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Tsiolkovsky arrived on the Zelenina doorstep late one afternoon. Stasya opened the door for him, and shrieked in alarm, bringing Lydia and Phyllis hastening to her aid. For it seemed a moot point whether the emaciate tramp who stood there ought not to proceed onwards to the nearest hospital ward.
Granted that Tsiolkovsky was worn out by a long and tiresome journey---and nobody could reasonably expect a traveler who had just traversed the Siberian plain to arrive with his clothing anything but soiled, crumped, and decorated with straw. Yet Tsiolkovsky appeared to have neglected to eat a scrap during the entire journey. His eyes peered out weakly through cheap spectacles. What's more, it immediately became clear---despite the size of the man's ears with their long dangling lobes---that he was almost deaf; certainly he seemed to have dire difficulty in communicating. This picture of misery was completed by a cheap suitcase tied together with string. In short, Tsiolkovsky looked just like the most wretched kind of deported exile.
Nonetheless, once the man had succeeded in identifying himself, Lydia Zelenina drew him graciously inside----though she raised an eyebrow.
"Most honored sir!" Dropping his suitcase, Tsiolkovsky blundered into Eric's embrace, and the two men hugged each other---rather more dutifully than devotedly on Eric's part.
"Statsya, we will eat dinner much earlier than usual."
The old lady nodded to her mistress, and bustled off, casting back glances of pity and contempt. What was this fellow then, a house guest or a refugee?
Right there in the hall, Tsiolkovsky knelt down and began to unpick the string from his suitcase, as if he expected that would have to doss down before the front door like a watchdog. Meanwhile, the two young sisters had crept behind a pillar to peer at him: Evpra, wide-eyed and giggling, Zino with the narrowed gaze of a police agent.
From amidst a jumble of dirty crushed laundry, Tsiolkovsky produced a manuscript bound with a frayed blue ribbon. This he presented to Eric.
"Thought perhaps---thought maybe---after dinner? And an entertainment?" Tsiolkovsky choked. "Better at expressing myself on paper!" Did Eric's ears mislead him or did Tsiolkovsky speak Russian with a faint hint of a Polish accent?
The manuscript was entitled On the Moon, and was penned in a neat, sloping copperplate hand.
Oh, well, this had to be that same piece of---what had he called it in his first letter? Science Fantasy? A glanced confirmed that the pages were a first person narrative. Undoubtedly the very same. I hold, thought Eric, an infant genre in my hands. He was careful not to drop it.
"Phyllis," said the countless loudly, "would you kindly show this gentleman up to his room?"
Tsiolkovsky gaped. "Room? Eh? Oh yes..."
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Rather better groomed and with his beard combed out, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky sat down at the table two hours later. The instruction to Satasya to hurry might as well have been spoken in English. But no doubt she had the welfare of the other dinner guests equally in mind. This evening, these were Matousek and Milorad Yanovich. The meal began with kidney and cucumber soup accompanied by several glasses of vodka that presently loosened Tsiolkovsky's tongue, though they did little to improve his powers of hearing. While Phyllis and Statsya quizzed Tsiolkovsky about the hazards of his journey. Eric tried to assess the man.
He had already glanced through On the Moon, and an odd piece of fiction it was indeed....all about lunar latitude and longitude, and thermal conductivity and light intensity, and the joys of feeling the chains of gravity slacken; wrapped up in the form of a dream. Pleasantly enough written, on the whole, but hopelessly moralizing!
Watching the man sharp down three helpings of Statsya's soup while trying to conduct a conversation, Eric couldn't help but recognize an element of wish-fulfilment in the tale. Could an author only but cut the dash that his characters did---striding the landscape in great leaping bounds! Of course, Eric could sympathize with such a fantasy, having only recently hauled his own prematurity aging carcass halfway across Siberia, full of sheer envy for the birds. But really, there was no irony in this Konstantin Eduardovich.
Soup was followed by roast duck and stewed cabbage.
"Now, let's imagine," said Tsiolkovsky between mouthfuls, "a cosmic spaceship----powered by the same principle as the sun itself! When it came to its doom it was as if a miniature sun had blown up---using up an eon's worth of energy instantly."
Yanovich spoke slowly and loudly, as to the deaf. "Do you mean to say this spaceship was powered by jets of gas?"
"No, no! The sun cannot burn its fuel---in the way a gas-jet burns. Somehow the very atoms of the sun must burst apart."
"Atoms are invisible" Matousek said. "Everybody knows that. They're the smallest piece of matter you can have."
Tsiolkovsky cupped a hand behind his ear; Fima repeated the objection.
