Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - I'm Going to Meet My Br

VIP免费

2024-12-18 0 0 125.66KB 23 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - Molecular Cafe - I'm Going to

Meet My Brother

Vladislav

KRAPIVIN

I'M GOING TO MEET MY BROTHER

Molecular Café Compilation

Mir Publishers Moscow 1968

Translated from the Russian (The translator is not indicated)

___________________________________________________

OCR: http://home.freeuk.com/russica2

Watch for the "Magellan"

Whoever has been to Konsata must remember the steep narrow steps down the

cliffs. They start from a colonnade at the top and lead down to the sea. At the

bottom there is just a narrow strip of shore between them and the water. Covered

with porous rocks and shingle, this strip stretches along the yellow-white cliffs from

South Valley right up to the North Point, where the obelisk to dead astronauts

pierces the sky like an inclined needle.

It is a pleasant spot to collect the coloured stones rounded and smoothed by the

waves, and to hunt for the fierce black crabs. The boys from the school whose

grounds lie to the south of Ratal Cosmodrome, always stop here for a while on their

way home. They cram their pockets with treasures whose value adults never have

understood, and never will, and then run up the steep steps, which they prefer to the

escalator that climbs the cliff a hundred yards or so further on.

At the time I'm writing about I had just finished a paper on the third expedition to

the Amazon basin. Now for a whole month I could read the ordinary books I had

missed from pressure of work.

I would take a book of poems, or a collection of Randin's stories, and go to the

top of the Old Steps. The place was deserted. Grass grew between the flag stones

and birds had built nests in the scrolls of the heavy capitals.

At first I was all alone at the colonnade, but later a tall dark man wearing a grey

jacket of strange cut started coming there. To begin with we took no notice of one

another as though by mutual agreement. But as hardly anyone else ever came there,

and we were meeting every day, eventually we began to salute though we never

spoke to one another. I read and the stranger, who seemed to have something on his

mind, was too preoccupied to want to strike up a conversation.

This man always came in the evening. Then the sun hung over North Point,

behind which rose the white buildings of Konsata, the blue of the sea was beginning

to fade, and the waves were taking on a grey metallic hue. To the east the arches of

the old viaduct would be tinted pink by the rays of the evening sun. The viaduct lay

at the end of Ratal Cosmodrome, as a memorial of the days when planetary liners

had not yet been adapted for vertical takeoff.

The stranger would seat himself on the plinth of one of the columns and, sit there,

chin in hand, in silence.

He brightened up only when the schoolboys appeared on the beach. Then he

would stand on the top step of the stairway and watch them at play until a fair-haired

lad in a black-and-orange striped jacket would spot him and dash up the steps. Each

time he would rush at such speed that his striped jacket, which he had flung over his

shoulders, would stream out like a gaudy banner.

The gloomy stranger would change visible. He would cheerily meet the boy, and

the two of them nodding goodbye to me would go off, discussing their affairs with

animation.

At first I thought they were father and son. But one day I heard the boy shouting

to someone as he ran: "I'm going to meet my brother."

Later I learnt, from the brothers' conversation, that the elder was called

Alexander.

What ensues took place about a week after I first saw Alexander. He came along

at the usual time and sat down by a column, whistling a strange and somewhat harsh

tune. I was reading, but without much concentration, because I knew Valentine

Randin's "Song of the Blue Planet" almost by heart. From time to time I looked up

from my book to glance at Alexander and it seemed to me that his face was

somehow familiar.

There was a slight breeze. As I was turning the pages of my tattered book a loose

page blew away and fluttered over the flags. It came to a stop almost at Alexander's

feet. He picked it up and got up to give it to me. I got up as well and met in the

middle of the colonnade.

This was the first time I had seen him so close and I found he was younger than I

had thought. The wrinkles between his eyebrows gave his features a stern

expression, but now he was smiling and the wrinkles had gone.

"Your book isn't very interesting it seems?" he said, giving me the page.

"It's just that I know it so well." I didn't want the conversation to end here, so I

remarked, "Your brother's late."

"He was going to be late today, but I had forgotten." We sat down together.

