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"Youth Technique" 1968 No.10, p.7-11.
**имо «Илиады» и «Одиссеи»...
Past the works of Strabo, Eratosthenes, Plutarch, Suetonius, Flavius, Herodotus...
Past the first editions of Russian chronicles...
Past the ancient tomes, where under leather bindings — narratives about the extinguished civilizations of ancient Egypt, Phoenicia, Mesopotamia, Tibet...
Past the latest editions of Wells, Belyaev, Bradbury, Shekley, Kuttner...
Past the solid works on anthropology, medicine, philosophy, astronomy, quantum mechanics, navigation...
This is how he walks around his office, as if measuring the pages of his own books with huge strides.
Reaches the window. Stops. Looks down at the noisy Moscow yard. Then up, to where lilac clouds glide along the sunset edge. The sunset illuminated his sharp profile, his entire rugged, powerful figure.
It turns. And, continuing the interview, talks about the future, about what will happen or may happen. Tomorrow. In a year. In a millennium...
Philosopher. Naturalist. Science fiction writer...
**
IVAN ANTONOVICH, SCIENCE IS INCREASINGLY TURNING TO THE QUESTION OF IMMORTALITY. WILL HYPOTHETICAL IMMORTALITY ALTER THE VERY ESSENCE OF SUCH CONCEPTS AS "HUMAN SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE", "GENERATIONAL CONTINUITY"?
— All problems related to extending human life or, if you will, to immortality, are primarily associated with the activity of the brain. Attempts to transplant organs, to overcome diseases — all of this has a single underlying motive: to preserve the human brain.
To another researcher in the silence of the laboratory, it seems that the brain is eternal, that the energy reserves of neurons are inexhaustible, that death is generally unnatural. And now we seriously begin to reason and argue that it is enough to periodically replace worn-out parts of the body, and — there you go! — live on, human, for a whole millennium.
No, it's not that simple. First, one must understand a simple truth: our brain is delicate, like a flower. And, like a flower, it is just as temporary a phenomenon of nature.
Do you think it is a product of the ability of each individual? Yes. But to the same extent, it is a product of society, public consciousness, a molecule, a microparticle of the mental atmosphere of knowledge, a brick in the huge structure on which the words shine: "SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY."
From birth, everything is programmed in the brain: the impulses of youth, the mighty spirit of maturity, the wisdom and caution of old age, and finally death.
I would compare the activity of the brain to marathon running. There are bursts, accelerations, the blessed feeling of "second wind", the impossibility of sprinting the entire distance at sprinter speed, and the necessity of a reasonable distribution of energy. But even in the longest distances, the finish is inevitable.
And now imagine: a runner, having given everything to win, is told that the race will have to be repeated...
What will we do with the condition of the brain if it lives an extra 50, 70, 90 years? After all, it will be worthless. No, it will not exhaust its store of knowledge. Not at all. But all the connections in it, all the memorable areas, all the familiar associations will be as if preserved.
Give doping to a gasping runner? Wash the aging brain with streams of young blood? But to make the brain fundamentally new, young, it must be completely modified, destroy past associations, simply put, destroy the old brain. And what is the worth of a genius brain (even a genius!), reborn?
Mozart, composing the "Requiem" for the fifth time?
Newton, periodically, from time to time discovering the same law of universal gravitation?
Mendeleev, having hated his invulnerable creation - the periodic table of elements - at the four-hundredth year of his life?
Here you have Her Majesty Wisdom.
Of course, these arguments are deliberately exaggerated. Of course, living in another era, the brain of a genius thinker would work differently. And yet, one cannot shake the feeling that immortality is a mistake, an obsession, a misunderstanding. What is the point of expending so much effort to repeat the inefficiency of nature? That very inefficiency that can drive one to madness. If a son could start from where his father left off, the concept of "spiritual experience" would be inexhaustible. But no, the son is born a helpless infant, crawls on all fours, gets tangled in three pines, initially rejects what he will later accept with all his heart, painfully and laboriously comprehends a world long since known to his father.