"Ahah! But what if it's not the smallest? What if it only seems to be so, because each atom is locked together with immense force? Once we can survey the true extent of the destruction, I can calculate the energy needed. That will make it possible to estimate the strength of this 'binding force'. What's more, how will these broken bits of atoms behave? Will they fly around frantically, trying to combine again? Will they smack into other atoms and split them as well?"
"If broken atoms hit a living body," said Yanovich excitedly. "I mean, if they burrow into living cells---I'm thinking about those scabs on the reindeer!"
"Exactly. But medicine isn't my province." Tsiolkovsky nodded deferentially at Eric, and crammed more cabbage into his mouth.
Eric smiled. "I assure you, I know nothing whatever about Broken-Atom Sickness."
"Equally, if we were to bombard chosen inorganic substances, in a controlled way, with broken atoms---maybe we could deliberately transform one element into another? A bar of lead into a bar of gold."
"That's not science," protested Matousek. "That's alchemy. Consider this: the atom is called an atom---from the Greek---because you can't divide it. We might find a lot of iron and nickel and tin buried under the taiga, but I can guarantee that we will not find any gold."
"What?'
"I said..."
"I heard what you said, Mr. Matousek. I didn't say there was any gold--aren't you listening? What I said was, we might find evidence of a spaceship from another world, powered by a form of propulsion undreamed of at present. With respect, I'm afraid your attitude's all typical. Too many scientists are bound by mental chains."
"Quite!" Yanovich nodded sagely. "All your conventional professors---I've said it before: Lord Nelson's blind eye!"
"I myself have the dubious privilege of being self-educated..." Tsiolkovsky tried to scrape more duck flesh from a bare bone. "I taught myself in isolation from professors, laboratories and universities. Of course they can lead to ignorance of the latest scientific progress, but I also believe it yields a fresh approach, a willingness to look at the phenomena from a new viewpoint. Provided, always, that the math is correct! My dear Sir, just because science tells us that an atom can't be divided and uses a Greek word to say so, does not make it a fact now and forever."
"Bravo!" applauded Yanovich.
"We must keep our minds open, gentlemen. And ladies. If the evidence discredits my hypothesis of a spaceship, I'll be the first one to discard it. With regret, yes. But without defending it blindly to the death, as is so often the case."257Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡD04d5ItSH2
"If we do find broken bits of a spaceship from another world," began Lydia.
"No, no!" Tsiolkovsky interrupted her. "There won't be any broken bits."
"But you said..."
"I said broken atoms---that's different. This isn't like an artillery shell exploding, showering fragments of metal around. The ship would be totally evaporated."
This touched Lydia's heart. "Alas, what kind of brave creatures can have been in it?"
Perhaps because her higher in pitch, Tsiolkovsky heard her perfectly. "Creatures possessed of noble intentions, I promise you! Only the nobly-minded will heed the call of the cosmos."
As the conversation proceeded, and as a duck was succeeded by stewed gooseberries with cream, Eric decided with relief that he hadn't made such an error of judgment after all. Vagabond though he looked, and blunt through the manners were sometimes, this Tsiolkovsky was a visionary, a man of endurance and honest rationality. Maybe it was unfair to expect him to have insight into the human heart as well.
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They repaired to the drawing room after dinner. With Lydia's nodded consent, Matousek commandeered a bottle of vodka en route. Phyllis Faerber seated herself promptly at the piano and proceeded to butcher a transcription of the first movement of Peter Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. In despair at her heavy-handedness, compared her legerdemain at cards---Eric fled upstairs to fetch Tsiolkovsky's manuscript.
Returning, he passed this over to its author before the governess could commence murdering the second movement; fortunately Phyllis took the hint and retired from the Piano.
"Konstantin Eduardovich, would like to entertain us with a short story he's written. Do we have your kind permission, Countess?"
"With the stamp of your approval on it, Eric Savali, how could anyone possibly refuse?"
Tsiolkovsky adopted a pedagogic stance in front of the fireplace. In the stilted style of a teacher dictating out of a chemistry textbook, he at once began to read his tale of science fantasy. Fortunately, once the narrative moved on to the heady delights of flying through the air under one's own power, freed from the oppressive pull of Earth, his delivery improved markedly. His voice thrilled; he seemed intoxicated, like a religious fanatic. Yanovich watched him devotedly all the while, wearing the expression of a loyal hound whose master had just come home after a six months' absence.
Afterwards, and it was quite a long while afterwards, everyone applauded the odd story. Phyllis Faerber jumped up and pirouetted around. Casting direction to the winds, Lydia joined her, and together the two women whirled around the room like a swiftly rotating planet and its attendant moon.
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