JUST ONE PERCENT

Sci-fi short story

Styopka jumped up joyfully, as if he was trying to soar into the sky and … ran down the hill straight into the green meadow located near the river. Summer holidays have begun!

Usually his vacation took place in a camp, where his mother bought vouchers, and ended with a short trip to his relatives in the village. But it was time to help his mother with money, and Styopka went to work for the whole summer in Sunny-village, where she was from.

Early in the morning, before he was caught up in the whirlwind of activities in the field, farm, orchard and garden, Styopka left the house and took his favorite route to the river. The meadow was already overgrown with young, lush grass, on which it will be softly to lie, protecting the herd. Today the cattle were taken to distant pastures, and entire the green feather bed by the river was at his personal disposal.

“What a beauty!” thought the boy, diving face first into the thick grass and inhaling the sweetish smell of wildflowers.

There was someone, in the grass.

A hare? A doll? A child?

Styopka had never experienced such a strange feeling. Some creature was either sitting or lying, in a word, was lounging comfortably in the tall grass. He immediately realized that it was not dangerous and kind. But in such a way as to not be able to distinguish an animal from a person – this has never happened to him before. The appearance of the creature seemed to be constantly changing, so the perception also changed every second.

“Who are you?” Steve asked, just in case.

“A friend,” answered the alien.

Styopka immediately realized that this was not an earthly creature, but did not experience any surprise or fear. Neither from the type of creature, nor from the method of silent conversation.

“Have you arrived to us?”

“You can say so.”

“Alone?”

“Alone.”

“Aren’t you lonely? Don’t need any help? I’m still free from work today. Do you want to eat?”

“Thank you, I’m not hungry. And I never get bored. I must interview one hundred people of different ages, specialties, professions, education in each of one hundred different countries and decide whether earthlings are ready to enter the Commonwealth.”

“Will you ask me too? I’m ready!”

“I already see that you are not afraid of my appearance and offer me help and food.”

“Certainly! If you don’t need anything, let’s play. I can show you my homeland. My grandfather and my mother, and a bunch of other cousins were born in this village. Very beautiful places. You will not regret.”

“Great! I can also show you many beautiful places, but for now I have to meet other earthlings.”

“How will you find them?”

“In every country I choose a quiet place, like here, and meet with children.”

“First with me, and then you will fly to other countries?”

“To say the truth, no. I am now, right this minute, meeting a hundred children in a hundred countries.”

“And it’s all you, alone?”

“Yes, just me and no one else.”

“Where will you get adults from?”

“That’s what I rely on you and the other children. You really want to help me, right? Return to the village and send here one by one everyone you can persuade to look at something very unusual and incomprehensible that you saw in the meadow in the morning.”

“Should I tell them that this is a friend from space?”

“You can say whatever you want, but think about it, you and I have become friends, and others may want to choose their own friends.”

“Can I send you just anyone? You know, not all people in our village are kind and friendly. No matter how someone offends you…”

“Don’t be afraid, Styopa, no one will hurt me. Come on, send me people to talk to. OK?”

“Okay Friend. Shall I go then?”

“We’ll see each other again later. Good bye!”

* * *

Cheng Guan was very unhappy. All supplies of rice vodka ran out, and his body demanded more. Getting alcohol in the morning was an almost impossible task. Of course, it would be possible to beg from the widow Meng for a loan of one or two ge (100 – 200 ml), but he needed to get at least half a shen (~ 0.5 l).

Having grabbed the empty bottle, Cheng walked unsteadily to the other end of the village, through the plum grove, avoiding houses and people. The times were no longer the same, but he remembered how they were sent people to forced labor for appearing drunk.

The neighbor boy Lee jumped out to his way, so much so that he almost knocked him down.

“Where are you going, like crazy?” Cheng attacked him, “Is there a fire in the forest, or do you not respect adults?”

“What are you saying, Mr. Cheng, just there…”

“What is there? Did something happen there?”

“There’s a little talking panda sitting in the bamboo thickets.”

“Well, yes! I don’t believe you.”

“Honestly, Mr. Cheng, I’m not lying. A few steps to the side and you will see it for yourself.”

