| Gennadi Gor THE BOY Russian title: Mal'chik ©Gennadi Gor © The translator is unknown, please contact me if you have any information. |
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Parts: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 -
1
HERMAN IVANOVICH walked into the classroom carrying a pile of our copy-books. Taking one of them he turned to us and said in his usual quiet, tired voice:
'If Gromov doesn't mind I'll read his homework out loud. I think you will find it interesting.'
He began to read. He read magnificently and we felt at once that the story was about something very strange and extraordinary. About a boy lost in the cold, boundless universe.
The Boy had been born along the way, among the stars, and the spaceship, a copy in miniature of the planet left behind, to which the grown-ups, his mother and father and companions failed to get used in the course of a decade, was to him something ordinary and habitual like our schoolyard was to us.
Somewhere in the infiniteness of the universe they had left far behind the dense evergreen forests, blue rivers, houses full of merriment and noise and long roads. The Boy could watch all this on the screen, but to him it was all bits of dreams. Perhaps all this had never really existed ...?
His companions tried very hard and insistently to prove to the Boy that all this had really existed, but it was the dreamer - the musician, who managed to do this better than anyone else. Listening to his music the Boy could see the forests and rivers, the houses and roads of the distant planet that the expedition had left, long before he was born. It made him want to stretch out his hands and touch this world shimmering on the screen before him which was so unlike the life on the spaceship, but even if his hands could have stretched for millions of kilometres, they would not have reached the forests and rivers, houses and roads - they were all that far away.
But all this really existed. The music said so. And it was proved by the screen and knowledge: the Boy did not just live on the spaceship - he studied too.
Everyone taught the Boy - his parents and the rest of the grown-ups. Even the commander of the ship, who was always busy with something, found time to teach him. The memory machines carefully preserved the knowledge of the past and passed it on fully to the Boy. But the Boy often thought that he would have given all this knowledge in exchange for only one hour in the forest on the bank of the swift-running river. It was music that told him of the forest and the river. The musician also pined for the home he had left behind and he made no effort to hide his longing. He had the right to show his feelings as he was a musician and a dreamer. His grief did not interfere with the life and work of his companions - it even helped them.
The Boy went on with his studies. He had no chums of his own age. Just as he had never seen real rivers and forests, the only children he had ever seen were on the screen. He had no one to play with except the little robot, an amusing toy made especially for him. But the robot was too serious and businesslike - so dull and monotonous.
The Boy often wondered what children were really like. He wanted to see them in his dreams, but he never did, not even once.
The Boy made inquiries of the grown-ups, who were always so kind and attentive to him, and of the machines that knew everything, but none could tell him anything sensible or convincing about children. Neither the grown-ups, nor machines, nor the screen. Not even the music. Perhaps the reason was that they didn't want to tell the Boy of their own childhood which had been spent not on a spaceship falling in a black, ice-cold abyss.
But the Boy very seldom thought of this abyss. The spaceship in itself was a whole world to him. And in this world there were prohibited corners, where the grown-ups did not allow the Boy to enter, each time putting him off with promises that he would be allowed to enter when he grew up.
When he grew up? These words frightened and brought joy to the Boy with their slightly strange and obscure meaning. On the ship he was the only one growing up. Everyone else had grown up back home on their planet long before they had left it. He alone was growing up and changing and everyone noticed this with a certain sadness as a sign of the implacable passing of time, more implacable here, on the spaceship, than back at home. The Boy was growing and changing, but he still had a long way to grow and change before he would become grown-up.
Where was the spaceship going, what for? The Boy instinctively felt that the grown-ups did not like to answer these questions. They were not prohibited, but there was a great deal that was not clear. The spaceship was to take the expedition to one of the planets near the Big Star, to find out if there were any reasoning creatures there. This was a subject for heated dispute. Part of the expedition considered that there must be and part were very much in doubt. The Boy was a bit doubtful himself. Perhaps this was because his father was among those who were doubtful. The Boy loved his father more than anyone else in the world, even more than he loved the musician, although he didn't know why he loved him so much. His father had a nervous face which jerked with a tic. But the Boy liked his face even though it had a tic.
Sometimes a strange brilliance appeared in his father's eyes, and the Boy knew that, unlike many others, his father could not and did not want to hide his yearning impatience to reach the planet near the Big Star as quickly as possible. The Boy forgave his father his impatience because he guessed at its cause. The Boy's father was a geologist and a great part of his life was passing away in idleness on the spaceship where he could not put his knowledge and effort to use. For many years now his father had been pining for the work he loved. The Boy's mother, who was an expert in forests and trees, had also spent years in tiresome waiting. Evidently on that planet she was hoping to find extraordinary large and thick forests full of strange trees which had been waiting for centuries to have someone come and give them names and determine their nature. It was quite possible that there were no reasoning creatures on that planet.
It was really amazing that nearly everything had already been named, and that, to give names to the unnamed, it was necessary to travel through millions and millions of kilometres and decades of years. The Boy lived among names and titles.
Among the living beings populating the spaceship he was the only one who was hardly in need of a name. Everyone just called him Boy, even his mother and father.
'Boy!' his companions would call out.
'Boy!' the toy-robot would say, as they played.
On the part of an inanimate object this was, of course, a somewhat familiar form of address. But the boy did not feel insulted. The robot could not answer for his words. He spoke according to a dictated programme.
'Boy!' the grown-ups would say, 'how did you spend your day?'
And their faces, he noticed, would brighten up and become more carefree. Now why was that? Who could tell? Perhaps it was because when they looked at the Boy they remembered themselves as he was now. Only the face of the ship's commander did not brighten up when he saw the Boy. He remained as stern and busy as ever. And the Boy understood and approved of his behaviour. The commander did not allow his thoughts to carry him back to the past and so make his life in the spaceship more easy. In sparing others he never spared himself and thoughts of the responsibility he carried never left him.
The commander would go off to his cabin, or to his instruments and assistants. The Boy would stay where some interest in some phenomena, some thing or someone had caught his fancy. He was always interested in something and was never at a loss for something to do.
'Boy!' his companions called out to him.
Things also called out to the Boy, even those things that could neither speak nor think.
And the Boy would answer.
2
Herman Ivanovich stopped reading and put down the copybook.
'What comes next?' someone asked.
'Next,' Herman Ivanovich answered, changing his voice back to its normal tone, becoming the old, worn and tired teacher we knew. 'Next there is nothing but a full stop. Let us hope that Gromov will some time finish the story. As it is, the story has no end."
The Boy had disappeared. But there was Gromov, seated near the window, pretending that he had nothing whatsoever to do with the Boy. There was an expression of tense alertness on his face as if he expected us to play some dirty trick on him. But honestly, none of us had the slightest idea of doing any such thing. As far as that goes he had let himself down by writing that strange story for homework.
