Братья Стругацкие - Monday Starts on Saturday

“The what?” asked Vitka.

“K-gamma plasmoine. Or, let’s say, mu-delta ionoplast. The ship, engulfed in flame, plunged into the taiga and naturally set it on fire. That was the scene observed by the peasants from the village of Karelinskoye and other people who were later recorded by history as eyewitnesses. The conflagration was appalling. The countermovers glanced outside, shuddered, and decided to sit it out inside the heat-resistant refractory hull of the spaceship. Until midnight they listened anxiously to the roaring and crackling of the flames, then precisely at midnight everything went quiet. Naturally. The countermovers had entered a new day, June 29 by our reckoning of time. And when the brave captain, having taken massive precautions, finally decided to venture outside at about two in the morning, by the light of the powerful searchlights he saw the fir trees swaying calmly and was immediately attacked by clouds of the small bloodsucking insects known in our terminology as gnats or midges.”

Roman paused for breath and looked around at the rest of us. We were really enjoying this, and looking forward to dissecting the mystery of the parrot in exactly the same way.

“The subsequent fate of the countermoving aliens,” Roman continued, “need not interest us. Perhaps on about June 15 they quietly and unnoticeably lifted off from the strange planet without any fuss, this time using nonflammable alpha-beta-gamma antigravity, and went back home. Or perhaps every last one of them died from being poisoned by mosquito saliva, and their spaceship went on standing on our planet, sinking back into the abyss of time, and the trilobites crawled over it on the bottom of the Silurian sea. Maybe even sometime around the year 906 or 909 a hunter stumbled across it in the taiga and for a long time afterward kept telling his friends about it, but they quite naturally didn’t believe a word he said. In concluding my brief address, I should like to express my sympathy for the renowned explorers who have striven in vain to discover anything in the area of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. Mesmerized by the obvious, they have only investigated what happened in the taiga after the explosion, but none of them has tried to find out what happened before it. Dixi .”

Roman cleared his throat and drank a mug of living water.

“Does anyone have any questions for the speaker?” Edik inquired. “No questions? Excellent. Let’s get back to our parrots. Who would like the floor?”

Everybody wanted the floor. And everybody started speaking at once—even Roman, who was a little bit hoarse. We grabbed the list of questions out of each other’s hands and crossed them out one after another, and after about half an hour we’d put together the following absolutely clear and comprehensively detailed picture of the observed phenomenon.

In 1841 a son was born to the family of the poor landowner and retired army ensign Polyeuctus Khrisanfovich Nevstruev. He was called Janus in honor of a distant relative, Janus Polyeuctovich Nevstruev, who had precisely foretold the day and even the hour at which the boy child would be born. This relative, a modest and retiring old man, had moved to the retired ensign’s estate shortly after the Napoleonic invasion, living in an outbuilding and devoting himself to scholarly pursuits. He was a little strange, as men of science are supposed to be, with many eccentricities, but he was absolutely devoted to his godson, always staying close by his side and insistently instilling in him knowledge from the fields of mathematics, chemistry, and the other sciences. In effect Janus Jr. spent hardly a single day without Janus Sr., which was why he failed to notice something that amazed everybody else: as the years passed, instead of growing more decrepit the old man seemed to become stronger and more vigorous. By the turn of the century old Janus had initiated young Janus into the ultimate secrets of analytical, relativistic, and universal magic. They carried on living and working side by side, taking part in all the wars and revolutions, enduring all the vicissitudes of history more or less valiantly, until finally they ended up in the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy…

To be perfectly honest, this entire introductory section was pure literary improvisation. The only fact we knew for certain about Janus’s past was that J. P. Nevstruev was born March 7, 1841. We knew absolutely nothing about how and when J. P. Nevstruev had become the director of the Institute. We didn’t even know who had been the first to guess that S-Janus and A-Janus were one individual in two persons and let the secret slip. I’d heard about it from Oira-Oira, and believed it because I couldn’t understand it. Oira-Oira had heard about it from Giacomo, and he’d also believed it because he was young and the idea delighted him. Korneev had been told about it by a cleaning woman, and at the time he had decided that the fact in itself was so trivial it wasn’t worth puzzling over. And Edik had heard Sabaoth Baalovich and Fyodor Simeonovich talking about it at a time when he was still a junior lab assistant and believed in absolutely everything except God.

So we only had the vaguest possible idea of the Januses’ past. But we knew the future with absolute certainty. In the distant future A-Janus, who currently spent more time dealing with Institute affairs than with scientific research, would become absolutely fascinated by the idea of practical countermotion and devote his entire life to it. He would acquire a friend, a little green parrot called Photon who would be given to him by famous Russian space pilots. That would happen on May 19 in either 1973 or 2073—that was how Edik had deciphered the mysterious number 190573 on the ring. Probably soon after that A-Janus would finally be successful and transform himself into a countermover, along with the parrot Photon, who at the time of the experiment would naturally be sitting on his shoulder and begging for a lump of sugar. At that precise moment, if we had even the slightest understanding of countermotion, the human future would lose Janus Polyeuctovich Nevstruev, but the past of mankind would acquire two Januses, for A-Janus would be transformed into S-Janus and start slipping backward along the axis of time. They would meet every day, but not once in his life would it even enter A-Janus’s head to suspect anything, because he had been used to seeing the kind, wrinkled face of S-Janus, his distant relative and teacher, since he was a baby. And every midnight, at precisely zero hours, zero minutes, zero seconds, and zero tertia by the local time, A-Janus would move, like all of us, from one day’s night into the next day’s morning, while at the same moment, in an instant equal to a single microquantum of time, S-Janus and his parrot would skip from our present night to our yesterday morning.

That was why parrots numbers 1, 2, and 3, observed respectively on the tenth, eleventh and twelfth days of the month, had been so much alike: they were quite simply one and the same parrot. Poor old Photon! Perhaps he had simply succumbed to old age, or perhaps he’d caught a chill from a draft, but he’d fallen ill and come to die on his favorite balance in Roman’s lab. He had died, and his grieving master had given him a ritual cremation and scattered his ashes, and he’d done it because he didn’t know how dead countermovers behave. Or perhaps precisely because he did know.

We, of course, had observed this whole process like a film with its sequential parts transposed. On the ninth Roman finds Photon’s surviving feather in the furnace. Photon’s body no longer exists; he has already been burned tomorrow. The next day, the tenth, Roman finds it in a petri dish. S-Janus discovers the body in the same place at the same time and burns it in the furnace. The surviving feather remains in the furnace until the end of the day and at midnight it skips into the ninth. On the morning of the eleventh Photon is alive, although he is already ill. He dies before our very eyes under the same balance on which he will henceforth love to sit, and simpleminded Sasha puts him in the petri dish, where the dead bird will lie until midnight, when he’ll make the transition to the morning of the tenth and be found by S-Janus, cremated, and scattered to the wind, but one of his feathers will survive and lie there until midnight, then skip to the morning of the ninth, where Roman will find it. On the morning of the twelfth Photon is fit and lively, he gives Korneev an interview and asks him for sugar, but at midnight he will skip to the morning of the eleventh, fall ill, die, be placed in the petri dish, at midnight skip to the morning of the tenth, be cremated and scattered, but the feather will be left, and at midnight it will skip to the morning of the ninth, be found by Roman, and be thrown into the wastepaper basket. On the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and so on, Photon will delight all of us by being bright and talkative, and we’ll pamper him and feed him sugar lumps and peppercorns, and S-Janus will come and ask if he’s interfering with our work. By means of associative questioning we will be able to learn many interesting things from him about humanity’s expansion into space and no doubt also something about our own personal future.