Of course, Cheng Guan was not a thinker. Rather, it was the other way around. But the thought of a quite enterprising person flashed in his undeveloped mind,

“A panda cub costs a lot of money. Finding one and selling it cheap is more profitable than receiving 10 shen of excellent plum sake as a gift.”

True, he still will have to tinker until the find begin to bring him the pleasure he deserved.

“Over there, right behind the grove, where the bamboo plantings begin,” Lee indicated the direction and rushed further.

Another time, Cheng would have been offended by such impolite behavior from a neighbor’s boy, but now he was even glad that he would take the panda without witnesses. However, after searching around, Cheng did not find any signs of a living creature in the bamboo, but it seemed to him that something glassy flashed between the young green shoots.

Indeed, so was it! It turned out to be a huge bottle with a transparent liquid, and he no longer doubted that he would find his favorite drink inside it. The cork popped out of the neck with a pleasant clicking sound, and the strong spirit of sake hit the taster’s nose. Cheng looked around feverishly, then cut off a young bamboo shoot and, as if through a huge straw, took a sip of the divine drink.

The panda’s fate do not interested him anymore.

* * *

Jacques ran into the kitchen just as Solange was about to start the laundry.

“I met someone there,” he announced from the doorway, barely catching his breath.

“Well, and who was he?” she smiled, turning on the washing machine.

This was not the first time that her growing son tried to introduce his young mother to a groom of his own liking.

“Does he really miss his father that much?” Solange wondered every time, “Or is this the Oedipus complex manifesting itself?”

In all cases, she did not refuse her son and met his protégée. And one day one of these men got lucky, she didn’t refuse him either. However, nothing serious came of these meetings. It seems that all the “suitors” wanted only one thing, and little Jacques served only as a bait.

“I know you won’t believe me, but there, behind the spruce trees at the bend of the river, between the willows, Mother Goose sits, and she… talked to me.”

“Jaco, you’ll soon start writing fairy tales yourself. Look, how you are composing!”

“Mom, why don’t you believe me?”

“Because geese cannot talk like people.”

“And she didn’t talk like people at all. She thought, but I understood everything. Entendre le jar (French: “Understand the goose” – a play on words, that is, understand the secret language). Well, go and see for yourself, it costs you nothing.”

“Oh, anyway, by the time the machine spins the first cycle, I’ll have time to walk to the shore to see whose goose is stuck there. If it’s nobody’s, then it’s ours. It will be useful for the kitchen,” Solange thought.

A few years ago, Solange would have announced in church that she had found a goose, but after she was left alone with the child, such trifles stopped bothering her. God sent it, and it’s good. The oven in the house was still working properly.

There really was something white in the willow branches, down at the ground. Two white wings raised to the sky. “Lord, this is a sculpture of Cupid,” the woman thought, “Jacques couldn’t have confused it.”

She carefully approached the snow-white figure of a young man, depicting not quite a child. “Did Jaco really want to tell me something with this? But where did the statue come from? What to do with it? To sell? “It’s beautiful and … sexy.”

Solange was ashamed of her own thoughts, but after looking around and making sure that there was no one around, she reached out her hand and stroked the statue along the marble tummy and further down. It was as if an electric current had passed through the woman’s body. It seemed to her that the statue, or at least some of its parts, was beginning to come to life.

“Lord, this is what it means to live alone, without a man!”

Solange was shaking as if in a nervous attack, her face was burning, contractions began in her stomach. And suddenly, sweating from head to toe, she experienced a strong orgasm. She hadn’t have anything like this for a long time. And now she was torn apart between the desire to forever appropriate this vicious statue of the young god for herself and the shame that all this was the tricks of her son, who would greet her at home with ridicule.

With thoughts of how to transport the imaginary goose to her house, Solange slowly walked back.

* * *

Mrs. Molly Robinson, a pretty twenty-six-year-old nurse, had long suspected that the owners of a chemical plant in New Jersey were violating sanitary standards and actually poisoning the environment. Of course, she had no evidence of this, other than an increased incidence of fatigue, hyperactivity and inattention in children in the district compared to national data. And the figures that she scraped together at meetings of school nurses looked shaky and unconvincing. Nevertheless, it was necessary to discuss with lawyers whether it was possible to punish capitalists with dollars or at least to scare them more strongly?