Gromov was the last person who should write about that Boy. Everyone knew he was the son of a well-known archaeologist, and that several years ago, his father had made some great - discovery. He had discovered some puzzling things that had been the subject for a great deal of controversial dispute. Articles had appeared in the evening paper and several magazines, about Gromov's father finding traces of aliens from other planets. But for some reason the magazines had stopped writing about it just as they had stopped writing about the Snowman whom the newspapers had made such a fuss about at first. School gossip had it that it wasn't true - both about the aliens and the Snowman. Everyone had already begun to believe in the Snowman and so they were all sorry to part with him, of course.
None of the kids wanted to be in Gromov's shoes when all the magazines suddenly stopped writing about his father's archaeological findings. And when Gromov was around we tried not to talk on archaeological subjects as we understood that it wasn't his fault. Of course it wasn't Gromov's father's fault either that some reporter had been in a hurry to make such a fuss about something that was still a matter of dispute instead of waiting patiently until the scientists would settle the problem authoritatively.
Gromov took it hard. He always kept to himself and walked home alone and never invited any of the kids over to his place except me and Vlassov. But Vlassov was a quiet boy who was always stammering with shyness, and Gromov just couldn't help inviting me over as I lived in the house right opposite and had even broken a window in his apartment - but that was long before his father had made his discovery. Gromov was afraid that if he didn't invite me over I would think it was because of the broken window. The glass in that window cost a lot of money. It was a thick one, like in a shop window.
If you don't count Vlassov, who was so shy he was afraid to look around in a strange apartment, I was the only one in the class who knew the inside of Gromov's apartment well. It was a large old-fashioned flat. And it always had a strange smell about it which was impossible to place. There were several yellow and brown skulls up on top of a cupboard with figures written on them, and a little wooden idol on the wall, which stared at everyone with its transparent cruel-looking eyes made of obsidian - a volcanic glass, as Gromov had explained.
Neither Gromov nor his father ever invited me or Vlassov into the study. And every time I was in the apartment I looked at the study door with curiosity wondering what was behind it, thinking that there must be all kinds of rare things and probably even those that had been the cause of all those fierce arguments among the scientists. Deep down in my heart I was sorry that the reporters had stopped writing about the findings of Gromov's father. I don't know why, but for some reason I wanted Gromov's father to prove to his opponents that he was right. The kids said that I didn't stand up for the truth but for false pride and vanity because I was Gromov's friend. But that wasn't true. I valued the truth very much, but I wanted one thing: I wanted the truth to be something extraordinary and interesting. There are too many ordinary and uninteresting truths in this world as it is.
3
If anyone had asked me to describe Gromov's character or what he looked like I don't think I could have. He looked like any ordinary boy except for the grey lock of hair over his left ear. It had turned grey as soon as he was born, long before he learned to worry or be sad about anything. His grey lock of hair and glasses in greenish-coloured frames gave a serious and grown-up looking expression to his face. One of the kids had called him an academician, but the nickname hadn't stuck. Nothing seemed to stick to Gromov: neither dirt nor dust nor envy nor cruel words. In some ways he was like the Boy he had written about m his story.
It wasn't just because of his grey lock, but because he knew a great deal about a lot of things. None at school knew as much as Gromov did, although he was never at the top of the class. The thing was his knowledge had no connection whatsoever with the school programme. For instance he managed to know the exact size of the brain of the plesiosaurus which had become extinct millions of years ago. Even Ivan Stepanovich, the biology teacher, didn't know that. But we couldn't understand what sense there was in knowing things like that if they weren't included in the text books or school programme. Except for Herman Ivanovich the teachers didn't think much of this sort of knowledge. Of course it would have been stupid to think that they only valued the knowledge that could be found in the text books and school programme. They were just practically minded and understood that knowing how large the brain of a plesiosaurus was, could hardly be of use to Gromov in the future and that one had to acquire knowledge that could be used in everyday life. It could hardly be expected that he, or we, or you, would ever come face to face with a plesiosaurus.
Once I spoke straight out and said the same to Gromov. He looked at me mockingly, pulled a newspaper cutting out of his school bag, and handed it to us. We read it and our eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. The article stated that a few days ago a real live plesiosaurus had been discovered in one of the Scottish lakes.
During the biology lesson we showed the article to Ivan Stepanovich and for some reason he was embarrassed and even seemed displeased at the discovery. At the end of the-lesson he said:
'That doesn't change a thing.'
Then, after thinking a moment, he said:
'But there is no loss either.'
His words were no less puzzling to us at the time than the discovery of the plesiosaurus.
But that's enough about the plesiosaurus. Everyone knows about it anyway. But Gromov knew a lot about things that there weren't the slightest mention of in our text books. He knew things about water that none of us did. And he knew things about ice that Vera Nikolaevna, our chemistry teacher, most likely knew nothing about. Once, at the chemistry lesson, he said that ice was not a solid as many people think it is.
'And what is it?' we were interested to know.
'Solids are bodies, the particles of which compose a regular structure, a crystal lattice.
The thought of glass, which is so hard you have to use a diamond cutter, struck me and I asked Gromov a perfidious question.
'What about glass,' I asked. 'Is it a solid?'
"No,' Gromov answered. 'Glass is a super-cooled liquid of high viscidity.'
Vera Nikolaevna didn't take part in the conversation. Where chemistry or physics was concerned it was better not to come up against Gromov. No one knew the source of his knowledge and it was difficult to check whether he was right or not.
When Gromov was silent he was just an ordinary schoolboy like the rest of us. But as soon as he opened his mouth he changed completely. He seemed to become bigger and cleverer than the rest of us, as if that was his real self, and he was keeping the fact under cover until the right time came.
He never hurried to answer any of the teacher's questions, as the top pupils usually did. On the contrary, he spoke very slowly as if he didn't know the right answer and was mutely asking the advice of someone inside of himself.
4
When I walked into the classroom, Gromov was in his seat near the window reading a book. I said hello, and then, quite unintentionally, blurted out:
'What about the Boy? Are you going to write any more about him?'
I thought he'd pretend he hadn't heard, but he answered me, and rather willingly, at that.
'Herman Ivanovich has the copy book. I managed to get hold of more information.'
'But you thought that Boy up ... it's just a story ... a fantasy ...'
Gromov looked at me and answered with a question:
'Are you sure of that?'
'Aren't you sure of that?"
He grinned and uttered the words, the meaning of which I couldn't get to the bottom of, no matter how I tried.
'It doesn't matter in the least whether anyone is sure of it. The whole thing is much more complicated.'
After lessons were over Herman Ivanovich read us the continuation of the story. This time his reading was much worse.