Is it not because of this that the path of humanity to prosperity is so slow and bumpy, "or is it because of this that it is so difficult to wrest the secrets of nature from her?"
Immortality is a myth, metaphysics. For us, dialecticians, materialists, it is pointless to ask this question. There are no immortal stars, immortal planets, immortal beings. "Everything has its time, everything has its laws," as Baratynsky said.
However, the impossibility of being (or becoming) immortal does not mean at all that we cannot extend human life, nor will we fight for it. The main thing in this problem is to use a person in the most wise period of their existence, to find universal ways to combat aging.
In my deepest conviction, a person as an individual is formed by the age of forty. By this time, he accumulates knowledge, life experience, and a happy balance is established between emotions and reason. But more often than not, it happens that the subsequent decades of inspired creative work are overshadowed by diseases of the heart, liver, kidneys, and many other ailments. And as a result — premature death.
Meanwhile, people can — and should! — live much longer than we, the current generation of Earthlings, than our fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers lived. Not to fade away, gradually dying out, losing memory, becoming a burden for others, but to live a full, healthy life.
How many years? To what limit?
Purely intuitively, by some analogies with nature, I will answer: 150 years is a quite reasonable limit for the existence of the human organism.
In a world where diseases and old age will be defeated, the concepts of "human spiritual experience" and "continuity of generations" are unlikely to change qualitatively. However, they will expand immeasurably. Just think: a twenty-year-old young man will be able to have a lively conversation with his great-great-grandfather about events more than a century ago. Epochs will seem to come closer, time will flow faster, and the line separating the past and the future will become less noticeable.
AND ANOTHER ASPECT OF IMMORTALITY? WHAT DO YOU SAY ABOUT THE CRITICAL AGE OF CIVILIZATION? CAN SOCIETY DEVELOP ENDLESSLY?
— Civilization, if considered as a set of technical achievements affecting existence, is something temporary. But if civilization is regarded as the spiritual life of humanity, then in this area there is no limit to accumulation, to movement forward.
In all my works, I try to emphasize that society will only develop and exist normally when the noosphere develops normally. Any, even brief, stop along the way threatens death, signifies stagnation in spiritual life, a stagnation more severe than material.
Let's remember at least the Hitler Reich! Those who piled up bonfires of the books of Aristotle, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Feuchtwanger, those who in their ignorance believed that one could do without poets, composers, actors, those who tried to replace the principles of humanism with the ideology of racism, — how they all miscalculated!
Civilization is the transmission of all cultural heritage from one generation to another.
And culture — will it not exist forever? It will. Thousands, millions of years, like the Galaxy.
IN THE WORLD, THE PROBLEM OF REST IS BECOMING MORE AND MORE ACUTE. WILL IT HAPPEN THAT A PERSON, GRADUALLY FREEING HIMSELF FROM CRAFTS, WILL BEGIN TO PAY MORE AND MORE ATTENTION TO THE CREATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES?
— I agree: humanity is slowly freeing itself from heavy mechanical labor. The time will come — and representatives of the so-called "black work" will disappear from the world, just as burlaks, diggers, and locomotive stokers have disappeared in our country, etc. I have no doubt that in the future, material goods will be produced in a closed loop of technology — by machines, robots, and electronic computing machines, while humans will fully devote themselves to creativity.
A few years ago, a book by the English philosopher Charles Snow titled "The Two Cultures" made a lot of noise abroad.
The author came to the disheartening conclusions about the tragic divergence of science and art, questioning the idea of harmonious personal development.
It is unlikely that such a threat exists in relation to the distant future. Even now, people are slowly beginning to understand; education and spiritual culture are by no means equivalent concepts. Pascal wrote that he finds it strange to hear when someone is referred to as: "doctor", or "philosopher", or "physicist", without mentioning their purely human qualities.
The great scholar is right. When we stop substituting the concept of personality with the concepts of diploma or position held, when we start paying more attention to purely human values, then the question of "two cultures" will be completely erased.
Creativity is everything that is related to the movements of the soul, the goal of which is to improve human nature. To teach to create, not to consume, to make everyone a creator is perhaps the noblest task of the future.