Alexander asked me to let him have a look at my book. I was surprised he did not

know Randin's short stories, but I said nothing. As he opened the book and laid his

palm across the pages to keep them from blowing away, I noticed a white forked

scar on the back of it. He caught my glance and said: "It happened out there... on

Yellow Rose."

Immediately I recalled everything. "The Snow Planet?" I exclaimed. "Alexander

Sneg!" (Sneg-snow.-Tr.)

The unusual broadcasts, and special numbers of magazines with pictures of Sneg

and his three companions-were all recent history, and all over the world people had

spoken their names with admiration.

Before me I saw a man who had returned to Earth three hundred years after

setting out from it. That in itself was not astonishing-after all "Banderilla" and

"Mousson" had also been in space for more than two centuries. And though the

story of the photon frigate in which Sneg had returned was more unusual than that of

the others, I was not thinking of that just then.

"Alexander," I said, feeling I had come up against a strange riddle, "surely three

hundred years... and the boy is not more than twelve. How are you his brother?"

"I know you're an archaeologist," said Alexander after a pause. "You must feel

time better than others. And understand people. Will you help me if I tell you

everything?" "I'll try to help you."

"Only three people, besides myself, know about what I am going to tell you. But

they cannot help me. I badly need your advice. Only, where shall I begin? Though

really, it all began on these steps."

It all began on these steps.

For the first time since the death of his parents Naal had come down to the

seashore. The sea, brilliantly blue and foam-flecked and bordered by the great curve

of the white town, was gentle and sunlit, as though no ship had ever perished in its

depths.

Naal went down to the water. The nearer he got to the sea, the faster he ran down

the steps, until finally he was rushing headlong toward the vast blue expanse with its

sparkling spray and salty breeze.

He tripped over a stone and fell. He had not hurt himself badly, so, biting his lip

and limping, he continued his descent. Like all boys, Naal believed salt water was the

best cure for scratches and grazes, and had kicked off his sandals and was on the

point of entering the water when, among the stones that were washed every now and

again by the ripples, he saw a big black crab. Involuntarily he jumped back.

It is one thing to give way momentarily to fright, but quite another to be a coward.

So in order to test his courage and revenge himself on the crab for his fright, Naal

determined to catch the black hermit and throw him far out to sea.

The crab, apparently sensing danger, scuttled off and hid himself among the

stones.

"Look out for yourself!" muttered the boy. He was engrossed in the sport and

began to turn over a stone.

The flat stone splashed into the water, and the crab, seeing that he had been

discovered, scuttled away even faster. But Naal was no longer looking for him. On

the wet shingle he had seen a small blue box, round and smooth, like a water-worn

stone. Where could it have come from, to be washed up on this shore by the sea?

The boy sat down on the shingle and examined his find. The box was tightly

sealed, and Naal spent all of an hour scratching at it with the buckle of his belt before

he was able to prize open the lid. Inside, wrapped in an old piece of paper, lay a

strange badge: a golden spray with gleaming stars scattered among its leaves. The

stem bore the single short word: "Search".

Naal was so absorbed in his examination of the badge that he forgot about the

paper, and he would not have remembered it if the wind had not blown it on to his

lap. He smoothed the crumpled paper out and saw that it was a page of a very very

old magazine. Water had not soaked through into the box and the paper was not

spoiled.

Naal began to read it deciphering the old type with difficulty, and his face

suddenly became very serious. But he went on reading, and at the bottom of the

page found words as startling as the loud and sudden twang of strings.

When the schoolboys came to the shore two hours later, Naal was still sitting in

the same place, his elbows resting on a sun-warmed rock watching the white crests

rising along the coast.

"We've been looking for you," said an older boy. "We didn't know you'd gone to

the beach. Why are you alone here?"

Naal did not hear him. The wind had grown stronger and the waves were getting

louder. Do you know the noise of the waves? First there is a swelling sound as the

wave comes rolling in. Then it breaks and crashes on the rocks, and the water

spreads out and, hissing, sweeps up the shore. And it is followed by another.

III

Nothing in particular distinguished Naal from the other schoolboys in the South

Valley. Like all the others, he was fond of swinging high and dangerously close to

the gnarled and twisted trees, and of playing with his ball in the sunny copse. He was

not very fond of studying the history of the discovery of the great planets. He could

run faster than many of the boys, but was not a very good swimmer. He would join

with pleasure in any game, but, he never came first. Only once had he done

something that not everyone could have done.

