Rogov sat down.
A white-smocked technician brought the machine over to him. It was mounted on three rubber-tired wheels and it resembled the small X-ray units used by dentists. In place of the cone at the head of the X-ray machine there was a long, incredibly tough needle. It had been made for them by the best surgical steel craftsmen in Prague.
Another technician came up with a shaving bowl, a brush, and a straight razor. Under the gaze of Gauck’s deadly eyes he shaved an area of four square centimetres on the top of Rogov’s head.
Cherpas herself then took over. She set her husband’s head in the clamp and used a micrometer to get the skull-fittings so tight and so accurate that the needle would push through the dura mater at exactly the right point.
All this work she did deftly with kind, very strong fingers. She was gentle, but she was firm. She was his wife, but she was also his fellow scientist and his colleague in the Soviet State.
She stepped back and looked at her work. She gave him one of their own very special smiles, the secret gay smiles which they usually exchanged with each other only when they were alone. “You won’t want to do this every day. We’re going to have to find some way of getting into the brain without using this needle. But it won’t hurt you.”
”Does it matter if it does hurt?” said Rogov. “This is the triumph of all our work. Bring it down.”
Cherpas, her eyes gleaming with attention, reached over and pulled down the handle which brought the tough needle to within a tenth of a millimetre of the right place.
Rogov spoke very carefully: “All I felt was a little sting. You can turn the power on now.”
Gausgofer could not contain herself. Timidly she addressed Cherpas, “May I turn on the power?”
Cherpas nodded. Gauck watched. Rogov waited. Gausgofer pulled down the bayonet switch.
The power went on.
With an impatient twist of her hand, Anastasia Cherpas ordered the laboratory attendants to the other end of the room. Two or three of them had stopped working and were staring at Rogov, staring like dull sheep. They looked embarrassed and then they huddled in a white-smocked herd at the other end of the laboratory.
The wet May wind blew in on all of them. The scent of forest and leaves was about them.
The three watched Rogov.
Rogov’s complexion began to change. His face became flushed. His breathing was so loud and heavy they could hear it several meters away. Cherpas fell on her knees in front of him, eyebrows lifted in mute inquiry.
Rogov did not dare nod, not with a needle on his brain. He spoke through flushed lips, speaking thickly and heavily, “Do-not-stop-now.”
Rogov himself did not know what was happening. He had thought he might see an American room, or a Russian room, or a tropical colony. He might see palm trees, or forests, or desks. He might see guns or buildings, washrooms or beds, hospitals, homes, churches. He might see with the eyes of a child, a woman, a man, a soldier, a philosopher, a slave, a worker, a savage, a religious, a Communist, a reactionary, a governor, a policeman. He might hear voices; he might hear English, or French, or Russian, Swahili, Hindi, Malay, Chinese, Ukrainian, Armenian, Turkish, Greek. He did not know.
None of these things had happened.
It seemed to him that he had left the world, that he had left time. The hours and the centuries shrank up like the meters, and the machine, unchecked, reached out for the most powerful signal which any human mind had transmitted. Rogov did not know it, but the machine had conquered time.
The machine had reached the dance, the human challenger and the dance festival of the year that might have been A.D. 13,582.
Before Rogov’s eyes the golden shape and the golden steps shook and fluttered in a ritual a thousand times more compelling than hypnotism. The rhythms meant nothing and everything to him. This was Russia, this was Communism. This was his life-indeed it was his soul acted out before his very eyes.
For a second, the last second of his ordinary life, he looked through flesh and blood eyes and saw the shabby woman whom he had once thought beautiful. He saw Anastasia Cherpas, and he did not care.
His vision concentrated once again on the dancing image, this woman, those postures, that dance!
Then the sound came in-music that would have made a Tschaikovsky weep, orchestras which would have /silenced Shostakovich or Khachaturian forever.
The people-who-were-not-people between the stars had taught mankind many arts. Rogov’s mind was the best of its time, but his time was far, far behind the time of the great dance. With that one vision Rogov went firmly and completely mad.
He became blind to the sight of Cherpas, Gausgofer, and Gauck. He forgot the village of Ya. Ch. He forgot himself.
He was like a fish, bred in stale fresh water, which is thrown for the first time into a living stream. He was like an insect emerging from the chrysalis. His twentieth-century mind could not hold the imagery and the impact of the music and the dance.
But the needle was there and the needle transmitted into his mind more than his mind could stand.
The synapses of his brain flicked like switches. The future flooded into him.
He fainted.
Cherpas leaped forward and lifted the needle. Rogov fell out of the chair.
It was Gauck who got the doctors. By nightfall they had Rogov resting comfortably and under heavy sedation. There were two doctors, both from the military headquarters. Gauck had obtained authorization for their services by a direct telephone call to Moscow.
Both the doctors were annoyed. The senior one never stopped grumbling at Cherpas.
”You should not have done it, Comrade Cherpas. Comrade Rogov should not have done it either. You can’t go around sticking things into brains. That’s a medical problem. None of you people are doctors of medicine. It’s all right for you to contrive devices with the prisoners, but you can’t inflict things like this on Soviet scientific personnel. I’m going to get blamed because I can’t bring Rogov back. You heard what he was saying. All he did was mutter, ‘That golden shape on the golden steps, that music, that me is a true me, that golden shape, that golden shape, I want to be with that golden shape,’ and rubbish like that. Maybe you’ve ruined a first-class brain forever-” He stopped short as though he had said too much. After all, the problem was a security problem and apparently both Gauck and Gausgofer represented the security agencies.
Gausgofer turned her watery eyes on the doctor and said in a low, even, unbelievably poisonous voice, “Could they have done it, comrade doctor?”
The doctor looked at Cherpas, answering Gausgofer, “How? You were there. I wasn’t. How could she have done it? Why should she do it? You were there.”
Cherpas said nothing. Her lips were compressed tight with grief. Her yellow hair gleamed, but her hair was all that remained, at that moment, of her beauty. She was frightened and she was getting ready to be sad. She had no time to hate foolish women or to worry about security, she was concerned with her colleague, her lover, her husband Rogov.
There was nothing much for them to do except to wait. They went into a large room and waited.
The servants had laid out immense dishes of cold sliced meat, pots of caviar, and an assortment of sliced breads, pure butter, genuine coffee, and liquors.
None of them ate much. At 9:15 the sound of rotors beat against the house. The big helicopter bad arrived from Moscow.
Higher authorities took over.
The higher authority was a deputy minister, a man named V. Karper.
Karper was accompanied by two or three uniformed colonels, by an engineer civilian, by a man from the headquarters of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and by two doctors.