Last week she was finally able to meet with lawyers from the union. They politely listened to her, shook their heads negatively, and as a result advised her to quit her idea or to continue accumulating data. Which is what she did at every opportunity.

This morning, on the occasion of the day off, Mrs. Robinson decided to take a walk along the river bank, where in the dense greenery, fenced off from tourists by a wire fence, there were factory treatment facilities and pipes for discharging water into the river. Suddenly, a girlish figure appeared around the bend, walking towards Molly.

“Hello! Are you wandering by yourself?” she asked the girl, who looked too young to hike alone.

“No. With Dad. He now went to look at the Brother Rabbit, who was stuck in the elderberry bushes.”

“Wasn’t Brother Fox there by any chance?” Molly joked, “Still, you shouldn’t go far away from your parents.”

“I promised to invite someone else to talk to the rabbit. Dad still didn’t believe me, even though he went to check.”

“What’s your name, and what have you seen?”

“My name is Anna. I saw a talking rabbit in the bushes.”

“And these bribe takers from the trade union don’t believe my numbers,” thought Molly, “Half the district’s children are out of their minds, but they don’t care! The girl is clearly not young enough to believe in talking rabbits, but not old enough to indulge in drugs either.”

“And you believe that the rabbit talked? In English?” Mrs. Robinson asked ironically and looked suspiciously at her interlocutor.

“And do you believe that the bush spoke to Moses?”

Mrs. Robinson blushed. Only professional training allowed her to pull herself together and not reprimand the impudent girl.

“After all, what do I care about the talking rabbits in her imagination? Maybe Anna’s parents are well aware of them. And these lawyers are not so stupid: you can’t attribute every deviation in a child’s psyche to the criminal actions of companies, even if they profit from our taxes.”

“Come on, I’ll take you to dad,” she said.

“Alright, you may get acquainted the rabbit at the same time,” the girl was delighted.

They walked about a quarter of a mile to a car parked around a bend on the side of the road, where her dad, dressed in a Giants jersey, the New York American football team, was waiting for the girl.

“Well, have you seen Brother Rabbit?” Anna asked.

“Your daughter invited me to meet a talking rabbit,” Mrs. Robinson said and straightened her hair.

“Oh, dreamer,” dad smiled. “Don’t listen to her,” he turned to pretty Molly, “It was a ball. I kicked it and it flew over the fence of the chemical plant. It seems to me that I twisted it in a completely new way.”

“What did you do, dad! I had to invite different people to meet the rabbit.”

“Anny, don’t fool me with your fantasies. There, behind the fence, on the territory of the chemical plant, your “rabbit” will meet many more people than here, in the forest. So don’t worry about him, okay? And you, Mrs…”

“Robinson. Molly Robinson.”

“… Mrs. Robinson, I thank you for looking after Anny. Are you interested in seeing the Giants game? Would you like to go to the stadium?”

Ani no longer listened to the chatter of these adults. She thought that it would be difficult for Friend to explain himself to those who wanted to talk only about themselves, their principles or pleasures, and not at all about friendship with alien rabbits.

* * *

“I cannot know!” district police officer Kosciuszko shrugged, reporting to his superiors, “There is talk throughout the village that there is something in the Small Meadow. No two people saw the same thing. No one can really say anything, but everyone got something from the meeting: some received an unexpected solution to their problems, and some just enjoyed it. Yes, I don’t know, Comrade Major, who they had meeting with. Of course I was there myself. I’m still there. What did I saw? Nothing special. A telephone. I picked up the receiver, and there was my wife’s voice. Well, we talked… She anyway calls me every day on her cell phone. So there is nothing unusual in the fact of the call. What kind of device it is, where it came from and how it connects – I have no idea. But I’m talking to you through it. How do you mean “how”? As always: I dialed the number and spoke. I think, maybe you’ll send sappers just in case. Let them see if there is any trick here? You never know. Nowadays, anything can happen. In this case there may be a lot of troubles later. And there would be plenty of noise throughout the whole province.

