Creature of unknown kind

– Hey you, youngster! – said Bashkalo from the stalls in the same calm tone, and not moving. – He's gone crazy, I mean it. For a long time the rumor was spreading around the quarantine, that Kolya Petrovich has gone crazy. He goes to missions with a group and comes back alone. And, you see, he says, that they stopped imprisoning people for this. They began to believe what people say. “Died performing a rescue or reconnaissance operation in the area of a natural disaster of unknown kind.” And he is telling this now to you and me. Understand, goose? Listen, Nikolaich, I didn't believe this! – said Bashkalo to Petrovich. – I hit one in his face for these words. You know me, Nikolaich, we served in the same military unit! And this is how it turns out. It turns out this is true. Came out with a group, came back alone. Did you kill them yourself? Or had you brought them here and leave?

– Do you refuse to carry out a military order regarding a scientific investigation of this anomaly? – Petrovich asked persistently. – Talk to me straight, why are you fidgeting like a woman, you comrade Ensign of the Soviet army?

– Comrade Senior Ensign! Allow me to go! – said Vadim.

Bashkalo licked his lips.

– Call me “Nikolaich”, youngster, – said Petrovich.

– All right, Nikolaich, all right. I will go, – said Bashkalo. – Everything is fine. But I need to treat the hand with peroxide. Look how it is grazed.

– Then stand up, comrade Ensign. Prepare for the task. Personally yours.

And he turned his back to Bashkalo as if nothing had happened and came to the “procrust” boundary, which was only clear to him. The remains of the scientist were just a step away.

– I remember everything, Alex, everything… – said Petrovich to them. – Hey you, Fenimore! Listen, newbie, what was that.., Sverzhin, be attentive. This… What the fuck was it called? This gitik! According to Alex's calculations it is doubled. It stands in the shape of eight, two glasses back to back. Two zeros. Give me my stick, youngster.

Vadim picked up the stick, handed it over. Ensign Bashkalo also approached, hanging the rifle on his shoulder, tense, attentive, very concentrated. Vadim sneezed as his approached.

The Senior Ensign was drawing on the ground with the end of a brush.

– Here's how that is. This “zero” is – the closest one. Has been founded by Alex. And here's how the second one is located by the first. I'd found it during the first mission when I walked around the heavy one. Like an “eight” on its side. They are only ten meters in diameter each and both are the same. You can bypass it on the left using the “risks”. It is safe. I did it before. Have I already said that? And here, between them, I've noticed the traction, like in a good furnace. It starts at throwing the “risk”. Pulling smoke somewhere. How much we had burned there…

He slipped the stick to Vadim, took out his wallet from one of his pockets, and from the wallet – a piece of a comb, a piece of paper and, continuing to talk, he quickly made a smoke pot.

– And Alex ascertained that where the joint and traction are between these “procrustes”, something strange is present. By appearance – it is the effect of “invisibility”, with air-to-air special effects, with oxygen, with gas. A step forward – there is something, a step back – you don't see anything. Hocus-pocus, as I showed you, Sverzhin, with the “risks” and the fog. “Risks” just disappear in the hole, but nothing thumps as it would if they fell in the heavy stuff, nothing like this. And then Alex thought of throwing “a cat” in there and pulling it back out.

Vadim (“Fenimore, or already Fenimore with a capital F? Huh?”, leaned out Mumbler) was listening to Petrovich as he used to listen to cosmonaut Makarov. Madness is infectious and contagious, and Senior Ensign Petrovich, Nikolai Nikolaevich, judging by his tone and appearance, was now completely out of his mind, like everyone who creates (or imagines he does) a story or a feat.

This time, the wrapper of a cigarette pack, glued on the sides with a blue electrical tape, appeared from Petrovich's wallet. Petrovich first showed it to Vadim, then handed it to him. In the wrapper Vadim saw a dry, bluish flower and the curved stalk of some plant with sharp leaves on it. He stared at Petrovich. Petrovich grinned.

– Bennettit! Did you understand, my Fenimore? An ancient flower, shortly. And even more precisely – a protoflower. That's what we took out with that “cat”. Live protoflower. I personally saw Alex drank two bottles161 like water. Two hundred million years ago… or whenever it was. The Cretaceous of the Jurassic, did you understand, son?.. In this hole is the Cretaceous! Understand?

He suddenly cut himself off, stopped smiling and lifted a finger, and said anxiously.

– Oh! Do you hear? There is a shooting somewhere.

