Kravets brought me down from the heavens — headlong down a steep flight of stairs. We're a dreamy lot, inventors. And Bell probably thought that people would use his telephone only for pleasant or necessary news, and certainly not for gossip, or anonymous denunciations, or for sending an ambulance to perfectly healthy friends as a joke. We all dream about the good thing, and when life turns our inventions inside out, we just slap our sides, like loggers in a forest, and ask: “What are you doing, people?”
The hellish part of science is that it creates methods and nothing else. So we will have a “method for transforming information in a biological system.” You can turn a monkey into a man. But you could also turn a man into a donkey.
But I can't, I can't believe that after our discovery things would go on as they were! Not for the sake of science — for the sake of life. Our discovery was intended for life: it doesn't shoot; it doesn't kill — it creates. Maybe we're looking in the wrong place — the problem isn't in the computer but in man?
Graduate student Krivoshein finished reading the diary to the inner accompaniment of these troubling thoughts. Had they worked for nothing? Was their discovery too soon, ahead of its time, and could it harm mankind? In Moscow he hadn't given much thought to it: the discovery was only within him — it had nothing to do with anyone else — and he just explored it to his heart's content and said nothing. Of course, after his bath in the pool of the reactor he was bursting to share his knowledge and experiences with Androsiashvili and the guys in the form: radiation and radiation sickness can be overcome! But this knowledge was top secret… “because of the dregs!” Krivoshein was angry. “Because of the dregs, of whom there are maybe one in a thousand and for whom that prostitute science prepares methods of destroying cities and nations! Only methods. I guess we'll have to just wipe out those vipers. No one would catch me or shoot me… but then I'll be just like them. No, that's not it, either.
The student shut the diary and raised his eyes. The table lamp was lit without illuminating anything. It was light. Beyond the window the matching yellow faces of the buildings of Academic Town stared into the sun; it looked like the herd of houses would take off after the light any second. The clock said 7:30 in the morning.
Krivoshein lit up and went out on the balcony. People were gathering at the bus stop. A broad — shouldered man in a blue raincost paced under the trees. “Well, well!” Krivoshein was amazed by his tenacity. “All right, I have to save what can be saved.”
He went back inside, undressed, and took a cold shower. Then he opened the closet, critically eyed the meager selection of clothes. He chose a Ukrainian shirt with embroidery. He gave the worn suit a dubious stare, sighed, and put it on.
Then the student trained in front of the mirror for fifteen minutes and left the apartment.
Chapter 21
“Hey! Stop! Don't be a jackass!”
“Easier said than done….” muttered the jackass, and rambled on.
The man in the raincoat noticed Krivoshein, turned to him, and stared.
“God, what a bumbling amateur detective!” Krivoshein thought to himself. “None of this watching my reflection in store windows or hiding behind a newspaper — he's pushing his way toward me like a preneanderthal on a county bus! Don't they train these guys? They should at least read comic books to improve their technique. A guy like this is really going to solve a crime, hah!”
He was angry. He walked right up to the man.
“Listen, don't you ever get relieved? Doesn't the seven — hour workday law apply to detectives?”
The man raised his eyebrows quizzically.
“Val….” he said in a soft baritone. “Val, don't you recognize me?”
“Hm….” Krivoshein blinked, stared, and whistled. “I see… you must be the double Adam — Hercules? So that's it! And I thought….”
“And then, you're not Krivoshein? I mean, you are Krivoshein, but the Moscow one?”
“Right. Well, hello… hello Val — Adam, you lost soul!”
“Hello.”
They shook hands. Krivoshein examined Adam's wind — burned, tanned face: the features were coarse, but handsome. “Val did a good job, just look at him!” But the light eyes behind the bleached lashes hid a certain temerity.
“There's going to be an awful lot of Valentin Vasilyevich Krivosheins around here.”
“You can call me Adam. I think I'll adopt the name.”
“Where have you been, Adam?”
“In Vladivostok. God….”He chuckled, as though not sure whether he had the right to joke or not. “In Vladivostok and its environs.”
“Really? Teriffic!” Krivoshein looked at him enviously. “Did you work on the ships?”
“Not quite. I blew up underwater cliffs. And now I'm back to work here.”
“And you're not scared?”
Adam looked into Krivoshein's eyes.
“I'm scared, but… you see, I have an idea. Instead of synthesizing artificial people I want to try to transform regular ones in the computer — womb. Well… you know, put them in the liquid and act on them with external information. I guess that's possible, no?”
Adam was too diffident, he knew he was, and was sorry that he put the idea so clumsily.
“It's a good idea,” the student said. He looked at Adam with new interest. “I guess we're not that different,” he thought. “Or is it just the internal logic of the discovery?” He went on. “But it's been done, Val. They put various parts of their bodies into our native element. I think they've even gotten in completely.”
“Is it working?”
“It's working… only I'm not sure about the last experiment.”
“That's marvelous! You see… then… then we can introduce art information into man with retrieval on a feedback basis.” And Adam, still shy and confused, told Krivoshein his plan for ennobling man through art.
The student understood.
He quoted from Krivoshein's diary: “We have to base our work on the fact that man strives for the best, that no one, or almost no one, consciously wants to perform vile or stupid deeds, that such deeds are a result of misunderstanding. Things are complicated in life; you can't figure out right away whether you're behaving the right way or not. I know that from my own experience. And if you give a person clear information that his psychology can respond to — about what's good, what's bad, what's stupid — and a clear understanding that any of his vile or stupid acts will eventually turn against him, then you don't have to worry about him or his behavior. This information could be introduced into the computer — womb as well — “
“He's done that, too?” Adam was surprised.
“No. There was only a vague idea that it was necessary. That the rest would be meaningless without it. So your idea is right on the mark. It fills in the blank, as we say in academic circles. Listen!” Krivoshein suddenly realized. “And with an idea like that you walked around, following me like a detective instead of just hailing me or coming up to the apartment?”
“You see,” Adam tried to explain, “I thought that you… were him. You walked right past me, didn't recognize me, didn't acknowledge me. I thought you — or rather he — didn't want to see me. We parted unpleasantly….” He lowered his head.
“Yes…. Have you been to the lab?”
“The lab? But I don't have a pass. And my papers are Krivoshein's, they know them there.”
“How about over the fence?”
