Boris Strugatsky - Noon - 22nd Century

“There he lies,” said Panin. “Only he’s depressed.”

“He’s in a bad way,” said Gurgenidze.

“They won’t let him train,” Panin explained.

Sergei raised up his head and saw that Tanya Gorbunova, a second-year cadet from the Remote Control Division, had walked over to him.

“Are you really depressed, Sergei?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Sergei. He remembered that Tanya and Katya were friends, and he began to feel uneasy.

“Sit down by us, Tanya old girl,” said Malyshev.

“No,” said Tanya. “I have to have a talk with Sergei.”

“Ah,” said Malyshev.

Gurgenidze shouted, “Hey, guys, let’s go get the kibitzers!”

They got up and left, and Tanya sat down next to Sergei. She was thin, with lively eyes, and it was remarkably pleasant to look at her, even if she was Katya’s friend.

“Why are you mad at Katya?” she asked.

“I’m not,” Sergei said gloomily.

“Don’t lie,” said Tanya. “You’re mad at her.”

Sergei shook his head and began to look off to the side.

“So you don’t love her.”

“Listen, Tanya,” said Sergei, “do you love your Malyshev?”

“I do.”

“Well, there you are. If you had a fight, I’d try to get you back together.”

“You mean you had a fight?” said Tanya.

Sergei was silent.

“Look, Sergei, if Misha and I have a fight, then of course we make up. Ourselves. But you—”

“We’re not going to make up,” said Sergei.

“So you did have a fight.”

“We’re not going to make up,” Sergei said distinctly, and looked straight into Tanya’s lively eyes.

“But Katya doesn’t even know you and she have had a fight. She doesn’t understand anything, and I feel just terrible about her.”

“Well, what do you want me to do, Tanya? Look at my side of it. The same thing has happened to you, I’ll bet.”

“It happened once,” Tanya agreed. “Only I told him right away.”

“There, you see!” Sergei said happily. “And how did he take it?”

Tanya shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “But he survived.”

She got up, brushed off her skirt, and asked, “They’re really not going to let you pull Gs?”

“Really,” Sergei said, getting up. “Look, it’s all right for you—you’re a girl—but how am I going to tell her something like that?”

“You’d better tell her.”

She turned and walked toward the four-dimensional chess fans, where Misha Malyshev was shouting something about mindless cretins. Sergei called after her, “Tanya…” She stopped and turned around. “I don’t know—maybe this will all blow over. Right now I haven’t got my head together.”

He knew it wouldn’t blow over. And he knew that Tanya realized this. But Tanya smiled and nodded.

After everything that had happened, Sergei wasn’t a bit hungry. He reluctantly dipped his cookies into strong, sweet tea, and listened as Panin, Malyshev, and Gurgenidze discussed the menu. Then they set to eating, and for a few minutes silence reigned at the table. They could hear someone at the next table assert, “These days you can’t write like Hemingway. You’ve got to write concisely, provide maximum information. Hemingway lacks precision.”

“And a good thing, too! Precision belongs in technical encyclopedias.”

“In encyclopedias? Take Strogov’s Road of Roads . Have you read it?”

“‘Precision, precision!’” said someone’s bass. “You yourself don’t even know what—”

Panin put down his fork, looked at Malyshev, and said, “Now tell us about the insides of a whale.”

Before school, Malyshev had worked in a whale-butchering complex.

“Hold it, hold it,” said Gurgenidze.

“I should tell you instead about how they catch cuttlefish off Miao-lieh Tao,” Malyshev proposed.

“Cut it out!” Sergei said irritably.

Everyone looked at him and fell silent. Then Panin said, “This can’t go on, Sergei. Get a grip on yourself.”

Gurgenidze got up and said, “Right! Time for a little snort.”

He went over to the buffet, came back with a decanter of tomato juice, and said excitedly, “Hey, guys, Phu Dat says that on the seventeenth Liakhov is leaving for Interstellar One.”

Sergei at once lifted up his head. “When exactly?”

“The seventeenth,” Gurgenidze repeated. “On the Lightning .”

The photon ship Khius-Lightning was the first manned ram-scoop in the world. It had been two years in construction, and for the last three years the best spacemen had been testing it within the System.

This is it, it’s begun, thought Sergei. He asked, “Do you know the range?”

“Phu Dat says one and a half light-months.”

“Comrade spacemen!” said Malyshev. “We must drink to the occasion.” He ceremoniously poured the tomato juice into their tumblers. “Let us raise our glasses,” he said.

“Don’t forget the salt,” said Panin.

All four clinked glasses and drank. It’s begun, it’s begun, thought Sergei.

“I’ve seen the Khius-Lightning ,” said Malyshev. “Last year, when I was interning on the Astericus . It’s enormous.”

“The diameter of the mirror is seven hundred meters,” Gurgenidze said. “Not all that large. But on the other hand the span of the scoop is—get this—six kilometers. And the length from edge to edge is almost eight kilometers.”

Mass, one thousand sixteen metric tons, Sergei recalled mechanically. Average thrust, eighteen megasangers. Cruising speed, eighty megameters per second. Maximum rated acceleration, six G’s. Too little. Maximum rated intake, fifteen wahrs… Too little, too little.

“Navigators,” Malyshev said dreamily, “that’s our craft. We’ll ship out on ones like that.”

“Over the sun from Earth to Pluto!” Gurgenidze said.

Someone at the other end of the hall shouted in a ringing tenor, “Comrades! Did you hear? On the seventeenth the Lightning is leaving for Interstellar One!”

Noise broke out all over the hall. Three cadets from the Command Division got up from the next table and rapidly took to voice.

“The aces are right on course,” said Malyshev, following them with his eyes.

“I’m a simple man, a guileless man,” Panin said suddenly, pouring tomato juice into his glass. “And what I still can’t understand is who needs these stars, anyhow?”

“What do you mean, who needs them?” Gurgenidze asked in surprise.

“Well, the moon is a launching pad and observatory. Venus is for actinides. Mars is for purple cabbage, the atmosphere project, colonization. Wonderful. But what are the stars good for?”

“Do you mean to say you don’t know why Liakhov is going to Interstellar?” Malyshev asked.

“A freak!” said Gurgenidze. “A victim of mutation.”

“Listen,” Panin continued. “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. Here we are, interstellar spacers, and we go off to UV Ceti. Two and a half parsecs.”

“Two point four,” said Sergei, looking into his glass.

“We travel,” Panin continued. “We travel a long time. Let’s even say there are planets there. We land, we do research, see the seven sails, as my grandfather says.”

“ My grandfather has better taste,” Gurgenidze put in.

“Then we start back. We’re old and stiff, and arguing all the time. Or at least Sergei isn’t talking to anyone. And we’re already pushing sixty. Meanwhile on Earth, thanks to Einstein, a hundred and fifty years have gone by. Some bunch of very young-looking citizens meets us, and at first everything is very nice: Music, flowers, and shish kebab. But then I want to go see my home town, Vologda. And it turns out nobody lives there any more. You see, it’s a museum.”