Rair watched. His eyes hurt suddenly. He tried to focus them. But they wouldn't focus. The man seemed to blur at the edges. The veinlike network of filaments pulsed and ran with tiny golden lights. Even the webbing straps that held the battery pack in place grew indistinct.
Rair looked away. A blueprint on a wall was crystal clear. But when his gaze returned to the man in the suit, he couldn't quite focus on him.
107
"The effect you are trying to understand is result of hypervibration," General Semoyan announced. "Suit is vibrating at trillions of pulses per millisecond. This is why we have dubbed it our zibriruyushchiy kostyum, or vibration suit."
Rair walked around the man in the suit. There was something very odd about him now. Something he could not quite put his finger on.
When he looked closer at the man's concealed face, he recognized it. The featureless membrane expanded out like bubblegum bubble, but there was no crinkling sound anymore.
"If he spoke, we could not hear his voice, although he can understand us," the general explained.
"Will he become invisible?" Rair asked. Reasonably, he thought.
"That would be perfect, but no. You may touch him if you wish."
Rair hesitate. "Will it hurt?"
"Nyet, you will feel no pain. Nor will he."
Rair Brashnikov still held back. Why would they want him to touch the suit again? He reached out careful fingers. The tips of his fingers disappeared into it.
"Ahhh!" he cried, recoiling as if stung. "My hand!"
"Your hand is fine," General Semoyan assured him.
"I felt . . . nothing," Rair said in a dull incom-prehending tone. He was pleased to see that he still had fingertips.
"Exactly," General Semoyan said. "It is much like known phenomenon of colliding galaxies. Astronomers know that in cosmos, galaxies sometimes collide. But there is no resulting catastrophe, for suns merely pass one another, so great are spaces between them. Vibration suit is vibrating so that its atomic structure is fluid, like water. When you place your hand within the field, suit compensates for your atomic structure. Its electrons are repelled by your electrons. The spaces
merge, but atoms remain apart. Thus, your hand coexisted in the same physical space as his chest. At least, that is our theory."
"No bullet, no hand could harm him," Rair breathed, inching closer.
"No wall can stop him either." General Semoyan smiled. "Comrade, please demonstrate."
As Rair Brashnikov watched with wide black eyes, the man in tht suit walked through the solid oak bench. He passed from it to one wall, walking as soundlessly as a ghost. He passed through the wall. Then he was gone. Utter silence filled the room as they stared at the blank white wall.
Soon the technician stepped from another wall. He emerged from it as if coming through a dense fog. Except he was the fog and the wall was solid.
"This is astonishing! This is incredible!" Rair Brashnikov shouted eagerly. "Who says Russian technology is backward? Who says we cannot compete with West? If Soviet science can produce such a wonder, there is nothing we cannot do!"
"We stole the suit from the Japanese," General Semoyan said dryly.
Rair subsided. "It is Japanese?"
"Another reason why you were chosen, captain. Aside from your criminal past, you are short and slim enough to fit into the suit. It was built by the Nishitsu Corporation, and is designed for the average Japanese male physique. We believe it is a by-product of their recent superconductor breakthroughs."
''You do not know?" Raid asked in surprise. "Why not take it apart and make blueprints, then build suit that will fit sturdy Russian?"
General Semoyan shook his leonine head.
"It is too complicated. We dare not dismantle it for fear of not being able to restore suit to proper operating order. Better to risk the suit in the field than to lose it to our incompetent technicians."
109
The technicians in the room shifted their feet and looked down in embarrassment.
General Semoyan cleared his throat. The technician in the suit turned it off. The blurry indistinctness of his outline faded with the lambent glow of the suit itself.
"We will train you to walk in suit," General Semoyan told him as the man was helped out of the suit, "to pass through solid objects without hesitation or fear. Then we will let you loose in America, with a shopping list of what we most need. Are you prepared for this, Captain Brashnikov?"
"As always, I am brave in the service of my motherland," Rair Brashnikov said, visions of American blue jeans and VCR's dancing in his head. He was so elated he did something he had never done since he picked his first pocket. He slipped the gold pen into the general's coat pocket.
That way, when Semoyan noticed it missing, even if he suspected Brashnikov, the proof of his innocence would eventually be found.
For Rair Brashnikov was not about to risk losing the opportunity to be set loose in the consumers' paradise of the world for a mere gold pen.
For months, they trained him. He learned that for all its wonders the vibration suit was fraught with hidden perils. One had to be careful how one walked. For the vibrations which allowed a man to pass through six feet of concrete would also cause him to sink into a floor.
The technicians who maintained it, obviously only dimly understood the suit. They explained to him that the thick boot soles contained tiny vibrating elements that caused the bottoms to vibrate in counterpoint to the suit vibration. Only a micron thickness of the bottom vibrated out of synchronization, they theorized. But it was enough to allow for footing and traction. Still, the suit wearer had to be careful, when he passed through an obstacle, that he did it with the toes and soles kept level.
110
Rair tried this a few times. It was a difficult skill to learn. If he stepped wrong, his upper body passed through the test walls, but his feet got hung up.
It took thirty days until he mastered the art of walking through a wall. At the same time, he had to deal with the eye's blinking reflex. The face membrane helped, but when a concrete wall came up to the eye, the eye naturally flinched and the body flinched too. Merely shutting the eyes was not enough. For Rair was taught that although he could pass through walls, he could not see through them. He could never be certain what was on the other side. It was imperative that before he dared enter such walls, he stick his face into them like a swimmer sticking his face above water to see what lay on the surface.
It took time, and skill, and it was difficult.
They taught him that he could trot while in the suit, but he could not run. Even with his body as insubstantial as smoke, his micron-thick soles could trip on ground rocks. If he tripped, he was told, he would fall. And if he fell . . .
"What?" Rair had asked anxiously.
The technician shrugged. They did not actually know, but they theorized that a fall would propel the suit through the earth's crust, where a man might, in theory, sink until he emerged on the opposite side of the globe.
"That would not be so terrible," Rair had said, visibly relieved.
True, they told him. But no one could say if, after passing through the earth, the man might not keep going, forever and ever, into deepest space.
"Oh," Rair had said in a sober voice.
There were other problems with the suit. The more he learned, the less he liked the assignment, but because giving up meant facing a firing squad, Rair Brashnikov continued training.
Even after they warned him that he must never, ever, turn off the suit while inside something solid.
111
"What would happen then?" he had asked fearfully.
On this the technicians were not in complete agreement.
One thought that Rair would become trapped like a fly in amber.