Red Star Tales Read online

  “The whole world” came to the launch site of the Lunar Bomb. The government was in no mood for superfluous expenses, so it limited itself to construction of a huge circus arena around the structure.

  Kreuzkopf pondered. It was the tenth of March and the launch date was coming soon. If equipment were added to the Bomb to produce oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide, a person could go up with it. After all, the flight was only to last eighty-one hours.

  Kreuzkopf appealed to the Science Office for Lunar Research, stating his desire to fly to the Moon on the Bomb, and argued in detail for the utility of adding a living person to the Bomb.

  The Science Office sent Kreuzkopf’s appeal to the Government, which rejected it. Kreuzkopf wrote a second appeal: “The Government did not purchase the patent for the Lunar Bomb from me, and I, Kreuzkopf, remain the only person who knows the details of the design. I do not give my permission for my invention to be placed into operation, and, in practical terms, no one will know how to activate it properly without me. I, Kreuzkopf, also refuse to accept any monetary compensation. I exchange my compensation for the chance to fly in the Bomb.”

  According to the patent laws in effect in the country, Kreuzkopf was perfectly right. He had left the government no way out, and it gave consent for him to board the Lunar Bomb.

  The news of Kreuzkopf’s flight on the Lunar Bomb caused a stir in society. But soon everyone decided that this was a dramatic suicidal gesture. On 19 March, at eight o’clock in the evening, Kreuzkopf boarded the Bomb. Kreuzkopf boarded and the missile was sealed at the workshop, after which the missile was taken at once to the disk. Kreuzkopf thereby deflected public attention away from himself. By ten o’clock the entire arena, out to the very last tiers, was full.

  There was abundant lighting and music, vendors sold water, kvass and ice cream, and taxi cabs waited on duty – the usual accompaniment to a rare event.

  Three minutes before astronomical midnight they started rotating the disk. The electric engine roared. Five giant fans sent whole clouds of cold air through the motor as it hummed and heated up, and the air flew out the other side dry, harsh, and scorching, like a desert cyclone. The oil in the machines was cooled with icy sprays from turbine pumps, and still an acrid smoke hovered around the disk and the whole structure. The bearings were heated to excess, and oil burned in ice.

  Despite its precise placement and flawless installation, the disk rumbled like artillery and a volcanic eruption, so great was the number of revolutions. Smoke came from the edge of the disk, which was starting to burn from air friction.

  Nimt was numb with fear: the slightest failure of the tiny detaching device at this moment would cause an untold catastrophe: the disk was operating in the vicinity of hundreds of thousands of living spectators…

  The meter was now showing the number of rotations required for launch: 946,000 per minute. A half-second remained before the missile would detach from the disk. At 24:00 the astronomical clock would connect the current controlling the detacher. This device would release the Bomb from the disk, and the Bomb would take flight due to the kinetic force it had accumulated during its time on the disk.

  Nimt set the rotation controller to maintain speed: the calculated rate had been reached.

  The beacons on the launch pad started shining at once: the signal that the Bomb had taken flight. No one noticed the moment of the launch itself. The missile’s initial speed was incomprehensibly high, and human sensation is powerless when the technological spirit of humanity breaks nature.

  The disk continued to turn from inertia after Nimt disconnected it from the driving clutch plate. Only four hours later was it possible to stop the rotation using the full force of the magnetic brakes’ death grip.

  Around fifteen thousand spectators lost their hearing, and another ten thousand sustained some sort of nerve contusions. No one had expected to see such a wild, impassioned elemental force, roaring like judgment day, in the form of a technological device.

  7. MESSAGES FROM INTERPLANETARY SPACE

  The Lunar Bomb was equipped with a specially designed radio. This radio was to be used for receiving messages from Kreuzkopf roughly every hour (Kreuzkopf could not have a watch), and the waves from the radio could be used to determine the interplanetary position of the Bomb from Earth.

