The Chronocide Mission. Lloyd Biggle jr.

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СКАЧАТЬ and—after glancing about for sniggering practical jokers and seeing none—Kuznetsov decided he had better get back to the dorm and study. Then came a tremendous jerk, like having a chair pulled from under him at the same instant that a truck hit him, and he almost lost consciousness. He landed with a painful bump and skidded for a short distance along a very rough wood floor. He still held his open jackknife in his hand.

      For a moment he sat gazing about him dazedly. He had been abruptly translated from his seat on the ground in a pleasant park on a lovely spring day to a seat on a wood floor in a large, dim room with a thunderstorm raging outside. He had a distinct impression that the two scenes had been linked by an earthquake. He tried hard to focus his thoughts, staring first at a table where a candle burned brightly and then at an animal tied to one of the table’s legs by a short leash. It was another hairy pig. He raised his eyes to the room’s two small, water-streaked windows and saw nothing beyond but branches swaying in a strong wind.

      There was only one other person in the room, and he was staring at Kuznetsov with profound astonishment. He was elderly and wizened, with a deeply wrinkled face and amusing tufts of hair scattered about his overly large head. His skin had a mildly oriental, or perhaps a southern European, tinge. He wore white clothing and a white apron, and he smoothed the apron with nervous fingers while his mouth worked soundlessly.

      Finally he produced words. He mouthed them strangely and ran them together, and Kuznetsov’s impression was of a wholly alien language.

      “Where am I?” Kuznetsov demanded.

      Again the man spoke unintelligible sounds. Kuznetsov struggled unsuccessfully to make a meaningful arrangement of them. Another repetition, and the sounds began to suggest a blurred question. “Who are you?”

      Kuznetsov looked about him perplexedly. He knew who he was, and he also knew his identity would mean nothing to this character. He wanted to know where he was, and how he had got there, and why. He had been sitting on the grass in the park, and a hairy pig landed in his lap, and immediately after he released it, the jerk hit him. Now he was somewhere else.

      He didn’t want to believe it. He started the thought again and went through the sequence slowly, wondering whether any part of it could have been cause and effect. Then he went through it a third time. He had been sitting on the grass in the park, and the next thing he knew . . .

      His mind seized on the strangely placid animal that was tied to the table leg. An identical hairy pig had landed in his lap. That could only mean it had come from here, after which—perhaps in an attempt to recover it—this old villain had snatched Kuznetsov instead. He didn’t want to believe that, either, but surely the pig tied to the table was the spitting piggish image of the strangely hairy one Kuznetsov had released in the park.

      He got to his feet. He towered over the stooped old man, holding his open jackknife like a weapon. The forceful anger he displayed was genuine. “Send me back!” he demanded sternly.

      The old man’s features continued to register astonishment.

      “Your pig landed in my lap,” Kuznetsov said accusingly.

      “Peeg?”

      Kuznetsov pointed. “Pig. That’s a pig. One just like it landed in my lap. The next thing I knew, I was here. Send me back.”

      The old man suddenly became articulate. His jabbered response engulfed Kuznetsov like an rampaging Niagara. Any meaning his words carried was swept along on the same current, and both words and meaning washed over Kuznetsov unintelligibly. Finally Kuznetsov put an end to the torrent by shouting at the top of his voice. He didn’t know where he was, or why, but he had already decided he didn’t like it.

      “Send me back!” he demanded again. “Back. Where I came from.” Then, as he began to grasp the full implications of his predicament, he modified his tone. “Please send me back.”

      The old man seemed to understand. He walked to the far corner of the room. Staring after him into the dim light, Kuznetsov made out something that looked like an enormous, crudely built photographic enlarger. On the floor, a series of concentric circles had been burned into the wood, and these were divided into segments by chalk lines, some of which had been partially obliterated by Kuznetsov’s sliding entrance. The old man stood Kuznetsov in the central circle. Then he brought a short wood stepladder, climbed up to his apparatus, and began fussing with it. Kuznetsov had the sensation of having landed in a perverted Hollywood hodgepodge that blended Frankenstein and The Wizard of Oz, and it wouldn’t have surprised him if the old man had next handed him a bottle labeled, “Drink me,” but he stood waiting patiently.

      The old man climbed down again, pushed the ladder aside, and took a dangling cord in his hand. He looked preposterously like an old-time photographer about to take a picture with an overhead, sadly obsolescent camera. He pulled the cord.

      Kuznetsov screamed. His instinctive leap as the wave of torment swept over him probably saved his life. He collapsed on the floor a short distance away, writhing in unendurable agony. The intense pain quickly swept him into unconsciousness.

      The agony persisted for days. He floated in a delirium of pain. His bones ached, his head throbbed, his ears rang, and his vision seemed blurred and distorted. He felt as though he had been flayed, and any hand, any finger that touched his flesh was a dagger stabbing him viciously. A woman came and went, and her hideously misshapen face gave Kuznetsov nightmares about being condemned to live forever in a world of grotesque distortions. Then the old man came, and his face was as Kuznetsov remembered it. Kuznetsov’s vision was normal. The old woman’s face really was hideously deformed.

      Words were spoken to him, or spoken in his presence, and as time passed, some of them began to make sense. Even as he struggled out of the all-enveloping fog of pain, his mind was subconsciously learning or adapting to a language. There were familiar words pronounced differently and unfamiliar words that sounded confusingly familiar, and gradually he got them sorted out. Kuznetsov wasn’t good at languages, and the ease with which he assimilated this one seemed proof enough that it was somehow related to English.

      His systematic study began with his quest for a date. It had been March 24, 2001 when he went to the park. When he began to recover, he wanted to know how long he had been delirious.

      “Month” should have been an easy place to start, but the old man failed to recognize the word. Neither could Kuznetsov discover an equivalent for “March,” or “April” or any other month, or for “year,” or “week.”

      Learning words for table and chair, for clothing, for food was easy. Kuznetsov pointed; the old man said the word. It was his attempt to relate the calendar he was familiar with to whatever system the old man used that tantalized and frustrated him. Winter, spring, summer, fall or autumn apparently had no analogies. Not until he accidentally happened on the word for “season,” which was “esun,” did he begin to make progress.

      The calendar in this strange civilization was closely tied to the agricultural year. There were seasons of planting, of growing, of harvesting, and of resting, named Plao, Gero, Haro, and Reso. With that beginning, he was able to form an outline, and the old man quickly filled in the blanks once he understood what Kuznetsov wanted.

      The year began—or ended—with a five day holiday, six days every fourth year, that undoubtedly had originated as a period of supplication to the gods for prosperity in the year to come. Kuznetsov was in no way surprised to discover that the original religious basis for the festival had been all but forgotten, and it had degenerated into five or six days of dissipation. Then came the first season, Plao, the season of planting, starting early in the March of Kuznetsov’s time reference. Each СКАЧАТЬ