— IVAN ANTONOVICH! THE JOURNAL "TECHNIKA-MOLODEZHI" IS STARTING TO PUBLISH YOUR NEW NOVEL "HOUR OF THE BULL". WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO SAY TO OUR READERS ABOUT THIS?
— The third work about the distant future after 'The Andromeda Nebula' and 'The Heart of the Serpent' was a surprise for me. I intended to write a historical story and a popular book on paleontology, but I had to dedicate more than three years to a science fiction novel, which, although not a direct continuation of my first two works, also speaks about the paths of development of the upcoming communist society.
«The Hour of the Bull» arose as a response to the widespread trends in our science fiction (not to mention foreign) to view the future in dark colors of impending disasters, failures, and unpleasant surprises. Such works, known as warning novels or dystopias, would even be necessary if, alongside the depictions of disasters, they showed ways to avoid them or at least a way out of the dire traps that the future prepares for humanity.
Another pole of dystopias can be considered the considerable number of science fiction works where a happy communist future is achieved almost by itself, and the people of the era of planetary communism suffer from almost worse shortcomings than we, their imperfect ancestors. These unbalanced, impolite, talkative, and flatly ironic heroes of the future resemble poorly educated and badly brought-up slackers of the present.
Both poles of the representations of the future converge in the unity of ignoring the Marxist-dialectical consideration of historical processes and in disbelief in man.
With my novel, I wanted to counter the works of both aspects of the future and thus follow three of the most important statements of V. I. Lenin, which were astonishingly overlooked by the creators of models of future society on Earth.
The unimaginable complexity of the world and matter, which we are only beginning to comprehend in the second half of the 20th century and about which V. I. Lenin warned scientists three-quarters of a century ago, will require colossal work for significant steps in knowledge.
The transition to a classless, communist society and the full realization of the founders of Marxism's dream of a 'jump from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom' is not simple and will require the highest discipline and conscious responsibility for every action from people, as V. I. Lenin never tired of repeating.
And finally, now more than ever it is appropriate to recall the recommendation of V. I. Lenin given to the science fiction writer A. A. Bogdanov — to show the plundering of the natural resources and nature of our planet by capitalist management.
In 'The Hour of the Bull', I presented such a planet with the resettlement of a group of Earthlings, repeating the history of the pioneering conquest of the West of America, but on a much higher technical basis. The monstrous rapid growth of the population with a capitalist economy led to the complete depletion of the planet and mass mortality from hunger and poverty. The state structure on such a plundered planet, of course, must be oligarchic. To build a model of such a state, I continued into the future those trends of gangster, fascist monopolism that are emerging now in America and some other countries trying to preserve the 'freedom' of private entrepreneurship on a dense nationalist basis.
It is clear that it is not science and technology of a distant future or strange civilizations of immeasurably distant worlds that have become the goal of my novel. The people of future Earth, raised by centuries of existence in a higher, communist form of society, and the contrast between them and the same Earthlings, but formed in the oppression and tyranny of the oligarchic system of another planet, — this is the main goal and content of the book.
If I managed to show this in any way and help the builders of the future — our youth — to move forward towards the all-round perfection of the people of the communist tomorrow, the spiritual height of humanity, then my hard work has not been in vain.
The novel, with a volume of over 26 printed sheets, cannot naturally be published in full in the magazine. 'Technique for Youth' will publish it in a shortened version, but one that fully reflects the content.
'DEDICATED'
T. I. EFRIMOVA
_
The Bodhisattva said: "Now, having touched upon the hidden in the past and future, go and seclude yourself in a proper place and write for all people." The disciple replied: "Master of knowledge, I have not been given the skill to write on all three vehicles of life — the highest, the middle, and the lowest. Where can I find great skill?"
The Bodhisattva replied: "The knowledge revealed to you imposes a duty. And you must try" — "I obey," said the disciple.