“Somewhere” nearby the fuse had flipped.

Vadim would remember forever that after the first hit, the smile returned to the face of the Senior Ensign, and each of the next four bullets that pierced Petrovich from the back made this smile wider, more cheerful, more sincere.

– There is a time hole, did you understand, son? – said Petrovich, gurgling and dying. – I myself… oh… uh… like water…

And he died and fell on his side, as if at attention.

Bashkalo transferred the smoking pupil of the machine gun to Vadim. Vadim stepped from foot to foot. Bashkalo barked quietly:

– Freeze, sonny! He'd gone crazy. He deserved it. And got it. He's dead. That's all! And now you. A question! How should I finish you, bitch, immediately next to him or with a benefit for science? Huh, contract boy? Want to suffer a bit more? It's up to you, I'll provide that. And meanwhile, put the rifle on the ground slowly. And the twig, throw away the twig too. F-Fenimore, fucking bitch!

Darkness was looking at Vadim with no blinking, with no trembling, the smoke had faded away, Bashkalo's hands were firm, and Petrovich was not killed in hysterics; and he was ready to kill Vadim clearly and consciously. Actually, the lecture about “went out with a group, came back alone” he had read to himself, not to Petrovich. Now they don't imprison you. Vadim sneezed. “You will not die”, Mumbler told to Vadim. You cannot. You have girls. Irka and Katty. And Zhitkur did not order this.

– Don't shoot, comrade Ensign, – Vadim said calmly.

– Or what? – Bashkalo asked oddly, lifted his chin.

– Or then no one will pull living plants out of the hole, which have been dead for two hundred million years. I can't even imagine how much they may cost. Even if paid a penny for a year.

Bashkalo snorted. Vadim sneezed.

– Cheers to you, bitch! – said Bashkalo with a twitch. He was really calm; excited, but not rabid. He was working. – Everything is possible in the Zone, you're right. Piss, not war! Five-storey buildings fly, air cuts people, equipment operates itself. You can walk a kilometer in a month, like at the airdrome, from hangar-three to meteorological booth. And why not to visit the time hole? Science fiction. But if you, Fenimore, don't put the rifle on the damp mother-earth right now, arsehole…

Vadim moved his shoulder, the rifle slipped, balanced against his leg. Vadim moved his leg; the rifle fell.

Bashkalo's cap nodded approvingly. But the rifle did not move; as if it was cast into space. Vadim was already too tired not to blink, his eyes were stinging.

– And everything else. The backpack, the jacket. The knife, the gun. Slowly. Take off your gas mask too.

Watching the disarming of the survivor, Bashkalo sat down on the Alex the Aspirant's chair. Vadim also wanted to sit. But the KHM together with its owner was watching his slightest movement and the fuse was off. The scientist’s chair seemed strong. Bashkalo sat carefully first, but when Vadim was removing a device for measuring the parameters, Bashkalo somehow tested the strength of the chair and, moving the ass, sat freely, spreading his legs, with his whole center of gravity. The distance between him and Vadim was equal to four good spittles, but just as Petrovich's corpse was lying across the directory, so was Vadim's equipment. Only Bruce Lee would be able to jump over this all, dodging the oncoming bullets. By the method of “combined shooting”.

Vadim’s clothes were a blend of wool, with the stockings of the hazmat suit over the celebrated American shoes. He was cold, but he stood motionless, waiting. He was freezing, trying not to tremble. He was sniffing and (already habitually) moving his fingers at the hips, at least so checking the external situation. He sneezed twice, not because of the cold, but because Bashkalo was making his nose itch stronger. Bashkalo suddenly took out a bottle of vodka from somewhere, uncorked it and began to sip gently from the bottleneck, watching Vadim with one eye. Vadim shivered when the bottle became empty. Bashkalo dropped it in front of him and deftly crushed it with a heel.

– Want some? – he asked, taking out the second. – Vodka in the Motherland is really like water, but to you – according to the circumstances – even water is not superfluous.

– No.

– “No, sir”, Anika-warrior. You had to say “no” at home, to your mother. So if it's “no” then get on with the task. Assigned by the heroically fallen Senior Ensign. Let's see what there is for two hundred million… pennies.

– I need to take something, – said Vadim, pointing to Petrovich's corpse, pretty drenched in blood.

– No question, take it, – Bashkalo pressed the bottom of the half-empty second bottle into the ground and aimed, holding the machine gun with both hands.

