LIGHT SCIENCE FICTION
Dedicated to the friends of my student years
This story happened so long ago that almost no witnesses of it can be found. Some are no longer alive, others have dispersed to distant countries. And only the sea is still noisy, and the surf still plays with pebbles.
We were situated ourselves comfortably at a table on the second floor of a seaside restaurant with a beautiful view of the bay. When I said “we” I meant the three vacationers from the same city and the same university. Two former graduate students and one former doctorate, who successfully defended their theses and his PhD before the start of the summer. However, what connected us was not so much our university affiliation, but our beach fraternity and love of good society. The fact was that this was not the first summer we’ve met on Medical Beach, a favorite place for researchers and musicians from the composers’ union of USSR.
Apparently, democracy is inversely proportional to the weight of clothing on the body: people in swimming trunks and swimsuits were losing their previous guidelines and found interlocutors based on the geometry of the body and the width of the smile.
So we had a lunch.
Levan and I started enjoying smoked meat barbeque, and Fred Gelman, the idol of university youth, who taught us field theory in the third year, had not yet killed his soup-kharcho. He was telling an interesting story from his countless arsenal of observations and hypotheses,
“Do you know Emik? Emik Chechiladze.”
Well, who didn’t know this vivid colorful personality! A passionate lover of scientific innovations and an adventurer of the D’Artagnan type, Emil Georgievich, the Manager of the City Aquarium and also the head of the laboratory of alternative treatment methods, was called Emik behind his back.
“In the history of the birth of the famous “anti-cancer” drug Katrexin, I, one might say, was a witness of its conception,” Gelman continued. – “Here is how it happened. One day, when you weren’t appear on this beach yet, Denis Pound-Likhovetsky-son came to rest.”
Levan’s and my eyes sparkled in anticipation of the intrigue. Everyone knew and loved Papa Pound-Likhovetsky. He was a nuclear celebrity, like Sakharov, and his son, Denis, not only had a deep knowledge of biology and physics, but also had a good command of words, always joked, made wisecracks and was the life of the party, just like our Fred, who continued,
“It happened that Emik was just stretched out on the beach, playing cards with Mika Tariverdiev. Denis, as if by chance, said,
“Have you heard that the Americans want to extract an anti-cancer remedy from sharks?”
“Why from sharks?” – Emik perked up.
“Because they don’t seem to get cancer.”
“Yep,” said Mika, “They’re not people. What cancer then?”
“Let’s say, not the human one you thought about. The sharks are the most ancient animals living on Earth. More precisely, fish. They are older than dinosaurs. Modern sharks have eaten up the endangered giant lizards, and they themselves, as if nothing had happened, remained to wait for humans…”
Emik thought out quickly,
“Do you, Denis, want to say that in these millions of years they should have died out from cancer?”
“Maybe I don’t want to, I’m just recounting behind-the-scenes conversations. Sharks don’t want to die out or get cancer.”
Emik became worried,
“This means that their body contains substances that prevent uncontrolled cell division. And where would you look for them?”
“In the body’s laboratory – in the liver!” Denis summed it up.
Perhaps the whole conversation was one of Denis’s jokes, perhaps a mixture of hypotheses and speculation, but the enterprising Chechiladze immediately decided to enter into competition with America: to get a boat, to catch small Black Sea sharks – katrans, to isolate an extract from their liver and to test it on hopeless patients. This was his plan.
And the enterprise started up. As usual, the secret becomes overt.
“Chechiladze seems to have found the elixir of youth.”
In such a distorted form, the information reached the aging members of the Politburo. Literally and figuratively. The drug was tried on the second secretary of KPSS, whose… prostate shrank with all the ensuing consequences. And away we go: funds were allocated, a laboratory was opened, and staff was provided. The mechanism started working. And soon the drug Katrexin became a new shortage.
“And what?” Levan asked, forgetting about the barbecue, “Has it helped at least one patient?”
“This is already a medical secret,” Fred threw up his hands, “If you see Emik, ask him yourself.”
All evening Levan and I discussed Gelman’s story.
“It looks like a joke,” Levan said, “Maybe Fred was playing a prank on us?”
