“That’s good.”
“What’s good?”
“That they’re not in the field.”
“Why?”
“I was afraid that I saw them.”
“How so?”
“It’s nothing, I was just joking…”
I got up from my chair. In general, Alice can be a great fabulator…
“I didn’t go walking in the forest, Papa. Word of honor, I didn’t. I was in the meadow. That means I didn’t see them.”
“Alice, I want you to tell me everything, in detail, all that you know. I’m not going to add anything myself. You saw strange…people, in the fore st?”
“Word of honor, cross my heart, I wasn’t in the forest.”
“All right, all right. In the meadow.”
“I didn’t do anything bad. And really, they’re not all that strange.”
“I want a decent answer from you, an adult answer: who did you see and where were they? Don’t torment me and the rest of the human race….”
“Is the rest of the human race here, Papa?”
“Listen to me, Alice…”
“Oh, all right. They’re here. They came with me.”
I looked around involuntarily. The terrace was empty. If you didn’t count the buzzing bee, there was no one here but Alice and myself.
“No, not there. You’re not looking in the right place.” Alice sighed, walked up closer to me, and said. “I wanted to keep them. I really didn’t know the human race was looking for them.”
She stretched out the basket with the strawberries. She raised the basket right in front of my eyes, and I made out, not really believing what I saw myself, two figures in space suits. They were covered with strawberry juice and sitting together on a single berry.
“I didn’t do them any harm.” Alice said guiltily. “I thought they might be gnomes, from the fairy tales.”
But I wasn’t listening to anything else she said. Carefully clutching the little basket to my heart I was running for the videophone. All I could think was, for our visitors, our uncut lawn must have seemed like an immense forest.
And that how we made our First Contact with the Labucillians.
Our Man In The Past
The ordeal with the time machine took place in the Little Hall of Science House. I had picked Alice up from the kindergarten and realized that if I took her home I would miss the demonstration. So I made Alice swear that she would behave herself and we went to Science House together.
The Head of the Temporal Institute, a very large and very bald person, stood in front of the time machine and explained the scientific principles of its construction and operation. The scientific community listened eagerly.
“Our first experiment, as you all know, was rather unsuccessful.” He said. “The cat we sent back to the beginning of the twentieth century exploded in the region of the Tungus river, giving rise to the legend of the Tungus meteorite. Since then we have not experienced serious failure. True, in accordance with certain natural laws with which anyone may become acquainted by perusing our Institute’s brochures, for the moment we can send people and objects back only to the seventh decade of the twentieth century. One has to say that some of our co-workers have spent time there, obviously in the utmost secrecy, and returned home successfully. The temporal transmission procedure is comparatively uncomplicated, in as much as it is the results of the labors of some hundreds of our people over many years. One need only put on the Time Belt… If I could be so fortunate as to have a volunteer from the hall, and I will demonstrate the procedure for preparing to move through time on him…”
There was an awkward silence. No one wanted to be the first to go onto the stage. So obviously, who else should be the first to step forward but Alice, who only five minutes before had sworn up and down that she would behave herself.
“Alice!” I shouted. “Get back down here!”
“Oh don’t be alarmed.” The Institute Head said. “Nothing at all will happen to the child.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me, Papa!” Alice said happily.
The people in the hall began to laugh, heads turned in my direction, in search of the strict father.
I tried to appear nothing of the sort.
The Institute’s Head put a belt around Alice’s waist and attached something like earmuffs to her head.
“And this is all there is.” He said. “Now the person is ready to travel through time. All he has to do is enter the time cabinet here and he will appear in the year One Thousand Nine Hundred and Seventy-Five…”
What has he said!? The panicky thought exploded through my head. If Alice was listening….
But it was too late. Of course she was going to take advantage of the opportunity.
“Little girl, what are you doing? Stop!” The Institute’s director shouted.
But Alice had already climbed into the Time Cabinet and, in the eyes of everyone, vanished. The hall gasped in chorus.