The spaceship continued on its journey. The Boy was the happiest one on board because he had been born on the ship and knew about other things only from what he had been taught or told by his companions. Unlike them he had left no one behind on the home planet that he missed or pined for. Everyone he had ever known were all here, with him on the spaceship. His present and his past were here; as for what the future held, he could only guess. His future depended on the theory of probability and the unknown planet they were flying to. There was a great deal said about that planet aboard the ship. Everyone had his own ideas about what it was like. Some considered that it was inhabited by highly reasoning and civilized beings. Others argued that the time hadn't come for reasoning beings to inhabit the planet and that it was inhabited by pangolins. The Boy had his own hypothesis. He was certain that the planet was inhabited by children. Deep down in his heart he understood that this was impossible. But he wanted so much to see some children before he grew up and became old. The Boy never told anyone about his hypothesis. He was afraid of the cold and relentless logic of the grown-ups who would try to prove to him as they proved a theorem, that his dream was just a castle built on air, and could never come true.
In the course of many years of continuous non-stop flight a certain life rhythm of its own had been established aboard the spaceship. This rhythm made life easier for all the members of the expedition so that they hardly thought of the fact that only the walls of the ship separated them from the cold and horrible emptiness of the universe.
The Boy learned that there was a name for this rhythm. It was called the trivialities of everyday life. Try as hard as he could he couldn't understand the real meaning of this word, although he always caught the meaning of other names and words at once. Perhaps the grown-ups had decided, as soon as they boarded the spaceship, never to think of the bottomless abyss, and then this rhythm had appeared which kept them from thinking alarming thoughts, just as sleep or work does.
There were representatives of nearly all the professions on board the spaceship. There was a philosopher too. He found sense for everything that happened around them and with the help of reasoning put everything in its right place.
Once he met the philosopher in the section of logical machines. He worked up the courage and asked him what the trivialities of life meant.
The philosopher smiled at the Boy tenderly.
'The trivialities of life,' he said, 'are a chain of habits that we really don't notice, as we don't notice the clothes that we wear. But if we take off our clothes and go out into the cold frost...'
The philosophere suddenly went silent, remembering that he was not talking to a grown-up, but to a boy.
He smiled at him once again and walked off.
The Boy never repeated his question and tried not to think of it. He guessed that everyday trivialities existed only for grown-ups. That there were no such things for children and that there couldn't possibly be. Everything that the Boy saw was new and interesting to him, even the things that he had seen many, many times.
He saw how hard everybody worked, calculating, inventing or studying something. He visited the laboratories. Wherever he went everyone was glad to see him, especially in the laboratories where they experimented with the most complicated phenomena, particularly in the laboratory of sub-molecular biology. Perhaps this was because the scientists went so deep into the study of the 'unseen' and 'unknown', which they could approach only with the most complicated of instruments, and for hours lost contact with the surrounding world, and the Boy appeared to them as a messenger from that wonderful world.
In their off hours some of the participants of the expedition played chess. The Boy would look over the shoulder of one of the players and try to guess what the next move would be. The musician was the worst player of them all. He lost to everyone - to both the machines and his live partners. And he always took it very hard, but couldn't keep from playing. His continuous losses vexed the Boy terribly.
Having lost a game the musician would go off to -his cabin to compose music. Once he beckoned to the Boy and led him into his cabin. He switched on the recorder so that the Boy could hear the new melody he had composed.
The Boy listened and the sounds poured out, ethereal and bright. He could hear bits of ice as they broke and shattered against each other, he could hear the song of water as it bubbled and murmured and then flowed on to thunder and beat against the rocky boulders it met along in its path.
And little by little the Boy could see the unknown planet they were flying to with its myriads of rivers and streams. The water sang a wonderful and amazing song.
And suddenly the Boy felt that the song was there but there were no ears to hear it or reason to understand it. The time for reasoning beings had not yet come to that planet ... The planet that the music was telling about.
And then a silence fell. They were both silent - the composer and the Boy. But a boy is a boy, and he could not keep silent for long.
'Please tell me,' he said.
'About what?'
'The same old thing,' the Boy pleaded quietly.
And the musician understood what the Boy was asking about and he began to tell him about the planet where he was born and where he had spent his youth. He was a good musician but a bad narrator and often got mixed up and stopped at places and repeated himself over and over again.
But besides the mountain paths and trees and the mountains with the lake at the top, the musician said, there was also something else that is called necessity. When the musician grew up he had to leave the paths and river and the mountain with the lake at its very top up among the blue clouds. An automobile as swift as lightning brought him to the city. It was all right in the city too. But in the city there was no mountain with a lake at the top. But the musician did not lose heart. By that time he already knew that life is composed of both gain and loss.
And for the first time the thought came to the Boy that the distance the spaceship had to cover could be measured not in time and space but by life time. And that was amazing ... The years were passing. And even if the musician ever managed to see his mountain again, it would be when he had become old and feeble.
There was only one very old man on the spaceship. He was the chief calculating technician, the expert who was in charge of the computers. Everyone knew he would never reach home again. He was too old for that.
The Boy examined the old man on the sly. There was something in common between him and the old man. The old man was the oldest on the ship and the Boy was the youngest.
Did that man ever have a childhood? Possibly he did have. He couldn't have become old all at once. Whenever he came upon the Boy he exclaimed in amazement:
'However did you get here, Boy?'
The Boy understood that it was just his way of joking. But was there any sense in repeating the same thing over and over again? The Boy who had no past at all and the old man who had a past which held nearly as much as the memory machine, the keeper of data and facts. But the past kept silent from a feeling of dignity. The old man wasn't a memory machine ready to answer anyone at all no matter how foolish the question. And the past in the old man's memory was quite different from that in the memory of the information instruments. The machines remembered dates and facts, incidents and events. Besides all these facts and events that had taken place the old man remembered himself and other people as well.
It is strange, incidentally, that on the night when the abyss nearly swallowed up the spaceship, the Boy should have suddenly thought of the old man. But the story about the Abyss and the spaceship and the Boy will come later.
'And that's all for now,' Herman Ivanovich said with a strange note in his voice, which sounded both sad and glad, we couldn't tell which, and closed the copy-book. We shall look forward to the continuation.'
5
I felt as if something were missing. Gromov seemed to have been carried away by the memory machines and the old man and had wandered away from the main subject of the story. Like the rest of the kids, I was expecting the Boy to do some brave deed of daring or heroic act. But there didn't seem to be any heroic deed forthcoming. Everything in the story dragged along so ordinarily and so tiresomely slow, just as things do when you are getting ready for exams. And then, at the end, something did happen. But we didn't know what.
We did all sorts of calculating. We calculated as to how large the spaceship would have to be to hold all that was necessary for such a long journey. We kept on asking Gromov how many people were aboard, how many machines, what kind of energy was used on the ship - light energy, or atom energy or energy connected with the use of anti-gravitation forces? Whether the ship used the ordinary Einstein time or zero space, which science-fiction writers wrote about.