(Из тибетских легенд) 
Ivan EFRIMOV
(SCIENCE-FICTION NOVEL)
Fig. A.Pobedinsky
**FAY RODIS — head of the expedition, historian GRIF RIFT — commander of the starship, engineer of annihilation systems DIV SIMBEL — engineer-pilot GEN ATAL — armor protection engineer SOL SINE — computing systems engineer EVIZA TANET — doctor of the Star Fleet
CHEDI DAAN — sociologist-linguist
**
**
AT THE EDGE OF THE ABYSS
**
Long ago, the areas of negative gravity in space were guessed, but only three centuries ago did they receive their explanation as pits from our world into Tamas, or into null-space. Sometimes, starships of other civilizations, unadapted for movement in null-space, disappeared without a trace in them. The direct beam starship is subjected to even greater danger. With the slightest error in balancing the fields, it risks slipping either into our Shakti space or into Tamas space. It is impossible to return from Tamas. We simply do not know what happens there with our objects. Does instant annihilation occur, or do all active processes also instantly freeze, turning, for example, a starship into a block of absolutely dead matter (this new concept of matter also resulted from the discovery of Tamas). Now you can imagine the danger that the first ZPLs — direct beam starships — faced, including the "Dark Flame." But people took this monstrous risk. The ability to instantly penetrate to the desired point in space — this kind of leap in the power of the mind, this mastery of the infinity of the cosmos, which just recently seemed absolutely impossible, and there were no visible paths to resolving this curse of all times and all civilizations of the cosmos, connected in the Great Ring, but only seeing each other on the screens of external stations.
Three hundred years have passed since humanity entered the ERA — Era of Meeting Hands. The boldest dream of mankind has come true, distant worlds are within our reach — in time.
Of course, practically the movement of the FTL is not instantaneous. Time is needed to remove to null-space, time for a very complex calculation of the exit point and to pull the starship from the approximate point to the target using conventional anamneson engines and sublight speed. But what are two or three months of this work compared to millions of light years of distances of the usual spiral-light path in our space. Even the increase in speed from a turtle to a regular starship is nothing compared to FTL.
(From a lecture at the Third Cycle school.)
●
The silence was broken only by three notes of the OES chord. The Rift's neck turned to Sol Sain and made some sign to him. The singing of the OES fell silent, the silence became so deep that the flaring screens of the panoramic view seemed to rustle and chime with handfuls of bright stars. To the left, towards the galactic center. The tangled threads of needle-like lights stretched to the right, along the outer arm of our universe.
At the second sign of the Griffin Rift, Div Simbel turned the starship. Slowly, the wildly disheveled nebula of glowing gas left the front screens, the edge of the dark matter cloud illuminated by the dense fire of a globular cluster, and the long threads of scattered light in the Swan. The blackness of the cosmic night loomed closely, casting the dim lights of distant stars and galaxies into immeasurable distance. This meant that the "nose" of the ship had turned towards the constellation Lynx and was approaching the repagulum — as if a partition separating part of the world's rotation and the antimatter, Shakti and Tamasa, nested within each other.
Div Simbel spun a small red wheel, mounted on a cone protruding from the control panel. The starship shuddered, a light acceleration pressed Cheddi into the depths of the seat. The lower edges of the screens flickered, extinguishing the sharp star lights with reflections from the neutrino vortex. The Rift glyph clicked something, a piercing signal swept through all the rooms of the ship, and the blue flame that flared on the screens made Cheddi and Fai Rodis flinch. Both women instinctively covered their eyes with their hands until they got used to the change of colors — blue and azure, swirling and rapidly flowing around the dome of the starship. It became dark in the cockpit, as if it had plunged into a lake of darkness, covered from above by a bowl of swift streams of light.
Four giant round dials lit up one above the other on the vertical partition separating the two screens at the top of the control arc. The Rnft grip nodded towards Div Simbel, and the engineer-pilot hurriedly turned the red wheel back.