“Rather, Denis played a prank on Chechiladze.”
“Be that as it may, Chechiladze played a prank on the Politburo for an entire laboratory.”
“Look,” Levan noted, “The hypothesis is bursting at the seams. Who checked whether sharks get cancer? What does extinction have to do with it? And since they haven’t died out, does that mean there is no cancer?”
I also joined him:
“The ancient sharks had become extinct! Even before the dinosaurs. And sick sharks can be eaten by their relatives, or in the very clean environment of the world’s oceans the incidence of cancer is low…”
“It seems that there, in the Politburo, they fell for the bait.”
“Not for the first time. Lysenko fooled everyone like that.”
“In general, it’s not difficult to fool your superiors.”
Our electronics engineer, having nothing better to do, assembled a space gun for his boy son. Academician Sh. found him fascinated by the colorful blinking of LEDs and the howling of acoustic circuits and asked,
“What are you thinking about?”
“About the blaster!” the engineer went all-in.
“I can see for myself that’s about the blaster,” the scientist decided not to lose his face, “I meant: are there any problems with the parts?”
“This is fun,” Levan noted, “But people may suffer if, instead of hard treatment, they reach for a magic cure.”
“And how many sharks will die now!” I added.
We devoted the whole evening to discussions about science, nature, treatment, but the story did not end there, but, strangely enough, received an unexpected continuation.
In those days, most holidaymakers rented rooms in the private sector. Usually students found cheaper housing on the outskirts. Levan regularly rented a room near the Medical beach and traveled back and forth wearing only shorts. But in the evening he rarely appeared in the city – he enjoyed the rural idyll.
On the contrary, I really liked living in the center: everything was close, including the seaside boulevard – a place for evening walk. True, every morning it took an hour to get to my favorite Medical beach, but the boat trip on the sea was to my liking.
Luckily for me, my parents had a new employee at work, whose mother-in-law owned a huge house near the boulevard and plantations in the mountains. We can say that the design institute received a boarding house in the center of the resort, or, conversely, the boarding house received a design institute in the capital.
The most amazing thing, which I encountered in the house of Margot, huge, big-nosed, but friendly hostess of the house, was a slave. My own jaw dropped when Margo introduced to me a slave, a hefty, strong man Vasily with an unhealthy drinker’s face, brown from the sun and rough as an unplanned board. He was sweeping when I entered the yard and began to introduce myself to the hostess.
“I am very happy!” she said, “You have wonderful parents. Make yourself at home. Vasily, take his things to the blue bedroom.”
The man, without saying a word, picked up from the ground my suitcase filled with books, easily threw it over his shoulder and rushed up the stairs. I looked at Margot in bewilderment.
“Don’t be surprised,” she said, “Different places have different customs. This man is my worker, my servant. But he does not work for hire, but according to a sentence. That is, he is my slave. If I say a word, he’ll go to prison for what he had done before, but with exemplary behavior he’ll serve in freedom. I feed him, support him, and transfer the money he earned to his family. They couldn’t be happier. At the same time, Vasily is being treated for alcoholism here. Look, don’t give him money – he’ll drink them out right away. He is obliged to help all the tenants, but if you really want to thank him, give me his tip. I swear, his family will get every single kopek.
I was completely blown away. I have never heard of such a thing in my life. Soon the harvest will ripen, and Vasily will be sent to the mountains on a plantation. I strongly associated this word with his status as a slave. For some time I wondered how this was possible in the twentieth century? But then Vasily said that he himself voluntarily chose this option, instead of trial and imprisonment in a distant, cold region. In general, Vasily turned out to be quite an interesting man. He described to Margo’s tenants (and Margot rented rooms only to her acquaintances or people on recommendation) his amazing stories, which they mistook for alcoholic confabulations.
“I started my service in the spring of 1946,” he began his story, taking pleasure with a puff of my aromatic cigarettes, “This was the first conscription into the Soviet army, and not into the Red Army. And I was lucky not only with the name, but also with the branch of the troops. I ended up in the chemical troops. The soldiers rejoiced – there is no war, so they won’t be killed! Who knew that many of my fellow soldiers would not return home? In the spring of 1949, our regiment was transferred to Semipalatinsk. The demobilization was delayed. They promised to let us home by the end of summer. No one could have imagined that the soldiers would experience the power of a nuclear explosion.”