We had a lot of arguments about the theory of zero space. No one could make head or tail of it. Dorofeyev, our top pupil, said it was a phenomenon that no one understood anything about except the science-fiction writers. Then we had a go at Gromov. He said that we had to drop the idea of zero space because the Boy lived in quite a normal three dimensional world and that the ship moved at a speed somewhere near to the speed of light.
Some sort of communication - it wasn't the telephone, or telegraph, or radio or quantum communication, but clearly psychological, one might say, kept us in contact with the Boy who lived somewhere in the past or future in some unknown spot in the universe.
I had read somewhere that research in the field of communication had still a great distance to go. That the subject had not yet been probed to the full. Some scientists assert that there exists a so-called psi-field, the physical nature of which is not yet known. The spaceship Boy took on reality and became an everyday part of our life. To understand the atmosphere that surrounded the Boy we began to follow all the news that appeared in connection with science and engineering. We were all in a feverish state of activity. Leonid Starovertsev even started a card file and wrote down every new event in science discoveries and techniques on a separate card. He usually carried the cards around in his pockets, and, during lessons, he would pull them out, one by one, wrinkling up his near-sighted eyes, as he went over them. And what you couldn't find on those cards wasn't worth looking for! He had everything on them from super-new stars, nucleic acids, the automatic memory of birds at birth, the cleverness of dolphins, to the language of the ancient Mayans and community-mindedness of bees and ants that communicated with each other exclusively with the help of ultra-sound.
Starovertsev sat in front of me, and, peeking over his shoulder, I could add all this to my store of knowledge.
Once I asked Starovertsev if he had any notes on the Snowman.
'No, I've left that card open for future information,' he said.
'Why did you do that?' I asked.
'Because I'm waiting till science finds an answer to that controversial problem.'
Those cold laconic words of his made me feel bad. That meant that the card which should have had notes on Gromov's father's discoveries had also been left unfilled and was waiting for science to solve that controversial problem too.
6
Gromov occupied his usual scat near the window, and when I wanted to take a look at Gromov I pretended that I wanted to look out of the window. The window was big and wide and bright and looked out upon the street down below with its trees and people on the sidewalks. Across from the window was a house, and there was a window in that house too, right opposite, and in that window you could see a fat old woman looking out, eating plums and spitting the stones straight out of the window onto the sidewalk. You could see her there at the window so often that looking at her you could imagine that that was how she lived, never leaving the window for a minute.
And, looking out of the window, I thought of the Boy and that he had no idea of windows whatsoever (there couldn't be any windows in a tightly sealed spaceship); instead of windows he had the screen, but it couldn't fully take the place of a window. And then I thought that windows are wonderful things. You could look out into the distance from a window, as if there weren't any walls in the building, and see the clouds and trees and the old woman eating her plums. I asked Starovertsev if he had any notes on his cards about windows and in what century or millennium the window had first made its appearance.
The question seemed to confuse him somewhat and he said that he hadn't filled in that card yet.
'Why?' I asked.
'Because the window was an invention of ancient eras,' he answered. 'I am filling my cards with data which only concerns the future.'
'Won't there be any windows in the future?' I was interested to know.
'Sure there will, but they will be different. Say, for instance, that you won't see a barber shop or a cobbler's shop through your window in the future, but a piece of the universe. That's what the windows will probably be like in future.'
Gromov was listening to what we were saying but he made no remarks although I could see from his face that the question of windows had caught his interest. But he was too tactful to break into the conversation as he had no need to mess around with cards or reference books to find out in which century or millennium man had hewed through his wall to make the first window. Gromov assuredly knew all about that.
The question bothered me but I kept from asking Gromov. I was being tactful too. Many of the kids were irritated because Gromov knew so much, especially those kids who couldn't check up on what he told them and had to take him at his word. They also considered that Starovertsev was envious of Gromov and that he wanted to catch up with him with the help of his cards. All the tables and desks in his apartment were covered with boxes filled with those cards. He was like some professor who didn't trust the encyclopedia or his own memory. It might have been so, but Starovertsev hadn't managed to catch up with him or even come near to it. The kids asked me and Vlassov if Gromov had boxes of cards at home. But I had never seen a single card or box at his house except the box his mother grew flowers in during the summer time. Anyway, everyone came to the conclusion that Gromov just had an amazing memory.
I don't know whether it was his memory or something else, but when Gromov answered a teacher's question something extraordinary seemed to take place in the world - everything around us seemed to change, we changed and the teacher changed and it seemed to us that an unseen cable existed that connected Gromov with the moon and the atom and the bottom of the ocean, and the intelligence of the ant or bee and even with Napoleon and Aristotle. And Aristotle and Napoleon and the bees and ants and the moon and the bottom of the ocean all seemed to associate with him. They all seemed to have confidence in him, and told him everything. One of the kids in class even produced a hypothesis that the Boy in the story really existed and helped Gromov with advice. A lot of the kids began to laugh at this hypothesis and Starovertsev asked:
'How many million years has he existed?'
Some of the kids even defended the hypothesis. Dorofeyev, our top pupil, said that it could be possible that Gromov's father had found the Boy's informative double. He had read about such things in science-fiction books. To be short, Gromov was not connected with the Boy himself, but with his double. The inner life of the Boy had been taken down in code and the Boy's double life in Gromov's apartment, and the real Boy had disappeared long ago having been subjected to the inevitable law of deterioration.
I thought this hypothesis was extremely naive. And then I didn't think it would have been very ethical of Gromov's father to conceal this informative double of the Boy from science and society just for his son's success at school. This was my first argument against the hypothesis. I had many others. How could the double of the Boy know about such things, say, as Napoleon, and many other things which could not have existed on that planet. Reason and logic resisted in every way, but stronger than these feelings was the feeling and wish to be a witness and participant in extraordinary events. Although I reproached myself for inconsistency, the thought sometimes entered my head: what if Gromov's Boy really existed? Of course, not really, just his double. But let us just suppose. If so, where was the double? In Gromov's father's study? All right. But if that is so what does it do? Just stands there in the study and talks to Gromov from time to time on science subjects?
But let us drop this fantasy and turn back to reality. Reality was extremely commonplace. I was sick with a fever and had to stay in bed for several days. Starovertsev came to see me. He was afraid of catching the fever from me so he sat in a corner at the other end of the room which my parents still automatically called the children's room, from force of long habit. He sat there, looking over his cards and writing something on them from time to time as if he had completely forgotten about my existence.
'You could have done that at home or at the library,' I told him.
'If I were at home or at the library, I couldn't have been here visiting you,' he retorted.
'I agree with you,' I said, 'but as long as you're here it would be better if you put your cards in your pockets. Can't you get along without them for at least a few moments?'
'I value my time very highly.'
'You can go on valuing it,' I said. 'That's your affair.'
This seemed to have got under his skin and he even dropped some of his cards onto the floor.