Чеди Даан скорее угадала, чем почувствовала вращение сфероида кабины, циферблаты замерцали перебежкой оранжевых огней, и огромные стрелки их двинулись налево, вздрагивая и качаясь вразнобой. Гриф Рифт склонился над пультом, и его руки, освещенные лишь отблеском циферблатов, замелькали на клавишах непонятных приборов с быстротой первоклассного музыканта. Стрелки медленно выравнивались, одна за другой прекращая свое неровное трепетание, и справа на экраны начала наползать тьма. Это не был ночной мрак Земли, наполненный воздухом, запахами и звуками жизни. И не мрак космического пространства, чернота которого всегда подразумевает необъятный простор. На звездолет ползло нечто, не поддающееся чувствам и разуму, не наделенное ни одним из привычных человеку свойств, не поддающееся даже абстрактному определению. Это было не вещество и не пространство, не пустота и не облако. Нечто такое, в чем все ощущения человека одновременно тонули и упирались, вызывая глубочайший ужас. Чеди Даан вцепилась в кресло, стиснув зубы, чтобы не издать бессмысленного воя животного, охваченного первобытным страхом. Вся дрожа, Чеди фиксировала свой взгляд на единственной психологической опоре — длинном суровом лице Гриф Рифта, замершего над своими приборами. Четыре циферблата над его головой теперь горели тусклым желтым пламенем. Резко выделялись острия стрелок — две вверх, две вниз, — подползавших к вертикальной черте. Едва стрелки коснулись этой черты, звездолет сотрясся. На секунду перед глазами Чеди встало незабываемое грандиозное зрелище — горящие кинжальными лучами звездные облака, полосы и шары слева, вплоть до вертикального столба с циферблатами, а справа — заполнившая все стена тьмы. 
And suddenly everything went dark. The feeling of failure, falling into an abyss without support and salvation crushed the fading consciousness of Chedi. The unspeakably tormenting sensation of an internal nervous explosion made her scream, tearfully and helplessly. In reality, Chedi was only silently moving her lips. It seemed to her that the icy cold had shackled her in the depths of that abyss into which she was falling endlessly...
With the feeling of former bodily integrity, consciousness returned to Cheddi. Streams of invigorating gas mixture quietly enveloped her sweat-covered face. Slowly, fearing to see the abyss of darkness again and not survive the secondary disintegration of consciousness, Cheddi glanced at the right screens. There was nothing visible on them except for a murky and gray emptiness. To the left, where the luminous power of millions of suns of the Galactic center once shone, there was also a gray nothingness. Cheddi met the eyes of Fai Rodis, who smiled weakly and, seeing that Cheddi was about to say something, awkwardly pressed her fingers to her lips.
The Griff Rift, the Div Simbel, and the Sol Sain brought their chairs closer together. In the triangle formed by their shoulders and heads, a low, transparent column glowed like crystal. Inside it, a liquid resembling mercury flowed along a barely discernible spiral. The slightest slowing or speeding up of its flow caused one of the large dial's hands to jump and a short demanding beep to sound from somewhere at the base of the control panel. With the beep, all three heads twitched, tensing, and then fell back into a stupor as soon as the hand returned to the line.
An especially insistent horn sounded, two arrows moved simultaneously. On the right screen, an indistinct projection of a terrible abyss emerged from the gray mist.
Chedi knew enough about the new concepts of the structure of the universe to understand this spot of darkness as a projection of Tamasa. She knew that gravitational fields in our universe have very diverse shapes, most often resembling tops, funnels, heavily flattened cones, stretched in chains in the directions of the anisotropy of space-time. There is nothing surprising if the anti-gravitational fields for us of the anti-world, that is, the gravity of Tamasa, are constructed similarly and behind this wavy projection are hidden condensations of antimatter — black galaxies and invisible suns of Tamasa.
Once, it seemed incredible to people that habitable worlds could exist in neighboring galaxies, like the Andromeda Nebula. And even earlier, one would get dizzy at the thought of the inhabitants of the planets of Arcturus or Altair. Now, a person is no longer satisfied with their universe with its billions of galaxies, and they are approaching the terrifying darkness of the antimatter, which turns out to be very close. But what courage and thirst for knowledge must people accumulate to not only fearlessly stand before the wall of horror but also strive to penetrate through it into that which an ordinary person, like Cheddi herself, does not even have a mental definition for. And she almost gathered the courage to teach life to the very Griff Rift! No, she spoke with him well, with friendly understanding and unity of feelings...
