His name was Vladislav Kuznetsov, and he had been a twenty-one-year-old student at Mount Harwell College in Mount Harwell, Ohio. On a Friday afternoon, March 24, 2001, he succumbed to a sudden attack of spring fever and cut his classes for a stroll in a public park near the campus. Even after fifty years and several hundred centuries, he remembered it as vividly as though it had happened an hour before.
It was a warm, fresh day with a promise of spring—the first really pleasant day of the year after the usual vagaries of a midwest winter. He strolled leisurely through the park, thinking with shameless delight of the stuffy classrooms he was avoiding. Eventually he seated himself on a patch of greening grass with a convenient tree to lean against and enjoyed the soft breeze and the peaceful surroundings while he absently whittled on a twig he had picked up. He felt sleepy. Probably he dozed off.
For decades afterward he relived that afternoon again and again with retrospective editing: What if he had not cut classes, what if he had turned in the opposite direction and avoided the park, what if he had not sat down to rest, what if he had not fallen asleep?
He was awakened by a violently squealing and squirming young pig that had landed in his lap. The pig’s fore and hind legs were tied together with strips of leather. Kuznetsov knew at once he was on the receiving end of a heavy-handed practical joke, and he also knew the ones responsible. He had been the victim of their pranks often enough. Before looking about for the culprits, he good-naturedly set about freeing the pig. His open jackknife was still in his hand, and he quickly sliced the leather restraints. He hoped the pranksters would have to spend the afternoon trying to catch it, which would deftly turn the joke on them.
The pig scurried for cover. Kuznetsov looked after it in puzzlement, wondering what unlikely porcine species it belonged to. He had never seen a pig with long hair before. Perhaps he had unfairly maligned his practical-joking friends. The animal looked peculiar enough to have come straight out of another dimension. So many odd things had happened to him in his short lifetime that he would have felt more resigned than surprised to find himself the target for a materializing pig.
As a child, he had blamed all of his misfortunes on his name. It had blighted his life in so many ways. Not even a boy’s best friend could be expected to call him Vladislav Kuznetsov, and the changes rung on it varied from the humiliating to the obscene. As he grew older, some of his friends began to call him Wally Kuznet, which seemed like a substantial improvement but failed to alter his life an iota.
He finally accepted the fact that his luck was going to be bad no matter what people called him. A snowball thrown into a crowd unerringly sought out his nose, which was broken three times before he finished grammar school. A bully always acquired a yen for beating up a smaller boy a moment before Kuznetsov innocently walked into view. Teachers invariably scheduled surprise quizes on the one day of the term he failed to prepare an assignment. If, after timidly admiring a girl for months, he finally nerved himself to ask her for a date, it always turned out she had agreed only the day before to go steady with a star halfback. Every job he applied for had three relatives of the employer in line just ahead of him. Nothing overwhelmingly bad ever happened to him, but he found life a long succession of increasingly intolerable frustrations and petty failures.
He’d had a single-minded passion for space engineering. By the time he reached college, the space program had been curtailed, and he’d had to face the bitter fact that with so many experienced engineers out of work, a brand new degree in space engineering wouldn’t even qualify him for a job as bus driver at Cape Canaveral. Reluctantly he switched to something solid, conservative, and perpetually reliable: automotive engineering. It would not surprise him in the least, now that he was about to graduate, if the auto industry suddenly collapsed and his brand new degree would not even qualify him to drive a bus in Detroit.
He was a good-looking blond youth, popular with those who knew him well. Though all of his disappointments, he learned to persist and face life with an attitude of calm resignation and determination. Bullies quickly learned to avoid him when he began judo lessons, and he worked hard until he became an expert. In college he was an excellent student, but his deeply ingrained inferiority complex meant that success in his studies failed utterly to compensate for his sense of failure in life. Deep in his subconscious, he probably expected that sooner or later fate would dump a hairy pig into his lap.
The pig ran off with deep grunts of piggish satisfaction, 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
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
