“Legionnaires!” he bellowed in a voice that sent shivers up and down Guy’s spine. “You have a job to do. Do it well. Company, attention! To your trucks! Corporal Gaal, front and center!”
When Guy reached the captain and snapped to attention, the captain said softly: “Your platoon has a special assignment. When you arrive at your destination, remain in your vehicle. I myself will take command of your platoon.”
6.
The shock absorbers were in terrible shape, and the ride on the miserable cobblestone roads was particularly jolting. His submachine gun pressed between his legs. Candidate Sim held Guy by his belt solicitously, reasoning that it would be unbecoming for the corporal, so concerned about his image, to go flying head over heels. Either Guy did not object or he failed to notice his subordinate’s precaution. After his conversation with the captain, Guy appeared to be very disturbed about something, so Maxim was happy that the orders required him to remain at Guy’s side and render assistance if necessary.
The trucks passed the Central Theater, rolled along the stinking Imperial Canal, then turned down Boot Street, a long thoroughfare deserted at this hour, and began to zigzag through the winding streets of some suburb that Maxim had never seen before. Recently he had visited many sections and had come to know the city well. He had learned a great deal in those forty or so days and finally understood the difficult position he was in. It proved to be far less comforting and far more incredible than he had expected.
He had still been plodding through his ABC’s when Guy had persisted in asking him where he came from. It was useless to show him drawings: Guy would accept them with a strange smile on his face and continue to repeat the same question: “Where are you from?” Irritated, Maxim finally pointed to the ceiling with his pencil and said: “From the sky.” To Maxim’s surprise, Guy thought this a completely natural explanation and began to rattle off words that Maxim at first assumed were the names of planets in their solar system. But Guy opened a map, and Maxim saw that they were not the names of planets but of antipodal countries. Maxim shrugged his shoulders, used up his entire stock of negative expressions, and began to study the map. The conversation had ended there for the time being.
One evening, several days later, Maxim and Rada had been watching television. A very strange program was being shown that resembled a movie without beginning or end. It had no plot, just an endless stream of actors, rather weird individuals who, from the point of view of any humanoid, behaved rather savagely. Rada watched with interest, shrieked, grabbed Maxim’s sleeve, and twice burst into tears. Maxim became bored quickly and was about to doze off to some gloomy music when, suddenly, something familiar flashed across the screen. He rubbed his eyes. There, on the screen, was Pandora. A morose takhorg was dragging itself through the jungle, crushing trees. Suddenly Peter appeared with a decoy in his arms. Very engrossed and serious, he backed away, tripped on a snag, and flew backward into a swamp. Maxim was startled to recognize his own mentogram. Then came another, and still another, without narration, and with the identical musical background.
And Pandora disappeared, yielding the screen to an emaciated blind man who crawled along a ceiling covered by a dusty spider web. “What’s that?” asked Maxim, pointing to the screen.
“A TV program,” snapped Rada. “It’s interesting. Watch it.”
It made no sense to him. It suddenly occurred to him that these might be the mentograms of other visitors from outer space. But he quickly rejected this thought: the worlds portrayed on television were too terrible, too monotonous: stuffy little rooms; endless corridors cluttered with furniture that suddenly sprouted gigantic thorns; spiral staircases winding into the impenetrable gloom of narrow stairwells; basements, with barred windows, jammed with crawling bodies, and immobile faces locked in pain peering through the bars. These images were closer to a grotesque delirium than to real worlds. In comparison, Maxim’s mentograms sparkled with realism.
Similar programs were repeated almost daily and were called Magic Journey. But Maxim could never understand their point. In reply to his questions, Guy and Rada merely shrugged their shoulders in bewilderment. “It’s a TV program. That’s the way it’s done to make it interesting. It’s a magic journey. A fairy tale. Watch it! Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s frightening.” Maxim began to doubt very seriously that the purpose of Professor Hippo’s research was to facilitate communication between his planet and visitors from outer space.
About ten days later this intuitive conclusion was confirmed indirectly. Guy had passed the entrance exams for the Independent Study Program of Officer’s Candidate School and was cramming for his mathematics and mechanics courses. The diagrams and formulas used in their elementary ballistics studies puzzled Maxim. He nagged Guy. At first Guy did not understand what he was driving at. Then, grinning condescendingly, he explained to Maxim the cosmography of his world. It turned out that the inhabited island was neither a sphere nor a geoid; in fact, it wasn’t a planet at all.
According to Guy, the inhabited island was the World, the only world in the universe. Beneath the natives’ feet lay the firm surface of the World Sphere. Above them was a gigantic gaseous sphere of finite volume and unknown composition, whose physical characteristics were still not understood. There was a theory that the density of this gas increased rapidly toward the center of the gaseous bubble and certain mysterious processes produced periodic changes in the intensity of the World Light, thus giving day and night. Besides the short-term daily changes in the World Light, there were long-term changes that generated seasonal fluctuations in temperature and the seasons themselves. Gravity acted away from the center of the World Sphere, perpendicular to its surface. In short, the inhabited island was located on the inner surface of an enormous bubble in an infinite firmament filling the rest of the universe.
Completely stunned, Maxim began to argue, but it soon became quite apparent that they did not speak the same language, that it was more difficult for them to understand each other’s thinking than for a staunch Copernican to understand a follower of Ptolemy. Maxim believed that the unusual characteristics of this planet’s atmosphere were the key to the matter. In the first place, its unusually high index of refraction lifted up the horizon and from time immemorial had inspired the natives’ peculiar conception of their land as being neither flat nor convex but concave. “Stand on the seashore,” suggested schoolbooks, “and follow the path of a ship leaving a pier. At first it will appear to be moving on a plane, but the further it goes, the higher it will rise, until it vanishes in the atmospheric haze covering the rest of the World.” In the second place, the atmosphere was very dense and phosphoresced day and night, so that no one ever saw the stars. Isolated instances of observation of the sun were recorded in chronicles and served as the basis for countless attempts to create a World Light theory.
Maxim realized that he was caught in a gigantic trap, that contact with Earth could not be established until he succeeded in turning inside out the natural concepts that had developed over thousands of years. Evidently, attempts had been made to do this, judging from the popular expletive “massaraksh,” which meant, literally, “world inside out.” Guy had told him about an abstract mathematical theory that analyzed the World differently. The theory was formulated in ancient times, but its adherents had been persecuted by the official religion, and it had its martyrs. Through the efforts of certain brilliant mathematicians of the last century, the theory was expressed in exact mathematical form. But it had remained a purely abstract theory, although, finally, like most abstract theories, it found practical application—very recently, when super-long-distance military weapons were developed.