A springy branch of a bush growing near the shore had torn the badge from his

shirt, and the golden spray with its blue stars had fallen into the sea. Through the

transparent water he could see it sinking to the bottom. Without a moment's thought,

Naal had dived from the six-foot embankment, by good fortune missing the sharp

rocks below.

He soon came out on the beach, holding the badge in one hand, and without

saying a word started squeezing his shirt out with the other.

No one knew where he had got this badge and why he treasured it so much, but

no one questioned him. Everyone can have his own secrets, and since the loss of his

parents Naal seemed to have grown much older and did not always answer the

questions of his classmates.

Outwardly nothing very much had changed in his life since he learned of his

misfortune. Even before, he had lived most of the time at school. Both his father and

mother were authorities on ocean deeps and were often away on expeditions. But

now he knew that the bathyscaphe "Reindeer" would never return and never again

would someone appear at the end of the walk to whom he could rush at top speed,

forgetting everything else in the world.

Months had passed. There had been quiet mornings with school lessons, and

days full of sun and noisy games, and sparkling rain. Perhaps he would have

forgotten his grief. But one day the waves washed the small blue box ashore by the

Old Steps. Wherefrom, he had no idea. Only it was not a relic of the lost

bathyscaphe.

At night, when the windows reflected the orange gleam of Ratal Lighthouse, Naal

would get the crumpled page out from 'the blue box. He needed no light: he knew

every line by heart. It was from a very old magazine, published about three hundred

years ago and it told of the setting out of the photon frigate "Magellan".

The textbook on the history of astroflight spoke of this ship briefly and dryly: the

"Magellan" had set out for one of the yellow stars with the aim of finding a planet

like Earth. Apparently, the crew had used information about this planet, obtained

from the wrecked frigate "Globe", which had not been correct. The "Magellan"

should have returned after a hundred and twelve years, but there had been no news

of it. The young astronauts, stirred by legend and lacking experience, had obviously

perished without achieving their aim.

The textbook didn't even give their names. Naal had learned them in the page he

had found. The captain's name was Alexander Sneg.

Naal had heard from his father that' one of their ancestors was an astronaut. And

when, on the beach that day, he had read the name "Sneg", he had felt both pride

and resentment-resentment at the textbook for its dry and probably incorrect words

about the cosmonauts. There may have been many reasons why the frigate was lost.

And was the crew to blame?

"What if they didn't find anything when they reached that yellow star and

continued their flight? What if... what if they're still flying?" thought Naal, arguing

with the book. But at this thought he suddenly screwed up his eyes, as though

frightened by his own thought. He conjured up the long shady walks in the school

park and at the end of it a tall man in the silvery jacket of an astronaut, a man to

whom he could run, forgetting everything else in the world.

And what if he returned? He might still return. Time passes many times slower in

a spacecraft than on Earth. What if the frigate returned? Then Naal would meet, not

an ancestor, not a stranger from another century, but a brother. Because at the

bottom of the page from the magazine the had read what someone had said to the

crew of the "Magellan": "Don't forget the old names. You'll return in many years'

time, but the grandsons of your friends will meet you like friends. The grandsons of

your brothers will become your brothers...."

Naal realized that all this was pure fantasy. Yet he vividly pictured to himself how

it would happen. It would be morning. He saw this morning clearly-the bright sun,

already high overhead, and the sky so blue it was reflected on the white buildings,

the white clothes, and the silvery sides of the frigate. Auxiliary rockets had just

landed the spacecraft gently on the field of the cosmoport, and this huge

astrofrigate-a glittering tower with a black crest one hundred and fifty metres

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

ArkadyandBorisStrugatsky-MolecularCafe-I'mGoingtoMeetMyBrotherVladislavKRAPIVINI'MGOINGTOMEETMYBROTHERMolecularCaféCompilationMirPublishersMoscow1968TranslatedfromtheRussian(Thetranslatorisnotindicated)___________________________________________________OCR:http://home.freeuk.com/russica2Watchforthe"...

展开>> 收起<<

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - I'm Going to Meet My Br.pdf

共23页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - I'm Going to Meet My Br

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: