Red Star Tales Page 16

  “What do you think of me? Tell me, does the short haircut spoil my looks? Oh, how I wept when they cut my hair… My hair… that was the last bit of my womanhood!”

  They entered the room adjoining the laboratory.

  There they found two heads.

  The first was the head of a boy, as curly-haired as a Raphael cherub. But the spinal cord extended from the base of his small head downwards into a liquid-filled vessel, lending him the appearance of some monstrous tadpole. Clearly, Kern was continuing his scientific experiments. The boy’s dark blue eyes stared at the newcomers with childish curiosity.

  The second head was that of an elderly man with close-shaven hair and an enormous meaty nose. Over its eyes the head had a pair of perfectly dark glasses.

  “Its eyes hurt,” Kern explained.

  “That’s all I have to show you,” he added with an ironical smile.

  Disappointed, Arthur Dowell headed for the door. The detective and Kern followed him towards the exit.

  “Wait!” exclaimed Miss Adams. And stepping towards the head with the fat nose, she opened the air tap.

  “Who are you?” asked Miss Adams.

  The head moved its lips, but its voice made no sound. Miss Adams released a strong current of air.

  Then they heard the whistling mutter:

  “Who are you? Is that you, Kern? Uncover my ears! I can’t hear you.”

  Miss Adams looked in the ears and extracted thick wads of cotton wool.

  “Who are you?” she repeated the question.

  “I was Professor Dowell.”

  “But what about your face?”

  The head spoke with difficulty.

  “My face? Yes… even my face was taken from me… A minor operation… paraffin injected under the skin… Alas… only my brain is still my own, in this strange container… But even that is refusing to obey… I am dying… Our experiments... My experiments are unfinished. Although my head has survived longer than I had considered theoretically possible…”

  “Why are you wearing glasses?”

  “My colleague has recently come to mistrust me,” the head even attempted to smile, “he has deprived me of the chance to hear and see… the glasses are not transparent, so that I couldn’t reveal myself before guests he mightn’t want… but I seem to recognize your voice… take off the glasses.”

  Miss Adams removed the glasses.

  “Miss Adams… Greetings, my dear! And Kern said that you had left! I don’t feel well… I cannot work any longer… These are the last experiments… the boy… with the spinal cord… But I will not finish them… My colleague Kern kindly declared an amnesty for me yesterday. If I don’t die by myself today, he will liberate me tomorrow.”

  And suddenly, seeing Arthur, who, astonished by the sight of his father’s head, stood transfixed, the head cried out gladly:

  “Arthur! My son!”

  For an instant life seemed to return to the head. The dull eyes grew bright.

  Arthur approached his father’s head.

  “My dear father! What have they done to you?”

  “Well… it’s all fine… I have seen you one more time… after my death…”

  The vocal cords were barely working any more; Dowell’s head spoke in short bursts. In the pauses, air whistled out of its throat.

  “Arthur… kiss my brow... if it is not too unpleasant for you…”

  Arthur bent over and kissed him.

  “There… now it is good.”

  The detective walked over to the head.

  “Professor Dowell, can you give us information about the circumstances of your death? I am a detective…”

  The head looked dully at the detective, not understanding. Then, evidently having grasped the situation, the head glanced towards Miss Adams and whispered:

  “I... told… her… She knows everything.”

  “Good….” the head whispered one more time, with just its lips, after a pause, and its eyes grew cloudy.

  “It’s the end!” said Miss Adams.

  For some time they all stood in silent grief.

  “Well, anyhow, the case is clear!” the detective interrupted the painful silence. And, turning to Kern, he pronounced firmly:

  “Please follow me into the office. I need to take a statement from you.”

  Kern silently obeyed. They went out.

  Arthur sank heavily onto a chair beside his father’s head and laid his own head on his hands.

  “My poor, poor father…”

  Then he rose. Silently and firmly, he squeezed Miss Adams’ hand.

  From Kern’s office, a shot rang out.