«A moment between light and shadow» — the song of Rodis sounded in memory... Indeed, a moment. The vertical bar with dials embodies the boundary. Slip off it, and... she knows now what will be in Tamase! One can also find oneself in our world, the bright Shakti, but it is also deadly if you get too close to the star or in a globular cluster. Thus they race along the crest of the wave, with the difference that a too great fate stands behind the flight of the "Dark Flame" and the thirteen lives of its crew. The Griff Rift told her about a seagull flying in a night hurricane — who knows better than him! For him, it is not a poetic comparison, but an exact image of ZPL. No, enough! The roots of the universe are too terrifying for her, a small sociologist-linguist, raised in the caring society of Earth. It is interesting what Fai Rodis felt — here she is, as motionless as the three around the crystal column, raised her gaze to the screens behind which is a gray emptiness, and probably also tries to imagine Tamase?
Chedi did not guess the thoughts of Fai Rodis. The sensations she experienced were more tormenting than those of Chedi, because Rodis did not lose consciousness. Her strong, magnificently trained body resisted the transition to null-space almost as much as the drivers of ZPL. Quickly returning to normal, she thought of the room in the Kin Rukh Institute, in eastern Canada, where she was preparing for the expedition.
A spacious room with a wall made of huge sheets of silicoll, overlooked the valley of a large river, among the pine forests of the reserve. Fai Rodis recalled the most insignificant details — from the pale shade of the solid carpet to the large tables and sofas made of artificial gray-silky wood. The warm coziness and absence of room constraints contributed to work. Especially when low clouds crawled behind the transparent wall facing the river's expanse and cold rain poured through the wind. Then Fai Rodis would climb onto the sofa on the opposite side of the room near the reading machine and stacks of restored ancient films, reading, thinking, watching. A happy time of "absorbing" information to make herself capable of understanding ancient historical processes and the paths of humanity's ascent.
Once she came across a fragment of a war movie. A mushroom cloud and a pair from a nuclear explosion stood over the ocean at a cloud-high altitude, above the hills and palm groves of the steep shore. Several ships were overturned and scattered, and on the ledge of the coastal fortification, two people were watching what was happening. They were in identical caps with golden symbols, golden straps, and outlines of visors — obviously, commanders, elderly and stocky. Their faces, illuminated by the glow of the sea fire, etched with wrinkles, with swollen eyelids of tired eyes, did not express fear, but only concentrated attention. Both had large features, massive jaws, and the same confidence in the successful outcome of the titanic battle...
Rodis remembered how back then, looking into the black night beyond the transparent wall, she thought about the ocean of courage that the people of Earth needed to pull themselves out of a wild state and turn their planet into a bright, blooming garden.
Ninety billion people have passed under the scythe of time, starting from shaky huts in the branches of trees or narrow crevices in the cliffs, until with the final victory of reason and knowledge, with the advent of a global communist society, the night of misfortunes that has long accompanied humanity came to an end.
Но сейчас гордая женщина потрясена столкновением с реальностью вселенной, испугана не меньше, чем когда-то поддавались страху ее давно прошедшие по лику планеты сестры. Страх перед реальностью, ведущий к разрыву с ней, к созданию иллюзий, к искажению действительности, всегда владел человеком, не закаленным с детства для борьбы с силами природы. Этим отрывом от реальности всегда пользовались владыки любого рода — религиозные и светские, творцы ошеломительных теорий в науке и дисторсии истинного в искусстве. Особенно когда большая часть человечества скопилась в городах, занимаясь пустяками и развлекаясь небылицами за счет разграбления природы. И погибала массами, не умея противостоять неизбежным несчастьям, к которым приводили легкий путь и фетишизм вопреки голосу здравого смысла. Даже теперь она, полная здоровья, специально тренированная психически, дрожит перед видением подлинного мира... Но опять тверды и непреклонны лица современных командиров в борьбе с чудовищными силами, на этот раз антимира, перед которыми не только человек, но даже целая Галактика — пылинка, без следа исчезающая во враждебной тьме Тамаса — антивремени и антипространства... 
