Arkady Strugatsky - Monday Begins on Saturday

We are all naive materialists, I thought, and also rationalists. We demand that everything should be explained immediately in rationalist terms; that is, reduced to fit in with the handful of known facts. No one applies a penny’s worth of dialectics. It enters nobody’s head that between the known data and some new phenomena, there could be an ocean of unknowns, and so we declare the new phenomenon to be supernatural and therefore impossible. Say, for instance, the way Maitre Montesquieu would take the message about the resuscitation of a dead man forty-five minutes after his heart stopped beating. With a bayonet counterattack, that’s how he would take it. Toss it on pikes, so to speak. He would no doubt dub it obscurantism and clericalism. That is, if he would not just wave such a datum away. If it happened right in front of his own eyes, he would be placed in an extremely difficult position. Such as my own at the moment, except that I was more accustomed to it. But for him, it would be necessary either to consider it a fraud, or to disbelieve his senses or even to renounce materialism. Most likely he would opt for fraud. Nevertheless, to the end of his days the memory of this adroit trick would irritate his thinking, like a mote in the eye…. But we, we are the children of a different age. We have seen a lot: the live head of a dog sewn to the body of another; the artificial kidney as big as a closet; the iron hand operated by the nerve signals from a live one; the people who can say, casually, “This was after I had died for the first time…”

Yes, in our times Montesquieu would have had a poor chance of remaining a materialist. Nonetheless we remain materialists and there is no harm done! True enough, this can get to be difficult sometimes when a chance wind, blowing across the ocean of the unknown, will carry our way some strange petals from unexplored continents. Most often it happens when one finds that which one was not looking for. Soon enough there will appear new and amazing animals from Mars or Venus in our zoos. Of course, we will be ogling them and slapping our sides, but we have been waiting for them a long time, and we are prepared for their appearance. We would be much more astounded and disappointed if there would not be any such animal or if they would be like our cats and dogs. As a rule, science, in which we have faith (and often, blind faith), prepares us well in advance for the coming miracles, so that a psychic shock occurs in us only when we collide with something unpredicted—some hole into a fourth dimension, or biological radio communication, or a living planet…. Or, say, a cottage on hen’s legs. Anyway, that hawk-nosed Roman was right with a vengeance; it’s very, very, and very fascinating here with them.

I came out on the square and stopped by the soft-drink kiosk. I remembered that I didn’t have any change and that I would have to break a bill. I was formulating an ingratiating smile, knowing full well that the girls who sold the drinks couldn’t stand changing bills, when I felt a fivekopeck piece in my jeans pocket. I was both astonished and delighted, but more the latter. I drank up my soda water with fruit syrup, accepted a wet kopeck in change, and chatted with the girl about the weather. Next I set out homeward with great determination so as to finish with the DC and the TS and be free to continue with my dialectic and rationalistic explanations. I shoved the kopeck down into my pocket and stopped, discovering that there was another five-kopeck piece already in it. I took it out and studied it. It was somewhat damp and on it was stamped 5 kopecks, 1961, and the numeral 6 was marred with a small gouge. It may be that even then I would not have paid this little incident any attention, except for that instant feeling, with which I was already familiar, that I was simultaneously standing in the Prospect of Peace and sitting on the sofa looking at the wardrobe. And just as before the feeling disappeared when I shook my head.

For a while I kept on walking slowly, absentmindedly tossing the piece (it kept landing heads-up in my palm) and attempting to focus my thoughts. Then I saw the food store where I had fled from the kids in the morning, and entered. Holding the coin between two fingers, I went up to the counter and drank, this time without any pleasure at all, a glass of plain seltzer. Next, gripping the change in my hand, I went aside and checked the pocket.

It was one of those cases where there was no psychic shock. More likely I would have been surprised if the piece had not been in my pocket. But it was—damp, 1961, and with a gouge in the numeral 6. Someone bumped into me and inquired as to whether I was taking a nap. Apparently I was standing in the line for the cashier. I said I wasn’t and punched a ticket for three boxes of matches. Standing in line for the matches, I verified that the piece was back again in my pocket. I was absolutely calm. Having received my three boxes of matches, I returned to the square and proceeded to experiment.

The experiment took about an hour. During this hour, I circumnavigated the square ten times, swelled up from the seltzer, accumulated match boles and newspapers, got acquainted with all the clerks, male and female, and arrived at a series of interesting conclusions. The five-kopeck piece came back if you paid with it. If you just simply threw it away, or dropped it, it stayed where it fell. The coin returned to pocket at the moment when the change moved from the hands of the seller to the hands of the buyer. If you kept your hand in one pocket, it appeared in the other. It never appeared in a zippered pocket. If you kept a hand in each pocket, and accepted the change with your elbow, the coin appeared anywhere on your body. (In my case, it turned up in my shoe.) The disappearance of the piece from the saucer with the coppers cannot be observed: it is immediately lost to sight in the pile of other coppers, and no motion of any kind takes place in the instant of the transfer to the pocket.

And so, we were faced with a so-called unspendable five-kopeck piece in the process of its functioning. In itself the fact of the unspendability did not interest me. My imagination was primarily overwhelmed by the possibility of an extra-dimensional transference of a material object. It was abundantly clear that the mysterious move of the coin from seller to buyer represented none other than a special case of the legendary matter transmission, so well known to the friends of science-fiction under the pseudonyms of hyper transposition, similarization, Tarantog’s phenomenon…. The unfolding perspectives were overpowering.

I didn’t have any instruments. An ordinary minimum-recording lab thermometer could tell a lot, but I didn’t even have that. I was forced to limit myself to purely visual subjective observations. I started my last tour of the square, with the following self-assigned task: “Having placed the coin next to the change saucer, and impeding to the maximum possible extent the cashier’s mixing it with the rest of the coins before passing the change, to trace visually the process of transference in space, attempting simultaneously to determine, even qualitatively, the change in the temperature of the air near the presumed Trajectory of Transit” However, the experiment was cut short right at the start.

When I approached Manya, my first seller, I was already expected by the same young police sergeant whom I had met before.

“So,” he said in a professional tone.

I looked at him searchingly, with a premonition of disaster.

“May I see your papers, citizen,” he said, saluting and looking past me.

“What’s the problem?” I asked, taking out my passport.

“And I’ll be asking you for the coin, too,” said the policeman, accepting the passport.

I handed him the five-kopeck piece in silence. Manya was regarding me with accusing eyes. The policeman studied the coin and, stating with satisfaction, “Aha,” opened the passport. He studied that passport like a bibliophile would study a rare incunabulum. I waited, mortified. A crowd grew slowly around us. Various opinions about me were expressed by its members.