For an hour and a half, Kosciuszko guarded the telephone from the encroachments of the village residents and, as usual, had in the first category what he protected – he managed to talk for free with friends and classmates who had traveled to countries near and far abroad.

Then, a military UAZ drove into the meadow, rolling over bumps, from which several people in uniform and a couple of civilians jumped out. Without approaching Kosciuszko, he was ordered through a megaphone to immediately move away from the object to a safe distance. Marveling that his hypothesis was confirmed and, glad that he did not fly up into the air, the district police officer, bending down as if during a bombing, ran away to the protection of the UAZ.

“What is this object?” the lean sapper, who was in charge, asked him.

“I thought it was a phone,” Kosciuszko was surprised, “But you suggested something else…”

“A telephone?” the officer asked, looking at the policeman as if he were an idiot, “Do you think this is what phones look like?”

He handed over binoculars to the district police officer, through which Kosciuszko, to his horror, saw a horned sea mine lying in the grass in the same place where he had a pleasant conversation on the phone with his classmate, the beautiful Larisa, who had found her female happiness in Bulgaria.

Two soldiers were already running along the edge of the meadow, setting out the temporary enclosure.

“I’m the fourth,” the officer said into the radiotelephone, “I’m calling a cargo helicopter with a set of non-standard brackets.”

The plainclothes officers were standing aside and reporting the situation to someone in muffled voices over their cell phones.

“Gee!” thought Kosciuszko, “But I remember very well that I spoke into the telephone receiver, and not into an anti-tank grenade.”

* * *

A platoon of ground forces from the Third Bureau of the General Staff of the People Liberation Army of China, specializing in telecommunications of a potential enemy, took up a tactical position behind a plum grove, not far from the bamboo plantings, in which a technical device, presumably from a foreign army, was discovered.

Yang Biao, the platoon commander, was once again examining on the screen the signals intercepted from a transparent sensor, as if made of glass or polymers. The computer interpreted them as mosaic combinations. He found neither meaning nor analogy with anything he had seen before. Most likely, it was necessary to deliver the sensor to the General Staff laboratory and conduct a study of its structure there, as well as involve colleagues from the Fourth Bureau in deciphering the signals.

He typed the code into the computer and sent a secret message asking for a helicopter to be sent to evacuate the object. Twenty minutes later, the blades of the Sikorsky S-70C were already rattling overhead. Flickering his fingers over the computer keys, the commander had achieved precise alignment of the transport helicopter and halyards with grips over the object. It was time to introduce the human factor, and Yang Biao, without hesitation, sent two privates to attach the object to the cables. To be fair, the other two soldiers aimed their grenade launchers at the large unknown glass sensor, although it seemed that a good rock would have sufficed for it. No peculiarities were observed in the operation until the helicopter tried to lift up.

Actually, from the point of view of the recorded sensor signals, nothing has changed, but the pilot’s verbal signals, due to their obscenity, exceeded all permissible army standards.

The unknown object continued to remain on the ground. The ropes became taut and hummed like strings. The tone born of their trembling became higher and higher until, at the peak of howling and whistling, they burst one after another.

One of the grenade launchers, unable to withstand this psychic attack, pulled the trigger, and the explosion of a grenade was added to the crackling of the ropes being torn. The object stoically endured the attack and remained externally undamaged. The signals in the computer disappeared for a few seconds, and then appeared again, also without changing their character after the explosion.

  “An interesting object, but let them decide what to do with it further,” Yang Biao thought respectfully, meaning the General Staff, not the helicopter’s pilot.

And he again had run like a virtuoso pianist through the keys of his instrument.

* * *

“Fire!” ordered the commander of the Leclerc, Captain Pierre Moret.

The tank jerked and spat a one-hundred-twenty-millimeter shell into a pink marble cube standing under the willows. Pierre put binoculars to his eyes and couldn’t believe it. What was left of the willows was burning out on the river bank, but the cube was not even dirty and shone as if dust had been wiped off it with velvet. Pierre increased the volume of the microphone and, in masculine terms, reported to the foreman everything he thought about the shitty cube and the place where it should be inserted.