The Temporal Institute’s director, white as a sheet, waved his arms back and forth, trying to lower the din. And, seeing that I had started to run toward him down the aisle, started to speak, bent over the microphone so he could be heard over the other noise:
“Nothing at all will happen to the child. After three minutes she will re-appear in this very hall. I give you my word that the apparatus is completely reliable and tested! Don’t worry a bit!
His arguments were excellent, but all I could think of as I stood there was the fate of the cat who had been transformed into the Tungus meteorite. I both believed and disbelieved the speaker. Think of it a minute; what would you do if your child found herself a century in the past. And what if she should run away from the machine there, and get lost?
“Isn’t there any way you can send me after her?” I asked.
“No. In three minutes…. Don’t be alarmed; our man in the past will meet here.”
“You have one of your researchers there?”
“Yes and no. He’s not a researcher. We just found someone who understood all our problems perfectly and the second time cabinet is in his apartment. He lives there, in the twentieth century, but because of his specialty is sometimes comes into his future, our present…”
At that moment Alice appeared in the cabinet. She stepped onto the scene with the look of someone who had completed a mission successfully. Under one arm she held a large, antique book.
“So you see….” The Institute’s Director said.
The hall burst into friendly applause.
“Little girl, tell me, what did you see?” The speaker said, not even giving me the chance to approach Alice.
“It was very interesting there.” She said. “Pop! And I was in another room. There was a man sitting at a desk. He was writing something. He asked me: ‘Little girl, are you from the twenty-first century?’ I said of course I was, only I didn’t know the number of the century because I can’t count too well, I go to kindergarten in the middle group. The man said he was very pleased to meet me and that I had to go right back.
“‘Do you want to look at Moscow the way it was before your grandfather was born?’ I said I wanted to, and he showed it to me. It was very strange. All the buildings were small. Then I asked what he was called, and he said he was Arkady. He was a writer and wrote science fiction books about the future. Only it turns out that he doesn’t think everything up by himself because sometimes people from our time come to him and they tell him everything. Only he can’t tell anyone of this because it’s a strict secret. He gave me his new book… And then I came back.”
The hall greeted Alice’s story with wild applause.
Then a venerable scholar rose from his seat and said:
“Young lady, in you’re hand you are holding a unique book a first edition of the SF novel “The Holes On Mars.” Would you give this book to me? There’s no way you’ll be able to read it.”
“No,” Alice said. “I’m going to learn how to read myself real soon.”
“I think you’d better tell me just what it is you’ve gotten into.”
“Nothing special. I just need the gold.”
“And if you were to be totally honest with me….”
Alice took a long and painful sigh, looked out the window, and finally came clean:
“Dad, I’m a criminal.”
“A criminal?”
“I committed a robbery, and now they are going to kick me out of school for sure.”
“Too bad.” I said. “But continue. It might be that everything isn’t quite so terrible as it was when you looked at the problem first glance.”
“Okay. Well, in general, Alesha Naumov and I decided to catch the giant pike. It lives in the Ikshinsky reservoir and devours the fry. One of the fishermen there told us about it. You don’t know him.”
“And for this you need gold ore?”
“For a fish lure.
“My whole class talked it all over and decided we would need a lure to catch the pike. Ordinary pike you catch with simple lure, but a giant pike would need as really special lure to catch it. And we have a big piece of gold in the school museum. Or we had. It weighed a kilogram and a half. One of our graduates gave it to the school; he found it in the asteroid belt.”
“And you stole gold ore weighing a kilogram and a half?”
“It really wasn’t like that, Dad. We were just taking in on loan. Leva Zvansky said that his father was a geologist and could get us a new one. And so we decided to make lures out of gold. The giant pike wold be sure to fall for a lure like that.”
“Is that all?”
“Nothing much else happened, Dad. The other kids were afraid to open the display case so we drew straws and I wouldn’t have ever taken it if I hadn’t drawed the shortest straw.”
“Drawn.”
“What?”