When he left I got out of bed and picked up the cards he had dropped. On one of them there were notes on the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, another was about the ATP molecule and hydrogen links and the third card - I couldn't believe my eyes - was about the Boy's informative double.
Dorofeyev, our top pupil, had been right.
There was a reference on the card to a newspaper item on the findings of Gromov, the archaeologist, and mention was made of the double of a boy who had come from another planet and had lain in the earth ever since the Jurassic formation.
I read and reread the card and my hand was trembling. Then I got back into bed, switched on the light and read and reread it over and over again. Two voices kept up a continuous argument in my brain. One voice said that it was all nonsense, and that Starovertsev had taken it all down from Dorofeyev's words and had dropped them on purpose to make fun of me. The other voice argued that Starovertsev valued his cards too highly to use them that way. The two voices argued and I listened to the controversy not knowing which to give preference to.
The voices argued back and forth putting forward the 'pros' and 'cons' in hundreds. Then one voice began to take over, the voice that talked sense and logic, like our maths teacher, Mark Semyonovich. I pictured Mark Semyonovich in my mind with a piece of chalk in one hand and the blackboard eraser in the other, figures on the blackboard, and his voice dragging out in his perpetual doubting manner, even when there was nothing to be doubtful about.
This voice, the voice of Mark Semyonovich, sat somewhere inside me and argued.
'Let us say,' he said, turning to the class, 'let us say that the existence of the Boy's double is known and we will call it "x". Then, let us ask ourselves why should "y", that is Starovertsev, be in such a hurry to fill in that card which he had kept blank for so long? Let us say that Starovertsev ...'
The voice with the doubting tone went on trying to convince me of something that wasn't very hard to convince me of. Starovertsev wasn't the kind who went in for joking or playing tricks. That meant? That meant that while I was lying here in bed taking my temperature and swallowing pills there must have been an article in the papers about the Boy's double.
I called to my mother who was in the dining-room and asked her to bring me the paper.
'It's Monday today,' she said. 'We don't get the paper on Mondays, and I wrapped the shoes that I took to the repair shop in yesterday's.'
7
I dialled Starovertsev's telephone number. A thick, guttural, masculine voice answered the call.
'I would like to speak to Starovertsev,' I said.
'Starovertsev is speaking,' the voice answered.
I was so upset that I didn't realize at once that I was speaking to Starovertsev's father and was surprised that my school chum should have such a low strange voice over the
phone.
'Starovertsev is speaking,' the voice repeated irritably. 'I would like to speak to your son, please.'
'He was taken to the hospital yesterday with an attack of appendicitis.'
Everyone in the world seemed to be in collusion to keep me from getting down to the bottom of the mystery. I lay in bed, swallowed pills, drank quarts of tea with lemon and waited for the doctor from the district polyclinic to come.
The doctor finally came - an old grumpy woman who immediately began complaining that the elevator wasn't in good order. Last time, she said, when she had to go to the sixth floor, the door banged shut behind her and she couldn't get out. She had to shout until the repair man had come to let her out and she had lost forty minutes while she was shut up in the elevator. Today she had walked up without using the elevator as she was afraid of being locked in again and losing time. She rebuked my mother for the elevator, asked her to bring a teaspoon and then made me open my mouth. Then she said I had to stay in bed for at least another two days and went away.
Two days ... I lay in bed two days thinking. I thought of the Boy's double, which Gromov's father had found, if I was to believe Starovertsev's card. Many millions of years had passed since the time of the Jurassic formation, the period when the earth had been inhabited by huge scaly pangolins. That would mean that the double had patiently lain in the earth waiting for reasoning beings that could understand its language and come into association with it to appear.
I wanted to know more about the Jurassic formation and I asked my mother to bring me the textbook on palaeontology that my older brother had used when he was a student. Mother couldn't find that book, but she brought me another book, on the Palaeontology of Vertebrates.
I read about a strange fact in the book that almost shook me. It seems that during the Jurassic formation there lived a dinosaur which had small front teeth with very stressed grasping functions and no teeth. This little dinosaur was expert in stealing eggs from big dinosaurs.
The author of the book advanced the theory that from this pangolin with its exceedingly mobile nervous system, had originated the mammals, which meant people too.
I got the idea that if the informative double of the Boy really existed, it would be possible to check up if this hypothesis were true. It seemed to me that it wasn't very fair.
Two days later when I came to school I decided to show Starovertsev's card to Gromov.
I felt as it I had lost the ground from underfoot and was falling down a precipice, but I couldn't help myself; the wish to clear up the mystery was too strong.
Choosing the right moment I pulled out the card from my pocket and silently handed it to Gromov.
I couldn't tear my eyes away from his face, my heart was beating heavily and I became hot, then cold, in turn and I thought my fever had begun all over again. It does happen sometimes.
That minute seemed an hour to me. Then Gromov handed back the card and calmly looked at me.
'Well, what about it? What do you find so surprising?"
'What do I find so surprising?' I exclaimed. 'Do you mean to tell me that the story about the Boy's double has been corroborated?'
'It has.'
'He referred to a newspaper article. Was there anything about it in the newspapers?'
'No. Starovertsev found out from me. He referred to the newspaper to make it look more convincing. He didn't want to indicate that the information had come from a private source. I am the private source.'
The bell put an end to our conversation. Mark Semyonovich entered the classroom, drew a right-angle triangle on the blackboard and began to demonstrate the theorem in that doubting toned voice of his. Tapping his chalk on the blackboard he went on demonstrating the theorem as if he himself didn't believe in what he was trying to prove. Of course it was the fault of the intonation that didn't coordinate with the logical argument that ensued from the demonstration.
I wasn't paying attention to what Mark Semyonovich was saying at all. Instead of the theorem I was thinking of the dinosaur that stole eggs from its bigger contemporaries. I couldn't believe that all the mammals had come from that little thief. That meant people too and I didn't want to have that kind of an ancestor. And the only way to find out the truth was with the help of the Boy's informative double found by Gromov's father.
Only the Boy could give the lie to this doubtful hypothesis because he had been on earth during the Jurassic period.
On my way home I thought of the thread that united the mammals with the pangolins through that dinosaur whose front legs were so quick at grasping things. If the dinosaurs had been killed off and become extinct, no mammals would have appeared on earth and neither would have I.,
I kept on thinking of that. And again two voices were arguing with each other in my head. One agreed with the hypothesis on the origin of the mammals - the other disagreed.
When I walked into the entrance hall and pressed the elevator button, I found it was out of order. The switch button wouldn't light up. I walked up to the second floor and tried to open the door. But it wouldn't open. There was someone in there waiting to be let out.
'Who's in there?' I asked.
'It's me,' a grumpy woman's voice answered and I recognized the doctor's voice.
'We didn't call you,' I said. 'I'm quite all right.'
'I wasn't coming to see you. It was an emergency call for the Novotelov's on the fourth floor.'