  First published in Russian: 1926

  Translation by Muireann Maguire

  ANDREI PLATONOV

  1926

  THE LUNAR BOMB

  1. KREUZKOPF’S PROJECT

  Peter Kreuzkopf, an engineer and the son of a miner, was in his country’s capital city for the first time. He was in ecstasy at the maelstrom of automobiles and the rumble of surface railways. There must have been practically no one living in the city other than mechanics! But no factories could be seen. Kreuzkopf was sitting on a bench in the downtown park, but the factories were built on swamps in the outskirts, in the fields where wastewater was dumped, out beyond the airstrips of worldwide aviation lines.

  Kreuzkopf was young and penniless. He had quarreled with the mine administrators, who wanted to extract money from nothing but compressed air, raised a fuss at his mine, was taken to court and fired, and then came to the capital.

  The train arrived early, but this strange city was already full of vigor: it never awoke because it never went to sleep. Its life consisted of steadily accelerated motion. The city had no connection to nature. It was a self-enclosed concrete and metal oasis, completely isolated and alone in an abyss of the world.

  Kreuzkopf’s gaze was attracted by a sumptuous theater made of dusky dull stone. The theater was large enough that it could have been an airship station.

  Peter Kreuzkopf’s heart was pierced with grief. His young wife Erna, who had once loved him, had stayed in Carbomort, the coal town from which Peter had come. Peter admonished her: “There’s no sense breaking up, Erna. We’ve lived together seven years. Things will get easier. I’ll go into the city and start working on the Lunar Bomb, and they’ll pay me for it, surely.”

  But Erna was tired of promises, tired of the coal haze of the mine, the narrow life of Carbomort, and the monotonous, ugly faces of the unchanging workers, particularly two persons from among Peter’s friends, narrow specialists who consciously believed themselves to be the atoms of human knowledge. The most frequent conversation Erna heard was the words of Mertz, Peter’s coworker: “We live to know things!”

  “But what you don’t know,” Erna replied, “is that people don’t live to know things…”

  Peter could understand both Erna and his friends, but they didn’t particularly understand him. Erna was an aristocrat, the daughter of a coal baron and educated at the Sorbonne. She detested Peter’s friends, the craftsmen, electricians, and inventors that sat around in her living room getting into needless arguments with Peter till midnight.

  Kreuzkopf knew he had little in common with Erna. He was half self-taught, an engineer by trade, while she had mastered all the latest “flowers of culture” that were out of his reach.

  And Erna had left him to be with her own kind. Kreuzkopf grieved and did not know what to do all alone amid this multitude of people.

  The general feeling of preoccupation, the electric advertisements, the smell of exhaust, and the roar of rumbling machines magnified Kreuzkopf’s sadness tenfold. He remembered the bygone years of his life, full of labor, trust in people, technical inventiveness, and devotion to his beloved wife. And now it had all been destroyed by inscrutable elemental forces: people had deceived and betrayed him, and they did not need his labor; his wife found another love and grew to despise him; and his creation led him to loneliness and poverty.
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br />   “Is there really no salvation? Death? No, let me crushed by the unconquerable. Or else I will conquer all that is visible and invisible!”

  Kreuzkopf stood up, wiped his face with a dirty handkerchief, and set out for the Science and Technology Commission of the Republic. He did not think their green desks to be of much use; he knew the irony hidden in those boxes in those offices, and the dull ignorance of the professors. But he had nowhere else to turn.He was received by the chairman of the Commission, a railway engineer. Kreuzkopf laid out his proposal, complete with illustrative graphics.

  The proposal concerned a “Lunar Bomb,” a kind of transportation tool capable of moving in any gaseous environment, within the atmosphere or outside it. A metal sphere filled with the payload would be attached to a disk installed in a fixed position on the earth. The sphere was attached at the edge of the disk, and the disk itself was positioned either horizontal to the earth’s surface, at an incline, or vertical, depending on where the missile was to be sent: to a station on Earth or to another planet.

