“Do you mean — you don't love me?”
“No, Val,” she looked at me sadly. “And I won't fall in love with you. I don't want to. I used to… to tell the truth, I worked at this relationship. I thought a quiet and unattractive man would love me and appreciate me. You have no idea, Val, how I needed the warmth and comfort of a relationship! But I didn't get warm near you. You don't love me very much either. You don't belong to me, I can see that. You have another love, science!” She laughed angrily. “You've invented all sorts of toys for yourselves: science, technology, politics, war. And women are just something on the side. Well, I don't want to be something on the side. It's well known: women are fools. We take everything seriously. We know no bounds in love and can't do a thing with ourselves….” Her voice trembled and she turned away. “I would have said all this to you anyway. I was wrong again!”
Actually, there's no need for details. I threw her out. I'm sitting here over my diary.
So, it was all planned. Don't love a handsome man, love a crummy one. And I wanted to create a big family….
I feel cold. Oh, so cold!
Lena's not mercenary. Then what is she? Actually, she was right: I knew that myself. And how! But this light relationship suited me before. “Will it do?” — as they ask in the store, offering you margarine instead of butter.
Nothing happens in life to no purpose. I'm the one who changed, who realized things in time, and she's still the same. I fell for a storybook illusion, what a jerk. I wanted to get warm.
And that's it. There will never be anything in my life. I'll never find anyone like Lena. I'm not willing to go in for one — night stands.
Lena didn't want to become my widow.
It's cold….
We've lost spontaneity, the ability to follow our feelings, to believe on faith because we believe, to love because we're in love. It's possible that it happened because everyone got burned more than once, or because in the theater and movies we see how those feelings are manufactured, or because life is so complicated and everything must be thought out and planned — I don't know. “Tenderness, in a Taylor series expansion….” I've been expansive enough.
Now we have to understand with our reason just how important solid, strong feelings are in human life. Who knows, maybe it's good that it has to be proven. And it will be proven. Then people will develop a new naturalness of feeling, strengthened by reason, and they'll understand that without feelings there is no life.
And for now… it's cold.
Ah, Lena, Lena, my poor frightened girl! Now, I think, I really do love you.
Investigator Onisimov reached the New Systems Laboratory at 8:30 in the morning. The guard on duty, Golovorezov, was sitting in the sun on the porch, leaning against the door with his cap over his eyes. Flies were crawling around his open mouth and on his cheeks. The guard moved his facial muscles, but didn't wake up.
“You'll get a bad burn on duty, comrade guard,” Onisimov said sternly.
The guard woke immediately, fixed his cap, and stood up.
“Everything quiet here, comrade captain. There were no incidents in the night.”
'I see. So you have the keys?”
“Yes sir.” He pulled the keys from his pocket. “You gave them to me, and I have them.”
“Don't let anyone in.”
Onisimov unlocked the door and shut it behind him. He found his bearings in the dark hallway easily, maneuvering among the boxes and crates, and reached the door to the lab.
He looked around carefully in the laboratory. There were gelatinous puddles on the floor, their dried edges curling up. The hoses of the computer — womb hung limply from the bottles and flasks. The lights were out on the control panel. The switches on the electric panel were sticking out sideways. Onisimov inhaled the stale air carefully and turned his head: “Aha!” Then he took off his blue jacket, hung it neatly on a chair back, rolled up his sleeves, and got to work.
First of all he rinsed the teflon tank with water, stood it back up on the floor, and removed all the hoses and conductors from it. Then he followed the power cable and found the burnt — out part that had shorted, eaten away by acids, near the wall board. He took rubber gloves from the drawer, got the right tools from the cabinet, went back to the cable and cleaned and patched it up with insulated tape.
A few minutes later it was all done. Onisimov, taking a breather, stretched and turned on the electricity. The transformers in the TsVM — 12 began humming. The air vents rustled, and the exhaust fan whined, picking up speed. The green, red, blue, and yellow lights on the control panel blinked aimlessly.
Onisimov, biting his lower lip in anxiety, got a full flask of distilled water and added it to all the flasks; he got Krivoshein's lab journal from the desk, and deciphering the notations, started adding reagents to the bottles and flasks. When he finished all this, he stood in the middle of the room expectantly.
The trembling light flitted from one end of the control panel to the other, and up and down and down and up — tearing around like a maddened bulb on an electronic billboard. But gradually the random movement began forming a pattern of broken lines. The green vertical lines were shaded with blue and yellow lights. The red lights blinked more slowly: soon they went out completely. Onisimov kept waiting for the “Stop!” signal to go on at the top of the panel. Five minutes, ten, fifteen… the signal didn't come on.
“I think it's working.” Onisimov rubbed his face with his hand.
Now he had to wait. So as not to sit by idly, he filled a pail with water and washed the floor. Then he taped up the torn wires of Monomakh's Crown, read the notes in the journal, got together some more reagents and poured them in. There was nothing else to do.
He heard footsteps in the hall. Onisimov turned toward the door sharply. Golovorezov came in.
“Comrade captain, scientific secretary Hilobok is out there. He wants to come in. He says he has something to tell you. Should I let him in?”
“No. Let him wait. I have to talk to him, too.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I guess I'll have to talk to Harry,” Onisimov chuckled. “The perfect time to remind him of recent events.”
May 17. But Harry Haritonovich bent the truth when he said he didn't have time to write his dissertation! He lied. Yesterday, it turns out, he had his preliminary defense of his doctoral at a closed session of our scientific council. We do what so many organizations do: before letting one of our people out into the world, we listen to him in our private circle. His official defense will take place in a few days at Lena's construction project bureau.
Oh, Harry isn't lying for nothing! There's something going on.
May 18. Today I knocked at the window next to which a local institute poet, who wished to remain anonymous, had written in penciclass="underline"
Be worthy of the first form.
The enemy does not sleep!
Major Pronin.
I was worthy. That's why Joahann Johannovich let me into the closed reading room and gave me a copy of the dissertation of technical sciences candidate H. H. Hilobok to attain the degree of doctor of technical sciences on the top of… well, I can't write about that.
Well, brother…. First of all, the topic deals totally with the development of the blocks of memory that Valery and I had done long ago, and it looks like Hilobok was at least the inventor and director of the project; it doesn't come out and say so, but you can read it between the lines. Secondly, he allowed himself free improvisation in part of the explanation and interpretation of the results, and made major mistakes. Thirdly, he has long — proven facts, determined by foreign systemologists and electronics people, introduced by “It has been determined by experiments that….” How could the scientific council let that get by? It's May, and half the people are on business trips or vacation.
No, he won't get away with this.