'All right,' I said. 'I'll go upstairs and call the technician.' I ran upstairs as quickly as I could. I wasn't thinking about the Boy now or the dinosaurs. I was wondering why the elevator always worked when I or my mother or all the other neighbours and their friends used it, and always broke down and played dirty tricks as soon as the old doctor got in. I thought of that and the theory of probability and the theory of games. And then I began thinking about the Boy again.
8
'Do you think I could see the Boy's double,' I asked Gromov. 'I've got to clear up an important question.'
The whole thing sounded extremely stupid and wild. It had sort of been pushed out of the whole rigmarole that was going on in my head.
'What's the question?' Gromov asked calmly, I would even say, indifferently.
So I told him about the dinosaur and its front feet with the grasping function and about the mammals who could hardly stomach the hypothesis connected with the origin of these doubtful animals.
'And you want to ask the Boy's double this question?' Gromov queried.
'Yes,' I said.
'You'll have to wait a while.'
'Why?'
'First of all because you're not the only one who wants to ask that question. Secondly because my father and his assistants have been trying for a long time to decode and understand the language which the Boy thought and spoke in ...'
But here we were interrupted again. The bell rang and the lesson began. I had to wait for the next recess to continue our conversation. The lesson seemed endless ... Finally the lesson was over and I asked Gromov:
'Isn't it possible for me to see him?'
'See whom?'
'The Boy's double.'
'It's quite impossible. It's kept at the Institute of Archaeology and no one can enter except the laboratory assistants.'
'Have you seen him?'
'Allow me to leave that question unanswered.'
I was hurt. His words clearly showed that he didn't trust me.
Gromov could see from the expression on my face that I was hurt. It made him feel uncomfortable and he said:
'Why don't you come over any more?'
'Your apartment is under repairs, isn't it?
'That was finished long ago. Drop in tomorrow evening. ? I'll be at home.'
9
There I was standing in front of that padded door with the blue post box on the outside.
I rang the bell and stood waiting. No one seemed in a hurry to open it. Perhaps there wasn't anyone at home?
I pressed on the bell again. Gromov himself opened the door.
'Come in,' he said leading the way into the entrance hall.
'I haven't been here for quite a while,' I said. 'Are your parents at home?'
'My mother's at home, but father's at the Institute. Why?'
'Oh, just like that. Is the idol with the obsidian eyes still on the wall?'
'Sure. You'll see it in a minute. Hang your coat here. Have you seen Starovertsev?'
'How could I? He had his appendicitis cut out a few days ago.'
'Appendix, not appendicitis. He's getting well already and filling in his cards again. He sent me a whole list of questions ... Come in here.'
We had to pass through the dining-room to get to Gromov's room and I saw the transparent eyes of the wooden idol with its narrow figure, thin hands and little legs, slightly doubled under.
'What were the questions he wanted you to answer?' I asked.
'He's a funny guy, that Starovertsev. He wants me to answer questions that only the Boy or his double could answer. And he demands that I answer them in writing right away, while he's still absent from school.'
'Are you going to answer the questions?'
Gromov looked at me in surprise, but said nothing.
Then I said:
'Have you written any more about the Boy?'
'Yes. I have it somewhere if I can find the copy-book. Everything was in such a mess. It's difficult to find anything since the apartment was repaired. Why?'
'I would like you to read it.'
'No. Sorry, but I'm not in the mood,' he said. 'And then I never like to read out loud.'
'Please, read it,' I begged. 'Please.'
I hated myself for my words and the begging tone, but I kept on at him. I did so want to hear about the Boy before "the code was deciphered. That would take a long time.
'Please, read it. It's all the same to you...'
'No,' Gromov said very decidedly. 'I'm not going to read it. If you like I'll switch on the recorder and we'll listen to the melody which the musician composed, which ... The recording is in father's study. Only don't you tell anybody ...'
He went into his father's study and soon came out carefully holding a record. He turned on the recorder so that I could hear a melody that a musician had composed many million years ago before reasoning and the human ear had appeared on earth.
I listened and the sounds poured forth bright and ethereal. You could hear bits of ice breaking and shattering against each other, you could hear the song of the water as its joyful murmuring melody changed to thunderous sound in its battle against the rocks. This was the unhuman heart of the musician which was beating humanly, and which against all the laws of time and space seemed to be here right next to us.
The sounds poured out and out uniting that which could not be united. They were here, although the dream that had given birth to them was immeasurably far from us.
In the story Gromov had called the one who had managed to come to us, the Boy. And he was a boy who was full of his childhood, although his childhood had lasted for millions of years and had not yet ended.
He was called Boy on the spaceship. And that is what he called himself, too.
Gromov and I were still boys too, but our childhood would soon be over. His childhood went on and on merging with the sounds of the melody that I was listening to.
When the music came to an end I asked a question that probably I shouldn't have asked.
'Did your father find that recording along with Boy's double?'
'Of course not. Where did you get that idea? A friend of my father's composed it. I asked him to.'
'You wanted it to be written by the Boy's musician friend, didn't you?'
'Yes,' I answered softly.
'But the music is nice, isn't it? You liked it, didn't you?'
'Yes. But I would have liked it better if it had been composed by that musician, and then ...'
'When there was still no reasoning or human ear to hear it?' Gromov asked.
'Yes.'
'Can you imagine what the earth was like at that time?'
'I couldn't before . . . But I can now after I heard that melody. Can you imagine what it was like?'
'I don't have to imagine it,' Gromov said. 'I know.'
'How do you know?'
'I am sorry, but permit me to leave that question unanswered.'
10
I permitted him to leave that question unanswered. I just got up and left. I put on my coat in the entrance hall and left. I couldn't stand around and beg any longer.
Someone else in my place probably wouldn't have gone away without finding out the truth. A research worker or big scientist for the sake of science would have sent his sense of dignity to the devil and would have stayed on and gotten to the bottom of things.
But I just got up and left. It's true it didn't make things any easier. I hardly slept the whole night.
The next day something unpleasant happened in class. I don't know why I have called it unpleasant. But it doesn't matter. This is what happened.
We had a new teacher in biology. Our old teacher had retired. Nothing would have happened if our old teacher had been there. You couldn't surprise him with anything.
This new teacher asked Gromov a question. And Gromov answered the question, of course. It wasn't because Gromov answered the question way out of the limits of the programme. It was because Gromov knew what no one knew or could know. And the new teacher understood that at once. I could see that by his eyes. I've never seen such eyes anywhere, neither at the movies nor at the theatre. There didn't seem to be anything else on his face except those eyes. There was everything in those eyes: delight and horror, bewilderment and rage, despair and joy and something else that I can't put into words.
I thought that he must have either fallen ill or gone mad. He began pacing from one corner to the other, as if he had forgotten all about us.
Five minutes had passed and he was still striding up and down the room. Then he walked up to Gromov.