“Vasily,” I interrupted the narrator filling extreme astonishment and disbelieve simultaneously, “You want to say that you survived the atomic explosion?”
“Well, yes, of course! Nobody believes it! There was nothing left of those who were closer to the explosion. I was lucky to be further away and in the tank. Not everyone at all died. Those who survived got sick. They suffered from burns and ulcers. Everyone was vomiting, their hair was falling out, and they suffered from repeated infections.”
“And everything subsided?”
“As you see. I only do not have children, and there are nasty growths on my skin.”
Vasily awkwardly lifted his shirt with his rough oak hands, and I almost screamed. Gray-brown crusts, reminiscent of the bark of an apple tree, covered here and there the surface of his body. In the center of the chest, a gas mask in a phallic style was clumsily impaled with blue ink, and under it was the inscription “For a peaceful atom!”
“You need to see a doctor! A skin doctor! To be examined and tested! And in general, it looks like…” I bit my tongue just in time.
“What? Like cancer? I wouldn’t be surprised,” Vasily sighed, “Many of us died from it. But I can’t see a doctor, I’m here illegally. And I don’t want to be explored. They performed quite a lot of experiments on me. But the main reason is still not this, but the fact that I feel great. It’s not cancer.”
I didn’t want to argue with Vasily. How an uneducated man who was being treated for alcoholism could knew whether he had cancer or not? And if the story about Semipalatinsk was not fiction, then…
In a word, I decided to consult with Emil Georgievich Chechiladze.
Fred promised to help me. Apparently, he called Emik. In any case, the head of the laboratory of alternative medicine and the manufacturer of Katrexin appeared on our beach a couple of days after the conversation. He politely greeted all the celebrities from the Composers’ Union, and kissed Plisetskaya’s hand.
“Well, healers,” Emik asked cheerfully when we stepped aside, “Where is your patient? Doesn’t he want to come to my laboratory?”
“Probably not,” I sighed and told Vasily’s story. “I’ll be honest, I would never have asked for the drug if it weren’t for the special circumstances of the life of “our slave”. He should not be treated at home, but investigated at a research institute.”
Emik frowned, “You don’t believe in alternative medicine, but still beg for Katrexin.”
“Leave the fellow alone,” Fred stood up for me. “He’s worried about the poor guy.”
“You know,” said Chechiladze, “I’ll talk to the patient myself. I know Margot well; she will not be against treatment. The main thing is that Vasily would not refuse.”
It seemed to me that Emik said that on purpose, because he already knew from my story about Vasily’s attitude to injections.
“Don’t worry too much,” Levan advised, “If the patient was not examined by a doctor, then let Chechiladze do it at least.”
“Levan is right,” Fred added, “You cannot prescribe the drug in absentia. And don’t forget, in decent countries, the patient always has the right to refuse treatment.”
When I returned, Vasily was no longer in the house. He was sent to the mountains to harvest crops.
“Aunt Margot, hadn’t Chechiladze come by? Had he spoken to Vasily?”
“He came, sure. They talked in the utility room, where Vasily sleeps, the healer laid out ampoules and equipment for injections on the table and went to wash his hands at the tap in the yard. Meanwhile, Vasily had lapped up a bottle of alcohol for skin cleaning and took a bite of Katrexin from five ampoules. “Liquid fish,” as he said.”
Emik was beside himself, “A real cudgel, this Pinocchio of yours,” he shouted, “Let him turn back into a log!”
“Why did he say that, son, don’t you know?” asked Margot.
I shook my head. Indeed, I didn’t know, but I explained it to myself this way: the serum eaten is either useless or… even dangerous.
At this point, I thought, the story about an alternative medicine and an unusual patient ended, along with a summer vacation on the warm and tender sea.
My wife and I had tuned for a pleasant evening. Parties at the Rockefeller Institute were always great – intriguing reports, lively discussions, great conversationalists and delicious cocktails.
