Arkady Strugatsky - Definitely Maybe

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.”

Vecherovsky stopped. I had tried to interrupt him, tried to find arguments to refute his point, to argue heatedly, foaming at the mouth—but to prove what? I don’t know. He was right. It’s no shame to concede to a worthy opponent. I mean, that’s not what he thought, that’s what I think, that is, what I suddenly just thought, after he said it. I’ve had this feeling all along that I’m the general of a decimated army wandering around in the fire, looking for the victorious general to hand over my sword. That I’m less bothered by my position than by the fact that I can’t find the enemy.

“What do you mean there is no enemy?” I finally said. “Somebody wanted all of this.”

“And who wanted it to be,” Vecherovsky drawled, “for a rock near the Earth’s surface to fall with an acceleration of nine point eight one?”

“I don’t understand.”

“But it does fall precisely at that rate?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t drag a supercivilization into the case? To explain that fact.”

“Wait. What does that have—”

“So who wanted the rock to fall with precisely that acceleration? Who?”

I poured myself some tea. It seemed as though all I had to do was add two and two, but I still didn’t understand a thing.