He said something to him so softly and indistinctly that I could only gather from Gromov's answer what it was all about.
It concerned animals that had become extinct millions of years ago. It wasn't that Gromov gave a very lively and concrete detailed description of them, but he dropped a word that he shouldn't have uttered no matter what, if he wanted to keep everything undercover. When the teacher had disagreed with something he said:
'You know that from the course of palaeontology, but I remember ...'
And he went into one detailed description after another, as if he didn't care two pins about the mystery or the teacher or the top pupil, and that word 'I remember' popped up again ... The teacher seemed turned to stone, unable to utter a word.
I felt sorry for the teacher and still more for Gromov and I shouted out:
'That was just a slip of the tongue!'
The teacher grasped at my words as a drowning man grasps at a straw.
Somehow he managed to bring the lesson to a close. Gromov also quieted down.
11
The new teacher fell ill. He had caught pneumonia. I heard that he had sent Gromov a letter from the hospital. But no one in the class knew what the contents of the letter was. Starovertsev had seen the envelope on Gromov's desk. He knew where it was from and who had written it, from the return address.
I think the teacher must have written to Gromov to explain why he had been so agitated at the lesson. But it didn't need any explaining. I don't know if there was anything about the truth in the letter.
But I thought about it every time I saw Gromov. Then Gromov stopped coming to school too.
There was a rumour that the Gromovs were moving to a science centre near Novosibirsk. Gromov's father had been elected a corresponding member of the Siberian branch of the Academy of Sciences.
I just had to see Gromov before he moved. I kept on waiting for him to come to school, but he didn't. Perhaps he had already arranged all his school papers and wouldn't come any more.
The new biology teacher got well and left the hospital. He acted nervous in class and seemed to be confused. From time to time his gaze would fall on the empty seat near the window where Gromov used to sit. And then a strange expression would appear on his face as if he saw something there that other people couldn't see.
I often glanced at that empty seat near the window too. Through the window I could see the street and the pedestrians on the sidewalk and the window of the house across the road where the fat old woman sat and ate apples or cracked nuts with an iron on the window-sill.
But you could tell from the teacher's eyes that he saw something quite different. Perhaps in his imagination he could see the live and impressive picture of the earth in ancient times. The earth as it was before man and before the mammals appeared upon it, as Gromov had described it.
When I was going home I heard the sound of heels tapping behind me, someone was trying to catch up with me. I turned around. It was the new teacher.
He caught up with me and we walked side by side for some time without a word.
Then he turned to me and asked:
'What do you think of Gromov?'
'Gromov is moving to Novosibirsk,' I said. 'He's going to live at the science centre there. There's a school there for talented mathematicians and physicists. I suppose he'll be attending that school.'
'Do you think he needs that school?'
'Everyone tries for entrance to that school,' I said, 'but it's hard to pass the exams. I'm quite sure Gromov will be accepted at once.'
'I have no doubt that he will be accepted,' the teacher said. 'But I doubt if he needs that school at all. He knows too much.'
'Yes,' I agreed. 'He knows a lot.'
The teacher's face brightened up. And he bent down and asked me in a trusting tone of voice:
'How does he know so much?'
'Oh, that's simple,' I said. 'His father has a wonderful library.'
'Do you think so?' the teacher said. But from his voice I could guess he wasn't quite satisfied with my answer. But what did he have in mind when he asked me that question? Perhaps he thought that I would tell him everything I knew or thought about the Boy? He certainly wanted a lot.
The teacher took several nervous steps and then said:
'Good-bye,' and turned down Fifth Street.
I praised myself for not having answered his question. But what could I have told him anyway? I didn't know how Gromov got to know so much.
When I got home I took a book that had been given to me on my birthday and began to read it.
Then I looked out of the window. It was snowing. The snow made the street look new and fresh as if it had just been created. I don't know why but I suddenly began to feel good although I didn't live in a spaceship that was flying to distant planets, but in an ordinary old house that needed repairing badly. And the house was not in any danger of being struck by some meteorite or anything else of the kind. It couldn't miss the track and get lost in the endlessness of the universe. Everything was so commonplace and ordinary. Down in the street across the way I could see the bakery with the old sign over it on which was painted a pretzel, and the dressmaker's shop with the wax dummy of a man in a dumpy-looking suit in the show window, and the telephone booth in front of the shop. A feeling of joy and cosy security filled me as if the next day was a holiday that was going to last a long long time. But then my eye fell on the entrance door of the house across the road where Gromov lived. The feeling of joy and cosiness seemed to have been snapped away by a wild gust of wind. Although it was an ordinary entrance door and an ordinary house it seemed to me that behind that door there existed another world, a world full of adventure and mystery. I stood at the window and wondered at these two worlds and at which one was better: the world with the bakery and dressmaker shop or the one where instead of shops and telephone booths, meteorites flew around.
I thought of the Boy. He had no choice. Fate had chosen for him. He had been born on board the flying spaceship. And his whole life was spent in flying. On the other side of the section where the Boy slept there was no dressmaker shop, there was nothing but void space that was called a vacuum.
I suddenly felt uncomfortable as if I had spoken my thoughts to an audience-filled hall. I began to put on my coat. Exactly one minute later I was standing in front of that padded door again.
I stood in front of it unable to make up my mind and press the bell button. When I finally got up enough courage to raise my hand the door opened and Gromov's father came out. He had his coat on and was evidently going somewhere.
'He's at home,' he said. 'Go on in.'
I stepped forward. At the moment when I made that step I had no idea what the consequences would be.
Gromov seemed glad to see me.
'Come in,' he said. 'Take your coat off. We've got everything packed already.'
Why he mentioned this I don't know.
When we passed through the dining-room I looked up at the wall, but the idol had already been taken down. It was lying on the floor near a suitcase with its thin little legs doubled under.
And then it suddenly struck me that Gromov was really moving away to another city. Until the moment I had seen the little wooden idol on the floor next to the suitcase I had had my doubts.
When we entered his room Gromov turned to me and asked:
'Have you come over just to see me or on business?'
'On business,' I said.
Gromov didn't ask any more questions. And I couldn't make up my mind to say why I had come.
'Are you taking the skulls along with you?' I asked.
'Yes.'
'And the wooden idol?'
'And the wooden idol too.'
'What about the Boy?'
The word seemed to have sprung out of its own. I would have given a lot to be able to take it back again. Gromov's face underwent an immediate change, as if something had taken him and placed him at a distance. I had the feeling that he wasn't here nearby in the room, but that I was looking at him on the television screen.
'What do you need the Boy for?' he asked in a low voice.
'I want to ask him a question.'
'Go on, ask your question,' he said in the same low voice. 'I'll answer it.'
'I want the Boy himself to answer it.'
'I am the Boy.'
'You?'
'Yes. I am the Boy. Didn't you guess that before?'