Fai Rodis was examining the three fearless pilots of the ship sitting in front of her and asking herself: where is the limit and does it exist? With the invention of ZPL, the Era of Joined Hands has begun, but what will come to replace it in the future? The Era of the union of Shakti and Tamasa? Balancing the roots of a bipolar universe? But how, to avoid closure, the unstructured annihilation? Even vague guesses about this are beyond her power.
And suddenly, as happens with everything seen for the first time, the crystal column went out, a new sound, like the chord of a bass string, echoed in the cabin floor. Fai Rodis instinctively understood that "The Dark Flame" had reached its destination, or rather — the exit point. Something happened again with her body — a fall or a rise, stretching or compression, — Fai Rodis could not comprehend. All ordinary sensations disappeared. It was as if she was floating in weightlessness, feeling neither cold nor warmth, neither bottom nor top, neither light nor darkness. Losing all reference points, her brain refused to perceive anything. Monotonous dull thoughts spun in circles, chasing one another in an endless series of repetitions. She felt neither fear nor joy, did not understand her state, similar to a life that had already been born and was still meaningless, like billions of years ago. But the unknown intruded into the circling thoughts, tearing apart their closed chain. Consciousness again opened its arms to the outside world. Returning from oblivion... No, this state could not be called that. Rodis was, but did not exist, or rather, existed, but was not.
First, she saw the luxurious scatter of starry lights. Only the belts and spheres of burning matter had now gone down the screens on the left side. Ahead, in the blackness of space, the constellation of five red suns ominously shone, and to the side, there were two more close pale stars.
The Rift Griff raised, ran his palms over his face as if washing away fatigue. The Simbel Div manipulated the digital disks on the control panel. The starship shuddered several times, like a calming beast, and froze. Joy, undefined and deep, warmed Fai Rodis. Like a man wandering in a deadly dungeon, he emerges into the blue sky, warm sun, and the living scent of grass and forest. She smiled at everyone: to the Rift Griff, to Chedi, to both astrogators making their way along the consoles to the elevator in the computing room. Before the oval door, Ghen Atal appeared from somewhere. He moved the green lever, and the massive door slid to the right. The armor protection engineer approached Chedi at the same time as the Rift Griff.
— Everyone, — said Rift, — now it's up to the astronauts. Soon they will tell us how far we are from the target. What do you think, Div?
The pilot engineer pointed to a dim star with a diameter of four to five centimeters, half hidden by the screen frame and previously unnoticed by Fai Rodis.
— If this is the sun of Tormans and it is the size of ours, then it may be only 300—400 million kilometers away. That's nothing.
— And what if it's not it? Some one from that five? — Sol Sain squinted.
— Then we will have to wander for a long time... or enter the null space again, but already without a pre-prepared grid on Earth. It will be a disaster, but I believe in the electronic brains of Earth and our pair of astronaut navigators. It's not the first time they are leading the NPL, — Div Simbel said calmly.
Chedi Daan carefully lowered her legs onto the springy floor.
— How do you feel, Chedi? — asked Grif Rift with concern. — Maybe we should call Eviza? After all, we took a risk putting you through such a trial. I was counting on the thorough training of our entire crew.
— And they were not mistaken, — Chedi straightened up, trying with all her might to overcome the weakness in her legs and the flickering before her eyes.
The three starship pilots exchanged approving glances. She responds as if losing consciousness twice in a short period of time was a common occurrence for her. Chedi caught a playful spark in Sol Sain's dark eyes and straightened up even more expressively.
— Why don't you care about Fai Rodis? She also ended up in null space for the first time.
— No one worried about Fai Rodis, — Grif Rift lowered his voice, — she not only conducted excavations on distant planets, she passed all ten levels of infernality.
— Why? — Cheddi Daan was amazed.