  All information from Kreuzkopf was received by the Office of Lunar Research in the person of Lesuren himself, and it was Lesuren who personally performed all the calculations of the Bomb’s position and carried out the tracking of it.

  The journalists had been paid for the special editions and were now turning their money into beer. However, the first day after the launch one newspaper did present an article on Kreuzkopf entitled “In Search of a Grave,” which foretold the destruction of both Kreuzkopf and the Lunar Bomb.

  Here are Kreuzkopf’s reports from interplanetary space, in sequential order:

  Nothing to report. The instruments show a coal black sky. The stars are unbelievably bright. There was weak friction between the missile and something else. The instruments could not find the cause. I feel free. I am reading a book called Manor House by Andrei Novikov, which I happen to have brought. It’s an interesting work.

  A lot of blue flame passed by the Lunar Bomb. I can’t say the reason. There was no increase in temperature.

  The flight continues. I feel no movement, of course. The instruments and equipment are working. Send my greetings to Skorb in Aldagan.

  The Moon is falling on my Bomb. A small fireball sped by parallel to the missile in the same direction. The Lunar Bomb passed it.

  The Bomb is moving in sharp bursts. Strange forces are contorting its path, tossing it up and down, and making it very hot, though there should be only ether all around.

  The bursts are getting stronger. I can feel the movement. The instruments are ringing from the vibration. The landscape of the universe looks like a painting by the long dead Čiurlionis: the stars are crying out in the cosmic ocean.

  The oscillation continues. The stars are physically rattling as they tear along their paths. Their movement is, of course, agitating the electromagnetic environment, and my universal radio receiver is turning the waves into songs. Report that I am at the source of earthly poetry: someone on Earth conjectured about celestial symphonies and excitedly wrote verse. Tell people that the song of stars has a physical existence. And tell them that there is a symphony here, not a cacophony. Send as many people as possible up on interplanetary bombs to the heavens: it’s frightful, exciting, and everything makes sense. Invent receivers for this celestial sound.

  The flight is calm now, no shaking. Half of space is filled with purple rays that flow like moisture. What this is I do not know.

  I have discovered an electromagnetic ocean all around.

  There is no hope of returning to Earth. I am flying in a blue dawn. The instruments measure the electricity in the environment at 80,000 volts.

  The Moon is approaching. Voltage is 2 million. Darkness.

  An abyss of electricity. The instruments are in chaos. Fantastic things happening. The sun is roaring and small comets screech as they run by: you can’t see or hear anything through the mica of the atmosphere.

  Clouds of meteors. Judging by the shining, and by the electromagnetic effects, they are metal. Fires or lights are shining on the larger meteors, shining with a flickering light. I’ve seen nothing shaking here.

  The environment of the electromagnetic waves where I am has the property of evoking within me powerful, irresistible, and uncontrolled thoughts. I cannot cope with this whispering. I’m no longer in control of my own brain, though I’m fighting it so much I’m sweating heavily. But I can’t think what I want to or about what I want to, I keep thinking of what I do not know, I remember events, breaks in clouds, the sun bursting through – I remember everything as if it occurred and is true, but none of this happened to me. I am thinking of two distinct subjects awaiting me on a rugged hill where there are two decayed pillars with f
rozen milk on them. I continually want to drink and save my canned food. I nibble at a fish, but want to eat a whole shark. I am trying to conquer these thoughts born from electricity that penetrate into my brain like lice into a sleeping body.

  I just returned from steep mountains where I saw a world of mummies lying in ragged grass… [Signals unintelligible – Lesuren]. Everything is clear: the Moon is 100 kilometers away. Its effect on my brain is terrifying. My thoughts are not my own. They are induced by the Moon. Do not consider what I said before sane. I am lying here a pale body: the Moon is continually feeding me incandescent mental power. It seems as if the missile is thinking as well, and the radio is murmuring comprehensibly of its own accord.

  The Moon is passing by at forty kilometers: desert, dead mineral, and platinum haze. I am passing by slowly, no more than fifty kilometers per hour, judging by eye.