“To draw straws. Past participle ‘drawn.’ I draw, I drew, I have drawn, I had drawn.”
“Oh, yeah. So I drew the shortest straw and there was now way I could go back on my word to the other kids. All the more so since no one was going to miss that piece it just sat and sat in the museum…”
“And then?”
“And then we took it to Alesha Naumov, who got a laser and cut the darned gold nugget into lots of small pieces. And then we went to the Ikshinsky reservoir and the pike took our bait.”
Alice thought it over a moment, and she added:
“Or maybe it wasn’t the giant pike. Maybe it was a snag on a dead tree. The lure we made was very heavy. We searched for it and we never found it. We all took turns diving for it.”
“And your crime was discovered?
“Yes, because Zvansky was a liar. He brought a handful of diamonds from home and said there wasn’t a bit of gold to be had. We sent him back home with his diamonds. As if we needed diamonds! And when Elena Alexandrovna came by and said: ‘Kids, open up the museum; I’ll be taking the first graders on their tour. Talk about bad timing! So everything was discovered. And she went running to the headmistress: “Danger,” she says (we were listening under the door) “The past has come alive in someone’s blood!” Alesha Naumov did promise to take all the blame on himself, but I didn’t let him. I drew the straw, so they hang me. And that’s everything.”
“And that’s all?” I was amazed. “And you’ve `fessed up to it?”
“I haven’t had a chance yet.” Alice said. “They gave us all until tomorrow. Elena said that either the gold nugget is in place or we will be having a ‘serious conversation.’ That means that tomorrow they’re going to take us out of the races and maybe even expel me from school when I do ‘fess up.”
“What races?”
“Tomorrow is the big air bladder races. For the school championships. My class’s team is Alesha, me, and Egorov. And there’s no way they’ll let Egorov fly alone.”
“And haven’t you forgotten one further complication?” I said.
“What complication.” Alice asked with a tone in her voice that told me she knew perfectly well which one.
“You have failed to live up to our agreement.”
“Yes I did.” Alice agreed. “But it was done in a good cause.”
“It was? You stole a gold nugget in the weight of a kilogram and a half, cut it into fish lures, lost it in the Ikshinsky Water Reservoir and you don’t even recognize what you did! A good cause indeed! I fear the Pegasus will have to leave you behind.”
“Oh, Daddy! Alice whispered. “What do I do now?”
“Think.” I said, and went back into my office to finish the paper. But writing proved difficult. Such a silly misadventure! How like small children to cut a museum exhibit to pieces with a laser!
After about an hour I looked outside my office. Alice was nowhere to be seen. She had run off some where. I went back inside and punched out the number of Friedman at the Mineralogical Museum; we’d met long before when our expeditions had crossed in the Pamir Mountains.
His round face and black moustache filled the videophone screen.
“Lenny,” I said, “Do you by any chance have any gold nuggets weighing about a kilogram and half in stock?”
“I’d say I have at least five kilos. What do you need it for? For work?”
“No. It’s needed at home.”
“I don’t know what to say.” Lenny answered, curling one long moustache end around a finger. “They’re all on the account books.”
“And I need the most worthless.” I said. “Or rather, my daughter needs it for school.”
“Alice?”
“Alice.”
“Then you know what,” Friedman said, “I’ll give you the gold. Or rather, not to you, but to Alice. And you can pay me back with a favor in return.”
“With pleasure.”
“Loan me one of your Centaurian Blue Leopards for one day.”
“What?”
“Your Blue Leopard. We are infested with mice.”
“They go after the stones?”
“I don’t know what it is they are eating, but the Pied Piper would be hard pressed to keep up with them. And they do not fear the cat. And they get away from the robot mousecatchers and ignore the old style mousetraps. But the smell and sight of a Blue Leopard sends mice running until they can’t go any further. Now, what am I to do? A Blue Leopard is a rare and exotic animal, and I need someone who can bring it to the Museum and make certain it doesn’t eat anyone. Other than mice, of course.”