Anatoly Kucherena - Time of the Octopus

Feathers flew, and the eagle, making a long chicken neck, shamefully crowed for the whole world. He threatened, he pecked with his beak, he scratched the ground with his claws, but the reputation of the predator had been dented. Why, even the president of a tiny Latin American country was not afraid to declare that he was ready to provide to ‘the brave guy Joshua Kold’ with political asylum.

So journalists of all colours, after settling in the transit area of Sheremetyevo Airport, first of all started looking for Kold as for a lost puppy, or maybe even a truffle in the autumn Provencal wood.

The younger ones ransacked every corner and peered at every passenger’s face – what if the guy was wearing heavy make-up and/or a false beard? They checked utility rooms, too, because, apparently, several incidents involving employees and airport security service had already occurred.

Their senior colleagues bided their time to give Kold a chance to find them, and spent the hours in what is said to be called, in the vernacular of the second most ancient profession, ‘collecting the invoice’. These writing journalists talked to passengers, composed descriptions of airport interiors, surfed the internet, collected information on the notorious capsule hotel where, according to hearsay, Kold had been hidden away together with an assistant sent to him by the professional unmaskers ‘Mikiliks’. That assistant was of course a very cute and brisk young maiden, and gave the story an additional frisson.

Meanwhile, the cameramen were shooting general views of the transit area to use in cutaways, and also of the crowds of journalists near the smoking room – to dramatize the importance of the moment.

This crowd generally consisted of the ‘golden plumes’, the VIP cabinet of the journalistic tribe, the people deemed acceptable to the noblest offices, and entrants to most forbidden doors. Accustomed to gaining information in comfort, they had decided long ago that the saying ‘going the distance feeds the wolf’ is not about them. Indeed, these golden plumes could not understand why nobody had yet delivered Kold to them on a silver platter.

Time was passing. Tension was increasing. Nothing was happening.

A grey-haired press photographer in a jacket with a Reuters logo joined the group of journalists watching the take-offs and landings. The photographer’s eyes were as red as an April rabbit’s. He carefully rearranged the wardrobe-like case containing his very expensive Canon, took a sip of dreadful coffee dispensed by the machine in an all-too-thin plastic cup and without addressing anyone in particular said:

“Modern airplanes are literally time machines, especially if flying from East to West.”

“Do you think so?” asked the rather middle-aged female journalist nearby, without turning her head, lolling aloof and lanky like a tired hunting dog. It was clear to the photographer, that she, like all the rest of the writing and shooting fraternity now passing their time in transit, was rather lonely, condemned to hours watching the toings and froings of those airborne fish through dusty glass.

The well-heeled photographer smiled, combed his hair and began to chatter with the speed of a boxer:

“Oh, progress has given us what only science fiction writers and poets dreamed of before – to outwit artful and ruthless time. Yes, yes, just so!”

“Scam,” a girl with bleached hair butted in lazily. She had just come from the smoking room, and reeked of tobacco. “So what’s the secret?”

The photographer laughed.

“To be blunt, ma chérie , there is no secret; it is all about the laws of physics and observation…”

“As I said – scam!” the girl snapped back. But she was shushed – and those listening clearly understood that the grey-haired gentleman might lighten the tedium as well as – or rather no worse than – a professional compère or a radio host. And he, being given carte blanche, settled down comfortably on the broad window sill and continued:

“Let’s imagine that between eleven and midday you are in the company of the same idle travellers aboard a comfortable airliner – say an Airbus-A330, since frankly speaking, I don’t rate Boeings – at the airport of… let’s say Bangkok. Yet at five in the afternoon you reappear on the earth at Moscow and inhale its native smoke – which, as we know, is both sweet and pleasant.”

Some listeners hemmed, skeptical about the sweetness and pleasantness of Moscow smoke. The others kept silent and so the grey-haired gentleman continued.

“And yet, my friends that flight takes about ten hours! What is going on? Of course, it’s the difference in time zones, but, you see, such an explanation is too boring and banal. It is much more interesting to think that, thanks to turbojets and the remarkable mechanics of a wing multiplied by the laws of aerodynamics, you have deceived omnipotent time and ripped several hours of life away from its tenacious claws.”

“Yes, but when you fly in the opposite direction, it gets those hours back with percent,” the hunting dog interrupted him, yawning and covering her mouth with a narrow yellow palm decorated with a silver Indian bracelet. “Comme il faut.”

“But the surprising thing is,” the photographer continued undeterred, “That time on the moving plane, as the ingenious physicist Albert Einstein established, is really slowed down. And the quicker the plane flies, the slower time in it passes. Of course, in our case this is virtually imperceptible – some thousand fractions of a second. But if we managed to accelerate a plane near to the speed of light, a person, after staying on board just a few hours according to a place’s time, could return to earth at a time when tens or even hundreds of years would have passed. That is, you could make a trip to the future.”

“Really?!” the bleached blonde girl was surprisingly excited. “That’s amazing!”

It seemed, for a second, that she forgot about the forthcoming hours of fruitless waiting, and found her head filled with the boundless prospects of travel to the future. But the feeble fire in her eyes died away almost as quickly as it ignited.

“But what would I actually do in the future?” she continued despondently. “There’ll probably be the same old press tribe working with some totally fancy computers. And I can’t even cope with the ancient ones in our editorial office. Maybe it’d be possible to go back into the past? Where there are brave men and beautiful women, and wars, and duels, and hunting – just like in ‘The Countess Of Monsoro’ series – you can get a box set now.”

“Someday science will make it possible,” the grey-haired photographer said significantly. “Scientists have already established that in one aspect the great Einstein was mistaken to claim that the velocity of light can’t be exceeded. As it happens, it can be. And if we accelerate our plane or, more precisely, our spaceship, to superlight speed, we could reach a remote planet 450 light years from Earth in a few days. Then, if we directed our high-powered telescope back towards the Earth, we would see the slaughter of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, or Admiral Kolinyi swearing that he didn’t kill his father the Duke de Guiz, or Charles IX firing an arquebus at the running Huguenots, or Catherine de Medici with her poisons. And, of course, maybe all those amazing scenes Dumas père’s novel. Though, probably, a lot of those scenes were not absolutely so, or even absolutely not so.”

The girl was stunned by the prospect, and made feverish efforts to remember where exactly in her favourite series these names and events occurred.

“You should anchor ‘Obvious-improbable’,” the Hunting dog observed drily.