  The Moon has hundreds of cracks. A sparse green or blue gas is coming out of these cracks… I have regained control of myself and have acclimated.

  The gas is coming out of some of the cracks like a maelstrom. Is this a natural element or the mind of a living being? Probably a mind. The moon is one enormous, monstrous brain.

  I cannot figure out the reasons for the eruptions of gas. It seems I will have to open the hatch of my Bomb and jump out. It will be easier for me. I’m going blind in the darkness inside the missile, and I am tired of seeing the wide open expanse of the universe only through the peepholes of instruments.

  I am going inside the clouds of lunar eruptions. Millennia have passed since I separated from the Earth. Are the people to whom I am signaling these words still alive? Can you hear me? [19 hours have passed since Kreuzkopf took off – Lesuren.]

  The Moon is beneath me. My Bomb is descending. The cracks in the Moon are emitting gas. I cannot hear the passage of the stars anymore.

  Tell everyone, tell them that people have been horribly mistaken. The world is not what they know it to be. Can you not see the disaster in the Milky Way: there is a roaring blue cross-stream. It is not a nebula or a star cluster…

  The Bomb is descending. I am opening the hatch to find a way out. Farewell.

  First published in Russian: 1926

  Translation by Keith Blasing

  YURI DOLGUSHIN

  1939

  RAYS OF LIFE

  (EXCERPT)

  Chapter 17: “The Curve Shoots Upwards”

  Among the various instruments that were helping to bring Anna back to life, there was one whose function did not become clear to Nikolai until later. It seemed to be an ordinary electrocardiogram, an instrument for measuring the heartbeat. It consisted of a small box with a round eye that glowed green, and inside the green was a dark shadow in the shape of a butterfly. By observing the pulsations of the butterfly’s wings, one could follow the heart’s “action current,” as Ridan called it.

  In and of itself, this apparatus did not present any particular mystery: its construction, which was based on the principle of cathode oscillations, was clear. The beats of the heart were transmitted to the machine by two wires, which were in turn attached to electrodes glued to either side of the chest cavity.

  The device had been turned on as soon as they took Anna out of the cylinder and laid her on the operating table. By that time, over three days had passed since the moment of her death. Yet immediately the cardiograph’s “butterfly” had started to furl and unfurl her trembling wings. In this dead, immobile heart a charged electrical life was still pulsing. Therefore, the heart wasn’t completely dead! Some kind of life was still there after all!

  Now Nikolai started to understand Ridan’s musings about “real” and “false” death. What we are used to calling death is not really death. It’s just a pause. The remarkable scientist Bakhmetyev, working with anabiosis, was right: an organism that has been struck down by death is actually like a clock, whose pendulum has been stopped by a hand.1 All you need to do is push the pendulum, and the clock starts to tick again. Ridan took this concept even further.

  “Real, irrevocable death arrives only at the moment when the proteins that make up living tissue fall apart,” he reiterated. “If that hasn’t happened yet, then life can be resurrected. If the cause of death is the destruction of one of the organs – whether a lung, a heart, or a stomach, then that organ can be removed and replaced with a new, healthy one, often taken from an animal – and the whole organism will live again. That’s the theory. And we have already advanced to the practical application of theory. We were able to do so thanks to the ‘conserving apparatus’ that you, Nikolai, have invented. Soon we will arrive at a time when death ‘by accident,’ that is, by the failing of this or that organ, will no longer exist. We will create reserves of live organs that are ready to function, and we will use them as necessary, just as today we use the preserved blood of those who have died for transfusions to those who are still living. Futhermore, Nikolai Arsentievich, I am certain that this very condition, which up until now we called death – and rushed to bury or burn the body – we will come to understand as the opposite: one of the most powerful healing methods at our disposal.”

  “What?” said Nikolai, who was completely taken aback by this progression in Ridan’s prognosis. “We are going to heal by death?”

