…. a previously unknown type of benign tumor. And I found out about it only last fall, yet I saw him every blessed day, had coffee with him, listened to his Martian guffaws, complained that I was tired of hearing about his problems. And I didn’t suspect a single thing, not a thing.

And now, overwhelmed by that unexpected pity, I couldn’t stop myself, and I said, knowing that it was pointless, that I would get no answer:

“Phil, are you, are you under pressure too?”

Of course, he paid no attention to my question. He simply didn’t hear it. The tension left his face and disappeared in the aristocratic puffiness, his reddish lids settled back down over his eyes, and he resumed puffing on his pipe.

“I’m not blathering at all,” he said. “You’re driving yourself crazy. You invented your supercivilization, and you can’t understand that it’s too simple; that it’s contemporary mythology and nothing more.”

My skin crawled. More complex? Worse, then? What could be worse?

“You’re an astronomer,” he continued reproachfully. “You should know about the fundamental paradox of xenology.”

“I know it. Any civilization in its development is very likely—”

“And so on,” he interrupted. “It’s inevitable that we would observe traces of their activity, but we do not. Why? Because there are no supercivilizations. Because for some reason civilizations do not become supercivilizations.”

“Yes, yes. The idea that reason destroys itself in nuclear wars. That’s a lot of nonsense.”

“Of course it’s nonsense,” he agreed calmly. “It’s also too simplified, too primitive—in the realm of our usual way of thinking.”

“Wait. Why do you keep harping on primitive? Of course, nuclear war is a primitive concept. But it needn’t be that simple. Genetic diseases, some boredom with existence, a reorientation of goals. There’s a whole literature on this. I for one feel that manifestations of supercivilizations are cosmic in nature, and we just can’t distinguish them from natural cosmic phenomena. Or take our situation, for instance, why do you say it isn’t a manifestation of a supercivilization?”

“Hmm, too human. They’ve discovered that earthlings are on the threshold of the universe. Afraid of the competition, they decide to stop it. Is that it?”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s fiction. Dime-store fiction in bright, cheap covers. It’s like trying to fit an octopus into a pair of tuxedo pants. And not a plain octopus at that, but an octopus that doesn’t even exist.”

Vecherovsky moved the cup, put his elbow on the table, and, resting his chin on his fist and raising his eyebrows high, stared above my head into space.

“Look how it turns out. Two hours ago we seemed to have come to some decision. It doesn’t matter what force is operating on us, the important thing is how to behave under that pressure. But I see that you’re not thinking about that at all; you stubbornly keep trying to identify the force. And just as stubbornly, you return to the hypothesis about the supercivilization. You are prepared to forget—and have already forgotten—your own feeble objections to this hypothesis. I can understand why this is happening to you. Somewhere in
the back of your mind you have the idea that any supercivilization is still a civilization, and two civilizations can always come to an accord, find some sort of compromise, feed the wolves and save the sheep. And if worse comes to worst, there is always sweet surrender to this hostile but imposing power, noble retreat before an enemy worthy of victory, and then—how the devil does play tricks—maybe even a reward for your reasonable docility. Don’t bug your eyes out at me, Dmitri. I said this was all subconscious. And do you think you’re the only one? It’s a very, very human trait. We’ve rejected God, but we still can’t stand on our own two feet without some myth-crutch to hold us up. But we’ll have to. We’ll have to learn. Because in your situation, not only do you not have any friends, you are so alone that
you don’t have any enemies, either
! That’s what you refuse to understand.”