The dead, Alex the Aspirant and Petrovich, had been absolutely right. Several flares marked the shape of “eight” of the “gitiks” perfectly, as in the class. Smelly smoke was being blown along the boundaries of “locations of anomalous gravitational intensities of unknown kind”, clearly denoting them.

– Two hundred million pennies… Some crooked junior science employee gets four thousand one hundred and eighty-five rubles per month! – proclaimed Bashkalo suddenly from somewhere from another world. There too, a thought process was ongoing, gaining momentum, being born, coming to conclusions and finding the general meaning of things. But Vadim did not even turn around, mesmerized by the almost living twists of smoke. It was akin (not the same, but akin) to the drawing of tobacco smoke in the sun, peeking through the cracks in the dark shed.

– And he sits in his tents – clicks on the scores, did you understand?! Damned JR! Call me formally by name and patronymic, he says… And what about an academic then – a hundred thousand per month? I beat the shit out of their mother together with your Gorbachev! Who marks the tracks? An academic? Who carries devices and cables? JRs? Who carries jars, funnels, loots inside and out? Gorbachev? Fu-cking no! Me! I went out to the airfield, I went to the “Zhitkur” object, reached up to halfway together with Pasha-Maz! (Here Vadim picked up his ears for a second. “Yes-yes-yes”, said Mumbler, “'Pasha-Maz'. I wrote down.”) And to me, to me! – two hundred rubles with deductions for the work. Where round here should I spend it? Quarantine? Fuck your quarantine.

“And maybe”, thought Vadim, appealing to Mumbler, “this is not two gitiks but one?” “Or a system of two”, picked up Mumbler. “The system is even probably better”, Vadim agreed. “But when it is the only one – this is flawed”, said Mumbler. “So you're an astronomer”, said Vadim. Mumbler chuckled, self-satisfied. Vadim lit up another couple of pieces of the comb and threw them; one to the right, filling the gap of the smoky hoop, the second directly into the center of the hole. It then disappeared. Vadim stood on a knee, watching. At the junction of two parts of the “eight”, the smoke drew a pipe from the inside, accelerating, getting denser… and suddenly a hefty, upright circle appeared in front of Vadim. Vadim jumped up and back for a couple of steps, completely stunned.

– We have talked to the guys for a long time. Many are unhappy! Because this is not right. We are here, in the Zone, in the middle of the Trouble, the main ones, so you pay us well. And here, you see, you're driven. We teach you, drag you, share the combat experience with you. And here we are now! You are living off us along with the same psychos as our resting Senior Ensign Petrovich. Wanted me to go as a bumper, b-bitch! Me! So “a thousand and a half” goose made sense to him. And me, the old stalker… he decided to appoint me as a bumper in a tough place. And for what? The poles were lost! I did not lose them… So, what's up with you, contract boy? What the hell!

Vadim turned around. Bashkalo was standing, his gun lowered, staring at the smoke arch in space, his jaw hanging as far as the chin strap allowed. However, he recovered faster than Vadim.

– Stop, sto-op! – he said, taking Vadim on sight again. – Calm down, son. Ye-e-es… Fucking gitik! – he exclaimed softly and cheerfully. – The time hole. Well… Fine. Are you ready for work and defense, comrade traveler to the past?

Vadim imagined how Bashkalo saw him, Vadim, in general, so to speak. Against the background of the smoke patterns, in the center of the main arch of the system of gitiks “The Time Hole -1”. A beautiful target. (Mumbler laughed.)

– As for me – I'm ready, – said Vadim loudly, cutting off this laugh, which nobody except him could hear. – And what about you, a chunk, are you ready?

– So you're not a pussy, right? A brave one, right? – said Bashkalo grinning, with pleasure. – Well, say it, say it, bumper. Last speeches. The Senior Ensign Petrovich was kind, but Ensign Bashkalo is evil. No damn way, puppy, you will not understand me. And you did not understand the meaning of the situation. For you it won't make a difference if I was lying as a corpse now and Petrovich was drinking vodka. Do you think he's better than me? He has done in more of ours here than guerillas in his Afghanistan! He was a beast, his soul was dead!

Vadim stopped listening to him. Bashkalo noticed this immediately.

– So you're a brave one, right? – he said over the gunsight. – Well, come on, come on, come on, go ahead… you sensitive leather stocking. Bring me some prehistorical loots, my two-legged cat. Some flowers. Dinosaurs. And will see, what we shall do with you later. But if you don't get out, then you don't. A grenade after you. You don't know, right? Exactly “procrustes” explode very well. How do you think we made it almost halfway to the airfield? So many of these tough places were there… Stand down, – he said to himself. – Come on, Sverzhin. Farewell.