I couldn't say a word. I turned cold, then hot, then cold again. Sweat covered my brow.
'Why don't you ask your question?'
'I'll ask it later on,' I said.
'When later on?'
'Next time.'
'But we're leaving for Novosibirsk tomorrow.'
'At what time?'
'Nine o'clock in the evening.'
'Then I'll drop in after dinner, if I may?'
'All right.'
But I didn't go to see him after dinner. I don't know why. Perhaps because I didn't know what I wanted to ask him. I couldn't ask him about the dinosaur that stole eggs from its neighbours. It would have been too petty a question. But I was too upset and too agitated and nothing more serious would enter my head.
12
I remained in this state of upset and agitation for about five or six days, and then it passed away. As soon as it did, oodles of questions that I should have asked the Boy, that is, Gromov, piled up in my head. But Gromov now lived far away in the science centre near Novosibirsk. There was another family living in their apartment now. I saw the furniture van driving up with their things. But they were just ordinary things like tables and chairs and beds and couches. You wouldn't expect to find wooden idols with their legs doubled under or numbered skulls among such things. I watched the furniture men take in the things and my heart contracted with sadness. I thought of the apartment in that house across the road and how different it was when Gromov lived in it, and now other people would be living there - an irreversible process - as Dmitry Spiridonovich our physics teacher liked to say.
I was in a bad mood those days and the kids noticed it.
'What's eating you?' they asked.
'Gromov's gone,' I said.
'So what? What's so important about that? There's someone else in his place now. A new boy. He seems to know a lot too. He's from Gorky. He knows three languages.'
There was another boy in the seat near the window. He even looked like Gromov from a distance. He had the same thoughtful look on his face and his hair stuck up straight and stiff like a hedgehog's.
He kept on looking out of the window just like Gromov used to do. Then he made a face and stuck out his tongue at someone. It must have been at the old lady in the window across the road who ate apples and cracked nuts all the time. Gromov would never have done a thing like that. He had treated everyone respectfully and the old lady too.
I certainly wasn't in the best of moods. Those questions that I hadn't asked Gromov kept on bothering me.
The lessons just dragged on and on and when I was going home I saw the new boy walking alongside.
'Do you live far from school?' he asked me.
I told him the name of my street and the number of my house. He was surprised.
'You live right across from my house,' he said.
So I guessed that he lived in Gromov's apartment now. I looked at him and wondered how I felt about him. Whether I could stomach him or not? Again there was an argument going on in my head. One voice said that it wasn't his fault that he now occupied Gromov's seat and had moved into his apartment. The other voice said: sure it's not his fault, but there's something about him. And he's most likely stuck up too.
I decided to ask him a question, one of those that I wanted to ask Gromov.
'Why does the world exist?' I asked him.
'Just because it does,' he answered.
'What would there be if there wasn't any world?' I questioned again.
'We wouldn't be here,' he said.
'That's no answer,' I protested.
'Why do you ask questions like that?' he asked.
'Because I want to know.'
"You want to know a lot, don't you ...?'
'Sure I want to know a lot. Why shouldn't I?'
'Yes, but you ask stupid questions.'
'They aren't stupid at all. You just don't understand, that's all.'
'They are stupid. And then they are not concrete. What sense is there in asking why the world exists?'
'There is sense.'
There isn't.'
'Gromov wouldn't have answered that way.'
'Gromov? The boy that lived in our house?'
'He didn't live in your house. You're living in his house.'
'We have every right to the apartment, and he left.'
'He didn't leave, he moved to Novosibirsk.'
'So he moved. What's the difference. Do you play table tennis?'
'Sure.'
'Come over to my place after dinner and we'll have a game. We've got a tennis table.'
'I'll see,' I said. 'Maybe I'll come. What's your name?'
'Igor,' he answered importantly. 'Igor Dinayev.'
And again those two voices inside me put up an argument - whether to go or not. I went. More for the sake of curiosity than anything else.
In the dining-room, instead of the wooden idol, there was a picture on the wall. I couldn't recognize the apartment. The furniture was all new as if it had just come out of the furniture shop. When Gromov lived there the apartment looked something like part of a spaceship. There was hardly any furniture at all. The new furniture and picture on the wall of a bathing beauty with one outstretched long leg touching the water made me feel uncomfortable and out of place. I lost the wish to play tennis and suddenly felt very thirsty. But I thought of the people in the desert who courageously fought against their thirst. So I fought against mine.
'Why don't you say something?'
Tm thinking,' I said.
'What are you thinking about?"
'About a lot of things.'
'Come on. Tell me!' he demanded.
'I was thinking about the Gobi desert.'
'Were you ever there?'
'No.'
'Then why were you thinking about it?"
'I always think of the places I haven't been to.'
'Then you're a nut. There's something wrong with all the boys in your class. I noticed it at once. Who's the kid you all seem to be harping about?'
'Gromov.'
'What's so wonderful about him? Why does everyone talk about him all the time?'
I changed the subject and began to talk about something else. I didn't want to discuss Gromov with him. And in his apartment too.
Then I got up to go.
'Well, I'll be going. There's a lot of homework to do,' I said.
But there wasn't. As a matter of fact, there was very little homework to do that day.
What else can I say? Hardly anything at all. Everything had become commonplace and ordinary without Gromov in the classroom. But everybody soon got used to it, and began to forget Gromov. I stopped thinking of him all the time too. The homework kept on piling up. We were given so much to do, there was hardly any free time at all. But I still read a lot.
One of the two voices which still argued inside me from time to time said that you couldn't know everything. The other said you could and reminded me of Gromov.
There was no news whatsoever from the science centre near Novosibirsk. I began to think that Gromov had been joking when he said that he was the Boy from the story.
But something happened on Saturday after lessons when I was in the street car with my mother. We were on our way to a housewarming of some friends who had just moved to a new apartment. My mother was holding a huge cake in a white cardboard box on her lap which she had bought at the 'Sever' Bakery Shop. Everything was just as it usually is in a street car. Some people were standing and hanging on to straps, others were seated. One of the passengers was reading a newspaper. I peeped over his shoulder and glanced at the third column and the letters began to jump all over as if I were looking at them through my father's glasses. But still I managed to read the following:
'A profound study is being made of the informative doubles of people who visited the earth during the Jurassic period of formation discovered by Professor Gromov. The Professor's fifteen-year-old son has greatly helped the scientists in studying the possibility of human perception of the psychology and knowledge of the double of the boy who came to earth from another planet. The memory reserves appeared to be extraordinarily vast...'
The words danced up and down before my eyes. I turned cold, then hot, then cold again.
'What's the matter with you?' my mother asked.
I had no time to answer. I dashed after the man with the newspaper who had stood up and was hurriedly making his way towards the exit.
'The paper!' I shouted at the top of my voice. 'Please let me have that newspaper!'