  The disk was rotated sufficiently for the missile to arrive back from its destination station. When the disk, in the proper position for the direction of the launch, reached the required number of revolutions, an automatic device separated the sphere from the disk and the sphere took off at a tangent. All this was done based on a formula for centrifugal force adjusted by a coefficient for environmental resistance.

  A safe landing on earth (or another planet) was provided for by automatic devices on the missile itself. When approaching a solid surface, a circuit in the device was closed and a certain quantity of an explosive was detonated in the same direction as the flight. The recoil acted as a brake on the flight, and the fall became a smooth and safe descent. The missile’s ascent was also safe and smooth because the speed of the launching disk started at zero.

  Kreuzkopf proposed launching the first missile in a curved path that would take it around the Moon, close to its surface, then return it to Earth. The “Lunar Bomb” would have all the equipment required to automatically record the temperature, gravitational force, general environmental conditions, and structure of the electromagnetic sphere in the interplanetary space near the Moon. And finally, movie cameras with special microscopes would capture everything passing by the missile. Of course the design of all this equipment must take the hurtling state of the “lunar bomb” into account.

  Kreuzkopf was guided by a secret thought: there were a lot of humans on earth, passing the days of their unrepeatable lives in stifling crowds that gathered around the shriveling veins sustaining the earth. Kreuzkopf hoped to open up new virgin sources of sustenance for life on earth, run hoses from these sources to the earth, and use them to swallow up the meanness and the burdened, cramped feeling of human life. And then, when the endless depths of the alien celestial gift were opened, people would feel more of a need for other people…

  “We’re expecting a good harvest,” the Commission chairman said contemplatively after hearing him out. “Industry is up and running, new construction is underway… Yes, we can ask for the money. How much do you estimate you need? Six hundred thousand? Okay. But we need to put the entire matter before the Commission Plenum and get their approval, and only then can we take the proposal to the government… The Plenum is meeting on – today is Tuesday – they’re meeting on Friday. Personally I’m in favor of your proposal. As far as I can see there are no mistakes in your calculations. So, are you free on Friday?”

  “I am at your disposal,” Kreuzkopf replied.

  “Okay then, see you Friday. All the best.”

  “Goodbye.” Kreuzkopf left. He hadn’t expected to be paid such attention. But now what could he do until Friday, three days from now, and where could he get something to eat?

  The city ceaselessly rioted with life and work. It was noon in torrid summer. Kreuzkopf bought a cheap newspaper. He began with the classifieds: “Engineer wanted… travel required… travel required…” Nothing useful. Here’s one: “Design engineer wanted… for generators.” Kreuzkopf didn’t have detailed knowledge in that field. Another one: “Temporary driver wanted for testing dynamics of new types of automobile engines…” This would work. Kreuzkopf had had two cars (gifts from his wife during the first year of their life together). He knew how to drive quite well and he liked doing it.

  Kreuzkopf was hired and, to his amazement, would be paid more than what he’d earned at the mine. They offered to take him on at the garage on Wednesday morning. Kreuzkopf spent the rest of the day and the whole night sitting on a park bench. Thoughts of the past tormented him.

  2. A TRAGEDY ON THE HIGHWAY

  In the morning Kreuzkopf set off for the outskirts of the city, to the garage and his new job. The garage was open but the manager wasn’t around. Morning was ablaze. Kreuzkopf smoked and fought against sleep.

  At last the manager arrived and Kreuzkopf was given a car. At first glance it looked like a 90-horsepower Hispano-Suiza, but there was something different about it: the wheel diameter was greater and the radiator was a semicircle. The engine was sealed. A separate compartment, also sealed, held all the necessary recording instruments.

  Kreuzkopf pulled out. The car handled smoothly and had furious pull despite the cold engine. Dead weight was placed in the passenger seats. Kreuzkopf was told to put 300 kilometers on the odometer before lunchtime and then return.

  The highway lay empty. Kreuzkopf shifted to fourth, floored the gas, and flew like a brick. The odometer read 104 kilometers. But the motor warmed up and the thrust increased. 118 kilometers… The wind rushed past on that quiet morning. Nature spread out all around. Smoke streamed from the pipes of a crematorium in the distance.

