The truck had terrible shock absorbers, which was very noticeable on the terrible cobbled roadway. Candidate Maxim, clutching his automatic rifle between his knees, considerately held Gai by his belt, thinking that it would be inappropriate for the corporal, who was so concerned about his authority, to bounce and hover above the benches like some Candidate Zoiza. Gai didn’t object, or perhaps he didn’t notice his subordinate’s attentiveness. Since his conversation with the cornet, Gai had been seriously preoccupied with something, and Maxim was glad the schedule meant they would be close beside each other and he would be able to help if necessary.
The trucks drove past the Central Theater, trundled along beside the foul-smelling New Life Canal for a long time, turned onto long Factory Street, which was empty at this time of day, and started winding their way through the crooked little side streets of a workers’ district where Maxim had never been before, although recently he had been in many places and given the city very thorough and thoughtful study. In general, he had learned a great deal during these last forty-something days and finally figured out the situation, which proved far less reassuring and far more bizarre than he had expected.
Maxim was still at the stage of poring over his spelling primer when Gai accosted him with the question of where he came from. Drawings didn’t help; Gai responded to them with a strange kind of smile and carried on repeating the same question: “Where are you from?”
Then Maxim had tetchily jabbed his finger at the ceiling and said, “From the sky.”
To his surprise, Gai had found this perfectly natural and started peppering him with a barrage of words spoken with an interrogative intonation; at first Maxim took them for the names of planets in the local system. But Gai spread out a map of the world in the Mercator projection, and it turned out that they weren’t the names of planets at all but the names of countries on the far side of this world. Maxim shrugged, uttered all the expressions of negation and denial that he knew, and started studying the map, and that was where the conversation temporarily ended.
About two days later, Maxim and Rada were watching television in the evening. The program being shown was a very strange one, something like a movie without any beginning or any end, without any definite storyline, and with an interminable cast of characters—rather sinister characters who acted rather barbarically from the viewpoint of any humanoid. Rada watched, enthralled, sometimes crying out or grabbing hold of Maxim’s sleeve, and twice breaking into tears, but Maxim quickly got bored and was about to doze off to the dismal, menacing music when he suddenly caught a glimpse of something familiar on the screen. He actually rubbed his eyes in surprise. There on the screen was Pandora, with a morose tahorg trudging through the jungle, trampling down the trees, and then suddenly Oleg appeared, holding a decoy whistle in his hand, very intent and serious, walking backward; suddenly he stumbled over an exposed root and went flying, landing on his back in a swamp. Maxim was absolutely flabbergasted to recognize his own mentogram, and then another, and another, but there was no commentary, the same music just kept on playing, and Pandora disappeared, to be replaced by a blind, haggard man who was crawling across a ceiling, tightly wrapped in a dusty cobweb.
“What is this?” Maxim asked, jabbing his finger at the screen. “A program,” Rada impatiently replied. “It’s interesting. Watch.” He didn’t manage to get a sensible answer, and suddenly the strange idea occurred to him of dozens and dozens of different aliens, all diligently recalling their own worlds. However, he quickly rejected this idea; the worlds were too terrible and too uniform—small, poky, airless rooms; endless corridors crammed with furniture that suddenly sprouted gigantic thorns; spiral staircases winding their way down into the impenetrable gloom of narrow well shafts; barred-off basements packed with writhing bodies, motionless faces peering out between them through ghastly, motionless eyes, like in the pictures of Hieronymus Bosch. It was all more like delirious fantasy than real worlds. Against the backdrop of these visions Maxim’s mentograms shone with a bright realism that, owing to his unique temperament, verged on Romantic Naturalism. Programs of this kind were shown every day, under the title Magical Voyage, but Maxim never did completely understand what the point of it all was. Gai and Rada responded to his questions with baffled shrugs and said, “A program. To keep things interesting. Magical Voyage. A story. Just watch it, watch! Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s frightening.” And extremely serious doubts arose in Maxim’s mind about the goal of Professor Hippopotamus’s research being first contact, and about his research really being research at all.
This intuitive conclusion was indirectly confirmed about ten days later, when Gai passed the exam to join the correspondence school for guardsmen wishing to apply for the initial officer’s rank and began cramming math and mechanics. The diagrams and formulas of the elementary course in ballistics perplexed Maxim. He started pestering Gai, who didn’t understand at first, but then, with a condescending smirk, he explained the cosmography of his world to Maxim. And then it turned out that the inhabited island was not a globe and not a geoid—in fact, it was not a planet at all.
The inhabited island was the World, the only world in the universe. What lay beneath the feet of the indigenous population here was the firm surface of the Sphere of the World. What hung above the heads of the indigenous population was a gaseous sphere of absolutely gigantic but finite volume; its composition was not yet known and it possessed physical properties that were not yet entirely clear. A theory existed that the density of the gas rapidly increased toward the center of the gaseous bubble, where certain mysterious processes occurred that gave rise to regular changes in the brightness of the so-called World Light, and this gave rise to the regular succession of day and night. In addition to short-term, diurnal changes in the state of the World Light, there were also long-term changes, which gave rise to seasonal fluctuations in temperature and the succession of the seasons of the year. The force of gravity was directed out from the center of the Sphere of the World, perpendicular to its surface. In short, the inhabited island existed on the inner surface of an immense bubble in an infinite firmament of solid matter that filled the rest of the Universe.
Totally dumbfounded by this surprise, Maxim tried to launch into a debate, but it very soon became clear that he and Gai were speaking different languages, and it was far more difficult for the two of them to understand each other than it would have been for a convinced Copernican and a follower of Ptolemy. The whole problem lay in the amazing properties of the atmosphere of this planet. First, its exceptionally powerful refraction hoisted up the horizon, and from time immemorial this had implanted in the heads of the indigenous population the idea that their land was not flat and quite definitely, absolutely not convex—it was concave. “Stand on the seashore,” the school textbooks recommended, “and follow the movement of a ship that has pulled away from the quayside. At first it will appear to move across a flat surface, and the farther away it moves, the higher it will rise, until it is concealed in the atmospheric haze that screens off the remainder of the World.” Second, this atmosphere was extremely dense, and it phosphoresced by day and by night, so that nobody here had ever seen the starry sky, and the incidences of observation of the planet’s sun that were recorded in chronicles had only served as a basis for attempts to create a theory of the World Light.
Maxim realized that he was caught inside a gigantic trap, that first contact would only become possible when he managed to turn natural conceptions that had been formed over the course of millennia inside out. Apparently some attempts had already been made to do this here, judging from the common expression “massaraksh,” which literally meant “the world inside out.” And in addition, Gai had told him about a purely abstract mathematical theory that took a different view of the world. This theory, which arose in ancient times, had been persecuted by what was once the official religion, and it had its own martyrs. It had been given mathematical consistency by the works of brilliant mathematicians of the past but had remained purely abstract, although, like most abstract theories, it had finally found practical application very recently, when super-long-distance ballistic shells had been created.