“Well, at least an unfair spanking won't knock us off the track. We're at the wrong age.”
“I'll drink to that!”
They announced the train. We went out to the platform. He went on talking.
“You know what's interesting? What happens to that old saw about people being born with a destiny? Let's say that it was intended at your birth for you to move through space and time at a certain rate, to advance at work, etc. And suddenly — abracadabra! — there are two Krivosheins! And they lead separate lives in separate cities. Now what happens to the divine plan? Or did God write it in two variants? And what if we turn into ten? And what if we don't want to, and don't?” We both made believe that something ordinary was happening. “Friends, check to see that you haven't kept the departing passengers' tickets by mistake!” I hadn't. The train took him to Moscow.
We agreed to write to each other when necessary (I'll bet that he won't feel that necessity very soon!) and to meet next July. We'll spend this year approaching the problem from two angles; he'll take biology, and I'll take systemology. We'll see….
When the train left I realized that I would miss him. I guess because this was the first time that I had felt as comfortable with another person as I do with… with myself. There's no other way of putting it. Even between Lena and me there is always something left unsaid, misunderstood, strictly personal. But with him… but even with him, we each developed our own secrets over a month of living together. Interesting, that bustling mother life!
I was high on cognac, and coming back from the station I stared at people and at life. Women with concerned, anxious faces entering stores. Guys riding on motorcycles with girls on the back seat. Lines forming by the newspaper kiosks, waiting for the evening papers. Human faces, how different they all are, how understandable and mysterious! I can't explain how it happens, but I seem to know about a lot of them. The corners of the mouth, harsh or fine wrinkles, the bearing of the head, and the eyes — especially the eyes! — they are all signs of preverbal information. Probably from the days when we were apes.
Just recently I did not notice such things. I did not notice, for instance, that people waiting in line were ugly. The banality and meaninglessness of such an occupation, the worry that they will run out, that someone will sneak in ahead of them, leaves an ugly imprint on the face. And drunks are ugly, and brawlers are ugly.
But take a look at a young girl, laughing at a joke made by the boy she loves. Or at a mother, nursing a child. At a master craftsman doing fine work. At a good man thinking about something. They are beautiful, despite pimples, wrinkles, and lines.
I could never appreciate beauty in animals. As far as I'm concerned only man is beautiful — and then only when he is human.
A toddler stared at me as though I were a miracle, tripped and fell, insulted by earth's pull. His mother, naturally, added to his pain. The little guy suffered for nothing. What kind of marvel am I? Just a man getting fat, with a round back, and a common face.
But maybe the little fellow was right: I'm really a miracle? And every person is a miracle?
What do we know about people? What do I know about myself? In the problem called life, people are a given that does not have to be proved. And everyone who uses that given comes up with his own theory. Take my double, for instance. He left and that was both unexpected and logical.
But wait! If I'm going to get into this, I should start at the beginning.
It's funny to remember. Actually, I began with the simplest of intentions. To do my dissertation.
But creating something secondhand and compilatory (sort of like the topic recommended to me by my former chief professor Voltampernov, “Several Peculiarities in Projecting Diode Memory Systems”) was boring and repulsive. I was human after all. I wanted an unsolved problem, to get into its soul and to investigate nature with the help of reason, machines, and apparatus. And to discover something that no one had ever known. Or to invent something that no one else ever had thought of. And to be asked questions at the defense that would be fun to answer. And then to be told by friends, “Well, you really let them have it! Terrific!”
All the more because I can do that. It's not something you announce to people, but I can say it in my diary: I can. Five inventions and two completed research projects are proof of that. And this discovery… ah, no, Krivoshein, don't be in a rush to add this to your intellectual laurels. You're mixed up by this and still can't get it straightened out.
In a word, my heart's desire is what led me into the thick of that tendency of world systemology where the fundamental operative function is not the formula, or the algorithm, not even the recipe, but mere chance.
We, with our limited minds, love to make juxtapositions: lyric poets and physicists, waves and particles, plants and animals, machines and people…. But in life and in nature these things are not juxtaposed; they complement each other. Just as logic and chance complement each other in comprehension and solution finding. You can find much of the unproved, the capricious, in mathematical and logical constructions and you can find logical laws at work in random events.
For example, the ideological enemy of random retrieval, Voltampernov, doctor of technological sciences, never missed a chance to parry my suggestion (to study modeling of random processes) with the quip: “But that will be modeling with, so to speak, coffee grounds!” Isn't this the best illustration of that complementary nature?
And it was hard to argue. There was little achieved in this field, and many projects ended unsuccessfully, and ideas… ideas didn't have enough effect. In our department, like in the Wild West, they believed only in bare facts.
I was thinking of following the example of Valery Ivanov, my friend and former head of the lab, and to call it quits with the institute and move on to another city. But — and here it was, the random chance! — the builders did not complete the new building for perfectly good reasons, and the money allotted in the institute's budget was not spent for good reason, and Arkady Arkadievich announced a “contest” to find the best way to spend eighty thousand rubles. I'm sure that the most virulent defender of determinism would have to be careful not to make a mistake here.
I had formed my idea by then to research what a computer would do if it was fed not by a program that had been reduced to a binary system, but with ordinary — meaningful and random — information. Just that. Because when it is programmed it works with an amazing brilliance that stuns reporters. (“A new breakthrough in science: a machine can plan a shop's work in three minutes!” — because the programmers in their modesty usually fail to mention the number of months they prepared for that three — minute decision.)
Naturally, my idea done in an elementary way was nothing more than delirium for any intelligent systemologist: the computer would not behave in any way at all; it would simply stop! But I wasn't planning on doing it the elementary way.