  Calmer, forgetting his heart’s sadness, Kreuzkopf gained speed. 143 kilometers… The road is deserted, our past is dead, and ahead is the wind, the road, and the rising needle of the speedometer.

  And suddenly a cow appeared. Kreuzkopf steered past without braking. A slight turn followed, and the speed caused the car to skid a bit. Kreuzkopf disengaged the clutch and saw the curly-haired head of a child a meter away from the car…

  Kreuzkopf yanked the wheel to the left and pulled the hand brake all the way. The car shook and the gashed roadway threw up dust, but the right headlight struck the child and his head split open at the cranial sutures. Thick blood poured over his shirt. His long eyelashes drooped down to half cover his undamaged eyes, and his plump crimson lips formed a bow that would never again be untied.

  Kreuzkopf grew numb at the suffering that tore his body. In distress and fighting the dark despair surrounding him, he cried out, jumped from the car, and fell to the child’s corpse. It was quiet all around. The engine was silent and the city in the distance gave off an even hum.

  Kreuzkopf stood up, lifted the child in his arms, and laid the body in the car. It was a boy. His cap had the word “Ocean” written on it. The blood clotted and the bleeding stopped. The boy was about five years old.

  Kreuzkopf started the car and slowly pulled away, looking for the mother with his eyes while driving around potholes so as not to shake the little body. But there was no one around. Kreuzkopf threw off his cap and sped away, giving the speedometer needle a sharp jolt. And tears mixed with dust rolled down his face in dirty streams. He wept with his chest pressed against the wheel. The child’s small body flopped from the seat to the floor and shuddered from the shaking, as if having convulsions.

  Kreuzkopf turned onto a side road and quickly stopped the car. There was a pit next to a boundary marker. He got out of the car with the corpse and laid it in the ready-made grave. The child’s face had now begun to wrinkle, and the slightly open eyes had grown white and rolled back. Kreuzkopf took some water out of the radiator and washed him clean, then quietly kissed him on his clean lips, as bitter tears again washed the boy’s face again.

  “I will never forget you, my dear, warm boy…,” Kreuzkopf whispered, sore with sorrow like a burning fire. He cut off a lock of light hair an
d took it for himself along with the “Ocean” cap, then filled in the grave using tools from the car’s kit. After filling in the pit he felt such longing for the boy that he wanted to dig him out.

  “I will atone for you, dear boy,” he whispered, then went to the car. “Forget Erna! From now on my eternal tenderness will rest here!”

  Kreuzkopf noted the location of the grave and set off. He drove slowly, pressing the Ocean hat and the tress of fine blond hair to the wheel with his hand.

  Back at the garage Kreuzkopf got his salary advance and left for the city. He bought an evening newspaper, hoping to find the name of the boy, and in it he found: “His parents are pleading… he left the house at six in the morning… his name is Goga… four and a half years old, blond, very friendly, wearing a cap that said “Ocean”… the Rompa beet farm… Mr. Femm, director…”

  “Goga Femm,” Kreuzkopf whispered. “But what can I do? His mother will die if I tell her he’s been crushed by a car!”

  Friday arrived. Kreuzkopf went to the Central Science and Technology Commission to defend his project and was successful. He argued and fought desperately, and held the dead boy in his memory.

  The Commission passed the project and it went to the government. It would be at least a month before he knew the result.

  Kreuzkopf continued breaking in cars, and killed time in the evenings at the movies or in aimless wanderings along the seething streets.

  At one point a letter came from Erna, who had somehow discovered his address: “Peter, I’ve married an engineer named Nimt. Before the New Year we will be leaving for Brussels. It would be nice to see you as a friend sometime. One cannot erase the past all at once. We will be in the capital from 20 to 25 August, staying at the Hotel Mayon. They tell me you are quite unhappy and that you’re working as a driver. If you will permit me, I can ask my husband to remove any obstacles in the way of your career. I certainly know you to be a very talented man. Write back to me in Carbomort. Erna.” Kreuzkopf wrote nothing in response, naturally.