Vadim turned away, looking at the hole, that means looking at the steppe, framed with a smoke frame. “Slowly, try it with your hand first”, timidly suggested Mumbler, who became serious. Vadim shook his head. No. He rummaged around the belt, pulled out another strip of gauze from the clamp.

– Hey, hey, warrior, no jokes!.. – proclaimed Bashkalo expressively.

Vadim showed him the gauze over the shoulder. Bashkalo went silent. Vadim tied several knots at one of the ends, one above the other, put the formed ball in his mouth and began drooling on it. The wet ball weighted the strip rather well for something homemade, making the “risk” manageable, but without a sinker, without a nut. For some reason here and now it seemed important to be iron-free. (The thought about the first one who ran through the second railcar flashed again.) Keeping the “risk” in his outstretched hand, Vadim began to swing it forward and backward. Here the ball touched the hole, like the surface of a vertical puddle, no waves ran, but the gauze immediately stretched out. Vadim unclasped his fingers and the hole sucked it in. And Vadim, without a farewell sigh, bent and stepped after it. And disappeared.

Having waited a moment, ensign Bashkalo licked the mustache, sticky with blood, lowered the barrel of the machine gun and said into space:

– And what now, bitch? Is that all, bitch?

Meanwhile, two hundred million years ago Vadim was smothered by an enormous sun, by overwhelming heavy, damp odors, making his knees weak, knocking him down and tossing at the same time. And he fell with his eyes shut, not painfully but heavily on the left side and left shoulder, as if somebody had snatched him back and thrown him to the left. He knew for sure that he had already fallen, struck the ground, but inside everything continued to fly, to churn, howling with cold in the lower abdomen… and a huge wet rough palm grabbed him in that place between the ears, where the balance control center of the brain is located, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it to another huge wet rough palm. And back. And forth again. And he was aware of all this, with no sign of fainting. His head was ringing clearly, and this ringing clarity was thrown from side to side.

He waited. The panic of the five senses subsided with his eyes shut. Signals from the periphery appeared: “It's wet!”, they informed him. He opened one eye and immediately saw a prehistoric bennettite flower on its stalk, bent in front of his nose. Vadim shook himself up. With one eye open, somehow the head wasn't spinning.

He was sitting in the thickets of Wollemi, his last “flare” was giving off smoke in front of him, dirty gauze strips were hanging on a stems of strange grasses, including his own, the clean one with the ball, wet with drool. There were also a few rusty nuts thrown by Alex the Aspirant. The sun was pressing from above, it was sweltering, the air was bitter, and one had to literally drink it, rather than inhale, so dense it was.

– July 14, 64, 765, 563, 122 BC, – said Mumbler aloud, without hiding. Not two hundred million, but also nice. Please shave, like dad said.

Vadim looked around. Behind him was a pile of some kind of a fern, from which some kind of bamboo tree protruded. Not bamboo. Dinosaur-like, with scales. On the left, in an Ilex's embrasures, which was not focusing in the eyes, glistened either a hairy lake or a Savannah, simply flooded with water. Everything was sparkling unbearably, everything was wet, everywhere were rainbows. On the right there were impenetrable bushes. Not bushes. Something green and impenetrable. The Lost World, the “black” Conan Doyle in eight volumes. All this did not interest Vadim; he had already come to his senses. He was interested in the way out. From here, from this side nothing clearly indicated the time hole, but even in this heat there was a feeling of heavy chill on the sweaty back, cold from the Zone. The hole was there and the hole was open. Vadim was surprised: the temperature difference was very high, dozens of degrees, there must be steam, it should be steaming like bath doors in winter. But there was no steam. Vadim looked at his wet dirty hands. Seemed like he was sitting in the puddle. The ground under his ass was deeply slushy, saturated with wet humus; brown water flooded the dents from his palms right before his eyes. Something buzzed past his face like a slow bullet, Vadim twitched the head away. His vision still could not cope with the general focus, the huge green sunny world fell on its side every time he opened the second eye, the dizziness was still there, as strong as ever… Something in the stomach slurped loudly and gave a nasty taste in his mouth; but it pleased him. “Now I am going to vomit”, thought Vadim, “And it will become easier, as on the “neutral” with the first “kiss”. Yes, yes, it is already getting easier.”