Today’s program included the report of Dr. W. about the discovery of a gene-moderator that can turn on the process of genome change. For “the dessert” we were shown excerpts from the upcoming documentary movie “Sentient Primates” shot by the International Geographer Journal. They showed talking monkeys in Africa, killer monkeys in South America and suddenly, to my surprise, the camera took the audience to places that were well known to me. Yes, yes, to the green slopes of the mountains, near the unforgettable warm sea of my youth. The years have destroyed previous realities. Countries have changed; people also have changed and, as it turned out, monkeys have changed too.
A reporter and a cameraman from the Journal flew out for an investigation, attracted by reports from local residents.
Witnesses spoke from the screen.
A local capital dweller: “War and devastation affected the Apes Nursery, from where apes fled to the mountains. It’s colder there, but it’s easier for the animals to feed themselves.”
A resident of a mountain village: “The apes appeared unexpectedly. They must have escaped from the zoo. Why be surprised, people are escaping too.”
His wife: “At first we thought that the boys were stealing fruits from the plantations at night, but then my husband set up an ambush and recognized the thieves as large monkeys that were in the Nursery.”
A shepherd: “The monkeys settled in those caves on the mountainside, can you see them, behind the cemetery? The trees here are already growing poorly, only one apple tree appeared on the grave of a homeless man, there are no others. Animals hide in caves, and every time they go down to gardens and plantations for food.”
The reporter: “The cemetery is located right on the border of the alpine meadows. Therefore, the apes found a relatively quiet place to live in the caves, but only berries grow there on the bushes, and animals have to go down considerable distances to get the fruits.”
A hunter: “When I first told my friends that monkeys were warming themselves by the fire, my friends laughed and advised me to drink less chacha.”
The reporter: “Nobody believed the first reports, but now the villagers are convinced that a miracle happened – God created a new man in the Caucasus. Some old and deeply religious people make a pilgrimage to the monkey site and bring food as a form of worship to the act of creation. Cameraman John Robertson and I also went up here, delivering a backpack of oranges and biscuits to the apes.”
Shots of apes sorting out gifts appeared on the screen, and then the camera began to approach the entrance to the cave. Darkness.
The cameraman: “You can see a narrow entrance to the cave. I’ll turn on the flashlight now.”
Suddenly it brightened up.
The cameraman: “To my surprise, the light does not come from the lantern or from the hole in the roof. This is the light of a fire burning in the cave!”
A burning fire appears on the screen. Next to it are armfuls of brushwood.
The reporter’s voice in the cameraman’s headphones: “John, quickly leave! Several apes are heading towards the cave. Two of them having sticks in their hands.”
The frames flash quickly, because the cameraman is retreating under the protection of civilization.
The reporter: “Now that the reports have been documented, we hope to raise funds for a full-fledged scientific expedition to understand what we are faced with: an innate change in the behavior of animals or an acquired one, or even the result of training. Residents of a nearby village have already added a poetic element to the story of the monkeys. They call the apes’ hideout “Adam’s Cave”. We managed to find the origins of the legend, which was told to us by a local centenarian, ninety-five-year-old Margot Sanaya.”
The old woman: “I won’t tell you anything new. This has already happened once. To become a human, one must eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Such a tree turned out to be here. And its only fruit was eaten by apes.”
The reporter: “What is the difference between the apple tree on the grave and other apple trees?”
We see a lone tree on a simple grave hill.
The old woman: “This tree itself used to be a man who knew a lot of evil, brought a lot of trouble to others, but, I hope, atoned for it.”
The reporter: “Thank you very much for the interview and your opinion. Don’t you think, dear viewers, that any important phenomenon is accompanied by legends and folk art? But this is already the topic of our next movie.”
Sounds of music. Captions. In the frame there is a lonely tree at the grave. The camera zooms in.
“Look,” my wife said, “This country will never change. It seems to be an object of worship, and there are two and a half people there, but they still managed to draw a dick on the tree and, I guess, some swear words underneath it.”
On the trunk of the apple tree, between two branches raised like hands to the sky, round glasses and the ribbed trunk of a gas mask were symbolically depicted with blue chemical pencil.
“For a peaceful atom!” I said and finished my cocktail.
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