  “Yes, heal by death. The dead can’t be sick. All illnesses depend on the functioning of living organisms. Temporary death, with very few exceptions, closes down all bodily functions and cuts off everything that feeds the pathological process. It stops the disease.”

  “And when the person is resurrected, and bodily functions resume, the illness will pick up where it left off?”

  “No. Once the pathological process has been cut off, an external force or infection is required to restart the process. A functioning organism is only capable of supporting illness, it can’t initiate it.”

  In these conversations, Nikolai was always deeply struck by the novelty of Ridan’s ideas. Ridan’s fanatical faith in the power of human reason was contagious. Nikolai needed this inspiring faith now more than ever, because when he was left alone with his own thoughts, he was ready to fall back into doubt and despair, to lose hope again.

  Another night and another day had passed since the last little golden sparks of happiness had danced in Nikolai’s heart, which was darkened by doubts. He had hoped that it would be just a few more moments – and Anna would look up at him, smile, and recognize his love, which he had for so long kept hidden both from her and from himself….

  None of that had happened. For days Anna lay on the operating table with a beating heart and quietly breathing chest – yet still as immobile as ever, still completely lifeless. As before, her eyelids were slightly opened, but they only fluttered in response to a touch. There were no signs of consciousness.

  “What is happening?” asked Nikolai, with a despairing glance at Ridan.

  “Nothing,” he said, and Nikolai sensed the same sense of anxiety in his voice. “We’ll have to wait…” Ridan looked for any opportunity to distract himself from the doubts that threatened to overcome him, so he talked, and talked… “In the animals that I brought back to life after a ten-minute death, the brain resumed its functions within seven or eight minutes. Simka the ape was also dead for about ten minutes, but it took twenty hours for him to come back to consciousness. I think that the more complex the brain of the organism, the more deeply its cells are damaged by carbon-dioxide poisoning at death. After all, death is accompanied by the cessation of oxygen to the brain, oxygen that the blood conveys from the lungs to the brain. It’s quite possible that the brain of a person takes much longer to restore. We’ll have to wait…”

  At nine in the evening, Natasha telephoned to the operating room to say that Vikling had arrived.

  “Ah, Vikling!” answered Ridan. “Take him to the cafeteria, I’ll be there shortly.”

  Nikolai had expected this call and followed Professor Ridan.

  “Are you really thinking of meeting with Vikling?” he
asked.

  “Of course.”

  “No, Konstantin Alexandrovich, you will not go. I’m sorry, but this part of the set-up has been vouchsafed to me. Everything is prepared, and your appearance is not part of the program. It would be insane to subject you to this danger. Vikling is perfectly aware that Anna’s life is in your hands, and, at the last minute, if he sees that he can’t save himself, he may do something unexpected.”

  “Sure, maybe,” Ridan shrugged, “meeting with him does not exactly flatter me.”

  Meanwhile, in the cafeteria, the silent drama was already starting to unfold.

  Natasha had been initiated into our secret a few days earlier. Since then, she had mostly stopped crying, but her mood had grown darker. A feeling of insult had compounded her pain: why had Ridan hidden from her what he was doing with Anna until now?

  When Nikolai explained everything to her and told her that Anna was still breathing, Natasha looked mistrustfully at him with her dark, searching eyes; then, with sudden comprehension, she laughed, threw herself at Nikolai and sobbed on his chest. This was happiness, and from that moment on, her grief disappeared. Without any hesitations or doubts, she was immediately convinced that Anna would return to life, and everything would be as it was before.

  When Nikolai told her about Vikling’s arrival, her emotions boiled to the surface just as violently.

  “I sensed this would happen! I hated him from the very beginning! How could you all have believed him, when in his every movement and every word, something rings false!

  She triumphantly swore to Nikolai that she would not give herself away in even the slightest gesture as she welcomed Vikling. And now she was leading him into the cafeteria.

  “Please, have a seat, Alfred.”