Then it began. He did not have time. The hell knows why “Montana” on his hand started to play.

Tam-ta-tam-ta. Ta-ta-tam. Never let me go. Tam-tadam-tadam…

The first organized melody played on planet Earth, the Solar System, Milky Way, God's World, by the very first tune attracted to the confused, disoriented Vadim the keen attention of a young Triceratops, who had just left his group of hatchlings in the morning of this ancient day. The young Triceratops had gone into the jungle because it was now time for the heroic and dangerous adventure of searching for the mother of his offspring. He was equally scared and uncertain, but male pride was burning at his intimate parts and forcing him on, and he was ready to snack on flint and rape T-Rex females. So, is it possible to blame him for the fact that the squeaking of the watch, inaccurate in its electronic annoyance, and the general light-headedness of the melody infuriated him to the point of “kill immediately, bite!”? The young Torosaurus walked through the Jurassic, looking out for the moos of young females, and here we go – music by Poulton, words by Fosdick, performance by Elvis Presley. Who would not be furious? Everyone would be furious.

Vadim did not immediately distinguish the attacking horned hippo from the surrounding flora. And that actually saved his life, when he finally did, like a bunny on a mysterious picture, and realized that the tenth chapter of “The Lost World” had already begun.

PART ONE

1990. DIFFERENT OFFERS

Archive of Shugpshuits (Book of the Trouble)

File “Blinchuk-4”

A fragment of self decryption, pp. 1-5

(Spelling errors fixed)

(For the previous meetings, we had developed a little communication ritual, I do not want to decipher the reasons behind. Blinchuk, scarcely seeing me and scarcely saying “Hello”, started whining again and again, with the peevishness of a helpless sick man, how it nags at him, on his deathbed, that he never visited the Zone. But he could have. Oh, he could have! His rating would crush any Wobenaka. Or Gena the Genious, now deceased. But it didn't work out. And even now, when it doesn't matter anymore, the evil troublers, trackers, they are also selfish smugglers, and related others – the little boozers, the clumsy beggars, and border-hoppers, allowed him to go only to the “neutral”. But he still didn't reach the exit, he was banned. He, who had been working as a god of the Perimeter for fifteen years! And here is your regard, here is your glory. And what is he supposed to do, whom to ask so that he will at least be buried there, in the Trouble. In the park of the Old Tens. That is his dying wish. If only you, comrade writer, could put in a word for me before your aliens. It is not the Ass, his former subordinate and protégé, that the old General and Major Blinchuk should ask. And so on so forth.)

– Sergey Borisovich, this is now the third time you're trying to wring a tear from me, saying how unfortunate you are, nobody needs you, old retired General-Major; damned Maloroslikov pranked you, the bloody Putin hadn't given a hand.

– And what, is it so hard for you to listen to the whining of a dying man once again? I should have finished you, such an insensitive shit you are, right at the moment you appeared in my Pre-Zone on April 6th, 1998 on a thirteen-hour bus. I would have sent someone, and – you would be finished like a gnat. Actually, get out of here! Now I'll call Dr. Vyatkin, and he'll expose you. Doctor Vyatki-in! Come here!

– For the third time, Sergei Borisovich. This is already recorded and will not disappear.

– Got out of it. Well, give me some water.

(Drinks)

– So they set me up as the Commandant at the Trouble in 1990. In November. After the putsch, the mess, the bickering, that time I was a Colonel. And then Pasha Grachev called me from Ukraine, and… And until the end, until the fifteenth, until last year… Did you at least know this, writer?

– The whole world knows this, Sergey Borisovich. But the putsch was in 91. And you were appointed as a Commandant of the Zone in 1990. By the Gorbachev’s decree.

(Pause)

– You know what? Fuck you, smart ass!

(Drinks)

– The whole world… I did my job badly if the whole world knows me!

(Drinks)

– On the other hand, though I was like the Governor-General… How can you not know me… And everybody knew… Ones who needed to know and who didn't need to… So, I didn't tell you yesterday, I didn't tell you the day before, but I will tell you today. I was, Shug… pshug… pshuitz… Stierlitz171, damn it! I have been watching you carefully, from that day, when you came to my Pre-Zone on a fake visa. Ufologist-conspirator! I know exactly who you are. That's why I agreed to talk to you, as I'm dying. I know that the “troublers” trust you, that the trackers care of you and that you had your hands on the Trouble Radio and saved many in the Trouble through this matter. And that you're kind of a priest-confessor here… Although you're a boor.