In a certain sense, the foreman agreed with him, although he did not show it.

“Should I try armor-piercing shell?” asked the captain.

“Wait, son,” answered the foreman, “Don’t waste your shells. It looks like this tough nut need to be handed over to the General Staff. Let its boss and the Minister of Defense have a headache. I hope there is a video recording of the tank’s shot? Send it to me immediately with a courier and make sure that the copy does not end up on YouTube.”

Having disconnected from communication, the brigadier dialed the secret code for the reception of the General Staff.

“I need to have an immediate audience with the Chief of Staff. On what issue? On the issue of the use of nuclear weapons. Yes! Report it to him right away!”

* * *

“Mr. President,” said the Secretary of State, “I believe that this issue must be resolved at the level of Congress, and not at the level of the Cabinet and the General Staff. The decision to conduct a nuclear explosion on one’s own territory in peacetime is extraordinary and will neither be understood nor approved by the nation.”

The President made a slight gesture with his hand towards the Minister of Defense.

“If it was possible to evacuate the Object, we would not have gathered here to discuss the situation at all. This would be a technical solution. And now we need to make a political move, regardless of party affiliation. In the context of the war on terrorism, we cannot leave an object that challenges the power of the country without reaction. For every professional military man, this forced decision is completely obvious. And I am sure that if any other country from the nuclear club was faced with a similar situation, it would act in a similar way.”

“Let’s put off resolving the issue for twenty four hours,” the president suggested, “Until analysts develop ways out of this situation.”

* * *

Styopka understood well that all these military personnel, equipment, guns, tanks and barbed wire around the meadow appeared here for only one reason – to capture his new acquaintance.

“Why do these adults, instead of playing, talking and becoming friends, always prove to others that they are right and strong? How to protect poor Friend from them? True, he said that there was no need to worry about him, but dad also said that when he left for the war. I have to somehow crawl under the wire and get Friend out of there.”

It’s good that Styopka lived in an old house with his grandmother, and not with his aunt and uncle, from where it would have been much more difficult to escape. He was going to make his way through the vegetable gardens as close to the meadow as possible, and then figure it out on the spot. Imagine the boy’s surprise when, in the far corner of the garden, near the fence in which one board was movable, he saw the silhouette of either … or … no, Friend in the darkness.

“Hooray! Did you manage to escape from the guards?”

“Not really. I’m there too,” answered the thought in the boy’s head.

“Ah, I understand, like in other countries.”

“Yes. The military can’t harm me, but bombs can be deadly to people. In all countries they want to fire at an object that seems threatening to them. This is how they see him.”

“Can’t you stop the military, since they can’t harm you?”

“No, my friend. I cannot. This is the right of only an earthly person. Of course, the Commonwealth would reveal many amazing things to people, but earthlings, except for children, did not even think about getting to know the guests. Only one in a hundred wanted to be friends with strangers.”

“Could you teach the children how to stop bombs and guns?”

The friend was silent for a while.

“You know,” he said, breaking the pause, “all a hundred children want the same thing as you do.” Hmm, one percent, but we can try… You will all have to leave Earth, study a lot, experience another life, discover superhuman capabilities and become different while remaining human at the same time. And then come back. The very next second after your disappearance. And no weapon, no bomb will be harmful for you. You will direct the energy of the explosion to peaceful causes, and turn the fragments of it into your favorite flowers. Do you agree?”

Styopka swallowed the lump in his throat and nodded his head impulsively,

“Да (Yes!)” he said, “Into lilacs.”

“是 (Shi)!” Lee said, “Into peonies.”

“Oui (Vi)!”  Jacques said, “Into roses.”

“Yes!” Anny said, “Into tulips.”

And Styopka heard many more “yes” in other languages, inhaling the aroma of flowers and rising into the night sky, up, to the distant stars, into the world of a new Friend, so that in a second he would return back to his native Earth no longer as a cabin boy, but as a captain.

He imagined how the meadow would be covered with bushes of blooming lilacs and smiled joyfully.