it.
I took out the lab journal and looked at the last few notes… vague and pointless. It's when the experiment is working or when you get a good idea that you write at length; here I had:
April 8. Decoded numbers, 800 lines. Unsuccessful.
April 9. Decoded extracts from five rolls. Didn't understand a thing. Some kind of schizophrenia!
April 10. Decoded with the same results. I added to the flasks and bottles: Numbers 1, 3 and 5–2 liters of glycerine; Numbers 2 and 7 — 200 ml. of tyomochevina; and 2–3 liters of distilled water to all of them.
April 11. “Streptocidal striptease with the trembling of streptococci.” That does it….
And now I'll pick up the pen and write:
April 22. The complex has re — created me, V. V. Krivoshein, Krivoshein Number 2 is sitting next to me scratching his chin. A real joke!
And then I was engulfed with a wave of satanic pride. After all, this was some discovery! It encompassed systemology, electronics, bionics, chemistry, and biology — everything you could want and then some. And I did it all. How I did it was another question. But the important thing was me, ME! Now I could invite the State Commission and demonstrate the emergence of a new double in the tank. I could imagine the look on their faces. And my friends would have to say: “Boy he really did it! That Krivoshein is something!” And Voltampernov would run over to see…. I had an uncontrollable urge to giggle; only the presence of my double stopped me.
“Who cares about friends and Voltampernov,” I heard my voice say and I didn't realize at first that it was my double speaking. “This, Val, is a Nobel Prize!”
That's right: the Nobel Prize! My portrait in all the papers… and Lena, who treats me a little high — handedly now — and why not, she's beautiful, and I'm not — will appreciate me then. The run — of — the — mill name Krivoshein (once I tried looking in the encyclopedia for famous people with my name and didn't find any; there was a Krivoshilkov and a Krivonogov, but no Krivosheins yet) will resound. Krivoshein! The same….
I was made uneasy by these meditations. My vain thoughts disappeared. Really, what would happen? What should be done with this discovery?
I shut my journal.
“So, are we going to create in our image? A crush of Krivosheins? I guess we could make others if we recorded them into the computer. Damn it! This is… it just doesn't make sense.”
“Hm. And things were so peaceful….” My double shook his head.
Precisely. Everything had been peaceful — “Nice weather, miss. Which way are you going?” “In the opposite direction!” “Me too. What's your name?” “What's it to you?” — and so on right up to the wedding palace, the maternity ward, a licking for killing a cat with a slingshot, and burning the hated zoology textbook after graduation. The chairman of the Dneprovsk Registration Office put it so well in his article: “The family is the method of propagating the species and increasing the state's population.” And suddenly — hail science! — there is a rival method; we pour and sprinkle reagents from the local chemistry manual, pass input through sensors, and get a person. And a mature one at that, with muscles and an engineering degree, with habits and life experience.
“It looks as if we're taking aim at the most human of man's qualities: love, parenthood, childhood!” I was beginning to shudder. “And it's profitable. It's efficient and profitable, the most terrible things in our rationalistic age!”
My double looked up and there was anxiety and tension in his eyes.
“Listen, but why is that terrible? Okay, we worked — rather, you worked. So you made an experimental determination and on its basis a discovery. A method of synthesizing information into a person. The ancient dream of the alchemist…. That's very nice! Once upon a time kings financed ventures like that very generously. Of course, they chopped off the heads of researchers who had failed, but if you think about it, they were right. If you can't do it, don't take it on. But nothing will happen to us. Just the reverse. Why is it so terrible?”
“Because this isn't the Middle Ages,” I thought to myself. And not the last century. And not even the beginning of the twentieth century, when everything was still ahead of us. In those days, discoverers had the moral right to spread their arms and say: well, we had no idea things would turn out badly…. We, their lucky descendants, don't have that right. Because we know. Because it's all happened before. It had all happened before: gas attacks, according to science; Maidanek and Auschwitz, according to science; Hiroshima and Nagasaki, according to science. Plans for global warfare — science with the use of mathematics. Limiting warfare — also science…. Decades had passed since the last world war. The ruins had been rebuilt. Fifty million corpses had rotted and enriched the earch. Hundreds of millions of people had been born and grown up — and the memory had not faded. It was horrible to remember and more horrible to forget. Because it had not become part of the past. The knowledge remained: people can do that.
The inventors and researchers are merely specialists in their field. To obtain new information from nature they have to expend so much energy and inventiveness that they have neither strength nor ideas left for thinking outside their fields — what will this do in real life? These people and their chosen fields — people for whom any change or discovery is just another means of achieving old aims: power, wealth, influence, and buyable pleasures. If we gave them our process, they would see only one new thing in it: it's profitable! Should they make doubles of famous singers, actors, and musicians? No, that isn't profitable. It's better to produce records and posters. But it would be profitable to mass — produce people for a special goal: voters to beat a political opponent (much easier than spending hundreds of millions on the usual election campaign), women for brothels, workers in rare fields, cannon — fodder soldiers… and even specialists with narrow vision and tame temperament who would continue inventing without getting involved in things that were none of their business. A man with a specific function — a man — thing. What could be worse? How do we deal with things and machines that have outlived their usefulness and have fulfilled their function? They're recycled, burned, compressed, discarded. And you can treat men, things, the same way.
“But that's the way it is over there….” My double waved in a vague direction. “Our society wouldn't permit it.”
“And we don't have people who are ready to use everything from the ideas of communism to false radio reports, from their work situation to quotes from the classics in order to become wealthy, and have a good position, and then to get more and more for themselves, at no matter what cost? People who see the least attempt to reduce their privileges as a phenomenal catastrophe?”
“We do,” my double agreed. “But people basically are good or else the world would have turned into a mass of bums attacking each other a long time ago, and died without thermonuclear war. But… if you don't count the minor natural disasters — floods, earthquakes, epidemics — people are at fault in all their problems, including the most horrible ones. It's their fault that they submitted to what they shouldn't have submitted to, agreed to what they should have fought, and thought that they weren't involved. At fault that they did work that paid better instead of work that was needed by everyone and themselves. If more people on earth coordinated their work and business with the interests of mankind, we would have nothing to worry about with our discovery. But that's not the way it is. And that's why, if there is at least one influential and active bastard in dangerous proximity, our discovery will turn into a hideous monstrosity.”
“Because the application of scientific discoveries is mere technology. Once upon a time, technology was invented to help man in his battle between man and man. And in that use technology didn't solve any problems; it only increased them. Think how many scientific, technological and sociological problems there are now instead of the one that was solved twenty years ago: how can you synthesize helium from hydrogen?
“If we announce our discovery, life will become even scarier. And we will have fame. Every man, woman, and child will know exactly whom to curse and why.”
“Listen, maybe you're right.?” my double asked. “We saw nothing, know nothing. People have enough terrible discoveries to deal with as it is. Let's cut off the juice and turn off the faucets. How about it?”
“And right away, the problem no longer exists. I'll write off the reagents I used up and make up some excuse about the work. And I'll start work on something simpler and more innocent….” “I'll go to Vladivostok to be a fitter in the ports.” We stopped talking. Venus blazed over the black trees outside the window. A cat cried with a child's voice. A howling note pierced the grounds' silence — they were running tests on a new jet engine in Lena's construction bureau. “Work goes on. It's right; 1941 cannot be repeated.” I was thinking about it so that I could put off my decision a little longer. “Deep underground, plutonium and hydrogen bombs are going off. Highly paid scientists and engineers are determined to master nuclear arms. And pointy — nosed rockets peer into space from their concrete silos all over the world. Each is pointed at its objective; they're wired up. Computers are constantly
